Water texturing of caustics effects

If you are interested in rendering water, I just posted a new article on how to do texturing of caustics patterns to improve the look of rendered water.

The article focuses on the caustics texturing and provides complete shader code that can be downloaded and used in your own projects.

http://www.dualheights.se/caustics/caustics-water-texturing-using-unity3d.shtml

I have also posted a video of how the final result looks.

Happy reading!

 

Cool Kjell. Thanks for information. Will store it away for later use.

 

This looks great - are you happy for people to use this commercially?

 

The source code in the article is free to use even commercially if you want.

 

Great, thanks for posting!

 

Awesome!
I really like it, and will likely use it.

At the end you write it's freely usable within unity projects, however that still creates a slightly limiting copyright. And I don't think posting here is enough for usage outside that.
It would be awesome if you could take the time and update all the files to include a copyright notice at the top of Each file, with a type of license that allows them to be used freely. (There are a few of those out there).
ex: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

 

Yay!!
Thank you!
Been looking for something like this for a while now!

 

I have put a bit of clarification at the end of the article now that my modifications are released as Public Domain. As for the original Unity shader code, I haven't found any licensing information for that so I can't really claim any license on it. Since Unity publishes the standard shader code for us to modify I assume it is ok to use it freely.

 

Actually that means default copywrite, so read but not use... My guess is that they mean for people to be allowed to modify it, but...

 

This might also suit my needs.. Thank you very much

 

Could you please show a screenshot of the shader in use (with any of the (9 possible) maps plugged in) from your pool example.

Once I see that I will understand how it is used

 

Does this screenshot answer your question?
The Emission map is updated by the CausticsProjector script every frame to animate the caustics.

 

I'm a little confused so there are 2 textures on the pool bottom?

I'm still new to Unity but I did not think you could do that in Unity.

The Tiles are one texture and this is a second?

On another UV channel?

Nice to know Unity can do that...?

Ohh and Thank You

 

The tiles are on the Albedo channel. The caustics light pattern is on the Emission channel, which lights up the Albedo texture.
Normally the other texture channels use the same UV but if you read the article that I linked to above you will notice that I have modified the code of the standard shader, so the Emission channel is a bit special in this example. It does not use the object's UV but instead it calculates new world-projected coordinates.

 

I have it now. Thank you. It looked to be a blue and white version of the caustic map. It all makes sense now

 

Regardless of the technique used for this effect - Unity can do this. It's just a matter of creating the shaders.
Unity by default uses the newish standard shader which can't do it out of the box. But if you are willing to create a shader of your own there are not really many limits other than current technology.
If you want to create custom shaders without coding them yourself you might want to give ShaderForge a try. It's basically the Unreal Shader Editor for Unity and an all around awesome tool. The sky's the limit

 

Hi Kjell-Andersson,

I'm very new to Unity and wonder if you could detail in a bit more of a step-by-step way regarding how you implement the code you have made available (on https://www.dualheights.se/caustics/caustics-water-texturing-using-unity3d.shtml) and what parameters need to be in check? I only wish to create a close-up of some caustics projecting on to a plane and a target sphere (as if it were resting on the bottom of a pool - like your original demo clip) and haven't had much luck visualizing the effect yet...

Cheers!

 

@Kjell-Andersson, thanks for sharing your work! May I ask, will this asset still be updated to work in Unity 2018.1+? The following Console Rrrors are shown in Unity 2018.1.6:

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader error in 'Standard Caustics': 'AdditiveLight': no matching 0 parameter function at Assets/Unity5CausticsShader/UnityStandardCausticsCore.cginc(455) (on d3d11)
2.  
3. Compiling Vertex program with POINT
4. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_RGBM_ENCODING

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader error in 'Standard Caustics': syntax error: unexpected token ')' at Assets/Unity5CausticsShader/UnityStandardCausticsCore.cginc(455) (on d3d11)
2.  
3. Compiling Vertex program with POINT
4. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_RGBM_ENCODING

 

Huge thanks to the author for providing the solution.