Ocean Waves Shader

A lightweight ocean rendering project featuring procedural wave displacement and realistic water shading based on a sum-of-sines wave model.

This project uses a custom vertex/fragment shader to simulate animated ocean waves in Unity without relying on complex simulation techniques or external assets.

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Features

• Vertex displacement based on multiple sine waves
• Procedural normals from analytical wave gradients
• Physically-inspired shading with:
  • Fresnel reflection
  • Skybox reflection
  • Diffuse and specular lighting
  • Depth-based color blending (shallow and deep)
  • Simple slope-based foam (doesn't work well at the moment)
• Fully GPU-driven: no textures, no baked data
• Custom mesh generation at runtime

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Parameters

Shader (Shader "Unlit/OceanWater")

• _SunColor - directional light color
• _SpecularColor, _SpecularPower - controls highlight intensity
• _FresnelPower - sharpness of view-angle-based reflection
• _ShallowColor, _DeepColor - water base color by depth
• _DepthFadeDistance - controls transition range between deep and shallow water
• _SkyboxTex - cubemap used for reflection
• _FoamSharpness, _FoamIntensity - controls appearance of crest foam

C# Controller (OceanWaves.cs)

• numWaves - number of sine waves combined
• randomSeed - deterministic wave generation
• speedFactor, baseWaveAmplitude, baseWaveLength - global wave properties
• edgeLength, edgeResolution - mesh density and extent

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Example Scene

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