Stylized cartoon water for lakes, shallow shores, pools and lagoons. Drop a water plane into the terrain and the rest sets itself up.

What it does

• color bands from shallow to deep, one to eight, with a glow along the shoreline
• shore foam at the bank and around objects standing in the water; a pillar or a rock gets its own foam collar with no setup
• five foam patterns: one texture and four procedural
• caustics projected onto the bottom, with an optional rainbow fringe
• shallow water refraction, toon specular with sun sparkles, vertex waves
• vertex color paints three things: foam islands on open water, parts of the surface hidden inside caves, and areas with the wave motion stopped, for example under a pier or under ice

Color, foam and caustics come from the depth below the surface: the shader measures the distance to the bottom and picks the shade and the amount of foam from it. One plane covers the whole body of water - near the bank the water lightens and foams, over deep water it darkens - so shallows need no separate mesh and no baked mask.

Settings sit in the material inspector: 27 sliders and color fields. Shallow and deep color, depth range, number of bands, foam width and speed, caustics strength and scale, and wave height are all there to change.

Three ready materials to pick from: tropical turquoise, pool blue, green lagoon.

What is inside

• water shader
• three materials
• demo scene: a blocked out test terrain with a lake basin and two pools, for looking at the materials and changing settings
• procedural textures: normal map and foam mask, 512 px
• documentation and a quick start guide, PDF

Requires 4.7 or newer and the Forward+ renderer.