Playway Water for the Ocean

Playway Water for the Ocean

Looking for the best / fastest water

There are so many water assets at the asset store and outside, that it is difficult to find the right one without testing them.

That is what I have done and here is the result of my tests.

Unity Water 4

Unity water comes included with Unity and has a decent look, is handling the shore automatically. The only problem is that I found it very slow, actually slower than Playway which is by far better. If you are using their planar reflections, then you divide your FPS by 3! It is too much. Plus it has no underwater.

Smart Water

This water is not at the asset store but exists for +5 years. It is free, It is looking pretty good, and is the fastest in the list. It features underwater, the best of all but the waves simulation is lacking way behind. Also for now it uses pre-calculated shore lines which is dated. Generally the look was not as good as playway.

CETO Ocean.

The best looking ocean in my opinion, and also it was looking great as a river. The only problem, I could not get the underwater to work in my environment.Also the author has announced that he is dumping the project and that will be no more updates.

Tarashen Water, Triton Ocean 

These are dead for a long time. The Authors ran with the money.

Aqua

It was my water of choice for the first demo. But the problem is that it is a Shader forge generated shader, not really optimized. It is quite slow for a flat plane, with no waves and no underwater.

Playway

There are some problems with Playway, the most important is the lack of control over how the water is looking. You have really to struggle to get something that is not looking fancy.

But apart from that, the underwater is smooth and the transition is top notch, really AAA. It is infinite, and can work both for rivers and ocean.

I decided to modify it in order to get a progressive change between calm water and choppy water, so I added the 2 profiles and a progressive slider that fades between the 2. That will be used when the weather changes for example.

Conclusion 

I will use Playway Water in WOK! Check how the water is looking in this movie.