SUIMONO Water System - 2.0 BETA Announcement

Now how much time? You know beta 6 didnt work for me thts why i am so eagerly waiting for beta 7.

 

Today dude! Today!

 

Thats the spirit!!

 

@chingwa,
Oh so you've added the edge blending? Kudos! It should make your package more complete!

 

Yes, it's been added to shorelines... you can control to what degree the water fades at the edges. However it isn't implemented on all object overlap edges as I didn't think it was appropriate, but I'd be open to feedback in this area after you guys have had a look at beta 7.

 

The normal behavior should be: whatever geometry intersect with the water, must be counted for edge blending. I take that you are using a depth map for the shorelines edge detection but only few meshes are rendered to the depthmap? If so, adding more objects to the depthmap could interfere with the way you are generating shorelines?

 

Suimono renders a depthmask for the shoreline effects, yes, however it also calculates edge detection on all dynamic/intersecting objects via z-buffer comparisons. Foam and edge color settings utilize both the shoreline depthmap and the edge detection when they render, so any intersecting object can have these effects applied at the edges. However (for now at least) I've only setup the edgefade effect to render with the shoreline depth mask.

I guess this was a stylistic choice, for example I didn't want an object/boat that was floating in the water to appear suspended in mid-air... and in reality there are all sorts of reflective effects that would keep it from appearing this way, which become somewhat less applicable in a computer approximation. I suppose the control should be there for those who wish to use it though. I'll look into adding it in beta8.

 

I am going to sleep. Hope when I wake up there is a beta 07.

 

Haha, man i'm really looking forwards to this now. I think i've found a decent sss shader that i could blend in based on depth just for experimenting really because i'm really curious what could be done, hopefully wont be too much later today as i want to get messing with it but, no rush, get it how you like it.

I even read Patapom's paper on raymarching through participating mediums and while that discusses cloud volumes, i'm wondering how it could approach ocean rendering, esp since the latest version of Nuaj released the shaders too

 

I've been really wanting to look into raymarching shaders as well... for a variety of uses. However I just haven't had the free time. There is a built in "Back-Glow" setting to the beta 7 update... which somewhat mimics this type of translucent effect, though of course it isn't going to be as accurate as real raytracing. It sure is easier on the hardware though.. I'm not sure how accurate it really needs to be on ocean waves... they are constantly changing and moving and you don't often have the chance to sit and stare at the the same way you with a cloud.

 

For me it's just pure curiosity! If I can glean enough to try it out based on the Nuaj shaders I have several other uses for it too, and along with what's going to be a bunch of 'educational' messing around i'm going to be doing soon, that will be in there, although i'm trying for quite a few different approaches to water shading. In the case of Suimono i like your current look too much to do anything drastic to wave and foam formation but i'd love to try and see what the options could be for shading between surface and a few meters under. Anything I find will be passed onwards, naturally. I'm basically thinking of a situation where the viewpoint may be close to the water's surface, with pronounced waves (consider high wind or similar), it would be nice to have the option if your gpu can deal with it, i certainly wouldnt put it down to your responsibility though, its just good you providing good stuff to work with

 

UPDATE: 2/23/2014 - 2.0 Beta Version 07 released

This release was a long time coming, particularly because I decided to completely rewrite the water surface shaders in Suimono. When I first undertook this task my goals were to both improve the visual fidelity, as well as improve the performance of the shaders. After a couple months of endless tweaking I feel I've accomplished both tasks.

Suimono now renders the most complex water shader in only 4 shader passes (as compared to the 8 passes it used previously), and even though the rendering passes have been halved I've managed to squeeze some new rendering features into there. There's actually too many changes to make a complete list, but below I'll describe the largest changes and additions.

Looking forward, the beta is now almost complete. There are some things missing from version 7 here which still need to be looked at. The most obvious issue is the shoreline generation. The waves generation has changed quite a bit since the last version and as such I now need to go back and revisit those interactions and visuals as they hit the shoreline. Also even though with version 7 you'll notice buoyancy and wave height sampling are now accurate to the visuals, it currently doesn't take the shoreline area into account. This and bug fixes will be the main focus of upcoming beta version 8 which I hope to have ready in about a week.

One last feature which is currently experimental is the new "Infinite 3D Ocean" surface type which you'll find under the General settings of the Suimono Surface object. This will allow you to add one SuimonoSurface object to your scene, and then automatically handle scaling/texture scrolling/and wave handling for an infinite body of water. Oh, and It doesn't work. Don't click on it. But it's under development and I hope to have it working for both dx9 and dx11 in the next beta version.

Also coming in the next beta will be a full demo scene where you'll be able to walk around, hop in a boat and ride across the ocean (GTA5 style) While it isn't strictly necessary to include I think it's helpful to see an in-depth game example, both as a test case of what can be done with Suimono, as well as just a nice showcase to get people excited.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone for both their patience and encouragement over the past 2 months!

Download Here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/beta


NEW WATER SURFACE SHADER UPDATES:

• Fewer shader passes for performance boost
• Reformulated reflective properties for more realistic visuals
• New 'refraction shift' setting simulates separate color spectrum refraction effects
• New shoreline transparency edge-fade setting
• Simplified surface high color calculation
• Added surface back color setting
• Removed tidal color fx (was confusing for many and not a popular feature)

NEW UPDATED UNDERWATER EFFECTS:

• Below-water surface visuals have been improved
• Fog effect tweaks

NEW EDITOR UPDATES:

• Added Detail Wave Scale Settings
• Added shallow water / shoreline wave controls
  (can now control wave height,scale, and speed near shoreline... still work in progress as noted above)

NEW BUOYANCY COMPONENT

• Buoyancy module completely rewritten
• New SuimonoGetHeights() function now wave-accurate (note: still needs work with shoreline waves.)
• Water surface direction can now influence object position (globally, or based on wave height)

PRESETS

• 12 new presets included (would love to hear ideas for more)
• Tessellation settings no longer saved with preset data (was causing serious performance issues)
• Direction and Speed Settings no longer saved with preset data (you'll need to set these for each water surface)

MISC

• New 'fx_waveInfluencer' component (add local 3d wave distortions... more info coming soon...)
• New 'fx_effectObject' component (add local particle fx to your scene... more info coming soon...)
• Can now set dynamic reflection generation on a per-object basis.
• Removed 'Wave generation' component. Waves are now calculated directly in the shader.
• Added work-in-progress 'infinite 3d ocean' setting
  (auto scales water surface based on camera cull distance... still needs scaling work for dx11, and resolution implementation for dx9... stay tuned!)

MOBILE

• Have had reports of slow performance (and errors) on various Android and iOS systems. The mobile shader quality has been reduced (temporarily?) and there is an Andorid specific setting now for testing. I'd love to hear everyone's feedback for both Android and iOS. If performance is acceptable I'll see about adding visual elements back in.

Coming Soon (or, what's not in beta 7?)

• Full Interactive Demo Game Scene.
  (terrain and character interactions. boat buoyancy and movement example. Updated and additional particle fx)
• Particle effect improvements and additions.
• Finalize shoreline waves.

 

Awesome,
I might take a look at when b8 is out.

 

Aha, good stuff. I'll get to this soon

 

Very excited to see this! However, it still doesn't work on iOS for me. It looks great when the platform is set to Mac/Win standalone, but when I switch platforms to iOS (and change the Unity Version Target to Unity Mobile), the water is solid black. (It was pink before.) Doesn't throw any errors, just black water. Hmm, if I switch to Android, the water looks good too. It's just for iOS that it's black.

Oh, also: If you go to the edge of the water, then it seems that the buoyancy goes crazy and you float up up up into the sky.

 

Thanks gecko! I'll take a look here on my side. If you switch to iOS, and then set the Unity Version State to Android does it make any difference? (in Suimono these are just labels, they don't really rely on the underlying Unity target definition... but there are differences between the mobile/ios shaders and the android shaders, it's be good to know if from your side if it makes any difference for iOS).

WOW! Nice catch! hahaha. let me take a second look at that... (slowly backs out of the room)

 

With iOS platform, if I set the Unity Version State to Android....then yes, the water does render. (I haven't tried building to device yet; this is all in the Editor.)

When I set the target back to Mobile, it uses the "water_basic" and "effect_reflect" and "effect_refractPlane_basic" -- are those correct?

Also, in SUIMONO_Module Lib inspector, the Tex Displace, Height 1 and Height 2 fields are empty (just in case that's a problem.) I'm using your example scene.

 

"Deep Wave Height" seems to have no effect when set to Android, the water is still flat. Should it? And is iOS be the same, or does it have 3D waves?

 

Actually, when target is set to Android, and I increase the Deep Wave Height: the water surface becomes a bit more translucent but remains flat -- but the character capsule starts bobbing up and down, and occasionally I glimpse a bit of foam well above the water surface. So it seems like the big waves are happening in some components, but the water surface is not being affected.

 

OK, it's good to know it's working for you in Android, that'll give me a place to start from. However, yeah, as you found out the Android version doesn't currently have the wave displacement coded in. I hope to change this, but first I needed to make sure this basic version was working for everyone.

iOS should have the wave displacement. Buuut... that might be part of the reason it isn't working for you. I'll investigate.

The missing textures on the Module object has been fixed and reposted to the download site (same download). Though I don't think you really need to download it again... the textures were also referenced in as part of the surface object. The module_lib was just a backup reference.

 

Just FYI... anyone who is noticing flipped surface visuals under Forward Rendering, The fix is already in and will be out ASAP.

 

Chingwa sir i think you've hit the jackpot, of the directions yu've taken the tesselated version of this is absolutely great, its believable and tweakable as hell, although so far the ;light absorbtion' parameter does seem to take the oomph out of some of the others. Foam generation is great, would like some more animation on the small scale waves and bouyancy settings on objects would need to be creator-tweaked, but its very impressive and looking like a great contender. I was too ill to give it several hours of nitpicking but the time I had convinced me that this could well be exactly what many need

Some problems: the camera sometimes thinks its underwater when its not, i wonder if theres some way to find the intersection of the camera plane and the ocean and use a stencil buffer or something to sort this out, currently set to ocean height point maybe? Like I say bouyancy need tweaking for tesselation. I've noticed that you can overall push the tesselation level quite far, i do imagine that wakes, etc are possibe, even displacing via an image (like the coasts)

The foam generation is lovely (well, that said i think coast foam may need work)

I havent started fooling with its guts yet but so far, this is very pretty, as realistic or unrealistic as you like and i think youre going in the right direction, well done!

 

Thanks a lot for your feedback lazygunn!

the light absorption setting affects the depth rendering of the water, and the distances/scale at which the 3 levels of DepthColoring intitiate at. I typically have this at pretty low setting.

I'll have to give the underwater detection a thorough look over... can you describe the situations where it's showing you underwater scene when it shouldn't? I have yet to update the documentation, but you can use the following function to calculate height information from the water surface if you have a need to...

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. SuimonoGetHeight(vector3,"mode");
3.  

where vector3 is a Vector3 position(in world-space) and "mode" is a string defining the return data type (as a float). Data Types are as follows:

"height" = the height of the waves, relative to the base water surface.
"surfaceLevel" = the height of the waves in world-space.
"baseLevel" = the base height of the surface object.
"object depth" = the depth of the passed Vector3 position.
"isOverWater" = returns 1.0 if over a water surface, returns 0.0 otherwise.
"isAtSurface" = returns 1.0 if the passed Vector is within 0.15 meters of the wave/water surface.
"direction" = returns the current flow direction of the water surface in degrees (0.0 - 359.0).
"speed" = returns the flow speed of the water surface.
"wave height" = a normalized height range of the wave (where 0.0 is the base of the lowest wave, and 1.0 is the crest of the highest wave).

Below is an example of using this function to clamp an object's position to the generated wave heights...

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. var waterHeight : float = 0.0;
3. private var moduleObject : SuimonoModule;
4.  
5. function Awake(){
6.     if (GameObject.Find("SUIMONO_Module") != null){
7.         moduleObject = GameObject.Find("SUIMONO_Module").gameObject.GetComponent(SuimonoModule);
8.     }
9. }
10.  
11. function Update(){
12.     if (moduleObject != null){
13.         waterHeight = moduleObject.SuimonoGetHeight(this.transform.position,"surfaceLevel");
14.         this.transform.position.y = waterHeight;
15.     }
16. }
17.  

 

It was mainly if i 'bumped' the camera behind the character controller the underwater shader would kick in seemingly at random sometimes, ill have another go later though

 

Will be trying this out later tonight when I get off work.

 

I shall also be giving it a go later (again), but also be trying it out on the various android phones in the flat. Should be able to get a good spread of performance ideas, but it's running nicely on my pc (i7 950, gtx580), around 85fps (this could be completely innaccurate mind, i just quickly took it from the editor), which i think is very dependent on the card's tesselation unit (if i've read correctly) over many other factors, the hit the tesselation makes might not mitigate other areas of the gpu's performance

Not sure when i'll start getting all frankenstein with it (going back to my old ocean with the new shaders, possibly) but i'm looking forwards to it

 

The tesselation is very forgiving... to a point... if you raise the tesselation too far, or increase the tess distance at a certain point your system will certainly start chugging. I've found though that I don't have to have all that much to get the desired effect.

 

Just a note, this has now been fixed. Also iOS will have it's own shaders and (at least right now) the iOS shaders include wave vertex distortion. This will need some 3rd party testing though to see if it actually works on devices. I'll put out a bugfix beta pretty soon with this and a number of other little fixes.

 

Great! I will test it on a variety of iOS devices.

 

I think I found a bug. Anytime a point or spot light shines on the water this happens.

Here is a flashlight(spotlight) being aimed at the water



Deferred Rendering, Linear Space, DX11

 

Thanks OneshotGG... I just confirmed it here on my side as well. I'll run through the lighting calculations and see If I can find what's causing this!

 

As a response to chingwa's earlier message...I assume I am seeing the problem with upside-down reflections..? Doing Forward Rendering on the blue reflective preset all reflections appear upside down. When I change to Deferred Lighting I don't see reflections at all. I assume this is being fixed?

Thanks
Wayne

 

Hi Wayne, yes this is already fixed and will be out in a bugfix release probably tomorrow. It isn't the reflections, actually, but the refraction rendering... it copies the screen pixels and distorts them, and then writes them back to the screen, however in Forward rendering it was writing them back upside down. :/

Actual reflections are working as expected (you may need to tweak the reflection sliders until you get the effect you're looking for... the "clear calm mirror" preset shows them at about the maximum that they'll render).

 

OK, This is fixed and the update will be posted for you guys tomorrow! the water shaders were missing light attenuation, but all is good now....

 

Incidentally, I just noticed that under DX11, in Linear Space, the WaveHeights calculation seems to be completey off. :/ I'm going to revisit this and see what's up. I don't know if this would be the cause of your problem, however in Gamma space all is as it should be.

 

I wasn't sure if this was a bug or user error but I may have found something similar. When walking in shallow water the splash effects/ect play much higher than the water surface and seem to scale oddly using dx11 and linear space.

I can take a picture if you need it. Thanks for the quick lighting fix!

 

yeah, I think these are absolutely related. Hopefully I can narrow down the cause soon.

 

Yep, the linear height issue is now fixed. This applied to many aspects... underwater transitions, splash positions, buoyancy heights etc.

 

Phew! That slight offset with the heights using linear space was the only real complaint I could have had to it at the time

Hoping for the update soon now although after i've done my duties on other projects i'll be back on this

I agree with what you said earlier actually about not needing to push the tesselation very far, you really don't at all to get very convincing effects, I think i'd like some kind of animation to the high frequency detail, like a noise generator being advanced through a 'phase'. This might be something I try in fact if possible.

One thing needs underlining with this, you gotta tweak the buggery out of it to see where it shines but this latest release is hitting the spot, figuring out what works is addictive and getting some really nice results. I can't wait until i get back to it

 

Hi All, there's a new BETA version ready for download...

This is just a bug-fix release that takes care of a number of little issues that have popped up in the last couple days since the last release.

Download Here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/beta

UPDATE: 2/26/2014 - 2.0 Beta Version 7.5 released

• NEW - Added iOS specific surface shaders.
• CHANGE - Added 'Max Vertical Speed' attribute to buoyancy component. (prevents vertical overspeed).
• FIX - Flipped water visuals in Forward Rendering mode are now rendering in the correct matrix.
• FIX - buoyancy object no longer launches you into the atmosphere at the edge of water surfaces.
• FIX - removed forced deferred rendering while underwater.
• FIX - water now renders behind billboarded trees, as appropriate.
• FIX - Android Build - Pink water surface while underwater. (Suimono now logs surface shaders for builds).
• FIX - Black surface render on iOS taget mode, now fixed.
• FIX - missing light attenuation causing squared lights with point and spotlights objects.
• FIX - DX11 shader brightness was slightly darker than dx9 version. fixed.
• FIX - Height Function in Linear Color Space is now accurate (effects trnsitions, splash positions, buoyancy etc.)
• FIX - Fixed underwater surface visuals in Forward rendering.

 

Got it! Unfortunately, the water is still black on iOS platform and Target.

 

Beta 75 is much improved in the underwater effect and the camera transition from ground to underwater is a lot nicer. However, it appears the reflections are GONE. Using various presets including the 'clear calm mirror' in combination with / without DX11, forward / deferred rendering, and linear / gamma color space there are no reflections. The 'clear calm mirror' consistently creates a very bright white water surface with no reflections. Other presets generate a different water color surface but again, no reflections at all.

 

Sorry - I forgot to add to the previous post that the beta is periodically generating this console error:

Quaternion To Matrix conversion failed because input Quaternion is invalid {-0.358850, 0.668865, 0.621599, 0.195658} l=1.000821

The actual numbers vary but doing a few sequences of going underwater and back out cause these errors to intermittently appear. There's no other diagnostic info that pinpoints the file where this occurs. Perhaps in a shader??

 

gecko - OK, let me take another look. I was seeing black water as well, but was able to fix it in the latest. However, I didn't double check it on Unity Indie... I'm not sure why that would make a difference, but I'll get to the bottom of it.

WayneS56 - Can you tell me your OS and Unity version (version #, pro? indie?) I have no problems with reflections here, but with a little more info I'll see if I can reproduce it. Also, thanks for the error message... it's a bit cryptic... I'll find it though, stay tuned.

 

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate, Service Pack 1 and Unity Pro v 4.3.4f1 I double-checked to make sure the SUIMONO_Module was set to 'unity pro' and it is. (That would have been a big 'doh!!' had I forgotten to do that..hehe) Thank you for looking into it Ya, the quaternion error is cryptic...usually I get a stack unwind or something to help with errors but absolutely nothing but that simple message. Which made me think it's a shader error...dunno...

 

FWIW, I've got Unity Pro. Should I look for anything in my project to help diagnose the problem? I've got a MacBook Pro/Mavericks.

 

Hmm... can you try it out in pro? I'll boot up my mac and test it out there in the morning...

 

What do you mean? I'm using Pro....

 

Here is a sample screen shot using the preset 'clear calm mirror'. Dunno if it'll help you seeing what I'm seeing but thought it was worth a shot

 

gecko - Oh, sorry 'bout that, I thought from your screenshot you were using the Indie version. It's likely this is a difference between mac and PC. But I'll know more tomorrow.

Wayne - yeah, that seems really strange! Can you adjust the light intensity in your scene and tell me if that has any affect?