Plugins + Scripts [ForgeLab] SeaForge: Now with More Realistic Ocean Surfaces and Underwater Worlds

Late in the day. The light has gone low and gold, and the sand is still warm from the afternoon in a way you can feel through your palms.

She comes up out of the water toward you, unhurried. The sea does not want to let her go: it runs off her in sheets, it climbs her calves one last time, the surface behind her is still ringed where she pushed through it. Every step she takes up the beach leaves a print, and the prints change as she comes: sharp and shallow in the wet band, then deeper and softer where the sand is dry and loose and gives under her.

She lies down beside you and the sand takes her. Not on top of it, into it: the beach sinks under her hips and her shoulders, the edge of the hollow slumps a little as it settles, and the shape she makes is the shape of her.

When she rolls toward you the sand comes with her. It is on her back, the backs of her thighs, packed dark and heavy where her skin is still wet, dusted fine and pale where she has dried. You reach over and brush her shoulder. Where your hand goes, the sand goes. She laughs and shakes it out of her hair, and for a second the air between you is full of it, catching the light.

Then a wave you did not see coming reaches all the way up. It slides under her feet and stops, lace-edged, and when it pulls back it takes half of her footprints with it and leaves a line of foam on the sand that will be gone by the time the sun is.

Tomorrow the beach will be smooth again. Tonight it remembers.

Now count how much of that we could never do before. The ground did not move: lie down on a CUA beach and you lay on stone with a sand texture. The sea never came up the beach and never took anything back. Nothing stuck to her, nothing fell off her, and your hand had never once changed what was on her skin.

The scene looks like a beach. It never feels like one.

---

Sand, until now, was a CUA: a texture on a floor. This is a field: a layer of sand with a thickness, sitting on your scene's floor, that every part of a body pushes into.

• Prints where she touches, as deep as she pushes. Feet, shins, hips, the length of a thigh or a forearm. Dry sand gives about 7 cm under a foot; wet sand, packed by the sea, gives about 1.5 cm and holds a sharper edge. Nothing is stamped from a library. The mark is the body, where the body was.
• Then the sand does what sand does. The rim of a print slumps to the angle of repose, dry and wet at different angles; loose edges creep; the sharp shape she left goes soft the way it does on a real beach after a minute. Settling runs on its own clock, so a print an hour old and a print a minute old do not look the same.
• Lie down and the beach takes you. The whole body prints, not just the feet. Get up and the hollow stays, edges settling, until the sea reaches it.
• A beach, not a plane. It rises inland, falls seaward, undulates a little, and every one of those is a slider. Terrain relief off gives you a perfectly flat one if that is the shot.
• It reads as sand at every distance. Grain, glitter, the dark minerals, the broad wet sheen: the surface is built so that a close-up and a wide shot are both the same sand. Colour it, dry and wet, with two pickers.

The Empty atom is the beach. Put it where the action is rather than stretching the beach to reach the action: the sand is finest, and the prints sharpest, near its centre.

---

Look at any beach and the first thing you read is not the sea. It is the line where the sand changes: dark and packed and shining below it, pale and loose above it. That line is what tells you where the water has been, and it is the thing a sand texture can never have, because it moves.

• The sea writes it. Every wave that runs up the beach leaves a band of wet sand behind it, and the wet climbs a little above where the water stopped, the way it does when sand draws water up into itself. The band is wherever the sea has actually reached, wave by wave, not a stripe you painted.
• And the sand remembers it. Wet sand dries out over the minutes after the water leaves, from the top of the band down, so a beach that the sea has pulled back from shows exactly how long ago it was there. Wetness memory is a switch; off, the band snaps to the water and forgets.
• Wet sand looks like wet sand. Darker, glossier, smoother: the grains pack, the surface loses its fine ripple, and it takes a sheen off the sky and your lights. Dry sand next to it stays matte and loose and paler. Two colours, two speculars, and the boundary is where the water decided it is.
• It changes what a body does to it. A foot sinks about 7 cm into dry sand and holds a soft edge; the same foot in the wet band goes in about 1.5 cm and holds a crisp one. Walk from the water up the beach and your own trail shows the change.
• And what it does to her. Sand from the wet band packs onto her skin dark and heavy; sand from the dry beach dusts on pale. SkinBeach reads the same wetness the beach does.

---

The sea, until now, was a CUA surface you placed next to the sand and hoped nobody walked to the edge. This one is part of the same field. It knows where the sand is, the sand knows where it is, and the two of them keep a running account of who was where.

• The swash comes up the beach on its own rhythm, cusped along the shore the way real run-up is, reaching further on some waves than on others, and every wave leaves the wet band above described a little higher or a little lower than the last.
• It erases. Prints inside the wet band are worn down a little by every wave that crosses them. Walk along the waterline and watch the sea take your trail back, one wave at a time.
• Foam is a field, not a sticker. It is born where the wave breaks, carried in on the bore, left behind as lace when the water drains, and it dries on the sand or is picked up again by the next wave. It piles up where the water slows, exactly where foam piles up on a beach, and the front of it is never a hard line.
• When she is in the water, the water answers. Bubbles stream off her limbs and cling to her for a while, rings spread from wherever she moves, and a fast move throws a sheet of spray. Each is its own switch, and each is free when it is off.
• Swell, breakers, glitter, a horizon. The surface itself: rolling swell with a direction and a spread, breaker foam on the crests, sun glitter you can tighten or loosen, three colours from the shallows to the horizon, and a render queue slider for when it has to sort against glass.
• v1.2 : it mirrors your sky. The sea reflects the skybox that is actually in your scene, the sun on the water is the sun in that sky, and under the swell runs a wind sea : short chop with a wind speed and a direction, so the reflection breaks the way it does on real water. Physical optics is the default now; Classic, the v1.1 look, is one chooser away on the SEA page. +0.17 ms at 8K, mid framing.

Turn the sea off and no water reaches the sand: the surf stops, nothing new gets wet, and what was wet dries at the drying rate you set. Your waterline and swash settings are kept and come back with the sea.

---

Sand does not stay on the beach. It gets on her, and it gets on her where she touched it.

• Contact is what sticks it. Wherever her skin goes below the surface of the sand, sand comes back up with it. The longer she stays, the more she carries. Nothing is painted on; it is the beach's own height field read against her body, so a shoulder that never touched the ground stays clean and the hip that took her weight does not.
• Wet skin holds it darker and heavier. Where she is still wet from the sea the sand packs into clumps and darkens; where she has dried it sits as a fine pale dust. The wet look is hers to tune: darkening, colour, how much it clumps.
• It is sand up close. Grains with a size and a relief, clumps with a scale, dust between them, lit by your scene's lights. Coverage is one slider if you want less of it.
• Clothing keeps it off. Scan what she is wearing once and covered skin stays clean, per item and per part, with a soft edge at the hem. Untick a wet T-shirt and it collects sand like skin does.

---

This is the part you will keep coming back to, because it is the part that answers you.

• Wipe-off. Her hands, or yours, sliding over her skin take the sand with them. Brush her shoulder and the shoulder is clean where the hand went and sandy where it did not. In VR that hand can be your own. It is the first thing in this line where somebody else's touch changes what is on her.
• Shake-off. Motion sheds sand: a fast rise, a turn, a shake of the hair, and it leaves her, more from dry skin than from wet, which holds on. Leave it off while she lies in the sand collecting it, then switch it on the moment she gets up. That is a shot, and the switch is on the panel for exactly that reason.
• Airborne sand. What comes off her does not vanish. It becomes grains in the air, with weight and drag and the light through them, thrown in the direction the limb was moving.

The switches that are really directing handles

Everything above is an ordinary VAM storable, so all of it is a Timeline cue. The ones worth knowing by name:

• Shake-off ON at the frame she rises. Everything she gathered leaves her at once.
• Clear all marks (EnvBeach) between takes; Clear the sand off the skin (SkinBeach) likewise.
• Stamp the whole body now: she was posed onto the sand already lying there, and you want the beach to know it without her moving.
• Level the sand under the person: she lies on a slope and you want the beach flat where she works, and free to rise beyond her.
• Time of day: day, night, or your own. One dropdown moves the built-in light, the sky and the exposure together.

---

1. Empty atom where the beach should be → EnvBeach. Sand, sea and surf are there. Rotate the Empty so +Z points inland; the shoreline follows.
2. Walk her onto it. Prints appear. Lie her down. The hollow appears.
3. SkinBeach on her. It finds the beach by itself. Sand is on her where she touched it.
4. Time of day on the LIGHT page, or leave it on custom and light it yourself. Name one or two of your scene's lights as Accepted light A/B and the sand takes their colour and their shadow.
5. Switch on Shake-off and Wipe-off when the scene has motion in it. They ship off because a beach where nothing has happened yet has nothing to shed.

Then wait for a wave. The beach is at its best after the sea has been over it once.

---

• LumenForge SkyRay puts the sun over it: full-screen shafts cut by your palms and rocks, and cloud shadows drifting across the sand. The shot at the top of this page is the two of them together. EnvBeach's own built-in light and SkyRay's direction are set by eye to match, and a beach is where that takes ten seconds.
• SteamForge SkinWater on the same Person: water running down her, sand packing where it is wet. Two Skin plugins, one body, and both carry a Render queue slider for the order they draw in.

---

v1.1 said where the sea was going next, and this is it. Add an Empty, load EnvAqua.cslist, and a sunlit underwater stage builds around it : a sand bed that takes impressions and lets them settle, a coral reef with its opening toward you, seaweed and seagrass in the current, suspended motes, light curtains falling from a surface overhead that carries the same wind sea the beach has, seen from below.

• The sand is the beach's sand. Press into it and it keeps the shape; the edges round off and slump on their own; lift a limb out and it sheds a soft cloud of haze and heavier grains that settle back. Recovery is a half-life you set, up to a day, and it ships off so a mark stays until you clear it.
• Caustics on her. A caustic light aimed at the performance area, natural patterns or crossed bands, in a colour you choose, moving with the water. The seabed gets its own. And one native scene light of yours can shadow the sand : pick it, and the sand and every impression in it receive that light's real shadows.
• The nearby school knows she is there. A bounded, independent group that lives in the water where she performs. Every fish keeps its distance : walk toward them and the school parts and closes behind you; stand still and it drifts back. Behaviour → Dance along makes it pick up her movement and swim with it, which is one trigger in a choreography and one trigger back. Three species on one chooser : silver reef fish, clownfish, or jellyfish, and the jellyfish come with their own locomotion, a power stroke, a recovery, a coast.
• A breath from her lips is one action, placed from the mouth with a positioning aid you switch on to set it and off when you are done.
• The distant schools are the backdrop : small shoals in the middle distance that turn and glint, and cost almost nothing.
• None of it asks her for anything. The school reads her body and never pushes on it; the sand applies no force to her. Her physics are exactly what they were before you added the plugin.

The reef opening faces the Empty's +Z. Cameras that pull back should pull back through it; that is what it is for.

---

Deep down there is no surface worth drawing, and what moves is snow. Add an Empty, load EnvDeepSea.cslist : dark water with a visibility you set, marine snow and fines drifting on a current with a heading, a slow upwelling, and a mottled light far overhead : the beach's wind sea seen from a long way below, with a sun glow and glitter in the direction the caustic comes from.

• Colour transition is one slider between two endpoints you can both edit, blue-black at one end and red-black at the other; the jellyfish, the bubbles and the caustic follow the palette or keep their own colour. Artistic colour, not lighting : keep her key light.
• The caustic lights only the performers. A cookie light on a stage would paint every rock and prop with the same ripple. Cookie on performers only keeps it off everything that is not part of a Person atom : rocks stay rocks, she ripples. A name list keeps it on something by name (shark, rays for a stage's animals), and a host that owns render layers for its set can name those layers instead of having anything moved.
• The seabed has a current. Ripples lie across the current heading, 12 cm ripples on 95 cm megaripples, dark detritus in the troughs near the camera, lit from the caustic's direction. The classic sediment look is one chooser away.
• 🪼 Jellyfish and mouth bubbles, the same creatures as the shallows', in the deep palette, and they run with the sand off.

Aqua and DeepSea are stages, not a dive : each on its own Empty, one at a time, each with its own Master Switch.

---

Add an Empty where the net should stand, load PropNet.cslist. Posts, tape and net appear at regulation beach dimensions, from nothing : no model, no bundle of geometry. Walk a Person into it and the cords stretch around her, hold, and snap back when she steps away; a hard shove makes the cord let go of her rather than dragging the whole net across the court. It settles still on its own and sleeps when nothing is touching it.

It collides with Person bodies. A ball is wired to it by trigger, not simulated by the net.

---

• EnvBeach → add an Empty where the middle of the beach should be → Plugins → Add → EnvBeach.cslist. The beach appears around it, sea included.
• There is no beach asset. The whole beach is generated from that one Empty. No mesh to import, no prefab, no CUA to find, nothing to keep in sync: the sand, its relief, the waterline, the sea and the surf are all built in code at load from the sliders on the panel. Which is the point rather than a curiosity. A prefab beach is the shape somebody else chose; this one is whatever you set, and every one of those settings is a storable. Wider, steeper, flatter, a different waterline, a different sea, a different colour, at run time, from a trigger, halfway through a scene. You are not decorating a beach. You are specifying one.
• SkinBeach → select the Person → Plugins → Add → SkinBeach.cslist. It finds EnvBeach on its own. With no EnvBeach in the scene, set Sand height from to the manual slider and give it a floor height.
• EnvAqua → an Empty where the bottom of the sand should be, its +Z toward the camera → Plugins → Add → EnvAqua.cslist. The sunlit stage builds around it, fish included.
• EnvDeepSea → the same, with EnvDeepSea.cslist. Run one underwater stage at a time; each has its own Master Switch.
• PropNet → an Empty where the net should stand, its rotation facing the court → Plugins → Add → PropNet.cslist. Posts, tape and net appear; walk her into it.
• Same grammar as the rest of the line. Env-plugins go on an Empty, Skin-plugins go on a Person, exactly like EnvFog and SkinWater. If you have used SteamForge you already know where everything is.
• Master Switch on every page, and one switch in front of each thing that costs: the sea, the foam, the bubbles, the splash, the ripples, the thrown sand, the relief. Off is off.
• Several people? All Person atoms is on out of the box: everyone in the scene leaves prints, up to four. Untick it and it is the one you pick in the dropdown.
• Everything is a normal VAM storable, so every switch and slider is drivable from Timeline and triggers.
• Both plugins have a Copy report button. If something does not appear, paste that into the thread instead of describing it. It prints the version, what is bound, every gate, every control's current value and the live counts, and it usually answers the question in one message.

---

A beach is a lot of screen. Sand fills the frame from the foreground to the horizon, and the sea fills the rest, so this is the kind of product that is easy to make expensive and easy to lie about. What follows is the data that drove the defaults, including the rows that are not flattering.

Every row below is marked. MEASURED is a reading off the bench. INFERRED is arithmetic on a reading: useful for planning, not a benchmark.

v1.2 : the bench grew a floor. The v1.1 rows were read against a CPU-bound empty scene (3.41 ms). A GPU cost measured against a CPU floor shows only what sticks out above it, so those rows were lower bounds. The v1.2 rows were read against a scene loaded with GPU ballast until the frame was GPU-bound, four passes per row, over three unattended nights, with a reader that judged the run before anyone chose a number. Where a v1.1 number is kept below, it says so. The method, the charts and the night that found a defect are on the v1.2 update page.

---

---

HONEST NOTES & LIMITS
Up front about the edges, so nothing surprises you.

• The beach is a shore; the underwater products are stages. The beach's sea is a surface with swell on it, not a volume, and its camera stays above the waterline. EnvAqua and EnvDeepSea each build their own stage on their own Empty : you do not swim down into them from the beach, and you run one at a time.
• Physical optics needs a sky to mirror. A skybox CUA, or any large background sphere with a panorama on it. With none, the sea shows the classic colour and the Report says so. A sky that loads late or is switched on later is found within a few seconds.
• DeepSea's performer-only caustic moves non-performer objects to render layer 26 while it is on, and puts them back when it is off; Aqua's scene shadows borrow a free render layer while a source light is selected, the same way the beach's light rejection does. A plugin that reads object layers, or edits culling masks itself, will see those while they run.
• PropNet was not benched this round. It collides with Person bodies only; a ball is wired by trigger.
• Prints come from the body's joints, not from every vertex. Twelve body segments, each a capsule between two controllers, print the sand: torso, head, thighs, shins, upper arms, forearms, feet. That gives a foot, a shin, a thigh, a hip, a forearm; it does not give individual toes or the crease of a palm. Up close the print is the shape of a limb, which is what a real one is.
• Thin sand and thin limbs. The sand is a layer with a thickness, 12 cm by default, on top of your scene's floor. A forearm pressed into 7 cm of sand reaches the floor underneath it, and VAM's floor is whatever collider your scene has there. Thicker sand (SAND · Sand depth) gives deeper prints; that is a slider, not a limit.
• Four people, and the body work is per person. All Person atoms tracks up to four; the rest are counted in the report rather than tracked. The bench was one person; see the numbers section.
• VR hands are a switch, and it ships off. With it on, the player's own hands print, throw sand and wipe her. On a desktop it does nothing and the report says so.
• A garbage collection about every 50 minutes in a scene that does nothing else, at a quarter of a second. Steady-state garbage, measured; not a leak, also measured. Most scenes never get there.
• Reject lights at the source edits your scene lights' culling masks. It is how the sand keeps every light but the two you named off itself. Do not combine it with another plugin that edits culling masks (Light Atom Excluder, for one); one of them will win and it will not be obvious which. Leave it off and both are fine.
• Transparent against transparent has no correct order. Sea against glass, thrown sand against the sea. Both carry a Render queue slider. Author's call, per scene.
• The Empty is the centre of the beach, and the beach is finest near it. Prints far from the centre, out in the backdrop sand, are coarser than the ones at her feet. Move the atom to the action.

Found something odd? Want something the beach does not do yet? Post in the discussion. This grew out of two whitebox probes and what the measurements said, and it will keep growing on what you report.

---

v1.2

• EnvAqua. The sunlit underwater stage : responsive sand, caustics, light curtains, a reef, scene shadows on the sand, and a nearby school that keeps its distance, dances along on cue, and comes as reef fish, clownfish or jellyfish.
• EnvDeepSea. The deep stage : colour transition, snow and fines on a current, the overhead wind sea, a caustic that lights only the performers, ripples across the seabed.
• The sea mirrors your sky (EnvBeach). Physical optics is the default : the sea reflects the scene's own skybox, with a wind sea under the swell. Classic is the v1.1 look, one chooser away. New storables : seaOptics, seaWindSpeed, seaWindDirDeg, seaChopAmount, seaSkyMirrorView, lightSunFollowsSky; actions seaRebuildSky, seaCaptureAB.
• PropNet. A volleyball net that gives when she hits it, built from one Empty.
• Fixes. Reject lights at the source gives every light back exactly the bit it had, by every route off (feature off, Master off, plugin disabled, plugin removed), and never touches a light added while it is off. A sky that appears after the beach stopped looking is found again. Unticking the plugin puts the beach to sleep instead of freezing it. Settling no longer runs forever on a flat field. SkinBeach : a submesh hidden by a clothing item's Disable anatomy gets its shell when it is shown again; Master off → on no longer sheds sand for one frame; four retired parameters and one action are no longer registered.
• The full changelog, every price, the charts and the three factory nights : the v1.2 update page.

v1.1

• Draw the sea off now means no water on the sand. In v1.0 the sand kept running its surf with the sea hidden: the wet band still climbed the beach and foam still appeared. Now the switch takes the water with it: no swash, no foam, nothing new gets wet, and what was wet dries at the drying rate you set. Your waterline and swash settings are kept and come back the moment the sea does.
• All Person atoms ships on. Everyone in the scene leaves prints from the first frame, up to four. Untick it to name one person.
• Clear the sand off the skin moved under the Master Switch (SkinBeach), on every page, so a clean take is one press wherever you are. Same action as before for triggers and Timeline.
• Panels only show what can act. The swash and waterline sliders fold away while the sea is off, with a note saying why; they are back the moment it is on.

v1.0

• Initial release. Two plugins. EnvBeach: sand that prints and settles, a sea that wets, foams and erases, surf that answers a body, day and night. SkinBeach: sand that sticks where she touched the beach, packs where she is wet, falls when she moves and comes off under a hand, with a clothing mask.
• Reviewed before release. Two independent code audits and a third-party read before this went out, an overnight bench at 8K, and a re-measure of the exact factory configuration. What they found is fixed or written above.

---

Special Thanks

Thanks to @C&G-STUDIO for the ideas and encouragement!

---