AQUAS Water/River Set - Water & Rivers for Mobile, VR, Web, Desktop

I wouldn't be too concerned yet. @dogmachris is usually pretty helpful with stuff like this, so let's wait to see what he says.

BTW, did you solve your tree clipping issue? It looks like a problem with the render queues. See this post for more info:
https://forum.unity3d.com/posts/2963027/

One trick I use is to duplicate the terrain. For the first, go to settings, and uncheck Draw under Trees and Detail Objects. Tag this terrain as Default, or Terrain, and make sure it's included in the Reflect Layers of the Aquas_Reflection script. Then go to the second copy, and uncheck Draw for the Base Terrain, while leaving Trees and Detail Objects checked. Tag this terrain as Trees, or NoReflect, and make sure this layer is excluded from the Reflect Layers of the Aquas_Reflection script. Be sure to also uncheck the terrain collider on one of the terrains so you don't duplicate the physics calculations. Now the water will reflect the main outline of the terrain, but not the trees. Due to the distorted reflection, this omission is hardly noticeable most of the time.

 

There's no two-sided shader for mobile. That's mainly for performance reasons. You might use one of the double sided desktop shaders. Then thing is, that the double sided shaders are being switched between color absorbing water and transparent water. This means, that a double sided mobile water would also require all underwater effects, to work the same as the double sided shaders. However, you might want to try using a double sided shader and a mobile shader together. Simply disable the mobile shader when you're underwater and enable the double sided shader with "underwater" ticked in the material inspector. That should do pretty much what you need.

 

Will have to look into that- at this point, I have no idea, I'm sorry to say.

 

That's because AQUAS seems to have a higher render queue value than the tree billboards. This only affects billboards. You can set the render queue value in the inspector of the waterplane. Set it to 2800, that should do. Setting it to -1 will set it to the default specified in the shader, which is 3000. Keep in mind, that manipulating the render queue might affet the interaction with other objects that are being rendered based on the render queue, so use wisely.

 

As you pointed out correctly, the FPS drop is being caused by the reflections. Keep in mind, that every object reflected means something is rendered multiple times (at least twice). If you have lots of objects that are not part of the terrain, you might put them on a separate layer and exclude that layer from the reflections. Alternatively if the trees are what causes most of the FPS drop, you might reduce the billboard distance.
Another option would be to reduce the far clipping plane of the reflection camera. You'd have to edit the reflection script however, to achieve that, because the reflection camera is defined and instantiated in there.

 

Never thought about that - brilliant.

 

@FargleBargle @rickblacker At this point, I don't know exactly what changed about the image effects in 5.6. I'll havew to look into it. If the namespace is still the same, importing the image effects specific to 5.6 might still work. However, if major changes occurred to the image effects in 5.6, it might indeed break AQUAS.

In such a case, I might have to change the way AQUAS handles the underwater and that in turn may limit the use of AQUAS to Unity 5.6 and above - OUCH! - I already see some discussion coming up. :S

 

The image effects look like they've been completely replaced. The old ones are now deprecated in the Unity 5.6 download, and users are being told to use the new integrated post-processing stack instead. This shouldn't really break Aquas, as long as the legacy image effects are still available, but Aquas might benefit from using the new integrated stack now that it's available. Unfortunately that would either involve discontinuing the old effects, or having two versions of Aquas.

 

I feel bad for you dogmarchris. Looks like you have a bit of unwanted, unplanned work ahead of you.
Hoping for the best!

 

I wonder if there are other dependencies that are no longer available which sit outside the ImageEffects folder.

 

Where do I set the render queue at? I've looked at the Aquas inspector for the water plain. Didn't see anything there.
Also, My issue seems to have gotten worse somehow. At designtime, the water is rendering behind the terrain. However, at runtime, it seems to show fine.

I'm really hoping I have not done unrepairable damage to my scene.

 

Just expand the AQUAS_Render Queue Editor (at the bottom of the Inspector view posted above). BTW, Aquas usually only displays properly in the Game view, so don't waste time trying to get it to look right in the Scene view. Just set the render queue as @dogmachris suggested above and you should be fine.

 

Hmmm.. It had been displaying properly in the past. I'd be ok if it didn't render pretty, just as long as I could at least see the waterline for placing assets.

 

Don't know why it used to work for you. It never has for me. I usually just add a plane to the scene to show the water level in Scene view, and set the camera to ignore the layer it's on in Game view. If there's a way to get Aquas to show in the Scene view window, maybe @dogmachris can enlighten both of us.

 

Yeah, that would be awesome. Would love to have it back in scene view!

 

@dogmachris @FargleBargle Thanks for the responses. I will try experimenting some more with this when I get home.

I think it might still look good if the trees are not reflected in the water, might look odd if there is something that is hidden behind trees but then visible in the water reflection but maybe that is not really noticeable, I need to test a bit. But it sounds like a lot of hassle having to create duplicate terrain tiles to get the trees ignored from the reflections, at the moment I have 64 terrain tiles in the world that get streamed in when needed.

btw. Would it be easy to edit the script so it ignores the terrain trees completely when creating the reflections? Or is that not possible when the trees are part of the terrain?

I'll also try changing the far clipping range and see if that still looks good.

I'm using world streamer for streaming the terrain tiles in, do you think it would make sense to tile the water plane as well? So there would be 64 Aquas water planes but only the 9 closest water tiles will be enabled in the scene at anytime. Or is it better to have fewer bigger planes?

 

I might be able to have AQUAS use image effects depending on whether the Unity veriosn is >= or < v5.6. Time to get coding.

 

Gotta straddle in here: @FargleBargle @rickblacker it seems you have the scene view camera set to orthographic mode. Setting it back to perspective should do the trick.

 

I don't know exactly how world streamer is built up, but if you can get it to have an AQUAS plane as a child object on each terrain tile, you can have AQUAS enable and disable at the same time as the terrain tiles. Disabled AQUAS tiles should have no impact on performance at all.

 

Ahh, good to know. I generally hate, and therefore avoid, using perspective views when setting up scenes in Unity or any other 3D app, so I've never really tried it.

 

This brings up a similar issue when using Aquas in multiple different scenes. I have a persistent player that moves between scenes, with different Aquas waterplanes in each scene. Since the AQUAS_LensEffects script keeps a list of all waterplanes it will be used with, and needs to be attached to the camera, I use a script to find all Aquas waterplanes in each new scene, and configure the camera and LensEffects script to use them. Would it be "simpler" to make the waterplanes all persistent, and simply enable/disable them as needed?

The only downside I can see is that I'll have 6 - 10 scenes when done, some having 3 or more waterplanes. That means I could end up with a stack of 20 - 30 waterplanes, with their associated effects modules hanging off of my camera, all waiting to be activated/deactivated when needed. Is that really the best way to manage this, or do you have a better suggestion? Is there a simpler way to turn waterplanes on and off, along with their associated camera effects? What I'd like to see would be a way to turn each of the entries in the AQUAS_LensEffects Waterplanes array on or off individually, along with their associated effects/caustics/etc, that could be called from another script with a simple one or two line command. This would be useful not only for me, but for anyone using multi-terrain streaming, which seems to be increasingly popular. Would this be possible in a future release, or is it already available and I've simply missed it?

 

Maybe @Acegikmo knows what to do? I know SF shaders when I see them
We need the light cookie to work to get cloud shadows on our terrain. Having them on the water plane would be nice but that isn't a top priority.
Oh I forgot, we are on Unity 5.5 (linear, deferred).

 

@dogmachris
The issue with the light cookie seems to somehow depend on the Render Mode of the directional light (auto vs important) and the Pixel Light Count in the Quality settings.
I've messed around with both and got a new issue. The water is divided into tiling meshes. Sometimes a mesh gets correctly lit, sometimes not when in play mode.
When in scene editing mode everything looks correct with Render Mode important and Pixel Light count set to anything higher than 0.

See this discothing to get an idea of the playmode vs scene mode:

 

Hi @dogmachris
Actually, my camera is set to Perspective already. I never changed it to ortho.
View attachment 225783

 

The settings in the image are for the game camera. I was talking about the scene camera. Have a look at the editor scene gizmo:


Try to click the little grey cube in the middle between the x-y-z indicators. That should switch between perspective and orthographic for the scene camera. Does that work?

 

Personally I would probably create a 2-dimensional array with a number for each water plane you want to use as vertical index and the associated settings for each water plane along the horizontal index. Then use a script that automatically sets up the underwater effects for each water plane according to that array based on which water plane you're currently closest to or so.
You can place all water planes and enable-disable them at will, but since AQUAS checks for them each frame, I wouldn't recommend putting them all into the list of water planes in the inspector of the lens effects script. For performance reasons I'd probably count the enabled planes instead, set the array's length accordingly and assign the enabled planes to it, whenever a scene change takes place.

Is that what you'd like to know?

 

Possibly. You lost me at "array" though. Not being an intuitive programmer, I'm not sure from your description how to implement this in code. As I said, I have a clunky way of dealing with this already. I was just looking for something a bit more elegant. I like the idea of arrays and lookup tables, not just for this, but for other game mechanics; I'm not there yet in terms of coding ability.

 

Hi @dogmachris , Im getting a really strange flickering effect underwater. Also a flickering on the edges (shorelines) of aquas. Not sure what the reason is. I have just done a simple setup, added terrain and camera, and added underwater.

 

Has anyone tried to get Aquas working with 5.6 yet? I've been working on other aspects of my level and have not tried to come back to this yet. But, getting to a point where I'd like to.

 

Hey, I was hoping someone could provide some guidance.

My environment has a large river running through it (Aquas). I want to to changer the color of the water to a browner (muddier) colour. So far all i can do is make it an orange\red colour that looks like dawn\dusk.

Anything suggestions?

 

@dogmachris
Any ideas what may be wrong with Light Cookies in conjunction with AQUAS? Have you tried contacting Acegikmo about it?

 

Hey, having a weird issue and looking for a solution. Aquas is running correctly in the editor, but when I build the project it doesn't render in the standalone player.

The project is VR. I'm using the standard SteamVR camera and the build is exporting to Windows as 64bit. Windows is running DirectX 12. Unity version 5.6.0f3, no errors in the console. Reflection script is disabled on the water plane. Again, it works perfectly when played in the editor. Any ideas?

 

@cleverfoxvr.

Was this a project upgraded from unity 5.5? I know that when I upgraded from Unity 5.5 to 5.6 and created a brand new Unity 5.6 project, imported Aquas, Aquas no longer worked. I guess the Unity upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6 removed a bunch of standard assets that Aquas uses. Not sure if this is what might be happening with your project though.

If you go back a page or two here in this thread, I made a comment and there was discussion about it.

@dogmachris
Any updates on how we can get Aquas up and running with 5.6?

Thanks!

 

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, AQUAS works with Unity 5.6.0f3. The old image effects that it depends on have been deprecated in favor of the new integrated post-processing stack, and are no longer included in the Unity download. They're still available for free from the asset store, though, so just download and install them, and AQUAS can still use them.

@dogmachris is aware of this situation, and should be hard at work on some kind of integration that would allow the new processing stack to work natively with AQUAS, but in the mean time, I've been experimenting with a new "underwater" post-processing profile that can be substituted for AQUAS' existing underwater effects, and so far it seems to work quite well.

 

Hmm... Ok, so I went back and tried to put Aquas back into a project that has been created in 5.5. I'm getting this error
Anyone else see this same error? If so, were you able to get past it?

 

No. More info might help though. It looks like this was triggered when you attempted to use the AQUAS Quick Setup script? You also say you were attempting to add AQUAS back into a project created in 5.5? Are you still at 5.5 or have you upgraded to 5.6? If so, have you also imported the legacy image effects pack I mentioned, or do you still have the old 5.5 versions from before?

I'd say re-import the legacy image effects from here, and then re-import AQUAS, and see if it still gives the same errors. You may need to purge your old AQUAS folder and Standard Assets > Effects > Image Effects and Editor > Image Effects folders before re-importing, to clear out any old junk. You may also need to change line 9 of the re-imported GlobalFog.cs script to this:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class GlobalFog : PostEffectsBase

(Without being marked as "public", it sometimes triggers errors from other scripts that call it.)

 

I'll check in the morning but I'm pretty sure I had already set that class to public. I know it's a known issue and pretty sure I already addressed it.

 

Ya. I only mentioned it because sometimes it reverts back after upgrading/re-importing, so you always need to verify that the change is still there. It's caught me out a few times, even when I thought I'd dealt with it already.

 

Hi Fargle
Yeah I double checked, I had already modified GlobalFog and made it public.
Correct, I created the project in 5.5, then upgraded to 5.6.
After the upgrade I still have all the ImageEffects files in both
- Assets/StandardAssets/Editor
- Assets/StandardAssets/Effects/ImageEffects

But, for grins, I'll get rid of all those and reimport.

I'll report back in a few.

 

Ok, none of that fixed the problem. The GOOD news is... I know why this is happening and have fixed it

I opened up AQUAS_QuickSetup.cs.
I put a break point in the function AddWater()
I found where the problem is. On line 107 of the source code

Code (CSharp):

1. GameObject aquasPrefab = (GameObject)AssetDatabase.LoadAssetAtPath("Assets/AQUAS/Prefabs/AQUASWater.prefab", typeof(GameObject));

aquasPrefab is null after this call. So, when the code is trying instantiate the prefab

Code (CSharp):

1. GameObject aquasObj = Instantiate(aquasPrefab);

It's throwing an exception.

And the reason aquasPrefab was null is because the code is using a hard coded assumed path to look for the prefab in the project structure. HOWEVER, that's not where I put Aquas. The way the code is structured, it assumes that you will pull the two individual folders
- Aquas
- Editor
and put those at the root of Assets. However, that's not what I did. I dragged the root Aquas folder off the hard drive and pulled it in which gave me a folder structure of
- Assets/Aquas/AQUAS
- Assets/Aquas/Editor

For grins, I modified this code to take into consideration my folder structure and the prefab loaded up fine. I didn't keep this as my solution to the problem.. Rather, I deleted all Aquas from my project and just imported the two aquas folders
- Aquas
- Editor
onto the root Assets folder and everything is fine now.

I'd like to keep Aquas all wrapped up together in it's own tidy little folder, but... I don't feel like going through all the code to try and find out where he has hard coded paths in place. On top of that, any time there is an update, I'd have to go do the same thing.

But, anyway, that was the issue. Up and running again.

Now, onto the NEXT issue with Aquas... How to improve performance. I'm running VR and I've got to get my FPS back up.

 

Lots of applications, including Unity's old image effects, place components in the main Editor folder, rather than creating their own Editor sub-folders. Most don't care if you move them, as long as they're still in an "Editor" folder (the same as resources in "Resources" folders), but there doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule about this. I used to micro-manage where things were installed, not just in Unity, but in Windows. Over the years I've learned to just go with the default locations most of the time, and save myself a lot of headaches. The only exception is if I create modified versions of an asset. These I store somewhere else, to avoid deleting/overwriting them during updates. I save my careful organization for the Hierarchy window, and leave the Project window alone for the most part.

Try to reduce expensive AQUAS reflections as much as possible (Check out my and @dogmachris's answers to @Paxew above). You might also want to check out some of@AdamGoodrich's terrain and SpeedTree optimization tutorials, if you use them: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

 

Cool, I will check those out. I turned off reflections. That did help. But, I'm all for other tutorials and help on performance.
Running VR, I need to squeak out as much as I can.

 

It's strange because AQUAS does work in 5.6.03, but like I said in the original post it only runs when I play the game in the editor. When I build the project the asset just doesn't do appear at all in the game.

 

Hey. Some of my players have this problem:

How can this problem be solved?

 

Hi,

Rusty a bit with my coding skills, but I tried using your code example above to make the borders disappear upon submersion. For some reason, it seems to just turn the borders off altogether. Please forgive my ignorance, but what am I doing wrong? Obviously, it doesn't appear to be returning the value for underwater to set borders true, but since it's been so long since I coded last, I'm not sure what's wrong. I admit it's probably something simple that I'm just missing. When I use it, it finally makes the borders invisible, but when I jump in the water I see the skybox instead of the borders.

Here's the C# script I made based upon your code:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

public class NewBehaviourScript : MonoBehaviour {

AQUAS_LensEffects myEffects;
GameObject borders;
// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
myEffects = GameObject.Find("UnderWaterCameraEffects").GetComponent<AQUAS_LensEffects>();
borders = GameObject.Find("Borders");
borders.SetActive(false);
}

// Update is called once per frame
void Update() {
if (myEffects.underWater)
{
borders.SetActive(true);
}
else
{
borders.SetActive(false);
}
}
}

My other question, since eventually I will be adding multiplayer, will this work on a per player basis, or will it cause issues? Please be patient with me--I haven't coded much in the last 15-20 years. Before that it was Basic, Fortran, Supertool, and toward the end--just before I changed career tracks, it was C++ and Assembly. So, I'll get up to speed eventually, but I'm still struggling to loosen the hinges on this old brain.

 

Hi @CaptainStardog
What sets myEffects.underWater to true? Are you sure it's ever being toggled from false to true?

And what kind of langue was Supertool? Never heard of that one and I've been developing for 20 years.

 

Try this (HideBorders.cs):

Code (CSharp):

1. public class HideBorders : MonoBehaviour {
2.  
3.     private AQUAS_LensEffects myEffects;
4.     private GameObject borders;
5.     private bool wet = false;
6.  
7.     // Use this for initialization
8.     void Start()
9.     {
10.         myEffects = GameObject.Find("UnderWaterCameraEffects").GetComponent<AQUAS_LensEffects>();
11.         borders = GameObject.Find("Borders");
12.         borders.SetActive(false);
13.     }
14.  
15.     // Update is called once per frame
16.     void Update()
17.     {
18.         if (myEffects.underWater && !wet)
19.         {
20.             Debug.Log("Camera is wet.");
21.             borders.SetActive(true);
22.             wet = true;
23.         }
24.         if (!myEffects.underWater && wet)
25.         {
26.             Debug.Log("Camera is dry.");
27.             borders.SetActive(false);
28.             wet = false;
29.         }
30.     }
31. }

I added the "wet" boolean so Update only needs to do something when the status actually changes, and some Debug Logs, which can be removed once you're sure it's all working properly. Otherwise, all I did was add "private" modifiers on the variable declarations. To use, just put the script on any game object in the scene, and it should just work, provided AQUAS is set up normally.

@rickblacker: The script checks the "underWater" boolean in the AQUAS_LensEffects.cs script during Update, and responds to any changes.

 

So you guys have nothing for me on this one? Does the dev ever show up here?

 

Sorry, I really don't. I just started using Aquas a couple weeks back. He does show up, he could be busy making changes to the Aquas code base. The Unity 5.6 update had an impact on Aquas. nothing you can't work around but he may be busy working on an Aquas update for that.

 

We were using it to code changes to database development and mining at a major university healthcare HMO/insurance office. I really can't say more. Might have simply been the environment for another language combined with a proprietary interface. We were assigned jobs, we ran them in test, they got moved over to another office that implemented them into the actual code on live servers.

I left the industry because I didn't have the skills to go into game development, couldn't afford to keep pursuing the education to amount to anything in terms of a decent job, and couldn't see myself sitting in a grey cubicle in an insurance/whatever office for the next 20-30 years making absolutely zero positive impact in life other than making sure their insurance bills and mail got to the proper address on a regular basis. What's more, they hired 3 temps for the job, telling us all we'd have the ability to get a permanent position at the end of it all. When it came time, they opened one permanent position and had three of us temps compete for it. They were perfectly willing to allow the two who didn't take the position to stay on with no benefits as before. Imagine, having a family, going to school, and working full time as a coder for a major university HMO/insurance office and having no healthcare... it was really too much. Also, the three of us temps were friends before they pitted us against each other in the ring to get the one permanent opening. At that point, I'd had enough working in corporate America. That wasn't my first rodeo as they say. I needed something else for my life, I went after it, and now I'm back looking for what I really was after all those years ago--but heard too many negatives about from people in my life who didn't think that video games would ever amount to anything. As a result, I made them happy, but failed to make myself happy. As a further result, my B.S. tolerance levels are zero. Life is too short.

As for your first question, I had one semester of C++ and Assembly. I can remember how to code Hello World and not much else of any use to me. As for what sets it to true? Good question. I lifted the code verbatim from the example the dev posted in this thread earlier, made a C# script in Unity, pasted it in place. Now I'm back looking for what is probably obvious to you. Thankfully, someone else helped me with that.

8P Sorry, I was spelling it wrong. It was Suprtool from Robelle. Here's a link (hope that's okay): http://www.robelle.com/ftp/qrg/suprqrg.pdf.