Creating believable caustics reflections is something that most technical artists have attempted achieving at some point in their career. If you are a game developer, one of the main reasons to use Twitter is the endless stream of inspiration it can provide. A few days ago Florian Gelzenleuchter (kolyaTQ on twitter) posted a GIF of a caustics effect created in Unity using shaders. The post (below) quickly reached 1.5K likes, showing a genuine interest for this type of content.

Want to have sweet caustics? Here you go:

-> Get a caustics texture (bw)
-> unpack in shader twice and pan at different speed/size
-> blend with min(tex2, tex1)
-> Enjoy!

(If you're extra fancy, add some rgb split to the tex!)#screenshotsaturday #unity3d #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/U9yFAE3eKs

— FLOGELZ (@flogelz) August 24, 2019

While I usually focus on longer, more technical series (such as Volumetric Atmospheric Scattering and Inverse Kinematics), I could not resist the temptation of writing a short and sweet tutorial about Florian‘s effects.

At the end of this article, you will also find a link to download the Unity package with all the assets necessary. Continue reading →