WaveMaker - Wave simulation asset Official Thread

THIS IS THE OFFICIAL DEVLOG THREAD OF WAVEMAKER ASSET. WATCH IT TO GET NOTIFIED OF NEW POSTS (top right on this very message)

There are also a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to, a bug tracker and find much more detailed feature list and info in the official website:

http://wavemaker.lidia-martinez.com

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Hi all!
After a long time working on this, finally I release WaveMaker to the public.

In case you have questions (what it is, what can I do with it, and what I shouldn't, etc) most of them are answered in the official website:

--> Find tutorials, more tests and videos, F.A.Q , detailed info, bug tracker and more in the Official website

--> Or you can directly visit the asset page (affiliated link, thanks!)

You can also send me suggestions over here or add them in the bug tracker, or send me an email. That way I will know what you need in your project and make it happen. Please let me know your thoughts!.



Since it took a while to get a validation, I also uploaded version 1.1, which includes a huge improvement on efficiency, even when it is still non-multithreaded and on CPU. I created a video so you can see what it means and detailed information about it in the profiler.

I also created a fast test using Unity Chan free model, with different resolutions and parameters. I'm working on a tutorial so that you can see how I did this, and how fast and easy it is to adapt your scene to use WaveMaker.

If you thought the UE5 demo released not long ago showed a "not very good looking" water simulation on the ground... well... you can now do something better with this asset

Thanks!

 

Hi everyone. I've been very busy during the quarantine working on new features for WaveMaker!

Here are all the tutorials available for V1.0 and V1.1. I'd love to have your feedback! It's been viral in Reddit but I'd love to know what you think in the forums. I'll make this the official news thread of WaveMaker too.

 

To test the simulation I followed the suggestion of a user to create a Double Slit Experiment . The goal of this experiement is to see that when waves from both sides collide they start neutralizing generating interesting patterns.

Check it out!

more about it :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment


Here's the experiment in real life!

 

This is the upcoming huge improvement on the asset : Buoyancy! (floating forces).

I had to give the option to use buoyancy instead of velocities as a new simulation mode.

You can choose the depth of the simulation, the strength, damping, etc, of the forces. This will be used for only horizontal surfaces that look like water.

 

Gradient calculation is an important mathematical tool for these kind of simulations to know more about the shape of the surface and apply more effects.

I'm using this to improve interaction between floating objects and waves coming from other objects, something that some users noticed that was missing.

 

This is a WIP video of the upcoming v1.2 of WaveMaker, coming with the new Buoyancy model in case the velocity based model is not for you and you want to generate waves using objects and want the waves to affect the object (what is called Two Way Coupling).

This is a problem I'm solving right now that arises due to the discretization of the surface (grid - heightfield based). I wanted to keep it all in CPU and use Jobs and Burst to improve performance in the next version of WaveMaker (1.3), but I'll have to spend some time moving these calculations to a shader instead.

 

Here comes another DevLog for version 1.2. Let me explain a little bit :

This is a preview video. v1.2 is taking a little long than expected due to the lack of efficiency while working on the very important Buoyancy (floating objects) feature, requested by many. In order to fix problems depicted in previous uploaded videos that you can watch in the previous posts, I had a massive increase of miliseconds use due to the use of Raymarching instead of raycasting, in order to soften the edges of the interaction of the objects and the surface and avoid the flickering you can see.

So I decided to, before than expected, move all code to multithreading - jobs - burst.
This is the result of the surface simulation, the heavy part of the code (no interaction and some features disabled for now). I chose 60x60 resolution in this example in order to compare it to the official v1.1/1.2 video, that shows an efficiency of around 1ms per surface (1.2 added the feature of sleeping surfaces, so, unless all of them are simulating, it will stay around that, as you can see in the Unity Chan integration video).

With this improvement, it returns 600 to 1200 fps, and taking around 0.1ms. That's a huge 10x improvement of efficiency.

With maximum resolution (for now) 256x256 = maximum allowed mesh size 56k vertices, simulation takes around 5ms with version 1.1, which was way too much (also, way too much resolution). With this improvement, it takes 0.2ms, mainly the simulation part, so the improvement is extreme (x20) for big resolution surfaces, allowing scenes to use huge surfaces. And it will get better.

This had to be done. The only problem is that it adds a Jobs/Burst requirement to the package that had to come eventually and I will probably have to find a woraround to be able to let people use WebGL, hopefully I manage to get it working.

Thanks for following updates. Don't forget the asset has an official website, some live demos to play with, a bug report app and a feature request app too. ---> http://wavemaker.lidia-martinez.com

 

Wow!!! Que belleza! I neeed to try this! My game is water based and this is beautiful work! I need to get this. Any limitations? Will it work with “stylized water shader?” Actually it should since he posted this asset on his thread.

 

Thanks a lot. I'm glad you find it useful. I suggest you to watch this thread, because many updates will come up in the following weeks. Right now I'm working on buoyancy as you've seen in the previous posts.

I've been talking with the creator of that shader, he made a workaround and I think you will have to talk with him. He had to do some changes. I'm talking to several shader creators to adapt my asset, just because most of the water shaders are based on a flat plane. The wavemaker asset modifies the flat mesh itself, so any shader that uses normals will work. These shaders, on the other hand, generally don't use the plane normals, but instead generate their own.

Next good features would be to allow the mesh to store more information on the mesh so that shaders can work with it. I should make guides to adapt them to my asset. That's definitely something that I need to help people with.

 

Any chance you are still gifting this? I would love to evaluate it.

 

I'm not giving it away right now, but thanks for the offering. Sorry for that.

 

It’s fine. I will most likely buy this soon anyways. Looks great. I just need to make sure it’ll work.

 

Hi, is it support mobile devices? if it does what about the performance on mobile, thankss

 

Hi there! It supports mobile devices. It doesn't use any GPU for now, and the current version doesn't have any requirements or packages needed. About the performance, I've been working on v2.0 for a while now and I haven't tested it that much or generated any reports. I can work on that a little bit and let you know what I found out. The new version is upcoming and I'm spending all time on that!

 

Just in case somebody is wondering about the same thing: The user wrote me in private and he used the asset and it worked fine for him. I'm still working on the new version so I will generate reports and a lot more resources after I finish that.

 

This is a massive update. It's so massive that I had to literally rewrite the whole asset from the ground up, took 6 months, stalling any other development or improvement, and made me call the upcoming version v2.

What changed?
Fist, It is now implemented nearly completely in Burst&Jobs, (multithreaded instead of single threaded in CPU).
Apart from improving efficiency a lot, it was needed in order to add buoyancy (floating forces) due to the amount of computation it required from the first tests. It is a simple but pretty realistic model, but depends a lot on the resolution of the surface and the properties you set. Needs a lot of testing.
Problems mentioned in the previous posts regarding unstable water around floating objects due to the "discretization of the surface" still happen, but that will be fixed in the next update now that I have multithreaded code and using raymarching or any other method like multisampling will allow for a smoother interaction.
Also, wave push effect mentioned by some users, not available in the velocity based simulation (previous) will be available in buoyancy based simulation.

Compatibility with the older version? The code has absolutely changed for the better, that it's why I moved to v2. If you used the API it will probable need to be updated a little but. Let me know when the time comes, and I will help you gladly. The previous simulation method, which is velocity based, will be restored and shown as an option in the settings instead of buoyancy based, which is the default method now.

When will v2 be available? It will come asap, I don't have an ETA since it took 6 months to do this and I lost track of everything else, but I'm restoring all to how it was, give the UI an upgrade, test and add everything that is left. But it will not take as much as it did. I would love to have this done in maximum a couple of months, probably less. I'll let you know.

Future versions plan. From now on efficiency improvements will come and it will get faster and better. There's only room for improvement here!. I had many bottlenecks that are still there and need more work (basically write physics engine methods myself instead of using Physx's ones, because they are too slow! ). Also, some of the small features asked by the users plus more examples to show how this asset works are seriously needed. So I'll be working on that soon.

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I was asked in Reddit why I didn't upgrade to Compute Shaders instead of using Jobs&Burst, which would allow a more flexible surface of liquid, (bigger, more efficient).

The first reason is very critical:

- There would be no two-way coupling : Objects floating would not affect the water and the water would not affect the object. If everything is calculated in the GPU, to affect Unity's physics system would require to get the information out of there, which means milliseconds wasted each frame. We don't have that luxury of miliseconds to spend. Compute shaders means EVERYTHING is done in the GPU. I would have to write a full physics engine on GPU to make this work and native physics could not be used.

Other reasons

- Limitations on platforms of Compute Shaders. Some would be out of the game, which I don't really like.

- Lack of time and resources.

Some other reasons I commented before:

"Yep. That would be another future update. But since compute shaders are not compatible with a lot of devices and platforms, I prefer to do this step by step and allow people to choose. The same way Obi simulation plugins, made in the company I founded, do. You have the choice of simple, burst, and compute.

I have some bottlenecks even for burst that I can't resolve because I'm using miltithreaded raycast functions made by unity instead of my own, because the results can't be used inside another job. Something else is that I will have to make my own RecalculateNormals() by hand instead of using the slow default method.

Some of the algorithms in fact are impossible to move to jobs right now, I would have to implement by hand most of the basic mathematical methods of physx in order to make most of the algorithms work in jobs, just because jobs don't allow the use of any UnityEngine methods, and add you can imagine, my time is limited. Constant updates are needed.

This one was a much needed cpu to miltithreaded upgrade, and the addition of buoyancy made it necessary. WebGL will not be supported probably now, and my live demos won't work, so I have to add a lot of code in order to let people choose both methods.

From now on, there's only room for improvement. It's pretty fast right now but it will get better and better."

 

Oh wow. That looks stunning. Can’t wait to see how this turns out

 

This looks amazing! Very interested to see what v2 will be like to use.

I was curious about how this might work with non-square surfaces, such as curving rivers? My game has a lot of river stretches generated from splines. It would be amazing to have a current and collisions, even if 256 was the accuracy limit per length.

Good luck with the new version.

 

Sorry for taking this long to reply. That sounds like a great idea. It would have to be made out of patches... There's no such functionality, as well as the "forced stream direction". That sounds like a great suggestion and it's pretty easy to do currently.

Let's see if I can finish v2 these weeks.

 

Thanks for replying! I’m excited to see how this develops.

 

Looks pretty amazing this is the first I've heard of this asset. Ill be trying it soon for sure.

Are there any videos of it working with various 3rd party water shaders?

 

...and the current selling version is still the old 1.1?
Is there to be an update or just teasers?

 

Purchased old version!
So cool and so do-able.

Only after 5 minutes this was made. Remarkable. Only using defaults apart from textures/materials.
Well done Developer. Can't wait for any updates!

 

Certainly don't want to gum up the works with my Youtube stuff..but my Shark ballet (in progress) looks so much better with ripples. Your asset is really remarkable in both it's ease of use and it's outcomes.
It would be amongst the best thing I have ever purchased from the Store,
Maybe a better explanation of using various colliders will help others?
Please feel free to wipe my posts and links whenever you wish. The one shown here is just a small clip.
EDIT. New one after some more learning about those colliders etc.

 

Are v2 free upgrade if buy v1?
And this work with URP?

 

Don't think there is a version2 yet?
Very quiet from the developer!
Not working with URP ! (Not much does anyway does it?)
But this version seems pretty good except for tutes which mostly show outcomes only?
Once one has the correct colliders set up and parented, then for the price... this software is tops.

 

HI there,

Can this be used on meshes other than planes? I'm looking for options for creating wave effects on complex models, on particular buildings.

 

Not currently. Just working on the asset took 100% of my time. Now that I'm 100% on it, I'll be able to approach those new examples! Stay tuned

 

Hey vertexx !! Thanks a lot! Apparently, Unity forum didn't notify me until today that people was answering the main thread. Sorry about that, guys!

About your videos, I'm glad people can watch how it looks in other people's projects. I mentioned a couple of fixes you could apply to the simulation to make it look better in your asset review in the store. Have a look!

The old 1.1 version is the version before I started trying to add buoyancy, probably the most expected feature of WaveMaker. And it's one of those things from which you pull a string and then suddenly you realize it's time to move all to Jobs and Burst and make it multithreading because it takes around 30ms a frame instead of 0.5 (which is still too much). And then, I had to seriously rewrite the whole asset to a point where it's no longer similar to the previous one, it has two simulation methods, it's al multithreaded, and you can have floating objects and drifting over the water.

Since it was not my full-time job, I had to do the work of 3 months in 1 year. But good news is, I chose to stay 100% on it a week ago, so things will improve in no time.

Just an update, It's 95% finished, even though some little problems will arise, and aliasing on the water (depending on the resolution) is still there and will be softened, now that all is multithreaded and much better, all it can do is become faster and faster and have more features very fast.

I'm adding the previous type of simulation based on velocity (the one in v1) but multithreaded (so whatever you used, it will become 10x faster, hopefully. After that, I'll update all the stuff. If everything goes well, probably maximum ETA 1month. Maybe less. Let's see! I'll be on the summer sale with v1.1 and release the new version during it, they told me I couln't use v2 for the sale, which would have been awesome, but they lock the prices too soon. :-(

Cheers!

 

I'm afraid you can't. WaveMaker is not attached to any mesh. It creates the mesh itself. If you have one, it will be overwritten by it. You can see that in the tutorial videos in the YT channel. So depending on the settings you give it, it will generate the plane. You can attach whatever material you want, it will work. If your material uses normal information to create effects, you will be able to see the waves better.

If I add a material to the asset, people will think WaveMaker can only work with that material. It just creates and manages the mesh.

That's one suggested feature that I can work on in the future. Right now I'm staying with that.

 

Colliders with an Interactor component (that's what a component based system does) makes them interact with the wavemaker surface. That's all. So if you want somebody walking on the water, put a couple of capsules on the legs with the interactor component. It's that simple!

About URP... it shouldn't have any problem. URP is the rendering pipeline. The mesh is the only thing WaveMaker manages, whatever material you use, it's on you. The material should work on URP, WaveMaker doesn't provide any material except for a standard one. If you want we can have a look at that. What is the problem with URP?

 

Just a little update, I've just finished WaveMaker v2 and I'm updating all videos, website and live demos, as well as a lot of documentation and gif examples of all parameters!.

Spoiler: V1.1 will be available in week 4 of the current summer Sale, in the Fantasy week (don't ask me why, I have no idea).

It's a good idea to get WaveMaker in this sale, since the price will definitely go up a little bit in v2, and will be an Update package due to the massive improvements it got in this whole year of silence.

Stay tuned, follow this thread for more info!

 

Hi all ! The fantasy week of the Smash Hit sale is here. Wave Maker will be this week at 50% as mentioned in the previous post. If you are planning to use this version or the upcoming v2, I recommend getting it now because v2 deserves a price rise very soon and you will save money!
I'm finishing a last very hard problem to solve and finishing the videos. The rest is done! It will come out during this summer, pretty soon.

Find the discounted assets here : Affiliate link ( help me for free , otherwise visit here)

 

I buy a minutes ago, start the test.
Lo compre hace unos minutos a ver que tal

Edit: Run perfect in Android

 

Well. The smash hit has been successful considering the asset hasn't been updated for a year and still lacks examples and a lot of features. But it's been awesome! New reviews coming and seems like everybody is happy for now.

I'm working on v2 which was going to be release this summer. But I had to stop development for a while because I encountered a very serious problem concerning (again) RaycastCommand, which I massively use in WaveMaker with the new features.
RaycastCommand is used to throw thousands of rays using multithreading features.

The problem is basically that even though it is documented and in the API, RaycastCommands don't allow multiple hits per raycast, even though you can set the parameter. Thanks Unity...

Damn, I even wrote a post about it and created a script for anybody to download if you need it to work as expected.

Why do I need several hits on the raycasts? Well , basically because if you want objects to overlap in the same water zone, you must detect all of them, see which ones are interactors, calculate how much each occupies in the surface, mix colliders that share the same RigidBody. Very complicated stuff that took me months to make it work and make you happy. Because these things are basic and people will expect them.

This has lead to a serious problem, now that I do it by hand using my new method, efficiency has gone down terribly, and I had to do a very big refactor of the whole code to make it faster so that you don't feel it that much... even though it is terrible for now.


The solution would be to create my own physics engine, basically. Create my own raycasts and do with them whatever I want. I currently use my own collider definition, and that's why I still don't support Mesh Colliders in my asset, that would be terribly slow. But creating my own physics engine would take a lot of time.


Well. I updated the website but you won't be able to see it now. I must finish this, run the thousands of unit tests in all unity versions, and then upload new videos . It will take maybe a month, but add to it vacations...so maybe more than one month. Thankfully less than two.

See you folks! Stay tuned, and watch the thread if you're interested in these news.

 

Hope you don't mind if I share how I use your lovely asset in my WIP progress:
(43seconds into vid):

 

Oh , that is exacly what I wanted people to use the asset, I'm glad you did. Awesome stuff, I love it. Looks awesome. Thanks for posting!

 

Waiting with baited breath! All the best with this. Thanks for posting..and don't forget those vacations. Sounds like you might need one or two!!

 

Well. This has been absolutely crazy, to fix the last problem that gave me a big headache in my way to finishing v2. It's about RaycastCommand multihit and here's my blog post about it.

Buoyancy working perfectly. Some little pikes are generated sometimes, I'm trying to see if I can reproduce that, but overall it works fine, as you can see.

What's new this time? You can combine rigidbodies and colliders objets inside the same rigidbody. They can be overlapped and occupation of water volume is calculated correctly, so you can build your own complex combined objects and it will still work with the Unity native physics engine.


Well. It's now time to give the website a new look (90% done already), put up some comparatives between v1 and v2 in terms of speed, some performance info and a easy to follow documentation and examples. The documentation looks awesome now.

I'll also update the videos. All this can take up to two weeks before I prepare all for release (cross fingers!), maybe less. Let's see how this goes!

 

Thanks by your update Work
Gracias por actualizarlo

 

Hi everybody.
a little update. Uploading and creating the new stuff for v2 is taking longer than expected. This update took one year to develop, and I left my full-time job mainly to finish this and work on more features, so it has been ... really.. 8 months. Next updates will come very often.

Main video, and 4 tutorials are already finished and uploaded. One more coming about efficiency comparions between v1 and v2 which I think is necessary for people to understand how this improved and why it takes a while to execute in some cases.

Also, the website has now a documentation page, with all the examples an tutorials, very easy to follow.

Creating the tutorials I encountered a couple of user experience problems that I need to fix asap. Specially, the undo-redo feature that people will expect to have, is not working completely.

Sadly (not for me) I'll have to take some vacations next week, but I'm finishing all this before my vacations and will release it afterwards. Very soon!

 

Looking exciting!

 

Just for people who are following the thread.

As promised, WaveMaker Version 2 has been already sent to review and it will be out soon as they give me the OK (in the next two weeks, hopefully). I don't want to publish the videos until it is out. It is an upgrade, but you will have a grace period for updating it within a month for free.

Stay alert !

 

Baited breath!

 

Gracias
Thank you

 

If / when v2 is available will there be any specific upgrade instructions, or should it just work?

 

That is an excellent question. I didn't add that anywhere. The rewrite has been brutal.

Before updating, I recommend creating a copy of your project. Just because WaveMaker v1 will be deprecated fast from the asset store. V2 will be a new package. In case you lose some setting or want ot mantain the look of the older version.

First: V2 will still be available for 2018, even though it says it's 2019 (the mandatory version right now), something that not all assets do. But I wanted to support long term projects.


- You will have to install the new required packages to avoid compilation errors. The installation process is easy using the package manager and you can find an explanation of it in the documentation linked everywhere.

- All components are the same so surfaces and interactors will remain.

- All parameters will be kept, except for the ones that have been replaced. In particular, the local mesh size, in case you used it, you will have to copy that from the settings of the old scene, and the "speed clamp" which is now two values (min and max).

- The Descriptor has changed quite a bit internally and will be detached from the surfaces. You will have to create it again and paint the fixed cells since the database inside the asset is lost completely. I'm afraid I didn't put that much effort in this part since the asset is still used but few people due to lack of content in social media and youtube. I put all my effort in working on this version instead of creating more content for 1.1.
Let me know if I can help there, in case you have a very complex setup and doing it once again would take a lot of time.

- The only thing that could be an unfixable problem is that since many of the bugs have been fixed... the fluid looks quite different now. There were many serious ones regarding maths calculations... Waves will look more accurate but smaller, more detailed. Thankfully I added more tweaking parameters, because I was worried people would not like that.

Let me know if you find something wrong!


PS: Still waiting for the package to be accepted...

 

Cool, many thanks

 

Any updates on the v2.0? I'm validating WaveMaker for new project, just wondering if the 2.0 will be available soonish?

 

Hi. I'm still waiting. The package has been pending since... 22nd September! Tomorrow makes a month of wait.
They say its between 20 and 30 work days... so could take, apparently, one or two weeks more (maximum).

In case the package check fails and they reject it, there will be another wait. But I don't think it will have any problem.

Maybe today, maybe in a week.
You can talk to me directly through the official website , find there the contact information, and I can guide or help you.

I'm finishing an important update on the new buoyancy features, (efficiency and removing all aliasing on the horizontal movement) that will come right after the published v2.0. I'd love to know what are your requirements, if you need anything in the API, so I add it to the next version.