Crest Water 5 (Oceans, Rivers, Lakes)

About Crest Water 5 (Oceans, Rivers, Lakes) – Unity Editor Tool & Plugin

Unity Water System and Ocean Tool

Crest is a Unity water system for creating animated water surfaces with wave simulation, underwater rendering, water physics, and data-driven effects. It combines multiple levels of detail with Animated Waves, Dynamic Waves, Water Depth, Water Level, Albedo, Flow, Foam, Shadows, Surface Clipping, Absorption, and Scattering data.

Water Simulation and Rendering

The wave system supports deterministic FFT and Gerstner Waves, with multiple wave sets that can be blended together and local waves with edge interpolation. Shallow Water Wave Attenuation reduces wave height according to water depth, while Dynamic Waves can model wakes, ripples, and wave reflections. Foam can be generated from turbulence, shorelines, and foam inputs, and Flow can affect waves, normals, foam, and caustics.

Crest provides physically based water rendering with approximations for reflections, refractions, transmission, scattering, caustics, and shadowing. Underwater rendering includes partial submersion, a meniscus water line, and depth-based out-scattering. Surface Clipping can remove sections of the water surface using meshes or signed-distance primitives, while Varying Water Level supports elevated lakes and gradients for rivers and streams.

Water Data and Physics

Input sources can inject and manipulate water data using renderers such as meshes, trails, lines, and particles, as well as textures and Shader Graph. The Query System can retrieve water displacement, normals, and velocity on the CPU through asynchronous GPU readback, along with flow and signed-distance information for shorelines.

Water Physics includes buoyancy and drag through a semi-modular floating object system. Nested physics layers allow floating objects to behave within other floating objects, such as a barrel inside a boat.

Unity Compatibility

Crest supports the Built-in Render Pipeline, Universal Render Pipeline, and High Definition Render Pipeline. Supported Unity versions include Unity 2022.3, Unity 6.0, Unity 6.3, and Unity 6.6. It supports Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Deferred+, Perspective, and Orthographic rendering, along with Single-Pass Instanced, Multiview, and Multi-Pass Stereo Rendering for VR/XR.

The system supports motion vectors and depth-based effects such as Depth of Field. Experimental WebGPU support is available, and mobile rendering modes include Simple Transparency and Simple Mesh for situations where reduced rendering complexity is preferred.

Workflow and Extensions

Adding water uses two components: a water surface and waves. Crest imports into the Packages directory as an editable UPM package and includes inspector validation with controls for fixing reported configuration problems. The water shader uses Shader Graph, while its internals remain HLSL. A fully documented scripting API is also provided.

Optional extensions include CPU Queries, Paint, Portals, Shallow Water, Shifting Origin, Splines, and Whirlpool. Integrations include Cozy 3, Dynamic Water Physics 2 (DWP2), Enviro 3, Expanse, and Gaia.

Use Cases

• Ocean and open-water environments requiring configurable FFT or Gerstner wave sets, foam, flow, and dynamic waves.
• Rivers and lakes using varying water levels, depth-based wave attenuation, absorption, scattering, and flow.
• Projects with boats or floating objects that need buoyancy and drag behavior.
• VR/XR or split-screen projects where multiple camera viewpoints and stereo rendering are required.

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