Crest Water 5 (Oceans, Rivers, Lakes)

Documentation • Email • Discord • GitHub • Twitter • YouTube

Important: some of the features in the video require a separate package. Please see the Extensions heading below. The Shallow Water package is NOT required for shallow water. It is an integrated shallow water simulation, a next-generation feature. Crest 5 can still have shallow water without the SWS using the same features as Crest 4 does.

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.

For launch the scripting API is limited but will be rectified as soon as possible.

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 fully editable 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
• 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.

Compatibility

• Unity 6 Preview supported
• Unity 6 URP Render Graph & compability mode supported
• Motion Vectors (HDRP only, Unity 6 URP coming soon)
• Raytraced Reflections (HDRP only)
• Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Perspective and Orthographic supported
• Stereo Rendering (VR/XR) supported

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

These are optional extensions.

• CPU Queries: Not required as there are GPU queries provided. This is for GPU-less environments
• Portals: Restrict rendering. Useful for aquariums and portholes
• Shallow Water: A shallow water simulation. Not required for shallow water as Crest has wave attenuation. It is a next-generation feature
• Shifting Origin: Keeps the camera at zero. Only needed for very large worlds
• Splines

Requirements

• Unity 2022.3.34+ or Unity 6 Preview 6000.0.7+
• Shader Graph package
• Shader compilation target 4.5 or above
• Graphics API that is not OpenGL or WebGL

As a general requirement, it may be necessary to update to the latest patched version of Unity in order for a problem to be solved. Furthermore, legacy versions of Unity are not supported.

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.