QuickWater

QuickWater lets you drag and drop bodies of water into your scene and will flood fill the area by conforming to the terrain shape.

A plane is frequently used to simulate water surfaces, but comes with many considerations, such as shaping the plane to fit the terrain and subdividing the plane into a mesh for waves or colliders. This problem becomes especially painful during early development when the shape of the terrain may go through several iterations of change, often requiring that bodies of water be reshaped to match.

QuickWater is intended to enable rapid prototyping and deployment by removing these cumbersome steps. It samples the terrain and builds a shaped plane mesh with minimal overhang (no more raising surrounding terrain to hide the corners of your water!), and even allows complex shapes, like "holes" through the water mesh (imagine a mine shaft or volcano on an island), or rings, like a moat. This shaping takes place while still in edit mode, allowing you to tweak position and other configuration parameters without playing the project. (Waves are only calculated in play mode)

While the true power of QuickWater is in its ability to shape to terrain, it comes complete with a BIRP shader graph for mesh waves, depth fade, surface foam and shore foam, all customizible within the Unity editor simply by changing wave parameters on the game object component, or adjusting shader parameters on the material.

Last but not least, QuickWater also offers the ability to probe the water height, enabling things to float on the surface of the waves, or triggering an underwater camera effect when the camera is under water. A simple post-process effect is included for a truely comprehensive solution.

QuickWater was designed to be as modular as possible, allowing you to use the pieces that are valuable to you, while forgoing those that are not. If you still need a complete solution, but have specific designs or styles in mind, QuickWater can be rapidly implemented into your project as placeholder, and offers a solid foundation for eventual improvement, refinement, or replacement.

**LIMITATIONS**

• QuickWater is currently only compatible with built-in Unity terrain. If you are using another terrain solution, it will not work out-of-the-box. Compatibility for additional paradigms, such as Unity layers may be added in the future.
• QuickWater can only produce flat plane meshes which are then modified to add waves. It cannot handle more complex structures like a stream running down hill, waterfalls, or "planet-wide" oceans with a spherical shape.
• Y+ axis must be "up". If you are using another axis orientation, QuickWater will probably produce unexpected (and undesired) results
• Water will clip under surround terrain at least a little. Because of the tiled nature of the water mesh, some penetration is unavoidable. Tiles can be set to custom sizes, along with some other parameters which can be fine tuned to avoid this as much as makes sense.