Animating a sea shader

Even though we've worked on water before, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about large-scale ocean shaders in UE4. 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 for rest in our journey!

Getting ready

Big changes for this recipe but everything you'll need is, as always, provided either by us, included in the Starter Content, or part of the engine. Since we are going to be working on a large ocean material, it made sense to move from the familiar interior scene we've been working on to a large outdoors environment. The level we'll be working on is called 04_07_SeaShader_Start, and you can find it in the folder for this chapter...