Freshwater Plants – Animated Lake and River Set

10 animated freshwater plants, 14 underwater props and 4 tileable lakebed Terrain Layers. Current and wind sway shader, Terrain tree painting, 4 LODs, demo lake. URP.

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer (Unity 6 supported), Universal Render Pipeline 14+
• Built-in and HDRP are not supported (custom URP shader)
• 24 prefabs (10 plants, 14 props), 4 LODs each (100 / 50 / 25 / 12.5 %)
• LOD0: 2,878 - 20,577 triangles per model, 354,367 triangles in total
• 22 materials, 69 textures, 4 Terrain Layers
• BaseColor and Normal: 2048 for plants, 4096 for props; Mask Map at half size (1024 plants, 2048 props); lakebed layers 2048
• Normal maps OpenGL; Mask Map: R metallic, G AO, B detail/height, A smoothness
• Custom URP shader "SGTrade/FWP Plant Sway": two-sided, translucency, GPU instancing, shadows, LOD cross-fade
• 3 C# scripts (current and wind, underwater camera, fly camera), no external dependencies
• 1 demo scene, documentation in Documentation/README.txt

Fill ponds, rivers and lakes with living underwater vegetation. Every plant sways with the water current in the shader, with no bones and no Animator, so thousands of plants stay cheap. One component sets the direction, strength and speed of the current and of the wind for the whole scene.

Plants (10)

• Canadian waterweed (Elodea canadensis)
• Hornwort (Ceratophyllum demersum)
• Eurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum)
• Shining pondweed (Potamogeton lucens)
• Sago pondweed (Stuckenia pectinata)
• River water-crowfoot (Ranunculus fluitans)
• Tape grass (Vallisneria spiralis)
• White water lily (Nymphaea alba) - floating leaves stay on the surface
• Yellow water lily (Nuphar lutea) - floating leaves stay on the surface
• Common cattail (Typha latifolia) - stands above the water and sways in the wind

Underwater props (14)

• Mossy log, sunken snag, tree stump with roots
• 4 waterlogged branches, 3 river boulders
• Rusty anchor, rusty barrel, old wooden rowboat, deer skull

Lakebed Terrain Layers (4)

• Silt, river sand, pebbles, algae bed
• Seamless 2K textures with normal and mask map, height-based blending

Features

• Sway shader driven by a vertex color mask: bending from the root, leaf flutter, random phase per part
• Water current and wind in one component (FWP_WaterCurrent): direction, strength, speed
• Per-plant sway amount, speed and translucency in the material
• Paint the plants on your terrain with the Paint Trees tool - LODs and sway are kept
• Full PBR on every model: BaseColor, Normal and Mask Map
• 4 LODs with cross-fade on every model, Box Collider on every prop
• Real-world scale, pivots at the base
• Demo scene: one lake with all 10 plants and all 4 bottom layers, water surface, underwater fog and color grading, free-fly camera and a labeled showcase row of all 24 models

How to test

• Open Scenes/FreshwaterPlants_Demo and press Play
• Hold Right Mouse to look, WASD to move, Q/E down/up, Shift faster - dive under the water
• Select FWP_WaterCurrent and change the current or wind - all plants react at once
• Terrain > Paint Trees > add a prefab from Prefabs/Plants and paint it on your own terrain