About the effect

As a part of the automobile simulation project, I was really interested in creating a similar water-splash/water-drops effect of DriveClub.

Have a look at the amazing effect that Evolution Studios made for the game in the GIF below.

It all began in 2015 when I asked a clue to even where to start creating the effect on a PolyCount thread.

The community helped me to create this effect which in fact became the world’s first real-time water drops effect ever made for Unity3D. But it won’t be the one and only anymore, as I want to share its details and how you can have the effect in your use-case, too. In this article, I will explain how the effect is made – history-wise – and when the effect will be ready to download FOR FREE.

After a year (technically a month or so, if you count the days I’ve worked on it only) an initial version of it was ready. Since people in the PolyCount community were really supportive, I could finish making a beta version of it weeks after the initial version.

You can check it in the video below. (If you were to reduce metaball size and increase the amount of them, then you’d get a prettier outcome)

The thread has a very informative content for you to learn, although most of the images and video sources there are now expired.

Now two years after creating the thread (or about a year after completing the beta version),  No advancement is made and it is still not released, although I wanted it to be freely shared. The reason is simple, I ran out of free-time currently. Here is in-depth info of what this effect needs to have before a release:

1. Although I have fixed performance issues and now it uses more GPU computations than CPU, It is not “loosely coupled” which means you have to set the effect up for each individual car and you need to individually create a specific mesh for each car’s windshield. This means the setting-up-process for other devs is so complicated that releasing the asset for them is pointless, currently – nobody except me could properly use it. You will have to create your own manager for activating the effect of only the main player’s car. Which means I also should add event and delegates to the system, too.
2. The metaball effect is using CPU (which is not bad at all) but I’m curious if it is possible to get rid of meshes and just use GPU.
3. Wiper animations are not synced when the framerate is too low.

I have to resolve the three issues before releasing it publicly. But they – especially the first one – does take time although they are easy to fix.

A lot of people keep asking me a release date for it, I need time to fix those issues.

I am currently a computer engineering student who is trying to get a Masters’s degree sometime (not very soon, though). Putting that aside, there are more critical features that I am working on, Like a super lightweight Granular synthesis system for car vehicles sound and/or ambient sound, Its car physics needs lots of stuff to do, Mini-map system, AI features… So do not expect the effect to be ready very soon. I will share it for free though, Follow my twitter (@D4N005H) to get informed if the effect is ready for downloading or not.

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE! The download link is ready!

Although initially, I planned to share it after a major update, due to the lack of free time. I decided to share it as is on GitHub. I encourage you to try to enhance it for the community. Check the link below for more information and for downloading it.

https://github.com/ATG-Simulator/RealtimeDynamicWindshieldWaterFX

Regards.