Water User Manual
Setting up
Assign the Water material to any mesh — a plane, a river spline, a bathtub. It finds the bottom on its own, so there’s no volume to author and no second material for the underside: a single mesh renders correctly viewed from either side.
Water has no dependencies and runs on either renderer.
Surface
Four independent layers of motion stack into the surface:
| Layer | Role |
|---|---|
| Swell | The large-scale silhouette of the water |
| Ripples | Mid-scale movement on top of the swell |
| Fine detail (×2) | Two grades of small-scale sparkle |
Each layer has its own scale, speed and strength, so you can tune the silhouette of the water separately from its sparkle. One master speed drives them all when you just want the whole thing calmer or angrier.
Every layer takes your own textures, so the character of the water is yours to change. Tiling is broken up automatically — no visible repeat on a large body of water, at any distance.
Depth and colour
You control:
- How fast light is absorbed with depth.
- Where the absorption starts.
- What colour the water absorbs toward.
Refraction bends whatever is behind the surface. A distance fade keeps a large lake looking like water at the horizon instead of dissolving into shimmer.
Caustics and subsurface
- Caustics — scale, intensity and wobble.
- Subsurface scattering — lights the backs of waves when the sun is behind a crest.
Underwater
The underwater state switches on automatically when the camera crosses the surface. It has its own controls:
- Colour absorption with distance, tunable per channel — the reason deep water goes blue-green.
- Depth falloff, tuned for looking outward rather than down.
- Caustics intensity on everything around you.
- Refractive warp across the whole view.
- God rays, with speed and density controls.
Performance
Water is a screen-space effect: cost scales with how much of the frame it covers, not with how large the body of water is.
Detail that has no effect at distance is skipped, and effects fade out before they stop earning their cost.
Not included
So you know what you’re buying: no screen-space reflections, no simulated wave displacement, no wave-driven foam, and no impact or ripple-spawning system. Waves are texture-driven, which is what keeps them cheap and art-directable.