Unreal Shader : River & Lake

Learn how to create a dedicated water & river shader for UE5

What you'll learn

Create serval material functions

Create an optimized shader

Deep Water Logic (deep & shallow color)

Movable Caustics and Foam

Dynamic Ripples

Debris & Ice layers (vertex painting)

River Logic

Requirements

Owning a computer with Windows 10 (64Bits) / Not tested on Windows 11 or Mac

Winrar or 7zip to decompress files

Unreal Engine 5 Basics (Camera movements, create Materials, Import assets…)

Description

During this course I will show you, step by step, how to create a fully customizable water shader!What I will learn?We will start by creating the waves movements with the help of a native hidden function.After this first feature, we will create the deep water logic to control independently shallow and deep water colorTo control the normal, roughness or specular intensities, we will create a big function for the parametersAnd we will take advantage of this part to implement a distance system to avoid the wave repetition at long distance.Once we have taken control of our parameters, we will focus on opacity to create a smooth transition between the objects and the water edges.And we will configure some very simple parameters for refractionTo increase the realism of our water, we wll see how to generate caustic and foam effects, fully customizable in color, texture size, intensity, fade distance and speed.Because it can be useful in rainy environments, we'll look at how to integrate a ripple system.As a bonus, you'll find in the course resources the Substance Designer file for creating and/or modifying a ripple texture.To add detail to the water surface, painting meshes is always a good option, but it's sometimes difficult to simulate waves on them.With a vertex layer, you can paint all kinds of details on the surface and control the waves influence.Winter environments have always something special, that's is why we will integrate a vertex-controllable ice system.  And finally, we will set up an option to convert our water point into a riverImportant note : This course was created in version 5.2 and it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to use THE SAME version! If you choose to use another version, be aware that you may encounter possible errors not covered in this course.About copyrights:All you can find in this course are for personal usage only. You cannot share it, sell it or make it available for free on any platform.

Overview

Section 1: Shader Creation

Lecture 1 Explanations, Resources & How Work Material Functions

Lecture 2 Waves Function

Lecture 3 Setup Deep Color Feature

Lecture 4 Setup Other Attributes & Distant Based Normal Intensity

Lecture 5 Overall & Edge Opacity

Lecture 6 Edge Refraction

Lecture 7 Caustics Feature

Lecture 8 Foam Feature

Lecture 9 Ripples Feature

Lecture 10 Vertex Paint - Debris Layer

Lecture 11 Vertex Paint - Ice Layer

Lecture 12 River Feature

Anyone who wants to learn, improve or fix their skills in environment creation.