Currently working on a Unity Lake Water shader system optimised for VR applications and fully compatible with Unity reflection probes and new image effects (Screen Space reflection).
This will be a solution that can give you a realistic effect but will be many time faster than any other water rendering systems.
First version of this shader will be focused on lake (calm) water simulations.
This system doesn’t use any transparent shaders or render targets, and it can really improove performance in any VR application that require water effects. It mostly relies on terrain depth maps, and can do also a refraction without any significant impact on CPU or GPU.
Not sure yet. I’m almost in a final stage on programming this, but for a moment I had to stop working on it because I had some urgent works to do right now. I think I will wait for a stable Unity 5.4. Also, I will need some time to write a documentation and finish a decal system (but a decall system could be maybe introduced after first release). For now I’m concentrated on making it easy to use, because it uses it’s own baking system for creating textures needed for placing lakes onto a terrain or mesh.
For now it works like this:
-You place a standard plane at a level and in a zone where you want your lake to appear. (so that it covers all surface)
-Set a Terrain that holds your lake (or multiple terrains or objects)
-Add a Lake Baker Component and choose a resolution of baked textures.
-press a button “Render maps and create lake materials” (takes one second)
After that a script will create all neccessary maps, and create a lake material.
After creating material, you can move your lake plane, or use another object as a surface of a lake. Also, you can use more planes and a lake will be always casted on them (as long as you use correct lake material). After rendering, you can also move lake down and a lake shore will follow correctly your terrain. All lake materials are world space materials and there will be different shaders for those materials. One for lake itself, one for decals (plants floating on water), and various ripple dacals (to be placed on sides of objects holding that are in touch with water).
This simulation isn’t ment to be a physically correct simulation. But a higly optimised visually good looking simulation.
I second that. The setting for my game is a lake, and I’ve been using a very heavy water solution - this looks really amazing! If you need anyone to beta test, I’d be happy to help
Hi, I still don’t have any definitive release date as there is still a lot of work to do (optimising code, designing editor interface for clarity and simplicity of use, writing documentation). Core itself is almost finished, but it lacks features that a commercial plugin should have. Right now I’m trying to experiment with a support for flow maps.
For those who are interested on testing, you can apply for alpha/beta testing by writing on: olix@iol.it
Please write few lines about yourself, and send eventually some references of your work.
I have received some requests for betatesting, and I will respond to You all as soon as it starts. And it should be soon.
In a meanwhile, another test:
