Description
? Documentation | ? Forum | ? Android Demo | ⚙️ Compatibility | ? Roadmap
The successor to the original Stylized Water Shader asset, widely adopted since 2016. Now re-imagined from the ground up for the Universal Render Pipeline.
Rather than being PBR-based, a custom lighting model offers direct control over color and light/environment reflections. All while retaining support for dynamic lighting and all of Unity’s lighting features.
? Shading features:
• Deep, shallow and horizon color controls
• Intersection foam effect with other objects, based on scene-depth or vertex colors
• Unlit/simple and advanced shading modes
• Adjustable surface foam
• GPU-driven, layered wave animations
• Animated caustics in shallow water
• Translucency rendering from all light types
• Flat shading mode (low poly look)
• Planar reflections (excluding VR)
• Separate control over environment- and sun reflections
• Sparkles based on normal map
• Refraction, distorts objects behind the water surface
• UV- or world-projected tiling (seamless water)
• Vertex color support to control foam, fog and wave height
• Transparency mask to hide the water inside objects such as boats
• River mode for spline meshes (created using other tools)
• Distance normals (tiling reduction)
⚙️ Technical features:
• Clean material UI with tooltips and notifcations
• Simple and Advanced shading modes
• Tessellation support, dynamically subdivides triangles (adaptive & distance-based)
• C# API to read the wave height/normal. Integration for Dynamic Water Physics 2
• Water Grid component, creates water tiles which can follow a specific transform
• Utility to create subdivided plane/circle mesh assets
? Includes:
• Tropical beach demo scene
• Several pre-configured water materials
• Unique foam and normal map textures
• Set of particle effects, designed for gameplay and environment enhancement (flipbooks with normal maps)
✔️ Compatibility:
• Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 7.5.3+ (excluding the Built-in RP & HDRP)
• PC, macOS (OpenGL/Metal), Consoles, Android/iOS (OpenGLES 3.0+)
• One-click fog integration for Enviro, Azure Sky, Atmospheric Height Fog, SC Post Effects, COZY Weather and Curved World 2020
• Supports spot/point lights and baked/dynamic GI
• Orthographic camera’s
• VR rendering (Single Pass Instanced & Multiview)
⚡ Performance:
Hand-written, expertly crafted shader, for maximum performance and flexibility.
Features can be disabled, making it scalable to use on mobile platforms. Down from a simple colored plane up to a vivid lake.
? Limitations:
• Built for 3D rendering. Can’t be used with the 2D Renderer or Tilemaps
• Planar reflections are disabled in VR
See also the Underwater Rendering extension.
? 33% upgrade discount for users of Stylized Water Shader (automatically applies on checkout if already owned)