River Modeler 2024

« A license for this asset guarantees access to updates for Unity 2022/2023 through Unity 6.0, and potentially new features. »

📄 Documentation | 💬 Forum Thread

An easy to use, yet powerful, tool designed to streamline the process of creating rivers and creeks right within the editor. This tool enables developers and environment artists to transform splines into complete rivers.

Built around Unity's native Spline tools package, making synergy with other tools and purposes straightforward. This is the 3rd iteration of a proprietary tool, battletested in released production projects, now reworked and improved for the asset store.

Recommended, but not required, to use with Stylized Water 2.

• Stay tuned for Waterfall and Lake modeling assets later this year!

🗜 Mesh generation features:

• Intelligently create edge loops, depending on curvature and slope, resulting in an optimized mesh for relatively straight sections and higher detail on slopes.

• Layered displacement, creates the appearance of shallow or turbulent streams.

• Noise- and displacement based foam vertex colors. To drive shader-based foam effects.

• Ample UV controls

• Support for multiple splines within a container

• Automatic FBX file exporting

🧬 Spline tools:

These scene-view tools allow you to setup points on the spline that control a river's:

• Transparency, to fade out a river and blend it with the environment or other water bodies

• Displacement, adjust the width of the river and the scale of the displacement effects

• Foam, scale the amount of generated foam up or down, for complete artistic control

Transparency and Foam weights are stored in a (configurable) vertex color channel, and only work with water shaders using this data. The demo shader and Stylized Water 2 both support this.

📚 Effect-focused components

• VFX Emitter*, drives a VFX Graph to automatically create foam splashes where the water appears foamy, or on slopes to create small waterfalls. An innovative technique to liven up water surfaces with minimal effort.

• Audio Zone: spawns audio emitters along the river, to provide optimal coverage for a natural soundscape. Play separate audio clips for flat areas and on slopes. Actively attenuates the volume based on the camera's distance to the river.

* Water splashes are compatible with URP only, Unity's VFX Graph does not support cross-render pipeline compatibility. Which forces to pick a specific render pipeline. See Roadmap.

🛠 Technical features:

• C# API to generate geometry from a spline, integratable with custom tools/workflows.

• Callback events, both as C# functions and exposed in the inspector.

• Visual debugger to inspect generated geometry, foam and transparency weights.

🎁 Includes:

• River shader(graph)*

• Two original audio loops (cascade & fast flowing creek)

• Foam texture and Wave normal map

• Water splash particle texture

* A premade river shader(graph), intended to best demonstrate this tool's functionality. It supports all render pipelines but it is basic in nature and may not support all use cases, such as VR or orthographic views.

The focus lies on the toolset itself. The shader is not subject to feature development, except to accomendate new modeling features. Stylized Water 2 is already a dedicated water shader and pairs perfectly with this tool.

⛰️ Integrates with MicroVerse

Leverage the terrain authoring workflow of MicroVerse, and create rivers that naturally carve their way through the landscape. The integration can drive a Spline Path component to create a river bank and bed.

This requires the both the MicroVerse asset and its MicroVerse Splines module to be installed.

Disclaimer

• All the demo content is set up for the Universal Render Pipeline. In the Built-in RP and HDRP the environment will appear pink. This does not impact the ability to expirement with the river tool, which you can use in any render pipeline.
• The tool outputs a static mesh, so has no runtime performance overhead. Regular factors such as vertex count, and particle count/overdraw for VFX are in your control.

👇 Please read the package requirement details. Failure to follow instructions results in errors or incorrect imports, absolutely nothing I can do to avoid this if you choose to plow through!