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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 and simulators and is the subject of SIGGRAPH talks.
Nominated for Best Artistic Tool in the 16th Unity Awards.
CREST 4 x 5 HIGHLIGHTS
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- 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, while others have been moved to separate packages. Please refer to the Release Notes for more information.
WORKFLOW
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- 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 directly 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.
- Imports into the Packages directory as an editable UPM package.
FEATURES
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- 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. Create wave conditions from calm seas to monstrous waves for storms.
- 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 Asked Questions section in our documentation for more important information.
Sample scene selection may not include ones shown in marketing materials and screenshots.
COMPATIBILITY
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- Unity 6 supported.
- Unity 6 URP Render Graph & compatibility mode supported.
- Motion Vectors (HDRP and Unity 6 URP only).
- Depth-based effects like Depth of Field (HDRP and URP only).
- Raytraced Reflections (HDRP only).
- Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Perspective, and Orthographic supported.
- Stereo Rendering (VR/XR) supported.
LIMITATIONS
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- BIRP XR single-pass instanced is currently broken (Unity bug).
- BIRP does not appear to work on consoles due to using Shader Graph (Unity bug).
- URP XR multi-pass is currently broken (Unity bug).
- Planar reflections currently do not support XR.
- Manipulating data with Shader Graph is not supported with HDRP (Unity bug).
These known limitations may be solved in future versions.
EXTENSIONS
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These are optional extensions.
- CPU Queries: Not required as there are GPU queries provided. This is for GPU-less environments.
- Paint: Paint data with a non-destructive workflow.
- Portals: Restrict rendering to a mesh. 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: Powerful tool for creating lakes, rivers, and more.
- Whirlpool: Bespoke feature to create a customisable whirlpool.
REQUIREMENTS
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- Unity 2022.3 or Unity 6 (latest patched version).
- Shader Graph package.
- Shader compilation target 4.5 or above.
- Graphics API that is not OpenGL or WebGL.
- One license required for each individual user (see EULA).
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.
CREST 4 MIGRATION
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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.
ASSET COMPATIBILITY
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We avoid non-standard techniques and are not aware of any major incompatibilities. Third-party assets will need time before integrations are available. We have a list of known integrations, including Dynamic Water Physics 2 (DWP2), Enviro 3, and Expanse.
