Seamless Glass & Water Real-Time Unity Caustics

In case you missed it, last week, Technical Artist and Unity enthusiast Mirza Beig released a new tutorial on making a chromatic aberration distortion bubble shader, announcing that he'll be posting progressive iterations of this experiment.

Whenever you use water or glass shaders with lighting, using real-time caustics can significantly enhance the scene's beauty and dynamism. In this video, Mirza Beig is projecting them in all directions using a Point Light.

While this one is made with URP, in the past, the artist did this with Built-in:

These are post-processing scans created by Mirza, all rendered from a single shader. This shader includes a dedicated buffer for various parameters, enabling detailed customization. There are no textures, and everything you see is rendered procedurally using math.

"One of my favorite features in this shader is animated coordinate sampling for a special 4D [position, angle] 'caustic noise' function. The result is a beautiful Final Fantasy-esque projection of procedural watery caustics over any 3D surface", commented the artist.

If you're interested in learning how to start with something like this, check out this LinkedIn post on a simple post-processing scan effect shader, and see this thread for references.

Watch the original chromatic distortion bubble shader tutorial, grab free project files by clicking this link, and follow Mirza Beig on X/Twitter for more great tips.