SUIMONO 2.0 - Interactive Water System

@EternalAmbiguity

@Therian13 Without setting up a test scenehere on my end, I would say that it is probably related to the shader combining code... the ZTest Always for sure, that will put it above everything, as will the "Overlay+21" in the RenderQueue. I would remove the ZTest altogether, and change the Queue to be "Queue"="Geometry" Since you have it in a specific position on the outside of your ship(?) I think this should still render as you expect it to... This may take some trial and error, let me know if this helps.

 

Hi chingwa, i'm with a little trouble using Suimono + Tenkoku together. Now this is happening (in the image).
The problem is the reflection plane not being affected by tenkoku fog. There is any way to chenge the reflection plane settings? Or maybe even clipping the reflection far plane to not reflect too distant things?

 

@Uli_Okm Yes, it isn't just you! This is a known issue unfortunately... It isn't just Tenkoku fog, but any type of Unity fog as well. I'm currently working on some interesting updates to Suimono and I'll also look into getting reflections to apply both Unity and Tenkoku fog correctly in the next version. Stay tuned!

 

Hi, I have a few questions before I buy.
Can this water be applied to any mesh, for instance a cube or a sphere ?
Can it work upside down ?
What feature would work / would not work, in which case ?
thank you.

 

@kzaurckichz It can be applied to a custom mesh, yes. However in general it expects a flat planar shape. It can work on cubes, spheres, and other 3d shapes but the waves won't displace properly on these objects (they displace in the y-direction only).

It will work upside down to a certain point... wave displacement will work, but some the underwater function doesn't work at all in this case. I'm curious... why wold you want upside-down water?

 

So if I understood correctly, your script uses the Global Y axis for displacement and for Underwater.

I would like to apply it on a huge sphere which would be the ocean on a planet.

However, to fix all of this, maybe a solution is to rotate the universe around the user instead of revolving the user around the planet. But this would cause other problems.

So, Would it be possible to edit your scripts to simply use the normal vector of the current face of the mesh instead ?

 

Hello chingwa,

I've been trying for a few days now. but the most I can make it do is that it stops clipping over everything, and I can get it to stop being hidden by the water depth mask, but it turns completely blue (skybox color), so it is no longer transparent or renders the underwater fog....
Just can't seem to get it right...

 

hello @chingwa

I think I got it finally.

I changed the refract plane shader : turned off ZTest and I changed the tag to Overlay.
I then changed the depthmask shader tag from Geometry-2 to Overlay+2.

It started working good but then the water effects (foam, etcs) would go over the depth mask.

so I changed the tags for both the waterscale_pro.shader (line 149) and the water_pro.shader (line 148) to Overlay+3.
So now nothing isn't clipping through like it was.
So it now looks like what I wanted it to.

I've played around the level, going underwater and above, through different things, and I don't see any glitches or bugs.
So I think I got it down finally. Do you by chance think it would cause any possible errors?

But thank you for your help!
It looks really nice now when the ship dives between waters and air.

You are ,without a doubt, a 5 out of 5 star professional!!

 

Hello Chingwa

I just downloaded the most recent update (2.1.0a) and I'm coming across a strange bug.
The water in the editor and any other camera will reflect back what the main camera is looking at.

I have reflections turned off, but it still shows it.
It doesn't show in the main camera, but any other cameras it shows whatever my main camera is looking at.
Any idea on what caused this?

 

Hi Therian13, the reason this is happening is because the water is calculating transparency based on the scene camera position... the position of the camera in the editor window is different but it's still retaining the scene-calculated view in the editor window. This isn't a bug per-se, but I agree it's a little distracting. I'm not sure if there's much of a solution to this especially when you're able to have both windows open at once like in your screenshot. (at least not when reflections are turned on).

However, if you turn reflections off then it's probably feasible to keep the editor window from showing the rendered position... I'll look into a workaround like this for the next update.

 

@chingwa

well, the two windows are the scenario button in the editor, and the bottom is the actual game.
Even if I turn the editor off, it still shows it whenever my main camera switches to a second camera, such as the camera that checks the glove's oxygen level. The main camera doesn't even render the arms, and even if I turn the main camera off, it still does it. If you look at the screenshot, the bottom camera shows the glove, and it reflecting in the water.

I have other cameras in the game, but none of them are near any water, so it' isn't a problem for them, but I worry that when players check their oxygen level while facing a body of water, it'll show that weird little thing. If it was just in the editor I wouldn't mind it at all. (at first I thought it was just an editor thing, so didn't mind it.)
But I already turned off the water reflections. It stops if I uncheck the water transparency, but then it does what its suppose to, and makes the water a solid color.

I can delete the camera that does the reflection in game, but then the water looks all wonky (black with the caustic effect lines). Sorry for bugging you again with this. 0_o

Anyway, thank you for the quick reply! Every time I stream my game, I get complimented on the water, so I always re-direct the fans to your asset.

 

It sounds like the camera reference is getting lost somewhere, since you are using multiple cameras. The transparency setting inherits from the "scene camera object" on the module object. In theory as long as this camera is set to the current view camera the other renderings in suimono (such as transparency) should also update to the correct view... though it's possible there's a bug in the code that is causing this. Can you confirm that you're switching the scene camera object whenever your game view camera switches?

 

I checked if the scene camera object is changing when I switch cameras. It doesn't change, it still says the Scene Camera Object is the Main Camera. I changed it to the glove camera manually, and it renders the glove camera correctly, but then the main camera gets the bug.
I suppose I could make it change the scene camera object to which ever one is enabled at the time.

 

Hello Chingwa,

I rigged it to switch between the two camera.
in the SuimonoModule script,

I just changed the two codes that say

Code (JavaScript):

1. if (setCamera == null){
2.         if (Camera.main != null){
3.             setCamera = Camera.main.transform;
4.         }
5.     }

to

Code (JavaScript):

1. if (setCamera == null)
2.     {
3.         if (Camera.main != null && Camera.main.enabled == true)
4.         {
5.             setCamera = Camera.main.transform;
6.         }
7.         else
8.         {
9.         setCamera =  GameObject.Find("glove camera").GetComponent(Camera).transform;
10.         }
11.     }

I know I don't really need the get component part, but I just added it in, as a double check to make sure that it has a camera attached to it. But it seems to work fine now. no weird ghost images in the water.

Thank you for letting me know which component was doing it. There is about 70 Camera finds in the module alone. Would've taken me some time to find which one was causing what.

 

hello @chingwa,

I've come to bother you again.
I just noticed that in the newest suimono update 2.1.0a, the depth mask doesn't work correctly anymore.
it just makes the water turn bright blue where it was.

I saw on your forums it was a known issue, but I was hoping you knew the fix for it.
My game is only a few days from being released, but now that I have water running through my ships and submarines, I can't really release it.

Thank you for your help!

 

Nevermind! I fixed it. I forgot I had to do this last time.

So what I did to fix it was"
--------------------------------------------------
I changed the tag of the suimono2_depthmask.shader
I changed the tags from Geometry-2 to Overlay+2

and since I use DX11
I changed the tag in Suimono2_water_dx11.shader
at line 141, I changed the Tags Queue to Overlay+3

and finally I changed the tag in Suimono2_waterscale_dx11
at line 157, I changed the tag's Queue to Overlay+3

Also to fix the underwater for the depth mask, i changed the tag in Suimono2_water_under_dx11 at line 142. I changed the tag's Queue to Overlay+3
----------------------------------------------

but now everything is working good again.
I forgot this happened to me last time.
but I posted it here in case someone runs into the same issue. maybe this'll fix it for em.

 

I've just tested Suimono in the latest Unity 5.2 and haven't run into any upgrade issues . If anyone notices anything off with the latest Unity update please let me know!

 

Two questions:
1) How do I disable buoyancy? We have our own system and it seems that the Suimono code interferes with ours.
2) We have a lot of Suimono surface objects in one scene (multi-segment river, plus some ponds), so I need to set up some kind of LOD. Since we're using custom meshes, I guess we can't use the built-in LOD. Will Suimono work with Unity LOD (using the Suimono_surface object as LOD0, and a simpler water shader as LOD1)?

thanks
Dave

 

@gecko Buoyancy in Suimono is essentially disabled until you add a buoyancy prefab to an object. If you don't have this buoyancy prefab then you shouldn't be seeing buoyancy effects at all. One other possibility is that perhaps your object is interacting with the suimono surface collider. The surface collider is set to be on the water layer, and suimono attempts to disengage the physics of this layer from other game layers. However under some circumstances the layers don't disengage properly... you can double check this under the Unity physics preferences (edit-->project settings-->physics)... all layers should be disengaged from water (see jpeg below), and of course any of your other game objects that you want to have buoyancy should also not be on the water layer.



The built-in Suimono LOD only works on the default mesh, and won't work for custom meshes. I haven't tried it with Unity LOD groups, so I can't say for sure how it will work. As long as the LOD group is only replacing the mesh renderer component and mesh collider component then it should work ok. These should be setup only for the suimono_object sub-object, not the entire suimono surface prefab.

 

Thanks for the reply. We are using the water layer for our swimming functions; any reason why not just switch the Suimono objects to a different layer, or do they require that layer? (I do hope to use Suimono FX objects though...)

 

Well Suimono needs to use a physics layer in order to determine data like which surface is currently active, and to determine height coordinates etc. Since Unity has a built-in "water" layer this is the most obvious choice for this since I can't tell Suimono to add a specific layer to your project (custom layers need to be setup manually, unfortunately.. I would much rather be able to automatically create a suimono_water layer and use that, but since I can't this is the best solution for most people as it simplifies the install steps ). It's best to keep suimono the way it is, and create your own "water objects" layer to use for your objects/swimming.

 

And just to clarify a bit more... Suimono is hardcoded to use the "water" layer. Even if you switch the objects to a different layer Suimono will switch them back to the layer it expects.

 

Okay, that's understandable. So I think I'll use Suimono's system for desktop, and keep my original system for mobile.

So now two new questions:
1) I've set up two Audio FX, but they don't seem to work. At runtime, there are lots of audio objects in the Suimono Module,but they all use the default sfx files, not what I've assigned to the FX objects in my player-character.

2) I added FX Ripples but I sure don't see it at runtime. Any suggestions on how to debug that?

thanks!

 

Two more issues:

1) I added an empty GO inside my player-character, and positioned it where I want the splash fx to be instantiated, then put the suimono FX prefabs inside that GO. But at runtime, that GO is repositioned and now the splash particles appear in the wrong place relative to the PC. Can I force it to stay where I put it?

2) I added a rule for the splash fx to appear only when the PC is moving at a rate of at least 1 (m/s I assume). That works, but usually, the particles keep playing when the PC stops. Occasionally that works (the particles stop/disappear), but not usually, and I can't figure out any pattern. Is there a trick to getting that to work consistently?

I'm using Suimono 2.0.06 on Unity 4.6.7.

thx
Dave

 

Hi @gecko

1) audio objects.... Suimono automatically creates a pool of audio objects and holds on to them for future use. This is why you see a bunch of objects underneath the module object, but they won't activate until it becomes necessary for them to do so. If you're not hearing sound I would double check that your overall project volume is at 1.0 (edit-->project settings-->audio), and that your camera object has an audio listener component enabled.

2) splash fx rules... you need to probably add a couple rules in this case.... one for the speed as you already have, but also one so that it only activates when the object is underwater. I also recommend that you use the "emit at surface" checkbox, and perhaps adjust the "emission speed" to around 0.1 or 0.2... if this is set to 0.0 it doesn't calculate any delay and depending on the speed your scene is running at it may cause some unexpected issues?

3) as for repositioning... there isn't any code in the fx_object that changes game object positions, so I'm not sure what's happening here. Is it possible another script is affecting this? Or is it possible your Player character is getting offset from it's origin somehow, possibly through an animation? If you have an animated character you may want to attach your game object to the root bone instead of just the main game object.

 

Also, the "object speed is greater than" setting is a bit nebulous. It's calculated based on distance-units/frame-time, which can vary from project to project, so you might want to raise it to be a higher threshold if you see it emitting when you're character isn't in a movement state.

 

Thanks for all the answers, much appreciated.

Now I've got yet another problem, but this one is really weird: It started happening after I added both Suimono and an RTP terrain to my scene: All animated meshes flicker blue. Not the entire mesh, just certain tris (about half of them). After much trial and error, I found that *either* removing the RTP terrain *or* Suimono module and surface from the scene resolved the problem. (Or similar things like removing the terrain layer from the camera culling layers.) And now I've found that the blue color is set by the camera's Background color -- if I change that to red or something, the flicker changes to red or whatever.

I posted the problem on the RTP forum and he had no idea. Any chance you have a guess?

 

Is anyone tested Suimono water with SSAO? I can see a strange artifacts on water surface when looking through an object affected by SSAO, e.g. tree.
Doesn't happen with Unity water/water4

 

Try Screen-Space Ambient Obscurance instead... it seems to work much better (both in general and with Suimono specifically) in my tests here.

 

@gecko this sounds really strange! I don't think I've seen this issue before. I might suggest removing all image effects from your camera (if any) just in case there is a camera depthbuffer issue happening, and then trying again with Suimono/RTP. Also does this happen with all the RTP shader options, or just specific ones?

 

So that weird problem with the flickering mesh doesn't occur in builds, so I guess I can live with it in the editor.

Now a new question (EDITED after I realized one dumb mistake I made): The "abovewater" sfx is instantiated about 5 meters behind the player-character -- and it is always playing that sfx, so it's audible whenever the player-camera is zoomed back. I thought it would play based on proximity to the water mesh...?

 

Another thing. (The water is so gorgeous, but I keep finding weird quirks.) The polygons separate, leaving a gap, even with extremely small Deep and Detail Waves. Is there a way to prevent that?

 

@gecko the abovewater sound ( as well as the underwater sound) is a global effect, and it get's instantiated based on the "scene track object" location as set in the Suimono Module object. By default, this might be set to the scene camera, which may be why it's coming from behind your character. You can add your character object to this slot to compensate for this. (I assume your audio listener component is on your character?)

There aren't any controls currently on when or how it plays the above audio... it simply assumes that it should play when above water but it doesn't change the volume based on how far from the water you are. Depending on your scene it may be better for you to turn off the abovewater sound and simply add local sound effects near your shoreline. to turn off the abovewater sound go to Suimono_Module-->_sound_effects object and remove the audio file from the abovewater sound slot.

For the polygon separation problem... are you using a custom mesh? I don't think I've ever seen this with the built in default mesh, but I have seen this with custom meshes. In those cases it's usually because of the uv-layout of the mesh which needs to be setup in a planar top-down position so that all the uvs are laid out adjacent to each other as if you were looking straight down at the surface.

 

Yes, I'm using a custom mesh (for a river). I'll look into the uv-layout, thanks much!

Oh, and that makes sense about the audio.

 

I'm stuck on 2.0.06 (for Unity 4.6x) and I can't figure out how to activate the shoreline. (Those settings are not shown in the Surface prefab as indicated in the docs....)

 

Hi Gecko,

In 2.0.06 the shoreline function comes in two parts...

The first is the depthmap generation. this happens on your surface under the Suimono_shorelineObject sub-object. this generates a colored depthmap on start based on the location/size of your water surface. You can control the sensitivity of the shoreline and depth area generation with the Range controls on this object.

The second part are the shoreline controls on your water surface object, located under the 3d wace settings tab. when these are at 0 you won't see any shoreline fx. You'll need to tweak the height, scale and speed settings depending on your scene. The normalize shoreline setting will "flatten" the waves as they get close to shore. This setting isn't always necessary.

Finally, shoreline always looks best when you have more mesh detail available, so either using a smaller water area, or turning on the DX11 tessellation can make a big improvement.

I have some real improvements coming to the shoreline system in version 2.1.1, however this is setup for Unity 5+ only.

 

Thanks for the explanation. But what does it mean that "Edge Foam" is gray/disabled? That's the main thing I was hoping to have.

 

If foam is greyed out, it's because your SuimonoModule is set to "Unity" or "Unity DX11" (as opposed to Unity Pro) under the Unity Version Target setting. If you are using Unity Pro then you should switch the module to one of the Pro settings. If you aren't using Unity Pro then you won't be able to access some Suimono functions, edge/shoreline foam is one of these. These aren't available simply because Unity doesn't make the appropriate functions available to non-pro users in Unity 4.

 

I've got Pro (and got "Edge Foam" to activate by switching platforms away and back. But I still can't seem to generate any shoreline foam. Are these settings correct? It generate a Shore Map text at runtime (shown here), but it appears to be solid black.

 

Is this something we can edit using PS or Gimp?
ie. To prevent largish waves in lagoons or protected areas

 

Yes you can create your own texture, rather than letting the automatic function do it. First turn off the Suimono_shorelineObject sub-object, then add your texture to the "_FlowMap" slot on the Suimonbject's shader.

 

@gecko the default settings for shoreline range are...
Shore Range - 0.1
Wave Range - 10.0
These might give you better results?

 

Cool, except there is no way we would know how to draw that, or what the requirements are.

Can the current flowmap texture be saved so we can just modify it?
I don't see it anywhere - so I guess its only in memory. Perhaps 'Export To File' button is an idea ?

 

There isn't currently a built-in way to save out the texture, it's just held in memory while the scene is playing. It should be possible though, I'll look into it for a future update. In the meantime you may want to look into saving a render texture to a file... shouldn't be too hard I don't think.

 

Thanks I'm sure export options would be really useful, but the question is ...
What should the texture look like (If I were to try make it now) ... is it like a terrain heightmap? Greyscale, colored? And what should the color ranges be?, eg . is deep water black, dry areas white?

Do you have a sample you have used?

Thx

 

You can look at the demo scene and examine the in-memory depth map that gets generated there. Run the scene, and then click on the cam_suimonoDepth sub-object. Now double-click on the "Render Tex Depth" slot and it should give you a view of the render texture. (you may need to enlarge your preview panel to get a better view).

What you'll see is a top-down view of your scene, where the red channel shows the shallow areas where waves will start t form, and the green/blue channel show the even shallower shorline areas where the waves will crest and disappear. Black is equal to no shoreline effects. Below is an example of what you should see. You can take a screenshot like I did here and crop in on the texture and edit it, or write a script to export the render texture directly to a file.

 

Thanks - thats very helpful, and should be good enough for any to use.

Just one thing ... the colors are strange - I mean its not pure Red and Blue etc ... are those 2 colors the exact color mix to achieve max effect ? (then we can just color pick them).
If not can you tell me the exact color values for max shallow wave forming effect, and also for max (aqua) shoreline areas please. I would have thought it would be like R255, G0, B0, A0 for one, and like R0, G0, B255, A0 for the second.

Also is the alpha channel necessary (ARGB-32)? if not the image could be smaller.

 

The colors are broken down by RGB channel, and the amount of each channel is linked to the amount of the shoreline effect. you mainly want to be concerned about the level of red, as it determines the strength of the shoreline wave effect, for example...

rgb(0.0,0,0) = no shoreline effects at all
rgb(0.2,0,0) = shoreline wave start
rgb(1.0,0,0) = full shoreline wave effect

the G an B channels reduce the wave effect (in effect they override the R channel) but add more foam, and should usually be used only very near to the shoreline.

rgb(1.0,0.5,0.5) = reduced waves but more foam

It's probably easiest to only deal with the red channel initially, and then go back and add additive green and blue channels on top of it if you feel it's necessary.

The alpha channel is ignored (at least for now).

 

Actually, an easier way to think about would be... black = ocean, red = shoreline waves, and green/blue = land above water.

 

Thanks - the RGB values will help.

I have been seeing something a bit strange with Suimono - intermittently...
If my player character stands still for some time just viewing the water, the movement (animation) of the waves looks fine for a few minutes, then it animates at 2x or 3x speed for 30 seconds or so, then returns to normal speed. This is in editor, not tested in build, so may be something caching.