Stylized Underwater Environment (Unity, 2018)

Every asset seen here was modeled in Blender or ZBrush as a high poly sculpt, the details of which are baked onto a low poly UV unwrapped copy and textured in Substance Painter. This has largely remained my workflow since 2017.

Vegetation provided by client for me to hand place on the environment via foliage instancing.

Water is custom shader with fresnel based cutoff to simulate large scale refraction. Water caustics are projected from directional light.

Volumetric caustics are actually flashing additive particle-based planes. The planes adjust rotation and scale based on sun orientation.

Sea floor was a custom ShaderForge tessellated plane. Client requested 3D ground as normal maps don't hold well under parallax rendering. The optimizations to the environment freed up overhead to use more complex water/terrain shaders.