Water4 issues

Hey all,
This has been asked before but can't find an answer...

I want to make a ocean for one of my scenes, Water4 looks to have the best quality overall but I can't figure out how to make the prefab scale up without the wave animation messing up.

How is this feature supposed to work?

Cheers

 

hmm. I never really got it looking awesome, think it was pretty much related to the original meshes vertex density (so the coasts don't look as awesome).

Let me just unfreeze my unity and I will have a quick go in 5_0

 

Tried bringing in my own mesh, scaling that also screws it up. Really not sure how to make an Ocean with this water type....

 

sorry. pizza arrived. looking now. and - oh - unfreeznig my editor. Sigh.

 

Okay so 1st lets define a few quick things "BIG", "OCEAN", "LOOK GOOD".

BIG = goes all way to edges of visible space
OCEAN = surrounded on all sides to edge of visible space
LOOK GOOD = Here you have to help me. I will post what I have.

I scaled up the mesh to 50,1,50 in the main prefab.

Placed it on an island scene.



I turn on edge blending but since this is a fairly low poly mesh the edges are never going to be beautiful.
and stand back a bit.



I check the specular + reflection looks okayish



I check the refraction and waves looks okay when in the water


Are we talking about edge foam?

Specifically - given some references pics now - what do you want to improve.

Many thanks.

 

and if you miss this, and I don't seem to reply - PM me (with the thread link)- sometimes the THREADS don't ping me an update.

Thanks

 

Thanks for the effort twobob, I have this now. The issue is how the 'Gerstner' script screws all the waves up wen the mesh is scaled up....

 

Okay - will have an eyball on that then. Let me fire it up.

Heh, oh yeah - I remember now. it's all obfuscated away in the shader.
Even the displace script is squirreled in the guts.

Hmm

so here is the 50x example wave viewed from far

Here it is a 10x



those nasty lines are layered transparency artifacts that we will worry about if we get it going right...

Let's look at that from the floor.


Looks pretty decent.

Let's scale that back to 2x8 and see if we can spot what the displacement is expecting/doing


Now, I don;t have access to the code, but I would suggest (as I did originally) that the horrible waves at the larger scales are in fact to do with over-sizing those individual "faces"/"triangles"/"whatevs" into really large ones. (like in Picture 1 above)

Short of having the script, I would be reduced to creating my own (more dense) mesh via a turbo smooth or something and praying that the script doesn't "REQUIRE" a certain mesh geometry.

I test this by throwing a random mesh at it. It seems to work okay but not great.
I rethink the original design and note it is a "Tile" based solution. (there are probably reflection reasons for having four tiles but I ignore this.)

I splatter in another 4 tiles via copy and run it again.



This appears to immediately "work" meaning that the script probably "scrapes" for things called "Tile" and auto-adds them to the "process" pile.

 

So - to your " answer" - How do I scale the waves perfectly to suit an "all sizes" ocean?

I would say "You Can't" but you could fudge together something.

Water 4 was never really "finished" and that is exactly how it feels. Kinda unfinished.

I did fiddle with the shader settings (amp, freq, blah) but for the waves they are little assistance in terms of scaling, that I could find.

Here is that 8 tile example run from the ground.



It's never going to be Triton3D or suimono or any of the other - better - more complete - NON free - water systems.

With some kludging it can be made to look decent in fixed scenarios, the mesh size being linked to wave shape kills it.
There is I suppose the possibility of having (a) high res central tile(s) and lower surrounding ones but it is always going to be massage and trickery at best.


Stuff to Ogle while you consider your options.

There are also "shader only" based solutions to this problem
(CORE framework did some basic wiggles IIRC)
This thing https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10900
and a bunch of others.
I think - realistically - you are going to struggle with the OOTB tools.
(which explains why there are so many alternatives)

Cheers




I may not have helped - but hopefully I saved you some time.