Wave Maker Wave simulation asset for Unity
What it is for...
- To create small and medium surfaces like pools, portals, ponds...
- To simulate water as well as mud, cream and softer liquids
- To interact with dynamic and static elements
- To add eye-candy to your scenes
What this asset CAN'T do in the current version...
- No breaking waves
- Not suited for huge surfaces like oceans, rivers and waterfalls
- It is not a water shader, it's a mesh modifier. You must use your own shaders / materials.
- FXs like foam, splashes
- Aerodynamics (effect of wind and such)
- Buoyancy (floating forces)
- Shore and coast effects
- Different behaviour of the surface depending on water depth.
Some of these features will be added in the future. Please, see the bugs and suggestions tracker to know what's coming up.
v1.X Current Features
- Heightfield-based realtime fluid simulation on CPU.
- Colliders can be easily made to interact with the surface
- Easy and fast setup
- Wave speed, duration, smoothing and size parameters
- Arbitrary surface position and rotation, length and width
- Areas can be fixed to allow waves to "hit" on them
- Open or fixed borders
- Automatic detection and manual paint mode of fixed areas
- Mesh normals updated real-time, works with lighting
- Quality code, full documented C# source included, API available. Namespaced
- Timestep independent
- Scene hierarchy agnostic
- Efficient code, very small CPU cost.
- All example scenes shown in the videos included (except for the ones using assets by other creators).
- v1.1 Added idle/rest status to reduce computation to a minimum (video)
Change Log
Live Demos (WebGL)
Tutorials and More Videos
Known Limitations
- No breaking waves. Ever (unless researchers or I come up with a good idea): This method is based on heighfields so that means there is only one height per cell of surface. A breaking wave would have more than one height per cell.
- Small waves generated when rotating a surface and an interactor together: Relative movement between a surface and an interactor is always taken into account. Translating both at the same time will not generate waves. However, if both are rotated together under the same parent a little wave generation cannot be avoided. Sadly, this is due to the lack of precission of the calculation of the angular velocity for both objects. A solution that would make this system less flexible would be to associate each interactor with each surface, and calculate the velocity of the interactor with respect to the surface, but this will not be done unless you have a good reason to share with me.
- Open borders are still not perfect. Even when you don't fix the borders of your surface, a percentage of the wave will be returned. I'm still working on it.
- An interactor with a kinematic rigidbody should have a trigger collider. But this is due to the native physics collision system. It the collider is not a trigger, it will not generate contacts, so there will be no waves.
Common Problem Solver
My interactor does not affect the surface!
Check these steps:
- Are you on play mode?
- Are they on the same layer?
- Does the object that interacts (interactor) has a WaveMaker Interactor component?
- Does the interactor has a RigidBody component?
- Does the interactor has a collider component?
- If you are moving the object by setting the position directly or moving it by hand, you have to activate IsKinematic in the RigidBody component.
- Is the rigidbody kinematic and a trigger? This combination does not generate contacts in Unity. Find another combination!
- Activate the Debug Log checkbox on the surface to see in the console messages about interaction.
- If it still doesn't affect the surface, copy the parameters of one of the sample scenes and start from there.
- Contact support!
Support and Contact
If you need help, or you are interested in some new feature that is not in the tracker, please contact me directly at unitysupport (at) lidia-martinez.com
© 2021 Lidia Martinez Prado - http://www.lidia-martinez.com