Stylized Water Material.

For a current project - The Podlands - I've been working on a new, stylized water material. One of the requirements for this material was to stick to an Opaque shading model (rather than the transparent one, usually used for water) in order to avoid the plethora of problems associated with translucency.

The single biggest obstacle in this asset's creation was to make the ripples look pleasing. I've now ended up using the fully dynamic Distance Field Gradient nodes as a flowmap to drive motion on a tiling ripple texture. While it's more performance-heavy than the traditional static skirts, it's significantly more manageable for The Podland's massive open world.

In order to hide the lack of depth caused by the material's Opaque nature, Parallax-related UV trickery is used to make it look as if the water is cloudy, and shifts based on perspective. Water color and 'fuzziness' is also driven my water 'depth', as measured using Distance Fields, further driving home the volumetric feel.