Better water for Unity 3.3 free?

Questions & Answers
1

I’m making a level of a seafront Mediterranean style city and of course a main focal point is the water. The water that comes with unity is just the Daylight Simple Water and it looks horrible IMO with no flexibility whatsoever. I’ve searched for hours now and can’t seem to find anything for the free version of unity without having to pay for it. Anyone know how i can get some better water out of unity(free version) 3.3? or at least get some transparency

4

I realize you’ve probably already solved this by now, but I think other people will benefit from this since I had the same trouble finding a good answer to this question.

As digitalConundrum suggested, using Pro water and changing a few of the settings will give very good results. I will give the instructions for using the pro Water 4 inside Unity Indie (I know you said you’re using 3.3, but hopefully this will help other people with 3.4, and you can use a similar setup with one of the 3.3 waters).

  • In a new scene, import the Water Pro package and any other packages you need
  • Setup your scene with a ground (a terrain or primitive will do), FPS character controller (or some way to move around), and a light
  • Bring the default Plane gameobject into the scene and set it above the ground near the FPS
  • Change the Plane’s material to Water4Example (Water4/Sources/Materials)
  • If you simulate now, you will see a plane with a fairly decent animated water material (if you want waves, read on)
  • Add the following scripts to your plane: WaterBase, GerstnerDisplace (Water4/Sources/Scripts)
  • In the inspector, find the Water Base script you just attached and uncheck “Edge Blend?”
  • Turn of the mesh collider if you wish
  • Simulate the game and… tadaa… you will have the pro animated water with waves in 14 draw calls

Hope that helps, and I wouldn’t worry too much about the comments of the other two rude trolls. Let me know if you have any questions about my instructions.

Cheers

3

You’re right: the simple water is awful! You could try the following: create a new material in the Project View (Create/Material) and select the Transparent/Specular shader, then select the Water Fallback texture, a light green for the main color and white for the specular color. Create a simple plane (Hierarchy view, Create/Plane) and assign the new material to it (the Main Color A component sets the transparency).

To make the water move like in the old and good Quake I game, you can use this UV animation script: it adds sinusoidal offsets to the uv coordinates, producing a similar effect (not the underwater effect, unfortunately!). The effects looks better when the plane has more vertices (but also takes more time to animate); a primitive Unity plane has 100 vertices (10x10), and works fine. If you need a different format, create the plane in some 3D editing software and import it.

var rate: float = 10; // number of "waves" * 3.14
var speed: float = 0.9; // cycles per second / 3.14
var intensity: float = 0.003;

private var mesh: Mesh;
private var verts: Vector3[];
private var uvs0: Vector2[];
private var uvs: Vector2[];
private var size: int;

function Start(){
    mesh = GetComponent(MeshFilter).mesh;
    verts = mesh.vertices;
    uvs0 = mesh.uv; // get original uv coordinates
    size = verts.length;
    uvs = new Vector2; // create a new uv array
}

function Update(){
    var t = Time.time * speed;
    for (var i = 0; i < size; i++){
        var v = verts*;*
 *// calculate a local offset for each uv*
 _var uv = Vector2(Mathf.Sin(t + v.x * rate), Mathf.Cos(t + v.z * rate));_
 uvs = uvs0 _+ intensity * uv; // add the offset_
 _*}*_
 _*mesh.uv = uvs; // assign the modified uv array*_
_*}*_
_*
*_
5

The bootcamp demo has some good water shaders

6

If you want nice water, you could try a script like the one above and duplicate your water object. If you make them both a little transparent and have one go at a different speed than the other, it looks pretty sweet.

2

So you expect to find a free, very pretty water, which you can drag and drop into your scene, which suddenly makes it look nice? Does that sound sort of stupid to you? Keep looking, you won’t find anything.

You have three options:

  1. Buy - There is a very nice option, called smart water, by nikko, I think. It works fine in Indie, and isn’t that expensive (around $70).

  2. Code your own. Start with a translucent blue plane, and some perlin noise in colour and animation…it’ll be great fun for you.

3.Make do with what you’ve got. This probably sounds like the best option for you, since (please correct me if I’m wrong) you’re a beginner. Try changing the textures up a bit, perhaps add some translucency.

Anyway, those are your choices, or, you could keep searching, frustrum.