Stylized Water 2 [URP] ☑️ Desktop/Mobile/Consoles/VR

This is really cool, but does this work for you with all of COZY's weather conditions? I tried this workaround and it looked good with a sunny COZY day but when I switched it to anything stormy, the effect looked broken again.

 

This workaround only affects the fog, it does not affect the special effects like particles instantiated by the weather-system. However, you can modify any particle shader from cozy in the same way using the same logic as the above one used for the fog. You will however need some small modifications like for example how you access your screen position for the respective shader. Depending on the shader you can also discard instead of returning a value (for example, if the shader is non-transparent).

 

Hello, I am having an issue now that the underwater effect is not synchronized with the waves, so when the camera goes underwater, I have some pretty big gaps between the water surface and the effect, making it rather unusable. Messing with the offset and the other settings in the underwater renderer component didn't help, also I noticed that making the vertex distance in the water grid close to 0.65, makes the problem disappear, but then I get a water surface that went from 10k to 300k triangles which is a big loss of performance in mobile devices. Any advice on how to make this work together? Thank You!

 

The water geometry needs a sufficient amount of vertices near to camera to display detailed waves. That is in the nature of how vertex animations work so there's unfortunately no practical way around this.

The Water Grid component will create a uniform grid of vertices. The ideal set up would involve streaming water tiles or having a LOD set up, all to ensure geometry in the distance remains low-poly, whilst high poly near the camera. Alternative is to use the tessellation feature.


From https://staggart.xyz/unity/stylized...er-rendering-docs/?section=usage-instructions

I should point out that the Underwater Rendering asset isn't considered supported for mobile platforms.

 

Thanks! I will try to make work with the tessellation and make a LOD system, maybe it's possible to have a decent performance.

 

Hi guys, any clue what could cause these glitches, it only happens in the build, in the editor it works correctly, the only temporary solution is to disable the shadows for water, although I wouldn't want to do without them, I'm working on Unity 2021.3 urp, cheers!

 

I know where this comes from - it's from the newest Unity versions. They compile the shaders wrong when creating a build causing the shown shadow-cascade artefacts.

This is the "wrong" or let's better call it "due to kind of Unity bugs not working" shader configuration:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // BROKEN APPROACH
3. #pragma multi_compile _ _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS
4. #pragma multi_compile _ _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE

And this is the working solution:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // NEEDS TO BE ONE LINE OF CODE
3. #pragma multicompile  _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE

Actually, this should work too:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // NEEDS TO BE ONE LINE OF CODE
3. #pragma multicompile  _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_SCREEN

Stylized Water 2 is not the only shader affected by this issue - it's probably a ton of Asset Store custom shaders that are affected by this (Toony Colors Pro 2 for example).
The issue was introduced with Unity 2021.3.15f1+ and is also present in the newest Unity 2022.2.3f1 release.

Hope this info helps anyone who experience this annoying Unity bug .

Regarding myself, I decided to stay with Unity 2021.3.14f1 for now.

 

Man, I love you! thank you so much! I was about to go crazy, after build n36 nothing worked I tried everything, and the worst thing is that the error now I had the whole terrain! And in this case the shader was Flatkit/Terrain, I did what you mention and everything works fantastic! btw I bought iStep, it works like a charm!!!

 

I'm glad to have helped .
The bug bothered me for a while too - very time consuming to debug.
Thanks a lot for the positive feedback and for buying iStep .

I use a lot of Asset Store products in game-production myself so I run into all kind of bugs like integration and Unity bugs that I need to work around somehow .
So I am in the same boat as you and many others who make games .

 

What @Kreshi outlines is entirely correct!

The "two lines" thing was an approach to piggyback on an oversight on Unity's part. It kept shadows working between 2019.4 through 2022.1. It seems like it has been corrected now, meaning the shader needs to be fixed as well.

I'll see to correcting this in next update soon. It unfortunately means the use of a single shadow cascade will no longer work in builds made using 2020.3, but that's a small price to pay for future-proofing

 

@StaggartCreations I just upgraded from Unity 2020.3.25f1 to the latest LTS, 2021.3.17f1. Using the latest version of Stylized Water 2 URP (1.3.1). The water is looking fine in the editor, but in the game it's rendering like an opaque mesh... Depth and Opaque Texture are enabled on the pipeline asset. What am I missing?

 

I'm seeing these things which look suspicious... In the URP.hlsl file, it looks like the UNITY_VERSION value is wrong??



It also shows this error for all 3 shaders:



Edit: Reverting back to Stylized Water 2 v1.1.9, doesn't show any of these errors, but the result looks pretty much the same. No edge fading, no reflections, no transparency near the surface...

Edit2: If I turn on gizmos in the game view, suddenly everything works...??
So first question: What the heck? How can I get this to work without gizmos?
Second question: The reflections seem to work differently? I can't get them to look as they did before the upgrade.

Edit3: I was able to fix the issue. In the renderer options, I set Depth Texture Mode to 'Force Prepass' (instead of 'After opaques'). If this is now a required step, this should probably be added to the documentation. If there's another (better?) solution, please let me know!



I also managed to get reflections looking somewhat like they used to, but it's definitely annoying that an upgrade forces me to reconfigure the asset...

 

Hows the work going on this surface stuff addon ? Can we expect it this year?

 

While the Depth/Opaque are enabled on the pipeline asset used in the editor, it's possible for another pipeline asset to be used in a build, if you have one assigned under your Quality Settings. It may not have these options enabled.

Some things like enabling Post Processing (at least, with Motion Blur on), using SSAO, or forcing the Depth Prepass option will also enable rendering the depth texture internally. I believe enabling Gizmo's also does this under the hood.

The warning is indeed unintended, the cutoff point is likely a different Unity version. Though shader warnings will never be the cause of any issues, so its safe to ignore for now

Regarding reflections, there is likely nothing wrong with your set up! But the reflection strength is somewhat based on the viewing angle by default. On a larger body of water you would see the reflected objects more clearly.

This behaviour is controlled by the "Curvature Mask" parameter.


If you were to bring it down to 0, the water basically behaves like a mirror. From there on, you can increase the value to the point where you're satisfied with the appearance. The ocean material for example, isn't very reflective by default.

It may be worth simply selecting the water material you're using. If needed a popup dialog will appear with the option to auto-upgrade it to v1.3.0+. Until the conversion is performed, some features may appear to be disabled whilst you had previously enabled them. For any of the included materials, this won't be necessary, only water materials created outside of the asset.

To be frank, it hasn't had any attention in the last year. Mainly because existing assets continuingly require time for support, improvements or addressing Unity/URP updates. Secondly, because I was stuck on a few design problems that affected usability, performance and quality. It's conceptually very much a proof of concept, but I still find it promising. So I hope a dry spill will emerge in the future to take advantage of

 

Hi @StaggartCreations

The shader preprocessor in SW2 doesn't seem to work as intended when enabling "Strict Shader Variant Matching" in the player settings. In the player build only the error shader is visible and the following output is written to the console:

Shader Universal Render Pipeline/FX/Stylized Water 2, subshader 0, pass 0, stage pixel: variant _ADDITIONAL_LIGHTS _ADDITIONAL_LIGHT_SHADOWS _ADVANCED_SHADING _ENVIRONMENTREFLECTIONS_OFF _FOAM _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE _NORMALMAP _RECEIVE_SHADOWS_OFF _REFRACTION _RIVER _SHADOWS_SOFT _SHARP_INERSECTION _TRANSLUCENCY _WAVES not found.

 

Thanks for the heads up! Can't say I was aware of this option in the editor before now. I've made a note to investigate this further and see if I can pinpoint the what and why

 

Hey. Staggart do you have any update on Interactive water (extension asset) you have on your website? This is very cool and I would be happy to pay fo it!

 

Hello! We're building a game using marching cubes world generation. Is it possible to use this asset with dynamically spreading mesh or it's just for flat areas?

 

Practically speaking, the shader supports curved geometry, and you can expect lighting to work correctly for it. If you're using marching cubes for water geometry in a way that represents flowing water, that should be fine. For something like metaballs (zero gravity liquid), you'd notice textures stretching on the sides, since they're projected on the XZ plane. There is the option to use the mesh's UV's for the texture instead, but this naturally poses the challenge of hiding visible seams.

 

I opened intersectionfoam and there was a white edge at the far edge of the water. I wanted to know how to solve it.

 

You're seeing an intersection effect there because the water geometry is intersecting with the camera's far clipping plane. It's a depth-based effect, and anything beyond the camera's rendering range has 0 depth, thus is perceived as infinitely shallow water.

You can reproduce this by bringing the scene camera's far clipping plane way down


You could either increase the camera's far clipping plane range, or scale down the water geometry. Either to prevent them from intersecting with one another.

 

Hello. First of all thank you for such great assets. They are very inspirational and gorgeous.
I'm interested in river mode. It would be great if you can write in documentation more spline plugins that will follow requirements.
I already own Dreamteck Splines https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/dreamteck-splines-61926
And interesting will rivers work with it? I also found that Bezier Path Creator doesn't work with river system.
Thanks a lot

 

Thank you for your kind words!

I understand it would inspire more confidence to know which spline assets would be guaranteed to work.

I think it would actually be an exception if any spline tool that creates geometry wouldn't work. Which happens to be the case for the "Bezier Path Creator" asset. They create a road mesh, but do so without adding normals and tangents to the mesh. Preventing it from working with any shader that uses lighting. It takes a mere few lines of code to add, so it seemed to just have been forgotten

I can tell from the Dreamteck showcase video that it can create correct geometry, so I'll eat my shoe if it doesn't work

 

Thanks for the answer! I will try it in near future I'm not good at shaders, so thanks for explanations too!

 

Hi love your assets (SW2 and SC Posts).
Moving my project to 2022.
So far so good, only pb I have are some errors related to URP code which is If-Deffed with
URP_10_0_OR_NEWER
but I have hard time to understand who owns/where is this define supposed to be.
-> SOLUTION: I did not have the latest Underwater Rendering asset installed.
-> Maybe add a check in the Stylized Water 2 Hub wizard ?
Thx.
Nicolas

 

Side note: If hub open and I launch with Play, the hub windows blanks and there are some messages about textures ...

 

Thank you *so* much for sharing this fix. This bug has been driving me absolutely nuts since last December. For me, it was only happening in OpenXR builds, not in flatscreen builds, so I went down many time draining rabbit-holes trying to fix it. I guess there is some code lagging behind in their PC VR shader compilation?

Hopefully Unity can get the message out to asset creators better about this - the issue is even in Synty's latest Elven Realm pack, so it's probably pretty widespread.

 

If you're seeing this define being used in either asset, it is an older version. Later versions do not use this anymore, but also have fixes/changes in place to support newer Unity versions.

Thanks for the headsup! This has meanwhile been address for next update

 

Is there a way to limit the area affected by underwater rendering ? I have a mountain lake and I don't want the entire world under that level to be affected by the underwater rendering.

 

Hi, I got this error, I use the latest version of SW2, Unity 2022.2.16. Installation Hub is ok, it is all green. I did rebuild the library and re-downloaded the package, but didn't solve the error.

 

It won't be possible to have the fog stop at a certain point, as in being contained to a volume. But it is certainly possible to toggle rendering on/off through a Box collider trigger.

I've outlined more details about this set up in a previous post here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/sty...mobile-consoles-vr.999132/page-8#post-8137550

The error is entirely unintended, and the underwater rendering extension was released with the confidence my setup works error free. As of Unity 2022.1+ that suddenly became less consistent. This version has more aggressive shader caching, and compiles variants that are normally only activated under controlled conditions.

So yes, the error indicates a file is missing, but technically there was no reason to call upon that file to begin with.

You can clear the error by right-clicking on the StylizedWater2/Shaders folder and choosing "Re-import".

You may have to delete the Library/ShaderCache folder, to ensure that shaders are compiling using the absolute current state of your project. If all else fails, you can open the StylizedWater2 and StylizedWater2_Tessellation shader files and remove the line that reads "#pragma multi_compile_fragment _ UNDERWATER_ENABLED".

As of the upcoming version 1.4.0 this particular issue will fortunately be resolved entirely

 

Thank you!

 

opened a fresh install of Unity 2021 LTS, opened up a 3D URP template and imported the stylized water assets, including the underwater package, then opened the provided demo scene. However this is the result, some kind of post-processing tearing, or flickering effect that occurs especially when moving.

This also occurs in Unity 2022, but does not occur in the 2020 version of unity. Is it an issue that can be resolved in some way? or is there a workaround for newer versions of unity?

 

Very funky, it looks like a perfectly diagonal cutout, can't say I've ever seen that happen before. I fired up a new URP project in 2021.3.24 and 2022.2.17 and imported the assets from the package manager. Yet, I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary. If the software is identical, the issue must be hardware-specific? Perhaps updating to the latest minor versions sets it right.

 

A preview of the upcoming v1.4.0 major update. Which serves as a large housekeeping, usability and fixes update. Pleased to say it is possible to offer it as a free update thanks to your support!

Move to a new 'scriptable shader' framework
The water shader is now generated from a template file, as it is being parsed through a proprietary shader generator. Down the line, this means that any line of shader code can be modified, omitted or injected based on any kind of scriptable conditions.

A prime example is that the fog integration is now automatically configured, by checking which fog rendering asset you have installed, right before compiling the shader code.


This also paves the way for care-free development of extensions, as their shader code simply won't be present unless they are installed. This completely make (unintentional) errors like "Failed to include source file Underwater/UnderwaterFog.hlsl" a thing of the past.

Usability improvements
Added menu items to quickly create basic water-related components:


Planar Reflections Renderer component now has a preview of the reflection it renders and applies to the assigned water objects:


Water Mesh utility can now preview the mesh on water objects in the scene, to get a better sense of vertex distribution:


Underwater Rendering
Will also receive a needed update as well, to make use of the same shader system. And also officially adds supports for Unity 2022.2 (2023, without any further changes it seems as well).

This update is required to use the extension with version 1.4.0 of the base asset.

Version 1.4.0
It has already been approved for publishing on the asset store. Meanwhile documentation is being updated to reflect all the made changes.

An automated update process will be prompted when importing the update:

(This will simply delete the older shader files, and switch any materials in the project using it to the new one)

I expect to round things off in the next few days After this is all on dry land, I'd like to focus again on the Surface Modifiers (likely to be renamed) feature set.

 

Version 1.4.0 is now available!

Changelog:

Version 1.0.9 of the Underwater Rendering extension is now also up, and is an accompanying update. If in use, both assets need to be updated (preferably the water first)

 

Ahh cool, yeah i can work with that in my situation

 

Just info, since something not right. This asset definetly was installed from UAS

 

Thanks for the headsup! Seems like Unity 2023 gives a false positive due to new changes. This otherwise does nothing other than display a notice.

 

Hello, I want to know, if I want to see the bump effect of the sea from a high Angle, how should I adjust the parameters?

 

The normal/bump map is in a sense only visible in an indirect way. It affects both lighting and reflections, so those shading features will make it visually obvious the water has some small-scale bumpiness to it.

For lighting, this parameter controls how strongly the directional light affects the surface (Light angle is 0 in this example):


To the same effect, light and environment reflections:


In the example photo you've shown, all those fine details come from the sky being reflected. Here I've brought down the "Curvature mask" parameter, and maxed the "Distortion" parameter. This combination approached physically-correct reflections, and gets that sort of effect.

 

Hi StaggartCreations, I get this error with 1.4.0 now, no SW2 shader is working.

Shader error in 'Stylized Water 2/Standard (Tessellation)': redefinition of '_Time' at Editor/2022.2.18f1/Editor/Data/CGIncludes/UnityShaderVariables.cginc(40) (on d3d11)

I checked also if in the urp settings, the two checkmarks are active for depth and opaque texture.

 

That's very unusual, this error indicates that a shader library from the Built-in render pipeline is somehow being included in the shader, which clashes with URP's shader libraries. By no means should this be the case.

Are you using a specific fog rendering asset? If the integration for it is enabled, one of their shader libraries is included, its possible down the line they included "UnityShaderVariables.cginc" somewhere.

If you select the StylizedWater2/Shaders/StylizedWater2_Standard shader file, you can see which fog rendering integration is being used:

 

Ok, it was the Fog post-processing, changing it to the one I use works.
Just a curiosity, if I enable Refraction in the Underwater settings of the material, I get this grey color, it's not that important for the project I'm working on but looks wrong.
Anyways, thanks for your help.

 

Ah, that certainly explains it! Do you mind saying which fog rendering asset you are using? Just so I can double-check if anything went belly-up in more recent versions.

When the Refraction feature is enabled, the underwater color relies on the Opaque Texture URP renders. Which is why the option must be enabled on the pipeline asset as well. Without it, the water receives a blank texture instead, which is always gray.

You mentioned earlier having enabled that feature. It's possible it is still disabled on a different pipeline asset, which may be tied to the quality level you are currently using.

 

For some reason the caustics are not rendering on Meta Quest. They ARE visible in Editor though...
Any tips?

 

Quite possibly! The underlying technique is prone to breaking between different Unity versions, (non)VR, and on top of that different platforms. If you could mention as many project-specific details as possible, I can try to reproduce the same set up and make a test build.

What you'd usually see is that the caustics move around with the headset, or warp/stretch based on the viewing angle. If you are using Underwater Rendering, this was fixed in v1.0.8, so will remain an issue on older versions (but only on Unity versions released after December 15th 2022).

 

We are using the Buto Fog asset. I checked again all the universal render pipelines for Opaque Texture, checkmarks are enabled. We are using Unity 2022.2.18.