Question [SOLVED] Visuals of Standard Assets water prefabs broken in one project but working in another

Unity version - 2018.4.14f

Hey folks, I'm using different water prefabs from the Standard Assets pack, and they all appear broken in my project. In any scene. Weirdly enough, they also appear broken in much the same way - Instead of having their normal ripple effects/animations, those are crumpled into lines (or seams) and for the life of me I can't figure out why.

Broken - this is how they look like in my main project:




Working - and that's how they look like on a freshly created empty project. They seem to be working just fine:



I really can't understand what's wrong. Same engine version; Same shaders, materials, and scripts; Yet it works in one project and not the other. I've tried creating an empty scene in the "broken" project, and they are damaged there as well.

What kind of global project setting can I have that could cause this?

 

Well, almost exactly an year later, after I no longer need it, I found out why (by accident).
For anyone having this issue - you need to set your project's rendering settings to Linear, and the water will appear as expected.

Apparently, when switching to URP with an existing project (as I had, at the time), the default rendering is set to Gamma instead, which produced a visual difference, but I didn't yet know the cause.