Hello this is Seth with a Devlog for the Shader development for important modular shaders that will improve the design for the environment with a sand and water shader.

My water shader is still in progress, but the material can blend between 2 colors. One color is set up for the water when it is Shallow and the other is for Deep water to fade between the sense of depth of the water. Also I have two different scrolling UVs based on a gradient noise texture to create random noisy waves and I can mess with the normals to tweak between a more realistic or stylized style.

I created a modular sand shader that also uses gradient noise and uses an alpha texture to make sparkles.

I can also change the behavior of this shader by adjusting the accumulation and height.

Using the height and a render texture I can look for a particle that is on another layer that I called Sand Deformation. Which I put under the player character’s feet. The camera looks out for the particle and influences the height of the shader. This is an image of the trail created from the particles.

Here is the render camera over my entire terrain that looks for the particle system

Here are my particles.