Creating waves with vertex displacement

In this second section, we’ll continue our exploration of the vertex displacement technique with another common use case – the creation of waves on the surface of a water plane.

Here, we’ll keep things simple and focus on sinusoidal waves. These are not the most realistic, but this way, the computation will remain fairly straightforward; still, this example will be a good opportunity to see how the resolution of a mesh can impact the result of a vertex displacement shader and how, sometimes, we can mathematically compute the exact value of displaced normals.

Understanding the importance of mesh resolution

Before diving into the shader itself, let’s briefly talk about the geometry we need to get the proper effect.

In the previous section, Animating fishes and butterflies, we saw how vertex displacement shader can simulate interesting movements even on very simple geometries (for example, the split quad of...