Intro to shaders: 2D and 3D water

In this hands-on video series, you will create your first water shaders in 2D and in 3D. If you’re new to shaders, you should start 2D, because you need some basic understanding of the shading language, vertex and fragment shaders, to build upon. 3D adds quite a bit of complexity when it comes to writing shader programs, as you will see in the third video.

Watch the tutorials

You can watch the full playlist on YouTube. Here are the individual videos:

• Intro to Shader Programming

• Animated Water and UV Coordinates

• Water in 3D

• Texture-based Deformation

• Merging the Two Waves Together

• Functions in ShaderScript

• Water Shadow and Masking

Download the source code

Download the intro to shaders project here to follow along: 2d_water_shader.zip.

It comes with a start folder to follow along with the 2D tutorials, and an end folder that contains the final code.

You will find the 3D water project on this GitHub repository. We didn’t include it here, as it is a little heavy.