Okay, so you wanna hear about this “do you believe in light wuthering waves” thing I was messing with? Buckle up, it’s a bit of a ride.
It all started with me seeing this cool demo online. Something about simulating light interacting with really realistic-looking water. Looked super dreamy and I thought, “I gotta try that!” So, first thing I did was fire up my trusty old Unity. Yeah, I’m a Unity guy, sue me.
Right, so, new project, slapped in a plane for the water surface. Then I spent like a solid hour just tweaking the material. Trying to get that nice, reflective shimmer, you know? Started with the Standard Shader, but quickly realized that wasn’t gonna cut it. Too… flat. So I switched to a custom shader I found in some forum. It had some cool Fresnel stuff going on, which definitely helped.
Then came the waves. Ugh. Initially, I tried using a simple scrolling noise texture to displace the vertices of the plane. Looked okay-ish, but it was way too uniform. Like, perfectly repeating waves. Not natural at all. So I dug a little deeper and found this technique using multiple noise textures, each with different scales and speeds, layered on top of each other. That was a GAME CHANGER. Suddenly, the water started to feel more organic, more alive.
Next, the light. I really wanted that “wuthering” effect, that sense of the light kind of dancing on the waves. So, I messed around with the light settings. Increased the intensity, played with the color, and then added a subtle flickering effect using a script. The script just randomly changed the light’s intensity within a small range every frame. Simple, but effective!
The shadows were a pain. The default shadows in Unity looked blocky and weird on the water surface. I tried increasing the shadow resolution, but it still didn’t look right. Ended up having to bake some ambient occlusion into the scene to soften the shadows and make them look more natural. It took some experimenting, but I finally got it to a point where I was happy.
To add to the visual appeal, I threw in some simple post-processing effects. Bloom, for that extra dreamy glow, and some subtle color grading to make the colors pop. Also, a tiny bit of chromatic aberration, just to give it that slightly imperfect, realistic feel.
The biggest challenge? Performance. All those shader calculations and vertex displacements were killing my frame rate. I had to optimize like crazy. Reduced the number of vertices on the water plane, simplified the shader, and made sure I wasn’t doing any unnecessary calculations every frame. Learned a lot about profiling in Unity during this phase, let me tell you!
- Lesson Learned #1: Don’t be afraid to experiment with different shaders. The Standard Shader is great for basic stuff, but sometimes you need something more custom.
- Lesson Learned #2: Layering multiple noise textures is a powerful way to create realistic wave patterns.
- Lesson Learned #3: Optimization is key! Especially when you’re dealing with complex shaders and vertex displacement.
So, did I achieve that “light wuthering waves” look? I think so! It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn close. It’s got that dreamy, ethereal vibe I was going for. And, more importantly, I learned a ton in the process.
Now, the important question. Do you believe in light wuthering waves? I hope so, because I just spent a week trying to make them real!
