Triton Oceans and 3D Water for Unity Pro / Windows [DEPRECATED]

OK, I think / hope I have a breakthrough for those experiencing stability issues.

In assets/triton/TritonWakeGenerator.cs, change the "OnRenderObject" method to "LateUpdate".

This change is in the trial version of the SDK available now at our website.

Let me know if that clears things up - if so, I'll submit the change to the asset store.

 

Fingers crossed, will try as soon as I can.

Update.. did change the OnRenderObject to LateUpdate.. but no change for me.... crashed..

 

Hey Sundog,

Finally took the plunge into the trial, after seeing the latest round of updates this weekend.

Very very cool tool and one I feel pretty sure ill be purchasing at a later date.

Just wondering if anyone has set up a ship with the wake generator in a rough sea. The wake generator works well but generally in a calm sea I set 'Clamp to Surface' off as the 'sway' isn't worth the power. Oviously in a rough sea this needs to be On. The problem is my ship is 'snapping' to the sea at its centre point and its always horizontally flat. I would like the effect that it 'rolls' with the waves and im struggaling to achive this.

I tried adding the buoyancy script with the wake generator but the wake gnerator overpowers the buoyancy script or indeed disables it completely, seesm you can only have 1 or the other.

Next I considered the idea of 'weight points' on my model which would have rigid bodies attached. So when theres a dip in the waves the Front weight point will go down pulling the ship down with it. But this won't work because for the ship (which is a single object) to inherit that movement the ship needs to be a child object of that point which I can't do.

Am I missing something completely to achieve this or is it not actually possible at the moment?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Regards,

John

 

Hi Bronco78th, thanks for evaluating Triton!

I just uploaded a new trial version to our website (version 2.18) that might help. There were a couple of issues that may have caused the Buoyancy script to not play nice with other forces applied to your ship.

As a test in this new version, I attached a WakeGenerator to the Buoyancy example object as well as a constant force component with a force of 100 in +X. With "test motion" and "clamp to surface" disabled on the WakeGenerator (but "auto update" on,) it seemed to behave as you'd expect.

You probably know this already, but it is important to not directly modify the position of an object that's under control of Unity's physics engine. The WakeGenerator's test motion and clamping methods would do just that, while the Buoyancy script is relying on physics for motion.

 

Cheers Sundog,

That set-up works really well. Got stumped with my ship constantly rolling over onto its side, I narrowed it down to the buoyancy and realised I hadn't checked "Concave" which works great now!

One thing id love to see added in a future build if at all possible is more helper gizmo's in the editor.

For example a plane object which shows the level of the water.

Id also like to see helpers in the editor for the position of 'Bow Offset' "PropWash Offset" as well as another gizmo plane that shows the area covered by the "Length" and "Beam Width" values.

All for ease of use cos I could spend hours treaking those values and actually get nothing else done.

The other thing is, I presume it won't 'blow up' if I have play with customizing the textures? really wanna try get rid of the sharp edge you get on the wake and is it possible to adjust the spray effect particles?

Anyway cheers for the help, gonna try implementing it into my main project and see where we go then!

Regards,

John

 

Glad it worked! Good ideas on additional gizmos to make tweaking a little easier.

Feel free to modify the textures - they're the BMP's inside the triton/TritonResources folder. As long as you keep the dimensions as powers of two and retain the original format (paying attention to what's in the alpha channels) it should be fine. If you arrive at something better, we'd certainly be happy to roll them into future updates if you'd like.

 

For helpers what would rock even more than a water plane would be 2planes (min &max wave height!)

 

I just downloaded the latest trial and tried to perform the above steps, but after say 30 seconds of running everything goes nuts. The prop wash flashes in and out and the bow waves do the same thing. I tested this on two different machines with the same results. Do you know whats happening?

 

Try setting the "LOD distance" on the WakeGenerator to 0. I think something about this test scene as described confuses the LOD switching on the wakes. If you're seeing the wakes flash while the camera remains stationary, that's probably it.

If you're seeing distant segments of the wake disappear when the camera moves, you're probably just seeing the max budget of wake segments being hit. Under DX9, we only have enough shader uniform space to describe 17 wake waves at once, and we choose the ones closest to the camera to render. Since there is a second wake generator near the camera in this test scene, you'll hit that limit faster.

If that's what you're seeing, there are a few ways to mitigate this limit. One is to switch to DX11 where we have more uniform space and can therefore simulate more wake waves at once, although I think some people may still be experiencing instability with Triton + Unity + DX11 - so be sure to test things thoroughly if taking the DX11 route. Another is to configure individual wake segments to be longer, which can be done by increasing the wake-wave-generation-period setting in the assets/triton/tritonresources/triton.config file.

HTH
-Frank

 

Hi again Sundog.

Gone back to messing with this and ive got it going in my project with no hiccups (my project is suing alot of 3rd party tools!) .

One thing I did notice on a second look is that using the above set-up with buoyancy and the Wake Generator im not getting any spray or bow waves at all. I do get them however if I select 'Test Motion' On any idea why that might be?

The Wakes seem to be working fine however.

Regards,

John

 

Hi John,

The intensity of the bow wake and spray are a function of the ship's velocity. If you let that force-powered buoyancy test cube chug along long enough top pick up sufficient speed, you should start seeing the bow wake and spray. At least, I do.

Further contributing to the confusion is the fact that the default "bow offset" on the wake generator is 0, so at lower velocities the wake and spray are actually inside the cube. As the velocity increases, the wake starts to move further behind the bow (this is a real physical effect that's a function of the ship draft and velocity) and eventually emerges out from behind it.

The "test motion" option applies a constant velocity of 8 m/s, which is more than enough for the effects to get larger and emerge out from the confines of the test cube object.

So, it seems to be working as designed as far as I can tell - it's just that in this quick test of wake generators on a buoyant object, the combination of low velocity + unfortunate placement of the bow offset results in the appearance of no bow effects until the velocity increases to around 6 m/s.

 

Cheers for the reply Sundog!

Ill keep messing!

Regards,

John

 

Hi gang,

A new revision of Triton for Unity Pro / Windows just got approved in the asset store; this one fixes an issue that could cause a crash when using DirectX9 and planar reflections whenever the Direct3D9 device object was reset (for example, when moving or resizing a window.)

You can also get an updated trial version from our website.

While I've got your attention - a few people have run into problems when distributing their Unity app built with Triton. If you're encountering DLL not found errors and you've followed the instructions for installing TritonDLL.dll properly, you might not have the correct Visual Studio 2010 runtimes installed. Triton requires the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 redistributables to be installed on the user's system - make sure it's SP1 you're using.

Thanks!
Frank Kane
Founder, Sundog Software LLC

 

Hi there,

I'm using Triton Ocean and love it.
A couple of issues that I have, though:
- lens flares do not seem to work in conjonction with Triton ocean. I understand the tech reasons why transparent objects get overdrawn by the water, but I'm wondering why flares disappear. Any idea about that?
- waker wakes and other effects --> I have a situation where I have a boat that moves fairly slowly on the water and I'm trying to make some sort of wake effect. I played around with wakes and water impacts, but couldn't really get anything satisfying working. Any hint on how I might achieve that? Also, one thing that would be really really cool would be if we could pass triton renderer a set of transparent objects that we'd want blended on the water. I'm thinking something similar to your wakes, where you seem to be creating dummy geometry that gets blended with the rest. Is there any plan for that? That way, I could have more control on that particular effect and taylor it to my needs, creating/animating the fx geometry more easily (although I do understand that it might look inconsistent with the water simulation itself)

Thanks for this great asset!

 

Thanks for using Triton!

I can only guess as to what's causing the issue with flares, but I think they are being drawn after Triton does its native rendering to Unity's DX9 device, and somehow the act of doing this is preventing the lens flares from drawing. I don't think this could be fixed without changing how Unity works under the hood. However, there is a workaround - just like you would draw transparent objects from a second camera, if you create a camera for the lens flares with a higher depth value and no clearing, it should render the flares over the camera that includes Triton. At least, it works for me.

As you've seen, there are a lot of parameters to tweak for ship wakes. Make sure you're on the latest version of Triton for Unity, as there have been some improvements to wakes recently. If you're still having trouble getting good results, feel free to send me a video of what you're seeing to support@sundog-soft.com. Between the WakeGenerator properties and the properties in the Triton.config file, I can probably offer some advice on how to get what you're looking for.

The wakes are actually created procedurally as Gerstner waves radiating outward from the point they were generated at, and added into the vertex displacements inside the shaders. So, we're not actually blending in an external effect or geometry there - it's all just math. What sort of effects did you have in mind exactly? I suppose we could let you pass in a displacement map to deform the water surface, but I don't know how one would create such a thing in Unity.

 

I want to be able to enter the water as realistically as possible, with a transition that looks something like the attached photo. Any way to do this?

http://www.hdwallpapersarena.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ocean_life_wallpapers_001.jpg

 

Triton does not provide an explicit means for this sort of effect, but bear in mind all Triton really does is render the water surface. The picture you sent could, I think, be achieved by just pushing out the camera's near clip plane a bit, allowing the sky to be visible in the gap between the camera and the near clip plane where the water surface would start.

This would only work in calm water, however. As soon as you have waves in the mix, you could end up in a situation where the water surface is visible from both above and below the water surface if the camera is inside the waves. Back-face culling would prevent that from looking correct.

 

I did some experimenting with your demo and thought it might not be possible but thought I'd ask just in case.

 

Any other ideas why a build might be crashing if you've got both 2010sp1 runtimes and have the triton dll alongside your executable?

 

Make sure you're using the latest version. The one that went out a week ago does fix a potential crash under DX9.

One other possibility is that your build is being created for 64-bit. Unity has no mechanism for automatically loading 32 or 64 bit plugin DLL's, so you'll need to manually swap out the 32-bit TritonDLL.dll for the 64-bit one if that's the case - or just build for 32 bit.

If the issue is happening on the same system that you ran our Triton for Unity Trial installer on, then it's probably not a dependency issue. If it's on a different system, see if installing our trial installer clears it up - that could point to a problem with the DirectX runtimes installed on the system.

If none of that helps, feel free to send the error and crash logs to support@sundog-soft.com and we'll have a look.

 

Hi Sundog,

I'm having problems with reflections.
When I build my EXE and launch it, the reflection works fine, but as soon as I minimize the application and then maximize it again, the reflection is broken --> it looks like the pointer to the reflection is lost somewhere.
I updated to the latest version on the assetstore but I still get the issue.
I looked into TritonReflection.cs and see that you uncommented this in SynchTriton:

if (texturePtr == (System.IntPtr)0) {
texturePtr = reflectionTexture.GetNativeTexturePtr();
}

However, I still get this issue with the reflection texture being lost.

Strangely enough, I had witnessed this very same problem in your demo scene but it disappeared after I updated it.
Any idea what the issue might be?

Tks

 

It sounds like it has to do with how Unity handles lost devices under DirectX 9. Here's a thread describing a similar problem in general with render to texture (which the reflection texture is

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/87860-Lost-Graphics-Device

I'm guessing that the render texture for the reflection is becoming invalid somehow, and the only workaround would be to delete and recreate our TritonReflection class (inside the TritonRenderer class, which owns it) in response to a DirectX9 device loss. The problem is, there is no reliable way to detect when this happens within Unity as the thread above indicates, nor is there a way to know when the user minimizes or maximizes the window.

One possible workaround is to switch to DirectX 11, although that has its own set of issues for some users - but it may meet your needs.

The only idea I have is for the native Triton code - which does know about DX9 device losses - to somehow signal Unity when this happens, so we can recreate the TritonReflection object. I'll have to experiment with that, but it will take some time.

 

I think we have a fix for lost reflection textures when a DX9 device loss occurs. It's available now in the trial version on our website, and I've submitted an updated version to the asset store, which should hopefully be available within a few days.

By all rights this is a bug in Unity: RenderTextures can become invalid whenever you move, minimize, etc. a DX9 windowed standalone app. But the workaround we implemented seems to work.

 

Thanks Sundog,

This fix is very appreciated, it works like a charm!!

Unisip

 

The version of Triton in the asset store now includes the fix mentioned above (for reflections sometimes going screwy in a standalone, windowed, DX9 deployments.) Thanks for reporting that, unisip.

I noticed we're the #1 top-grossing asset in our category! Thanks everyone!

 

I see an update, what's in that one?

 

Can't slip anything past you, Ronan!

This latest update fixes an issue with coastal blending in standalone players. But more interestingly, it features a completely overhauled ship wake system. Here's a video describing some of the new capabilities:

[video=youtube_share;Yghy_XTWhho]http://youtu.be/Yghy_XTWhho

And, a few screenshots:





As always, a free trial of Triton 3D Water for Unity Pro 4.x for Windows is available from our website.

Thanks,

Frank Kane
Founder CEO
Sundog Software LLC

 

Great.. the old wake system was having some issues on my laptop, sort of turned on and off..blinking in a way..
Will check out the new version.

 

Hey, I'm still having delivery problems on some client machines.
I've got the visual c++ 2010 SP1 redist packaged in my installer, but it still doesn't work.
I had a look at the demo you have on your website and it seems you are also installing some DirectX runtime. Could you point to the required version of that on the microsoft website? Also, is there anything else that you are installing, aside from those two?

Tks

 

It could be the DirectX runtimes. We got them from the latest DirectX SDK (June 2010 believe it or not), but this looks like the right one:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

You'll also need to make sure DirectX11 is installed:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee416644(v=vs.85).aspx

If you continue to run into DLL dependency issues, Dependency Walker can be useful in tracking them down.

 

This is seriously impressive, downloading the update now!

Could you take that one step further and add things like Oil slicks with this new system? A shader which would distort the surface of the water, but since it 'sits' on the water surface would still follow the wave behavior.

But oh man, as said downloading the update now!

Keep up the great work guys!

John

 

Thanks for the feedback John! The idea of having artist-supplied films on the water surface has come up a couple of times in this thread. I'll add it to the feature backlog; it's not that hard to do, but it may have to be a DX11-only feature - we're already up against the limits of DX9 shader uniform space and instruction limits.

 

I am wondering if you could add "Sub Surface Scattering" to the shaders!!!
You can see kind of this effect in CryEngine and CryDev,let's see how this will look like in Unity ;-)

 

Amazing. Please tell me you're going ahead with the Mac version.

 

A Mac version is in fact in the works right now. Stay tuned!

 

It's great to hear that and I'll definitely be picking it up once it's ready. Thank you!

 

$475.00??? WOW!!! That's crazy.. Nice looking water thou.

 

the sdk looks excellent and the waves themselves look realistic, but I have a few points that i'd like to ask:

the prop wake looks acceptable, however a bit 'texture based'. you can see the straight seams between the textures. wouldn't using longer lived soft particles be a better option?

realtime refraction/reflections?


my 'holy grail' of water/ocean simulation would be this:

-being able to use an arbitrary convex plane instead of just a flat plane.
this could be used to simulate actual planet curvature on say a cubed sphere for localized simulations

-OR better yet-

-for planet-wide oceans, spherical meshes w/LOD using any number of optimized LOD algorithms (ROAM, geo mip-mapping etc etc) for space to planet transitions.

this could be done using 1 sphere for planetary terrain and another for the oceans/water with the ocean sphere being scaled a little larger than the terrain sphere to indicate ocean depth. then shaders/code could be used to test the depth between the 2 meshes to obtain realistic diffuse blended colors and wave effects based on the terrain below as well as to determine intersections between the 2 for coastlines and shores thereby ensuring realistic waves closer to shore.

-realistic soft shorelines with crashing wave/surf.
this could be done by testing the inbound wave against the depth to 'pile up' the wave to simulate cresting on shores/beaches as well as testing for collisions and using particles to simulate crashing against a cliff face for example.

granted, I am severely over simplifying, but the heart wants what it wants

how much of your sdk can handle the above? and if not, are there any plans to do anything like what I described? I would gladly pay more for such a solution

 

Thanks for having a look!

>the prop wake looks acceptable, however a bit 'texture based'. you can see the straight seams between the textures. wouldn't using longer lived soft particles be a better option?

The challenge there is keeping the particles stuck to the water surface, as it is always moving. The cost of those collision queries would be prohibitive. Our current approach is fast, but does have limitations.

> realtime refraction/reflections?

Yes, Triton supports both planar reflections and environmental cube map reflections in real time. It computes the full Fresnel equation for refraction, although it does assume you are generally in an ocean where the refraction color is constant.

> being able to use an arbitrary convex plane instead of just a flat plane. this could be used to simulate actual planet curvature on say a cubed sphere for localized simulations

Triton does have support for WGS84 ellipsoids and geocentric coordinate systems where 0,0,0 is the center of the Earth, although I don't think Unity in general works well with these large coordinate systems. Our C++ SDK does allow you to apply our water effect to arbitrary geometry, but the Unity version does not at this time.

> for planet-wide oceans, spherical meshes w/LOD using any number of optimized LOD algorithms (ROAM, geo mip-mapping etc etc) for space to planet transitions.

Triton's existing LOD scheme is based on a projected grid, where the geometry is created such that each triangle has constant size in screen space. It's about as optimal as you can get. In the case of an ellipsoid, the grid is projected onto an ellipsoid instead of a plane and it all just works - but again, doing geocentric stuff in Unity is a bit bleeding edge. It is possible to configure Triton to simulate an Earth with a smaller radius, but you'd be going into uncharted territory there. However, that's why we have a free trial package to try out before you buy.

> realistic soft shorelines with crashing wave/surf.

There is a "coastal FX" option that does just that, and breaking waves parameters. We don't spawn particles when the water collides with a cliff, however - we just fade out the water, dampen the wave displacements, and add in some sinusoidal waves near the shore that grow as the depth decreases.

 

doesn't the refraction color look a bit weird being constant during time of day transitions though?

also, and I do hope you'll forgive me by posting this, but this: http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/29385641/new-water-simulation-from-physx-position-based-fluids. on a larger scale absolutely makes me drool

watch the video, it's astounding

 

Oh, the refraction color is lit. It's not totally constant, sorry if I misled you there.

Yup, I read that SIGGRAPH paper last week. Computational fluid dynamics can do amazing stuff on a small scale, but getting it to run quickly enough on a large area is still ahead of what most consumer hardware can do today, I think. In the paper, an area slightly larger than a bunny took 8ms per frame. Still, I could imagine a hybrid system with FFT-based waves offshore with CFD near the camera when you are near the shore. That might be a neat idea.

 

btw, are you using some sort of static perlin noise lookup for the waves? I noticed that as I zoomed out, it started suffering from wave repetition making it look tiled.

 

true. something akin to shadow mapping mebbe?

 

Perlin noise is blended in with distance, to mask the tiling from the FFT patches. It can be tweaked if it's not sufficient for your views - open up the Triton.config file inside the TritonResources folder, and look for the fft-noise-amplitude and fft-noise-distance settings.

 

gotcha. will check it out. the reason I was asking is that there is a very good GPU based noise library that I purchased on the asset store

I use it to simulate my 'roiling' star surfaces. it's extremely fast, and dynamic (per frame) thus ensuring that the generated noise is unique.

 

Triton's rendering is all done natively from a plug-in, so you won't be able to use that asset on Triton's water directly. However, you're free to modify Triton's shaders if you're feeling adventurous flat-fft.fx in the TritonResources folder is the relevant file. Bear in mind it is straight-up HLSL, not Cg with Unity's stuff in it.

 

I'm evaluating Triton Oceans for a project and I really like what I see so far!

The one thing I haven't been able to figure out so far, is if there is any easy way to modify the water material to achieve different looks, for instance a wireframe or toon look rather than the default realistic look. Since no mesh is spawned in the Hierarchy, there is no where to apply custom shaders that I can find.

 

Thanks for having a look!

Triton is rendered entirely in native code, so you won't be able to get at its innards from within Unity. However, its shaders are provided in plain text. If you're good with HLSL and a little adventurous, you could experiment with modifying them to achieve different lighting effects.

Inside the TritonResources folder, you'll find the shaders. The one used by Unity is flat-fft.fx. Just be sure to save off the original version before messing with it.

A wireframe is easier to do - from within the scripts, get the TritonUnity object and call tritonUnity.GetOcean().EnableWireframe(true);

 

I've been looking at the demo screenshots and videos for Triton and I'ved noticed most show rather calm sea conditions. Are there any examples showing very rough conditions? Something along the lines of a monsoon, or very large waves breaking on shore in a storm is what I'm looking for.

I've spent a lot of time surfing out on the pacific coast... and during the winter storms in some areas, it's not uncommon to see 30+ foot thrashers roll in over and over again. The above is obviously even more extreme than that, but I'm aiming for a variety of sea conditions, to include those caused by tropical storms.

 

Hi,

Triton is capable of simulating Beaufort scale conditions 1-9, which goes all the way up to hurricane force winds. Our Unity demos don't really showcase that well, but if you look at our more general demo below, you'll get a better feel of how Triton simulates different sea states. Skip to 0:53 to see it maxed out:

However, Triton won't simulate waves crashing against arbitrary objects like in your video. You would need to augment Triton with your own particle effects on such objects to create spray effects from periodically crashing waves.