Cascade is an innovative and AAA quality water system that has been born by the cooperation between Jason Booth ( creator of Terrain Shaders Megasplat and Microsplat ) and Antonio Ripa ( creator of Sentieri and TerraPainter )
Designed around performance and ease of use with Cascade you can easily create multiple surface water like rivers, lakes and waterfall with a few clicks with a powerful mesh generator tool and a modular performance shader.
You have full control of the main parameters like width, slope, water depth, etc. globally and per node. Cascade is the first and only water asset that allow amazing water surfaces flowing into each other like a River flows in Lake and after flows out. Cascade fits small and large multitiles landscape.
Cascade take in account morphological information from your landscape to give the highest realism to your water surfaces.
Cascade has tree main software components :
Cascade Surface Manager : powerful procedural mesh generator with a simple and intuitive UI that allow user to create the water path on the landscape giving full control of all the parameters up to node level. Rivers, Lakes, Waterfall are not a challenge anymore. Analyze the terrain during the water surface design using those information to improve the realism.
Cascade Shader System: not simply a shader, but a dynamic shader compiler tool that allow the generation of custom shaders according to the features you select. Unused features are completely removed from the code.
Cascade Terrain Carving Engine that is part of the “more” … we are building a one stop asset , so Cascade can create your river bed and lake bed with an easy workflow and advanced setting.
Main features :
One single shader for every type of water surface like river, lake, waterfall controlling the parameters of each independently
You can create multiple water surface like rivers, lakes, waterfall using a spline tool with full control of the main parameters like width, slope, water depth, etc. on single mesh having only one material
Water surface can flow into other water surface on same mesh. Ex River flows in and out a lake.
Real Time Analisys of terrain morphology to generate more realistic water path.
Optimized Shader Generation.
Support Weather and Fog assets with smooth iteration ( Tested with Enviro and Fog Volume 3 )
Works with VR in single pass mode, as well as with multiple camera setups
Control water parameters along each node of the spline, or by painting on the vertices of the mesh it generates.
( Experimental ) Automatic FlowMap generation allow the stream to follow realflow
Lot of stunning features like up 3 independent flotsam layers allowing you to have leaves and other particulate float in the water, sparkles on the water, slosh water, lake ripples, drop rain, automatic waterfall cascade generation, and more… more … more …
Carving river bed with a new innovative system ( Lake ground will come soon )
Textures Packer for generate more variant of your Cascade Water
Automatic generation of Vegetation Studio Mask around the water surface for easy and fast integration
Automatic Import from third assets to migrate your project to Cascade
Work smooth with MicroSplat Terrain Shader module Puddles, Straeam , Lava & Wetness to add more realism to your landscape
Asset will support other tools by EarthShaping Project. the first suite of tool designed for a real time procedural infinite world generation including Terrain, Roads and Cities
Bonus Pack with a high quality set of PBR textures and trees for your “Cascaded” landscape
plus more and more features …
Join us on our Skype or Discord text chat if you have any questions.
Well I love MicroSplat, and I am following Sentieri, so there is some impressive brainpower behind this:)
I have been looking for procedural rod and river solutions for a while, and I am very excited to see these kinds of projects. I would love to try these ideas in my open world rpg BrightRidge.
Hey folks …
Preparing few videos waiting Cascade is live on asset store
2 series, first is gonna be a showcase series and second is gonna be a how to series . .( really short videos )
A question: water in a real waterfall accelerates during the fall, something which is necessary for full realism. Is this something you’re planning to implement? The videos all show water falling without acceleration.
That is a valid point. Currently I compute the flow map in real-time when you create the mesh, so basically I compute direction and velocity. Shader read those information and we have an experimental mode, but to achieve a smooth realism we need to sample terrain morphology with an higher resolution. There are couple of option to achieve that, but before we would have all the planned features implemented ( not yet mentioned in the initial post ) and we need to plan the shift to new scriptable rendering pipeline ( that unity has already postponed to 2018.2 and Jason has following and giving his contribute to the discussion ).
But it will definitely use a flow map for direction and speed getting even another improvement that is the correct water flow if there are static object along the path ( like large rock in the middle of the surface that will drive flow around itself ).
I hope I answered your question.
hello,
I can answer yes for first 2 question.
For the third, I would say that will be not a challenge doing same integration like other water assets, even if our workflow for river and in particular lake is totally different from other assets.
If you think to something more specific, please feel free to share your requirement. I will be glad to evaluate how support it.
yes, it can be used for larger body of water, but not infinite surface like assets specific for sea and ocean.
I can say that Cascade has a different approach than other water assets, and in all its aspects it’s been designed perfomance wise
yes, that can be done. Meshes are generate procedurally, so not a challenge. I can even support specific need exposing part of the internal class as API
