CREST - Open Source Unity Ocean Renderer

I took some footage in the Unity editor of that new CREST ocean renderer I came across on Github. It's pretty stellar considering these are the first iterations on the system and it's being bug fixed and improved. Did I mention it's open source and free as well? Links in the video description.

 

Wow. Does it work in HDRP ?

 

That looks great. Could be a perfect fit fir a current project, too. Thanks for showing!

 

Ugh.... I hate seeing stuff like this... because my first thought is now I want to make a ocean type ship based game. Thanks for the distraction.

Looks nice, I like color shifts.

 

Thanks for posting. It looks nice.

 

Just being open source isn't enough though. It needs to be a permissive license to be valid with Unity. This asset was released under the MIT license which makes it valid to use in Unity, but there are assets out there with non-permissive licenses like GPL that you simply can't use.

At a glance (I went and read the packages manifest) it appears to be using built-in.

 

I don't think it does as I see people putting in the requests on the Github for it. I'm sure it's coming, the creator is a very experienced developer. I found him watching talks at Siggraph on simulation and rendering.

Very good observation. I think I get so excited testing it out I forget to check what license it's using. Very important if you plan on using this for anything commercially.

Ha ha you and me both. I have a system already in place for a working prototype with deck crew, FPS controller and physics on the ocean. I even have a weapons system for cannons, deck guns, swivel guns, etc. This is my prototype from a month ago or so and it's using the Community Ocean found on Github as well.

The most exciting thing is that the Crest ocean is actively in development and is not stagnant. Speaking with the developer he had mentioned "The 'flow' stuff that's coming online atm will really unlock some unique features with moving bodies of water I think". I have to contain some of my excitement to see how he's implementing these things. I can imagine it can only be good.

 

Looks really good. I'm currently still using the deprecated Ceto ocean system, but this may be even better. Does it support endless oceans?

 

I followed the instructions on the repository for setting up a scene and added a script to the main camera that would move it in one direction. When the camera moved the ocean borders moved with it.

 

Overall really like this. Code quality and good abstractions seem to be a thing actually. Using native containers, didn't see any jobs in use. Did immediately find that the majority of their cpu usage in Update stems from using NativeArray.CopyTo which could likely be fixed with a memcpy approach that's been posted, or copy manually but do it in a job.

The main thing is I'd feel comfortable actually tweaking this thing, it's layed out very well.

Number of layers it uses is a bit insane. It fails to mention the required Terrain layer, so it's 4 layers this asset eats up.

Ability to control shape locally is kind of huge. Nobody else has that and it's one of those things you can't really just tack on. Waves themselves are very basic, not a fan of Gerstner only waves.

 

In Cryengine, infinite ocean comes as default asset. I hope this could be as default prefab in Unity 2018.3.

 

Ah I missed that they had other wave algorithms besides gerstner.

 

Found another layer it requires. So that's 5 layers now.

 

Looks superb.
Surely Jobyfing would bring lot of benefits. Or even ECS?

 

It doesn't really spend much time on the cpu. If you fixed that one issue I saw I think cpu time in Update would be around .25 ms.

Their wave generation approach just doesn't appear to require a lot of compute time. Most other water shaders use compute buffers with a more brute force FFT approach which gets really expensive. Crest is using like half the gpu resources that UWS does on my system.

 

Oh that is very interesting to hear.
Surely it is superb asset. Shame I don't have project related directly to be able use it.
But I see, many people will be adapting this in theirs projects.

I would love to see some stormy weather sample, if somebody don't mind put on youtube, or even screenshot?

 

I had a hard time getting realistic looks out of it just tweaking the obvious stuff. FFT I think does a better job at that. It needs a bit more chaos in the right places. UWS I can make that look better. But Crest has a lot of gameplay oriented features. Like fine grained control over wave spectrums and height sensitive to objects. A lot of control over the water itself they have a nice whirlpool demo for example.

Their buyancy script is really nice. They use displacement plus wave normals. Most of the other solutions out there sample and then apply force at a bunch of positions based on height. Normals means they can just apply it once and the end result is really much better.

 

Yeah, I'm really liking this. There are a few extra things I'd like, but what's there seems great. Honestly, I'd more than happily pay for this.

I haven't checked this against all of my project's requirements, but so far it seems a better fit than any of the other solutions I've tried.

I haven't got the same realistic look out of this that I've seen elsewhere, but I don't particularly care about that. I've also only been experimenting with it for a short while.

I think shorelines could definitely use some work. There's a harsh water edge and I'm not getting particularly useful behaviour out of the shore foam. The latter is presumably because my shores are more like cliffs than beaches. The former can quite possibly be changed with some shader tweaking.

Oh, I didn't run into a 5th last night. What's that for?

 

There are the 3 lod layers. One for the water itself, and one for terrain/ground that it interacts with.

 

I think it would be really cool to see Unity put some backing behind open source projects like this. Give their devs a couple hours a week to contribute and submit PRs.

 

Oh been a while since the last time i pull their repo. Gotta pull em up tonight.
Thanks for the remainder

 

Well 2 /1 does = 2

 

@JamesArndt
It seems you have experience with both Crest and Ocean Community.

If you don't mind could you give a rundown of both of them.
1. Feature differences
2. Performance differences.

 

I've only done small experiments with both, so I can't speak for the entirety of both packages. I can, however, give some insights into some major things that stick out to me in both. For starters, the buoyancy in the Crest system seems quite a bit more solid. Floating and moving over the ocean feels natural and it just works, no weird physics glitches or visual anomalies. In the Community Ocean, the buoyancy is very finicky. By default when you adjust new custom collision, without fail the physics get very strange and my boat flops over, falls out of the world or shoots to the sky. So I think Crest has an advantage in the buoyancy code.

Crest has all kinds of awesome looking features for the foam and it just visually looks far more impressive. This also goes for the translucency of the wave faces, depth scattering, light scattering and the appearance of the sun on the water. Crest also does this underwater "foam" bubbling in the wakes of wave breaks, behind your vessel or AI vessels. It also does a deformation of the water in the wake of a moving vessel. I didn't see any of this working in the Community Ocean, at least nothing quite near the visuals of Crest. I will add though I believe the Crest system is missing some of the micro normal map details to really add smaller ripple or wave details to the water. You have the large forms of the waves and large ripples rolling over the ocean, but I'd like to see another overlayed normal map for smaller detail. I do believe the Community Ocean does have these details in their settings.

One thing I've noticed is that Crest does not seem to do any reflections of the terrain or the ships. If they are there I am not yet sure where to turn them on or how to adjust them. The Community Ocean does have reflections, but I've found they can appear glitchy, scintillating or aliasing really poorly on the horizon or distance. Crest has very nice caustics that appear on the hull of your ship, which I've turned way down in my video so you don't see them as much. Crest also does a very nice depth fading of the water around your boat, you can adjust the density of the water clarity around the hull of your ship. This is really outstanding and in my video, you can see I've set it to be a bit dark. When you make it nice and clear the caustic reflections show through very nicely.

I will be moving over to using Crest in my own prototype. I haven't put it through insane stress testing, but on my system, it's run at a consistent 60 fps the entire time. I've seen no physics glitches or framerate issues yet. My own two decision makers for this move are the extremely stable buoyancy and the higher visual fidelity. It's also important to note that the developer for Crest is currently bug fixing, improving and adding features right now. In contrast, the Community Ocean has sat a bit stagnant for a while now (I'm active in that thread as well). I think he does some bug fixing here and there, but no major improvements or features in a while. I'm not complaining either way because it's amazing these free systems are supported or were created at all.

 

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. Appreciate it a lot. As a hobby game dev. insight like yours are invaluable as we don't really have time to test everything out.
I will fully move to crest in due time as per your opinion. I had posted regarding CREST in the other community ocean forum hoping to get such an opinion.
Ideally we would have the community come over and merge. But we can always hope.
Thanks.

 

No, they're not there. It's a pending issue on the GitHub page.

Same deal with shadows.

 

Hi, I just watched your uploaded video.It seems pretty nice.I want to take nice foam vision behind my ship like yours.
Can you share your script settings? Or if you added new codes to Ocean shader, where should I work with to catch that nice foam?
When I try to play with bigger ships like titanic how can I get bigger foam?
Also I have some issues with playing with bigger ships.How can I apply buoyancy for bigger ships?
When I try to apply buoyancy for smaller boats I just change buoyancy coeff, boyancy torque, boat width from BoatAlignNormal script and WaterObjectInteractionSphere's transform scale.

Sorry I'm almost new in Unity.I know that I want too much answers.

 

Nothing to it really. I just adjusted the SimSettingsFoam object to thicken up the foam and make it more apparent. All of the settings are on that object and pretty self-explanatory so you should have it looking good within a minute or so.

 

And there goes my Friday night...

Great share, thanks!

 

hi James, adjust SimSettingFoam not work with me, can you show more detail ?

 

Well, you'd make the adjustments and then drag it into the appropriate slot. If you're not seeing any difference with the adjustment, it's most likely that the Sim object you're adjusting isn't plugged into the ocean object.

 

In that case, I believe this would be a more likely candidate, since it's LWRP based and made by a Unity employee (although in his spare time):

https://forum.unity.com/threads/lwrp-boat-racing-demo-from-gdc.527104/

 

wow, looks nice. supports Singel pass instanced rendering?

 

Sure this is going to look impressive. Inspired me to create a ancient-style deathmatch game located in a port with this beautiful sea surrounding it.

 

Anyone able to set up the object cache ?

 

Hi, sorry my inglish...

Your water is incredible! I do not know if it's optimized for mobile, but on my iPhone 6 it's going very well.

Can I use your ocean in a commercial project? I do not know if I'll finish it some day

and I'm trying to activate and deactivate the shadows of the material by unsuccessful script,

[Toggle] _Shadows ("Shadowing", Float) = 0

when it is under the water I want to deactivate it and when it is not under the water I want to activate it, could you tell me how can I do this?

thank you!
and excellent work your ocean!

 

Does it have some more detailed documentation? I could not find any and I would like to try with with something larger than a boat.... more battleship sized.

 

Hi
I'm super impressed and am using CREST now in my project.
However, for some reason, there is this HUGE wave emerging every time, like that water planet in Insterstellar. I'm using the Shape Gernster Batched with the WavesModerateSmooth preset with weight only 0.24. And have some (speed)boats in the scene. What could cause the tsunami like monster waves?

 

This isn't an official support thread, so you might have better luck filing an issue on the GitHub project.

 

What an awesome asset! Just watching the waves and light hitting the water is mesmerizing.
I tried to add some lights on the boats to make a night scene - is there a way to get the ship and light reflected in the water? The refraction under water is awesome - but can't get the light to reflect.

Look forward following this project.

EDIT:
Saw this has been raised

 

don't make your raycast ignore the water's layer, would be my advice.

 

Hello,

Is there support for realtime reflection probes?

 

Saw this on Twitter this morning. Very well rendered scene using this Ocean system.

https://twitter.com/crest_ocean/status/1122425065788907520

 

Hi everyone, am I able to use CREST in a commercial project?

 

If there would be ship reflection on surface, that would be even cooler.
Shame light go through a ship and glare on the surface, where shadow suppose to be, just after adding sun shaft.

 

Well the good news they have been iterating on it and making improvements and new features.

 

If you read the License it's MIT. so yes.

 

Does this ocean system support point and spot lights? It appears that it doesn't but I was really hoping that the shaders support this so I can use it in a night time setting where lights hit the ocean surface.

Suimono does this but the buoyancy system in suimono is very innacurate so I'm looking for another solution.

This system would be perfect for my requirements if the shaders support surface lighting from point/spot lights.

 

If you enable the planar reflection, it will reflect the light in the ocean.
I did a night time scene with some ships with lanterns at some point.
If the reflection is too "blurry", you can increase the size.
It worked on my old macbook mid 2014 - for some reason I'm having issues getting the same result on my new mid 2018.

 

By the way: https://forum.unity.com/threads/crest-advanced-ocean-renderer-open-source.547684/