Ruined King: Water Shaders | Tech Art

My favorite part of getting to help with Ruined King was the chance to spend some more time working with Unity's shader pipeline, since I don't get to do as much actual HLSL within Unreal. I had the opportunity to set up the ocean shader used throughout many of the outdoors levels, as well as in fishing locations. Since Unity doesn't support distance fields out of the box like Unreal, I set up a camera capture underneath the water level to run once on load, which could then be used as a pseudo distance field in the shader to create foam waves, with varying step numbers/accuracy based on platform (sorry Switch). The water itself uses a typical Gerstner wave setup with vertex color modulation of wave intensity and speed, and a lot of faked lighting based on normals + the position of the Gerstner waves.
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I also set up the river shader and large waterfalls (shader, FX, and meshes) used in some of the outdoor levels, which incorporates a pretty basic vertex color based flowmapping to let the artists adjust water direction/speed/opacity/or the presence of foam.
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Lots of feedback on water look and feel was provided by Grace Liu and Peet Cooper, and the actual setup of most of the waterfalls in levels was done by the worldbuilding/art team of Brent Critchford, Thais del Rey, and Andrew Harrington. Other assets seen were made by Mat Kolbeck, Grace Liu, Peet Cooper, Thais del Rey, and Dragonfly Studio. Final lighting in the levels shown done by Andy Hansen, me, and GFactory.

https://www.artstation.com/andyh
https://www.artstation.com/graceliu
https://www.artstation.com/brentcritchfield
https://www.artstation.com/matkolbeck
https://www.artstation.com/thaisdelrey
https://www.artstation.com/orgoth02
https://www.artstation.com/3peet
https://www.artstation.com/gfactory