Official Water System for the High Definition Render Pipeline

Yes. CPU simulation have to be enable to get height... adding short summary comment to the FindWaterSurfaceHeight() would be nice

 

<3

Quick query:

Is it possible to use own mesh, for example have a mode where the overhead of tess is removed and people can supply perhaps a mesh of their choice, and the various textures you generate are mapped in world space for regular non tess displacement? Do you think it's a terrible idea or useful? I am just concerned about tess in general having high overhead. May be unfounded worry.

 

hmm... not 100% sure but looks like wind direction in WaterSurface produces wind in oposite direction to global volume Visual Environment wind... Not a big problem but I guess thats a bug.
Being able to use global volume wind on water surface directly in volume would be nice too

 

I want to understand something. Why we need motion vectors on a water system?
i'm a graphic designer so, i think a have a different concept of that xD

 

double fogging: i successfully addressed it in our custom water shader (forward) by tweaking the ShaderPassForward include: we write refraction to emission, save it to a custom float3, zero it out, let all the lighting code run and finally add it back using a custom refractive to reflective param.

motion vectors: we handle motion vectors on foam according to naughty dog's code which looks nice. way better than without motion vectors for the foam: in this case foam would just look like a blurry S***.

additional color pyramid: just to clarify: the ARE ADDITIONAL passes.

 

Awesome and all, can't wait. But a Surf Tunnel is the real challenge

Also, it would be nice if Unity would provide some VFX for splashes

 

Full integration with volume system (like new clouds) yeah - that might be a struggle.
But clouds and waves goes in oposite directions when I set wind orientation in global volume and in water system... I think (correct me if I'm wrong) its an easy thing to tweak to get similar results on both

 

ooh yeah that makes sense, i understand now, thanks

 

Any idea when would that be?

 

Bug or problem:

I can't use the water at the moment because Unity's clouds are drawn behind the water. This affects clouds with the local parameter (so they exist in 3D space).

Is there a resolution for this transparent order problem?

 

Awesome! I wasn't sure if it was a cloud problem or a water problem or both (I think it's kind of both).

My old method for transparent stuff was to either use opaque + screen door, or render the transparent object twice, one for above and below the water line.

But that's all hacky nonsense and I'm glad you have it in hand!

 

Hello again.
I did a small stress test of getting water surface height.
Water system in Boat Attack sample using jobs to get water surface height at specific position which seems to be very efficient. With 576 floating objects performance is very good


New HDRP water system seems to don't have this possibility so I had to update all floaters height individually by FindWaterSurfaceHeight(). I tried to keep things simple as possible, created WaterSearchParameters and WaterSearchResults at start and update only positions but performance for the same number of floaters is much worse


That would be very nice if water system have option to put many positions into one job and return surface heights for them.

 

I ran into the same issue... it seems to be rather a clouds-thing, because other transparent elements are also visible through clouds. But I'm glad to hear that this is on your radar, do you have a rough idea when this might get fixed (is it safe to assume this may get fixed in a few weeks or months)?

 

I recently experimented with the latest alpha, it was great, but one issue stood out to me:
when 'under water' is enabled, go under the water, and increase the visiblity paramater (forgot what it's called), nothing crazy, just enough to see a bit, finally look directly at the top and fly upwards until you leave the water.

When leaving, you can see the sky very clearly, and it does a really weird transition, the camera view almost becomes cube centered while exiting the water. Only tested it with scene camera, unfortunately I forgot to record it.

I imagine this would be an issue for games where the player goes underwater

 

The water looks like it is coming along nicely. There are a couple things that would be nice to have that to my knowledge no Unity water asset has. The first one is underwater sunshafts, Cryengine water had beautiful underwater sunshafts even back around 2015, and so far no Unity water system on the asset store looks as beautiful as Cryengine water did back then. Here are a couple examples of what I am talking about underwater sunshafts-






and here are some videos I took several years ago goofing around in Cryengine with their water system-

and

The other thing that would be a nice feature is for the light to be absorbed as depth increases. When you go underwater the highest wavelengths of light disappear first, greens and reds, so the deeper you go the bluer everything gets, until even blue light is absorbed and it becomes totally dark. As far as I know no Unity asset store solution does this either but it would be a great feature to have in a deep sea diving game such as a Subnautica type game. Anyway that is my 2 cents for water suggestions that would be nice to have, if not in the first release to be worked at for a later version.

 

My KWS water have this feature.

Spoiler: GIFs

I have a attenuation at depth.

Spoiler: gif

 

That's nice. I'll bet the performance is competitive too. Great work.

 

thought i'd stop by here as my water use case always seems to be against the norm, and i figured i'd try this out with thus far very poor results.

i view my water from top down, so far the best results i've had are with Crest, usnig this type of profile:



then the end result at runtime is this:



which animates nicely, looks like waves hitting the shore once i darken the texture on the sand.

i tried to make HDRP water look similar at the angle...

and top down its just looks like a static puddle even when animating




is this something you feel should look better? or is it just outside of the scope of the HDRP water system?

 

I'm kinda confused on this, do you mean the foam and shore effect?

 

yeah, the fact you can see waves and foam on crest. it looks like the sea. i suspect HDRP water assumes first person camera, almost everything else does.

but that's why i've raised it, if there is some way for my use case to be considered, better now while its in early development?

 

Adjust the foam settings especially the WindSpeedDimmer

I'm still not sure about the shore foam effect though

I do hoping HDRP water will have shore system similar as URP water not sure why they are not using a shared system ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Did the team port the water system from HDRP or is it from that Viking village demo from asset store?

 

It's Boat Attack Water, they keep developing the water system for URP i guess

 

yeah it looks better, not as good as your picture though, and the shoreline is still rather ignored.

 

They said shorelines is something that they're working on.
So it's not available yet.

 

Out of curiosity is depth blend/fading are considered to be added to water system? to get a smooth transition of other surface with water?

 

i don't really understand what any of that means, so none if it will makes sense. its just random sliders and numbers to change.

there are two fade sliders for smoothness, if i drop those it looks a bit better as the water is less clear.

the caustics don't seem to work at all which isn't helping as the transparency just looks unrealistic at the moment.

 

Hi! I just installed latest beta and tried out this water.
It feels very promising, so glad to not have to do this stuff on my own.
A thing that looks weird to me is the caustics:

It appears that it's a screen space effect or something? It should not appear on the bottom half of the submarine, right?
These are my settings:


Great job with the water system, keep it up!

 

Yeah that water does look nice. I knew about your asset but didn't know it had these features.

 

Will this work underwater? I want to make underwater buildings with air inside, and I currently don't have a clue how to achieve it. Maybe invisible deformer volumes could do the trick, or maybe not. Any hints would be much appreciated!

 

When working with an ocean and a terrain it soon becomes pretty hard to see anything at all underwater. There should perhaps be a layer to toggle here:

Or is there some other way to disable it in the editor view?

 

Looks like a really solid base good to see this.

Reflections stand out to me as needing more work. Have you guys looked at micro facet reflections? It really helps a lot especially at a distance with aliasing like patterns. Waveworks2 has this and it makes a huge difference. Also when you disable it in their demo it's roughly comparable to this water, so it's a good way to see the improvement that could be had.

Full integration is what makes this immediately more interesting then solutions like Crest or custom. I have a full waveworks2 implementation with custom lighting in HDRP, along with having tried to make Crest work. And it's just impossible to fully integrate scene lighting/fog well without doing that low level in the SRP.

The challenge I see with water in SRP is that it's such a specific thing. Generic lighting/reflection models for instance simply cannot work well. So I hope you don't compromise there. There has been a pattern in other high level features like this of we have to make it fit a grand design. And it hurt the end product.

 

Not sure if this is the right place to report a bug, but I know some of the Unity people are reading this.
I've found that loading the water system in a scene at runtime from an asset bundle results in the water component being in the gameobject but no water shows on the screen. I've reported a bug the proper way too but I'm just interested if other people are getting the same results.