Water Shader + Buoyancy Project

A project developed in Unreal 5 were I created a custom water shader and physics buoyancy system. The goal of this project was to learn how to create custom shader effects in unreal 5 and how to develop physics-based objects than can react to them.

The water shader is customizable through a collection of parameters and can be blended between two different settings to create different ocean environments seamlessly during gameplay. It contains many features such as wave colour blending, depth fading, wave foam and distance fields.

The buoyancy system is stored in a custom buoyancy component that I developed; which can be applied to any actor blueprint to make them float. The component samples a water manager, that replicates the shader calculations to get a wave height value that is used to make the buoyancy points around an actor move up and down according to the waves.

This project was a challenge to develop but I learnt a multitude of techniques and methods that can be used for futures projects and to improve this one in the future. From this I leant how to develop shaders in unreal 5 and particularly how to have them work in conjunction with physic-based objects and understand the limitations of having the 2 systems working with each other. I also gathered a deeper understanding of developing physics in UE5 and how to make the logic saleable through the use of custom components.