Crest Water System URP (Ocean, Rivers & Lakes)

Crest is a class-leading water system authored by professional game developers.

Crest is a trusted water solution by many studios for its quality and performance. It has been implemented in several successful games & simulators and the subject of SIGGRAPH talks.

Workflow

• Add water in minutes with three components (water surface, underwater and waves)
• Sane and balanced defaults
• Several example scenes covering many use cases
• Detailed help boxes display validation errors direct in the inspector with fix buttons to guide setup
• Online documentation with embedded videos

Features

• State-of-the-art LOD system achieving class-leading performance
• Innovative "equalizer" style wave authoring. Both FFT and Gerstner waves supported
• Input system for modifying ocean data (like foam) using mesh, trail, line and particle renderers
• Innovative "wave spline" technology to give detailed control over water simulation including rivers, lakes and shorelines
• Simulated light transport including reflection, refraction, scattering, caustics approximation and shadowing
• Underwater effect with partial submersion and meniscus
• Query water displacement using GPU or CPU
• Unity Server support suitable for authoritative servers (like MMOs)
• Shifting Origin component provided for large/open worlds
• Dynamic wave simulation ("ripple simulation") for dynamic object-water interaction including boat wakes
• Shallow water - light scattering and wave attenuation
• Foam simulated from waves and shorelines
• Apply colour onto ocean surface similar to decals
• Water volumes which can restrict rendering of both surface and underwater to a given geometry (eg sphere of water)
• Flow to enable horizontal motion of water surface
• Physics interface with buoyancy implementations and support for Dynamic Water Physics 2
• Flexible time synchronisation to support networking and cutscene Timelines
• Surface clipping to carve hulls/caves out of water surface
• Planar reflections
• Deferred, Forward, Perspective, Orthographic and Stereo (VR/XR) rendering supported
• Shader Graph nodes for applying underwater to transparent objects
• Forward+ supported
• Much more…

To see some of these features in action, videos can be found on our YouTube channel. Furthermore, we have a Frequently Ask Questions section in our documentation.

Asset Compatibility

We avoid non-standard techniques and are not aware of any major incompatibilities. Our users also use Dynamic Water Physics 2, Enviro, Gaia, Microsplat, Nature Manufacture, Azure[Sky], Skybox Creator, Weather Maker, Vegetation Studio, and many more…

Example Scenes

This asset comes with a few example scenes, including the 'Pirate Cove' demo scene shown in the videos.

Technical details

Crest is built to be powerful, flexible and scalable which may not be suitable for low-end mobile devices. Several studios have successfully launched using Crest on Android, iOS, PC, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox.

Crest does not support OpenGL or WebGL and requires shader compilation target 4.5 or above.

Crest has limited support for rendering multiple cameras simultaneously, as would be required by split screen multiplayer for example, as the LOD detail is centered around one position (normally the main camera).

The Crest code contains MIT-licensed code. The copyright notices are specified in the included file ThirdPartyNotices.md.