GSL Wave Toolkit

GSL Wave Toolkit is a modular Unity URP Wave Shader Toolkit for creating animated ripples, directional waves, pulsing surfaces, radial motion, energy effects, stylized wave patterns, and other wave-driven texture animations.

Use the included Ready To Use Shader Graphs and Materials for immediate results, or build your own effects with reusable Shader Graph Sub Graphs.

The Toolkit is designed around reusable Wave mechanics rather than a single predefined visual style, allowing the same building blocks to be adapted for different materials, VFX, surfaces, and shader workflows.

Two complementary workflows are included:

Ready To Use

Prebuilt Shader Graphs and configured Materials provide ready-made wave effects that can be used immediately and adjusted through exposed parameters.

Build Your Own Shaders (BYOS)

Reusable Shader Graph Sub Graphs expose the core Wave mechanics for users who want to create custom shaders, integrate wave behavior into existing Shader Graphs, or combine multiple shader operations into more complex effects.

Three Wave mechanics

Transverse Wave

Directional wave propagation with displacement across the propagation direction. Suitable for flowing wave patterns, oscillating surfaces, stylized motion, energy effects, and other directional wave animations.

Longitudinal Wave

Directional compression and stretching along the propagation direction, enabling a different type of animated wave motion that can be combined with other Wave mechanics.

Radial Wave

Center-driven wave propagation expanding inward or outward from a configurable origin. Suitable for ripple effects, pulses, impact-style waves, energy rings, and circular animated deformation.

Ready To Use examples

The included shaders and materials demonstrate how the same Wave mechanics can be adapted and combined for different visual effects, including:

• Directional animated waves

• Radial ripple and pulse effects

• Layered and sequential Wave composition

• Animated surface deformation

• Masked wave effects

• Independent Offset processing

• Alpha and Alpha Clip effects

• Emissive Wave effects with Bloom

Built for customization and composition

Each BYOS Wave block provides both CoordinatesOut and Offset outputs.

This allows Wave behavior to be:

• Used directly

• Chained sequentially

• Combined through displacement

• Modified before being applied

• Masked

• Integrated into compatible Shader Graph workflows

• Combined with other reusable shader mechanics

The same Wave building blocks can therefore be reused across different visual styles and effect types instead of being locked to a single predefined result.

GSL Wave Toolkit is also designed as part of the expanding GSL Shader Toolkit Library, with a modular workflow intended for composition with other compatible Toolkit blocks.

No custom scripts are required.

Developed in Unity 2022.3.62f3 LTS with URP and Shader Graph.

Compatibility has also been tested in Unity 6.6 (6000.6.1f1).