Assets [Released] Cascade - Rivers, Lakes, Waterfall and more ..

CASCADE IS LIVE ON ASSET STORE AND WE MOVED TO ASSET STORE SECTION

https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-cascade-rivers-lakes-waterfall-and-more.520714/​

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Latest version 1.0.1 rev.3 : http://u3d.as/11GH​

We are glad to introduce you Cascade.

Cascade is an innovative and AAA quality water system that has been born by the cooperation between Jason Booth ( creator of Terrain Shaders Megasplat and Microsplat ) and Antonio Ripa ( creator of Sentieri and TerraPainter )

Designed around performance and ease of use with Cascade you can easily create multiple surface water like rivers, lakes and waterfall with a few clicks with a powerful mesh generator tool and a modular performance shader.

You have full control of the main parameters like width, slope, water depth, etc. globally and per node. Cascade is the first and only water asset that allow amazing water surfaces flowing into each other like a River flows in Lake and after flows out. Cascade fits small and large multitiles landscape.

Cascade take in account morphological information from your landscape to give the highest realism to your water surfaces.

Cascade has tree main software components :

• Cascade Surface Manager : powerful procedural mesh generator with a simple and intuitive UI that allow user to create the water path on the landscape giving full control of all the parameters up to node level. Rivers, Lakes, Waterfall are not a challenge anymore. Analyze the terrain during the water surface design using those information to improve the realism.
• Cascade Shader System: not simply a shader, but a dynamic shader compiler tool that allow the generation of custom shaders according to the features you select. Unused features are completely removed from the code.
• Cascade Terrain Carving Engine that is part of the "more" .. we are building a one stop asset , so Cascade can create your river bed and lake bed with an easy workflow and advanced setting.

Main features :

• One single shader for every type of water surface like river, lake, waterfall controlling the parameters of each independently
• You can create multiple water surface like rivers, lakes, waterfall using a spline tool with full control of the main parameters like width, slope, water depth, etc. on single mesh having only one material
• Water surface can flow into other water surface on same mesh. Ex River flows in and out a lake.
• Real Time Analisys of terrain morphology to generate more realistic water path.
• Optimized Shader Generation.
• Support Weather and Fog assets with smooth iteration ( Tested with Enviro and Fog Volume 3 )
• Works with VR in single pass mode, as well as with multiple camera setups
• Control water parameters along each node of the spline, or by painting on the vertices of the mesh it generates.
• ( Experimental ) Automatic FlowMap generation allow the stream to follow realflow
• Lot of stunning features like up 3 independent flotsam layers allowing you to have leaves and other particulate float in the water, sparkles on the water, slosh water, lake ripples, drop rain, automatic waterfall cascade generation, and more... more .. more ..
• Carving river bed with a new innovative system ( Lake ground will come soon )
• Textures Packer for generate more variant of your Cascade Water
• Automatic generation of Vegetation Studio Mask around the water surface for easy and fast integration
• Automatic Import from third assets to migrate your project to Cascade
• Work smooth with MicroSplat Terrain Shader module Puddles, Straeam , Lava & Wetness to add more realism to your landscape
• Asset will support other tools by EarthShaping Project. the first suite of tool designed for a real time procedural infinite world generation including Terrain, Roads and Cities
• Bonus Pack with a high quality set of PBR textures and trees for your “Cascaded” landscape

plus more and more features ..

Join us on our Skype or Discord text chat if you have any questions.​

 

OK take my money.
With all these great assets coming out from creators, it is a great time to be a Unity user.

 

looks pretty cool! got any videos of creation process?

 

Looks really nice!

 

More videos in the next days .. showing the workflow ..

 

We are privileged to be following so many AAA quality assets. Thank you for compartinlhar @antoripa

 

Well I love MicroSplat, and I am following Sentieri, so there is some impressive brainpower behind this

I have been looking for procedural rod and river solutions for a while, and I am very excited to see these kinds of projects. I would love to try these ideas in my open world rpg BrightRidge.

I cant wait for more details. Thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks a lot . . all be released in the next few months .. Cascade is the first and should be live by end of Feb.

 

Hey folks ..
Preparing few videos waiting Cascade is live on asset store
2 series, first is gonna be a showcase series and second is gonna be a how to series . .( really short videos )

 

Awesome, I knew Jason was working on something river related but I had no idea you guys had teamed up.
Very cool

 

One of the goal in Cascade was the design and implementation of a simple but complete UI. A central point for your Cascade landscape .

 

Nice work Antonio & Jason. That's my water sorted now... with the possible exception of oceans with tides and waves.

 

Hello,
video is really impressive. I have few questions :
1) Does the tool work with multitile terrains ?
2) Does the tool support mesh terrain ?
3) Any plan about integration with GAIA by @AdamGoodrich using his amazing module extension ?

Thanks

 

Cascade allow users to create articulated water surface on their landscape handling smoothy and automatically transition.

 

A question: water in a real waterfall accelerates during the fall, something which is necessary for full realism. Is this something you're planning to implement? The videos all show water falling without acceleration.

 

That is a valid point. Currently I compute the flow map in real-time when you create the mesh, so basically I compute direction and velocity. Shader read those information and we have an experimental mode, but to achieve a smooth realism we need to sample terrain morphology with an higher resolution. There are couple of option to achieve that, but before we would have all the planned features implemented ( not yet mentioned in the initial post ) and we need to plan the shift to new scriptable rendering pipeline ( that unity has already postponed to 2018.2 and Jason has following and giving his contribute to the discussion ).
But it will definitely use a flow map for direction and speed getting even another improvement that is the correct water flow if there are static object along the path ( like large rock in the middle of the surface that will drive flow around itself ).
I hope I answered your question.

 

hello,
I can answer yes for first 2 question.
For the third, I would say that will be not a challenge doing same integration like other water assets, even if our workflow for river and in particular lake is totally different from other assets.
If you think to something more specific, please feel free to share your requirement. I will be glad to evaluate how support it.

 

hey, first congrats because that look incredible!

- can it be used for larger body of water?
- performance wise how does that compare to aquas with similar config?
- can a river and lake can be placed procedural at runtime?

thanks in advance

 

Thank you for your appreciation.
- yes, it can be used for larger body of water, but not infinite surface like assets specific for sea and ocean.
- I can say that Cascade has a different approach than other water assets, and in all its aspects it's been designed perfomance wise
- yes, that can be done. Meshes are generate procedurally, so not a challenge. I can even support specific need exposing part of the internal class as API

 

Runtime mesh gen would probably be quite helpful in odd circumstances. Handy thing to have for sure.

 

I have started the "how to" series ...It will be a collection of short video that help to start with the asset.

First one is about lakes ....

enjoy ..

 

This already looks like it will be very useful for pre-generated terrain - a real time saver and interesting to watch it create the mesh surface.

I'm wondering if it would fit into this workflow:

My game uses "Water Volumes" - a Swim component can be attached to any shape and then you can swim inside it like this example with a sphere:



For a proceduraly generated terrain, would we be able to 1) generate the terrain 2) (this is the part that would apply to cascade) in realtime drop a Node like in the above video and have it generate the lake there in realtime? Like maybe through an api (drop node at x,y,z and activate)

If we can do that, we could just texture it with some premade textures and so not worry about all the remaining calculations and steps form the video

My second question is any suggestion how to combine this with a water volume?

Off the top of my head, i would:
1) generate terrain
2) scan height map for depressions using a home made fast algorithm
3) drop one of your nodes and have it build a lake or three (is this mutlithreaded the lake generation?)
4) Find the bounds of the generated syrface mesh
5) create a rectangular cube with a collider trigger and swim component that matches these bounds and position it with its top at the lake surface
6) then effectively once you go under the surface, you would be entering the water volume

(only step 3 is for Cascade, the rest i can do here) -Im not really looking for specific answers, im just trying to get feedback and suggestions so if anything about what i said pops into your mind or something sounds really off i would love to hear it.

 

Regarding the Swim volume, i am just thinking i could maybe even skip that step for lakes

1) scan a terrain (from my homemade script)
2) find an appropriate spot to drop a Cascade lake node (cascade specific action)
3) generate the lake mesh and add premade texture (cascade specific action)
4) dynamically add a collider trigger to the lake and a swim component (from my homemade script)
5) Keep track of the lake Y position (from my homemade script)

when you collide with the lake, turn on the swimming, and only turn it off when you exit the collider AND you are higher than the lakes Y position. That way you would have swimming enabled whenever you are below the lake, and presumably you cannot exit a lake without passing through the lake collider because the terrain is in the way.

Just thinking out loud - you work is inspiring and very interesting no matter what is possible.

 

Alternatif terrain generation, create river and body water before the landscape, it's easier to correlate a mountain with the down slope of a river than contrary.

 

Good points ..i need to elaborate a bit more .

Hello . yep . we can do ...i need to elaborate a bit more and I will share something

 

Is Water Volumes something developed in house ?
I have been working to a swimming component that is not collider based, to include in the Cascade

 

Cascade submitted to Asset Store ...We expect to be live in 4 or 5 weeks.

 

Congrats!

 

What do you mean 'submitted'? What about the scope creep and the endless waiting ... I just don't know how I feel about this 'submitted' stuff

 

What you gonna charge....need to know if I should run to the bank. J/K ... maybe just kidding....

Terrains bleh, wonder if this will stick on top of some voxels!!!

 

Is there a way to get notified once it's released?

 

watch this thread

 

Cascade will be live on Asset Store by end of month / first week of March. That is according the review time by asset store team. As soon as live, I will post here.

 

Yeah, its just a collider linked to my home made swimming system - i guess everyone has their own swimming solutions so there are probably a hundred ways to approach this. I used to trigger swimming in my game when you went below 0 height (the ocean) but i changed it to work with colliders which is more flexible. (an ocean can now be just a big swimmable cube and i can make lakes too at different y positions)

Sorry i threw so much at you I think i just wanted to know if i can place a node and generate a lake in realtime, and it sounds like you have info about that coming up which is cool. I think i could just attach one of my coliders pretty easily and A swimming component sounds pretty interesting too - i would love to hear how that would work. But if we can generate a realtime lake like on a mapmagic terrain i think the rest would be pretty straightforward (although nothing is in coding right?

On a side note, the tricky part will be automatically deciding where to place lakes. I am imagining i will write a script that detects large depressions in heightmaps quickly and centers a live lake node on it. I have NO idea how to do this, but i find usually there is thankfully an answer for everything online

 

If only it were that easy. This forum has not option to watch a thread. The auto-watching "forgets" that you were in a thread after a few days.

@antoripa Feel free to spam me via pm once the asset gets released

 

Actually it is (kind of). Just surf from time to time on that url, it’s always up to date :

https://forum.unity.com/watched/threads

Alerts are buggy as hell on the other hand.

Hope it helps.

 

Happy to provide integration between Cascade and Landscape Builder. Let us know when you have a beta to test with.

 

Few quick comments regarding the package:

• Under EarthShaping/Framework v1.0/Resources is a few internal UI textures and fonts? I don't want these built with my project so they should not be in a resources folder.
• MinMaxRange seems to be conflicting with my non-namespaced MinMaxRange even though yours appears to be name spaced? I had to include the full namespace for all instances of MinMaxRange in RiverPath.cs & CascadeWindow.cs to compile (change from MinMaxRange to com.earthshaping.Framework.DataStructure.MinMaxRange). I realize that I "should" be namespacing my structures but this could cause issues for others if they don't know how to work around the problem.
• The demo scenes leave a lot to be desired. They need A LOT of love in regards to camera placement and lighting. Not to mention they have realtime + baked illumination checked so my computer starts chugging away as soon as I open the scene. This also causes issues with the water looking black if the scene has not finished baking which is especially apparent in the lake scene. Once I disabled realtime & global GI the water color looks much better. Here are some other comments that are scene specific:
  • "lake" camera is at 0,0,0 looking at the edge of the terrain, you can see no water.
  • "largeWaterfall" camera shows the waterfall in the left of the screen, but you can't see any of the river or detail of what is happening in the canyon.
  • "scene" camera is looking almost perpendicular to the river, would be nice to see more of the river since the section we can see is small comparatively. Also has a missing script on the RiverPathCamera
  • "scene2" camera is at 0,0,0 again looking at nothing. MainCamera is also missing a script.
  • "smallRiverCascade" camera is at 0,0,0 also looking at nothing.
• 9 warnings in 2017.3 in a number of scripts; while they are benign they will likely leave a bad first impression (see image below).

 

Thanks a lot for reporting that,
We are aware of that as something was wrong during our testing process.
We have already pushed version 1.0.1 clearing all the issues reported and a lot of improving.
If you prefer, you can send me a PM with your invoice number and tomorrow I can share 1.0.1
Thanks a lot again

 

Oh, it's online, instant buy and going to check it out!

 

Yes, it is. I have not yet announced as we are waiting for version 1.0.1
As I wrote above if you share your invoice number tomorrow I can share it
And tomorrow a tutorial series will be out
Thanks a lot for your understading

 

In version 1.0.1 you can play all the demo scene and cam will fly along the river

 

I bought it, no luck with the 1.0.0

Code (CSharp):

1. Failed to import package with error: Couldn't decompress package
2. UnityEditor.Web.JSProxyMgr:DoTasks()
3.  

But it's probably nothing to do with the asset, it looks like my Unity Editor gave up its ability to decompress and import the package.
I will have to postpone my test-run on this.

 

Yes . i have same issue and another user reported. But it works for others
Unfortunely during the weekend there is no support from unity, but share your invoce number and tomorrow i will share version 1.0.1.
Thanks a lot

 

oooo - bought it Congratulations on all your hard work. I am very interested to try it out. I know an update is coming too so i will just explore a bit.

 

Thanks a lot.
As I wrote above we have readz version 1.0.1 for approval. There are a lot of improvement in that version, so if you share your invoice# sending a PM, tomorrow i can grant you access to new package
I will even publish a how to tutorial videos to help start with our unique functions like have different water surface along the same mesh and with the same shader

 

Thank you - ill send it now

 

Hi ,
just more details about what you reported. I don't have problem to admin that during the preparation of first package, something was wrong at our end, So we immediately prepared a new package, but we had to wait unity approval before push version 1.0.1.
Cascade is improving on daily base gathering feedback from our beta test community and now from Unity users community. We are trying to release asset driven by community feedback as we develop asset for the community. Our organitation and our experience allow us to release fix or upgrade in few hours for the most cases. In few weeks we will grant access to all Cascade user's to our repository and they will have access to package immediately. So below more detailed comment

Deleted in v.1.0.1

That is prefixed with ES in 1.0.1. That is becuase inf two class have same name and one has no namespace, compiler will give priority to that.T hose conflict could be avoid is all vendor used namespace. During our test we found other conflict and we contacted other devs. But nice users report further conflict.

In v. 1.0.1 all demo scenes are full of our love. I

All warning removed in v1.0.1 ..

 

Just a note that your links on the asset store are broken. They show http://wwww.earthspaing.com/ instead of http://www.earthshaping.com/

Thought you might want to fix it.