A stylized shoreline study developed in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP), exploring how to create expressive, animated water effects using lightweight geometry and shaders optimized for mobile platforms.
The goal was to recreate the visual character of waves, shoreline foam, and wet sand while keeping the implementation efficient. The scene uses flat meshes, shader-driven animation, and a combination of procedural and hand-painted textures, avoiding complex geometry and expensive water simulation techniques.

Shoreline & Wave Animation

The shoreline was constructed using simple flat meshes shaped around the coastline, allowing the water effects to follow the beach naturally.
Using Unity Shader Graph, I developed animated wave crests, foam breakup, and shoreline wash effects. The shader was built iteratively, starting with simple gradients and wave shapes before introducing distortion and irregular patterns to achieve a more organic, painterly appearance.
The wave animation is entirely shader-driven, with no vertex displacement or additional geometry animation.

Wet Sand

A separate shader layer creates the transition between dry and wet sand.
The wet-sand animation is synchronized with the shoreline waves, allowing the darker sand region to expand and retreat as the water moves. This simple interaction helps ground the water visually without requiring physical simulation.

Ocean Look Development

The open ocean uses hand-painted texture masks to control the transition between shallow turquoise water and deeper blue tones.
Subtle animated highlights and surface variations add movement while preserving the clean, illustrative appearance of the environment.
This approach provided greater artistic control over the final look without relying on computationally expensive depth-based effects.

Mobile Optimization

Performance was a key consideration throughout development. The scene was designed around lightweight geometry and materials suitable for mobile-oriented rendering.

Key considerations included:
1.Flat, simplified meshes with no vertex displacement.
2.Unlit, opaque shaders developed in Unity URP.
3.Shader-driven wave and foam animation.
4.Low-resolution, hand-authored texture masks.
5.More complex effects concentrated around the shoreline, keeping the open ocean relatively simple.
6.Minimal reliance on additional lighting, post-processing, and expensive rendering features.

The result is a stylized coastal environment that balances visual quality, artistic control, and efficient real-time rendering.
Tools: Unity (URP / Shader Graph) | Blender | Krita