Physics Water 2D Tool - GPU based ripple water, realistic buoyancy, water flow & animation

Asset Store -15$
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Hello Everyone.
With Water2D Tool you can quickly create dynamic 2D or 2.5D water for your game. This plugin allows you to make your 2D game more dynamic and engaging. The ability to animate the water can be used to create different puzzles and obstacles for the players.

Water features​

• 2D and 2.5D water. The 2.5D water is similar to the one found in games like "The Cave" or "Rayman Legends".
• Water flow that affects the objects in the water. You are able to specify a direction like: Left, Right, Up, Down or use an angle value.
  
• 2 methods for simulating the Buoyant Force(This is what makes the objects float in the water):
  • Physics based buoyant force simulation that applies the Archimedes Principles. This makes the objects behavior more realistic in the water.
  • Linear Buoyant Force. Not very realistic, but very cheap in terms of performance.
• The objects in the water can change it's total Area. The change is proportional to the area of the object that is submerged in the water.

• 2 methods for animating the water:
  • Animation by object reference.
  • Animation by area offset.
• Constant Area. If the width of the water is increasing the water height will decrease so that the initial water area does not change.
• Texture Tiling. The UVs are recalculated every time the width or the height of the water mesh is changing. As a result there is no texture stretching. This is done in the Editor as well as at Run Time.
• The ability to specify the pixels per unit for the texture.
• Idle waves.
• Works with 2D and 3D Colliders.

WebGL DEMO​

Video Tutorials​

You can click on objects to move them in the scene.

Below are a couple of Gifs of Water2D Tool.

Water Creation.

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Floating objects.
Physics based Buoyant Force simulation.

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2.5D Water.

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Water flow.

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Area change by objects.


Water animation and constant water Area.


UV recalculation
In the Gifs bellow the green and yellow rectangles are a single 512 x 512 px texture.



Please tell me what do you think about this tool. What functions would you like to have besides the above?. You can contact me personally by email johnq002@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter.
Thanks.

 

That's really cool, I would buy it if it were priced fairly.
It's great as it is but just some ideas:
Perhaps a splash on impact, overflow if bounds are exceeded, just basically making it more like water. If you did things like that then the price I'd be willing to pay would go up

 

I'll probably add a splash a little further on the road. As for overflow, I am not sure I will add this option as it really hard to implement. Water2D is a tool for creating Static water with dynamic properties. Overflow is more in the fluid simulation domain.

 

Yeah I get it, I thought it may be especially difficult to implement overflow but nonetheless this is a great extension.

 

Does this require Unity Pro to create?
I guess a better question is why is it being created as an extension instead of a unity store asset?

I think this could potentially address issues several recent projects have had. Pretty cool!

 

No, you do not need Unity Pro, it's all in Unity Free. I called it "Water2D Tool Editor Extension" because you use the Editor to change the width and height of the water, as you can see from the first Gif. When it's finished it will be published to the Asset Store. I guess I'll drop "Editor Extension" from the name and just call it "Water2D Tool". That will make it less confuzing.

 

Added a new option for generating water waves. When enabled will distort the surface of the water to simulate waves like the one created by the wind. Needs a little more work to make it look more realistic.

 

The past couple of weeks had been busy and could not work on this tool as much as I wanted.
Here is a little update on the progress. Added a more realistic Buoyant Force (it's what makes the objects float in a fluid that has a lower density then the object) simulation, that takes into account the shape of the object and its mass. The initial Buoyant Force was calculated based on the objects position and did not take into account it's shape and mass and was not very realistic. Both will be included in the final version.

 

UPDATE: Added a new demo scene, a particle effect and a splash sound. If you use the last version of Google Chrome you probably won't be able to play the demo scene, so Paste the link in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

 

Made a small Preview video.

 

Love seeing the updates as they come along, quite impressive work so far! Is this being programmed in C# or UnityScript, and secondly will the sources be provided with release or will the package be locked up in a DLL? Either way, I am looking forward to seeing this on the Asset Store.

 

I'm glad you like it. The language is C#. The source code will be available with lots of comments. You will be able to change it if you want.
Next I'll do some tutorials showing how to animate the water and other things.
As for the release date, I hope it will be available on the Asset Store by the end of the next week if everything goes OK.

 

UPDATE: Created a couple of tutorials about some of the Water2D Tool features.

 

This is SO cool!

 

The Water2D Tool is finally released to the Asset Store. You can find it here Asset Store Link

 

I'm glad to hear you were able to roll it out and get it on the Asset Store. You have my purchase secured in the very near future!

 

It is optimized for mobile?

 

This looks nice. I've been working on something similar for my next game, but will take a look at yours as it appears to be further along.

I've not watched the vids yet so I'll ask. Can you manually generate the waves. In my game I need waves that start small then get larger and more "fierce" as time goes on. Possible?

Great job!

 

To give you a little benchmark. I tested the demo scenes on 2 Android phones: a Samsung S4 and Sony Xperia J.
Even if it's 2 years old the S4 is still a high end phone while the Sony Xperia J even at release was a low end phone.
So here are the results:

S4 - 60 fps with occasional drops to 58 fps.
Xperia j - between 10 to 20 fps, that's something to be expected.

Keep in mind that the demo scenes contain the most computer intensive features, like realistic buoyant force and animation. When I tested the scenes on the phones I used the same settings as on the PC. If you play a little with the water settings you could get a better performance.

 

At the moment this feature is not available, but I added it to my To Do list, so I'll try to implement it in the next updates.

 

Thanks, Nicrom

More follow-up questions:

Are the waves simulated using springs? Would be nice to have programmatic access to the surface vertice heights so we can generate our own waves and wave patterns. I don't want to continuously control the heights, just want to be able to move them and release in order to generate different waves. Similar to what you seem to be doing when an object falls in the water.

 

Yes, I use springs to simulate the waves. Water2D Tool has 2 options for generating idle waves (waves created not by objects): The first is small waves in random places (you can customize them in the inspector to make them bigger) and second are waves generated by a number of overlapping sine waves. Both methods change the velocity of the surface vertices to achieve their effects. I want implement another method for idle waves. I'm not sure if it will be in the next update, but I hope I will implement it very soon.

You could generate different patterns by changing the velocities of the surface vertices which are stored in a list in the Water2D_Simulation script.

 

This looks amazing!
Is there any type of tutorial for the line physics used for the top-side of the water?

 

Thanks. What do you mean by line physics?

 

Unity 5 compatible?

 

Yes. At the beginning of the thread there is a WebGL demo link build in Unity 5.

 

we can work in a way to use with sprite renderer?

 

Yes, the water is a mesh, but you can set in the Inspector the Sorting Layer and Order in Layer of the mesh so it will work with the sprites. You don't need Z positioning with the sprites, just use the Sorting Layer and Order in Layer.

 

The object that I want to interact with the water has a sprite renderer, not a mesh renderer.

 

It doesn't mater if the object has a sprite, as I said, the water object has the option to set its Sorting Layer and Order in Layer the same way you can do for the sprites. Even I if the water is a mesh it will be sorted based on the layer you set in the Sorting Layer drop down menu. So you could place a sprite behind the water or in front of it by just changing the Sorting Layer of the sprite object.

Take a look at this tutorial for the Water2D Tool, you can see in the Inspector The sorting Layer and Order in Layer options.

 

Like whenever an item drops on the water, the 'line' pretty much reacts ike water. I wonder how this is achieved?

 

The basic ideas I took from this Tutorial.

 

Thank you very much, I find the method for it very fascinating.

 

I could make it all work for the time being this normal functioning, thank you and congratulations for the asset.

 

You welcome and Thanks

 

A little Update on the soon to be released Version 1.1 of Water2D Tool.

• Added support for 3D Colliders.
• A new option for the animation.
• Code namespace to eliminate the likelihood of having clashes between classes.

 

Water2D Tool v1.1 is now live on Asset Store. Asset Store Link

• Added support for 3D colliders.
• Code namespace.
• Added a new option in the animation group.
• Now you can set the sorting layer and order in layer in the Inspector for the particle system and offset the position on the Z where the particle system will be instantiated.
• The code was updated to Unity 5 API, so when you import the tool in a Unity 5.x project, Unity won't tell you that it needs to update the code. The code is the same for projects based on Unity 4.x and Unity 5.x.

 

This is a little preview of a new feature that will be available the the next update. Added a new option that simulates a better interaction of the objects with the surface waves.

The new behavior.

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The old behavior.

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So is this new wave interaction using a true intersection between the water wave surface and the boat polygon and using that for buoyancy calcs? Or are you faking/simulating it somehow?

Looks nice!

 

No, I am not faking it. Before, the intersection polygon was calculated using the Sutherland Hodgman polygon clipping algorithm. The problem with it was that it doesn't work well with nonconvex polygons. Because of that the clipping polygon was always a horizontal line(the water line) and the water waves had no affect on objects. Now I added a new clipping option that works with concave polygons as a result the behavior of the objects is influenced by the surface waves.

 

Great. This is a feature I was seriously needing. What algo are you using now? Weiler-Atherton? When do you think the new version with this feature will be out??

 

I am using the clipper library. It may take a couple of weeks since I am working on a couple of other features for the 1.2 version. The current 1.2 alpha version works only with 2D colliders, If you don't need the 3D colliders, send me your invoice number by email and I'll send you the alpha version.

 

I can wait. Plenty of other stuff to work on. Good to see progress on your asset.

-Jeff

 

Another feature that will be included in the 1.2 update is water flow.

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Did you ever add the ability to programmatically modify the waves... height, frequency, etc..? As mentioned in an earlier thread, my game needs to start with no waves then have the waves get progressively worse as time goes on.

If so, what's the api look like?

New flow feature looks cool.

 

The 1.1 version doesn't have the ability to change the amplitude, phase or speed of a wave at run time, but I will try to think of something for this version.

 

Hey Nicrom, I would like to contact you. Can't start a conversation here in Unity, I guess you disabled that feature. Can you give me a mail-adress? I have some specific questions for this Water 2D tool, if you don't mind

 

Hi. Sorry, I didn't know I had that feature disabled. My Email is johnq002@gmail.com

 

Can it work with 2D platformers packages ? It is possible to have characters swimming underwater ?

 

Water2D Tool works only with objects that have a RigidBody2D or RigidBody attached to them. I used the 2D Character Controller that unity provides, for testing and it worked without problems. How an object behaves in the water depends on it's mass and collider area. There some additional parameters you can customize, like the scale of the buoyant force that is applied to an object with the tag "Player" and an imaginary bounding box that will be used to calculate it's area.