Believable Caustics Reflections (Alan Zucconi)
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Alan Zucconi
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Believable Caustics Reflections is Alan Zucconi's September 2019 Unity blog post on faking pool-style ripple caustics without ray tracing, sparked by Florian Gelzenleuchter's popular shader GIF.
One tileable texture is sampled twice in a Surface shader at different scales and scroll speeds, combined with min(), then tinted onto albedo with slight RGB UV offsets for dispersion.
The walkthrough covers _ST tiling, _Time animation, HDR albedo above 1.0, and Post Processing Stack v2 bloom. Readers should know basic surface shaders; fluid simulation is not used.
The tutorial is free on alanzucconi.com; Patreon tiers add a Unity 2019.2 package. It suits intermediate artists after introductory shader reading.
Often shared in graphics forums as a compact real-time caustics recipe alongside Gelzenleuchter's original demo.
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