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Your breakdown are so interesting every time! Thank you so much for taking the time to write and explain all of this! 🌸

Maybe we water shader people should compile a definite water shader guidexD The water shader on my recent project uses most of those techniques as well and I think everybody who got your points implemented is in a pretty good spot with their water shading magic!✨ (+ those fluid dynamics look tasty!)

In its core, the water shader is pretty standard, but it has some tricks up its sleeves 👀 It mainly features: - A custom lighting model - Depth-difference based intersection effects - Fake refraction with a twist* - World-space projected caustics - Color absorption - a surprise** (1/16)

The custom lighting is something I usually like to do with water shaders: I like nice normals panning up and down affecting reflections and refraction, but I don't like it when they are used in the diffuse color; it makes the water look plastic and points to the lack of subsurface scattering (2/16)

So, I just use the mesh normals for diffuse and the tangent-space normals for specular reflections, refraction, reflections etc. That way I get nice glints of specular without any dark spots from the diffuse The distorted specular, reflections etc are enough to convey the water surface ✨ (3/16)

Those breakdowns are super interesting, thanks for sharing!!