Volumetric Water Caustics

Real-time depth-buffer intersection foam with Gerstner wave displacement and dynamic caustics.

DEPTH ACCURACYSub-millimeterCamera depth texture sampling

WAVE MATH4 Gerstner OctavesRealistic physical ocean swells

CAUSTICS RENDERMulti-channel ArrayZero runtime raytracing penalty

Executive Overview

A stylized-yet-physically grounded water shader featuring shoreline foam intersection, underwater color absorption, and dancing light caustics.

Core Engineering Challenge

Water shaders that raytrace refraction are far too expensive for real-time video games.

Distributed Node Topology

Data pipeline flow and computational delegation across system layers:

NODE 01Gerstner Vector Math

Displacement Pass

Physical vertex wave simulation

NODE 02URP _CameraDepthTexture

Depth Sampler

Camera depth buffer subtraction

NODE 03Projective Texture Mapping

Caustics Animator

Animated dual-layer caustics projection

Architectural Strategy

Samples the camera's depth buffer to compute exact distance between the water surface and underwater terrain. Calculates shoreline foam and water opacity depth absorption based on this distance.

Architectural Engagement

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