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Important: 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 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.
Workflow
- Add water in minutes with two components (water surface and waves)
- Sane and balanced defaults
- Helpful tooltips including materials
- Detailed help boxes display validation errors direct in the inspector with buttons to fix problems directly
- Online and offline documentation
- Fully documented scripting API
- 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 and Unity 6 URP only)
- 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 2022.3.39+ or Unity 6 Preview 6000.0.13+
- 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.
