AQUAS Water/River Set - Water & Rivers for Mobile, VR, Web, Desktop

The shaders are not yet supported on Xbox. I'll add Xbox support and send you the AQUAS Lite shader via email - just PM me your mail adress. If it works, I'll add Xbox support on all the AQUAS shaders with the next update.

 

Hi @dogmachris,

I really like your water shaders for my mountain lakes within my enviroment. However when using the post effect for the camera the player is most times below the water surface at least so the system thinks. Every walk in the valley seems to be a subsurfed experience ;-)

Some feature requests:
- make the system aware of the actual water plane iso an arbitairy height value.
- support more than 1 water surface (it looks like there are more than 1 lake in the alps ;-))

Kind regards,

Wim

 

Hi @cygnusprojects Yeah, right now AQUAS only checks for the y-position of the waterplane, which is kinda ugly, because as soon as you have a little mountain lake the underwater effects trigger, whenever you're below that level, even if you're not underwater.

I've already enahnced that functionality and AQUAS is now able to detect multiple water levels and know precisely when the player is beneath a water plane or not. This works with both, the included waterplane as well as with the standard Unity plane (even if you mix them in your scene).

I'm currently implementing that functionality along with a bunch of additional features for improved underwater effects and will release it with the next update.

It'll take another 2 weeks or so till I'm done though, so expect the update to go online in no less than 3 weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience.

P.S.: If you want to, I can send you the routines for detecting multiple water levels right away, but then you'll have to implement them yourself to work with the lens effects script - PM me if you want it.

 

Thank you for the quick feedback. My project is currently still under heavy development and will definitely take more than 3 weeks to complete so I can wait for the official release.

Kind regards,

Wim

 

It is working! Thanks for the fast response and fix. Just went and bought the full version.

 

Here are some screenshots of Aquas in a tropical island, can't say how impressed I am with this water, especially the transparancy so you can see the coral and sand below the ocean. One thing I did notice however is that I'm using two visual effects (bloom and Texture blending, from Marvelous Techniques https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37726) and unfortunately the air lens (when you leave the water) doesn't work with them. Is there anything I can do to get them to work together? Cheers

 

@jonfinlay Sometimes image effects won't work if there's an active collider between the camera and the target objects for the effects. I think I might have left the colliders on the lens objects active. Does it work, when you remove the collider components?

Oh and BTW - that's a nice scene you have there. Gaia+Tenkoku+RTP?

 

The image effects work, it's the air lens (when you leave the water) that doesn't. However I tried removing both colliders but unfortunately it hasn't fixed it. Probably something simple so I'll have another look.

 

Well the update will change a thing or two on the air lens shader, so maybe you shouldn't even spend too much time on it right now.

 

No, just Gaia in fact. Haven't got any night and day system or shader yet, though I'll be buying Distingo as soon as it's out

 

I really wish, I was more talented at making terrains - mine always look kinda cheap. Just look at my preview images, what a joke...

 

Mine don't normally look like that, islands are easier!

 

Hey sorry for delay.
I have another Nexus 5X and some others in the studio. I'll try them tomorrow.

//Edit
Tested on some more of our test devices in the studio.

Nothing renders at all:
Asus Nexus 7 (2012) Nvidia GeForce ULP (Tegra 3) GLES 2.0

Have jagged issue:
Samsung S3 Mali-400 MP4 GLES 2.0
Second Nexus 5X Adreno 418 GLES 3.1
Samsung Note 4 Adreno 420 GLES 3.1

Works fine:
Sony Xperia Z3 works fine Adreno 330 GLES 3.0

That would suggest to me that it's a more than just a GLES 3.1 issue. Something that's enabling the foaming shoreline is not rendering correctly on old GLES 2.0 S3 & Nexus 7 and the newer 3.1 Nexus & Note 4 devices.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.

 

@pixxelbob
oh, that just dropped the hammer on me. :S
I tested it on several devices (Nexus 7 2013, LG G3, and Galaxy S3 Neo) and it looked just as it should on all of them. I had it tested by others on different devices too, with nobody experiencing that kind of behaviour. Guess I'll have to dig a bit deeper.
One thing though: I had that apk built for gingerbread and above, but the devices I tested on were all android 5. Could you share the android versions on the devices that don't display correctly?

 

@dogmachris Sorry, I hope I've not ruined your day.

• Both Nexus 5X - 6.0.1
• Nexus 7 (2012) - 5.1.1
• Note 4 - 5.1.1
• Galaxy S3 - 4.3

I have just tested on another device HTC One (M7) running 5.0.2 which has an Adreno 320 works fine.
Sony Z3 is also 5.1.1 but everything is fine on that.

Very weird.

Is it possible that building for Gingerbread is holding something back?
TBH most devices are 4+ these days.

 

Hello, I purchased Aquas Water Set. I works fine on Unity Editor. But when I build it into android device(I am using Samsung Galasy S6), water shows like this. I've set depth enabled to main camera.
Any suggestion?

 

@pixxelbob no, you haven't ruined my day, in fact, I'm very thankful you went through the trouble of installing the demo apk on so many devices just to test it. I'll have to make another build with different parameters and see if that changes anything. I'll do it as fast as I can.

@karlmarx81 Does the demo apk (download in the first post) cause the same issues? If not, I don't think your problem is related to pixxelbobs remarks. I've answered your email earlier today. Do you have any means to share the apk you've created and does the problem disappear, when you increase the near clipping pane on the camera?

 

@dogmachris cool no problem. Happy to test when you get the chance.

 

hey dogmachris, as of yet and owing to essential assets being on sale, I hadn't got around to purchasing this yet.
How easy is this to set up the underwater effects; will I have to complete an IT degree first or is it simply plug and play?

Also say I have a 2048 x 2048 Gaia terrain created which has multiple water levels such as, the sea at ground level, and either 1 or two lochs inland (i.e Scottish Highands). Is the asset better to make 1 large water plane to represent sea level, or is it better to have 3 different water tables to represent the 3 different water bodies?

What would you suggest?

 

Hey @TheSeawolf
no, you shouldn't need to do any coding for the underwater effects. They're just a prefab, that attach to your main camera (as child object). The prefab has some parameters in the inspector that you need to fill out (water level, fog density, aso.), most of which are self explanatory, and then it should work out of the box. The manual contains some additional info on how to set up the underwater effects and what the parameters mean - and of course you can hit me up, if you have any trouble.

AQUAS's underwater effects currently support only one water level - the v1.2 Update, that I'm aiming to submit by the end of this week will support multiple water levels. However it does so, by iterating through your waterplanes to find out if you're beneath one of them, so I'm not sure exactly how well it will work if you effectively have 2 waterplanes above each other - I have yet to test that.

 

Excellent thanks, I'll stick with my Bachelor of Game Design then, I won't worry about the IT degree. Sounds easy from what you mentioned.

My game is for the PC, and will effectively be a minimum of 200km2 of seaboard terrain. In your testing, what is the largest size water body you can create before losing detail?

My card is cashed up and ready to splurge today,

 

Holy cow, you're modelling scottland entirely?

The tiling on the waterplane will adjust automatically, so you can scale it up as large as you like. I think scaling it up to 10.000.000 and more shouldn't be a problem, as long as you use only one camera. The more cameras you use, the smaller waterplane needs to be if you want to use reflections - I think 9.000.000 is the limit for 2 cameras. I haven't tested constellations with more cameras. This is due to the realtime reflections, that remap the camera view and projects it to the water surface.

In order to keep the visibility of the texture tiling to a minimum, you should adjust the tiling of the normal maps while looking at the water from the farthest point possible in your game. Make the tiling as high as possible for a realistic look, but as low as neccessary to avoid visible tiling - that's a bit of a tightrope walk at first.

 

Ah, tiling was the word I was looking for. Cheers mate, some good advice there and some food for thought (what an odd saying).

Anyhoo, yes the whole of Scotland is the long term plan, but firstly something much smaller like 8 x 8, stitching terrains from Gaia together

 

I thought it might be useful for people to see that this shader can be used to make swimming pools too !

 

May I ask for a personal demo? both the demos you have on web player are not working for me, and I really want to stop buying water packs which do not have the kind of shoreline I am after, IF yours fits the bill then I will purchase it - just I really want to see more of the shoreline and if it looks better than the rest I've got

Obviously trying the LITE version has a completely different shoreline effect?

 

What kind of shoreline do you want? Aquas has a foam shoreline that you can make thicker or brighter, or blend in nicely with the water. You can change the scale also. It does not have shoreline waves like Suimono.

Here is a picture. I have the foam turned up a bit to make it thicker. The foam spreads out in shallow areas.



Oh, and the demos work fine on Firefox. They don't work on Chrome though.

 

Hi,

What do you mean by personal DEMO ?
That I think is the purpose of the lite/FREE version that he has released

 

@DarkXess You probably mean the web demo, that doesn't work anymore on certain browsers. That's because the Webplayer is now deprecated and won't work at all from march on - sorry about that - I'll create webGL demos as soon as I can.

Actually the shoreline effect in AQUAS Lite is one of the few things, that are the same in the full version, so the foam/shoreline you get with AQUAS Lite, can be achieved with AQUAS - the setup also works the same way.

 

Yea I meant the full version mate, I'd rather demo that as the LITE wasn't the one I wanted but then if it had the same shoreline effect which im looking for then its good for me to just try out

Tried the LITE one out and I love it, the shoreline is exactly what I'm after - I didn't manage to get the underwater effects working though, is that not included in the LITE version? I will be purchasing the full version once I've enough PayPal balance again as I've spent so much the past few days lol.

Finally though it looks like I can stop buying water assets as yours seems perfect

 

Nope, the underwater effects are somewhat exclusive to the full version. The lite version only serves as an alternative to Unity's water pro.

I'm glad you like it though and hope to read your review soon.

Cheers
Chris

 

@dogmachris sorry to bug just wondered if you had made any progress with the Android issues I mentioned a few weeks ago? Thanks. If there's anything I can do let me know.

 

Hi,

After upgrading to Unity 5.3.3p1 I'm facing this error in play mode:
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()AQUAS_Reflection:OnWillRenderObject() (at Assets/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_Reflection.cs:73)UnityEngine.Camera:Render()IsFinite(outDistanceForSort)
While playing the console fill with this error. I'm using the full version of Aquas.

 

This is a current Unity bug that seems to be related to anything with planar reflections, including AQUAS. It seems to occur in all 5.3 versions, depending on the scene setup. According to Unity it has been fixed in 5.4.0 and there's a post in the issue tracker about it:
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...rsort-when-looking-at-scene-from-certain-able

Also see:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/water-script-error-with-default-layer-reflect.382565/
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/isfinite-outdistanceforsort.383129/

Sorry, I was very busy with the Update in the past 4 weeks, but since it's now submitted, that's the first thing for me to investigate. Very confusing for me is that on your Asus Nexus 7 (2012) nothing renders at all, while on mine (exact same device) everything renders just as it should (Android 5.1). I'm gonna test the apk on a larger number of devices with different configurations. Since the error doesn't seem to be general, but rather dependent on the device used (if it's even that), the statistical approach is the only one that seems to make sense right now.

I really wish I had some more feedback on this, it would help me with the statistics but so far nobody (except you) has yet reported this kind of behaviour, there was only some people who had problems with larger scenes on mobile (see post from karlmarx81).

May I ask how you install the apk and which Android version you have running on your Asus Nexus 7 (2012)?

 

No need to appologise I was just wondering.
I installed the by literally downloading the APK direct from here and running it through the standard on device installer. All phones I've tested on are running in developer mode.
I have two Asus Nexus 7 (2012) both exhibit the same IE. They don't render at all. Both are running 5.1.1 vanilla Android.

 

New version is up! Been looking forward to this for ages. Judging from the package contents you seem to have added a lot of good features as well.

 

Love That plugin, awesome perf and pure beauty. my water spots in my jungle look awesome.

some features request, if at all possible, that could potentially save me a lot of trouble :
Regarding the river, something really cool would be that i could :
Drop the plugin on a mesh ( River mesh ).
It checks the "Steepness" of the mesh and adjust the flow speed / direction accordingly. May be with a min max flow speed ?
Or
Use a flow map like the plugin "Flow" did.


That would be awesome.

 

Yup, added quite some features, especially regarding the underwater effect. I'm busy writing the new documentation atm, that's why I haven't updated the first post yet, but I'll do as soon as I'm finished with the manual. I'll also add some tutorial videos this weekend, to give a better overview of the potential uses.

 

I've been wrapping my head around the river question for quite some time. The idea of using a flowmap would make for some very realistic looking water flow, however the critical limitation is that a flowmap effectively stretches out the textures, so your river can't keep flowing continuously without either flowing back or resetting - otherwise your texture will eventually stretch out beyond recognition.

The other way I see is to pan the textures along a path that would however have to be codetermined by the UVs of the mesh used as water surface, which is a bit tricky to set up properly. I'll see if I can automate it somehow, to read out the "river" from a terrain component and create a plane mesh with proper UVs set up, but honestly, I can't yet see this happen very soon.

If you have some nice looking screens, please feel free to share them.

 

What about getting the Normal from the mesh and set the flow direction and strength from that ?
( Like RTP is doing ... somehow.. or may be it s using the world space normal, baked from the mesh ...not sure it is achieved but it works )

 

@dogmachris Could this be anything that can be implemented to deal with flow maps and masking the resets: http://www.thewildeternal.com/2014/09/02/devlog-flowing-water/

 

That would probably be possible, even though I don't exactly know, what RTP uses that for. On the other hand, I'm not an expert with RTP.

Thanks a lot for the link, that seems to be a great approach, I'll look into it asap.

 

Hey guys, just a quick heads-up because I just got an email from a user: The user manual for AQUAS v1.2 will be online in about 24 hours from now.

 

@dogmachris would be you so kind as to build a fresh APK for me to test on my devices.
Thanks!

 

@pixxelbob sure, I'll build a fresh one later today and post the link.

 

i have some problems with underwater effects.
first i got error about not having audio source in my fpscamera then i aded it
now console says
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
AQUAS_LensEffects.Update () (at Assets/AQUAS/Scripts/AQUAS_LensEffects.cs:304)

i cant see no lens effects when come from water. underwater effect works good but how can i change color of it?

 

@pixxelbob I've prototyped a new apk for you to test. I've tested it on various devices again, (Nexus 7 2012 included). Please go ahead & TRY IT.

 

GalaxyTab2 a solid 7 FPS....worse than the first....the free version works and looks great great on PC, I actually was going to buy this, but it has to at least run as fast as water+, what i am using now..
I still very worried about android performance..

P

 

@kilju this usually occurs, if there's components missing on the camera gameobject. Have you used the quick setup window to set up water and underwater effects? I'm sorry, I only got the new manual online today, so it might have been a bit of a run in the dark for you with v1.2. :S
Also have you imported v1.2 over your old installation or have you remove AQUAS first? If you've just imported v1.2 over the old installation, it could be that it caused some problems, I didn't know of.
It might be useful in this to remove the water and the underwater effects from the scene and then readd the water and the underwater effects using the quick setup - you can find it under "Window" => "AQUAS". It's pretty much self explanatory and shouldn't take long.

 

The galaxy tab has a 1 GHz dual core cpu, which is simply too little to run AQUAS mobile. I do state in the FAQ that it's aimed at current and future generation devices and that older devices might simply not perform - sorry.

Water+ and AQUAS have totally different ways of displaying a water surface. If you're targeting older generation devices, then honestly and by all means Water+ might be a better choice than AQUAS. You should only use AQUAS mobile, when targeting more powerful android and/or iOS devices.

Androids should ideally have a quad core cpu and adreno graphics or equivalent. On Apple devices the water seems to be much less demanding.

 

I figured as much....thanks

Spoiler: love your water!!

p