Graphics Hydroform Ocean Renderer [RELEASED]

Thanks for your reply.

 

I'm building a museum interactive requiring an NPR low poly 'cartoon look' ocean.

I realize your emphasis is more on realism, but would it be possible to achieve a 'toon' shading in Hydroform?

Some reference our team likes is this Unity work-in-progress, Flotsam by Pajama Llama Games. Here's a still image:


Here is an (infinite) ocean preset I tailored in Suimono that uses some of the colors and relative wave heights of the above reference:


- Reflection mapping. One immediate difference is the reflection mapping: is it possible to supply a reflection map separate from the sky dome present in the Unity scene? A common practice in CGI rendering, this would allow us to create a spherical projection map to use as ocean reflection while using the cloud and sky map you see above for the environment. Is this possible in Hydroform?

- Can you suggest a way to create an intentionally faceted look to the water surface? For instance, I assume that the surface normals are rendered with Gouraud shading to smooth the face edges -- could I turn that off to see hard edges? Here's an image of faceted penguins that fit the world we'd like to conform the water to. I should have noted that the the cartoon look we're interested in is also 'low poly' in this way:


I assume that it's trivial to cull the sub-surface visibility of the bird character, above -- currently the tail pixels render as white -- but I haven't stumbled on the setting to reduce transparency/increase opacity. Where should I look?

Thanks for any thoughts!

 

Yes it would be possible to do a Hydroform 'toon' look with faceted lighting. It would require a shader programmer who knows how to code such lighting however; it doesn't support this 'out of the box'.

For reflections, you can specify whatever skybox you would like for reflections. I'm not sure what you mean by 'separate' from the sky dome - you can replace the sky box reflection so that it is different from the sky if you like.

I don't know how to fix the white tail pixels for the Suimono water, you'd have to ask that developer

 

Thanks for the fast reply! My question about culling surfaces below the water line was meant for Hydroform, even though I was illustrating it with my Suimono scene. Is it fairly simple to have objects that can't be seen in refraction/SS when under water?

I understand your response to my question of 'cel look'; if you have any examples of NPR water rendering in Hydrodorm, I'm all ears! While I agree that writing shaders is always a possibility, I'm hoping to start with with a framework that has some provision for NPR, so that I'm not fighting the core capabilities on offer. Thanks again.

 

I was hoping to do a quick example, but I just don't have time, I'm on a tight deadline on another project. Hydroform is essentially just a heightfield like terrain, so I don't see any reason why traditional NPR techniques could not be applied to it.

Culling surfaces below the water line is easy in Hydroform, just turn off refraction.

 

I might have missed the information, but does this assett support interiors of ships below the waterline? In other words, is there a way to the water to stop rendering inside a certain mesh?

 

There is no support for that at this time.

 

Thank you for the information!

 

I've just bought Hydroform and promise a review. ;-)

I've seen in your forum that you can model your GPU shader in script, which we could use to accommodate bouyancy:
"I just simulate the shader in script for a getHeight() call, so bouyancy calculations are possible" (https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/hydroform-ocean-renderer-released.385545/#post-2512259)

How would this be possible?

Is there any interoperability with existing bouyancy tools in the Unity store?, e.g.:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/181

Thanks!

 

Thank you so much for supporting this product!

The GetHeight() call in script essentially does the same calculation as the shader to determine the water height at any given point. Look at the box demo to see how to use the script function to get the height and set gameObject positions accordingly.

Hydroform is not currently integrated with any buoyancy assets, but I imagine all you'd have to do is find where they get the water height in script and replace it with the Hydroform water height lookup.

 

Hey!
I'm super excited about this asset, and have been reading this thread, but I haven't found concrete answers to some of my questions. Need a little bit of information before I can consider purchasing it.
I need it for an HTC Vive project where the player will see a big wave coming toward them and submerging them in water.
I have a video of my current prototype with water here (2:13 - 2:32) for reference:

1. Obviously, this needs underwater effects like caustics, being able to see lightsources and reflections from the sun +skybox above the water while submerged. + Underwater audio effects. Are these in, and if not, any concrete plans of when they will be?
2. It also needs to allow me to control the size, frequency and timing of waves in a detailed way. For example which direction they come from. What is the max height of the waves? Is it possible to create a "slow motion" effect so really huge waves come so slowly that they almost appear to be standing still?
3. I would like to simulate a blood-red ocean in some of the scenes, so the opacity of the water needs to be adjustable, as well as the color. Is this possible?
4. It needs to work in VR without obliterating my framerate on the Vive (needs to be above 90fps). I'm on an i7 3820, using a Geforce GTX 1060. Have you had a chance to check out how your asset performs in VR?

Cheers,
Mariam

 

Hi Mariam, thanks for your interest in Hydroform!

There isn't really a way to have a single big wave like a tsunami come in with Hydroform; all the waves have roughly the same height (except for where the water gets shallow).

1. Underwater + effects is likely many weeks away. For the next 2-3 months I have very little time to work on Hydroform, but after that, things will pick up rapidly.

2. You can control direction, size, frequency, and speed of waves, yes. There is no max height of the waves, you can scale them up to whatever you want. At some point they may look odd though, Hydroform is designed to look like 10 foot waves, so if you scale that up to 40 feet, it may make the scale of the scene look off

3. You can change the color of the ocean. I do have adjustable opacity working, but not released yet, I'm hoping to have that up in a couple of weeks.

4. Hydroform is very fast - without drawing anything else, it renders in the thousands of frames per second. One thing to note on VR - dynamic reflections do not work properly in VR, so you would only have the skybox reflected in the water.


Best,
-Brian

 

Thanks so much for the reply!

 

Hi,

Loving Hydroform - but am getting GC allocated memory every frame - which is generally a bad thing.



Any thoughts on how to get rid of this ?



Here is a massive test terrain i am experimenting with for Gaia 2.0. Your water looks great

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Hey Adam,

I was unaware it was leaking, I'll take a look at it when I have time.

How to get rid of the black pixels? It looks like a shadowbuffer problem. Is it present with Hydroform turned off? Is it present with GlobalFog turned off?


-Brian

 

Dont worry about that - just some shadows. Was more interested in the memory issue

 

Oh good haha. Yeah I don't have an immediate fix for the leak, I'm slammed with other work, but I'll definitely do a pass on it and see what's going on.

 

First of all, nice asset! Was a instant buy from me! But sadly, and that is what i need, it doesn't support any kind of day night cycle, as far as i see.

I am using AzureSky for my Day night cycle system and i tried a lot to connect them together, but nothing works. Did i miss something? Or is it just not possible

 

Kevin I will refer you to a different asset for creating cartoony water, Hydroform is meant for realistic assets and is still in development phase. Here is a complete system which you can use specifically for cartoon water:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/71207

Xix I noticed that your water shader has obtained a 4 star rating putting it on par with most other water solutions on the store, it can't be related to performance since yours seems to be the fastest on the store based on what you have said and since I am still waiting on some more improvements before I purchase it I am wondering why it got that rating?

 

That's probably an option I should add. It shouldn't be too difficult to do yourself, you have to do something like:

finalWaterColor = Color.Lerp( DayLightColor, NightColor, Mathf.Clamp01( Vector3.Dot( Vector3.up, -LightVector) ) );

You have full access to the colors in Hydroform via script.

 

[QUOTE="Xix I noticed that your water shader has obtained a 4 star rating putting it on par with most other water solutions on the store, it can't be related to performance since yours seems to be the fastest on the store based on what you have said and since I am still waiting on some more improvements before I purchase it I am wondering why it got that rating?[/QUOTE]

I would love to know that answer myself It only has 3 ratings and 1 review and the 1 review was 5 stars and very short, so not a lot of feedback to go on. I'm always open to suggestions and feedback on how to improve the asset!

If I were to point out the biggest weakness to Hydroform vs other assets is that it doesn't currently support underwater rendering, which is a high priority going forward.

 

Hmm that's very unusual, people don't usually rate assets for missing features that were never mentioned in the first place....It won't be long now until I purchase it, hows the shoreline coloration coming along that I suggested before?

Also is it currently possible to make the light behave all nice like this picture of the Playway water system:

Finally do you have your update list available here so we can see what you plan on implementing in the near future for this plugin?

 

My experience with reviews on the internet is that people rate things for all kinds of reasons including perceived missing pieces. If you've read this thread I've been very upfront about what the asset can and cannot do. I think it does what I set out to do very well - render an infinite ocean with geometric waves very quickly and it looks pretty nice too.

I'm pretty happy with the current lighting model, there are other things which I think need to be added/improved.

Yeah, here's what I'm working on, most of them are complete:

• Fade out SSS at higher altitudes so water looks less repetitive from high angles
• Add water 'clarity' field so users can control how far out the water is clear before it goes opaque
• Add control for what depth the wave damping kicks in on the shoreline
• Add coloration for shallow water
• Look at small memory leak
• Look at adding support for Day/Night lighting

Longer term the priority is on underwater rendering, mobile support and better VR support (dynamic reflections)

 

1.When you say infinite, is there a way to make it finite instead like to cover only the surface area of a small plane?
Because in some cases I may want to have multiple of these at different elevations like for small ponds or puddles and. Here is an example image attached with the question more clearly....

2.Preferably the underwater feature is a toggle on/off feature for optimisation as well.

3.Is the Fog feature toggle-able as well because it may not play with other fog solutions like this one: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/67665
So rather than asking for integration I would simply like the fog to be allowed to be toggled....unless of course you are claiming you have volumetric fog as well that can beat that one, then perhaps I won't need that other one at all xd.

4.When you have fixed the memory leak, let me know and I will purchase it.

 

1. Nope, it's designed to efficiently render as a full ocean, you cannot have patches or holes in it.

2. Right it would not render underwater fx unless they are visible

3. Fog can be toggled in both deferred and forward rendering

4. Ya I will announce it.

 

Hmm that might pose a problem, if it doesn't cover the surface area of your standard geometry like a plane but instead is an infinite game object that might pose some limitations to level design, nothing I can't work around for now.

I guess I will have to find out when I test it.

 

Any timeframe estimation on when the next update will be released, say a few days, a week or 2?

I can't wait to buy it xd as the author of Hx Volumetric Lighting said compatibility shouldn't be an issue and if it was it would be easy to solve.

 

Update in maybe a couple of weeks depending on my schedule and how long it takes to get it done.

Are you using deferred rendering? You must use GlobalFog to fog the water in deferred, but that may work fine with Hx Volumetric Lighting, I don't know.

 

Oh wow a couple of weeks to fix the memory leak alone? Sounds quite a long while.
I am using Forward Rendering.

 

I don't even know if there is a memory leak, and if there is it's tiny, so no, that's low priority but will be investigated.

 

Ok so I just purchased Hydroform but right now I am getting 40-fps and 23 MS on what I thought would be a 0.5 MS 600+ fps scene. I also can't figure out why the demo scene environment is pitch black.
I think with all the boasting about how it's all GPU driven I would have thought it would run super fast.

PLEASE tell me I did something wrong somewhere because you said it ran average 1500 fps?
It looks too pretty to run at 40 fps .

FYI I also get these warnings:
- Shader warning in 'Hydroform/Brim': gradient instruction used in a loop with varying iteration, forcing loop to unroll at Assets/HydroForm/Resources/WaterFunc.cginc(321) (on d3d11)
- Shader warning in 'Hydroform/Brim': use of potentially uninitialized variable (calcReflect) at Assets/HydroForm/Resources/WaterFunc.cginc(363) (on d3d11)

 

OK settle down, if we can't get you sorted I'm happy to give you a refund, I guarantee my work.

1) The rocks are black because I didn't ship the asset with lightmaps. Easily solved, go to Windows/Lighting, hit the 'Scene' tab and click the 'Build' button in the lower right corner. This is covered in the setup section of the manual, which you might want to go over.

2) How fast does the scene run with the water turned off? What kind of GPU do you have? Are you running on a laptop? Since it is GPU based, obviously the GPU will play a large factor in how fast the scene will render. The island scene runs at 600+ fps on my Geforce 660. It is not reasonable to expect it to run that fast on every GPU available.

3) The warnings can be ignored; if they keep returning the manual shows how to get rid of them.

4) There are loads of ways to speed up the rendering if you want to target lower end GPUs. The manual covers the many ways to optimize Hydroform - look at the Performance Tuning section. Try lowering the vertex density, patch size, and pix complexity. Then look at turning off dynamic reflections.

 

Working on Gaia 2 and made this earlier - great job with Hyrdrofoam - looking forward to seeing it develop!!



Gaia is on sale at the moment as well, prior to the imminent launch of version 2. Version 2 will be a free upgrade.

 

Nice Adam, Gaia is looking amazing!

 

Thanks - working hard on it and very happy with how its coming along!

 

Did the lightmapping and ignored warnings for now but I it looks like messing with the settings at most gave me 80-120 fps max with the ocean by itself and nothing else going on. At that point however the ocean looks like a flat plane and isn't moving.

I think one of the ways this could be avoided is by providing a unthrottled (vsync off) fps counter like the playway water demo did on your demo too.

I have a high end pc with ssd, i7, 8gb etc but my video card is a radeon 5700 series which is a 2013 video card. It runs full games like crisis and battlefield 3 without any problem and battlefield 3 had water that looked pretty similar to yours so this low fps shouldn't be happening.

I think the refund option would at this point seem to be the only option .

 

In the art of game development, its my opinion that the performance or not of a game is based on the skill of the developer. If you are looking for some advice on performance optimisation here is a blog post I created that might be useful : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/mobile-unity-scene-optimisation-with-gaia/

Personally, I like Hydroform because it looks good, is simple to use, and seemed quite light weight from a performance perspective.

 

Your showing the wrong card, this is my current video card and the statistics.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+5750

My card is a radeon 5750. I also had a GTX 770 for a while and you can't trust those statistics because they test based on bottleneck power, I am not trying to bottleneck or overclock my card to achieve those stats, I just want a water plugin that is in the background. I have some evidence that there is a fps depreciation but that is caused by the Hydroform plugin and we will see how it goes but I have been in this industry for a while, I know my stuff and while I won't point the finger directly at hydroform I know something is going on, I will keep you guys posted.

P.s. This is Unity we are talking about after all, I didn't have any issues running Unreal Engine 4 water.

 

That is not the best card around, but it should be running Hyrdroform faster than that. My 6 year old laptop with an Intel 4000 chip runs it faster than that.

Let's get you refunded, send me your invoice number so I can get that started. Let's not turn this thread into a flame war please.

 

Hi there please standby, I am in communication with the Unity team about a serious fps regression regarding Unity 5.4, 5.5 and the 5.6 Beta. This fps regression reduces performance by an incredibly high magnitude and is triggered by your plugin somehow and lasts until something unknown removes the bug until you trigger it again with your scene. This bug reduces the overall performance of the editor by about 6 times. I had one other plugin that performed at 600 fps by default and when the bug activated after I opened it later the fps was now 100fps.

If I cannot get this bug resolved with them within a week or two I will send my invoice for the refund.
Regardless I will leave a 5 star rating right now for your support.

This is the bug case number is 891322 In case you ever encounter a similar issue:
https://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?891322_f458a7u4gvdn4mot

 

Just out of interest, what other assets are you using in your scene?

 

Hi Xix,
Looks great, I have a few questions before purchasing if you don't mind:

• We've had to move to 5.6b11 - has the plugin been tried in 5.6?
  
• Can the ocean be a single tile rather than infinite
• Can the entire system be scaled
• Performant in VR

Thanks

 

Keeping thread clean, keep gossip to a minimum, nobody comes here for anything other than Hydroform.

 

You removed my answer to Gmax as well xd. Gmax I didn't add anything else when testing the Hydroform Tropical Island Demo. The test was the raw demo scene provided.

 

The Eye of Sauron sees everything

 

Thank you, here are my answers:

• No
• No
• Not sure what you mean by that, the waves can be scaled up if you want and they falloff at shore. In the next update you will be able to control at what depth they begin to falloff
• I don't know if it's performant, I have heard that it works in VR except for dynamic reflections

Hope that helps!

 

FWIW on performance, I was finishing up some work on Hydroform today and it was running about 150fps in the tropical scene. I rebooted, then closed down Cortana (ughh windows 10), and some nVidia things (nvidia share, etc), and it was back to 600fps. My GPU is a few years old Intel i5, so it can't get to 600+fps unless everything in the background is off.

It's also worth noting that there isn't a big difference to the GPU if something is running 600fps or 150fps - at 600fps the GPU isn't actually running 4x faster, it's just idle less and taking the CPU commands more frequently. When it starts to get down to 60-80 fps, then framerate starts correlating to actual GPU latency.

 

Hahaha

 

I got lucky enough to do some tests while the fps bug is not active today.
The Tropical Island demo renders at 40-70 fps on average, this is an unedited demo but I did bake precomupted lighting and enable reflections from the skybox - the island looks pretty nice with these on.

The good news is since the bug is gone for now when I disable the Ocean it renders at 1000+ fps instead of the 200 cap which the bug forced on me for all my projects while it was active.

Also I was able to actually do some proper tests.
I found that setting just the pixel complexity from 4 to 1 and vertex density from 1 to 0.2 after hitting apply it gave me about 200 fps. That's not too bad considering the water still looks decent and I didn't optimize any other part of the ocean.

Because of this discovery I will no longer be considering getting a refund.
For whatever reason I am sure a bit more tweaking will help me find the true bottleneck, as you said it should still be performing higher so if you have some other things you know of that might not be usual suspects that could impact performance other than what's in the documentation, perhaps hidden stuff like AA settings, Gamma or Forward, Shadow Quality settings that could jumpstart the fps please let me know.

It was changing the Shadow Quality to medium alone that made the Hx Volumetric lighting go from 140 fps to 1000!

Sorry for the trouble. Hopefully Unity will bring a patch for the fps bug in due time and now that I gave a good test without it I can settle down, few!

I look forward to seeing future updates and of course any optimizations you have planned.

 

Thank you for the kind review SilverStorm! Also try reducing the patch size for better performance!