Digital Water

Digital Water: Lakes, Rivers, Waterfalls and Seas for URP

WebGPU Demo (browser with webgpu enabled)

Digital Water builds water that fits your terrain. The Water Body component generates the water mesh from terrains or meshes. A lake fills the basin under the object, a river follows the points you draw in the Scene view, and a sea surrounds coasts and islands. The water shader animates waves, current, surf and foam on that mesh. GPU particles add spray and mist at waterfalls and sea cliffs, and the terrain gets wet where the water has been. Below the surface, Snell's window, total internal reflection and a volumetric underwater pass take over.

LAKES

• Surface filled from the basin under the object, with islands and rocks left dry
• Shore waves rolling toward the banks, Gerstner waves damped over shallow ground
• Opacity grows with depth: clear water at the shore, deep color in the middle

RIVERS AND WATERFALLS

• Draw a river in the Scene view, Auto Level sets it to the channel bottom
• Current speed follows the channel cross section: faster in narrows and down falls
• Waterfalls on any slope steeper than Waterfall Angle, optionally as a free falling ballistic arc
• Foam on rapids, falls and plunge pools
• Oblique wake crests behind rocks, impact rings and boiling foam where the fall lands

SEA

• Swell baked over the seabed: slows and turns over shallows, bends around islands, breaks on beaches and runs up the sand
• Standing waves in front of cliffs
• Breaking wave shape from a profile texture
• Infinite mode: the sea reaches the horizon around every camera

GPU SPLASHES

• Waterfalls: water clumps, droplets, foam streaks on the falling sheet, white water domes, impact mist and mist sinking along the fall
• Sea: spray torn off breaking crests, splashes and mist where waves hit steep walls
• Lit by the main light with shadows, glowing when the camera looks toward the sun
• Animated in Edit mode

SURFACE

• Four Gerstner waves with detail waves and wind
• Refraction, reflections from scene probes and sky or from a custom cubemap
• Caustics, subsurface scattering, sun glitter, anisotropic specular
• Edge foam, crest foam, white caps and streaks
• Additional lights in Forward and Forward+, main light shadows

UNDERWATER

• Snell's window with total internal reflection outside it
• Volumetric fog, light scattering, per channel color absorption and volume caustics
• Optional fog surface that follows the waves
• Several water volumes in one scene

WET GROUND

• Terrain Lit shader with a Wet Ground block: ground below the wet line gets darker, glossier and flatter
• The wet line follows the water level and dries after the water leaves
• Optional triplanar mapping for cliffs

WORKFLOW

• GameObject > 3D Object > Water Body creates a ready water object where the Scene view camera looks
• All settings live on the material and the components
• Material inspector with collapsible blocks. Settings of disabled features are hidden, and disabled features are compiled out
• The inspector warns about missing URP settings and adds the Underwater Volume Feature to your renderers
• Lite shader for shader model 3.5. Switching between the shaders keeps all settings
• Ready materials for lakes, streams, waterfalls, puddles and seas

INCLUDED

• Water shader (tessellated and non tessellated) and Lite water shader
• Water Body, Water System, Water Splash, Sea Splash and Wet Ground components
• Underwater Volume renderer feature
• Wet Terrain Lit shader
• Ready water materials and terrain layers
• 2 demo scenes: lake and rivers with a waterfall, infinite sea
• Documentation