Water

The Water component turns an entity into a high quality water surface, a plane with animated waves, refraction, reflection, depth based coloring, foam, and an underwater look when the camera goes below the surface. You drive it entirely from the Details panel, there is no shader to write.

Adding water

Select an entity and choose Add Component, Rendering, Water. The water is a plane centered on the entity, sized by Extent and scaled by the entity’s transform, so move and rotate the entity to place it. Multiple water bodies in one world are fine.

The surface is generated procedurally (no mesh asset needed), displaced by Gerstner waves, and rendered after the opaque scene so it can refract what is behind it and reflect the sky.

Surface

Property	What it does
Extent	Plane size in meters (local XZ), before the entity transform scale.
Grid Resolution	Vertices per side of the wave grid. Higher is smoother but costs more.
Opacity	Master surface opacity.

Waves

Waves are a sum of Gerstner waves fanned around the wind direction, plus an optional scrolling detail normal for fine ripples.

Property	What it does
Wind Direction	Direction (XZ) the waves travel along.
Wind Speed	Scales how fast the waves move.
Wave Amplitude	Peak height of the dominant wave, in meters.
Choppiness	Gerstner steepness, from rolling swell (0) to sharp peaks (1).
Wave Scale	Wavelength multiplier for the wave set.
Wave Count	Number of summed waves (1 to 8).
Detail Normal Map	Optional tangent space normal for high frequency ripples.
Detail Strength	Strength of the detail ripples.
Detail Tiling	Detail normal tiling across the surface.
Detail Scroll Speed	How fast the detail ripples scroll with the wind.

Color and depth

The water tints the scene behind it and fades from a shallow color to a deep color with depth, absorbing light along the way (so submerged objects darken and disappear the deeper they are).

Property	What it does
Shallow Color	Tint where the bed is close to the surface.
Deep Color	Tint approached as the water deepens.
Depth Fade Distance	How far you can see into the water before it reads as deep. Lower it for murkier water.
Absorption Scale	Overall murkiness. Raise it to hide submerged objects faster, set 0 for perfectly clear water.

Refraction

Property	What it does
Refraction Strength	How much the surface waves bend the view of the scene below.

Reflection

Reflections use screen space reflections of the scene with a prefiltered sky fallback where the rays miss.

Property	What it does
Reflection Strength	Overall reflection intensity.
Roughness	Blurs the reflection and softens the sun glint.
Fresnel Power	Higher values reflect only at grazing angles.
SSR Max Distance	How far the reflection rays march before falling back to the sky.
SSR Step Count	Ray march steps. Higher resolves more, costs more.

Specular

Property	What it does
Specular Intensity	Strength of the sun glint and the light that scatters through wave crests.

The sun glint and the subsurface scattering (wave crests glow when you look toward the sun through them) both ride this value.

Foam

Foam has two parts, shoreline foam where the water is shallow (near where it meets geometry) and crest foam on tall wave peaks. Foam is off until you raise Foam Intensity.

Property	What it does
Foam Color	Color of shoreline and crest foam.
Foam Intensity	Overall foam strength. 0 disables foam.
Shoreline Foam Width	Water depth over which shoreline foam appears.
Crest Foam Amount	Wave height fraction that foams (1 foams all crests, 0 only the tallest).
Foam Texture	Optional foam texture, scrolled with the wind. A procedural pattern is used if none is set.
Foam Tiling	Foam texture tiling across the surface.

Underwater

When the camera drops below the water surface, a fog absorbs the view over distance and a subtle distortion is applied, so being underwater reads correctly even when the camera is half submerged at the waterline.

Property	What it does
Underwater Fog Color	Color the view fades toward with distance underwater.
Underwater Fog Density	Absorption per meter of submerged view.
Underwater Distortion	Screen distortion while submerged.
Underwater Tint	Overall color cast applied to the submerged view.

Tips

• For open ocean, keep Depth Fade Distance low and Absorption Scale high so you cannot see far into the water.
• For a clear pool, raise Depth Fade Distance and lower Absorption Scale.
• Reflections only show on screen geometry; off screen the sky is used, so a visible sky (an Environment with a sky) improves reflections.
• The plane is finite. Size it with Extent and the entity scale to cover your body of water.