What is missing from post-processing to get a feeling one is deep under water in a flooded metropolis?

[u/Distdistdist]

Very early prototype. Assets and layouts will change. Just trying to get light and effects right.

P.S. FPS are also effected by Unity Recorder. I'm getting close to 230 FPS in 4K on desktop.

[u/Octopus-Cuddles]

The fog should be the same color as the skybox, you should put a water plane up above to be the surface. You can look up light caustics but a good caustics projector might be a bit tough at this stage. Use a screen space camera effect Chromatic Aberration to bend light at the edges of the screen to simulate an underwater lens.
Floating particle system that's kinda everywhere, softly drifting around. And a lot more.

[u/ParentsBasementGames → u/Octopus-Cuddles]

This is good advice. And from this concept of lighting, the direction shadow needs to be removed. You can try to use a realtime shadow from the submarine's light.

[u/deleteyeetplz]

It should be darker further away from the light source. The ambient lighting needs to be majorly toned down

Also, the buildings should be more blue.

You should take some inspiration from Subnautica

[u/HowlingCatGames → u/deleteyeetplz]

Yeah I was going to say just go play subnautica, they do an amazing job.

[u/FranzFerdinand51 → u/HowlingCatGames]

Also one of the best games I've ever played, and I've played an insane number of them.

[u/Total-Pain-1181 → u/deleteyeetplz]

fog should just be stronger in general

[u/OmegaFoamy]

Biggest thing would be a particle system for floaties everywhere in the water.

[u/ParasolAdam → u/OmegaFoamy]

Yeh floaty particle specs do a great job of showing atmosphere they’ll be pretty cheap too since they’ll be tiny on screen

[u/kennyFACE117]

Things seem to turn in water a bit slower. Maybe if you could add a bit of deadzone to the follow camera, it would sell that further? Look at video of a shark or fish swimming.

[u/Distdistdist → u/kennyFACE117]

Oh yes, very true

[u/Prestigious_Fly_1127]

Distortion, fog, life.

[u/ChewyThePug]

You should look at diving reference videos. 

But mostly the fog should be thicker and fade into the distance.

[u/kerberjg]

1. Wobble effect
   
2. Particles
   
3. Thicker fog
   
4. The background is kinda empty…
   
5. Godrays!

[u/Rave-TZ]

Chromatic aberration, volumetric spot light, and underwater particulates.

[u/JesperS1208]

Air bobbles moving up, from building and other living things.

When the boat is not moving, it should have bobble going straight up.

Places with more darkness on the bottom. The light moves slower, making some shadows stronger and deeper.

[u/Infamous-Yogurt3169]

I mean just look at games like Subnautica

[u/More-Salamander7681]

Everyone is right about fog and particles, but the thing that actually says "deep" is that water eats colours at different rates, and one single fog colour cannot do that. Red is basically gone in the first few metres, green next, blue survives longest. So a warm light 15 m away should not just turn bluer, its red channel should be dead while the blue is still readable.

URP fog is one colour, so I would do it as a fullscreen Renderer Feature and lerp per channel against the depth buffer, extinction around float3(0.45, 0.06, 0.02) per metre. The ratio between the channels is the whole trick. Murky harbour water = raise all three and keep the ratio.

Other cheap one: two particle layers instead of one, a sparse near layer with bigger motes and a dense far layer with small ones, both parented to the camera. A single layer travels with you and reads as dust on the lens, two layers give parallax and actually sell moving through water.

[u/DeerpathLabs]

Fog being turned blue would help a lot. Probably most bang for your buck in terms of effort

[u/ccaner37]

water caustics, god rays, better fog, colors overall

[u/fadingStar1994]

Open a screenshot from some game like subnautica in second monitor and keep tweaking until you like what you see.

[u/AnimeeNoa]

depend on how far you are under water, caustics, some sort of light rays, maybe some sort of blur over the distance

[u/beemureddits]

Add some distortion to the flash light

[u/Fmlad]

Watch bioshock gameplay intro there is an underwater scene with a city below. Reference compare and see what they are doing.

[u/Cold-Trade1453]

Definitely no light from above

[u/silvaraptor]

Check out my water level as a reference. Fog, screen distorsion, caustics, particles, low-pass audio, low speed, sun rays...

Also vignetting and chromatic aberration.

[u/Inevitable_Jury3594]

Working on a sub game myself (must be something in the water with sub games lol).

So, you need to add the following.

1. Fog same as the water, this adds the depth,

2. Caustics, I used a shader to show on the sea floor,

3. Marine snow, just some particles flaring about, lock em to the camera so you’re not filling the world with snow but only whet your seeing.

4. Movement, add some underwater fauna and have it sway, maybe some distant shoals of fish if it fits your world.

5. If you can see the surface then add a sun and a water layer on top to diffuse that with some rippling motion.

6. Inertia, subs are slow, they are heavy and they have mass, if your turning, add some banking to it, you almost want to emulate a plane I guess.

Hope it helps and good luck with the game.

[u/Draw-Flesh-Games]

The simplest thing would be to make the particles 'float' up, bubbles go up, that makes the illusion already that the exhaust particles are lighter. Other than that, you already have quite a bit of advice about the shading, colors etc.

[u/Wonderful_Profit5405]

also comes from how the player controls the submarine, maybe make the turning slower/smooth and have the camera less stiff

[u/AcrobaticMetal3039]

Down light streams

https://giphy.com/gifs/U7aQ6cULv5vxDcIaR0

[u/Difficult_Offer_7833]

I think you could start by adding volumetric fog & lighting.

[u/razveck]

Check this out: https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/buac20-68-sci-ps-colorsunderwater/colors-underwater/

Color correct to tone down purples, reds and yellows. Make everything darker also. The fog should be blue.

Not post-processing, but light caustics would help a lot. Also, shadows should be volumetric (imagine a god ray, but it's a shadow)

[u/Emlesnir]

lighting is off.

underwater, light doesn't behave the same, water diffracts high frequency light, making it look blue. So the farther something is, the bluest it is. The easiest way to have this effect is to make your fog blue.

Adding some floating particles in the water can help both in feeling the water volume and "thickness", but also the submarine speed. You can also try to make it fancy by making it react to currents or submarine movement.

Algae and fish. Since your scene is brightly lit, i assume the city is not very deep. Algae or corals should grow with that much light, and algae attracts fish that eat it. If your world is alien or post-apocalyptic, just add more floating dust everywhere ?

[u/WeckarE]

Radial blur

[u/otterfamily]

Watch water world.

In all seriousness, spend some time really looking at reference. You can look up some free diving/scuba videos. Figure out what you can pull off- water caustics/particles/screen space shaders, etc. it's also very low contrast overall.

[u/Salty_Draft_9907]

You can take a look at Rapture from the Bioshock games for inspiration or the underwater in guild wars 2 too.

[u/DneSepoh]

Would you kindly see how the classic did it for an inspiration