Check Out a New Guide on Creating Realistic Rivers & Oceans in Unity

In case you missed it, the Unity team shared a brand-new tutorial a few days ago, offering a deep dive into their engine’s novel Water System, introduced to the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) last year with the release of Unity 2022 LTS.

For those unfamiliar, the Water System enables artists and game developers to easily add high-quality oceans, rivers, lakes, seas, ponds, streams, puddles, and other bodies of water, as well as underwater effects, to their HDRP environments. Moreover, the system comes with an off-the-shelf, physically based water shader designed from a recently introduced lighting model in HDRP, enabling you to adjust the smoothness, refraction, absorption, diffusion, and light-scattering properties of a water surface.

The team’s latest guide thoroughly explains the nuances of the new system, showing different workflows for adding realistic bodies of water to Unity scenes. The tutorial is beginner-friendly, covering the basics of setting up a water surface from scratch and providing some useful tips along the way. You can watch the full tutorial attached above or by visiting Unity’s YouTube channel.