Water Shader update!

After reviewing the water I found that it wasn't quite looking like what I wanted, so I went back and did a big upgrade to how the shader works and looks! It took a lot of time to figure out but the shader graph community has been growing a lot lately, with lots of people posting tutorials on how to go about making lots of different effects. The biggest update is the refraction to give distortion to the water, this effect relies heavy on the scene color node as it essentially grabs the last frame rendered per second and distorts it using a noise. Although effective this effect would does not work underneath the plane so going underwater is a no go.

Another improvement is with the caustics now being rendered correctly on all objects underneath the water plane. Although very subtle in the video, this parameter can be turned up. The overall node re-usability has also been improved by making use of sub graphs. Sub graphs let you store shader graphs into nodes that can be used in as many shaders as you want, here I've set up one for World space UVs and Depth Fade. The images below show the water shader graph, the last two images are the two sub graphs.

One main reason for initially updating the water shader was that I wanted to add dynamic tessellation so that the waves around the player would always look highly detailed but anything in the distance would be much lower resolution. After a lot of research and a having a look at different shader graph editors I come to the conclusion that it inst currently possible in 2019.2 shader graph to do any form of tessellation. This was really disappointing but I didn't think it was worth jumping to another editor like Amplify Shader. So although disappointing I had to move on, I had a look at a few other options like coding the actual tessellation into a water system but this would involve a lot of work which I didn't think would be worth the time spent.