Water Gerstner Waves - UE4 Materials 101 - Episode 26

In this week's Unreal Engine Material Editor Tutorial, we're using World Space Vertex Displacement to create Gerstner Waves. We calculate both the vertex offset and the vertex normal in the shader, and then combine them with the rest of the water shader that we made in previous episodes. Finally, we create a Material Function with our Gerstner Wave and duplicate it several times to create a complex wave pattern.

If you haven't already seen them, be sure to watch the other videos in this series:

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Learn more!!

Gerstner Wave Videos

Web Resources

Shader Book Recommendations
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Learn to write shaders in HLSL:

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Theme Music
Peace in the Circuitry - TeknoAXE

Background Music
Speo - Reminiscent

[niccochen]

This is the best tutorial series I've ever seen.Thank you!

[omnimousone]

So happy to see every next video on this chanel!

[OpenMawProductions]

You're incredible. Thank you, truly, for educating us. It's not just the free materials and shaders we're getting, it's the knowledge that you present in such a classy and easy to understand manner. Really, thank you.

[romanmendicant]

Stunning stuff. Just what i've been looking for. There are channels with hundreds of thousands of subs with pure shit giving no knowledge. Im grateful to you sir, good videos, good series. Keep it on.

[reffect]

Very well done. I hardly can rebuild your tutorial. The coding skill behind these shaders is impressive and beyond my skills...

[Madlion]

your videos are amazing, especially how you break complicated things down in parts

[alexanderalikin]

Foam would be great. Also would be great to learn a bit about FFT.

[DArtAR]

Thank you very much, this tutorial series is awesome and providing so much information. It's even better than some paid tutorials.
You are my UE4 Man right now. <3

[TheAnimator]

You have improved my university project tenfold.

[blackpixel]

Thanks a lot for this tutorial Ben. In order to add even more randomization, I multiplied the time (exposed in function) with 3 different values. From 0.75 to 1.0.

[bentripn]

I knew subscribing to this channel was a good idea. Ben you have the best UE4 material videos on the Internet! I'd love to see adding foam in the next video!

[DarkHeliosGamesInteractive]

Amazing series of videos of an amazing person I can tell I'm totally new subscriber to your Chanel I just found you because I did a cloth search for my project and I loved also your water videos they are stunning man congrats right now except cloth i working hard also for skin shader with subsurface profiles and my outcome is amazing but I really want to go to the next level so because you definitely are a master of shaders I really would love to see advanced videos from you about skin, eyes, hairs etc.
I wish the best for you and your Chanel sir I'm glad I found you be well.

[pixpix]

Foam is nice, can u also make a tutorial about physical water that reacts to objects/ game characters? :)

[satyakimandal]

You have fantastic in depth tutorials, I am following these and others to learn UE5 materials. However in UE5, World Displacement is missing. I can do the tesselation part in Blender, or even with UE5 modeling tools. What is the alternative for World Displacement?

[daydreams]

Hey there!

First off, great tutorials, I'm a huge fan, and very happy for everything you consistently put out!

I'm was going through this tutorial and I realized that there is a minor change which I might need to do: I'm assuming that there should be a way to "backpropagate" the sampling position used in the cossine term (the one which generates the vertical offset), such that my vertices only move vertically, right?

If so, would you happen to know how would I go about doing that? Because I'm trying to both generate a mathematical model for the "ocean" in my game, where a boat will react to the water level with buyoancy physics as well as have the mesh which represents the wave follow the given mathematical model - essentially, I want to synchronize the heightmap which the water generates AFTER the vertex shading to an "invisible" mesh collider for my boat to float on top of.


I naively assumed that it would be possible to just sample each individual wave back by an amount of "offsetSize * waveDirection", but it seems to give me incorrect results.

[paolocontin]

Another stunning and very clear video... Thanks so much

[ChildOfTheLie]

Excellent vid! Any guesses for what method the UE5 Lumen GI system uses given that RT wasn't part of the demo?

[lamprosgiannopoulos]

Pure gold... Hey Ben, maybe you can make a patreon so we can support your work.

[jesseg.]

Don't forget to "Set Preview Value as Default" as True in the Properties of the Input nodes of the Material Function! Otherwise you'll get an error in the main water material.

[moragna]

What are the odds that 5 months later I'm revisiting my Gerstner waves and you released this tut 2 days ago lol great info! If you could do some foam math that would be great! thanks in advance!