How to Set Up Dynamic Water Physics and Boat Movement in Unity | Ship Buoyancy Tutorial

In this tutorial you'll learn how to set up boat movement and dynamic water physics in Unity.

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In this buoyancy tutorial, we set up dynamic water physics and boat movement in Unity. We'll be making objects float and implementing physics based buoyancy for large objects like ships. While the core of the video is about buoyancy and flotation, setting up boat movement after watching this tutorial is as simple as applying a local forward force. Add some input-based rotational forces to the mix, and you've made a boat controller in Unity!

#UnityTutorial #WaterPhysics #Unity3D #Buoyancy #GameDev

[tomweiland]

Several of you have asked about how I made the ship float in my game, so here's a tutorial!
Let me know what you think 👇

[JamesOfToya]

Love how at the end you're told that's the wrong way to do it and if you want it done right, you're on your own with the link. 10/10 right there.

[NeatGames]

I love the way the water moves and looks with the lowpoly look!

[MarcosPT]

If you're finding it hard to understand everything on your first watch through and you're amazed by every commenter seemingly having absorbed the entire thing in one go, do not despair: I have years of experience and still had to do a lot of pausing and rewinding.

Awesome tutorial by the way! Thank you so much for sharing ☺️

[toluyole]

This was *AMAZING!* he didn't waste the first 5 minutes with some crazy long intro, and he does the steps quickly while still explaining it pretty well, I mean if your slow to understand stuff I guess this would be pretty complicated and you would've had to watch it in *0.5X* speed, but still this tut was *AMAZING* liked and maybe subscribed . . . I'm gonna tell my friends about this

[tomasbenders]

Not planning to use this any time soon, but damn that was a good and simple tutorial!

[mattshu]

I love your style. Easy to comprehend as you code while speaking.

[sharkycat]

This is a great tutorial! I love how you show which script you are modifying, making it easy to understand and your voice is also easy to understand!

[rogeriocruz]

What can I say except thanks! I saw some other tutorials online about this and they were all extremely heavy on my CPU. Using some other shaders and the floating points from your tutorial I was able to achieve what I wanted without stressing my CPU. Amazing content

[SnutiHQ]

Hi Tom! 👋 Thank you so much for making this quality tutorial! 🎉 We took part in the Brackey's game jam 2020.2 and made a sailing game using your physics setup as a basis for our work. Really simple and intuitive setup, which was easy to extend upon. We planned to replace the sine wave function with something more fancy, but it actually turned out so beautiful when we finished our ocean shader and the motion of the boats was nice that we decided to keep it that way. 🌊 (Will be soon posting a devlog referring to your tutorial 💪)

[editingstuff]

Dude, this is really good and informative. You definitely deserve more

[e.d.gproductions]

this video was so helpful, I havve not only learned how to make waves but also how to get variables from another script. Thank you so much!! amazing!

[Spamap]

Finally! A working, easy to understand, and extremely helpful tutorial! Any chance you could do a follow up tutorial on using a shader for the waves, like you use?

[whoshotdk]

You write your function arguments with a preceding underscore. I do that too! First time in *years* that I found someone else who does that hahaha.

Much respect, thanks for the tutorial!

[Quinthelas]

This has been very useful tutorial in two ways, I have been working on a floating object for a project and I wanted to have it keep moving up and down on the surface and then this tutorial also helped me to figure out how to mimic the movement of the waves in my water without having to try make them real waves.

[greatbigeyeball]

Incredibly good tutorial, I was looking for simple arcade buoyancy and this did the job right away!

[greenfigure]

epic now i can recreate your game before you release yours

[magnusm]

3:28 That script would be great as a Scriptable Object for the water. So you'd be able to create multiple instances that each vary without disrupting the original or having to rewrite it either.
That way you could create many different versions of the water physics.
The default water physics.
Denser with more drag on a muddy swamp.
Or a more sinking ocean of lava with very little waves.

These short minute tutorials are the perfect format for learning. And you get so much down in so little time and even add small extras like singletons so quickly and clearly which otherwise takes others 30 minutes to confuse you even more somehow. Great work :).

[carny]

This is the first video of your I have watched and I found it very, very good and I like the pace. I can always pause and rewind. I prefer having to rewind and pause vs. speed the video playback up. Excellent job. I'l; be back.

[xavmanisdabestest]

Very nice video my guy I hope one day I become good enough to produce tutorials to help the community like you've done!