Crest Water 4 HDRP (Ocean, 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 5 is now available. Crest 4 will still continue to be supported with bug fixes and minor improvements.

Workflow

• Add water in minutes with three components (water surface, underwater and waves)
• Sane and balanced defaults
• Several example scenes covering many use cases
• Detailed help boxes display validation errors direct in the inspector with fix buttons to guide setup
• Online documentation with embedded videos

Features

• Unity 6 ready
• State-of-the-art LOD system achieving class-leading performance
• Innovative "equalizer" style wave authoring. Both FFT and Gerstner waves supported
• Input system for modifying ocean data (like foam) using mesh, trail, line and particle renderers
• Innovative "wave spline" technology to give detailed control over water simulation including rivers, lakes and shorelines
• Simulated light transport including reflection, refraction, scattering, caustics approximation and shadowing
• Underwater effect with partial submersion and meniscus
• Query water displacement using GPU or CPU
• Unity Server support suitable for authoritative servers (like MMOs)
• Shifting Origin component provided for large/open worlds
• Dynamic wave simulation ("ripple simulation") for dynamic object-water interaction including boat wakes
• Shallow water - light scattering and wave attenuation
• Foam simulated from waves and shorelines
• Apply colour onto ocean surface similar to decals
• Water volumes which can restrict rendering of both surface and underwater to a given geometry (eg sphere of water)
• Flow to enable horizontal motion of water surface
• Physics interface with buoyancy implementations and support for Dynamic Water Physics 2
• Flexible time synchronisation to support networking and cutscene Timelines
• Surface clipping to carve hulls/caves out of water surface
• Planar reflections
• Deferred, Forward, Perspective, Orthographic and Stereo (VR/XR) rendering supported
• Shader Graph nodes for applying underwater to transparent objects
• Ocean Shader Graph (2021.3+ only)
• Ray-Traced Reflections support (2021.3+ only)
• Screen-Space Reflections and Planar Reflection Probes supported
• Decals supported
• Gaia Pro VS integration
• Much more…

To see some of these features in action, videos can be found on our YouTube channel. Furthermore, we have a Frequently Ask Questions section in our documentation.

Crest does not support OpenGL or WebGL and requires shader compilation target 4.5 or above. Crest 4 currently does not support WebGPU.

Asset Compatibility

We avoid non-standard techniques and are not aware of any major incompatibilities. Our users also use Dynamic Water Physics 2 (DWP2), Enviro, Cozy Weather, Buto, Expanse, Gaia, MicroSplat, MicroVerse, Nature Manufacture, Azure[Sky], Skybox Creator, Vegetation Studio, and many more…

Please see our integrations page.

Example Scenes

This asset comes with a few example scenes, including the "Submarine" demo scene shown above. This scene was created by the Digital Wizards team (Aldana Zanetta and Fernando Zanetta).