Animating a sea shader

Even though we’ve worked with water in the past two recipes, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about large-scale ocean shaders in UE5. I’ll admit it: this is one of my favorite subjects in computer rendering, and achieving great results is completely possible thanks to the methods we are about to see. However, this is not going to be a mere expansion of any of the previous topics. Instead, we are going to continue to learn new techniques and apply new concepts throughout the following pages. So, buckle up – there’s no time to rest in our journey!

Getting ready

There are going to be some big visual changes in this recipe but, despite this, everything you’ll need will be either provided by the project bundled with this book, included in the Starter Content, or part of the engine. Since we are going to be working on a large ocean material, it makes sense to move away from the familiar interior scene we’...