Caustics

How to use caustics.

Caustics Renderer Feature

The new caustics feature should now be added as a custom renderer feature. To do this, you need to select your pipeline renderer asset and click on Add Renderer Feature.

The following properties can be set.

Visuals

You can set the strength of the caustics effect. The RGB split slider controls how much the caustics should be split into RGB components. The shadow mask keeps caustics from showing up in darker areas of your scene.

Movement

Set the caustics texture that should be used and the scale and speed of that caustics texture.

Depth

Control at which depth the caustics should be rendered. First, you need to set the height of your water surface. Then you can control at which depth (relative to the water object) the caustics will be rendered. For example a range of 0-10 will render the caustics right from the surface (0 metres) up to 10 metres deep below the water surface. Finally, you can also set the fade property to control how hard the cutoff should be between a region with and without caustics.

Rendering

Here you can set the render pass event which will control when in the rendering process the caustics should be rendered. You can also debug the caustics and the depth mask.

Caustics can also be rendered underwater. Look at this page for more info.

Legacy Caustics

You can also still use the old caustics feature. To do this, open up the Stylized Water shader graph which you can find under Stylized Water For URP > Shaders. Then, make the following connection.

Be sure to save the shader graph. Next, in the water material inspector in the caustics section, you can enable Legacy Caustics and then you will be able to control the caustics using the old method.