SUIMONO 2.0 - Interactive Water System

@chingwa Thanks for the speedy response. I'm going to check that the camera is rendering the Suimono_Water layer when I get the chance. Also, the activation range on the buoyancy objects makes perfect sense; I will check that out as well!

 

Height map resolution is really high (4096) - also it looks okay from close distance.

 

@Crossway effective resolution of the terrain is a combination of the terrain resolution (4096) and also how large that terrain is... if you have a 4096 terrain that is 2km in overall size then the smallest change in detail will be about 0.5 meters apart. If that terrain is at 8km then the smallest change in detail will be 2 meters apart, etc. So in a case like this it's the 'effective resolution' or the PPM (pixels per meter) that you should be thinking about.

Also the further you get away from a point on the terrain the more Unity automatically lowers the generated resolution.... they do this to save some cost in performance when rendering the terrain. You can control this somewhat by using the terrain 'pixel error' setting.

I think you'll have to experiment a bit to get a good balance between distant terrain and the edge of the water. Don't believe this is exclusively a Suimono issue (behavior would be similar even if all you had was a solid blue plane instead of water) due to How Unity terrain works. Hard for me to say for sure without seeing it in person, but I believe this is likely the issue.

 

I've disabled "Foam", make terrain smaller with high resolution and now it looks like this from a distance (Close distance doesn't have problem) ,also heavy flickering when moving camera around.

 

I figure out this will be solve if I set camera near clipping more than 3 (Depends on camera height)!!!! I can't really set my camera near clipping more than 0.1, is there anyway to solve this?

This water is amazing but can't use it at all because of this issue.

 

That's quite strange. What is your camera far clipping setting, if I may ask?

 

20,000 far clipping. is you graphics card ATI Radeon? cause this kind of flickering issue usually doesn't exist on ATI cards.

For example I remember I haven't shadow flickering problem on 0.03 near clipping but with Nvidia cards I should set near clipping to 0.1 to get ride of shadow flickering. this kind flickering problems usually happens with Nvidia cards.

 

I recently got Suimono and it was happening to me as well, Umbra plays havoc with scene reflections because at certain angles the terrain for instance will dissapear (of course that's what it's supposed to do).. I only really noticed when the terrain kept having blocks missing so I cleared the bake cache and it's working fine.

This is on a Radeon card too.!

 

@Crossway Well I thought if perhaps your far clip plane is extremely high it might freak out the Unity depth buffer. But 20,000, while high, is not that abnormal. You might try lowering just to see if it has any effect. Also I've not experienced the cache issue that @ShadowK mentioned, but sounds like a possible cause as well.

 

I have an issue.

Day time; Amazing



Sunset; Amazing



But It comes to night time, It gets really bad.




I can almost fix it with changing Wide Specular to 0 but i can't save it. Any idea? All transforms done btw.

 

@exploitedtaken It looks like in the first night image that perhaps the water is still being lit by the sun, as if from underneath. Suimono will react to the directional light in your scene, so if the sun is still "on" from below it could be causing something like this. Best advice is to make sure the sun light intensity is dropped to 0 (or disabled) during evening hours.

In the case of having two directional lights, such as sun and moon, often one of them is prioritized over the other. You can check to see on the moon light if the rendermode is set to "is important" which should force how it affects objects in the scene.

 

And just to followup... it's best to edit water settings in your scene while it's playing, and then to make a new preset with these settings before stopping your scene. Once you stop your scene click on your new preset in the list so it loads your new settings when you press play again.

 

@chingwa

Did you get the material index key spam message sorted out with Unity? After 5.4 beta 20? I wouldn't mind but the console log adds 9 msec to the CPU process ..!

I've got to say, performance has been pretty poor.. I've made plenty of water shaders in my time and I've never had to use multiple camera's for things like reflections / normals / shoreline etc.

You have to realise that in Unity, by default every active camera incurs a frustum culling charge. Ideally you shouldn't even need one, the shader it self can use world position to offest view angle. Then you can just slap a big shiny reflection probe on top of it. You can even blend pre-bakes over distance from TOD!>

It doesn't even need to be extemely complicated, lf you need a hand let me know.!

 

@ShadowK Yes, I figured out the material index issue in Unity 5.4. It will be updated in the upcoming C# version, but I believe you can also fix this on your own. It seemed to be an issue with a specific material (at least on my end). Try opening up each of your SUIMONO_Surface objects and go to the 'Suimono_objectscale' sub-object. Replace the existing material with the 'mat_water_surfacescale' material from the Suimono 'TEXTURES' folder.

I've noticed the C# version has a bit of a performance increase. It isn't a drastic increase but an increase nontheless.

The cameras you describe may seem bizarre compare to a normal water shader, but they are there for very specific reasons. I'll explain a bit more below...

The Normals camera is a special effect camera... it isn't used for the water surface wave normals, these are calculated directly in the shader as you describe. The Normals camera is instead used for additive effects that aren't generated on the surface, such as ripples and wake trails. These are generated as separate objects, captured by the Normals Camera, and then the rendered normal texture is combined additiviely in the surface shader. It's very useful and shouldn't take up much resources, assuming it's calculating the correct layer (should only be seeing the 'Suimono_Screen' layer).

The Shoreline camera captures a custom (top-down) depth texture of your scene, and then send this to the water shader which uses the depth texture to generate shoreline-specific area effects.... breaker waves/foam etc. This was the most efficient and foolproof way I could find of getting the needed scene info into the water shader.

The Transparency Camera is where a large part of the performance hit comes from because it is generating the scene layers you specify as a second pass which is fed into the shader for transparency effects. The reason this is done is so that the water surface can utilize the 'opaque' geometry rendering queue, which allows other scene effects to work properly with the water surface... specifically fog, and other depth-based effects. It also protects against inconsistent rendering issues between Forward and Deferred paths. In typical water shaders you would normally use a shader grabpass() instruction to re-use the pixels behind the water for transparent effects (which is very efficient), but in doing so you are forced to run the water in the Transparent rendering Queue which doesn't allow utilization of the depth buffer. This is the reason I've chosen to do it this way. Admittedly, this benefit comes at a high cost.

I've been thinking of building in an alternate option that will switch between a single pass Transparent-queue shader and the current Opaque-queue shader. This would allow you to choose either better performance, or better scene compositing. I still need to investigate this a bit though so this won't be in the next update. I just put the final touches on the C# update tonight... all is working well, even in the Unity 5.4 beta. I'll be spending tomorrow doing some final testing and expect to have it ready in the next day or so.

 

Once you get this conversion done, what are us C# guys gonna be able to harass you about now?

Seriously though.. Great job! Looking forward to it!

 

Why C#? it cast performance more than just a bit! even Tenkoku performance get worse after changing to C#.
Every asset on C# has a bad performance. why not C++? It's a lot faster for this kind of asset.

 

chingwa
This flickering issue on distance make me crazy
I will send you an example scene please see if you can solve this.

 

Hello chingwa,

I am working on a game for Xbox One, the action is mostly underwater and in an island. I have been looking at your asset for some time now, and with the latest update it appears you have fixed the frame rate. My question is, does your asset works on Forward path?

Regards,
Carlos

 

@strongbox3d yes it works the same in Forward and Deferred (and legacy deferred).

@Crossway I got your files and hopefully will have an update for you on this tomorrow.

@ksam2 In case you hadn't noticed, people loooove C# around here I myself am agnostic, but as far as I'm aware a C++ version would have to be compiled into a DLL which would be too limiting for a large number of people. That and the fact that I don't know C++ anyway are the main things against it.

@Shawn67 I don't know what you guys are going to do with all this freed up time now that you don't have to bug me about C# anymore. Spend more time with your kids? Travel the world? The future is wide open now...

 

I've got a strange new problem with Suimono on Unity 4.7.2 (this project is stuck there until UT gets mode lighting working in U5). I'm doing an update on a game released last fall. The Suimono water in one particular scene used to look great, but no longer has transparency. I’ve tried fiddling with the presets, and even copying a Suimono water object from another scene into this scene, but can’t get transparency working. I didn’t change anything in the preset. I can’t figure out why I lost transparency. I’m guessing it’s something scene-specific, but I sure can’t figure out what could have changed. Anyone have any ideas?

 

@gecko Are you using the old Suimono 2.0.06? Mysterious why transparency would just stop working... perhaps you changed your project Rendering Path (I recommend deferred in Unity 4), or added new image effects to your camera that might affect this? The old Suimono was more finicky with these types of things then the newer updates.

 

yes, I'm using 2.0.06. And that was it! The rendering mode is set on the fly in the game based on quality levels (Forward for lower quality, Deferred for higher quality), but at some point I set it in this scene to Forward, and that must have done the job on Suimono. I changed it to Use Player Settings and now I have transparent water again. Whew, thank you!

 

LOL

C# for Suimono??? Wow!!

 

chingwa
Thanks, did you find any solution for that flickering issue?

 

Also with UFPS camera?

 

@Crossway Thanks for your example scene. There are actually a couple issues happening here...

The first, as you mentioned, is the camera near clip plane... butto be more specific it's the depth buffer in the scene getting overburdened by the draw distance. You can fix this either by enlarging the near clip disyance, or reducing the far clip distance. The reason enlarging the near plane helps is because the buffer is weighted with more pixel density at the near end of the buffer. So the higher in altitude the more the shallow water areas get affected by depth inaccuracies as they get pushed to the far end of the depth buffer.

The best option would be to raise the near clip plane to around 3 or 5... or at least do this when the camera get's high above your scene. I wrote a utility script that will adjust this for you on the fly based on how high you go in your scene. Just save the below code as a C# file called 'utility_AdjustCulling' and attach it to your camera...

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3.  
4. public class utility_AdjustCulling : MonoBehaviour {
5.  
6.     public float nearCullAtBase = 0.3f;
7.     public float nearCullAtAltitude = 5.0f;
8.     public float altitudeLowerThreshold = 25f;
9.     public float altitudeUpperThreshold = 450f;
10.  
11.     private Camera cam;
12.     private float useThreshold;
13.  
14.     void Start () {
15.         cam = this.gameObject.GetComponent<Camera>() as Camera;
16.     }
17.  
18.     void LateUpdate () {
19.         if (cam != null){
20.             if (transform.position.y > altitudeLowerThreshold){
21.                 useThreshold = Mathf.Clamp01(
22.                     (transform.position.y-altitudeLowerThreshold) / (altitudeUpperThreshold-altitudeLowerThreshold)
23.                     );
24.             } else {
25.                 useThreshold = 0f;
26.             }
27.             cam.nearClipPlane = Mathf.Lerp(nearCullAtBase, nearCullAtAltitude, useThreshold);
28.         }
29.     }
30. }

In addition to the above I found some issues within the water shader code itself, both in how it was rendering the far ocean y-position, and how it was handling transparency falloff at a distance. These were causing the ocean to not composite with the terrain properly in the distance. I've fixed these issues and they will be included with the C# update, which I should be getting out either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

 

@llJIMBOBll There is a workaround for the UFPS issue... take a look at the forum post here: http://tanukidigital.com/forum/index.php?topic=763.msg2735#msg2735

 

Thanks but that can't be useful cause game going to be 3d person, so if I go upon a mountain with my character I can't increase near clip. I'll wait for new version to see if that solves the problem.

 

You might need to render the closest character/objects with a second camera. Or you'll need to adjust the far clip distance to be lower. You'll probably have to do some kind of workaround if your project requires using a very large view distance.

 

I got a report from someone who says that on his pretty solid gaming rig, the frame drops substantially when the player and NPC-partner are in the water, when the water splash effects are playing. His GPU is an AMD R9 270x, and I found a similar rig to test -- and indeed found that those two particle effects pull down the frame rate by 10-20 (on when player and NPC are in the water, so four particle effects playing). Crazy! Attached is a screenshot of those two particles. Any idea why, or how to improve that? (We're thinking of adding a toggle in Options to disable those, but that's not the ideal solution.)

 

Awesome Thank you soo Much!

 

@gecko that's pretty intense... are the particles playing correctly? Are there any errors that get initiated in the console? All the particles are batched specifically to avoid this type of fps hit so I'm not sure what would be causing this. You can increase the emission speed setting which will give more downtime between each particle emit function... your current setting of 0.1 will initiate 10 particles per second. Still you shouldn't be getting this type of a performance hit. When are you going to upgrade to Unity 5?

 

I'll get a log and see if there are errors...but there are not when I run the scene in the editor, so I doubt it.

Thanks. I'll try that.

I don't know. When is Unity 5 going to support mixed mode lighting in Deferred Rendering? :/

 

Hey man I tried the UFPS fix it works great in 3rd person but in first person I can see my player body when i look into the water... Seems to be related to transparent as when I disable once in play mode it goes a way.

[/IMG]


Thanx Man

 

I think the best way to fix this would be to have your character on it's own layer, and then to remove that layer from the Transparent calculations on the SuimonoModule object.

 

Hello All,

I'm happy to announce that Suimono version 2.1.2 is now ready for download...

Download Here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/download

This version now includes the long awaited code conversion to C#. This has been the most requested feature over the past couple of years, and I'm glad to finally release it to everyone. From this point forward all future updates will be developed in C# exclusively.

In addition to the above I have been able to fix a few serious issues with loading/saving presets, as well as problems with distance rendering. I've also incorporated some changes that will hopefully improve performance a bit for everyone. I reduced the number of texture calls taking place internally in the shader, which allowed the number of passes to be reduced from 2 down to 1. As well as a few other optimizations and bug fixes.

A Note About Updating
Because of the code conversion your Suimono objects will require to be setup again from scratch (sorry, but this is unavoidable). I highly recommend completely removing your current Suimono install before installing the new update. Follow the below instructions to uninstall...
1) remove all Suimono objects from your scene (including SuimonoSurface and SuimonoModule , fx_object, fx_buoyancy objects)
2) remove the Suimono components from your camera.
3) go to edit-->Project Settings --> Tags and Layers and delete any Suimono specific layers.
4) delete the Suimono folder from your project.

A Note About Coding
For those that are accessing Suimono variables through code, be aware that while all components and variables in the C# version are named the same, they are all organized under the Suimono.Core namespace. So in the past if you were accessing the SuimonoModule component, you will need to update your code to access Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule instead.

A Note About Unity 5.4 Beta
I've incorporated a number of fixes into this release that should allow a better experience in the Unity 5.4 beta. I don't officially support updates for Unity beta releases since they are often filled with bugs and other compatibility issues, but I am tracking any problems that arise and will make sure Suimono is as compatible as possible. Certainly once the final version of Unity 5.4 is released any remaining issues will be quickly addressed.

As always, let me know if you have problems/questions/feedback etc, either by email or on the forums!

All the best,
Justin Kellis
Tanuki Digital



UPDATE: 7/1/2016 - Suimono Version 2.1.2
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT'S NEW:
- Codebase conversin to C#!
- Reformulated water shader from double-pass to single-pass for improved performance.
- Added 'Set Automatic Layers' toggle on Module. enables/disables automatic layer/physics assignmet and detection.
- Added 'Set Automatic FX' toggle on Module. Enables/disables Suimono from automatically assigning effects to your camera.
- Added "Auto Y-Position" option to the shoreline object which allows disabling of auto height snap.
- Added ability to enable/disable underwater on a per-object basis (see surface 'underwater' section).
- Added Blend function to smoothly transition distant transparency.

CHANGES:
- Removed separate height texture support to reduce shader overhead. Height values now must be encoded in Normal alpha channel.
- Removed 'Advanced FX' menu from ui as it was deemed redundant.
- Removed internal 'audioObject' prefab dependency.
- Rewrote reflection blend method for better performance.

BUG FIXES:
- Fixed issue with object changes not being saved correctly in Unity 5.3+
- Fixed issue where using the Preset '+New' button was not properly saving preset data.
- Fixed error with some depth based image effects, such as AO (Forward rendering only. Deferred still has issues.)
- Fixed double rendering of some prefab icons.
- Fixed editor-specific preset code from executing in builds.
- Fixed water shader distant y-rendering which was preventing proper distant water/scene compositing.

 

But...but what will I be able to rib you about now? The puns, @chingwa, you aren't thinking about the puns!

All jokes aside, congrats on getting the new version out. Converting Tenkoku and Suimon from JS to C# couldn't have been a walk in the park. This is the coolest of beans.

 

Amazing, that actually worked , Thank you very much for C# version.

 

Awesome! Going to grab it know and try it out! Trying to get marketing/showcase videos done for my Gaia stamp packs this weekend! Looking forward to digging into it! Great job!

 

heheh.. I thought the same thing. It seems like forever that I've been harassing him about a c# conversion.. I guess now all that is left is to figure out other things to find for him to work on.. Since he has all that free time now, and all... *hides from @chingwa*

 

I've got an issue (the image is split across the diagonal to show what happens):



If the module is activated, my camera goes full purple in the game view. I'm using Scion postprocessing (still shows when I deactivate all PP).

Also getting ugly artefacts onscreen while running:



Any ideas?

 

I've never seen an issue like this before If you remove the Suimono camera effect does it still occur?

 

When I disable Unity SSAO it goes away :/ just saw now

Any way I can keep SSAO without losing suimono??

 

Still glitches though. Water doesn't move and I can't turn foam off:



EDIT: I'm gonna try update from 2.1.1 to 2.1.2.

 

The default SSAO in Unity does not work well with Suimono.... you can get it to work, but only if you are using Forward rendering in your project (if you're using forward and still seeing issues then let me know.). If you're using deferred you may try ScreenSpaceAmbientObscurance as an alternative, or use a more advanced SSAO from the asset store (such as HBAO... https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/54780) or use a deferred SSAO effect such as this one from gitHub... https://github.com/keijiro/DeferredAO

Just so I clearly understand the issue here... if you disable all camera effects except the Suimono effect do you still have problems? If so, do you still have problems if you then disable the suimono effect as well?

 

I just updated to 2.1.2 and everything works now (except for the purple screen and the SSAO artifacts). I'll probably have to buy a third party solution, but thanks for the heads up.

EDIT: after playing the game, the purple is gone from the static game view. The initial problem was that when I stopped playing, it was always purple.

 

Can you recommend SSAO products that work with Suimono?

 

Not sure what that purple screen could have been. Suimono water doesn't usually render properly in the scene-view mode, due to the scene camera not having the appropriate buffers available, thus I always recommend edit Suimono settings while they are playing and then save a Suimono preset when they get the settings they like. But I've never seen such a strange purple block in the scene view like that.

I recommend trying the Ambient Obscurance or deferredAO that I listed above, before looking for an asset store solution. They are both free and have been much updated since the original Unity SSAO effect was released.

I've personally used HBAO from the asset store, which is why I recommend that one (I haven't used the others on the store, so I can't say for sure). I'll double check that it's working with Suimono 2.1.2 and get back to you shortly.

 

Yes, HBAO still works with Suimono 2.1.2... you'll need to set the 'Pixel Normal' mode to either "G buffer" if you're in deferred, or "reconstruct" if you're in forward. Using the pixel normals from the camera is where issues with Suimono arise. The original UNITY effect doesn't have the option to use a buffer or to reconstruct the normals, which is why it has problems with Suimono.

 

ADDITIONALLY... I just tried out the new AmbientOcclusion from the Unity CinematicEffects package, and it seems to work very well. You can download for free here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515

The HBAO still seems preferable though because it has some additional distance-based controls. I thought Unity would have put this into their new effect too, but oh well.