AQUAS Water/River Set - Water & Rivers for Mobile, VR, Web, Desktop

Thanks for this. I'm going to check it after I've had a chance to update a couple of things. I'll get back with feedback afterward.

 

The lack of support and communications is disappointing. What's up with AQUAS and Light Cookies, are you going to fix this, @dogmachris ?
If that is out of your capabilities at least say so.

 

Hi Marco,

please let me apologize for the delay, I haven't yet found the time to work on that, due to private stuff. I'll try to get it solved this week and keep you updated, promised. Sorry to keep you waiting for so long.

 

I'll try to have everything ready by the end of this week. I can't make promises yet, but I'll keep the thread updated on a daily basis, and sorry for my absence during the recent days.

 

When adding AQUAS River through the setup window we get the following error:
Unity 5.5.1f1 & latest Aquas version

Looks like its caused by not having AQUAS in root folder (We have a 3rd Party Asset folder for a clean project structure).

 

Hi InvertedCat.
Yeah I ran into the same problem. I wanted to do the same. I could have gone thought looking for all hard coded paths in the code but didn't feel like it.

@dogmachris
Just curious, how difficult would it be to add to the editor window a method to allow people to tell Aquas were it's root is at?

I have not worked with enough 3rd party plugins to know if this is common or not, but would be a nice feature.

 

This is common enough that I don't even bother trying to "clean up" the folder structure of my projects anymore. It just adds a lot of extra work fixing things like this, which negates whatever benefit a "clean" project window supposedly gives. Instead, I let them install where they want, and then create one or more separate folders for my own assets, and any modified 3rd party assets that I want to protect from updates. My own folders can be set up using whatever hierarchy I want, but anything outside is better left alone. You can visualize it like this:



So instead of trying to organize the whole project, and keep all 3rd party assets in a cage, you build a wall around the part you want to protect, and let other assets do what they want with the rest. The only alternatives are to not use 3rd party assets at all, or spend extra time rewriting many of them to fit some arbitrary organizational structure. In the end Unity doesn't care if you have a clean project window, and it offers no real performance benefit to the final game.

 

That's a really valuable insight. Thanks for sharing.

 

I haven't had a chance to check the script Fargle gave me, since I'm actually having another issue at the moment. I changed versions of Unity to 5.5.2f1 and now when I import Aquas to my project I get some errors.

1. Binary to YAML conversion: type unsigned int is unsupported.
2. error CS0122 The standard assets GlobalFog is inaccessible due to its protection level
Any idea what could cause this?

 

When you update Unity, you should also re-import any Standard Assets you are using. Unity 5.5.2 still included the "old" Image Effects, so they may need to be updated along with it. If you do though, you'll need to edit the GlobalFog.cs script to make the class public again:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class GlobalFog : PostEffectsBase

This is a known issue, and is even addressed in the AQUAS manual's troubleshooting section. I'm not positive this is the cause of your error, which seems to be a bit different than usual, but you should definitely check it out. The other possibility is that the Image Effects folder doesn't have proper Windows permissions assigned for you to access it, but I'd think you'd have a lot more errors if that was the case.

 

Thank you so much! I'm just learning Unity for the first time, so I am glad to hear I may not be totally responsible for what happened. I'll get right on it.

 

Hey, I read that Fagles has successfully imported Aquas into Unity 5.6, however when I do this I lose the transparency during runtime, which is particularly noticeable around the edges, i.e. there is no blending. However in the editor it looks fine. Is this likely something I've done wrong, or could it be because of Unity 5.6? I've imported it three times and problem keeps recurring. Cheers.

 

Why is it that everytime you hit play there are changes to the material (the material in the file system not the instance)?
This is horrible when working with Source control & Multiple Team members.

 

Not happening for me. Since Unity 5.6 made major changes to lighting and rendering, I did need to adjust a lot of the AQUAS shader values though, including color, reflection, gloss, transparency, and foam visibility. Here's what it looks like:



As you can see, the ground fades away under the water at the shoreline , and the point of land to the left, and my whale are faintly visible under the water, even at a distance. I'm using the new post-processing stack in this shot, and linear deferred rendering, and I needed to enable custom fog in the Aquas shader for this setup.

 

Anyone else have this error??????

"Shader error in 'AQUAS/Desktop and Web/Double-Sided/Triple-Textured Bumpy': invalid subscript 'boxMax' at line 257 (on d3d11)"

It only showed up after upgrade from 5.3 to 5.6

thanks

 

I need to use this on a miniature body of water in a scene. As in, it needs to have very tiny waves and caustics. Is there a way to scale it down?

Also, do I need to use a terrain? The quick setup requires a terrain, apparently. I'd like to use my own mesh for the ground, for performance reasons.

 

See this:

 

Fargle, just want to thank you. It was a different error, but setting that line to public fixed the issue completely. So it worked!

 

While I'm here, I have another question. Maybe this is asking for trouble--in terms of complexity, but I'm considering combining this asset with another asset for water bodies. I want to use Aquas for smaller/calmer bodies of water, and I want to use another for very large bodies of water. I'm even considering combining some of the underwater effects, like the bubbles of Aquas with some of the other asset's effects. I don't have the other asset yet, and since it's competition, I'm not sure I should post the name here. Has anyone else explored this possibility? I mean, I know I can dig into the scripts and start wonking about, but since I'm a rusty coder any advice/suggestions would be appreciated. Does anyone know of tutorials that address this?

 

This is definitely do-able, but depending on the asset you choose, there could be issues that you'll need to solve. I currently use AQUAS for lakes and streams, and the now discontinued Ceto Ocean for larger bodies of water that require wave displacement. They work fine together, but there are a few gotchas to consider:

• AQUAS water bodies either need to be higher than the main ocean, or you'll need a mechanism to turn one or the other off sometimes. Most ocean assets don't let you carve out holes to allow inland lakes that are below sea level. Solution: Make sure any AQUAS lakes or ponds are always above the main ocean sea level.
• AQUAS has great underwater effects, caustics, bubbles, sounds, etc, but sometimes other assets do too. You need to decide which effects you want to use, and come up with a method to switch them on and off if necessary. Otherwise you could end up duplicating some of them. I use Ootii's Motion Controller to control my player. It has an add-on Swimming package, that also provides surface splash effects and underwater bubbles. Since they work with both AQUAS and Ceto, I've chosen to disable the equivalent effects in AQUAS, and use them instead. Since AQUAS doesn't provide a simple way to selectively enable or disable individual effects, you sometimes need to get creative to do this. Specific other issues you might face will depend on which other assets you choose to use.
• Water assets can be very resource hungry, especially those that provide wave displacement, transparency, and reflection. Combining two or more packages can slow things to a crawl if not done right. AQUAS is better in this regard than the native Unity water, but things like reflections can still be an issue if not handled properly. Be prepared to spend some time optimizing your scenes to get acceptable frame rates.

I hope this helps, but before choosing another water asset, check out their forums if they have them. See if anyone has had issues using them along with AQUAS. Do as much research as you can before buying. I'm pretty sure I spend most of my development time trying to integrate assets from different 3rd party developers, and get them to play nice together, so the more information you have ahead of time about possible conflicts the better.

 

Thank you, at least now I know it's not Unity 5.6. I'll give it another shot, although I have already done many changes to the settings. Strange thing is that in the editor it looks great, the problem is only during run-time. I'm using Linear and not custom fog, maybe that's the issue. Thanks anyway.

Solved the problem in an instant: it was the "Allow MSAA" that caused the transparency issue. When I deactivated it the water is perfect!

 

Heyas everybody,

I've been having a look at AQUAS in Unity 5.6. At this point it seems to me, that if imported entirely, everything should work just fine. However, the problem that was already discussed earlier - that underwater effects don't work when Standard Assets are not imported together with AQUAS - still remains. aS @FargleBargle pointed out correctly, the reason is, that Unity 5.6 uses new image effects, that AQUAS cannot yet handle. I'm already working on an update to have both new as well as old image effects working correctly for underwater effects, depending on the Unity version used.

@Marco-Sperling I've tried to reproduce your issue with the light cookie. I've used a simple grayscale texture for testing (see attachment Light.psd). Here's a screenshot of my resulting image:


I'm not sure what's causing the trouble on your side. Let's check some settings. In my inspector the texture type of the cookie texture is set to cookie and the alpha is created from grayscale. I would do that in any case, even for textures that do have an alpha-channel, but that might be just due my personal experience.

The only odd experience I had with this, was that first the light type in the texture's inspector was set to spot light - so far so good. Then I set it to directional light - still worked. Then I set it back to spot light and got black - since then only the light type directional in the texture inspector works.

The render mode of the camera made no difference for me.

You're right about the pixel light count - it needs to allow at least one pixel light for the cookie to show, otherwise it shows black. I'm not sure however why pixel lights need to be allowed for cookies to show. The shader itself allows point lights by definition, but I'm not sure this has actually something to do with light cookies in this case.

 

Thank you very much for taking time to check this issue on your end.
I can confirm the odd experience as you call it when setting the light type in the texture inspector. The mipmap border checkbox doesn't update correctly in that case. And maybe even more parameters that are not exposed via inspector.
But this didn't help with the problem since I had the same settings already.

What did help however was unchecking the "Static" checkbox for all the AQUAS water meshes in my scene. Today it dawned on me that the flickering we got (see my gif from before) might have been a result of Unity rebuilding meshes at runtime to reduce draw calls.

Please, could you try something like this:
1) In your 3d authoring software create a 2d-array of roughly 1000 quads (each 500 by 500 units in size) aligned next to each other.
2) Create a UV layout for all these quads (simple top down projection)
3) Import the group of quads into Unity and place them in a scene
4) assign an AQUAS material to them
5) Place some terrain or other meshes in the scene to have something to check against
6) Create a directional light with light cookie texture assigned

By toggling the static checkbox on the group object with the water quads before going into playmode you should see the same errors I got.
This now looks to me like a Unity error. What do you say?

 

anyone seen this?

I've tilting/looking up more than about this angle is suddenly causing this weird fuzz. The image on the right is more of how it should be looking, but even then I spot some of the multi-color noise going on. If I look down it turns off again =o Can't figure where to start playing...

well it went away after a while, though my Enviro cloud layers seem to be glitching on and off in the reflections... I assumed it was something to do with something in my environment system and turned everything off, but it persisted so I turned Enviro back on... after I moved around a bit, the water turned a much bright blue than normal and the fuzz went away....?

Still seems to be trying to reflect clouds at certain angles though when there are no clouds anymore...

ok I'm confused...

 

Could you turn off refraction completely and make another hi-res screenshot? It seems to me, that something is reflected, that's not seen through your player camera.

 

I see now that is the problem. I use my main camera clearing Depth Only and have a second camera that run behind that. If I turn my main camera to clear using Skybox it works fine.... is there anything I can do to work with it that way? Even if I have to tell the shader to use my secondary camera that might be acceptable...

 

You'd have to look into the reflection script. THere's an object called reflection camera. You'd have to tell it to clear using skybox. This way your main camera can clear depth only and the reflection camera can render the skybox. Does that work?

 

I'll give it a try! Thank you.

 

If it doesn't work for you, you can also send me a sample scene, where it does not work, I'll have a look and see what I can do on my side.

 

Great water, the best thing is "ignore occlusion" for me, reflections dont flicker, which is a problem everywhere else. Just wondering how expensive this is? And also the cheapest possible way to use this asset to minimise slow down, like are some waves more costly than others etc.

Another problem is the "caustics" seem to have projected across my entire level, not only under water, what could be the cause of this ?

 

I've been enjoying Aquas quite a bit, thanks for a great asset. Great tutorials too, by the way.... I just watched the one on water tiles, and think that can work for me on a project where I want water surrounding islands in a small group, but would like to have underground caves on a number of the islands.

One future request I have would be to have the ability to do water cutouts... maybe using a collider object? For example, a pirate ship or other larger boat, it would be nice to be able to go below decks and not hit the water plane inside the hull.

 

There used to be a solution for this here: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/DepthMask

As far as I know, this no longer works in Unity 5, but maybe an updated shader is still possible.

 

Wow not much update on this asset optimization or adding why?

More prefabs preregler would be good

lava would be good

A tutorial on how to create a waterfall would be good

just a suggestion

 

Having lots of issues with Aquas and Unity 5.6... any idea of when 1.3.2 is gonna ship?

 

How expensive this is depends entirely on what has to be reflected. The more it is, the more expensive reflections become. But you might consider excluding certain layers from occlusion to save performance. Another solution was suggested by @FargleBargle further above (using 2 terrains).

Do I understand it right, that the caustics display above water too? If you're not using the underwater effects, check the materials of the causitcs projectors. in the material inspector the water level can be specified. See if the value there is higher than the y-position of your waterplane. If you're using the underwater effects script though, the water level should be assigned automatically.

 

I'm planning to include that in 1.3.2, but don't know if that works now either - we'll see.

 

v1.3.2 will come with different prefabs for different kinds of water - that was requested frequently in the past - sorry for not having added it earlier. It's not possible however to create waterfalls with AQUAS - that would easily make for an asset of its own in terms of complexity.

 

I'll try to have it done this weekend, can't guarantee it though - if I can't get it done this weekend, it will probably be next weekend, since I'll have to go on travel during the week.

Meanwhile, please tell me the íssues you're experiencing, maybe I can help out.

 

The main issues I had going to 5.6 were:

• The current version of AQUAS still depends on legacy image effects that are no longer included by default with Unity 5.6. They can still be downloaded here though. Once you import them, the AQUAS lens effects should all work again.
• An alternative is to create your own above water/underwater effects presets using the new Post-Processing Stack, which is actually quite easy. Or wait for the update, which should include this option as well.
  
• Some of the AQUAS water shader values needed to be tweaked a bit due to changes in Unity 5.6 lighting and rendering, but nothing too extreme.

I'm actually quite happy with AQUAS in Unity 5.6 at the moment. The next update should include some of the fixes I've mentioned above, making the transition to 5.6 a bit easier, but there's nothing stopping people from doing it now.

 

That did work. I lose close-in reflections, which is good for getting rid of the waves that appear around the player in reflection scripts, but it doesn't render the reflection of nearby rocks etc.. good enough for now though. Thank you.

 

AQUAS UPDATE

Hey Everone!

As some of you already know, an update for AQUAS is on its way. Originally I planned to have it done this weekend. Now it seems - I'm sorry to say - that it'll take another week, since I decided to include more stuff into the new version.

Currently I've managed to separate the legacy image effects from Unity's new post processing stack depending on the Unity version. From now on, AQUAS will use the legacy shaders for Unity <v5.6 and the new post processing stack for Unity 5.6 and - in the future - >5.6. This will happen automatically, there'll be no need for extra user effort - from a user's perspective everything will work just as before. The only important thing to keep in mind, is that the legacy image effects will need to be imported in earlier Unity version and the post processing stack in 5.6 respectively. I'll try to ship both with the new AQUAS - if the package gets accepted like this.

Additional changes will include:

• Shader optimizations for the triple textured shader and the river shader
• Splash effects for different types of splashes
• Presets for different styles of water in the quick setup and the river setup (suggestions welcome!)
  • Materials of course included
  • Prefabs of course included and also usable without the quick setup
• Maybe a volume mask to prevent water being rendered inside of boats, etc

Please excuse the delay everyone. If you have any further questions, please just shoot!
I'll be off for the week.

Cheers
Chris

 

Great news, Chris! I am having issues with Aquas and fog. Since it is my favorite water asset of all time, I hope some of the new fixes will help us use fog with our water. Thank you!

 

please for the river
can you do plane follow spline because no accept multi terrain and terrain never plane
or plane deform

 

There is something better then Flow Map Painter to design a river flow ?

 

Hi dogmachris,

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming new version, because of a specific problem I got right now - actually the same as steeloblk already mentioned:

AFAIK this is not really an issue on your end but on Shader Forge, however are you going to fix this with the next version of AQUAS? As far as I can see the issue has been fixed in Shader Forge 1.31.

 

Which happens to operate easyroad3d and aquas please ?

 

Very much looking forward to the new version!
A few suggestions for water presets:

Calm mountain lake
Ocean with big waves
Ocean, small waves
Windy day water
Turbulent river
Calm river

 

That would be slick!

 

hello For those interested in it I advise you "Mesh Deform" to create rivers on non-flat land
flowmap Create pixels on the surface or I get bad ?

suggestions for water presets:

add option turned texture flowmap
flowmap prepared with direction

 

Question about performance: I have a river winding through a 7km terrain. I thought it would be best to set up a set of river meshes, so I could LOD them at various distances. But in quick tests, it looks like each Aquas instance has its own impact on the CPU, so 10 meshes is 10x the impact of a single large mesh. Is that correct-- it's best to have one single river mesh, even though it'd be very very large/long? Any other tips for optimizing a long river like this?

thanks
Dave