Stylized Water 2

Highly customizable to suit your art direction through various parameters. This package focuses on providing artistic freedom, rather than a realistic water simulation. Easy to use and self-documented

The successor to the widely adopted, original, Stylized Water Shader asset. Now re-imagined from the ground up for the Universal Render Pipeline.

Built on over 8 years of experience developing water rendering, both on the asset store and for commercial projects, ready to take advantage of. This asset targets both basic and intermediate uses of water in games.

« A license for this asset guarantees access to updates for Unity 2021 though 2023. An upgrade for Unity 6+ follows after its release. A backwards-compatibility patch for 2020.3 may be requested through email. »

VERSION 1.6.0 UPDATE

• Screen-Space Reflections

• Directionaly projected caustics

🏄🏽‍♀️ Rundown

Rather than being stricly PBR-based, a custom lighting model offers direct control over color and light/environment reflections. All whilst retaining correct dynamic lighting behaviour, and support for Unity's native lighting features.

This asset is perfect for both beginners and experts alike, and can serve a range of different applications and styles. UX/UI is a core focus, making this straightforward to use. Extensive documentation is available, and regularly improved upon.

💧 Shading features:

• Unlit, Simple and Advanced shading modes (spanning low- and high-end graphics)

• Deep, shallow and horizon color controls

• Intersection foam effect with opaque geometry, based on scene-depth or vertex colors

• 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)

• Control over Directional and Point/Spot light reflections.

• Separate control over environment 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, underwater fog and wave height

• Transparency mask to hide the water inside objects such as boats

• River mode, for directional animations and slope-based foam.

• Distance normals (tiling reduction)

⚙️ Technical features:

• Clean, accordion-style, material UI with tooltips and notifcations

• Tessellation support, dynamically subdivides triangles (adaptive & distance-based)

• C# API to read the wave height/normal.

• Planar Reflections Renderer component, robustly designed and scalable.

• Screen-Space (raytraced) Reflections, implemented as a direct shader effect.

• Water Grid component, creates water tiles which can follow a specific transform/camera

• Utility to create subdivided plane/circle mesh assets

• Custom time and world offset C# API (for network syncronized waves + floating origin systems)

📦 Includes:

• Tropical beach demo scene

• Several pre-configured water materials

• Several foam and normal map textures (original)

• Set of particle effects, designed for gameplay and environment enhancement (flipbooks with normal maps)

✔️ Compatibility:

• Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 10.3.2+ (excluding the Built-in RP & HDRP)

• PC, macOS, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Android/iOS and WebGL 2.0

• DirectX, Metal, Vulkan and OpenGL (3.0+).

• Automatic fog integration for: SC Post Effects, Enviro, Azure Sky, Atmospheric Height Fog, COZY Weather and Buto 2021/2022. No code changes required!

• Curved World 2020 support

• Integratable with Dynamic Water Physics 2

• Supports spot/point lights and baked/dynamic GI

• Network-syncronized waves/animations are possible.

• Floating Origin systems are compatible.

• Orthographic camera's

• VR rendering (both Single Pass Instanced & Multiview)

• Full details...

⚡ Performance:

Hand-written, expertly crafted shader, for maximum performance and complete flexibility.

Features can be disabled, making it scalable to use on mobile platforms. Down from a simple colored plane up to a vivid animated lake.

🚧 Restrictions:

• Built for 3D rendering. Can't be used with the 2D Renderer or Tilemaps

• Planar reflections are disabled in VR

• Not ideal for planetary rendering (texture seams would be unavoidable)

➕ Available extension assets:

• Underwater Rendering, seamless waterline rendering and underwater fog
• Dynamic Effects, enables advanced effects such as ripples and shoreline waves

Technical details

⚠️ It is expected you understand what the Universal Render Pipeline is, and have already converted your project to it before purchasing.

• Shader requires the depth texture option to be enabled in URP in most cases, check how this affects your draw calls first.
• Water is transparent, so any depth-based post processing effects will not affect it (inherent to how 3D rendering works). Integration for several fog renderers is included (details)
• Network-syncronized waves is possible through a simple API call (details outlined in documentation)
• Intersection foam is based on the vertical distance between the water, and the object/pixel below. It's technically not possible to exclude specific objects from the effect.
• Tessellation requires DirectX11+, Metal or Vulkan rendering (automatically falls back if not supported)