Water Shaders (Patreon)

Today's experiment was to render water by dynamically modifying the height of a mesh, in a similar fashion to terrain heightmaps.

The lighting is the same as what's used in Sector's Edge, but since the mesh is much more detailed than the water in SE, it looks much smoother.

The waves are produced by simulating Gerstner Waves, which is a method of producing waves by moving each molecule of water in a circle:

Image source: Wikipedia 

By overlaying 10 of these Gerstner Waves with different speeds and angles, it produces some nice looking results!

There's still a lot of extra details and effects to add, but I'm happy with tonight's progress.