My team and I are very interested in this ocean shader, after having followed and experimented with a few other shaders. We’re working on a game that takes place mostly underwater in vehicles, so we really need that area of the environment to look great. I have a few questions/feature requests:
First Question: Will translucent materials be fully supported underwater? Specifically, glass for windows and particle effects.
Second Question: You mentioned masking out objects inside the water as a feature you already want to implement, but will we be able to define a custom shaped mesh as the mask? An example would be masking out the interior of an irregularly shaped submarine, or a building. Additionally, will the masked area be able to move in the world such as on a vehicle?
Third Question: Will the underside of the water surface look realistic, and have the appropriate amount of transparency and sun visibility? One major issue with the Community Ocean Project is that everything looks pretty from above the water, but when viewing the water surface from underneath it often looks dark or black, especially from acute angles.
Fourth Question: Will volumetric lighting and light shafts be supported, and can we control the depth at which the light shafts fade away?
Fifth Question: Is there a water caustics lighting effect implemented, or will it be implemented?
I’ve attached some screenshots from Subnautica to illustrate the masking effects and really the general look of the water we’re hoping for. Thanks and looking forward to your reply!
First Question: Yes, full support.
Second Question: Custom shapes will be supported and able to move. I am implementing a new solution for this based on distance fields.
Third Question: the look underwater will definitely not be like the Community Ocean underwater and we aim realism. The underwater in the Community Ocean is a postprocess and even thou it does not takes position of the camera into account when applying distortion or fog. The goal is to mimic the appearance for a real ocean when moving from bottom to the surface, so I think your project will have a great benefit from this.
Fourth Question: volumetric light and light shafts are one of our top requirements, so a must have or no deal for us aswel.
Fifth Question: caustics are also important as much as the light shafts (both are linked), so it is part of our roadmap.
Since this asset have so many features, we are studying several alternatives for it to handle all this and still have performance for games. We will have a setup for film making (my main area), which will hold exceptional realism for cinematics with sequencer. That said so, we think that releasing in a two step asset (free + premium) is hard, so we might end up releasing one single asset for a modest price in the marketplace, so we get everyone using the same asset, which simplifies a lot support and maintenance aswel, making the price lower, instead of a free and high priced premium asset.
The release will only happen in 2019 thou, we are also developing a new Cloudscape system which will be called Sky Seasons, which will be able to work paired with Ocean Seasons and provide a better sky than any other available. So, their releases are tied together, with probably Ocean Seasons being released first and Sky Seasons in the month after it. We can’t have a target date yet thou.
That’s fantastic to hear Nilson! If you can get all that working you have a guaranteed sale from us. And yes it definitely sounds more straightforward for everyone if it’s simply sold as a single package.
Any idea how your system might perform in VR? We did some testing with the Community Ocean Project on an Oculus Rift and the performance we got was totally unplayable, so it would be icing on the proverbial cake if your system can handle VR.
I know you don’t have a target release date of course, but do you happen to have a very rough idea on when you think it might happen in the year - like early-2019, or late-2019, etc?
That’s also great to hear about Sky Seasons, and a convenient solution for having a sky system that we can know will work 100% with Ocean Seasons.
@Pyramas The major issue in terms of performance for the Community Ocean is that its beautiful reflections relies on the Planar Reflections which is a high cost component when dealing with large surfaces as an Ocean, because you have the time used to render the main material and the amount of time to render the reflections after that, that sums for large areas too much, which doubling by the needs of VR ends in a very slow rendering (lucky we only have two eyes). We will still offer this type of reflection, but we will provide a way for reflections not based on it or screen space reflections (which is not good for ocean) and this new method is not expensive as planar reflections is.
The expected release date will for sure be around UE 4.23 release, because we do want to make sure it will work with all the expected changes in the rendering module at the engine.
The expected release is April 2019, a little bit after Sky Seasons, since we are working on both to have them compatible. There are still a lot to work on this, but we are very confident on the quality and performance.
Thx Nilson, was hoping a bit sooner Saw the cloud video on youtube. Looking good and can’t wait to see some different lighting conditions like sunsets etc.
The rendering module for the engine is going to change a lot for 4.22 and 4.23 and if we release two plugins highly dependent on this, we will have a serious delay on providing the update on the code, which will make users mad and will be a bad marketing for us, therefore we decided to release it past release 4.23 and one after the other. We are a small studio with lots of project for film and we can’t afford having too many efforts out of our core business, not yet using a Unreal Engine workflow, but we are working on this. Once we have made the complete shift on the workflow we will have conditions to be ahead of any issues faster, even before users notice them.
I have updated the roadmap at the first post, but we are not able to provide pictures/video yet, because we need to wait for engine changes in order to reassure the quality will not change. Furthermore, things are happening and faster.
Hi, Will it be possible to blend ocean types in an infinite ocean? For example, the closer to land you get, the smaller the waves, and bigger waves when you get into the middle of the ocean?
I had to check that, because it was not a common question. But in fact the Ocean does receive the shadows from anything in the environment casting it. Even the Community Free Ocean (check my forum signature) does.
I have download the Community Ocean Project last month and test it, Everything is great except the shadow over the water are too soft/blur. Would it be possible to make the shader looks like this?
I don’t think there would be any reason why shadows would look blurry ONLY on the ocean plane. Can you please show some pictures to illustrate what you mean?
The shadows on the picture you showed are blurry as well, if you get closer, btw.
It is a matter of scale. Everything will look sharp at distance. Also, light intensity is key here and how you setup your skylight (indirect light).
I just took one of the boats and hanged it out of the water and seemed dark enough, since we are dealing with a translucent surface which scatters light in a very different way when compared with a solid/diffuse surface.
I would say it’s an issue due to the fact that it’s using the translucency shadow volume, which has very limited resolution and draw scale. move away from the shadow far enough and you’ll notice it gets hard culled in the shape of a box
sadly there is no other technique for shadows on translucent objects
Saw the cloud video on youtube. Looking good and can’t wait to see some different lighting conditions like sunsets etc.