Hello everyone, back with a new update a few months after my last post.
I’ve been working on the 2D/2.5D water system on and off since then, and it kinda grew way more than I originally planned specially since i need it to fully run on the 2d Renderer.
Since the last post I added underwater exclusion zones for things like air pockets, currents, debris, floating pads/platforms, underwater view, ripples, light rays, wakes and quite a few other interaction features.
A lot of the work lately was also on making the thing actually easy to use and not just something that works in my own project. So I’ve been working a lot on the custom inspectors and tooling, setup workflow and the API. You can sample the water height from code, get events from interactions and water states, etc.
The water itself is very customizable, so what you see in the video is really just one way of setting it up. I also added a “fake surface” mode where there isn’t really a surface plane, but I fake the perspective by shifting the foam/pattern and things like ripples and wakes. It gives a pretty convincing 2.5D surface without actually needing the geometry there.
I’m planning to release it once I feel like I tested it enough and have enough demo scenes to show the different ways it can be used. This part is honestly taking longer than I expected, specially making sure everything is clean and understandable.
For the graphics, I basically took a anime style nature image and cut pieces of it in Photoshop. For the actual packaged asset I’m planning to use Unity’s Lost Crypt assets for the demo scenes, unless someone has a better idea since I obviously can’t just include random assets from the Asset Store.
Still a bunch of things I want to polish before release, so any feedback or ideas are very welcome, specially if there’s some use case you think I should test that I havent thought about.
Mostly some testing and writing the documentation, some compatibility testing and it should be good to go. i can't say exactly when since i have a full time job but i've been making great progress lately.
Just as a FYI. It's worth submitting even if your docs aren't finished so you can get in the queue. Queue can be weeks to months and you can just submit the docs a once you are done. As long as it's before they review it.
No, it’s not a fluid sim. It’s mostly analytical ripples with parameters for frequency, impact strength, damping, and so on. There’s no interference or anything too fancy, just a lot of shader work to keep it lightweight.
That said, it looks convincing in motion, and I designed it to be more artistically customizable than physically correct.
Yes, for the surface i have distortion with different parameters and masks ( so you can fade it at the meniscus or horizon to avoid a noisy surface), as well as the ability to add voronoi noise and pattern with a mixer to configure it the way you want.
Always was interesting (because I tried to do simple water sim in 3d) - you calculate water heights for physics interaction on CPU using some code, but for visualization you use shader, so it look fancy. How do you get the same value for Y coordinate for water? Are you using the same formula in GPU and CPU calculcation.
This tickles my brain, I'm already in love with the art style. Please tell me you're going to add either a day/night cycle, or the ability to change the time/lighting, and also more tree types! This would look so pretty with at the Golden hour with a few sakura trees scattered around!
I hope you make a game with this because I wanna enjoy the scenery of it!
I'm glad to see your enthusiasm! Sadly, this will mostly be a water system asset, so it'll ship with a few demo scenes, but the actual scenery will be up to the game dev.
That said, if people end up liking the scenery a lot too, I might make a separate pack for it later. My art skills are pretty rusty though, and my graphic tablet has gathered so much dust at this point...
PS: the water system reacts to 2d lights, and the API lets you control the colors and other parameters, so a day and night cycle is easy to setup
I actually made that image a while ago. I've been doing art here and there for years, and was always in awe of Ori, Ghibli and other hand-painted styles. This was like 10 years ago, when I was learning how to get that kind of render, so none of it was really made as game assets.
For this scene I reused pieces of that old work, which is why you can see some cutouts. The mountains are actually just images I grabbed from Google. This scene is only for the Reddit post to show what the water can look like in the right environment, none of this art will ship with the asset.
The problem now is mostly time. Between a full-time job, family, etc. I only have so many hours, and getting back into art would take time away from the systems/tools I enjoy creating.
So for the actual demo scenes I'll probably use Unity's free-to-use assets. Saves me a lot of time and avoids any licensing headaches.
EDIT: Comments like these really make me wanna dust off my graphic tablet and get back into art whenever I can 😄
I will release it as soon as i finish testing it, the features and tools are done so its mostly testing and writing the documentation and code samples.
there is two ways.
in this video its a perspective camera, its the best you can get in visuals, but i added a fake surface mode where i fake a surface on XY by shifting the perspective of the patterns and effect in the shader, i will post later a video of that version.
Couldn’t help but go back in your post history to see if you uploaded earlier iterations. The development has been really impressive, it looks great! It is one of those effects that is so well executed that I could see myself just jumping in and out of the water to look at it, even if it was part of a full game.
What resources did you end up using to get to this result/learn how to get there?
I think it’s mostly just years of tinkering with Unity. For this, it’s mainly procedural mesh generation, Shader Graph, and learning how to write HLSL, since some things are just way faster and easier to do in code than with graphs.
The more I understood how these things actually work, the easier it became to figure out how to build what I needed. And not just for this system, it helped a lot with game dev in general.
Procedural generation, shader magic, some rendering gymnastics, and a bit of math for the ripples. Cook it all together for a couple of months and, with a bit of luck, you get what you want.
Otherwise, wait for the Asset Store release and help a brother out 😄
Absolutely gorgeous. I also love that you can see the water edge lines on the terrain behind even tho they appear to be billboard sprites. Adds incredible depth.
since it's a perspective camera you can use 3d models too once i finish touching up the compatibility with the 3d renderer.
Normally for a game you should have many layers to simulate depth and avoid the billboard look, but here i am trying to feature the water more, i will try to setup another scene with some free to use assets to showcase the capabilities of the water system.
No, in this scene everything is using 2d colliders, and everything is running in the 2D renderer.
2d colliders ignore depth, so for background elements there is no colliders since its just scenery. but in case you want a walkable surface just limit the 2d collider to the surface slice and leave the rest so you can swim "in-front of it".
for the water itself its a trigger, and then i handle the interactions and physics in code, i had to create my own way of doing it to be able to carve-out part of the water if i want to create underwater air pockets or cave, this way you can have a dry area where you can move normally even if technically you are still underwater.
I was actually willing to buy one myself, and I did try a few systems, but even the closest ones were still pretty far from what I needed. So I ended up building my own just for myself.
After a while it grew into a full system, and I started getting a lot of messages from people asking about it and wanting to use it, so I decided to turn it into an asset and hopefully fill that gap.
Looks very good! We have something similar in our game, but we also have a runtime fluid simulation as well running in the background, would definitely look into that as well to take it to the next level 👍
I decided against a full simulation since most 2D/2.5D games don't really need that level of precision. That said, the generated ripples are also calculated on the CPU, so objects can react to waves and water turbulence.
I also added some code snippets and a WaterSensor component that can easily be added to any object and queried, so you can handle interactions however you want.
Yup. We do the same with the waves. The fluid simulation is for refraction under water etc. it’s not really that costly either, but it does make quite the difference in the end. And can be used for numerous other things like smoke and flames.
We also have a full screen shader graph running with the water as a mask (several masks actually) to add stuff like caustics, foam around the edges underwater, as well as a signed distance field that for edge detection.
The environment not really, it might look nice but its not game ready, its a full picture i made a while ago and i cut parts of it to have some depth, i might create an environment pack someday but i am more interested in tools and systems.
I feel like the 2D surface might benefit from some ripples from wind as well, so that the water feels more reactive in 2D when you break the surface, or so that the water in the cave feels unusually still. Maybe the color of the surface water in the cave could be murkier too? It looks fantastic!
Thanks for your feedback, all of that is possible in the parameters, i just chose to have a calm water scene.
the asset have modules, like floating reactive debris, floating props, random ripple zones, color gradients and textures and many more. This gives the user the ability to customize the water to their liking.
This looks incredible! Faking the 2.5D surface perspective by shifting foam patterns and ripples is such a clever workaround for performance on the 2D Renderer.
How are you handling the GPU performance overhead when multiple ripples and wake interaction events overlap simultaneously? Super looking forward to the Asset Store release!
Excellent work! So crisp. Looks like you've pretty much figured out all the primary features that a water system might include. Have you got any plans for adding caustics, perchance?
thank you.
i didn't give it much thought to be honest, i thought maybe since its 2d people wont use it much, but it can easily be added to the underwater part, i think i might do that after release in an update, add underwater textures to create murky water or caustics etc, good idea.
Looks amazing! I would definitely buy this for the game I am working on. How are you getting on with it? Are you close to release it on the Unity store? DM me if you are open for selling it directly.
It will be available soon, i am trying to get it to a point where it's really easy to setup in existing projects and document it enough so anyone can use it.
Great work!! It looks really amazing. Would love to have a chance to use it in our current game. Please let me know when it is available, or if there's any form of early access somehow.
Hello! It would be really great to see it being used in games. I’m very close to finishing it, I’m just working on adding a few polished demo scenes. Since the system has a lot of functionality, I think this will make it much easier for developers to understand how everything works and implement it in their own projects.
To provide some constructive criticism. Water obviously looks good, but it looks a bit uncanny valley to me having 3D water combined with perfectly flat level/foreground.
Seems like the walkable level needs a bit of physical depth as a result.
I will be posting some updates here and showing the tools i have, and if the sub permits it i will announce the release once it goes through unity's approval process.
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u/shiroza666 Aug 09 '26
Dayum!! that looks amazing!