Crest Water 5 (Oceans, Rivers, Lakes)

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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.

Crest 4 x 5 Highlights

• Supports all render pipelines in one package
• Re-architectured to further performance scalability
• Many new improvements and features

Some features (mostly deprecated) have been removed. Some have been moved to separate packages. Please check the Release Notes.

Workflow

• Add water in minutes with two components (water surface and waves)
• Sane and balanced defaults
• Helpful tooltips
• Detailed help boxes display validation errors direct in the inspector with fix buttons to guide setup
• Online documentation
• Supports all three render pipelines in one asset
• Delivered as a UPM package and imports to the Packages directory

Features

• State-of-the-art LOD system achieving class-leading performance
• Input system for modifying water data using textures or renderers like mesh, trail, line and particle renderers. Supports Shader Graph
• Deterministic FFT and Gerstner waves with innovative "equalizer" style wave authoring
• Multiple wave sets can be blended together including local waves
• Physically based rendering with simulated light transport including reflection, refraction, scattering, caustics approximation and shadowing
• Water shader ships as a Shader Graph (only two nodes, internals are still HLSL)
• Underwater with partial submersion and meniscus
• Query water displacement, normals and velocity using GPU (CPU with separate asset)
• Water bodies with varying height
• Dynamic wave simulation for dynamic object-water interaction including wakes, ripples and reflections
• Shallow water wave attenuation which dampens waves based on terrain depth (not the same thing as shallow water simulation which is a separate asset)
• Foam simulated from turbulence and shorelines with accumulation and dissipation
• Soft shadowing simulation
• Flow to enable horizontal motion of water surface including displacements, normals, foam and caustics
• Surface clipping to carve hulls/caves out of water surface
• Albedo layer to apply color onto water surface similar to decals
• Planar reflections including Total Internal Reflections
• Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Perspective, Orthographic and Stereo (VR/XR) rendering supported
• Flexible time synchronisation to support networking and cutscene Timelines
• Extensions assets below for more features
• Much more…

Please see the Frequently Ask Questions section in our documentation for more important information.

Sample scene selection may not include ones shown in marketing materials and screenshots.

Limitations

• BIRP XR single-pass instanced is currently broken (Unity bug)
• URP XR multi-pass is currently broken (Unity bug)
• Planar reflections currently do not support XR

These known limitations may be solved in future versions.

Extensions

• CPU Queries
• Portals
• Shallow Water
• Shifting Origin
• Splines

Requirements

• Shader Graph package
• Shader compilation target 4.5 or above
• Graphics API that is not OpenGL or WebGL

Asset Compatibility

We avoid non-standard techniques and are not aware of any major incompatibilities. Third party assets will need time before integrations are available.

Crest 4 Migration

There is no assisted migration from Crest 4 to Crest 5. All GUIDs have been regenerated so Crest 5 can be imported alongside Crest 4 for manual migration.