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Important: The Shallow Water package is NOT required for shallow water. It is an integrated shallow water simulation - a next-generation feature. Crest 5 can still have shallow water using the same features as Crest 4 does.

Crest is a trusted water solution by many studios for its quality and performance. It has been implemented in several successful games & simulators and the subject of SIGGRAPH talks.

Nominated for Best Artistic Tool in the 16th Unity Awards.

Crest 4 x 5 Highlights

Supports all render pipelines in one package
Re-architectured to further performance scalability
Many new improvements and features

Some features (mostly deprecated) have been removed. Some have been moved to separate packages. Please check the Release Notes.

Workflow

Add water in minutes with two components (water surface and waves)
Sane and balanced defaults
Helpful tooltips including materials
Detailed help boxes display validation errors direct in the inspector with buttons to fix problems directly
Online and offline documentation
Fully documented scripting API
Supports all three render pipelines in one asset
Imports into the Packages directory as an editable UPM package

Features

State-of-the-art LOD system achieving class-leading performance
Input system for modifying water data using textures or renderers like mesh, trail, line and particle renderers. Supports Shader Graph
Deterministic FFT and Gerstner waves with innovative "equalizer" style wave authoring
Multiple wave sets can be blended together including local waves
Physically based rendering with simulated light transport including reflection, refraction, scattering, caustics approximation and shadowing
Water shader ships as a Shader Graph (only two nodes, internals are still HLSL)
Underwater with partial submersion and meniscus
Query water displacement, normals and velocity using GPU (CPU with separate asset)
Water bodies with varying height
Dynamic wave simulation for dynamic object-water interaction including wakes, ripples and reflections
Shallow water wave attenuation which dampens waves based on terrain depth (not the same thing as shallow water simulation which is a separate asset)
Foam simulated from turbulence and shorelines with accumulation and dissipation
Soft shadowing simulation
Flow to enable horizontal motion of water surface including displacements, normals, foam and caustics
Surface clipping to carve hulls/caves out of water surface
Albedo layer to apply color onto water surface similar to decals
Planar reflections including Total Internal Reflections
Flexible time synchronisation to support networking and cutscene Timelines
Extensions assets below for more features
Much more…

Please see the Frequently Ask Questions section in our documentation for more important information.

Sample scene selection may not include ones shown in marketing materials and screenshots.

Compatibility

Unity 6 Preview supported
Unity 6 URP Render Graph & compability mode supported
Motion Vectors (HDRP and Unity 6 URP only)
Depth based effects like Depth of Field (HDRP and URP only)
Raytraced Reflections (HDRP only)
Forward, Forward+, Deferred, Perspective and Orthographic supported
Stereo Rendering (VR/XR) supported

Limitations

BIRP XR single-pass instanced is currently broken (Unity bug)
URP XR multi-pass is currently broken (Unity bug)
Planar reflections currently do not support XR
Manipulating data with Shader Graph is not supported with HDRP (Unity bug)

These known limitations may be solved in future versions.

Extensions

These are optional extensions.

CPU Queries: Not required as there are GPU queries provided. This is for GPU-less environments
Paint
Portals: Restrict rendering. Useful for aquariums and portholes
Shallow Water: A shallow water simulation. Not required for shallow water as Crest has wave attenuation. It is a next-generation feature
Shifting Origin: Keeps the camera at zero. Only needed for very large worlds
Splines
Whirlpool

Requirements

Unity 2022.3 or Unity 6 (latest patched version)
Shader Graph package
Shader compilation target 4.5 or above
Graphics API that is not OpenGL or WebGL
One license required for each individual user (see EULA)

As a general requirement, it may be necessary to update to the latest patched version of Unity in order for a problem to be solved. Furthermore, legacy versions of Unity are not supported.

Crest 4 Migration

There is no assisted migration from Crest 4 to Crest 5. All GUIDs have been regenerated so Crest 5 can be imported alongside Crest 4 for manual migration.

Asset Compatibility

We avoid non-standard techniques and are not aware of any major incompatibilities. Third party assets will need time before integrations are available. We have a list of known integrations including Dynamic Water Physics 2 (DWP2), Enviro 3 and Expanse.

Crest Water 5 (Oceans, Rivers, Lakes)