Table of Contents
- Welcome to Full Sail
- Installing
- Quick Setup
- Custom Meshes
- Textures
- Movement Mask
- Furl
- Furled
- Thickness
- Texture Combine Window
- Helper Scripts
- Sail
- Sail Group
- Sail Furl
- Sail Bounds
- Shader Params
- Wind Control
- Version Changes
- Tutorial Videos
Welcome to Full Sail
Thank you for buying our Full Sail Asset for Unity. Full Sail is a shader based system that will add great looking wind effects to your ship sails, castle banners or other cloth type objects. All the animation and deformation is done via a shader making it super fast in any project. Easily have 100's of fully animated sails in your scene.
Full Sail offers a wide variety of options to control the look of your sails. Sails can taper in or out, be sheared. The sides can be arched or even be told to arch only when the sail is full of wind. You have complete control over how the sail is fixed to any object and also how the sail moves when the wind blows. How much the sails ripple and the type of ripple is also controllable.
Another advanced feature especially for ships is the ability to have the sails furl themselves away. Again you have complete control over how this happens via simple textures.
You can apply emblems to the sails, and you can control if that emblem appears on the back of the sail easily as well. Also you can add color the emblem easily and add emissive color to have the emblems glow if you wish.
If your project means sails can get damaged then we have that supported as well, each sail can have its own damage settings and textures, so holes can appear, or sails can look shredded.
The shader also supports bump mapping and translucency so your sails can look great with the sun behind them.
Full Sail comes with some sail meshes included to get you started or you can add your own. Also included is a set of sail textures, damaged sail textures and various controlling textures for attaching the sail and for the furling effects.
Full Sail can also be used for other simple cloth type objects such as banners, washing hanging on a lines and so on.
Full Sail has versions of the shaders for Builtin, HDRP and URP pipelines. Shader graphs for HDRP and URP are also include along with all source code. Also included are some helper scripts to show how you can control the sails in your game project.
If you check the image below of the Sailing ship all the sails on the ship are the same mesh and material, all the different shapes, colors, styles, effects are controlled by shader overrides and material property blocks.
A ship fully rigged with sails
Installation
By default Full Sails includes the shaders for the Built In pipeline. You will find two versions of the shader for each pipeline. There is an optimized version and a normal one. The only difference is the Optimized version makes use of a single texture to control the wind movement, furling and furled sate, the non optimized version has a texture for each. This makes authoring a little easier as you can swap in and out different controlling textures quickly for testing and setup and when you are happy you can use the include combining window to create a texture for use by the optimized version of the shader.
If you are using HDRP or URP pipelines you will find a couple of rar files in the 'Shaders/HDRP' and 'Shaders/URP' folders, they each contain a unitypackage with the shader graphs and shader source code for each pipeline, extract the unitypackage file to a folder and then go to the Assets menu and 'Import Package/Custom Package' and choose the file you extracted from the rar file.
Quick Setup
Custom Meshes
Full sail comes with a set of Square sails in multiple mesh densities as well as a set of tri angular sails which should be suitable for most situations considering the options the shader gives you for changing the sail shape.
If for some reason you can get the effect you need from the included meshes you can add your own. There are a couple of rules for the mesh you should follow.
First it is important that the pivot point for the mesh be at the top centre of the sail object and that the forward direction is Z up is Y and across the sail is X. The shader expects meshes to be in the way.
Second the UV mapping for the mesh should planar through the mesh so the UV values on the back of the mesh are the same as those on the front. The UV values are used to control the animation and furling of the mesh, so if the UV's are different on the rear the animations will not look correct. The uvs should go from 0,0 in the top left corner to 1,1 in the bottom right.
Another thing to note about the meshes is Unity will generate a bounds box for the mesh when it imports it. This is fine but if you have sails that deform a lot from their original position then it is likely that the Unity culling system will remove a partly visible mesh when it sees the mesh bounds box is not visible. To fix this the mesh bounds needs to be enlarged, there is a helper script called SailBounds included which you can add to your sails which will expand the bounds enough so culling is correctly handled.
Once you have you mesh created just export as normal and add to you project and use the same as built in sail meshes.
A sail mesh showing UVs and pivot location
Movement Mask
The movement of the sail is controlled by the Mask map. The lighter the area on this texture then the more the sail is allowed to move for that point. So if you want the top of the sail to not move at all then the top of the Mask map should be black. If you want all the corners to be fixed then again all the corners should be black. The gradients should be smooth for the best looking results. Check out the included examples to better get a feel for creating your own.
One thing to note when making a new texture is that when it is imported sRGB should be turned off in the import settings so the texture is linear, and the texture wrap mode should be set to Clamp otherwise you will get bleeding at the edges causing artifacts in whatever system the texture is controlling. This goes for the Furl and Furled textures as well.
Movement mask with multiple locked points and lines down the sail
Full Sail comes with some example Movement maps, or you can create your own using your fav image editing software. We have though also included the ability to make a movement map in Unity. If you go to the menu and click Assets/Create/Full Sail/Move Map a new Move Map asset will be create in the project. This contains values to create a Move Map from scratch.
The inspector will show the texture as you change the values. You can set the size of the texture with the width and height values. The fix falloff value controls how far the corner fixing values go into the rest of the map. The Falloff power control how quickly the value falls off. The four Fix values allow you to set per corner how attached the sail is, a value of 0 will mean no movement, 1 will mean it will move the amount allowed by the rest of the move map values.
If there is a texture in the Base Map then that will be used as the starting point for the new texture, if you are creating a Reverse Move map to stop the sail going through an object then you should select the move map used by the sail here so the sail mount points and general movement will be the same. Then you can add fills or blobs to limit the movement as required.
The Fill value can be used to vary the movement map across the map, so you can add ribs for example to the sail, again in the gradient white is full movement black is no movement. The repeat value allows you to add multiple copies of the gradient across the sail. There is also a vertical fill option that does the same as fill but the gradient runs the other way.
Lastly the two curve values control the main movement across the sail and down the sail, when you change the curve values you will see the texture update.
When you are happy with the values click the 'Save Map' and a texture will be generated in the Full Sails/textures folder and you can use this with the shader. If the texture is already present it will be updated so you can see your changes directly in the shader.
There is also a slightly more advanced option if you enable the 'Use Edge Curve' option then there will be four curves that control the movemap, one for each edge of the map so you have more control over the map and can make some more interesting movements.
Inspector for the Move Map Creator
Furling Texture
How the sail furls is also controlled via a texture, with this texture darker areas will furl before lighter areas, so the top of the texture should be white so the top of the sail furls last. Again look at the included examples to see what difference they make to the animation.
In the example furling texture below the bottom of the sail will furl start to furl first and the curved lighter lobes will mean those parts of the sail will furl a bit later, so the expected animation from this will be bottom moving first, then the edges and centre following a little behind resulting in a draped effect.
Example of a Furl Map
You can also create a Furl Map asset in your project from the Assets full sail menu. This create a Furl Map asset in the project and allow you to build a new furl map by changing the values in the inspector.
You can set the width and height of the texture. The fill gradient is the base color, usually you should start with white at the top and black or dark grey at the bottom. The curve values then allows you to add extra movement that controls how the sail will furl up.
When you are happy with the look click the Save Map button and a texture will be created in the Full Sail/Textures folder, you can then use that texture with the shader or in any overrides you want.
The Furl Map Inspector
Furled texture
When the sail is fully furled its shape is controlled by this texture and the furled radius value in the shader. With a white texture the furled sail will form a perfect tube with the radius of the Furled Radius value. If you add darker areas then the radius will be reduced accordingly. This allows you to get natural bulging looking furled sails.
As with the other textures you can create a furled map texture by creating a Furled Map asset in the project. Once added you can use the inspector to change the texture. Again width and height can be used to set the size of the map. There are two modes you can use to create the texture, first is Curve based so by editing the shape of the curve will update the texture. White will mean the furled sail will be larger than darker areas in the texture. The second mode is Gradient based, the curve mode gives more freedom but the option is there.
The Inspector for the Furled Map creator
Ship with all its sails furled
Thickness Texture
Texture Combiner
If you want to use the slightly optimized version of the shader then that makes use of combined Mask, Furl and Furled textures to reduce texture lookups in the Vertex shader. To make it easier there is a helper window in 'Window/Full Sail/Create Sail Texture'. When selected you can choose the Mask map, furl map and furled map. Click the Create texture button and new texture with the name of the mask texture with _Sail added to the end will be created. This has the Mask in the red channel, the furling in the green channel and the furled in the blue channel. You can off course make these in Photoshop or other software if you want.
The Texture Format drop down allows you to select the format the new texture will be in, it is best to leave it on RGB24.
The Create texture size option allows you to pick the size of the new texture, the animation control textures do not need to be very big so use the smallest size until you notice any odd behaviour in the end animation.
Texture Combiner Window
Helper Scripts
Full Sail is a shader system so you can use it just like that and manage the values like you would for any other material in your game project, so for example if you have 10 sails in your scene you could have 10 different materials each using the Sail shader and apply one to each sail and then change the material values directly.
But we have included a few helper scripts to make life a little easier if you want to control groups of sails of change one param only on one sail on a ship with lots of other sails.
Below are descriptions of the few helper scripts that are included to get you started. I am sure this will expand as we get different use cases suggested. Do let us know if you need something different and we will look at adding support for it.
Sail
This script allows you to set per sail any of the shader params. This is done via an Override system. Any Override added will replace the value that is set in the shader. This makes it easy to complex setups with each sail having different colors, textures, emblems etc. without having to have lots of different versions of the material. The overrides are applied via a MaterialPropertyBlock. To have the overrides applied a sail must be part of a Sail Group, see below for more info on groups. You are free though to use multiple materials and manage the values directly yourself.
To use add a Sail script to your sail object that has the shader on it, the included sail object prefabs already have the script added. Once added you will see an 'Add Override' button. Click this to add a new Override to the sail. When added you will see a check box, this allows you to disable any override at anytime. Next you will see a drop down, this is where you select which shader value you want to override, depending on which value you use the next item will be either a slider, float value, color selecter or a texture selected, this is the actual value you want to use for the sail. At the end the button can be used to remove the override from the sail.
In the image below you can see the sail has two overrides applied, one for the Sail Taper and one for the Sail Shear.
You can edit multiple sails at the same time so you can add an override and set its value to all sails you have selected which makes rigging up ships with lots of sails a bit quicker.
Sail script inspector with two overrides added
Sail Group
The Sail Group component allows you to combine multiple sails into a set for controlling. The Sail Objs section allows you to add which sails you want to be part of the group. If the list is empty it will be filled with all the child sail objects found under the group object.
The Sail Group component will apply any overrides found on the sails to the shader, once a sail is part of a Sail Group you will see any changes you make to the overrides in the scene view.
The Sail Group also has its own set of overrides, this make it easy to apply a group override to the sails instead of having to add an override to each sail. Overrides on the sail will take priority of any Group override. Add the overrides in the same way you did for the Sails.
In the example below the Sail Group has 6 overrides added, one of which, Emblem, is disabled so will not be applied. All the other overrides will be applied to all the sails in the group. Click the 'Add Group Override' button to add a new override to the list.
You can also see all the sails the group values will change, you can add as many as you need to each group.
You can also use the sail group to automatically add an Animation offset to each sail in the group. This will stop all the sails moving in the exact same way, you can do this by adding an override to each sail but this option makes it simpler. Check the 'Add Ripple Offsets' box to enable it, the seed value is used by the random number generator so change that to get a different set of values. The Anim Range min max slider allows you to set the range of the anim offset to add, if the values are close together then the sails will be quite close in animation which is probably a good starting point. A large range will tend to make each sail behave uniquely.
Sail Group Inspector showing selected sails and overrides
Sail Furl
This is an example script to show the furling of the sails. When you apply it select a Sail Group that it will control. When you change the Furl value any Sail in the group that has a Furl override and a FurlOrder override will respect the Furl value here and furl or unfurl as required. The furling is controlled by a SmoothDamp function so you can control the speed of the furling with the Speed value.
The furling order of the sails is controlled by the FurlOrder override for each sail. If your group has say 4 sails, you can set all the furlorder values to 0 and then they will all furl together. If you set them to 1, 2, 3, 4 then they will furl one after another with the lower furlorder value furling before the others. You can easily setup furling groups with this or have sails that never furl etc.
In the example below the speed of the furling is set to 1, lower this for faster furling increase it for slower furling. The furl value can be used to test the furling and directly controls the animation. The group option can be used to select a group to control, if left empty it will look for the Sail Group component on the object it is attached to.
Sails Furl Inspector
Sail Bounds
This script enlarges the bounds on the mesh to stop it being wrongly culled from the scene when it has a large deformation.
In the example below the script has been applied to one of the supplied sail objects whose default bounds size is 10 10 0.02. The values increase this to 20 10 20 allowing for plenty of sail movement without Unity culling the object by mistake. Adjust these values when you have a sail at its fullest deformation to get the correct size of bounding box for your case.
Sail Bounds Inspector
Shader Params
The shader has a custom GUI to break up the various shader options into sections. The image below shows the various section, each section can be expanded by clicking on the Foldout bar. Below is a list of all the shader params and what they do. All the scripts and shaders have Tooltips that explain what each param does as well.
General Section
Color
Main Color tint for the sail. The same as any other material applies a tint the main texture for the sail.
Albedo
Main sail texture for the sail.
BumpMap
Bumpmap for the sail. Normal Unity bumpmap to add surface detail to the sail.
SpecColor
Specular color tint as normal, used with the Smoothness value below.
Smoothness
Specular smoothness value. Controls how much specular the sail has, best with low values as sails are not very shiny.
Emblem
Emblem
Texture to apply as an emblem to the sail. Emblems are applied to the centre of the sail. You can use the color value below to tint the texture or make it see through.
EmblemColor
Tint color for the emblem, alpha value for transparency.
EmblemEMColor
Emissive Color for the emblem. You may want to have the emblem glow to make it look more magical, use this value to set that.
EmblemBackface
How much of the emblem is shown on the back of the sail. With the value at 0 then none of the emblem will appear on the back of the sail, if set to 1 then the emblem will fully appear on the back. If you use lower values then you can make it look like the emblem is just visible on the rear which can look nice.
Damage
Damage
Damage for the sail. 0 is no damage and 1 is full damage. The damage will work its way through the damage textures set below so you can have multiple damage stages. The damage is lerped in so will appear gradually as well, use the Alpha cutoff value to adjust how holes appear. The damage textures will need alpha channel to define holes or torn areas.
DamageTex
First stage of damage texture.
DamageTex1
Second stage of damage texture
DamageTex2
Third stage of damage texture
AlphaCutoff
Alpha cutoff for the sail and damage. If the sail texture or damage textures have any alpha values this will control the cutoff for when they become transparent.
Sail
Speed
Speed of the wind for the sail. 0 is no wind and the sails will hang limp, as this value increases the sails will fill with wind and bulge and show ripples.
WindDir
Direction vector of the wind. Direction of the wind usually 0 0 1 0 to be blowing into the sails but you can change it. Will change the movement direction of the sail. The value is a direction vector the last w value is not used.
SailForward
Forward vector of the sail usually 0 0 1 0. Should usually be left alone, but if for some reason you want a different forward direction you can change it here. Sometimes used is sails are leant at an angle to the wind. The value is a direction vector the last w value is not used.
MaskMap
Texture to control the sail movement (R), if using the Optimized shader then also Furl (G) and Furled (B). How this map is used is explained above, controls how far the sail will move with the wind.
MaskMapRev
Texture to control the sail movement (R) when the wind is against the sail, if there is nothing behind the sail then use the same map as MaskMap in here, but if you have an obstacle behind the sail then you can use a new map here to stop the sail going through the blocking object.
SailWind
The shader will compute the wind direction relative the SailForward value and this will used to control how much the sail fills with wind, so if the wind is directly blowing into the sail from behind then the sail will move forward and billow out as expected, if the wind is 90 degrees to the sail then the sail will not move as the sail is not capturing the wind at all. If the sail is blowing against the sail then the sail will move backwards, the amount it moves backwards can be controlled using the SailReverse value below.
If this value is 1 then the full range of the sail movement will be used, if the sail is moving too much for your wind strength then reduce this value to reduce the amount of sail movement.
FillPercent
This value controls how much ripple is filling the sail, a value of 0 will add no ripple effect to the sail, a value of 1 will add all the ripple. This can generally be left at 1 to get the full effect of the animation. Note the FullRipple value below can be used to automatically reduce the ripple effect as the sail gets stretched by the wind.
SailSideways
This values controls how much the sail will move with the wind as the wind becomes side one. A value of 1 means the sail is free to move fully, 0 will result in no sideways movement of the sail at all.
SailLift
Controls how much the bottom of the sail will lift as it fills with wind. If the sail is firmly attached at the bottom then set this to 0 then sail bottom edge will not move as the wind strength increases. If though the bottom is attached by say loose ropes then increase this, then as the wind gets stronger the bottom of the sail will lift. Use along with Arch values to get more realistic sail movement.
SailLiftArch
Controls how much the bottom of the sail will arch as it lifts. As the sail fills with wind and gets stronger you can use this to arch the btoom edge of the sail.
SailLiftSideArch
Controls how much the sides of the sails will arch as it lifts. Like the value above but does the same for the left and right edges of the sail.
SailReverse
If the wind is against the sail this will limit the movement, stops masks showing through etc. Normally you will have the wind blowing into the sail fom behind but if for some reason the wind blows the other way the shader will detect that and use this value to reduce the sail movement.
SailTaper
How much the sail tapers in or out at the bottom. Use this when setting up your sails to control the shape of the sail.
SailShear
Controls how much the bottom of the sail is moved relative to the bottom. Use this when setting up your sails to control the shape of the sail.
SailTilt
Controls how much the bottom of the sail tilts relative to the top, useful for some sail shapes. Use this when setting up your sails to control the shape of the sail.
SailArch
How arched is the sail, this is added to by any lift arch.
SailArchStart
How far down the sail the arch starts to appear. A value of 0 will start the arching from the top of the sail, 0.5 from halfway down.
SailSideArch
How arched the sides of the sail are, any side lift arch is added to this. You can have the sides curve in or out.
SailTopArch
How arched the top of the sail is. You can have the top curve up or down.
FullRipple
This value reduces the amount of ripple visible as the sail fills with wind. If this is zero then ripples will be applied to a sail no matter how strong the wind is, increase this if you want to see less ripples when the sail is being fully stretched.
Furling
Furl
How furled the sail is. 0 means the sail is full unfurled, 1 is sail is ready to be packed away and 2 the sail is fully furled.
FurlOrder
Controls the order the sail furls when in a sail group. Check the Sail Group section to see how the furl order value can be used to control the furling order of a group of sails.
FurlMap
Map that controls how the sail furls (R). See the Furl Texture section above for more info.
FurledMap
Map that controls the look of the fully furled sail. See the furled texture section above for more info.
FurledRadius
Radius of the furled sail. The radius of the furled state of the sail, this is multiplied by the furledmap amount.
Ripple
RippleStrength
How much the ripple effect moves the sail, gets used with wind value.
RippleSpeed
Speed of the rippling effect. How fast the ripples move across the sail.
RippleSeed
A value that is used to offset the ripple animation to stop all sails moving the same way.
RippleScale
Size of the ripple waves. If this value is low then the ripples will be large subtle waves over the sail, as it gets higher the ripples will be come smaller and noisier.
RippleSmooth
Smoothness of the ripple waves. Smooths out the ripple peaks and valleys.
Translucency
Thickness
Texture used to control the thickness of the sail for translucency (R)
Power
Controls how the translucency falloffs from the light direction
Distortion
Translucency distortion
Scale
Adjusts the amount of translucency
SubColor
Sub surface scattering color
Wind Control
You will likely want your sails or cloth to react to a general wind direction. To do this set the 'WindDir' param to the direction of your world wind vector, the strength of the wind is set using the 'Speed' param. If your wind direction and speed is global then you can just set the values directly on any sail materials used and that value will be used across all sails. If you have different wind directions and speeds then it is best to set a Sail Group override for the 'WindDir' and 'Speed' values. Note for the WindDir value it is expecting a normalized Vector3 value so a wind direction along the Z axis would be a value of 0 0 1. The w component is not used in the WindDir param.
The shader will automatically compute how much of the wind direction is pointing into the sail and will adjust various params itself to control the sail movement. Check the param guide for 'SailWind' to learn a little more.
