wave-harmonic/crest
Crest
Crest is a GPU-accelerated fluid simulator and real-time ocean renderer developed as a plugin and simulation framework for the Unity game engine. It provides a system for generating high-fidelity ocean surfaces and wave dynamics for use in professional game development pipelines.
The framework utilizes compute shaders and fast Fourier transforms to calculate water movement and wave synthesis. It manages large-scale water environments through the use of cascaded level-of-detail geometry and GPU-driven instancing to maintain performance across expansive scenes.
The simulation surface is further detailed with screen-space refraction rendering and texture-based flow mapping to simulate currents and coastal water interactions.
Features
- Water Simulation Frameworks - Provides a specialized framework for simulating and rendering realistic ocean surfaces and wave dynamics within Unity.
- Fluid Surface Simulation - Implements a simulation engine focused on the dynamics and rendering of water and ocean surfaces.
- Real-Time Graphics Rendering - Provides high-fidelity real-time rendering of liquid surfaces using GPU-accelerated shaders.
- Real-Time 3D Rendering Engines - Ships a graphics framework for interactive 3D ocean environments featuring displacement maps and screen-space refraction.
- FFT Wave Simulators - Generates complex ocean surface displacement maps by converting frequency-domain data using Fast Fourier Transforms.
- GPU-Accelerated FFT Libraries - Employs GPU-accelerated FFT libraries to calculate complex water movements without overloading the CPU.
- Compute Shader Kernels - Utilizes compute shader kernels to offload fluid dynamics and wave calculations to the GPU for real-time performance.
- Ocean Environment Graphics - Enables the creation of professional-grade coastal and oceanic settings with dynamic displacement and refraction.
- Screen Space Refraction Techniques - Simulates light bending through water by distorting the rendered scene based on the surface normal.
- Flow Mapping - Simulates currents and coastal water interactions by animating surface textures using directional vector data.
- Geometry Instancing - Reduces CPU overhead by rendering multiple copies of water mesh segments using a single draw call.
- Level of Detail Systems - Implements a cascaded system of nested geometry rings to manage visual complexity based on distance from the camera.
