New Pro Water!

Looks perty! Can't wait to check it out! Nice work guys!

 

WOW *faints* this is SO AWESOME!!!! What does it look like in unity basic?

 

Looks great! nice work.

 

I saw that also. Looks like a major leap forward from the existing Pro water. I can't tell from the screenshot or video how it compares to the "community ocean shader"? Does it include "ocean waves"? Whitecaps? Boat wakes? Can it be used for underwater scenes as well? If so, that will be awesome!

 

Its times like these that I wish I had unity pro

Does it automatically make waves at the shore in realtime?

 

Looks very sweet indeed

 

I studied the video again and it does appear that the new water shader does have waves and whitecaps. I may be mistaken, but doesn't it look like the boat is "displacing" water, ie. water is not leaking into the boat (as is typically the case with other water shaders)? Additionally, the sky looks quite nice. UT wouldn't happen to be hiding a nice real-time weather system in their bag of goodies would they? This update could make me a very happy camper...

 

Cool, this is really nice - can't wait to get my hands on it ;-)

 

One more reason why I need pro.

Will work for Food... err Pro.

 

wish i had unity pro now

 

This looks fantastic.

 

bigkahuna, you are right about waves, whitecaps and displacement.

the latter "water-not-entering-the-boat" thing however is a hack at the moment that we are maybe not packaging with the water.

 

Thanks ole. Will you give us access to water surface height and normal direction so we can calculate floating objects (like what is done with the "buoyancy" script in the community ocean shader)?

Edit: After studying the new water asset video some more (probably a dozen times now) I've decided that to me it doesn't look like any ocean shader I've seen before in an indy engine. To my eye, the water probably looks a bit "too perfect" to look like a real ocean, but knowing Unity Tech it will likely have lots of room for tweaking to get things even better (ok, I'll admit it, I'm fussy when it comes to water). In fact it looks more like the water in this demo video (starting at about 1:29). Apparently that was done with the Cry engine. If we get water that looks that good, with white caps, access to the shader's surface geometry (so we can simulate buoyancy, splashes, etc.), compatible with projectors (so we can give it boat wakes, etc.) and some facility for underwater effects, then this might just be better than any water shader available on the market (within an indy's budget, that is). But that's, admittedly, a lot of if's .

 

Shhh or they won't give it to us hehe

 

Me and my free version of Unity are so jelly.

 

yes, getHeight getNormal gives something like this

 

Great!

 

I would like to know if there is any changes to the free water??

 

Indeed, it's a shader not?

 

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

 

Delicious! This just looks awesome. Unity once again brings more stuff to the table

 

Yummy ... this really is delicious

 

yes, it includes a shader

most importantly it uses depth and render textures, multiple cameras and some scripts.

we are not 100% sure yet about free water upgrades as most features just require pro. e.g. foam and shore blending is based on a camera depth texture which requires pro. refraction uses grabpass which is also a pro feature. and so on :-(. making good looking water in free is still possible with some nice vertex animation and good texture and uv work though (usually this is specific for the use case, so a little hard to generalize). think infinity blade water, which hasn't really any fancy features.

what we could do for free:
- specular lighting (sun reflection)
- vertex displacement (waves)
- static cubemap reflection
- bump displacement ("small wavees", for cubemap and specular lighting)
- "refraction" (just simple alpha blending without perturbing uv's)

but all this still won't enable the "drag´n´drop and it will just look good" feature :-/.

 

@Ole - Thanks very much for the info. Two other things I'd really like (and I'm sure other folks will as well) are "boat wakes" and the ability to transition from above water to underwater. In the "community ocean shader" project we're able to add boat wakes by using a projector, can we do something similar with this new Pro water? Also, will there be some facility for us to transition from above water to underwater?

 

This looks amazing. I have been struggling to roll my own decent looking water as of late, this is exactly what I needed.

Are some other things getting an update as well? Or just the water?

 

Wow, the new water prefab looks great! Will it be possible to customize the depth falloff-rate of each RGB channel separately? This is in my opinion the secret to great looking tropical water


Another solution for floating objects is my newly released Buoyancy Toolkit on the Asset Store I haven't seen the implementation of the new water (obviously) but it should be straightforward to combine the two. Simply feed the buoyancy simulation with the wave function of the water.

 

@gustavolsson - The toolkit looks interesting, PM sent.

 

looks really really great!


but the bird-animation....arggggggggg

 

as many people were asking about what can be expected for unity indie/free users, i put together a quick video with only using indie features to show what is possible and where are the obvious limits.

View attachment $indie_water_opt_med.mov.zip

still, i think for many use cases, it can give better results to just produce good, customized water assets for unity free ...

 

That's the indie version? Jeesh, that's pretty damn nice!

@ole - I'm curious if you've taken a look at the "community ocean shader" project at all? The latest version (Trond's shader with Alexzzzz's edits) is actually quite good. I'm wondering if any of that might make it's way into the Unity "official" ocean shader?

 

yup, we didn't set out to replace the community ocean shader, we just wanted to upgrade our existing water prefab to be a better starting point for people in need of a water surface in their scenes. so our goal was not to create a full blown ocean editor solution but to give a nice, easy to use, good looking and very performant starting point that works from free and low end to pro and high end. so there were quite some compromises.

as a matter of fact, the community ocean shader is more advanced in some areas (e.g. mesh generation). if i have time one day, i could add a profile to the water prefab that incorporates more of the community ocean features ...

 

I'm sure everyone will appreciate whatever you can add.

 

I love Unity3d so much. That indie water is amazing too.

 

I think I speak for everyone here by saying Holy Crapness!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I decided to make the investment in Pro a long time ago and the version upgrade etc.. and I have to say the thing that I love about Unity even more than the features and it's amazing potential is how the development team takes the time to read community posts and take into consideration our ideas. That is worth the cost of Unity Pro and much more in my opinion. I think that the end product of Unity 3 will be truly epic. Thanks guys!

 

That movie is very nice indeed! I first thought it was a bit wierd with the rocks looking like they are floating, then I realized the camera is on a board that "is" floating. WOW! Glad I finally took the 3 plunge.

 

Wow, both versions look *great*. As an indie user (at least until I get a release out and generate some revenue) I'm stoked about that indie water. it looks perfect for a project I'm working on.

3.2 looks like it's shaping up to be one hell of a release.

 

I concur.

 

could we have a copy of the edited free version of the water

Mike

 

Quick technical question if you don't mind...

I am working on a massive ocean based world and have a paging system in place for loading portions of the world based on lat and long in the game. Sooooo.... my questions is this.. how well does this shader line up on a grid? For instance you have 4 tiles each with the new pro water shader on them. Will there be seams between them with the wave manipulation? The only other thing I can think to do is to actually try and scroll the material on a water plane using it's offset values and have the plane attached to the boat so that it looks like the boat is moving but really both the boat and water are standing still. Do you think that would be possible assuming they don't seamlessly tile? Also, what about the foam around land if I scroll the material would it compensate for that or would the foam scroll away from the land? lol sorry for the weird questions.

Thanks ahead of time! This will help me a lot in the mean time on pointing me in the right direction of continuing to work with the tiling system or setting up a scrolling material solution.

 

@rutecht - I haven't seen the new Pro water yet, but have you checked out the "Community Ocean Shader Project"? That shader includes an LOD system that would allow you to do what you're looking for.

 

@bigkahuna

Thanks. Actually I have set it up in my project but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I should mention since you brought up the ocean shader project which is really cool, something you might want to do is organizing all the updates on it. I found it very difficult to figure out what the latest version of it was.

The problem with the ocean project was that is uses a few more FPS than I'd like in my particular case. So... with the added foam feature of the pro water and the hope that it is a little more efficient for the scale I'm looking at that's why I'm leaning more in this direction. My game's view port is kind of like an RTS god view and the ocean shader is really better for something close up and personal like a boat racing game or something where you need that kind of detail in my opinion.

At the moment I'm using planes with the pro water shader on it and I can do what I need just fine. My questions arise with the apparent new wave feature that I saw in the demo video on the dev blog. I'm concerned that if I put my water planes next to each other they won't match up anymore.

 

@ rutech...

i'm verrrry much interested in this... i too have implemented an infinite ocean system using a 3x3 tiled based on a treadmill algorithm...



my implementation has realtime displaced wave action and the waves (amazingly ) joined up seamlessly at the edges... i'd like to implement the same thing in Unity...

looking forward to 3.2... and also anything you find out as well...

good luck...

--Mike

 

@RedOctober

You know actually as I have been pushing away at my project anyways I found implementing the single water plane solution then resetting it to 0,0 using a floating origin script after I travel a distance gave me a performance boost of about 100 FPS vs implementing multiple tiles. I realize that sounds confusing. Basically imagine that after my boat travels 200 units in one direction that the entire map is attached to the boat and the boat is moved to 0,0 with the exception of my water plane and sky sphere etc.. which are just centered on 0,0 separately.

I find when my script moves my water plane along with everything else back in relation to the origin that the shader resets itself so no problems with reflections etc.. my guess is that since the foam is part of a shader vs. a mesh that it should be no problem. The best part is that since I never get close to my water plane's edge I don't have to worry about waves at all. The only down side is that there is an ever so slight jitter that happens during the reset. What has yet to be seen with the new water is with the addition of waves if that jitter will become more obvious or not. Still though... I figure an occasional jitter for a 100 fps gain is worth it.

 

regarding animations, the prefab is using world space positions, offset by local vertex position, so a paging system for small water tiles should work* . however, some logic should be tweaked (calculations parameter handling should be moved out of individual 'patches' and into some global paging entity) ...

* it's a different story though if individual water patches have different vertex densities

 

this doesn't sound confusing at all... i've actually used a similar algorithm due to 3DRAD having issues if a physics object moves too far from the "world center", in which case i have to reset everything in the scene back to 0,0,0 while keeping track of their "virtual" positions...

i never thought of using it for the water though... hmmmm...


--Mike

 

Thanks Ole for the response!

I think what I may try and do when this comes out is to stick with my single water plane positioned at the origin and then see if I can simply adjust the wave position at the time of scene reset. That is if the waves suddenly change when the floating origin reset is made due to the boat attached camera being moved suddenly to a different location on the plane.

 

That water is just making me want to get Unity Pro even more ^.^

 

Where can I get that upgraded indie water with the waves? I've upgraded to 3.2 and the water I have stays flat no matter what I put the wave scale to. Or am I missing something obvious?

 

Just downloaded the latest Pro version and am trying to get to grips with the water. Among other things. It doesn't look like the demo video!

No reflections, refractions seems to work, float script produces weird results. I'm probably doing it all wrong but that's what happens when there aren't any instructions.

I think it's trying to produce foam round the sea shore. It's lots better than the old one anyway. Just wish I knew more about how to use it.


Update.
I just found a whole load of customisable options. OK WOW! Loads of fun!!!