SUIMONO - Customizeable Water System [RELEASED]

Thanks Chingwa, that worked!

 

@Bruno - Just an FYI, I have built in a "cool down" function for the ripple emissions so they will fade out over a set time period, as well as added a function that rotates and speeds up ripple and splash emission based on object movement and orientation. These updates will be in version 1.3.

 

Oh wow this is so cool, never had a chance to test the webplayer before.
Btw you might want to do depth difference check to fix the refraction bleeding.

-Cheers-

 

Thanks rea! By the way... the refraction bleeding is now fixed, and will be updated in version 1.3!!! I will post an updated webplayer demo and submit the next version to the asset store later today.

 

Hi Chingwa,


I am a custumer, and i would ask for a tutorial. Use the system is easy, but to integrate it inside a complexe secene or with a terrain, it's pretty hard. For waves for exemple, we must have a flow map, but how to make it ?

 

Hi Samsson,

Yes you are absolutely right. The Wave / flowmap function is the one part of the system that is currently not just "plug-and-play". I've been thinking there should be a better way to do this then have developers make their own flow maps, but for now you'll need to add in a custom texture. I'll post a basic tutorial a bit later today on how to create this texture.

 

Version 1.3 is now on the Asset Store, BUT there seems to have been some kind of error during the uploading process as I am suddenly not seeing any refraction effects on my end. This will be fixed ASAP! In the meantime hold on to version 1.2!

 

OK, the fix for the refraction effect is in to Unity for review and should be on the store as version 1.32 very soon!

 

I was waiting on this fix, will be buying it soon as the update is available. Thanks for the update Chingwa. Any roadmaps in development at the moment?

 

Thanks Aaron! I haven't heard any word from Unity yet, but I imagine it shouldn't be much longer before it's available.

As for my future plans, well, I'd like to continue refining Suimono both in the visuals and in terms of accessibility and ease-of-use. The custom preset feature is great but slightly cumbersome currently. And I'm hoping to find a way to implement auto generated flowmaps for the waves (though I'm not sure this is going to be possible), as well as flowmaps for the water surface itself.

Also, a little further down the line I'd like to implement normal map tessellation for Unity4 and possibly a mobile version. All of these things depend on the success of Suimono over the next few months, and I don't have a specific timeline as of yet for additional features.

 

I've posted a basic tutorial on how to get FlowMapped Waves working. I'm also including a photoshop action file for partially automated texture generation as well as an example flowmap texture.

Head over to the Suimono help forum for the details...

Suimono Help forum - Flowmap Tutorial

 

Suimono version 1.32 is now available on the asset store!
The webplayer demo has also been updated with all of the latest changes:

WEBPLAYER DEMO version 1.32

Below is a list of changes in version 1.3 and 1.32

FIX - Shader Refraction attributes were broken in version1.3... this is now fixed.
NEW - Added automatic cool-down timer for ripple emissions when objects aren't moving.
NEW - Added 'follow object rotation' option that automatically rotates ripple direction and increases speed if object is moving.
NEW - Added Forward Rendering version of Full Shader to fix refraction Bleeding.
FIX - Refraction Bleedng effect eliminated on water surface and ripple effects.
FIX - Eliminated visual underwater refraction + depth anomalies.
FIX - Intermittent error warning concerning material instantiation in editor mode.
CHANGE - Demo Scene: Added controller and box spawn back and changed to default keyboard inputs. (WASD, Space, Left Ctrl)

 

Hi chinwa,
now the web player works perfectly on both of my pc!
I hope to justify the buying of your tool in a future project that requires this level of interaction and quality!
Max

 

I'm having problems trying to play the latest webplayer. I'm using a MacBook Pro with X1600 graphics, Chrome version 22.0.1229.92, and MacOSX 10.6.8. Below are screenies of the error message and the Unity webplayer version.





Edit: Just tried it on FireFox and I'm getting the same error.

 

@sjm - thanks for the confirmation and all of you help!

@ Bigkahuna - I haven't seen this error before. I'll see if I can get to the bottom of it when I get home tonight. My computer here at work is also running OS 10.6.8 and it runs without these errors.

Anyone else experiencing problems with the Webplayer?

 

@chingwa - Seems that the webplayer loads to about 75% and then stops with the error. I'm not seeing this with other webplayers on this same machine. Are you using 4.0beta by chance?

 

I have the 4beta, but Im still using 3.5.3 for my dev environment. Had you tried any of the previous Suimono webplayers, or is this the first you've tried?

 

I also have the 4beta on this machine but am using 3.5.6 (as the webplayer test shows). This is the first Suimono webplayer I've tried.

Edit - Just tried the 1.1 demo and got a similar error.

 

try to use Mozila Firefox

 

Yup, tried that (see my note at the end of my post). Also verified that I'm using the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. Also checked it with Safari and got the same error.

 

bigkahuna, can you post or check in your webplayer log file (if there is one) for anything unusual?

on Mac:
~/Library/Logs/Unity/WebPlayer.log

as noted here:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/LogFiles.html

 

Also, could you try the following two webplayers and let me know if you can view either (or both)...

Suimono Webplayer Test A

Suimono Webplayer Test B

 

Ran "Test A" and got the same error message. The Webplayer error log contained this:

Code (csharp):

1. 121010 20:49:34 Instance starting, version 3.5.6f4_b81e0151ec83, UNITY_WEB_ENABLE_AUTODOWNLOAD: 1, GetDisableAutoUpdates(): 0
2. 121010 20:49:34 Instance 8eb969e76c1934d16a2e13174e3e7336 shutting down
3. 121010 20:49:34 Instance starting, version 3.5.6f4_b81e0151ec83, UNITY_WEB_ENABLE_AUTODOWNLOAD: 1, GetDisableAutoUpdates(): 0
4. 121010 20:49:35 Datafile http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/demo/test13a/WebPlayer.unity3d
5. 121010 20:49:39 Loader: Start Success
6. 121010 20:57:45 Setting error display: 'The content was stopped because a fatal
7. content error has been detected.', details: 'The content was stopped because a fatal
8. content error has been detected.', link: 0
9.  
10. ... repeated many times ...
11.  
12. 121010 20:58:39 loader: attempt unload reloable
13. 121010 20:58:39 loader: can«t unload reloable. Removing instance completely.
14. 121010 20:58:39 Instance 4dc892a8bf48e4b589a9297b81a6d84a shutting down
15. 121010 20:59:17 Instance starting, version 3.5.6f4_b81e0151ec83, UNITY_WEB_ENABLE_AUTODOWNLOAD: 1, GetDisableAutoUpdates(): 0
16. 121010 20:59:17 Instance 858edfe9a62d14bfa8e37d0d45bf79de shutting down
17. 121010 20:59:17 Instance starting, version 3.5.6f4_b81e0151ec83, UNITY_WEB_ENABLE_AUTODOWNLOAD: 1, GetDisableAutoUpdates(): 0
18. 121010 20:59:18 Datafile http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/demo/test13b/WebPlayer.unity3d
19. 121010 20:59:18 UnityPlayerLoading: Loading failed, trying in temp directory
20. 121010 20:59:21 Loader: Start Success
21.  

 

I tried "Test B" and got the same results. Here's the Player.log contents:

Code (csharp):

1. Mono path[0] = '/private/tmp/UnityWebPluginLoadInstance-3232464d10105439a9504992378e3da9/UnityPlayer.bundle/Contents/Resources'
2. Mono path[1] = '/private/tmp/UnityWebPluginLoadInstance-3232464d10105439a9504992378e3da9/Mono.bundle/Contents/Resources'
3. PlayerConnection::Initialize
4. PlayerConnection constructor
5. Playerconnection 3
6. PlayerConnection initialized network socket : 0.0.0.0 xxxxx
7. Multi-casting "[IP] xx.xx.x.xx [Port] xxxxx [Flags] 2 [Guid] 1302186869 [EditorId] 4294967295 [Version] 1048832 [Id] OSXWebPlayer(xxxxxxx.local) [Debug] 0"

 

Thanks for posting your logs. They don't tell me anything conclusive unfortunately. The second one ends with a 'null' error, but it doesn't give any indication what this is about, so I'm left to guess. I've posted another Test webplayer I'd like you to try.... the splash sounds have been turned off for this webplayer, I suspect the Webplayer may be having some sort of issue with sound instantiation on your system (though others are fine! strange!)

Suimono Webplayer Test C

 

'A' works fine here.

OSX 10.7.3 firefox 12.0.

 

@chingwa - Tried "C" with same result. Downloaded fresh Unity 3D 3.5.6 webplayer and re-installed it. Then rebooted and tried it again, still getting the error. I'm beginning to think this is an error with the 3.5.6 webplayer and not your plugin.

 

@shwa - thanks for the test!

@bigkahuna - wow, thanks for going through all the trouble! It's a bit annoying that the WebPlayer isn't acting consistent! the only 2 possible causes I was able to find was either the webplayer being unable to load resources (which is why I posted Test C), or WebPlayer memory issues. If you get the chance to try it with a different webplayer release I'd be very interested if that makes any difference. I can also try bringing it into 4 and exporting a webplayer from there. I'll try that tonight!

Anyone else here have any problems with the webplayer demo on the first page?

 

Well, scratch that. The beta webplayer states it will only work on my computer since it's still beta. Also I don't have the beta4 version of the webplayer installed anyway, and am not willing to overwrite my current version until the full version of Unity4 comes out. Sorry about all this bigkahuna!

 

All webplayers working fine here (win7 x64, Firefox 15, Unity 3.5.x).

Looks really great, epic water. All the presets look good and I like the onscreen splashes and the ripples when you move through the water.. very nice.
If I ever need water of such detail, I will definitely get this.
Keep up the good work

 

Thanks Djiel for testing the webplayer and for your kind comments!

 

Hi Guys, just a note, I updated the webplayer demo on the front page. It now has smooth wave-fronts (they were quite jagged before).

This isn't a feature upgrade, it was just a texture setting change... for those who are using the animated-waves / flowmap feature in Suimono, make sure to use Truecolor in the flowmap texture import settings.

Using compressed textures unnecessarily creates jagged artifacts in the wave flow... compare the example pictures below...



Of course if you like the look of the compressed texture setting better, feel free to use it! I feel though that it's easier to control the appearance of waves if you have it on the truecolor setting.

You can check out a Flowmap creation tutorial on the Suimono User Forum... Flowmap Creation tutorial

And as always I would love to get feedback from those who are using Suimono, what you like, and what you feel needs improvement! And If you feel Suimono is a worthwhile asset, please also consider leaving a rating and/or review on the Asset Store... Suimono Asset Store Link

 

Just to say i'm now very close to buying this, i'm hoping development will continue into the future but i think it'll be just fine for my needs already, the main outstanding wish i'd have would be for more river specific things but i'd imagine that amounted to suitable flowmap generation while i myself create a suitable mesh and uvs for it.. well, i'm not sure, im no expert, but hopefully ill have the money soon, looking forwards to it!

 

hi lazygunn, thanks for your comments. I hope you find Suimono suits your needs, but if you have any questions just let me know. I am interested in your comment about river specific features... what types of features do you think you would need?

 

I suppose that's a good question as i'm not entirely sure right at the moment but i suppose being able to indicate foam and flow around rocks or other things in the river and perhaps, if possible, some kind of automatic UV generation (Not sure im using the right words) to use for scrolling textures/normal maps or even foam/debris build up and direction in heavily broken up streams. The best example I can think of is skyrim where most of its tributaries seem to have quite complex UVs for showing the water direction flowing through them.

I may not be entirely sure what i'm talking about haha but assuming I get this today (which i hope to) i can do some little tests myself, unfortunately without being able to enjoy refraction but maybe getting some good effects without it. It seems i should look at the bootcamp demo a little and i'll reload skyrim also and have a proper study, it's probably a matter of creating a decent mesh for the river or stream. I suppose another thing i'm thinking how to do is where theres an abrupt drop in water height but not big enough to create a waterfall effect, like in a weir or rapids where theres no real mist created but a very particular visual effect to the falling water and it mixing with the water below

I suppose i wouldnt worry about it for now but i'll definitely have a good look at various games today and figure out whats going on in them and how some of it could be automated, river water's definitely something i'd love to be able to ace in the things i do

EDIT: Having had a long looong look at how skyrim and games like dear esther have done their water i think there's not a great lot you can do other than maybe provide a suitable prefab that might explain how somethings might be done, the skyrim waterfall is made up of several different elements that shouldnt really be too hard to piece together, something i'll investigate in the coming weeks anyway

 

Thanks Lazygunn. water flow and direction is something I've been contemplating for a while. It would require it's own flowmap texture (different than the shore waves flowmap) that distorts the normals as they get scrolled across the texture. I haven't had a lot of luck implementing this as of yet, though I'll continue to look into it for a future update. This would be such a great feature, but it would also require some rather complicated texture work on the user side in order to work in their scenes.

Foam should already work automatically to a certain extant as long as the rocks are breaking through the water surface.

As for waterfall effects and such... this is slightly out of the scope of Suimono at present... though it does come with a few splash effects which you could use in other places as well, but they aren't intended to look like waterfalls and mist. I haven't really paid much attention to Dear Esther, I'll go check out their water effects now...

 

Does this work on Mobile (Android or iOS) ?

 

Hi eskimojoe (awesome name, btw...), Suimono has not been specifically designed for mobile platforms, nor has it been tested on either iOS or Android. There are basic versions of the shader included for the non-pro version of Unity which possibly may work with mobile... but again this has not been tested.

 

I just purchased it Chingwa, and I'm loving it thus far. I'd been wanting to get it for a while, but was kind of torn because I wasn't sure how much you were going to put into it. I didn't want our coders developing code for flowing river/stream paths if you were going to eventually be working on it. Seems like you've come to a roadblock on the procedure you want to take, but we needed a more viable solution than the modified water 4 shader we'd been working on. So far, the product is solid, and I'm sure people won't be to disappointed in rivers with no flow directions in our first few videos. If we beat you to a solution in the near future, I'll be sure to share our methods with you. I'm sure we won't be tampering with it any time soon though, seeing as the current offering covers everything we need, but that. I have some friends that are developing Unity games, that have been looking for a great water solution for a while, so I'll be sharing my thoughts and suggestions with them. Hopefully it will encourage them to purchase SUImono as well. Thanks for a great product, I look forward to future updates.

 

Purchased this last night and while i won't get the most from it as i'm using Unity Basic i'm looking forwards to finally having a decent water solution after so long without. I'd love to see rivers having a good go at but in it's stead i've been really staring intensely hard at skyrim's river and waterfall systems and i'm thinking i can approximate much of it myself with Suimono and Shuriken. I'm planning to use these methods on something entirely different to Skyrim but if I come up with a nice selection of prefabs i'll make them available (Or as nice as i can without seeing refraction and relying on a cubemap), they'd certainly go nicely with the water anyways and certainly if any river systems were to be implemented

 

@Aaaron - Thank you so much for sharing your initial impressions here on the forum! I'm really glad you've had a positive reaction, as I know you've been following Suimono patiently from the start. If you and your team run into any issues using Suimono, or need specific features in the future, please let me know. As for the riverflow, yes I've reached a bit of an impasse, at least with my initial ideas. The main problem lies with making it general enough that almost everyone can use it, without requiring too much texture work on the user-end. This may turn out to be unavoidable though since river shapes are so individual to the scene and project.

@lazygunn - Apart from actual flow, I think a lot can be done creatively to approximate river effects with additional particles and texture overlays, just as you've said. I will continue my investigation as well.

To all, the recent response to Suimono has been really great, I'd like to thank everyone who's purchased! Please direct all questions and/or comments my way, either here on the forum/pm or on the Suimono user forum. Also to those who've had a chance to use Suimono for a little while a rating and/or review on the asset store (if you're so inclined) would be very much appreciated!

 

Thanks for helping me get everything setup Chingwa. Everythings running solid now. I have an idea for a possible method that may make custom mesh based rivers easy to do. I've already accomplished a reasonably believable look with the flowing waves and animation parameters, but what would make it even more convincing is if there was an option to set the animation to flow in the y and x directions of the local UV maps. I haven't had time to look into that, but if that was an option, that would make a great feature for many I'm sure. I haven't had time to look into it, but it'd be good to know if you had explored this option already.

Thanks for any information in advance.

 

If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to control the direction that the Textures scroll in correct? If this is what you're looking to do then this is already implementedin Suimono through the "Water_animScrolling" script component. for example, you can set the X and Y parameter of the Flow_speed variable to go in any direction you wish...

X = 0.5 (flow left)
X = -0.5 (flow right)
Y= 0.5 (flow down)
Y = -0.5 (flow up)

You can control the general flow direction/speed, the wave direction/speed, and the foam direction / speed.

The problem that I haven't been able to figure out yet is when you get to a corner or a curve in the river, how will the flow now switch directions to follow that curve. I would love to be able to do it generally and without an additional flowmap that users have to setup, but I haven't found a way yet to "sample" the current uv direction. I'll have some time to do some tests on this over the weekend I hope.

 

would there be any way to 'paint' such a map interactively in unity? that might be a huge amount of work for you i suppose

 

That's how I have it set up now Chingwa. But, as you suggested, when the custom mesh bends, the water doesn't follow. It doesn't look bad, just a bit unrealistic. Hopefully you find a way to render it to the path of the uv map's local direction.

 

@lazygunn - that would probably be an ideal way to do it. I'm sure it isn't impossible either as the Unity toolset is fairly robust. However it would require more dev time than is currently feasible I'm afraid. First step though is to get the waterfow working in the first place.

@Aaron - one interim solution, though certainly not ideal, is to break up the river mesh into smaller meshes that are flowing in different directions. I can see this being workable if you only have one river, but once you start magnifying your workload with multiple rivers this would quickly get out of hand.

 

Below is a rough example of riverflow. It certainly isn't perfect, as my inexperience with modeling kind of shows But, this is the basic proof-of-concept. Interestingly, this is being achieved with the current version of Suimono, using the animScrolling script. You can see the river model wireframe setup, and anim_scroll settings below.

The main issue is how Unity imported the model, automatically converting it to triangles. I'm sure there are others out there that would know how to fix this right away but to me it was not apparent going through the import options how to fix this. It probably needs to be setup a bit different in the 3D Modelling package (I'm using Max). But it gives you a general idea I think. Thoughts?

 

It looks good! Im certainly up to modelling such things, is there any way to 'distort' the uv's slightly across the surface to simulate er 'lateral' movement of the water, hah maybe getting ahead of myself but yes, looks fine, i should look into it more as my current obsession my start using it soon

One question, i don't know if i'm being silly and missing something but i have the problem of when setting the fog settings on the basic shader they reset to their default values after pressing stop (but not on pressing play), has the unfortunate effect of bright blue water in a nighttime scene,let me know if i'm missing something

 

Well you could layout the model to be a bit jagged, which would certainly distort the water as well, but I don't think I recommend that. The only other option I think would be to have an additional flowmap on the Water_Surface object, which would then have to be coded into the shader. This is certainly the more flexible way to do it.

If you're editing settings while Unity is playing your scene, then it won't save it when you stop. This is just the way Unity works. It is a bit annoying, but it's also done that way so you don't inadvertently screw up your settings while playing your scene. (since you can set changes on the fly through code as well... it tends to make sense). To make permanent changes you'll have to do it before you play your scene.

As for the fog not updating at night, I believe I have a fix for that. I'll be including this new script with version 1.4, but you might as well try to use it now. download this "water_colorCalculations" component, import it into your scripts/ folder, and then attach it to your Water_Surface object. What it does is reads the game render settings for fog, and the background color of your camera and updates / overrides some of the Suimono color settings on the fly... I was having the same issue with fog. Hope this helps!

download water_colorCalculations component

 

Ahh no i know it doesnt save while playing, i'm very used to this haha (Many many times making tonnes of adjustments then realising it was still on play, and sighing deeply)

In this case it doesnt matter when i make the change it reverts to a default setting (like fog distance of 1200 and intensity of 0.1 etc)

Cheers for the script! I'll give it a go, the fog problem was with your own shaders setting but! This is extremely useful as i was hoping for an answer to that too as much of my scene atm is initially shrouded in fog