Stylized Water 3

About Stylized Water 3 – Unity VFX & Shader Pack

Unity Stylized Water Shader

Stylized Water 3 is a URP water shader focused on artistic control rather than realistic water simulation. It provides configurable shading, wave animation, foam, reflections, refraction, caustics, translucency, water masking, and a C# water surface API for reading water height and aligning objects.

Water Shading Features

• Unlit, Simple, and Advanced shading modes
• Deep, shallow, and horizon water color controls with color absorption
• Surface foam based on wave crests, slope, or vertex color
• Intersection foam based on scene depth or vertex colors
• Adjustable light reflections from Sun, Point, and Spot lights
• Planar Reflections, Reflection Probes, and integrated Screen-Space Reflections
• Preset-based layered wave animations
• Caustics projected onto underwater surfaces
• Translucency for scattering light inside the water
• Flat Shading Mode
• Refraction
• Vertex Color Support for foam, underwater fog, and wave height
• Tiling reduction for normal maps and surface foam

Water Tools and Workflow

The material interface uses contextual tooltips and notifications, while setup issues can be displayed and fixed with one click. Adaptive tessellation subdivides geometry according to distance, and the Water Grid can generate tiled water surfaces that follow a camera or Transform.

• Water surface API for reading water height from C#
• Transform component for snapping a Transform to the water surface
• Planar Reflections through a dedicated Renderer component
• Water masking for hiding water inside boats and other objects
• Custom time and world offsets for synchronized animations
• Mesh utilities for generating subdivided plane and circle meshes

Included Water Content

The package includes a tropical beach demo scene, pre-configured water materials, foam and normal map textures, and particle effects using flipbooks with normal maps. The included materials cover Clear, Frozen, Lava, Lowpoly, Murky, Ocean, Realistic, Swamp, and Toon water setups.

Compatibility and Platforms

Stylized Water 3 requires Unity 6000.0.60f1 or newer with Render Graph enabled. It supports Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 17.0.3+, along with PC, macOS, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, Android/iOS, WebGL 2.0, and WebGPU.

Supported graphics APIs include DirectX 11/12, Metal, Vulkan, and OpenGL 3.0+. The shader also supports orthographic cameras, baked and dynamic GI, spot and point lights, and VR rendering through Single Pass Instanced and Multiview.

Rendering Limitations

• Built for 3D rendering and cannot be used with the 2D Renderer or Tilemaps
• Planar reflections are not VR-compatible
• Not suitable for planetary rendering because texture seams cannot be avoided
• Not compatible with Apple Vision Pro
• GPU height readback is limited to the main camera's frustum
• Tessellation requires DirectX 11+, Metal, or Vulkan rendering
• The shader requires the URP depth texture option in most cases

Use Cases

• Stylized lakes, oceans, beaches, rivers, and other water surfaces requiring configurable wave and shading controls
• Projects needing water interaction through C# height queries or Transform alignment
• Scenes using foam, caustics, refraction, reflections, and translucent water effects
• Projects targeting multiple desktop, mobile, console, WebGL, or WebGPU platforms through URP

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