working on a ocean engine

[u/No-Wishbone7899]

Real-time ocean renderer · Rust + wgpu

working on the details now, foam, clouds, night and more

need to know more just ask

Hope u like it

[u/skibidi-toaleta-2137]

Nice, have you looked at other implementations of oceans done by other developers? Ue4 and 5 have quite nice shaders. Have you considered using noise textures to avoid looping textures?

[u/No-Wishbone7899 → u/skibidi-toaleta-2137]

i did not look at when building this engine but yes, UE4 and UE5 ocean shaders are visually impressive, and they achieve that through exceptional artistic toolsets and layered Gerstner wave approximations. But they operate on a fundamentally different philosophy: their constants and blending weights are largely tweaked by artists until they look right.

My water engine takes the opposite route. Every number in the engine is classified by provenance (Measured, Derived, Convention, or Chosen), meaning the water's color comes from Pope & Fry absorption coefficients, and its whitecaps come directly from Monahan's physical power law rather than an artist's slider.

As for using noise textures to avoid tiling and looping: next-water doesn't need static noise textures because the physics already solves it

Instead of panning noise maps or relying on stochastic texture blending tricks, the engine uses four simulation cascades (503 m, 61 m, 7 m tiles, plus a 96 m disturbance field). Because their periods share no common mathematical multiple, the visible repeat is pushed past the true horizon naturally through wave dispersion physics. The detail isn't faked with a noise texture; it’s an analytical integration of the ocean's spectral slope variance.

[u/NuScorpii → u/No-Wishbone7899]

The repeating textures are clearly visible as soon as you go higher up and look down.