Dynamic Effects for Stylized Water 3 (Extension)

Extends the Stylized Water 3 asset with a framework to add dynamic and interactive effects, such as ripples, wakes and shore waves.

What’s new with Stylized Water 3?

• Rewritten rendering code for Unity 6's Render Graph

• Effects are now fully compatible with the SRP Batcher and new GPU Resident Drawer, this minimizes drawcalls

• New shoreline wave spawner component, spawns the shoreline wave prefab along a spline 

      + snaps an audio emitter to the spline, following the camera.

• The render feature is now embedded into the core SW3 render feature

• Effects are now readable through C#

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Unlock the full potential to liven up water surfaces with localized effects, to both enhance environments and support gameplay feedback.

Dynamic Effects are regular scene objects like meshes, particles, lines and trails but use a specialized shader that makes them project onto the water surface.

You can place them anywhere and in anyway, and they can add (vertical) displacement and/or surface foam, which allows for a variety of effects to be created.

This extension for Stylized Water 3 adds a rendering framework, but also aims to offer and further develop pre-built effects using it.

🌊 Features:

• Utilize particle effects and trails to push the water up and/or add surface foam.

• Recalculated normals, meaning effects properly influence the water's shading.

• Spline utility to automatically spawn shoreline waves

* Includes functionality to have an audio emitter follow the spline + camera

📦 Includes premade:

• Beach shoreline wave effect

• Boat wake effect (Trail & Particle based)

• Ripple trail effect (eg. swimming character)

• Impact ripple effect (eg. object dropped in water)

• Rain drops

• Wind gust

• Waterfall impact ripples

• Directional ripples

💡 Disclaimer:

• Prefab particle systems are configured to offer the widest sensible application (eg. sizes, timing and speed). You are encouraged to adjust/duplicate the prefabs to tailer them to your specific needs.

• Triggering and spawning effects through gameplay/events is expected to be handled by your own systems, such as a character/AI/boat controller (since they all differ). This asset uses standard Unity components, no special sauce, so general Unity concepts come into play.

⚡ Performance:

The render pass involved does not rely on an additional camera and integrates natively into URP's excisting culling/batching process. Providing best in class performance, no matter the world's complexity or scale.

The rendering range and resolution are the two influential, but scalable, factors. Configurable per render feature.

Typically occupies about 96mb in GPU memory. Down to <1mb for the lowest quality settings.

✔️ Compatibility:

• No exceptions from Stylized Water 3's compatibility details.

• Render Graph + GPU Resident Drawer

• Supports all platforms.

• Scalabe to use on mobile hardware (requires Surface Foam material feature to be enabled).

• VR rendering

🚧 Restrictions:

• Rendering resolution scales down by the increase in rendering range. Super high detail close to the camera, whilst rendering over long distances (+1000m) is not realistic to expect.

• Rendering internally is done from a top-down perspective. As such, planets or spherical worlds aren't compatible, neither is 2D.

Technical details

• Imports directly into the Stylized Water 3 folder (wherever it is located)
• Unity's Trail Renderer (mainly used for boat wakes) is not without its quircks and hard limitations, this asset is therefore not immune to them. Using Ara Trails is certainly possible. Developing a propiertary trail renderer, for wakes, is under consideration for future development.
• Performance and feature limiting options are exposed on the render feature, so can be used for multiple quality levels
• Looks best when reflections, refractions and foam are enabled on the water material.