Ceto (Scrawks Ocean)

Well, I am not 100% clear on what you mean. However:

There will be a main direction of waves movement. This is generally cyclical.

With the right settings you can make big waves that occur quite regularly from an expected direction.

 

The best solution we came up with was occlusion culling the CETO object - However since it isn't collidal, no occlusion system I'm aware of will work with that method. I mean think about it; You're five miles away from any water object - Why does the ocean 200m below you need rendered? Any ideas on how to accomplish that?

 

I solved it by using multiple cameras, one of which only renders the particle effect layer

 

@scrawk I'm having a weird issue in version 1.0.9 on OSX with some bumps and dips on the water surface

OSX El Capitan 10.11
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 2047 MB

This is in the demo scene on a fresh import on a new project
See a GIF of what I'm talking about here - http://i.imgur.com/7q7uOzr.gifv

 

@Timothee35 : Im not to sure what you mean by main wave. You will have to explain what your trying to do as Im not sure what you want to do.

@DivergenceOnline : I normally set up some box triggers. I would have two sets of box triggers one for where the ocean can be seen but is far away and another where it can not be seen at all. When the player enters the trigger you can then disable parts or all of the ocean.

For the areas where the ocean is far away you can disable the underwater, reflections (or just reflect the sky) and spectrum. Leave the grid enabled but set the resolution to lowest. That should run very fast an should look fine for a distant view of the ocean.

For the area where the ocean cant be seen by the player at all just disable the whole the ceto gameobject or all the components.

Occlusion culling the ceto object wont have any effect as its just a game object with some scripts.

@_invalidusername : Is that with the latest version? I added a game object called 'OverlayExamples' which renders 3 bumps on the ocean surface. Can you disable that object and see if the issues goes away.

If it does then it looks like the overlays are not rendering correctly on Mac which is making there position change around as the camera moves. I thought they where working so can you let me know if that is the issue.

 

Interesting. I'll try that, thanks!!

 

Glad someone brought up this Bumps issue. I got the same Bumps on my Macbook too, I disabled the "OverlayExamples" and those bumps are gone . In the beginning i was wondering what that is, then realise it is a new feature.

Yes, for some reason the overlays are not working probably on Mac. Just like exactly you said that bump position change around as the camera moves.

 

Those would be a couple ways of doing it, but the reason i ruled our triggers already was that last i checked, Unity was still too dumb to tell whether you're actually inside a trigger volume or not - It only takes notice when you cross the inside/outside border, so "logging in inside a trigger" wouldn't work. Unless of course, I'm wrong.

 

OnEnable /should/ count as a OnTriggerEnter these days...

Santa and his trailing collider say so. Or the OnTriggerEnter of the Sleigh does anyways...



Perhaps it's about huge volumes not working great, unsure.
YMMV

 

There's always culling groups and - oh my - doing a box test. Like that's hard or something.

 

Yes that is a bit of a issue with triggers. It would require some scripting to keep track of if your still inside or not.

Maybe they or not the best choice but any system which can tell if your inside or not will work. Im sure theres better options but that was the first thing that came to mind.

I will set up a proper system to do this and make it a included feature of Ceto for the next update.

 

I ran into a few errors that effectively crash CETO in the editor's play mode. I haven't tested it in a build yet. All 4 errors happen in order and at the same time.

It's happened multiple times. I haven't ran into a single method that reproduces it reliably but generally it happens when I click outside the game window to look and and use the console or the inspector.

Code (CSharp):

1. DestroyBuffer can only be called from the main thread.
2. Constructors and field initializers will be executed from the loading thread when loading a scene.
3. Don't use this function in the constructor or field initializers, instead move initialization code to the Awake or Start function.

Code (CSharp):

1. Ceto (1.0.9) Error:</color> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2.   at Ceto.WaveSpectrum.Update () [0x001dc] in (Project Folder)\Assets\Ceto\Scripts\Spectrum\WaveSpectrum.cs:480
3. UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
4. Ceto.Ocean:LogError(String) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:566)
5. Ceto.WaveSpectrum:Update() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Spectrum/WaveSpectrum.cs:498)

Code (CSharp):

1. Ceto (1.0.9) Error:</color> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2.   at Ceto.Ocean.UpdateOceanScheduler () [0x00000] in (Project Folder)\Assets\Ceto\Scripts\Ocean\Ocean.cs:593
3. UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
4. Ceto.Ocean:LogError(String) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:566)
5. Ceto.Ocean:UpdateOceanScheduler() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:598)
6. Ceto.Ocean:Update() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:428)

Code (CSharp):

1. Ceto (1.0.9) Error:</color> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2.   at Ceto.Ocean.Update () [0x00012] in (Project Folder)\Assets\Ceto\Scripts\Ocean\Ocean.cs:430
3. UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
4. Ceto.Ocean:LogError(String) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:566)
5. Ceto.Ocean:Update() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:484)

 

The last 3 are the same one repeated twice, and they are as a result of the 1st.

I too have noted this occured once during a project. A "Dispose()" isn't getting called somewhere if I have googled that error right. Will keep an eye out. Scrawky would know better.

 

@scrawk There is still a strange distorting issue even with the overlay are disabled. As the camera moves the water surface distorts, it's a bit hard to see in this GIF, but here's what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/9YIHjmj.gifv

You see the strange horizontal distortion line that moves with the camera? It's much more visible "in real life"

This is in version 1.0.9
The issue wasn't present in the previous version

 

@Saevax: Thanks. Have not seen that before. Will look into it.

@_invalidusername : Theres some overlays on the towers objects as well (the shore masks). Might be from that. There was some changes to the projection math in new version. Can you click untick the 'doublePrecisionProjection' option on the ocean component and see if it still happens.

Im going to buy a Mac after Christmas. Its too hard to support Mac without having one to check stuff on.

 

Greetings scawk! I am using Ceto in my work project (not from this account, this one is personal) and I am told to document everything. Including the water and how it actually works. Could you please provide some explainations on the water's math model or at least which model or the formulas you have actually realised in Ceto ? I couldn't really understand the wave spectrum code by itself without any background=)

P.S. Sorry for bothering you with this. Thanks for the great asset!

 

The issue is still there with doublePrecisionProjection set to false. It works fine when the overlays on the towers are disabled (sorry I didn't see those originally) so it definitely must be the overlays.

It's a pity we're not in the same country, I have a spare iMac that I'm trying to get rid of!

 

I can provide you a link to the papers that contain the theory.

This ones for the lighting.

real-time realistic ocean lighting using seamless transitions from geometry to brdf

This ones for the projected grid.

Real time water rendering.

This one for the spectrum.

A unified directional spectrum for long and short wind driven waves.

 

It is probably bad manner to ask about another water/ocean system. However, I am torn on buying this and the playway water system. In terms of features and future plans, both products are similar and both looks really good. Is there anyone who used both assets?

 

We have both.

In the videos the Playwater system appears to show it changing the wave presets from low waves to big stormy waves, however it's not something that seems to be built-in to the inspector. Ceto on the other hand has a simple slider to adjust the wave scale at runtime and the changes are calculated on a separate thread so there is little to no impact.

They both use basically the same spectrum for the ocean simulation, but Ceto has a few tweaks to make the ocean waves travel towards a certain direction. Playwater's simulation is less directional and more of a choppy fluid. However, Ceto can be adjusted to appear exactly the same by changing a few lines in the spectrum code depending on what visual style you're after.

Ceto has a much better and powerful masking system for shore blending and foam. 'Nuff said.

If there's anything I would say Playwater has over Ceto, I would say a slightly higher visual quality for the ocean normals, but this appears to be only from a detail normal map that's helping blend out some of the low-res artefacts from the spectrum textures. This could easily be implemented in Ceto.

Playwater's projected grid implementation seem to be borked at the moment.

I hope this isn't sounding biased or like I'm ripping into the Playwater system. Playwater is good, that's why I bought it! But these are my observations from having integrated Ceto pretty heavily into our current project and from also purchasing and having a look into the Playwater system. I haven't looked at Playwater's road map, but as it stands I would pick Ceto out of the two.

 

Playway's feature of rendering ocean on any mesh is pretty cool, would be nice to see it in ceto but not as essential as proper shoreline stuff.

 

+1 on pretty shorelines

 

m:\unity-projects-folder\gaia\assets\ceto\scripts\underwater\underwaterposteffect.cs

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // cache it, why not :)
3. private Camera cam;
4.  
5. void LateUpdate()
6. {
7.  
8. if (cam == null)
9. {
10. cam = GetComponent<Camera>();
11. // meh, skip this frame, wait for the private to be found for an extra few ms
12. Debug.Log(Time.frameCount + " skipped update");
13. return;
14. }

Seems to fix the error nicely I reported before.

Lateral solution

EDIT: Hmm, think it misses the network use-case still. will investigate.

 

I decided to buy/bought ceto ocean!

However, there seems to be a small bug where if the camera goes too far out from the ocean (beyond the camera view distance), it doesn't render once the ocean goes back in the camera render distance. It seems to just break the specific projection quality that you are in. For example, if the quality is High, and you zoom out and back in, the mesh doesn't show up, but once you change the quality, the mesh shows up again. Changing it back to High breaks it once more.

Additionally, (This is kind of a feature request), The Underwater fog image effect thing, doesn't work once the ocean surface is out of the camera view. It would be nice if the fog still persists beyond this since I want to dive deep into the ocean. Would also be cool, if the ocean gets darker as the camera submerges but I guess that isn't really a priority

 

Thanks

There is currently a bug where moving the camera to far from the origin causes the grid to stop rendering. This will be fixed in the next update.

With the underwater fog there is a invisible bottom mesh that the camera has to be inside for the effect to render. If you go to deep you end up out side of the mesh. As you approach the bottom mesh the underwater effect gets lighter as well.

The bottom depth can be changed if you want in the UnderWater script. By default its set to 1000. Its the OCEAN_BOTTOM_DEPTH value on line 105.

 

I have found an issue, with particles and planar reflections, and it only happens in Unity 5.3.1, and the new patch as well:

Code (csharp):

1. IsFinite(outDistanceForSort)
2. UnityEngine.Camera:Render()
3. Ceto.PlanarReflection:RenderReflectionFor(Camera, Camera) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Reflections/PlanarReflection.cs:470)
4. Ceto.PlanarReflection:RenderReflection(GameObject) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Reflections/PlanarReflection.cs:247)
5. Ceto_Ocean:RenderReflection(GameObject) (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Ocean/Ocean.cs:988)
6. Ceto.Common.Unity.Utility.NotifyOnEvent:OnEvent() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Common/Unity/NotifyOnEvent.cs:70)
7. Ceto.Common.Unity.Utility.NotifyOnWillRender:OnWillRenderObject() (at Assets/Ceto/Scripts/Common/Unity/NotifyOnWillRender.cs:22)

If there is *any* particle emitter in one of the layers enabled in the reflection mask, I get that error countless times, and the game is slowed down to a crawl. If I set it up so that no particles are reflected, no more errors are generated.

 

Hey Scrawk

I may have found an issue with the layerCullDistance and Ceto. I did a quick test with the script below on my camera, and put some object(trees) on layer 21. The objects where placed with different distances to the camera to test the culling. Btw, i set the "TreesLayerCullDistance" in my script to 200... so objects closer than 200 meters should be rendered and object farther away should not.

This works fine for the objects, but the reflection in the ocean are gone? I have the disable the script and restart the scene before the reflections are back.

It could be the same for the refraction(underwater objects), but I have not tested it.

It would be really cool if the reflection (and maybe refraction), could follow the culling done with "layerCullDistance".

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3.  
4.     public class CameraLayerCullDistance : MonoBehaviour
5.     {
6.         public float TreesCullDistance;
7.  
8.         void Start()
9.         {
10.             Camera camera = GetComponent<Camera>();
11.             float[] distances = new float[32];
12.             distances[21] = TreesCullDistance;
13.             camera.layerCullDistances = distances;
14.         }
15.     }

 

@SargeRho : thanks. I'm not on 5.3 yet but will check it out soon.

@Maxi77 : thanks. Should be able to have that fixed for next update. Just looks like the reflection camera is not copying the distances from the camera.

 

@scrawk I have the same "IsFinite(outDistanceForSort)" error as @SargeRho in Unity 5.3.1p1.

I noticed it repeatedly occurs if my PlayerController's Y Rotation is between 0 and 90. (My Camera is below that at 0,0,0) If it's outside those values there's no error.

I've only had a couple of minutes to tinker with it but will hopefully find more time tomorrow. (Googling had a few results but nothing stood out as a solution just yet; will need to put it under the debugger when I have time.) It's probably a Unity error, but maybe we can find a workaround.

 

I'm having a problem where the sun intermittently shine off the sea. This doesnt look great when it's just water, but it's doing it through my land as well, with the flashing area showing through my terrain.

I have a 6 second video of it here while the land is still generating so it's easier to see:

How can I stop this from happening? I would rather not have the sun reflection appear and disappear. If it's not consistent, I'd rather turn it off.

Shining through the terrain cant be allowed to happen, so I'd prefer just to turn this off as I am happy with the light reflection on the water without that sun hot spot.

One other problem is that alt-tabbing away and back again breaks the shader. It's just flat with a reflective surface after that. Is handling Awake something the developer is supposed to do and re-fix the shader somehow? None of my other assets have done this yet.

-g

 

try adjusting the camera FOV and see if that affects it. might be a bug

 

That bug is only in the editor, when build this error will not show up

If your working with the sun have you set the sun in the lightning menu correctly?
I to get visual errors if i forget to do this each time i start unity.

 

Hi. This issue with alt tabbing is happening for some people in the editor. I'm not sure what the cause is yet. Its nothing your meant to do in awake. It's a bug.

I'm not sure what the issue with the sun is. I have not seen that before.

Can you disable each of cetos components one by one and see if it goes away.

It could be caused by the reflection or underwater scripts maybe.

 

Is it possible to have the water plane go farther? I have tried using the two camera approach where one has a clipping plane of 0.3-1000 and another to 1000-10000000. However, there is a line where the plane intersects and is pretty obvious.

 

The water plane will always be projected to where the camera is looking. It should automatically extend to the end of the cameras far plane.

If its not you might have to post a screen shot so I can what the issue is.

 

I hadn't had an issue related to this yet, I'll check into how to do that. Thanks!

-g

 

I'll do a test of the scripts and options and see what effects it and post back, thanks!

No problem on the tabbing thing, if it works in builds then it's workable until you find it. Thanks for the quick reply!

-g

 

I ran into 2 more issues. First is that I have a mesh terrain (not Unity) that I want to make a shore line foam from Ceto. The documentation says it is To-Be-Done, is there any other source for how to set that up for a terrain mesh?

Second is that at low altitudes, Ceto goes to the horizon, but when I raise my camera it doesnt extend out far enough. I dont see any options for this on the scripts just from looking, and couldnt find this in the docs.

How do I get Ceto to extend out to the horizon? Pic:

 

The shoreline stuff is something people have struggled a bit with (and I have struggled a bit to explain it) so I am adding some new helper scripts in the next update to make it easier to do. The manual says 'to be done' as I though it best to wait until the new scripts are in. Next update should be at end of January.

Note - The overlays used to do the shore masks are not currently working on Mac. If you have a Mac you will need to wait until next update when this is fixed.

The basic idea is very simple. John G post a good explanation on this page (its near the bottom).

The basic idea is...

1 - create a new game object and add Cetos AddShoreMask script.

2 - Change the width, height and rotation until the yellow box fits the terrain size.

3 - Create a mask which is a texture where white is the mask and black is no mask.

To create a mask for the terrain you need to make the texture white where the terrain is above the sea level and black below. If you made the terrain in world machine it can do that for you. If you have Gaia it can do it as well. You can then edit the mask in photoshop to customize it if you need.

You must make sure the mask is in the texture alpha channel. Easiest way is to go to the textures advanced settings and tick alpha from greyscale.

The helper scripts I am adding in next update will make it easier to make the mask and there will be a new AutoShoreMask script that you just add to your terrain and it does it all automatically.

There are 5 texture slots on the script so you may need 5 textures but you can reuse the same one for most and you can just leave the slots null if you dont want that bit masked.

The height mask will mask the wave heights where it is white. Good to fade the waves near the shore.

The foam mask will mask the white cap foam and the normal mask will fade the wave normals. Both also good near the shore. I normally use the same mask for these as the height mask.

The edge foam text will add foam where it is white. Good to get that white rim around the terrain. I normally use a slightly burred version of the height mask texture.

And the clip mask will cut a hole in the ocean where it is white. Good for areas that have caves going under the ocean.

@aosome23 : the following explanation about the gap between the ocean and sky also relates to your question

With the gap between the ocean and the horizon this is not a ocean specific issue but its to do with how sky boxes work.

If you remove/disable the ocean and add a large flat plane to the scene you will see the same issue occurs.

Increasing the camera far plane helps a little (the ocean will always extend to the far plane) but the higher the camera goes the larger the gap will get and at some point there will always be a gap no matter what the far plane is.

The problem is caused by the way sky boxes are blitted into the screen. Basically the sky box horizon does not match the actual world horizon and the higher the camera the worse it gets. I dont know the exact cause but as far as I know its just a limitation of sky boxes. You might be best of asking one of the sky asset developers if they have a solution to the issue. Also if you use a sky dome they dont suffer from this problem (I think) but Unity does not include one by default.

 

@scrawk The holidays have kept me busy. I only had a little time to tinker-around with the code, trying to figure out a way around the errors you receive if a particle system is on one of the reflection's layers. Nothing stood out in the C# side of things, and none of the values I inspected looked bad, but my understanding of projection matrices is poor. This still smells like a Unity bug to me. I didn't look at anything in shader code, as I'm just an amateur at that stuff. So, unless Unity fixes it in upcoming weeks, it looks like I'll have to put all particle systems on different layers than the reflection sees.

 

The only way to have close and extremely far is having two cameras as far as I know. If the clipping planes are too far apart, you get less accuracy in the depth buffer. So my setup for two cameras are shown below:

Spoiler: Screenshots of lines between the clipping planes

However, you can see the line between the two clipping planes. Also there is a line from underwater too:

I was wondering if there are any alternatives for rendering for a farther distance.

Additionally, Is there anyway to decrease the intensity of the sun as it goes deeper? (Both for the fog and the mesh)

Spoiler: Example

Example:

[/spoiler']

 

Setting far clipping out worked just fine:

 

I have another issue, but that might be on our end rather than a problem with Ceto itself. We have a minimap that you can click on to jump to other parts of the map, but if you jump too far away, the water disappears. It reappears if I jump back to somewhere near the original position, and I can jump small distances without breaking the water.

Is there a setting in ceto itself to avoid that? Otherwise, we can just make the camera move really quickly instead of teleporting instantly.

 

@SargeRho I think this is part of the known issue where: .

 

Hmm, ok, I figured it would be a separate issue since it doesn't happen when I move around there the old fashioned way.

 

@aosome23 : Theres not a lot of options for having both close and far objects in the scene. Theres the two cameras method or using a logarithmic depth buffer (which takes a lot of custom shader coding to use).

I dont think Ceto is going to work well with the two cameras method. Those lines are going to be hard to remove. I can take a look at the issue at some point but it would not a high priority at the moment.

To decrease the sun intensity you can drag the sun game object on the sun slot on the ocean component and then click the 'Attenuate by sun' option on the UnderWaterPostEffect script on the camera. This will multiply the underwater color by the sun color. You would then have to code a script to make the sun color get darker the further the player is from the ocean level.

@SargeRho : Yep, thats a Ceto bug. Should be fixed in next update.

To by pass the issue you can go into the ProjectedGrid script and on line 444 in the ApplyProjection functions there is this line...

UpdateBounds(go, cam);

If you comment that out it will fix the issue. Catch is you cant have receive shadows ticked on the projected grid script as it will break the shadows for the scene.

 

Between work and Christmas I havnt got much done either. I havnt had time to look at this issue yet. The only option at the moment is to not reflect the particles.

The planar reflection script I use is based on Unitys default water one. It might be worth checking if the same bug occurs with Unitys water. If not see what they changed to fix it. Thats the first thing Im going to do when I look at this issue.

 

I've finally started messing with Ceto and I'm really addicted to this water asset. Thanks for a great water solution!

 

I have a fairly complex ship that works great with buoyancy but I can't get my player to stand on the surface, it goes right through. Am I missing some setup setting?

 

The water has no collision mesh, it is purely mathematical in that sense. You would need to add some form of height check to your player to handle its own buoyancy.