📝Description

The video shows a breakdown of my latest water shader, made with Unity using URP. The shader features the following.

• Distance based colouring
• Vertex displacement
• Tessellation
• Blinn-Phong specular reflection
• Height derivative maps, for flow dependent normals
• Flow map UV distortion
• Shadows
• Transparency with underwater tinting
• Refraction
• Tri-planar projected caustics
• Additional fake specular effects
• Interactive ripple particles that affect flow
• Planar reflections
• Fog

The caustics and ripple particles can be seen better in the following clip.

📘Acknowledgements

This shader was inspired by the following references/tutorials, which are ordered by content creator.

• Alan Zucconi
  • A great introductory tutorial on making believable caustics
• Half Past Yellow
  • Two great blogs (1, 2) on their water shader, with most important inspiration being the flow particles
• Jasper Flink (Catlike Coding)
  • The series on flow and water shaders has been the backbone for my water shaders
  • His tutorial on tessellation is a great introduction to it
  • Similarly his tutorial on tri-planar mapping is great as well
• Joyce (Minions Art)
  • She has a quick and concise tutorial on adding tessellation to URP shaders
  • Another great tutorial is on adding water ripples using the particle system and an orthographic camera
• Ned (NedMakesGames)
  • The projected tri-planar mapping requires scene normals, which Ned has a tutorial on using SRP’s render features.
• Simon Trümpler (Simon schreibt)
  • His talk about the water of Rime was the main inspiration for this shader
• Unity (you know, the game engine company)
  • A script from their boat attack demo project is used to for sampling planar reflections