Official Water System for the High Definition Render Pipeline

Any ideas why my ocean is not visible? 2023.1b4
checks in project setting are set

 

Hi, I'm working with the new water system, and found some (at least for me) strange behaviors, that without any documentation are pretty hard to understand.

1) Clouds rendering: In this screen clouds are rendered with water surface disabled. In this one water surface is enabled and clouds are rendered as dark blocks when looking through surface from underwater. Is there any setting to change or is this a bug?

2) Caustics customization:

In the shader graph i noticed caustics doesn't change at all if I disconnect relative node from fragment. Is this intended? Furthermore it seams it 's not possible to change caustics rendering color. I'd like to add some chromatics fx, is this possible in any way?

Is there any plan to release documentation for the water system?
Thanks in advance!

 

Can we get a little more explanation about this? I believe this mask applies on the whole ocean? How can I mask only part around my island, so waves weren't so aggressive around beach

 

I wonder if there's any plans for some shadergraph samples focused on the new water, similar to full screen shadergraph samples but for the HDRP water system.

 

First off: The water looks amazing and it is really nice to have something that is built in!

I am (also) trying to make the water spherical. I am writing a planet tiling system for our simulators and we are using a round earth for that. I have tried to push the vertices using a copy of the water shader graph, but without luck. I know it says "Do not modify in a lot of places," but I tried anyway! Here is what I did:



Instead of the water vertices being pushed down, the tiles that make up the water start to disappear.

Can this be done somehow or is it planned for the future?

 

Hi,

• I'm using Unity 2022.2 on windows
• Using volumetric clouds
• I was using infinite water plane, could this be the cause of the smaller rectangle not being visible?

 

You're welcome I knew it was a long shot . Thanks for your reply anyway. Is there somewhere I can upwote it? Is the water roadmap public like the HDRP roadmap?

If I use a custom mesh as input won't I lose the quad-tree tiling mechanism that allows for high detail up close and low detail in the distance?

 

I would be interested in water for planet rendering

Another question: How did you get the clouds in front of the water and how can we get our own transparent objects in front of water?

Would be great to have an at least somewhat public road map, to see if such things are on the list and what's the current priority.

 

I have noticed that things like particles or VFX are only visible at the same side of the water: underwater effects wont be visible if you are outside and outside effects arent visible while underwater.

Is there any way to solve this?

 

Played around it with large scaled island. In 2022.2 really needs debugging option to see your mask, otherwise it's borderline impossible to fit the mask around the island.

Overall it works great, but something like depth cache is needed like fresh air, also couldn't find water deformers in 2022 (option only for 2023?)

Ocean rendering eats a lot of resources with average looking shader (custom water solutions looking somewhere better and eating less resources).
I get that Unity products should be as cheap as possible in terms of performance, maintaining good look, but in this case it's not as performant as it should be nor looking good in some aspects
Texture tilling is the biggest issue especially when trying to make cinematic shots from above

Buoyancy is also very big issue, because it asks to transfer ocean rendering to CPU, which is already no-go solution, also being very basic.

 

HDRP Asset > Miscellaneous > "Dynamic Render Pass Culling" seems to disable the water rendering even though it's used (and clearly visible by the camera)

 

Is it possible to get the water to render within screen space reflections?

 

Tried to reproduce it in an empty project and failed so far. Our project was a 2021.x before and we updated to 2022.2 (maybe it's related to that?).

I copied the HDRP assets / project settings / post processing volumes over to my test project and even split it into a multi-scene setup (where main camera and ocean are in different scenes), but I can't reproduce it so far (in our project it's easily reproducable, just toggle the render pass culing checkbox), but I can't upload that for size and confidentiality reasons

 

But my test project (where I try to replicate the bug) and our project are on the same unity version right now. they show a different behavior. if it would be an issue that was fixed, it should be fixed for both projects, shouldn't it?

 

water is culled in scene and game view.
Went through the Render Graph Viewer and compared both one by one.
In the project where the water is culled...
- ... There are "Render Shadow Maps" (2x culled passes, 1x non culled) which are not present in the other project
- ... There are more "Render Water Surface GBuffer" passes. (They all have a grey badge below, so I guess they are not culled?)
- Forward Transparent is not culled (grey badge) while in the project where the water is visible "Forward Transparent" is culled (black badge).

Besides that there is only one further difference, the project where the water is culled has a custom pass (which renders into a render texture, so it shouldn't be bothering here).


(btw, exporting the render graph into a textfile so you can compare them with a diffing tool would be nice, just saying)

 

Is there a way to get the velocity of the waves?

 

Issue with using the Water System with Recorder. I'm rendering out a movie file of a scene with water for Cinematic purposes in HDRP. Since Recorder is recording my scene at a slower render rate, the Water system is rendering at another speed. So my rendered out video shows the waves moving super fast. Is there a way to set the waves to run in deltaTime.. if I understand that correctly? So that no matter how slow my Recorder renders are, the waves will move at the correct speed?

 

The accessibility of the new water system is still not good enough in 2023.2.0a ...

I added the water via context menu, then the error shows up that I have to activate it in the hdrp settings. Jumped there via click, now everything seems to be configured properly, but ... where's the water?



There's the info about volume setting missing.

 

Nice, will check in the next releases. Are there tutorials about how to deal with eg foam along terrain? Also about the deformers. Or is there an example project? And how to create rivers? But I guess rivers aren't possible yet since that depends on the splines / mesh / uvs. I do like the trail along eg a moving sphere. However that seems to be limited to a patch of the ocean and not be general on the ocean. Alpha and all, it's going into an exciting direction.

 

umm which Gifs?

 

Super awesome! Will look into the samples as soon as I can and will also check out the github project! (which is a great idea by the way!!)

 

well, i have to say that looks decent, nice job

 

I'm looking to access the HDRP WaterSurface script to change parameters in real time under simulation -- Swell -- 'Distant Wind Speed' or 'Current Speed'. Any ideas here - I can't find examples of anyone doing this.

 

In response to my own question... it seems some naming conventions are strange and don't match, instead of using WaterSurface.DistantWindSpeed (as worded in the editor) you need to use WaterSurface.LargeWindSpeed , I've noticed that pretty much every parameter here is labeled something different, this kinda makes it difficult to sort out at first I had to dump all the values in a test to see what was what. I assume this will be updated or at least mentioned in some upcoming scripting documentation? Thanks

 

set inspector to debug mode, might help in the future.

 

Just right-click inspector and click "Debug". To go back just do the same thing but click "Normal".

 

Thanks that does help in a way!

I seem to be having an issue accessing this 'Volume' as displayed under 'Sky and Fog Global Volume'. I've tried about 6 different methods some from chat GPT... lol god that thing can seem amazing but it just can't help here.

My goal is to set the values for Visual Environment - Wind - Global Orientation and Global Speed.... So my clouds can match my water settings.

The last version of Unity I had was 2019.2 so this whole volume / volume profile and sharing is all new to me.

Doesn't seem to be much by the way of examples in the documentation - they have some Fog example which I tried to base a solution off of but it didn't end up working for me.

Any pointers will be appreciated.

 

Chatgpt is amazing but it can only help you for things up to 2021

I do not understand exactly what do you need (i'm not 100% today) but remember, there is also a premade global values in: Edit > project settings > HDRP Global Settings
If you are not using an override, those values are used (most of the time i uncheck those values -.- is kind of annoying)

 

I just wanna say that all of these samples are amazing and may remove 99% of basic questions, everything so visual and intuitive, I genuinely didn't know the power of decals.

Hats off to you guys

 

Looks very awesome. Please state the license on that when it's released, ie for asset re-use.

Do you guys plan on making the water deformers / foam generators automatic? If you have a 4k island then the creation of the deformers could become tedious.

 

The Glacier Demo are interesting, by raising the sea water for the river. . . .
what are the workflow for this kind of scene with the current water system?