Wave Creator - Real Waves in Unity!

Hey

Wave Creator is a water shader which features real wave displacement and effects such as wave foam, shoreline non-repeating foam, edge fade, specularity and reflection. It also contains a Float Script so objects can float on the waves and a Submerged Effect script which produces camera effects when the camera is underwater. Here is a screenshot of Wave Creator in action:



It costs $20, check it out on the store:

Wave Creator on the Asset Store

Here are some key features:

1. Creates physical waves by modifying the vertices of a mesh.
2. The user can adjust the height, frequency, speed of the waves and where the water is flowing from or to.
3. 2 reduced shader included to run on mobile (see video)
4. Shoreline Edge Fade effect
5. Shoreline and Wave Foam aperiodically tiled
6. Advanced Shader reflection and Refraction
7. A 'Float' script is included which allows objects to float on top of the waves
8. A 'Submerged Effect' script is included which changes the scene settings when the camera is underwater.

Works on Unity Free or Pro

To view a Webplayer displaying most of the key features above, click the link below:

Wave Creator Webplayer

Here is a video where I explain how to set Wave Creator up and all it's features!

I have also created a video showing Wave Creators performance on iOS devices:

If you have any questions or feedback about this asset don't hesitate to contact me or comment on this thread.

I hope you will enjoy Wave Creator. Thanks

 

very cool!

 

Thanks snowboardkid, any comment is vastly appreciated.

 

Is it tested on mobile?

 

Unfortunately it is not tested on mobile as of yet. I will try to do so as soon as I can.

 

Looks fantastic! Curious to hear about mobile.

 

Wonderful and very complete !!!
6R

 

I just bought it and it's really good work thank you

 

I've been looking at water and ocean solutions for a long time, from simple animated texture effects to full blown ocean simulators. The community ocean shader does most of what I want, but it doesn't play nice with other assets. Water 4 is OK, but doesn't include sub-surface effects or floatation. Both are pretty much undocumented, and quite complicated to set up correctly. I like what I see here so far, though, and your demo was pretty easy to follow. Can you use it with more advanced surface effects than daylight and nighttime water? It would be cool to use your wave physics, floatation, and underwater transitions, with a surface that looked like water 4 or water+, to allow shoreline foam and blending for instance. Is there any way to mix and match between this and a good flat water surface shader? If so, you've made a sale.

 

Thank you for all your comments, all are appreciated.

Thanks. I'll test on mobile as soon as possible

Wow. Thanks

Thank you so much for buying, I'm glad you're pleased with it.

You can use any Material or Shader with Wave Creator. So yes, you can use more advanced surface shader effects with it. A quick note however, the underwater effect with wave creator looks good because you can see the water surface material from both above and below the surface. To create this effect the water shader needs to have Cull turned off. This will only require you to specify this in a line of code if the shader does not have cull turned off.

If you have any more questions don't hesitate to ask! Thanks

 

What stops people from unpacking your webplayer and decompiling the script?

 

I don't believe this is even possible and if it were I would hope nobody would do it because the only reason I (or anyone else) would post a webplayer is to give users a chance to view my work and make sure it is right for them before they buy. I am therefore trying to help customers. Either way you could not obtain the editor scripts from the webplayer so you wouldn't be able to create the correct wave mesh anyway.

 

Thanks for all the good comments guys as well as the 100 views on the YouTube video all in the first day.

Just a quick note of what's in the pipeline.

1. A more advanced float script where the object doesn't simply stay on top of the waves but has buoyancy so can be fully submerged under the wave and bob up to the surface etc...This could work with Rigidbodies.
2. A more efficient algorithm for finding the height of the waves.

Thanks. All comments are thoroughly appreciated.

 

I'd love to see what your waves would look like with a really nice ocean shader, with transparency and refraction. A shader like this:

I've always wanted to make a desert island "survival" game, and a great looking ocean, with REAL waves, would be an important part.

 

Yeah sure. I'll post up a demo of Wave Creator using Dekos' Animated Water later on today. As well as that, what other shaders / materials / textures would you guys like to see a demo of with my waves. Water+, Easy Water etc...

 

Would be nice too see, how it looks with water+, since im using it in my project =)

 

Hey

Here a demo of Wave Creator using Deko's Animated Water.



Wave Creator with Deko's Animated Water

In the near further I may try to in-cooperate an animated texture material in with Wave Creator with some nice reflection and refraction.

All comments are thoroughly appreciated. Thanks

 

I've been looking for a suitable surface shader to use with this, and have a few ideas. The sample posted above by snowboardkid looks like Suimono water, which costs $65, and already has a nice displacement, floatation, and underwater effect system. It would be pointless to try to adapt it to Wave Creator.

Water+ (the full version, not the shader) is cheaper, and doesn't already have any of these features, but after checking it out a bit more, I see a possible snag: it requires "baking" the ocean surface during setup, which creates the shoreline effects around a specified terrain object. If the surface it's placed on moves up and down this could break the illusion a bit, as the shoreline should be advancing and receding with the waves, but won't be. Still, it might be worth trying, to see how significant this would be to the overall effect.

Your demo using Deko's water seems fine, but it's a bit hard to tell with the dark lighting used. I don't think it includes shoreline foam effects though, so would probably work best for open water only.

Tasharen water looks like a possibility, but will drive the final price up a bit.

Maybe a hacked Water4 surface, minus the problematic gerstner displacement script would work, but only for pro users. Any other ideas?

 

I don't have Unity Pro, but doesn't it come with a nice water shader with refraction? Wave Creator is the only water system i've seen that does the big rolling waves i'd want. I might just have to do the free Pro trial and get some fancy water effects going!

 

Yes. Water Pro and Water4 are included in the pro version. They are both just surface shaders though, the difference being that Water4 has built in (though difficult to configure) displacement, as well as sun highlights, and shoreline foam effects, while the standard pro water is just a pretty flat surface, with reflection, refraction, and animated waves. Neither includes floatation or underwater effects without some additions though.

 

Thanks for the comments guys.

Yeah this is a problem with Water+ and Wave Creator. The setup required for Water+ doesn't really work with a mesh that is changing shape.

However, I have had some luck with Easy Water, despite it not having foam effects it looks very nice with Wave Creator whilst being reasonably cheap. I've posted a screenshot and a Webplayer of Wave Creator using Easy Water below:



Wave Creator with Easy Water Webplayer

As you can see this adds some nice transparency and reflection to the waves. I may try and in-cooperate a nice shader which creates this effect with Wave Creator in the near future.

Thanks for all the comments guys, all are appreciated! (I'd love to hear what you think about the combo of Wave Creator and Easy Water)

 

It looks fine away from the beach, other than being a bit uniform, but the illusion still breaks down at the shoreline. I've tried lot's of different water packages, and so far most don't even try to get this part right. There's a free shoreline generator script floating around, but it's a lot of work to set up. It requires an external 3d modelling program, and exporting your terrain, and the results are still pretty underwhelming. Maybe somebody who's better at scripting than me could find a way to use particles to do it. But getting this right would really make a difference in the realism of the scene.

Have you given Water4 any thoughts? I know it's a pro only asset, and already has displacement, but the displacement setup, when you want to scale it or change the speed, is a PITA, with zero documentation, and it doesn't detect the camera position relative to the surface like yours does. I was thinking you could set all of the gerstner values to 0, and use it as a flat shader on top of Wave Creator. The other possibility is to use Tasharen Water, which has shoreline effects also, but doesn't need to be baked. If you don't have it, maybe they'd consider sending you a free copy for testing. Your product combined with theirs could be a killer app, benefiting both of you. I really want to see this work, and it's so close at the moment.

 

Thanks for the comment.

I don't have Unity Pro so that really stops me from testing Water4. Tasharen Water's shoreline effects are also for Pro only as shown in this screenshot. Either way I wouldn't want the solution to be for Pro users only. So it appears finding a water shader that is compatible with Wave Creator and gives a shoreline effect is a challenge.

However I will try to (or collaborate with someone who can) write my own shader that will hopefully provide all these features as standard with Wave Creator in the future.

Thanks for your enthusiasm on the subject FargleBargle. We are so tantalising close to a solution.

All comments welcome.

 

OK, no problem. I just bought Wave Creator anyway. If I can get Water4 or Tasharen to work with it, I'll let you know, so you at least have the information if anyone else asks. In the mean time, good luck with doing your own shader. This is something Unity really needs, and while there are lots of partial solutions out there, very few have all the pieces to the puzzle. If you get there first, you'll be able to charge a fair bit more for your product in the future. Thanks.

 

Is this working on iOS with iOS free license?

 

Thanks, hope you like it.

If you could that it would really helpful. In fact I believe I have already thought up a way in which foam could be created around the edge of the terrain. I will get back to you on this in the future.

I will be testing this very soon.

Thanks for the comments!

 

I just tried Wave Creator out with Water4 from Unity4.2.1, and it looks great! All I needed to do was add the Water4 material, the Water4 base script, plus planar reflections, specular lighting, and gerstner displacement. I'm not sure I needed all of those, but I threw them on to prevent missing script errors from the base script. A hack of the base script might eliminate the need for some of them in the future. I set the gerstner displacement values to 0, to hopefully prevent it from doing a bunch of extra calculations, and it just worked, without any drama at all. Here's what it looks like:



Good luck with your own shoreline foam project as well. If you find a way to do the same thing using something simpler than Water4, I'd still be interested in seeing it (not to mention all of the Indie users out there). I've got a feeling I'm adding a lot of unnecessary overhead to use the few Water4 features I actually want.

Thanks for the great plugin. Best 10 bucks I've spent in a long time.

 

I'm really glad Wave Creator and Water4 worked, even if it does some unnecessary calculations. The screenshots look great.

That is an amazing comment. Thank you

 

Feel free to use my screenshots for promo purposes. As long as you mention they were made with the pro version, you won't be misleading anyone. I think this is an amazing plugin, and people need to see what it's truly capable of.

 

Hey

Version 1.2 of Wave Creator is out now. While not having a huge new feature it has been improved in a number of ways.

1. The Water Body can now be rotated, this is due to point 3.
2. I have fixed a bug where the Wave Speed resets to 1 upon playing the scene.
3. I have tidied up the 'Find Wave Height' function, as well as using less code it simply uses the x and z coordinates (in world space) and returns the height. This makes it easier to understand and therefore easier to use for your custom purposes. It has also reduced the amount of code needed for the 'Submerged Effect' script and the 'Float script'

I promise mobile testing (and hopefully foam shoreline effects) will be coming soon.

 

Good news. I noticed the speed reset bug, and hacked my script to fix it, but was worried my clumsy efforts might break something else. I was going to drop you a note, but it looks like you beat me to it. Glad there's a "proper" fix. I'll also check if the new height function fixes another minor issue I'm having with the Water4 surface shader. The underwater effect isn't completely synched with actual surface. This means the fog doesn't cut in right away when going under water, and sometimes lingers when coming out. To be fair, this also happened when using Water4 with its own displacement script, so maybe it's a Water4 thing. It may also just be the inevitable lag that can happen when the camera moves faster than the script can react. Still, the better the initial measurement, the less lag one should expect, right?

Speaking of your to-do list, is there any way to add an underwater view of the water surface to the underwater effect? It's currently got fog, but none of the surface ripples that should be visible from underneath the water. Again, this problem is shared with most of the other water packages I've tried, which are mainly concerned with how the water looks from above. My usual solution is to put an inverted water plane into the scene, but this doesn't work well with a displaced surface, as the above and below water versions won't stay at the same height. I'm thinking what's needed is either a 2 sided water surface, or the ability to add a synched inverted surface to the existing one, so that another surface shader can be applied for the underwater view. Does either of these approaches sound doable?

Otherwise, your product is working brilliantly, and makes every scene I drop it into look a lot better.
.

 

Thanks for the comment

Hmm, hopefully the update has fixed this issue, if not let me know. I'm sure there will be a fix. However if this is only happening with Water4 it's probably the source of the issue.

If you turn the Fog density on the Submerged Effect script down you can just about see the ripples when you are submerged below a wave, I admit this effect could be better and will be looking into it.

Thanks for the comment FargleBargle (I sent you a PM a few days back just in case you haven't read it)

 

Count me as another being interested in mobile perf. So I'd also need to know if the vertex displacement happens via script mesh-read/write or via vertex shader?

 

Seems excelent! I have 2 questions:

1) What happens if i want to make something different, lets say like, a maelstorm?

2) Is it interactive with physics? I mean how can i boost a ship on it the way i want?

Thank you

 

Thanks for the comments guys.

An Editor script generates the mesh based on your specifications (length, width etc...) and another script modifies the vertex positions at runtime. So it's all done via scripts.

Hmm. This got me thinking, I'm sure a whirlpool effect would be possible without too much modification. I will get back to you on this.

Rigidbody / Physics support should be coming soon.

All comments welcome.

 

OK... I realize writing a vertex shader may be a bit trickier than normal scripting, but this won't cut it for me on mobile... normally a mesh (meaning the collection of all vertex positions, vertex normals, texture-UVs and/or vertex colors) is stored in a "Vertex Buffer Object" (VBO) on the GPU and the vertex shader can easily and essentially with zero overhead manipulate those on the fly as the GPU processes them each frame. If you keep modifying the vertices on the CPU, isn't that a full mesh / VBO (re)upload to the GPU each frame? I mean... maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't that rather sub-optimal? Now maybe Unity doesn't allow custom vertex shaders but I don't really think that's the case, from a quick glance at their docs..

 

Probably the reason why it this running on CPU is because there is no easy way to get the wave height data required for physics if calculation are done on the GPU. Physics in Unity are done on the CPU, and traversing data from the GPU isn't easy and just generally slow, unless you're doing some black magic with DX11. Calculating normals on the GPU is also tricky (and pretty much not possible on OpenGL ES). I was facing the same problems with my water system, but it actually runs quite well on mobile (and will run even better with updates). So yes, for a mesh like this, there is some overhead on re-uploading the buffers, but it's not that horribly big, as there is no need to update any buffers except the vertex positions and normals.

 

Some interesting points! So I definitely wasn't asking for full-blown "GPU physics" I assumed that rather than real wave physics or fluid simulation, this package is simply displacing vertices sine-like / wave-like... then a vertex shader would be superior. But your point with normals is a good one, that might be somewhat tricky indeed and I for one would myself also have no clue on how to accurately refresh them in the vert-shader after positions are displaced... so yeap, some good food for thought, thx!

 

Thanks for the comments guys

I may have to look into vertex shaders more closely. I originally went for scripts because it was simpler and would be easier to keep track of physics data (Although Physics is not supported at the moment I have plans to include it). I didn't think using scripts would dramatically reduce performance over shaders as it's not that big a program, nevertheless I will look into it.

Your Dynamic Water looks awesome by the way.

As well as that I have incorporated a feature, that stops the script calculating the heights of vertices under the terrain which would not be needed. Therefore reducing the number of calculation per frame. This will be including in the next update.

Thanks

 

Just to clarify, the CPU calculation does not worry me one bit --- even on today's mobile hardware that shouldn't be a big hit at all (as long as you just wave instead of physics) --- the thing that concerned me was the "mesh re-upload to gpu every frame"... but then I guess I'd have to try it and measure before complaining that being said, it eats bandwidth I'll need for other streaming-in-and-out of gpu resources in my project

 

This looks like a great feature. I'm working on a very large (probably tiled) terrain, with water in various places, and was debating whether to use one large water object, or a number of smaller ones. Any thoughts on the best approach from a performance point of view? If the next update will only do wave calculations where they can actually be seen anyway, is there any point in breaking the water into smaller instances?

 

You don't necessarily need multiple instances unless you want different parameters for each wave. It wouldn't be too bad seeing as height isn't calculated under terrain, but if your looking to make a CPU intensive program, You might want to go through the extra bother for optimisation.

On another note, I'm looking forward to seeing some splashes from dumping objects into the water!

 

Thanks for the comments

I know validifyed if you were wondering how he had an insight into the code.

Yeah, I understand your problem, I'll look into doing it via vertex shaders.

When the new update is released then no, there won't be much point. The only reason why you might want to is if you want one water body to be higher than the other or have different wave properties.

Indeed, I am working on ripple effects where if an object is dropped into the water a ripple/splash appears.

Thanks. All comments appreciated.

 

for some reason if i create a prefab from the example scene you provided, the mesh disappears in any other scene, the 200x200 it seems to only exist in the demo scene, can you please package the 200x200 fbx, i have a custom plane creator but it doe snot create the uv's unfortunately. i would appreciate that.

 

SP0KK0, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the 200x200 mesh is a "virtual" mesh created when you set the size parameters in the wave creation script to 200. It exists only as a construct of the script. Even after creating it, you won't find it anywhere in your scene assets. You also can't save it as part of a prefab. (Well, you can save it, but it won't be there when you instantiate the prefab again.) The only way to include real meshes in the FBX, and include every size users might want, would be to make separate meshes for every size from 1x1 to ... how big do you want to go? It would be nice if there was a way around the prefab issue though.

 

Hey. Thanks for the comments

Yes this is correct. In response to tripknotix question. You don't have to use anyone else's custom plane generator because Wave Creator comes with one. Simply go to Waves (on top bar) / Create Waves and follow the steps, it will then create a mesh, with your desired length and width, for you in your current scene. I will however look into being able to save these objects as working prefabs.

All comments appreciated.

 

Hey

I thought it was about time I posted up a Webplayer with a moving character in a sunny environment with Wave Creator.

So here is a Webplayer with Wave Creator working with the 'Tropical Paradise Island'. Enjoy!



Tropical Island + Wave Creator Webplayer

Thanks, all comments welcome.

 

using your waves plugin on my mobile game future ops online,
performance does take a small hit on a low end device, but doesnt crawl. something like 30% cpu ussage of an 800mhz android 2.3 device with 512mb of ram. using the same water shader it came with, and only on a 2,000 triangle plane.

Its on the map "The Docks" with "HD WATER" turned on (from the graphics options menu)

definitely got the battlefield 4 look i was going for,
too bad i couldn't just jump on it and ride the waves =P but when you look outwards it definitely has that "wave is coming right for me" feeling.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.RealDefinition.FutureOpsOnlineAlpha

 

Thanks for the comment

Wow, it's awesome someone using Wave Creator in an actual game, and what seems to be quite a successful one too!

I'm really glad it works on mobile without much of a hit, I will do someone official tests soon. In the meantime I'll try your game as it seems pretty neat.

Thanks awfully. All comments welcome.

 

Hey

Just a few things to talk about:

I'm sorry if you are waiting for the new update, (which doesn't calculate vertices under the terrain), I sent it to Unity last Monday so I hope it will be up soon.

I have, however, been making good progress with some features which will be included in Wave Creator 2. Wave Creator 2 will feature Gerstner Waves. I have successfully implemented them in Unity already, here is a screenshot:



It looks much better than using Perlin noise in my opinion. There are some other features planned for Wave Creator 2 but I'm keeping them secret for now.

Thanks