Single Layer Water | 5-Minute Materials [UE4/UE5]

Today we're looking at the Single Layer Water shading model in Unreal Engine! (also known as singlelayerwater). This shading model is unique as it looks completely translucent, but is actually opaque due to a separate pass being rendered. This can be used for things like water, interactive water, rivers, oceans, glass, crystals and much much more, since it also factors in refraction!
Enjoy!
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Computer Specs:
Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's
Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine 4 - (Game Dev)
Blender 2.8 - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
Quixel Mixer - (Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (Chillax time)
Filmed using:
Sony A7s2 body
Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens
Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key
My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)

[@youth20003]

this channel has honestly become a gold mine about niche UE4 topics and I'm here for it

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha hope you're looking forward to more nuggets!

[@rickfuzzy]

Got a tip for you. If you use a one minus after your absorption then you can actually choose your water colour exactly in your instance, rather than always working with opposites..

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha I don't know why I hadn't thought of that before!

[@pietpanzerpanzer5335]

Press 1 and left mousebutton to create a Note. You can also use 2 or 3. In case someone didnt knew that.

[@TajaSukarya]

thank you

[@samulivalkama8617]

Exactly this. Thanks!

[@xShantkax]

my saviour!

[@snivilis]

Literally came in the comments to look for this. Life saver

[@LiMaking]

thank you I actually got pissed he didn't tell how wtf he did at the second node.

[@pattyb_117]

For anyone coming across this video with 5.4 and doesn't see their ripples, I believe refraction is disabled by default? If it is disabled, you can search "Refraction" in the materials details panel and select "Index od Refraction" from the drop box and you should be gucci

[@mehface]

hmm this didnt work for me.

[@OreoRobDog]

@@mehface me either

[@colmantrasscinniro2901]

Anyone having trouble with the refraction moving the whole plane: You need to activate "generate distance fields" in PROJECT SETTINGS, too! It is not default active in higher versions of unreal. Greetings :)

[@AhviMa]

Thank you Legend :>

[@HatPeasyCat]

still have flickering after i turned it on ....

[@MichaelMurphy-tl6cx]

What fixed this shadow/refraction jumping issue for me was making sure whatever ground geometry is under the water plane has affect distance field lighting set to false.

[@SamPandaSam]

Really appreciate these little videos. I've been working on my project for years and have a spline-based procedural river system which is an absolute nightmare - one of the biggest headaches was that overlapping polygons and whatnot of the meshes would cause artifacts cos of the translucency doubling up. Never knew about single layer water as an option, and this video made it very clear and succinct how it works - and since it's actually opaque it doesn't cause the artifacts. Of all the dev channels I follow, yours is the one that consistently helps me in my project the most, and I'm really impressed with what you've done with your own game. Thanks for this

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yes, it's absolutely perfect for doing things like waves and avoids overlap! I appreciate the really kind words :)

[@bobcharlotte8724]

Epic: "Check out our new water system in 4.26!!" Charlie: "Nah, ill just make something more simple and easy while also looking awesome."

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha I love making things from scratch because it's much easier to make it do specific things, where as using the pre-existing stuff often comes with limitations since they were specifically designed for a specific use case

[@bobcharlotte8724]

@@PrismaticaDevAnd it makes it easier to adjust since you know how it was put together.

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@bobcharlotte8724 That's exactly right :) It's always worth having a go at DIY

[@vaclavfliegel703]

If you still have some issues with the refraction, you can alternatively change Index of Refraction to Normal Pixel Offset in the material settings which distort the picture based on the normal map. It is not physicaly accurate by any means and without normal map it does nothing (not great for still water) but it does not have the weird reflection artifact near the shore. See UE4 documentation.

[@grixxy_666]

Bro. Better results in 3 minutes than an hour and a half epic live stream. Immediate sub.

[@asimplemotionua]

Finally i've found a great explanation how to work with single layer water, not with experimental water plugin (UE5, it's very buggy at the moment).

[@Urammar]

Literally how dare you be this good.

[@PrismaticaDev]

I'm sorry :((( I just have too much spare time haha

[@iendrin9152]

I was in a hurry once (school deadline) and needed a shallow stream for a small ditch, which i tried to follow Ben Cloward's huge water series to do lmao, this would've been perfect to do instead... 😂 Your channel has taught me more about shaders with this little series than my school ever will tbh. (Edit: Ben's channel is great btw, just in case it came across differently)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha it's apples and oranges - there are always multiple ways to do anything! And I love Ben's videos myself, he's an incredible presenter :)

[@morganlak4337]

So glad you made this, translucency is just not very good with the cel shader and my game is stylized so I was just not going to have translucent water but this looks great and I think refraction and "translucency" will look way better in my game overall

[@KaustavMajumder]

Folks at the UE Streams should learn a thing or two from you. Straight to the point. No bullshit.

[@DuckJohnn]

For me, the "DistanceToNearestSurfase" doesn't work like in the video. Whole water area just bounces. Turning "generate distance fields" on doesn't help.

[@sachaleighton2518]

I have the same issue!

[@rauljaramillo923]

Both educational and entertaining :) Thanks Charlie!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha I'm glad to hear it! You're very welcome :)

[@luanabianco5827]

In UE 5.1 you need to disable nanite for the water plane, otherwise it will cause the engine to crash

[@1Uik1]

OMG! thanks :D

[@mick0978]

Thanks for heads up

[@TuxedoVaileGAMES]

Do you know if that's still an issue in 5.3? I intend on using nanite for my project if possible.

[@tiannicalogheros6339]

Another great video. I had water working well enough on my own, I knew Single Layer Water existed, but I never experimented with it for some reason. Thanks for showing me the possibilities :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Glad to hear it Tianni :) I think SLW was gone under everyone's radar but it's actually super useful haha

[@Alina-ve1mc]

I felt educational entertained. ;D Thank you for helping out! :))

[@void9853]

Thank you! By the way, if you use 0 for metallic, specular and 1 for roughness, the number of instructions will be significantly reduced for stylized water

[@Fokkusu]

that was an excellent video, I'm going to be testing this shader on vr with forward shading and see what happens :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Oooh yes! Please let me know how it goes - hopefully it's a great alternative to Translucency

[@Fokkusu]

@@PrismaticaDev sure! I will do it today

[@Fokkusu]

I did it and shared it on the discord, for anyone reading this, yes this water is cheaper than traslucent water, specially in forward rendering, and looks perfect in VR

[@RomarioDev]

Awesome 👏 can’t wait to try this out

[@PrismaticaDev]

Happy to hear it - let me know if you run in to any issues my dude :)

[@GarethNN]

Fantastic video, thanks, you're a life saver!

[@armaanc.684]

For anyone who is encountering weird issues, i.e., normal maps not working, make sure you have the refraction method set to Index of Refraction in the material details.

[@666nevermore]

Refraction must go 1.33, the reason you see it wrong is because on the root is default “index of refraction” but you have to select the second option which is more fitting for larger surfaces like water

[@TilW]

0:20 cat vibing in the background

[@PrismaticaDev]

There are always cats vibing in my studio :P

[@cocinando3d]

Amazing, as always!

[@goeorgehuxleywells5375]

Wow thanks for the tutorial it gived a big level up to my project!!

[@МішаМихайлов-ь2б]

You are incredible! very cool presentation of information, very nice to watch! thanks

[@markbay9275]

Very cool effect. Great work as always.

[@chrispetersen3613]

When you zoomed in on the kitty… I’d subscribe to your channel a thousand times.

[@aluckyshot]

Inspiring! Definitely will tune in and try to learn.

[@spencersine2723]

ty for this helpful tutorial!

[@jeremiahwright1590]

love the ruenscape music

[@preshader7718]

Have to love the “Forest” track, one of my favorites

[@flying_redkite]

Amazing video :) Thank you

[@AlvaroRealtimeMayhem]

Dude, this is gold.

[@Nimasti]

Awesome tutorial, thanks you :D you gained a subscriber.

[@albertusugd3100]

Can someone tell me how did he reduced the base pass shader count from 608 to 133 in minute 7:59?

[@PrismaticaDev]

If the opacity is a constant 0 or 1, it doesn't have to render both "versions" of the shader.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Also, only using one of Absorption/Scattering will reduce the complexity as well. Keep in mind, however, that instruction count isn't a very accurate way to measure performance of a shader since all instructions have different costs (an Add an a Texture Sample are 1 instruction each, but one may be 100x more expensive than the other)

[@albertusugd3100]

@@PrismaticaDev can i send you a screenshot of what im working on? i still have like around 700 instructions

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@albertusugd3100 700 is quite normal for a SLW shader. If you're using unreal 5 they might have changed the way the instructions are calculated (more accurate to performance etc) Feel free to chuck a screenshot in the discord :)

[@jamesgabor9284]

Im a new subscriber bc this seems like such a good game!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Thanks James

[@BecineStudio]

What a great tutorial!

[@DahaiLi]

elegantly done.

[@a.l.murkar6425]

"Let's just create a plane" *drops gigantic picture of his head* love it lmao

[@giorgikoridze8608]

You're covering things that I've never seen others have ever covered.

[@paulmroczek]

Beautiful Rock, thanks!

[@darnedghost2008]

Thanks great tutorial as usual

[@PrismaticaDev]

No worries :) Hope you found it useful!

[@TheGuyWithWifi]

where di dyou get the texture sample from for the colour scale behind water bit at 4:30

[@PrismaticaDev]

It's just a cloud noise texture that I made in photoshop. You should be able to find some in the engine files :)

[@TheGuyWithWifi]

@@PrismaticaDev yeah I realised afterwards, I’m getting back into the whole dev thing after a pretty long break. 😅 Thanks tho

[@vspicey]

this is exactly what i've needed thank you :')

[@allalongthewatchtwer]

this tutorial was very useful, thanks, Gyro.

[@bringfire]

Do you know if there's a way to tune the Fresnel angle within a material using the Single Layer Water Shader? I want my reflections to be more prominent at steeper angles of view. Love your content, btw...some of the best on YT!

[@bronsoncjmj]

Just wondering how you got the zeros to come up with just a click? I can't seem to find an answer online so I'm guessing it was a hotkey? Thanks in advance and I appreciate the uploads!

[@bronsoncjmj]

Nevermind, the Unreal Engine 5 facebook group had the answer. Just hold 1 and left click the grid pattern in the material window :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@bronsoncjmj Was just about to answer but you've already got it! There are a tonne of useful little shortcuts like that

[@bronsoncjmj]

@@PrismaticaDev thanks!

[@chrismaurath1057]

Another great video!!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers Chris! Hope you learned a new trick :)

[@bernardvezina-gagnon24]

My refraction is disabled In the Mat , even with the distance field in settings ON , any ideas on how to fix it ?

[@baulator]

Great Video! Can you please make a video about flowing water like we can see in the background? 0:40

[@jankystreams3337]

Hey Charlie, how did you go about making the sparkles in your water?? I think it looks amazing and I would love to do something similar.

[@victorthebard240]

Got to say I really love your videos! It helps me a lot in learning more about everything shader related into Unreal. I was wondering how did you manage to make your foam work around your character? (9:12) I tried some stuff like adding basic static meshs onto the character bones (since distance fields doesn't work with movable meshs) but I just can't figure it out! Do you plan to do a video on that? That would be awesome! :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Heya Victor! The foam around the character is actually a completely different system that uses a render target and a depth capture - it's the exact same method as my landscape interaction stuff. I'll be making a video on it in the future :)

[@victorthebard240]

@@PrismaticaDev Thanks, I'll be checking your landscapes videos and keep on trying while waiting for new content! Keep up the great work, your channel is awesome!

[@polyatriton9801]

thank you very much for the material)))😄

[@QuiteDan]

D-Distance to nearest surface??

[@jayjaygolden5123]

where did you find the texture for caustics?

[@Paulo_Dirac]

Came for shader stuff, watched the cat all along

[@markelishaev617]

Great content! Do you think that ~600 instructions is good? I also couldn't find a way to reduce it with dynamic water.. Also, in the last part of the video I don't know if that was the same material, but you had there 200 instruction with what seemed like the same result, how come?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Heya Mark! I wouldn’t get hung up too much on Instruction Count - it doesn’t take instruction complexity in to account so it can be quite misleading. SLW is also opaque so it doesn’t result in any overdraw/rendering pixels twice. As for the instruction difference later on, it might have been when I enabled/disabled Scattering

[@okaydude5782]

how are you able to just bring up the parameters boxes without right clicking?? im curious of the shortcut key

[@guilhermenaco]

1,2,3 = Constant Vectors / S and V=Parameters / A,D,M,S = Math Operations / T = Texture Sample and so on

[@Maciej.01]

thaanx

[@RprtBak]

SO. GOOD. :D Thank you!!

[@alexanderalikin1210]

How would you go about adding reflections to the water? They don't work by default. The only way, as fa as I know for now, is by adding SSR reflections to your post-process volume which sadly prevents you from using Lumen reflections in your scene. Planar reflections also doesn't work on single layer water.

[@nether6209]

Specular = 1

[@alexanderalikin1210]

@@nether6209 No smart ass. There was no reflections for the single layer water. But it has been added with the latest update of the engine around a month ago. Thank me later.

[@nether6209]

@@alexanderalikin1210 ? what's the reason for rudeness? I was trying this today and your comment had no reply. You're a poor excuse of a human being. Also I have no reason to thank you.

[@nether6209]

Oh wait I checked your channel and you look like a serial killer irl. No wonder.

[@alexanderalikin1210]

@@nether6209 The reason for my rudeness is the fact that your answer was useless and had nothing to do with reality and with what I initially posted.

[@inversus1733]

Man, you are amazing. It would be very interesting if you made a waterfall.

[@somni4516]

Thanks G

[@levinqu7192]

Hey, I'm using UE4.27. When I give 1 to the base color, and give a texture to opacity, the color is black. I noticed you have got white wave in your tutorial. Do you know why is this situation?

[@charlessnix7547]

same question

[@charlessnix7547]

found it after commenting; make sure your base color value is 1

[@Axeinus]

@@charlessnix7547 I could not figure this out. I was trying to use the cel shading and incorporate the water shading and it just wasn't working. I'm finding that 0.7 is giving a nice effect thanks to your comment

[@somni4516]

@@charlessnix7547 Thanks man

[@OreoRobDog]

the little waves on the edge of the water is there BUT its soo small idk how to make it more visible

[@kairu_b]

Lovely

[@stormolflak]

So cool

[@amacias2012]

Awesome thanks you very much.

[@HotDumpsterCrab]

Wow! I'm just desperate to know how you make the full ocean material.

[@snyyx]

But then how do you remove the shadows on it? Cause now shadows are just cast like any opaque materials

[@PrismaticaDev]

Set the Opacity to 0. The "Opacity" means the surface opacity, not the water opacity.

[@snyyx]

@@PrismaticaDev but I use the opacity for the cusp with distance to near.. Since 0 opacity doesnt show the color, i use the distance as an alpha

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@snyyx the colour of the SingleLayerWater type comes from the Absorption values, not the Base Colour. The Base Colour denotes the colour of the surface of the water

[@thumbsup08]

Awesome Vid! How do I put it on the world space?

[@Orangefordays]

How to work with Cel-Shader, it's just black?

[@Neki2K1]

What do you think about Water System Plugin and Single Layer Water when applied to the game? I'm a newbie UE and am looking for information on water generation, so SLW will probably have better performance than WSP, but WSP probably has something for Epic to spend on building it, hope you can help.

[@PrismaticaDev]

I haven't actually used any water plugins before unfortunately - I've always just used simple planes and splines for my water. However I'm sure there are some resources about alternate methods and their pros/cons

[@cmitchell6927]

Great videos

[@andreascomposer5055]

Great showcase for the shader model! This might be a stupid question but how did you get your character to make ripples in the water? What I have found is that a skeletal character dosen't produce a distance field?

[@fuglong]

attach invisible cubes or spheres to your skeletal mesh and use those. One on each foot, one on the pelvis, and one on the chest.

[@BrianScotland]

Thank you sir.

[@roblaatz4188]

Black and white caustic alphas aren't working great for me. Does anyone know where I can find one similar to the example in the video?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey Rob, if you're talking about the ripples, check out my Distance Fields videos for more info. If you're wondering about the texture I used for the the caustics example (ColourScaleBehindWater input) it's just a simple generated voronoi noise that has been inverted

[@hkr1276]

@@PrismaticaDev Dude I cannot find an equivalent texture nor generate it to look generally the same no matter what I do. please please give us a download link

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@hkr1276 Do you mean the shader? This video is just a general overview - I don't usually do download links

[@hkr1276]

@@PrismaticaDev I meant the textures that were used, specifically the water caustics voronoi inverted texture. All the samples I found online were too "plant cells" kind and not water caustics type, same with the cloud textures for the foam. If you could do a video on 'Making your own textures for UE5' or similar explaining these, that would also be fine

[@yunoswaifu]

Thank you! How do I make this work with my Celshade???

[@PrismaticaDev]

Is your cel-shader material-based or post-process based? If it's post process, it should just work by default :)

[@yunoswaifu]

​@@PrismaticaDev It's post process but It was my bad!! I had a value 0 constant on my Base Color and my water was glowing ahaha. Sorry!! Nice tutorial, I'm learning a lot!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@yunoswaifu Ahhh yep, that would have been causing a Divide by 0 artifact haha. Glad you fixed it! :)

[@archsteel7]

Bless this comment, was having the same issue. My base color was 0, which was messing up my cel shader and making it completely dark. Setting the color to 1 caused it to glow, but then setting specular to 0 fixed it for real.

[@DatPhan-uo7ep]

question but where did you download cloud noise?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hello - I created it in Photoshop a while ago, but there are plenty of free noises on the internet. You can also create custom noise using Quixel Mixer and other material design apps

[@PrismaticaDev]

Oh and there are a few floating around in the engine files themselves :)

[@francisconhernandez9948]

The foam, and the green stuff being removed, are you doing that with renderTargets and SceneCapture? I love you dude, your tutorials are the best!

[@neeedsmorebeer6573]

Great vid thanks! Unfortunately, the single layer water shading model does not appear to like being two sided. When I make it two sided and view from underneath looking up, it seems to black out the sky but everything else retains its base color. When I switch back to a translucent default lit shading model, the problem is no longer there. Any ideas if this can be rectified or is this just a limitation of the single layer water shading model?

[@alessiamuggetti7930]

im sorry i have a question the texture that you use for the caustic how did you created it?

[@Zeuzdelaluz]

Hello Alessia, If you have a texture node just type in caustics it will give you a caustic texture you can use. Apply a panner 2 times and the second pannes have it going opposite from the first one and you have yourself some cool-looking caustics. =)

[@cgkrab]

Look at this fuckin legend

[@okamitsu7930]

That tutorial is really cool but, have a lot of cut and a lot of node appears, i'm a bit lost even if i can have a good water at the end without all that new nodes

[@compadrelucas]

this was NOT five minutes. but Thank you so much!

[@IRONFRIDGE]

That’s nice 🙂. Works with forward shading?

[@PrismaticaDev]

I THINK so, but I'm not 100% sure. It might say in the documentation somewhere but I would have to test to find out

[@nathaniel8422]

can I ask a question. Is it possible to do underwater in a way when character (third person) is not underwater, than we have current settings with sky and water lighting. When character goes underwater we set other settings of water (light and scattering, so that it is more translucent). Thanks

[@lhmsc]

Awesome! You got a subscriber :) Got a question if you may: I'm testing this with Lumen and the water plane seems to receive sharp shadows, in addition to the refracted shadow on the "water bed". In your example I can't seem to notice the shadow on the water surface. Shadow on the water plane also seems to lower the quality when I get closer. How do I get rid of it?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Unfortunately I don't have much experience with Lumen and all of it's quirks, but I'm sure it's just an oversight from the Epic team and will be fixed in a future update. They themselves rely pretty heavily on SingleLayerWater so I doubt they will let it look bad for long haha

[@lhmsc]

@@PrismaticaDev Thanks for the reply! I just read that this shader model is not supported with Lumen yet. Maybe in 5.1 :D

[@okamitsu7930]

4:50 where can i find that caustics effects

[@DesignRevolutionary]

Hey thank you for this tutorial! I have one problem I cannot find the answer to: When I make changes to a node I copied, it changes the original too. How can I copy a node, without affecting he original?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey! You'll need to either create a new Param, or change the Name of the param (although that might just change the name of all of the linked ones)

[@DesignRevolutionary]

​@@PrismaticaDev Hey, Thanks for the quick reply! Your answer helped a lot, it was a Noob mistake lol. (I forgot to rename the pasted node (WaterAbsorbtion) to (WaterScatteringColor) before changing the color, Keep up the great work mate 💯

[@kevinzawarrior]

Whenever I connect the 0 value to the absorption coefficients my UE5 Crashes, is this a bug? Im new to UE5 and Ive come from unity so i dont know if im doing something wrong

[@DreamweaverGameStudio]

same thing here

[@DreamweaverGameStudio]

Searching through the internet, I discovered that my graphics card might not be 100% compatible with DirectX 12. I switched to DirectX 11 in the project settings, and it worked just fine. I hope it helps you as well.

[@cr0uchingtiger]

Dammit. Got this working because my other water material casts weird reflections. But the shadows cast on the water of SingleLayerWater can not be soft.

[@sarahgreaney8241]

Just wondering where you got the cloud noise texture? would love to use it if thats ok? great tutorial for water:)

[@johninglis2622]

would u have to create mesh spline in order to change the direction water such as a river?

[@OreoRobDog]

how did you make that celshader

[@PrismaticaDev]

Check out my cel shader video :)

[@lucasgabrieldelimagoncalve5015]

it worked perfectly here! but I noticed that the terrain does not generate waves with the "distanceToNearestSurface"... any idea how i do this?