If you use the KWS Water System for Unity by kripto289, you’ll be happy to see what the creator has in mind for the “sequel” – KWS2, an improved version of the module-based component that simulates water surfaces such as oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and pools. While it’s not yet ready for release, the developer teases new features and beautiful simulations on Reddit, such as the one above.
“Here I use 4 overlapping zones (this way I can reduce the FPS of distant zones, the number of particles, etc.) For all visible zones within 2 km, the simulation takes about 0.2ms. Rendering all the water with max quality (caustics, volumetric lighting, quadtree instancing LODs, SSR reflections, rendering of 4 FFT cascades, translucent shadows for splashes, etc.) takes about ~1.5-2 ms in total on a GTX 4070 in 4k.”
In one post, kripto289 demonstrates how you can pre-compute a river simulation and still adjust it: stop the river, add obstacles, and turn off the source. Aside from this, the new release will replace the old simulation algorithm with fully dynamic waves.
While you’re waiting for KWS2, you can try out the current version, available for different pipelines.
Here are some of its features:
- GPU waves simulation with multiple cascades (to avoid tiling)
- Physical approximation of lighting (volumetric lights and shadows, absorption, sub-surface scattering, caustics, sunshafts, PBR shading and sun reflection)
- Physical approximation of reflections using reflection stack: fast screen-space projected reflections (several times faster than any other SSR methods) + camera planar reflections + skybox reflection
- Physical approximation of refraction in screen space with dispersion (using water IOR)
- Physical approximation of caustics relative to water waves (with dispersion).
- Underwater with partial submersion
- Underwater sunshafts/volumetric lighting with caustics
- Underwater half-line tension effect
- Underwater physical approximation rendering (Snell’s window effect and internal ssr reflection with volumetric lighting)
- Underwater bubbles and lit-particles (with feature that makes these particles tile infinitely across space using only few thousand particles)
- Aquarium mode
- VR support
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