SUIMONO 2.0 - Interactive Water System

Does raising the Near clip help at all? From 0.1 to say 0.3 or 0.5? It's a bit unintuitive, but the Unity depth buffer is front weighted and raising the clip plane even just a little can often help these types of situations.

 

No, I raised it up to 1 and still get the same issue. I even tried it on the Suimono2_Advanced_Demo.scene and the same issue appears

 

@Rotary-Heart Yes I see what you mean now. This is probably due to recent changes with Unity Depth settings (they reversed everything a couple versions ago) and I had not noticed this side effect when I put out the last Suimono update. I'll take a look and see what I can do here for the next Suimono update. In the meantime, you might want to consider turning off the Module's Transparency setting... this might not be an ideal solution, but may do the trick until I can get a real fix.

 

Alright I will try that one out. Thanks, I'll wait for the fix on the next update

 

@chingwa Is there any way to make ocean waves always align with the shoreline, so they're always coming in to the shore? My scene is a single, large island with a single Suimono object for the ocean. The waves come into shore on one side of the island, but they come out of the shore on the other side. I can write a script to adjust the wave direction based on the player's position, but I wanted to see if there's an easier way.

 

@Dwight_Everhart Yes there is a way, you need to add a shoreline object prefab to your scene. You'll see it in the suimono prefabs folder, it's a plane which you scale and stretch to fit around your island (or anywhere else you want shoreline effects. It will detect the depth of terrain and objects below your water surface, and you can turn on the debug view to see how it's calculating depth and make adjustments. This will then automatically be passed to any suimono objects in your scene.

Note that this doesn't actually change the direction that waves travel, but it instead adds wave like effects around the shoreline areas that do flow in direction of your island. If you need to see an example, check out the advanced demo scene. You can see how it effects the water simply by turning the shoreline object on and off as it's playing.

 

"Upcoming Features: Underwater light ray FX + Improved River Support" ... when will these arrive?

 

@FlyHigh Both these features are on my priority list, but as for a release date it is still yet to be determined.

 

@chingwa Thank you for pointing me to the shoreline object. You describe it in your excellent documentation, but I overlooked it. However, adding it to my scene didn't seem to make a difference, except for adding periodic flashes of lines to the water surface:



The water already had foam around where the terrain and water intersect, and, as you said, the wave direction didn't change. I'm probably not using the shoreline object correctly. I also had some problems after removing the shoreline object from the scene. Tesselation stopped working, and the appearance of the water changed. It looked simpler. Perhaps the shoreline object changed some properties of the water surface object. I had to reset my scene using version control to get tesselation working again.

But it doesn't matter. The ocean looks very good as it is, and I wrote a simple script that adjusts the ocean's flowDirection property to point at the center of the island, based on the player's position. However, I noticed that changing this property completely resets the wave pattern on the entire surface of the ocean. I had hoped I could change the wave direction gradually, as the player moved around the island, but the sudden change in the water surface precludes this, so I'm only changing the wave direction when the player is not near the ocean. It's not an ideal solution, and I'll have to revisit this issue before I release the game, but the game is still early in development, and this is good enough for a prototype.

Thanks again for your help. I'm amazed by how good Suimono's ocean looks! If it's possible to add support for waves that automatically flow towards the shoreline, please add that to my wish list for Suimono. But I'm very pleased with Suimono. It's given my game an ocean that looks great, with minimal integration effort. Thank you for all your hard work on this asset!

 

I'm glad you found a solution, at least for now. I have made some changes to the shoreline objects since the latest release that might help in your situation, though I'm really not sure why it seemed to corrupt the tessellation on you. I'm able to turn shoreline object on and off at will without any affect on the water surface. Sounds like a bug somewhere for sure.

 

Any estimates? So like in 2-3 months? What exactly does "Improved River Support" mean? Is the current system not good enough to make rivers? I am thinking of buying EasyRoads3D Pro which can make rivers. Could I add SUIMONOs water in that river? Is this compatible with that asset?

 

Hi, I keep getting these 999+ errors on basic setup with 2.1.3 using my camera:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.FixedUpdate () (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:685)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.SetCullFunction () (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:1512)
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.LateUpdate () (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:526)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.DecodeHeightPixels (Single texPosx, Single texPosy, Int32 texNum) (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:1343)
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.CalculateHeights (Vector3 testObject) (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:1460)
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.SuimonoGetHeightAll (Vector3 testObject) (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:1241)
Suimono.Core.SuimonoModule.StoreSurfaceHeight () (at Assets/SUIMONO - WATER SYSTEM 2/SCRIPTS/SuimonoModule.cs:739)

 

Hello,
I'm here to report Suimono does not work with the .NET scripting backend. The .NET scripting backend is necessary for a game to run correctly on Xbox One when built for UWP (using the "Windows Store" build target in Unity). The errors are related to operations regarding IO stream; it seems the UWP .NET backend does not support StreamReader. A quick look at the code points to this code being used only for getting and applying water presets from file. There are two errors produced for Suimono at build time of my project, preventing the project from building a UWP solution.

I don't know if accessing water presets is necessary or possible during runtime, but I would suggest isolating code for the editor from code for runtime.

For now, I have no choice but to use a different water system, which is majorly disappointing because Suimono is amazing.

 

Thanks for the reply. I'm on a Mac, is that why it doesnt work? There's no way around it?

 

My post was not in response to yours; I am reporting a separate issue.

 

Sorry, read it too fast It should work on a Mac though!

 

Hi guys, Sorry for the late reply, I've been out of town and away from my email for the last week. I was out in nature looking at REAL water for a change....

@FlyHigh No estimates on improved rivers yet. My ultimate goal is to have a spline based procedural river mesh creation tool that would allow you to simply draw your river object directly in your scene. I hit some issues with the experimental mesh building component I was working on, so this is stalled until I can get this worked out. Currently EasyRoads3D does not produce the correct mesh coordinates for use in Suimono (meaning the mesh layout and uvs are not what Suimono expects, so rivers do not render appropriately), so if you were getting it just for this I would not recommend it at this time. I've tested with the latest pro version (both 2.x and 3.x).

Suimono expects river mesh UV layout to be in a top-down planar orientation. You can read more about this here: http://tanukidigital.com/forum/index.php?topic=937.0

@MilesSmiles I'm not sure, but all these null warning make me think something got corrupted on install. I recommend deleting any Suimono objects (module and surface) from your scene, removing the Suimono camera effect from your camera, and deleting the Suimono folder from your project. Then try reinstalling from scratch. After installing all you need to do is drag a SuimonoModule prefab into your scene (first) and then drag a SuimonoSurface prefab into your scene(second).

@Ar7ific1al Did you also send me an email? If you did then please check your email, I sent a testpatch that might fix this for you this morning. If you didn't send me an email then please email me at konnichiwa@tanukidigital.com and I can send you the test patch as well. I'm hoping the test fixes the WindowsStore export issue, but if not then definitely let me know.

 

On 5.6.0f3 using Suimono 2.1.3 the CustomMesh check box does not show up on the SuimonoSurface_Object script in the editor by default, you have to switch to debug mode then enable it, took me a while to figure out but got it.

 

@Ranter1337 Do you mean it's hidden, or that the checkbox doesn't activate?

 

I'm looking at buying an ocean/water system for one of my current projects which involves large, flying vehicles. I've a case where a vehicle will hover over water where ideally there'll be visual depressions under its boosters, along with particles and other effects. Is that something that can be achieved with Suimono?

I'm also interested in wakes from vehicles that are more than just particles. The Suimono demo shows refractive ripples around objects, how much control is there over those?

 

@angrypenguin There is an included fx initiation system that works with particle effects. It lets you control various aspects of particle spawning, in relation to water height and other water related variables. You can use as many of these fx objects as you need to create disturbance effects from flying vehicles.

The refractive ripples are indeed just particle FX using the above mentioned system. In this case they are using a special shader that's deeply integrated into the Suimono rendering system. However, you can duplicate the effect, add it to the system, and customize it however you would like.

Trail wakes that you would see from a boat is something that Suimono does not currently include. I've experimented in the past but have not had results that I was happy with yet. It's likely possible to rig up your own system using the included particle effects as an example and guide though.

 

Thanks for the clarification @chingwa. That was the impression I got from your demo, but I thought I should check.

Another question: is there a built-in way to exclude areas from an infinite ocean in your system? I've got structures that go below sea level that ought not to be flooded, and separate bodies of water that shouldn't be treated as a part of the ocean.

 

@angrypenguin currently there is not a way to exclude water areas, unfortunately. If you have an infinite ocean in the scene and go below the water level it will activate the underwater effect.

I have been doing some experiments, for future water rendering that indeed allows for exclusion of areas and "volume" water rendering... though I'm not 100% decided yet if Suimono will go this way yet, as it actually requires a whole new water rendering system. I still need to make sure I'm able to fit in most current features before committing to it, so it's all very much experimental at this point. With a bit of luck this will be coming in "Suimono 3.0" at some point in the future.

 

Hmmm, I don't know if there have been any recent updates that might have caused this, but I seem to have trouble importing SUIMONO. It just holds on this

Normally never have this problem.

 

@Kaven-Co-Games I'm not sure why it would stall, especially there! What you can do is to uncheck the entire 'Demo' folder in the import list box. You don't need the demo to run Suimono in your own project.

 

Edit: Doh, if you saw the message via email completely ignore it. I thought the bake seemed a little quick. Closed and reopened Unity and looked at the occlusion data and it was incomplete. For some reason Unity wasn't baking everything successfully. Another bake of the occlusion data and everything is working great.

 

Hi Dustin, I'm not really sure why this would be happening. Suimono does technically use it's own form of occlusion culling for Suimono Surface objects, it should track these objects and refrain from rendering them when they are outside the camera frustrum, but this does not work for the Infinite Ocean mode. I'm not sure why having suimono in your scene would interfere with scene occlusion though. I might recommend turning off Suimono, rebaking your scene culling, and then turn Suimono back on without updating the occlusion bake?

 

Yeah it actually had nothing to do with Suimono at all. It was a Unity glitch. Unity itself didn't finish baking all of its occlusion zones so it thought the water was occluding stuff that it wasn't. When I got it to finish rebaking everything worked swimmingly.

 

Excellent! Glad to hear all is working now.

 

How about creating a 3rd water plane option, so one could create an ocean out of tiles? That way we could piece together an ocean where it's needed/ wanted and leave out tiles where we don't want it to be. Kind of similar to how Map Magic lets you create terrain tiles.
This would also have the benefit that the wave direction/strength could be different on each individual tile.

 

@chingwa Are you actually working on fixing the VR problems or is that not going to happen?

 

OK, Time for some Experimental "Suimono 3.0" Talk:

@DesertRaven The problem with doing water in tiles, as it currently stands, is A) it would not be possible to match up the water texture tiling, and B) performance would eventually suffer greatly in a multi-tile system. However I do have a better solution for this regarding the experimental updates I spoke of above... It's not something I really want to talk too much about yet, as things are still in flux and may change, and I'm still not sure if it's 100% feasible.

That being said the goal is to render water areas (both surface and underwater) into multiple off-screen buffers, then use these buffers to reconstruct water rendering directly in the camera. This allows, for example, being able to define exactly where the water renders using rectangular meshes which can overlap, and water surface and undersurface will render only where the meshes are displayed... so you can build the water volume into your scene exactly as you see fit.

The image below shows a basic scene and setup. So far I have the prototype working with normal rectangular meshes, but any 3d shape should work (needs testing). There are currently problems with overlap which is why I'm only showing one mesh, but one benefit of doing water like this is there is essentially no additional cost to rendering multiple water areas. You can have as many water volumes and as large as you want and the processing time should be the same. So you could see how you could build water volumes around a certain terrain feature, or to exclude certain areas. I do want to allow the use of "subtractive" meshes so you could exclude water from the middle of a volume as well (needs testing!).

Another benefit of this would be better multi camera support. Since it reconstructs water based on camera position, the current limitations regarding multi-cam and VR projects should be a thing of the past (needs testing). There is of course a performance hit for each camera that you render the water with, but I'm pretty confident this is the best way for Suimono to go forward ( i.e. tear it apart and rebuild it from scratch ).

 

@Baraff Full VR support (with transparency and proper reflections) is simply not feasible in the current version due to the architecture of the rendering method that the water uses. So, no, I am not attempting to work VR support into Suimono 2.0... However, there is a possible light at the end of the VR compatibility tunnel regarding future versions. See the above post regarding "Suimono 3.0".

 

Okay, being more of an artist, I do understand point A and a little bit of the technicality of point B.
So I will only "stress" on A:
I get it, even with an overlap there would be weird edges visible where one tile meets the other, in a 2D water surface this would work better.
But wouldn't using a procedural wave surface fix that problem? Would't the camera only render the tiles visible to the camera similar as flying over a Map Magic terrain?
And as far as the underwater effects go, could they be triggered in active tile areas only?

I know, I don't understand much about the technicality and coding, so forgive me my nativity.
One of the draw backs of the asset store is that most developers won't get a chance to work together. It would be beneficial if you could discuss or collaborate with the MM guy Dennis or the guy from Easy Road Raul for an advanced river tool. BTW, I found another amazing path tool for terrains:
Instant Road Path by
Bengkel Mang Dadan Check it out, if something like that could be used for rivers?

However, I love your Work, I'm very happy with Suimono. I'm confident that Suimono 3 will be another great milestone in Unity water systems.

 

Looks great.
I would advise to be cautious on adding performance drain though, which may mean at a minimum disabling some of those features if not needed (although often that does not help much). We'd like to see Suimono getting lighter as its a big drain on busy scenes already. Although perhaps copying and duplicating a 'tile' that way can speed it up ... in which case fantastic.

I guess posts and requests on this have been there since the beginning.
I remember experimenting with some mask/image in Suimono to achieve this too.
But the infinite ocean makes that problematic.

Recently I've been wondering if a solution for this would not be to have something like a 'calming volume' prefab (like a cylinder or cube etc). Surely with some of your magic mathematics, you could reduce the wave height within that volume to a target height, ideally gradually over a phase-out distance. So users could just place that in their harbour, bay, etc

Edit: Or just totally kill the waves in the volume if ramping down is too difficult.

 

A tiled system really seems like it would be a good idea from the outset, but just knowing the current structure of Suimono I can tell you 100% that it just won't work properly this way. There is too much overhead for each surface tile, and the waves and texturing are generated locally at different scales. Even if you could get 1 wave scale to match, the other wave scales will not. This brings up the point that perhaps wave texture uvs should be projected globally, and it's hard to argue with that point, but Suimono 2.0 will not be going this route due to the time that would be involved in re-engineering it.

Suimono 3.0 is most likely going to have world projected UVs instead of local, so this will not be an issue in the future. Also I believe I have a better solution than doing a tiled system for 3.0, referring to the mesh volume/screen reconstruction method. Essentially there would be no difference in performance between rendering a 5x5 meter surface of water and an infinite surface of water, so tiling methods are really not needed.

I've used EasyRoads in the past, it's a great tool, and of course it's a shortcoming in Suimono that it doesn't work properly with EasyRoads. I would love to build better support between suimono and existing river tools.

Yes, that is a mandatory goal for future 3.0... if it isn't lighter and easier to run on most systems than there is little point in doing a redesign imho.

a lot of what @Tazling is speaking of/wishing for is extremely specific. 99% of users do not need that level of water fidelity and behavior. But, that being said, anything that improves the default behavior of the water and makes it more realistic is very welcome in my opinion. Even those who do not need such complexity will appreciate the improved water fidelity, as long as it can be done without adding a burden on the setup process.

Obviously I'm just speaking "off-the-cuff" here, but I'm pretty sure similar effects can be done without too much overhead in setup and rendering time. The biggest obstacle is getting accurate scene depth and direction info. The current version of Suimono already can generate depth information through the ShorelineObject function, and this could likely be extended and automated. Directional information is a different issue though. I suppose it might be possible to generate a directional map using some kind of analytical algorithm against existing terrain, but even if you could it would still need to be easily editable somehow. This will require a bit more thought It is something I am definitely going to look into though for 3.0.

 

Hello All,

I'm happy to announce that Suimono version 2.1.4 is now ready for download...

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

This is a maintenance update that fixes a number of issues that had been reported over the past few months. Particularly, preset transitions are now back and working as expected. There are new transition code function options, so if you'd like to use these in your project please see the brief writeup below. This release has been tested and is confirmed working with both Unity 5.6.2 and the newly released Unity 2017.1, however if you run into any problems while using these latest versions please let me know.

Suimono 3.0?
Suimono started life as a relatively basic interactive water system on the Asset Store way back in September 2012! Over the years it has been under continuous development in order to offer new features and to keep pace with Unity feature updates. Suimono and Unity have both grown and improved exponentially during that time. That being said, the system has some weak points that are difficult to address in it's current form.

Over the past 6 months I have been researching experimental water rendering possibilities, in order to improve Suimono and address these weak points. I am still in the research phase but am excited by this progress so far. My main goals for this research include improved water and wave rendering, much improved performance overhead, better multi-camera and VR support, and deeper integration with modern Unity tech (SSR, Deferred Shading etc.).

Timeframe is not decided, but I hope to have a more detailed picture of what version 3.0 will bring a little later this year.

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


-----------------------------
RELEASE NOTES - Version 2.1.4
-----------------------------
WHAT'S NEW:
- Preset Transitions have now been updated and re-enabled.
- Added new 'Reflection Sharpen' option to UI under 'Water Surface' settings.
- Added 'Max Depth Range' option to shoreline generation to narrow down appropriate shore wave resolution.
- Added 'Texture Resolution' setting to Shoreline Object UI.
- Added 'Underwater Transition Threshold' setting to UI.
- Added Event Broadcasting to fx_object components.

CHANGES:
- Suimono no longer forces Y-scale of 1.0 when using custom mesh. (Be careful with your custom meshes though!)
- Removed deprecated internal function call 'PresetDoTransition()'.

BUG FIXES:
- Fixed bug with consistent Fog and foam. Depth rendering is now independent of camera far clip distance.
- Edited Preset Encoding to use InvariantCulture checks. (Big thanks to craftyfirefox on the TD forums!)
- Fixed error with Shoreline rendering waves inside terrain areas.
- Fixed bug with Infinite Ocean mode not always choosing correct mesh.
- Addressed errant bug with Layer assignment and physics matrix configuration.
- Code reference updates to use Type-based Find instead of Name-based Find().
- Re-Enabled 'Scene Track Object' inheritance when not explicitly set (fixes loss of audio and fx problem).
- Fixed occasional error with random assignment losing references.
- Fixed overbrightening of underwater transparency and reflection.
- Fixed bug that prevented deletion of Module system effects entries.
- Fixed 'Wave Scale' UI bug that greyed it out in Infinite Ocean mode with custom settings active.
- Fixed intermittent preset data loss while working in editor (causing error spam and UI breakage).
- Fixed intermittent layer data loss while working in editor.



PRESET TRANSITION FUNCTION OPTIONS:

Option 1: it is assumed that preset is in the "Built-In Presets" folder.
SuimonoTransitionPreset((string)preset name, (float)transition time in seconds);

Option 2: For accessing presets in a custom folder name.
SuimonoTransitionPreset((string)preset folder name, (string)preset name, (float)transition time in seconds);

Option 3: For transitioning directly from one preset to another, when presets are in same folder.
SuimonoTransitionPreset((string)preset folder name, (string)from preset name, (string)to preset name, (float)transition time in seconds);

Option 4: For transitioning directly from one preset to another, when presets are in different folders.
SuimonoTransitionPreset((string)from preset folder name, (string)from preset name, (string)to preset folder name, (string)to preset name, (float)transition time in seconds);

 

Thank you for the update. Bought and used many other water / ocean assets like ceto, playway... yours is always develpoded forward over years. The others are depreciated or not moving forward. At the beginning i didn`t liked your asset, because the others looked better. But after trying them all i`m coming back to your`s and i am very happy with it.

Thank you for your ongoing develpement.

 

The water just freez after adding Realistic FPS to the project .. Please help

 

@aymn I'm not that familiar with Realistic FPS, but I can tell you that if it uses two cameras (a second camera for a weapon as an example) then the top/weapon Camera should be set to Forward Rendering path. This is an old Unity bug that has never been fixed. Who knows, maybe they can't fix it? In any case these FPS systems really should be doing this themselves by default.

 

I'm looking for a good ocean solution that I can count on to work on say the current and last gen mobile tablets. Beyond that the main challenge I have is the game has a lot more ocean then terrain. It's 3d with an isometric camera angle so I don't need infinite necessarily. But if the solution involved moving several grids around the player, I havent' seen that work well because either more then one grid is to heavy, or enabling at runtime causes too much of a cpu spike.

Does Suimono provide a solution that would work here? Figuring that by the time mobile is released, the current generation as of now will be the minimum requirements. More concerned about whether mobile is officially supported/tested.

 

Hi @snacktime Suimono does not work on mobile devices.

 

Thank u for replying to my question .. but even in a new scene with single default unity camera the water still freez i dont know what is the wrong i am doing i hope someone find a solution... Thank u any way @chingwa

 

@aymn Are you sure Suimono is tracking the correct camera? Try switching the camera mode to manual and dragging in your main scene camera.

 

Hello There !

I am using SUIMONO 2.1.4 (Today updated.) But when I enabling VR Support (Using Oculus Rift) water starts to flickering and it shows some reflection problems. But , it only happens when I move my head . For example in this scene I was moving my head to look up to the mountains. and in the sea it started to shake and created new rectangular seafloor. Can you help me about this ? .
P.S : When I am disabling the VR Support it becomes normal and beautiful sea.
P.S.2: It also happens in SUIMONO Demo Scenes.

 

Hi @ertanturan The Transparency and Reflection functions of Suimono are not fully compatible with VR dual cameras, unfortunately. When using VR you may want to turn off the Transparency function on the Module object... this will also improve performance of Suimono somewhat, but of course this comes at the cost of visual fidelity.

Better VR/Multi-Camera support is planned for a future version.

 

I m interested with this asset but I have few questions first.

a. Does water receive shadow?
b. Does water get affected by multiple light sources ( point , spot etc )
c. Does it work in proper unity deferred mode rendering? ( Not using extra forward rendering after the deferred rendering, which is the same as just a normal forward rendering ) I am asking this because I am using deferred mode and don;t want to kill performance by rendering water with 10s of light sources in forward mode.
d. How good is the performance?
e. Has it been tested on consoles? (XboxOne,PS4 etc)
f. Does it even work in 5.6.f2 ?

 

Hi,
The layer assignation in this object is causing problems. With FV installed, your water object is locked in a FV layer

Then, FV renders your water as a FV because of that, breaking everything

You water wave amplitude seems to be affected by FV. I guess that some render texture you use is also rendering Fog Volume

 

Still not working after manually adding the camera to modular prefab .. I hope some one help me .. Thank u any way

 

@castor76
a. Does water receive shadow?
No, not currently.

b. Does water get affected by multiple light sources?
Yes, and all light types are supported.

c. Does it work in proper unity deferred mode rendering?
Yes.

d. How good is the performance?
Performance is very dependent on how optimized the rest of your scene is, as it renders transparency and reflection. There are a number of controls to tweak Suimono between performance and visuals. It runs well in a well optimized scene, it runs poorly in a poorly optimized scene.

e. Has it been tested on consoles?
I have not tested directly, but I know some customers have used it on consoles. I do not know if they encountered specific issues that needed workarounds for consoles.

f. Does it even work in 5.6.f2 ?
Yes, It's been tested and is working in 5.6.2 and Unity 2017.1.