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The formula for a good water shader for games in Unreal 4

Blog Intermediate

M. Marier

Proposed by Jan Mróz

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Description

The formula for a good water shader for games in Unreal 4 is M. Marier's Medium article on building a stylised lake water look in Unreal Engine 4. The piece is a practical material recipe rather than a physically based ocean simulation write-up.

Marier uses the Single Layer Water shading model with absorption and scattering colours, opacity-driven murkiness, distance-scaled normal tiling, Fresnel-modulated refraction, animated normals, simple vertex motion, and shoreline intersection foam. He highlights SceneDepthWithoutWater so depth-based effects work with the opaque single-layer water path.

Intermediate UE4 material authors who already know material graphs and the Single Layer Water output node will get the most from the walkthrough. Readers should be comfortable tuning artist parameters and following Epic's feature documentation linked in the post.

The article is one free Medium page with in-editor screenshots. It complements Epic's official Single Layer Water docs and community shader breakdowns aimed at lakes and stylised bodies of water.

Marier's post is frequently bookmarked in UE art circles when teams want a readable lake shader without FFT ocean tooling.