PlayWay Water - high quality water system

I've worked out calming the sea near shores. Allowing to blend in many intensities around will have to wait for my side project of moving a lot of water stuff to screen space. Now when I have that KS out of my head I hope to get to it

I think that this may be done right now with a custom script. Feel free to get in touch about it after I will get things straight here

No way. Can I get a test scene?

Now when I have that KS out of my head, it won't take long. Afaik I need to hunt down just one AMD bug.

It has been moved to WindWaves component. I've missed this one in the docs. Fixing it right now..

This is certainly a good idea. Thanks!

 

Just in case... have you tried opening a new scene then deleting the PlayWay water folder and reimporting?

 

I'm on a clean 5.3.4. I will download p6 in a sec to check this out.

Edit: @Fraconte is probably right on this one.

 

I will give that a whirl.

 

Thanks for responding.
It has to be related to either the process of Playway creating shaders, or how it creates them. The fact that it only occurs in the built-client of the game, i would think, should help narrow it down. I've also noticed that it seems to be more prevalent on materials that use textures with mipmaps, but obviously i can't simply just disable mipmaps.

 

Spoiler: Not Relevant

Not relevant

KatySaunders, yes copy that

 

Indeed, it's weird that it occurs only in builds. My guess is that one of the shaders used by command buffers is not included in a build for some reason and missing. That would also explain why it behaves the same way with an orphaned command buffer using shaders that were deleted.

I will get to it, but first things first. I need to know for sure if I have a correct lead. If you can, please verify which (if any) of these things will fix your issue:

1. Disable "Render Volumes" (on WaterCamera).
2. Disable "Render Water Depth".
3. Remove WaterCamera as a last resort.

Spoiler: Not Relevant

Busted!

 

Patch for Unity 5.4 beta.

It will be included in the next major release that I work on right now.

 

Hi zuzzu... thanks for taking the time to post. Its appreciated a lot!
Good luck with you Kickstarter, by the way... hope you didn't take my reaction before to heart. Just been there before, therefore maybe a little to quick to react.

Sure, I will create a testscene for you. Trying to reproduce the error might show that some other asset in my current project is the culprit. Just wanted to know if it is something you would recognize instantly.


Any chance to get more information on how to use Playwater for lakes and rivers? Or is there an example project I should look at for that? I have to confess that I didn't do that yet (time constraints on my side)... if you could point me in the right direction, I will do that before asking any more questions.


Regards

Gian-Reto

 

You aren't hearing me.
Playway isn't even in the file system anymore. Once it's been in, the whole system is tainted, permanently. Until I re-download the entire game off our subversion repo again totally clean without playway.

 

No worries.

Rivers still wait for a flow map support. I have a small break from sea based games right now, so I may get to this soon.

Speaking of lakes, the most performant way to have them is to use a custom mesh (you can choose it as a geometry on Water component). It just needs to be a planar geometry covering the space you need. It will be tesselated properly to look well.

This is something that I've described in the most recent docs, but you may have an old version of it, if you have missed this post.

I think that you've missed my explanation in this post. Command buffers is something that once added on a camera persists in a scene file. My scripts normally clean them up after themselves, but not after being deleted.

I will know for sure, if that's the case, if you could try the three steps above or clean it manually through inspector.

 

I did read it.
And since playway isn't in the filesystem as i said, obviously there is no such thing as "watercamera" or any of your other scripts to modify/delete.

 

I'm really trying to help, so please pay more attention to my posts. It's a bit annoying to repeat this for a third time.

There may be some command buffers left (using deleted shaders) on some of your cameras, that you can now remove manually through built-in inspector. I've attached a screenshot of such inspector earlier to my post. They may interfere somehow with your rendering pipeline.

Other than that I don't see any possibility for my scripts to leave anything behind them and this must be something else. Because it is GUI, this may be some stencil buffer issue. You can try to use a custom shader on it without stencil comparisons to debug this out.

 

I'm sorry if reiterating things annoys you.
You know what's more annoying? Waiting around all those weeks while you stuck other irons in the fire just to get a response then get an attitude when I do.

Let's try this again, shall we?

I found that screenshot you mentioned. There are no lines like those in that location so I can assume that means that isn't the issue. Regardless, the issue has now spread to other areas of the game, even speedtree models and animated textures.

I'm prepared to accept something else is in part responsible, but the fact still remains that the only way to fix it is to remove playway entirely and totally re-download the game without it. It's reliable in that putting playway back into the filesystem, and no other component, begins the "corruption process".

If it's an incompatibility with something else being used, that's still an incompatibility coming from the inclusion of your product and would need to be fixed. Right now, i'm debugging this in reverse - Starting with our game with "just" playway to see if the incremental inclusion of our other systems eventually initiates the corruption process.

 

Calm down, I didn't meant to offend you in any way, but to get your attention to the subject. It's obviously annoying to rephrase the same suggestion three or four times and get a bit rude comments in return..

I understand your frustration on this and would really like to aid you somehow. For now, I look forward to see what you will find out. You are correct that this may be some incompatibility with another asset and your approach may narrow this down.

It's most probably nothing related to the general use of this asset though and I would like to ask you to move our discussion to private medium. I will report here our findings.

 

Hey Zuzzu, thanks for tending to concerns here - would you be able to help me out in figuring why a different project holding an earlier version of Playway Water was changed with the update to 1.3 in a separate project?

I made a new project to test the water in case there were any issues, there were some, so I went back to the past project but the asset had changed too.

The problem being the algorithm used in the earlier version had perfect stormy settings, newer ones are leading to large patches of the water mesh dipping below terrain level, and altering the settings you said to previously leads to fairly bland looking water not at all comparable to what it was previously.

Thanks for any assistance

 

I can upload privately for you the version that you need to replace the files. You may give the current version a last chance though by changing the scale of water transform on y-axis

As a heads up - you may also wait a week for the new version. It supports calming the sea near lands.

 

Thanks, I'll try the scale right now.

-- Tried the scale 0.1, comes out looking like this:



what other values would need to be changed to get it looking normal at a scale of 0.1? Tried changing the wave foam supersampling to 0.1 and 2, 5 etc but there was little difference.

edit - just remembered that I hadn't updated the profile accordingly, my apologies. Will let you know if there is any problems, thanks for the help.

 

I think I may also take up that offer of a link to the older version if possible, thank you.

edit- Will definitely need that older link if available, setting it to a small enough scale to be comparable ended up crashing my video driver

 

Does this asset work well with Sonic Ether's SSAO? I saw SSAO Pro mentioned but I just want to be sure..

 

I will send it to you in a second via PM.

You will need to wait a week for that. It will work with SSAO, SSR etc. after the next update.

 

Thanks for your response... by the way, sent you a dropbox link containing a problem reproduction over PM.

Good to know that support for rivers is on the roadmap. Would be great to have.

I gave the custom meshes a try but couldn't make it work... I did however just work with the newest version from the asset store at the time, never downloaded that link you provided in the post you linked. Will check it and see if the newer doc contains the explanations for custom meshes I missed.

Regards

Gian-Reto

 

Hi Zuzzu! Any news on the new update? I'm super anxious to try it out.

Thanks

 

It's a matter of few days.

I will send it as a beta to try to everyone that declared interest in it (including you of course).

 

Awesome, thanks

 

Could I have the beta please? If I PM you my invoice number? Thanks

 

Sure. It will take up to two days.

Beware though, this update noticeably changes water look (due to SSS changes) and some tweaking to existing profiles may be needed.

 

Any news on the issue I reported a while back and the repro project I sent you showing the same issue?
Its about the weird white/blue artefacts around opaque objects when they are rendered in front of the water plane.


Regards

Gian-Reto

 

Yes, I've fixed this yesterday. Would you like to get the beta release, when it will be available?

It may take 1 - 3 weeks before I will send it to the Asset Store. Some of the features in this update will likely need some fixing.

 

Hi zuzzu

I think I can wait 3 weeks, got holidays coming up and busy with other things... just wanted to know a fix is in the pipeline. Thanks for looking into it!


Regards

Gian-Reto

 

@zuzzu Any idea when the beta will be ready? Super excited to get these fixes

 

I had high hopes to make it today, but it's probably not going to happen, sorry. Did my best.

Nothing is wrong though, I simply had a few additional support requests. Beta is still on track and very close to release. I won't be able to work tomorrow, but Sunday is fine to me

 

Ok no problem, thanks!

 

Hello,
I already tried to reach the author via mail, maybe the mail got in spam folder.
My question is, if someone could post some screenshots or a video, with the water look like these cyan carribean ones, where you can see the transition from cyan to transparent to the shore, like in this screenshot->

http://cdn.skim.gs/image/upload/v14...ibbean-resorts-caneel-bay-rosewood_yv9rdc.jpg

The asset looks really impressive, there aren't just any pics/vids with a setup like this.

Thanks

 

Subsurface scattering in the upcoming version creates such look in a shallow water. In the current stable version you should be able to achieve this by modifying absorption color in the water profile.

Edit: Try something close to this color: #3F0E10.

 

@zuzzu Thanks for the answer, I didn't purchase the water yet.
I like two things in my screenshot, the one is the transparent sss effect ,yea.
The other is the clear caribbean cyan water and for this one at least I wanna see a video or a few pics, someone using playway to achieve this look, before I buy it. Thanks again

 

Hi @zuzzu ,

High five for your great work. Could you please send me the beta version, because i must use it to show it to many people who wait it so much. Two days left for me...

I will pm you with my invoice number right now.

Hope you will answer me fast

Have a great day and night

 

My vive headset arrived yesterday. I've tried to make fixes for vr on Unity 5.4, but it seems that changes in that version are too extensive and tbh I still don't understand them fully, so this will be delayed until I will work this out.

Hi! Would love to send it to you right away, but I'm bombarded by requests and a bit overwhelmed right now. I will send the beta today at night after I will deal with everything.

Please understand however that it's a beta and it may take some time until it will be production ready. There are many new features and lots of reworked code and it may or may not work out of the box for your project.

 

Thanks Zuzzu, look forward to checking out the new features

 

Hey Zuzzu, I'd like to check out the beta as well. Very interested in the new features.

 

It seems I was too quick earlier about the beta release. It still needs some work, apologies.

I've tested pretty much everything again and it seems that there are some issues with underwater effect and new deferred lighting system (caustics, absorption etc.) after some of the changes that I've made lately. It will take me a few days to rewrite it to use the new data. Please be patient for a bit longer.

I think it may be ready for the weekend, but don't rely too much on that. I will update you on the progress here.

Sure, it's open for everyone. On a separate note, I've found a way to fix the issue that you reported some time ago with the trees rendering on top of the water. I will post the solution here. It sounds like a possibly common issue (I've got one more report).

To fix this, open Water.cs and replace occurences of 2990 and 2991 with 2500 or 2600 (depends on the tree shader). It should render fine afterwards. It won't be needed in the next version.

 

Can i please get access to the beta to.

 

Hey! Coming back again. Was there any planned support for adding waves via physics? As in, creating a splash or wave at some XY point.

 

Hi guys,

we have following problem on cutomized planes with your water-asset.

Do you know this? How can we fix it?


Regards
Peter

 

Hey there! Great and beautiful assets you got there, my good sir!
Just a quick question, I got this warning message:

TerrainColliders can no longer act as triggers since Unity 5.0
UnityEngine.Collider:set_isTrigger(Boolean)
PlayWay.Water.WaterVolumeBase:OnValidate() (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/Volumes/WaterVolumeBase.cs:69)

Which I think makes it so that when I use a terrain and add the WaterVolumeSubtract script on it, this errorhappen:

InvalidOperationException: Unsupported collider type.
PlayWay.Water.WaterVolumeBase.CreateRenderers () (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/Volumes/WaterVolumeBase.cs:208)
PlayWay.Water.WaterVolumeBase.OnEnable () (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/Volumes/WaterVolumeBase.cs:31)

and subsequently this error:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
PlayWay.Water.WaterVolumeBase.EnableRenderers (Boolean forBorderRendering) (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/Volumes/WaterVolumeBase.cs:94)
PlayWay.Water.WaterRenderer.OnSharedSubtractiveMaskRender (System.Boolean& hasSubtractiveVolumes, System.Boolean& hasAdditiveVolumes, System.Boolean& hasFlatMasks) (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/Base/WaterRenderer.cs:162)
PlayWay.Water.WaterCamera.RenderWaterMasks (Int32 baseEffectsWidth, Int32 baseEffectsHeight) (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/WaterCamera.cs:474)
PlayWay.Water.WaterCamera.OnPreCull () (at Assets/PlayWay Water/Scripts/WaterCamera.cs:348)

Which begs the question, will this be fixed in the upcoming update?
What I basically aim to create is the player standing on a beach, some mountains and shrubbery in the back and have 3 different 'scenes' for the water. A calm, a breeze and a storm. Everything is going a-okay for the most part, but when I use the storm, some of the waves suddenly come up from out of the ground behind me, and that's not right!
Is there perhaps a simple fix for this or will the fix be coming up in the update?

 

Hello! Amazing asset! Great surface view!
Question: When I go underwater, there always is a dark blur in front of the camera

the side that closer to the shore is thinner:

can make it fade by changing the absorption(underwater) to pure color

but in this case, the underwater fog looks pretty strange.
there is no error warning, so is it a bug or what?
How do I fix it?

 

A quick update. Work on beta takes me too long and started to collide with my other duties. I need to catch up for like three days and then I should be able to make the final fixes for beta and publish it.

I'm going to add this at some point. It is doable with custom scripts right now through WavesParticleSystem. I'm doing this in my games, you have to spawn 4 or 8 particles in all directions to make a splash. They will subdivide further when needed to fill the gaps.

I have some ideas, but I will need a test scene or more detailed report to be sure what to patch.

You won't be able to use terrain colliders as subtractive volumes, but your problems should be fixed in the next version as it calms water down near the shores. It is completely flat under the terrain.

You probably need to play a bit more with absorption color to fix this.

 

Hey there! For some reason in the Unity Editor I can see my water fine, but when I build I can no longer see the water? I read somewhere in this post that I need to rebuild the shaders? I tried that and it still doesn't seem to be working. Am I missing a step?

 

@zuzzu:

Is the latest beta compatible with unity 5.4 beta? If so could you please give me access? My email: psqv@me.com

Trying to incorporate it into a Unity 5.4 project and getting shader errors (pink geometry) with the current release.

 

Hey @psqv, if you check out this post (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/playway-water-high-quality-water-system.360079/page-12#post-2631266) it will work with Unity 5.4.

@zuzzu I have a question. It looks like I am getting semi-consistent spikes of 10ms calculation every hundred frames are so. They sometimes show, sometimes they don't. Can you think of anything that would cause this? I am happy to dive into the shader code and what may be causing this jump. I am using a Vive, so figuring out what is causing this stumble is super important.

http://imgur.com/c806Hjt

Thanks so much!

Second Edit: Looks like it is caused by calculating the volumetric lighting. After disabling this from the Water Quality Settings ("shader"), the occasional spikes went away. Is this probably what is causing it? How do you calculate water lighting in Playway Water?

PS. Your water is truly awesome, thanks so much for releasing this!

First Edit: Can't figure out how to post the img directly into this scene, had to edit the post a bunch of times.