Single Layer Water | 5-Minute Materials [UE4/UE5]

Today we're looking at the Single Layer Water shading model in Unreal Engine! (also known as singlelayerwater). This shading model is unique as it looks completely translucent, but is actually opaque due to a separate pass being rendered. This can be used for things like water, interactive water, rivers, oceans, glass, crystals and much much more, since it also factors in refraction!

Enjoy!
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Computer Specs:
Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's

Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine 4 - (Game Dev)
Blender 2.8 - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
Quixel Mixer - (Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (Chillax time)

Filmed using:
Sony A7s2 body
Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens
Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key

My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)

[pattyb_]

For anyone coming across this video with 5.4 and doesn't see their ripples, I believe refraction is disabled by default? If it is disabled, you can search "Refraction" in the materials details panel and select "Index od Refraction" from the drop box and you should be gucci

[youth]

this channel has honestly become a gold mine about niche UE4 topics and I'm here for it

[pietpanzerpanzer]

Press 1 and left mousebutton to create a Note. You can also use 2 or 3. In case someone didnt knew that.

[rickfuzzy]

Got a tip for you. If you use a one minus after your absorption then you can actually choose your water colour exactly in your instance, rather than always working with opposites..

[colmantrasscinniro]

Anyone having trouble with the refraction moving the whole plane: You need to activate "generate distance fields" in PROJECT SETTINGS, too! It is not default active in higher versions of unreal. Greetings :)

[SamPandaSam]

Really appreciate these little videos. I've been working on my project for years and have a spline-based procedural river system which is an absolute nightmare - one of the biggest headaches was that overlapping polygons and whatnot of the meshes would cause artifacts cos of the translucency doubling up. Never knew about single layer water as an option, and this video made it very clear and succinct how it works - and since it's actually opaque it doesn't cause the artifacts.

Of all the dev channels I follow, yours is the one that consistently helps me in my project the most, and I'm really impressed with what you've done with your own game. Thanks for this

[bobcharlotte]

Epic: "Check out our new water system in 4.26!!"
Charlie: "Nah, ill just make something more simple and easy while also looking awesome."

[cpjfhsi]

You are incredible! very cool presentation of information, very nice to watch! thanks

[ShinzuMusic]

I have this issue in VR mode with my quest 2 where there's glitchy lines on the water & the reflection is so off. Looks great when simulating in Unreal but when I put the VR headset on it looks weird and laggy. Would you happen to know why? It's a custom water plane, nothing too fancy. Thanks! 🙂

[morganlak]

So glad you made this, translucency is just not very good with the cel shader and my game is stylized so I was just not going to have translucent water but this looks great and I think refraction and "translucency" will look way better in my game overall

[grixxy_]

Bro. Better results in 3 minutes than an hour and a half epic live stream. Immediate sub.

[markbay]

Very cool effect. Great work as always.

[rauljaramillo]

Both educational and entertaining :) Thanks Charlie!!

[aluckyshot]

Inspiring! Definitely will tune in and try to learn.

[tiannicalogheros]

Another great video. I had water working well enough on my own, I knew Single Layer Water existed, but I never experimented with it for some reason. Thanks for showing me the possibilities :)

[vaclavfliegel]

If you still have some issues with the refraction, you can alternatively change Index of Refraction to Normal Pixel Offset in the material settings which distort the picture based on the normal map.
It is not physicaly accurate by any means and without normal map it does nothing (not great for still water) but it does not have the weird reflection artifact near the shore. See UE4 documentation.

[goeorgehuxleywells]

Wow thanks for the tutorial it gived a big level up to my project!!

[Alina-vemc]

I felt educational entertained. ;D Thank you for helping out! :))

[asimplemotionua]

Finally i've found a great explanation how to work with single layer water, not with experimental water plugin (UE5, it's very buggy at the moment).

[GarethNN]

Fantastic video, thanks, you're a life saver!