Animated Water

This is a project i did to get better at water shading and animation techniques. The animation is handled via flowmaps that direct Gerstner waves and normal maps, similar to the Vertex Animated Water I made a while back. Shading features include depth fog/color, adjustable cubemap reflection, and a Blinn specular. 

The shader graph is fairly large and I had to use material functions a lot to keep things reasonable. Here is an overview of the full material in UDK, with custom functions pasted in and noted with colored boxes.
The animation is based on some work I did in CGFX. Here is an early prototype when I was still painting the colors directly.

Recently i’ve been porting the scene into UE4, to get used to the new engine and try out the new material editor. 

Here is an in progress shot of the water. Its about 60 more instructions than the UDK shader due to the new shading model. Thanks to rebuilt vertex normals the waves read much better. Currently there is no direct specular for translucent objects, so I’m weighing my options for rebuilding it with a single light vector. It would also be nice to get distortion working, and perhaps improve the depth coloring with sub-surface scattering now that i can get proper vertex normals.