Hello! Great video! Can you /anyone help me? My untiy cube is "delaying", mean Its working weirdly.

9.5 / 10

I love how its just above 10 minutes

Hi Tom my Flotter dosn't follow wave movement his y position don't go more then 0.5 and 2.4...., so bettween wave he do levitation otherwise he is submerged like some heightlimiter were set

the probleme was i scaled the plane up.

It's not the _wrong_ way-it's just a starting point that doesn't scale super well, but the theory behind it works and applies to the shader approach as well 🤷‍♂️

Thank you :D

Glad you liked it that much :D

This is awesome to hear, I'm glad you found it helpful! Good luck with the voting phase, assuming that hasn't concluded yet :)

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it :)

Glad I could help!

Thanks, I really appreciate that!

Glad you like it :D

Glad you liked it :D

@@tomweiland just for curiosity: have you considered creating the floaters dynamically in the script as points in space instead of manually adding them as gameobjects? Code would be a little more complex but it would be simpler to create new floating objects. You could just find the corners of the gameobject programmatically and add 4 floaters to it, or even do it in a fancier way.

Glad I could help :)

я тоже хочу, научиться и сделать, что то кроме синусоидальных волн, а именно как в lowpolywater. но не умею, хотелось бы знать как!

Thank you :D

Glad you liked it!

Thanks :D

Thank you :D

Glad I could help :)

Glad you like it!

Thank you :P

@@tomweiland hey man, i know youve got a lot going on. but if you can, could you explain how you adjust the wave manager formula to match whats in the shader? ive tried picking apart the shaders equation and reassembling it in normal script but the variables just dont work.

Glad you like it :)

Glad you liked it, and welcome to the community :)

Glad it was helpful!

Glad you liked the videos-welcome to the community :)

How this game coming along?? I only ask because it sounds a lot like what I’m trying to create.

Not anymore, I got really sick of it 😂

I'm glad you think so!

Glad you liked it :D

@@tomweiland the floater script is working on my cube bit not my model ship with a rigid body any ideas

I'm glad you liked the pace-my first tutorials were definitely much too fast, but just like you, I hate it when a tutorial is really slow and you have to skip ahead :P

Glad to hear it :)

Glad you liked it :)

Thanks, glad you liked it :D

Thanks, I'm glad you like it :)

Tom Weiland good video man

Thanks :)

Glad it was helpful :)

Thanks :)

Glad you like it :)

Thanks :D

Thanks, I'm glad you've found it useful :)

Good luck :)

Glad it was helpful!

Glad to hear it :D

Maybe, although you'd need to make sure the floaters know which water instance they're actually floating on. Also, I'm glad you like the speed! I myself hate slow tutorials-there's just something extraordinarily excruciating about sitting through any sort of extra fluff when I just want to know what to do next, but skipping ahead is dangerous because you risk missing something :P

I'm glad you liked it :D

@@tomweiland Best part of it is that I can load heavy cargo as rigidbodies onto the ship and the ship sinks into the water and tilts according to the weight. Looks really cool :)

Probably not :P There's not _too_ much more I can cover here that isn't already explained in that article I linked in the description. If there was a _huge_ amount of demand, then maybe, but making tutorials isn't exactly the most exciting work...

@@tomweiland I vote for yes, also you have a new suscriber as this is the thing I was literally looking for

@@bustosmusic thanks for subscribing, I'm glad I could help :) I'm assuming you're voting "yes" for turning this into a series, right? What else would you want to see covered (not making any promises, just not really sure what else would need to be explained)?

I'm glad you liked it! I don't think I'll cover the shader side of things, mainly because that Catlike Coding article I linked to in the description covers it all. I'd basically just be recreating the article in video form.

@@tomweiland Ok, that's fine! Would it be hard for me to convert the shaders on catlike coding to shader graph? (As HDRP doesn't support custom shaders other than shadergraph) Sorry - forgot to mention that

That's strange...I haven't used HDRP but in URP you can write custom shaders 🤔 I believe shader graph has some kind of vertex manipulation node, so it's really just about plugging in the formula you want to use to calculate the height-it shouldn't be too difficult to convert.

@@tomweiland Ok, thanks!

Glad I could help!

Glad you liked it!

I love the low poly look as well. Sometimes I feel like I could just gaze at it for hours :P

You're welcome :)

For sure! I'll be doing that at some point in my own project.

I don't know what to do with this information 😳

Glad to hear that!

Glad you liked it :)

Thank you! To get the wave manager to produce accurate movement for your shader, you just need to make sure that both the wave manager and the shader are using the same formula and offset to calculate the waves :)

@@tomweiland haha yeah that's the tricky part, because shader graph is a visual thing it's hard to work out exactly which combination of nodes and in which order will produce the same movement algorithm. But I'll keep at it, this tutorial has definitely taken me one step further towards achieving it. Thanks again!

@@brandon-leecoskey5942 ah right, I always forget people use shader graph-I still write all my shaders with code :P

Good point-a few people have run into that issue.

Yep this was a problem I ran into just recently as well, my floater was bouncing up and down well below the waves but that fixed it.

Awesome, ty for this comment so much

im having a problem where at this point when I go to play my cube just falls and I get an error saying "NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Floater.FixedUpdate () (at Assets/Scripts/Water/Floater.cs:14)" which is on this exact line, I've copied everything correctly as far as I can see so I'm not sure whats wrong with it. Any ideas?

Double check that the RigidBody is filled in the editor. For some reason the reference removes itself.@@ethancotton1549

Thank you, I will!

Glad you like it 😅

Awesome :D

Good luck :)

Thanks :D

Thanks :)

Glad you liked it :)

You're welcome!

Thank you :) Thinking about it now, you're probably right. I could have definitely pulled out the drag and buoyancy forces into separate methods-it just didn't feel super complex as I was writing it (especially since it's less than 10 lines). "Big hunting" ?

@@tomweiland lol bug hunting. I love phone swipe keyboards!

Ah, that makes a lot more sense!

@@tomweiland I find that using the right words really helps in comprehension! Didn't bother teaching me THAT in school!

Thanks :D

@@tomweiland We have to thank you 🤗.

That's an interesting application for this kind of setup-I guess you'd probably raycast downwards at each floater instead of sampling a wave equation, and then apply an upwards force based on how far away the ground is 🤔

@@tomweiland Exactly ;)

@@tomweiland So, I've been messing around with things, if you'd like to see what I came up with, check it out: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l7uXldd5s6_TYZ8.html It needs a lot of work on my end, but your snippet here was essential in getting things going. I moved away from having 4 separate empties with a "hover" script, and instead moved all the logic to the parent, using a foreach on an array of "hover point" empties. I'd like to expand on this later by having the "thruster" destructible, and when destroyed fire off an event, which will then update the list of hover points. Anyway, the prototyping has been fun so far, you've definitely helped spark a new fire under my ass to work on gamedev stuff, and I think I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this.

:)

Did you read the article that I linked to in the description? It goes through the process of creating waves in a shader step by step. At the moment I have no plans to make a tutorial on that, but I'm glad you liked the networking videos :)

Thank you, glad I could help :)

I'll be honest, I haven't really dealt with the devops stuff (containers, kubernetes, etc.) so far, so my knowledge in that area is pretty surface level, but what you said sounds okay as far as I can tell 😅

@@tomweiland Nice! I've been trying to implement CI/CD with github Actions using game.ci workflows, but they don't yet support server build just the client. They have a container image with unity that I can use to build the server and upload to my digital ocean droplet, but it's a 9Gb sized image and there's no chance I have to pull it on every commit. I'm trying to find whether is there a chance to cache it for the subsequent commits. I sincerely appretiate the work you've been done so far. Please don't stop posting contents. I loved your implementation of buyoancy. I was trying to do that for a long time and now I think I'll be able to. Thank you so much!

You're welcome!

👍

hehe typical mr.krabs practices :P

You can try :P

Where is your game ?

@@fernandocabal5798 lol

Thanks 😅

Glad I could help :)

I don't know anything about threejs but I don't see why it wouldn't work outside of Unity as long as you replace anything Unity-related with some sort of equivalent.

Are you talking about water at different heights in the world, like rivers and lakes? If so, you're right that (as is in this tutorial) this solution only works with water that's at the same height. If that's not what you meant, then perhaps using some punctuation would help clarify what you're trying to say 😅

Right but then you need to set the mass accurately, which then means you have to do a bunch of calculations based on volume, material type, etc. and it just becomes a pain. It's much simpler & more convenient to just have a few multipliers that you can play around with to get something that looks/feels right than something that is completely accurate (which it really never will be because the force would be applied all over the object, not just at one or a few points).

Yes, you are probably right, for a casual gameplay not heavily relied on physics this is a simpler solution.

Glad you like my content :D

@@tomweiland yea

I don't get the height _from_ the shader, I just use the same equation that the shader uses to calculate the height for the specific points where I need it.

The displacementAmount is meant to approximate the total amount of water displaced if the object is entirely submerged. We use the displacementMultiplier because the object isn't always entirely submerged. For the drag, you can use the displacement "factor" instead if you like. Honestly this is just an example of how you _could_ mimic buoyancy, so if you think something else might work better, just try it out.

Yes, I'm using URP. Shader Graph is the only way to automatically use URP's lighting (that I'm aware of), and I think it's intended as the alternative to surface shaders. Since Shader Graph still doesn't allow you to modify certain things that I need to modify, I'm basically just piggy-backing off of URP's shaders. I copy + pasted the code files for the lit shader and then added my extra code, but the drawback is that any time Unity updates or changes something about the lighting calculations, I need to manually update my shaders with that same code for it to take effect.

@@tomweiland thanks for the info as always. I just created a new lit shader graph and copied its generated code, seems to work fine!

Have you completed the entire shader? Pink means there's an error, which may occur if it's incomplete. If you're using URP then the issue is probably that the shader from the article is made for the built-in render pipeline, which isn't compatible with URP. You'll have to convert it, which will be hard if you don't know much about shaders-it might be easier to recreate in shader graph...

I know its been a while since you typed this comment but I was wondering if by chance you have any documentation on doing such a thing. Want to get the most performance possible because I am currently developing a vr game and doing it CPU based with blow someones headset up haha

Have you tested this? I'll give it a shot, although that doesn't seem right since buoyancy is an acceleration isn't it? Also do you mean to subtract the specific floater's velocity or just he ship's?

@@tomweiland I mean subtract the rigidbody’s velocity at the floater’s position. I haven’t tested it in a buoyancy setup. But your rigidbody already has a velocity, since you’re adding one on top of that to reach your desired position, your ship will overshoot it resulting in a bouncing effect. If not, sorry for wasting your time. Would love to hear the result though. I’m not near a computer so I can’t test it right now.

I'll give it a shot, although on a theoretical level I'm not convinced :P

I'm assuming you're using the Gerstner waves in the shader? In that case the closest you can get to a mathematical formula is an approximation-it won't be exact but I can send you the code on Discord if you like.

@@tomweiland Thanks for the reply, i am in your discord and found other people asking, so i managed to get the formula.

🤔

Yep helped me as well. In the video, the water drag is multiplied with fixedDelta time but not the gravity calculations

Nevermind, I found the issue. I was using _Time in my shader instead of _Time.y. So the time value I was using was different.

Glad you solved it!

Uh...what? 😅

Just evenly spaced around the hull. How many you use depends on how big the boat is. How are you scaling up the waves? If you're changing the actual scale of the water plane's transform, that's probably why you're getting weird behavior because doing so doesn't change the scaling of the waves that are used in the physics calculation.

@@tomweiland no im changing it in the actual wave height parameter and not scale. I get the weird bounces at the beginning and then the ships float nice.

"you replicate the shader math inside the boat script" Yep, that's exactly it. As long as you pass the same values to the same formula you should get the same output.

1. The low poly look is achieved by having the entire surface of each triangle use the same normal. If a triangle shares vertices with neighbouring triangles, the normals of those vertices will be an average of all the surrounding face normals (I hope that makes sense). My low poly shader is sort of my "secret sauce", but I'll point you in the right direction-in order to have a universal face normal, each of the triangle's vertices need to have the same normal value, and what's most commonly done is to simply split vertices, meaning each triangle has its own unique set of vertices (since you can only have one normal per vertex). Alternatively, you can ignore the normals stored in the mesh data and recalculate them in a shader. This can be done using geometry shaders (which allow you to perform calculations on a per-triangle basis rather than per-vertex/per-pixel), or you can use the screen space derivatives in the pixel/fragment shader function. Over the course of several months, I probably read every article/question/forum post out there relating to low poly rendering trying to figure this out :P 2. I set the offset for both the WaveHeight method and the shader manually.

​@@tomweiland I managed to hack something together with a flat-cell shader I found by incorporating the vertex displacements... Much studying to be done on my part to understand it beyond that, though. I'll try not to make something too similar and step on your creative toes!

@@richardstevenson371 that sounds like an approach that I'm not sure I've heard of. If you don't mind sharing I'd love to know how it works-maybe we can talk on Discord?

@@tomweiland Whoops! I wouldn't mind, but I can't really offer any expertise myself. I simply implemented the wave functions into a shader I found online: hextantstudios.com/unity-flat-low-poly-shader/

Yes, that's possible, and I do that in my own game too. If your player is weighing the boat down too much, try increasing its mass a bunch.

@@tomweiland mass was the main issue, increasing that a large amount solved my issue. Thanks

This is something I've actually been working on in my own project over the last couple days, and I'll be talking about how I did that in my next devlog, so keep an eye out for that :)

@@tomweiland oh very cool. I am looking forward to it. I'm wondering if it's similar to the approach the War Thunder devs used. developer.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downloads/regular/events/cgdc15/CGDC2015_ocean_simulation_en.pdf

It's definitely nowhere near as complex/in-depth. I pretty much just decreased wave height around islands-it's not entirely realistic but it has the effect I need.

I just use the same formula on the CPU side, although it's a bit less straightforward and requires some approximation with the Gerstner wave formula since it doesn't give you the height for the point you used as the input (Gerstner waves move horizontally as well as vertically, so the returned height is for the shifted point, not the original one).

@@tomweiland okay I see, thanks for your answer! Because I’m in a case where my mesh is really large compared to the size of the boats, that’s why i was looking for the formula giving directly the height

I only simulate the physics for the exact point that I need it. You can use the same formula (or an approximation if you're using Gerstner waves) on the CPU to get the height of the water at any give point, regardless of whether you actually have a water plane there or not.

@@tomweiland Thanks for the reply! I feel I've been able to get things working well with your advice, but I had another question regarding how you organize large areas of water and coordinate the waves across planes? I am completely lost on how to approach this

Yeah, unfortunately there's no mathematical formula that will return the height at any given point of a Gerstner wave, simply because Gerstner waves are generated by shifting vertices on the horizontal plane as well as on the y-axis. The best you can get is ia approximation-I spent a _long_ time trying to derive a formula before I realized that :P If you're interested in the exact math, I suggest joining the Discord server (link in description) as it's a lot easier to share and explain code over there.

@@tomweiland Thanks for your help Tom. I'll join the Discord and try to find an answer :)

_"I'm wondering how you get your vertex data back out of the shader and into a C# script?"_ I don't. I use the first option you mentioned-I just use the same math as in the shader to calculate heights on the CPU as needed.

@@tomweiland Any chance you could show us how? It's doing my head in

You should be able to just use AddTorque to add a rotational force.

Most formulas you might use to generate waves will repeat at some point (an untransformed sine wave has a period of 2π, which is how often it repeats), so you could use some math to figure out the period of your wave equation and reset the offset every time you reach that value. That should result in a seamless transition (assuming you do the math right 😆).

@@tomweiland yea noticed that too lol to be smooth it has to reset at the right time thanks for the response. very cool system

You'd have to use the same gradient noise in the script-as long as the formula is deterministic you should be able to just use the same one in the shader and the script and it should work.

I don't plan on making a tutorial about shaders. I really don't see how it would be different if it's in video form, and I don't want to spend time turning a perfectly good article into a video. If you're struggling to understand the article (although you really just have to copy + paste, and I believe you can download the project files as well), then you should learn some shader fundamentals first, and there's tons of tutorials out there for that.

Just because you simulate the waves in a shader instead of on the CPU doesn't mean you need to change the formula, but there are much better formulas to generate waves than using a Sine function (look into Gerstner waves). I just happened to mention the two at the same time, but you can do one without the other.

@@tomweiland Ty for replying. Gonna Try your tutorial with GPU shader from the asset store. No nothing about shaders and wave formulas:( . Hope it works. Even if it isnt 100% accurate. Need just the feel.