I hope this is still being worked on.
I was rather impressed by his efforts and looked forward to seeing how far he could take it.
Would be nice to get an update.
Agreed. I still hope this surfaces, or at least joins with the Ocean Community Project.
I’ve searched for this on the market place. It appears it is still kept secret? I can not imagine such fine results would get shelved like this.
OP, where are you? 
Hello, i’m glad there are so many people interested in my work, and i’ve got quite a few responses on YT, mail and here on forums. Cheers \o/
Now about the reason i actually stopped working on it. Can’t remember if i mentioned it before, but PC i was working on is 6-7 years old, so during the hot summer days my gfx card is literally melted, and i didn’t have the resources to update it. Another reason is - i left my job and while searching for new one i had plenty of time to learn UE4 and work on this WIP. 
Then it was just a lack of free time.
Now i’m working on it again, but only for like 3-4 hours per week 
Also i changed it from just ocean/terrain shader to some kind of tropical island asset pack (with palms, plants, rocks etc.). It goes slow but i’ll try and post some screenshots or a vid next week.
Cheers for all your responses! \o/
Where do you live? What kind of work are you looking for? Can you message me some info?
Here is a couple of screenies of what i have at the moment 
https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/2ak8iFEI.jpg
Need to tweak LOD distances a bit.
Here is the promised video. Hope you’ll like it and sorry for bad quality 
I love it ! 
Can you tell me when you think put a demo version or content to download ?
If you need any help to get this moving along let me know, i do a lot of material work.
Charleston, Teriander, others, can we pool our resources and come together to help Alex ()? “Beverly Hills,” really Charleston? A graphics board is not that expensive. Perhaps EPIC could also chip in.
Alex has the best coastline water shader I have ever seen. It needs to be one the Marketplace or combined with the Community Ocean project. This water shader is exactly what UE4 needs. Time is passing, and water and coastline shaders are the area that UE4 is falling behind. Anyone have any ideas how we can help Alex get this to market now? Lets not let it die again. If he needs help, lets help him. EPIC, send him a graphics board or give him a job. Or lets take up a collection.
I think at this point the only way to help Alex would be for us to see his shader network and modify, tweek, or provide feedback on it. Unfortunately Alex has kept this type of information locked away nicely. From the point of accomplishment that he has already achieved I think he should put it on the marketplace now and let us tweak it after we purchase it. He could even have a series of versions if the current state is not to his satisfaction.
But until we have access to it from the marketplace or a link in this forum, I have no idea how we can help.
Agree, wish Alex would release this to the Marketplace or take it over to the Community Ocean Project [Community Project] WIP Weather & Water Shader - Game Development - Epic Developer Community Forums
Most games shrink the Gerstner waves down to the size of lake water to avoid dealing with breaking waves and the shoreline. The Community ocean shader has beautiful waves with AC3 like SSS in the wave tops (color change), but they also don’t break and they end in very simple shore foam. Someone needs to add the breaking wave foam to the community project, then add what Alex has here with the swash/backwash/wet sand effect, and it would be a game changer, literally. All the pieces are here but the offshore large breaking wave foam. The community project easily holds over 60 fps, not sure what Alex is getting, or what the two together would be, until we have a chance to try it out.
Hello guys, as i said before, i’m glad to see people concerned about this project, and i really appreciate that you are trying to help me. \o/
About my PC. It’s a bit old, yeah, but it works just fine. Had to swap my old and noisy ATI 5870 card with younger one after all those years, which was like 10 times cheaper and even bit more powerful. And i assure you - it’s all OK now, just discuss, criticize and help with an advice when needed
About my project. Water and ground materials are very simple, there are no any calculations or difficult formulas like in other ocean projects i’ve seen on the internet. It’ all done with a knowledge base equal to roughly one month of UE4 learning. And to be honest, at first i didn’t planned to get it too far, i just wanted to show my work and it’s progress. Also i wanted to thank EPIC Unreal team for creating, improving and letting us to use such an epic tools for free
First things to do:
- Shore waves are only moving in one direction. I have some thoughts on how to make it work in different directions, but first i want to finish the shader itself, make it usable, optimize and clean it a bit, cos it just a mess atm
- I want to try to add a smaller lake kind of waves with no foam, that appear very close to the ground.
- At the moment i’m working on caustic imitation, it’s very simple aswell, just wanted it to be invisible in the shadow areas. Almost done the basis, and for now i’m quite happy with the result.
- Refraction problem. I didn’t had a chance to get deep into UE4 refraction yet. Atm it’s just a very basic refraction setup, with lots of artifacts etc.
Alex o/
Cool. What about breaking waves alike Pipeline in Hawaii? And yes integrating into the community Ocean Project would be most welcome.
keep it going. most interested in it !
hey i live on the …the length of a palm branch out here is about 10 to 14 ft long and the tallest frans up to 3.5 ft …they look a bit short to the scale of the character in the images …by the way great work on the shader
I’ve been checking back on this thread for the last few months, and I must say I’m quite excited to see updates on this project. I just want to say that your ocean looks fabulous and I anticipate seeing a demo sometime in the future!
Hello everyone,
I have been looking at lots of different methods (most lacking tutorials or how-to info), and formulating my own theory on how to get this to work. I won’t be doing it myself right now, but here’s the gist of what I’ve got. Watching the demo posted helped to come up with this theory.
First, I would use a displacement map sequence to form the animated surface of the ocean and apply a mask to gradually reduce the height all the way to 0 at the edges. The idea is to keep the waves huge closer to the center, and almost non-existent by the shore. The waves near the shore are made up of a separate displacement map sequence. What I suggest is to set up collision points wherever you want your waves to start, and trigger them when the first ocean plane touches them. That way, the 2nd plane’s waves would mesh into the first plane’s waves, and they would appear to be one and the same.
As for the 2nd plane, you’ll need a sequence of displacement maps that are drawn to look like a wave that gains height quickly and then drops off slowly until it reaches the shore. The center should be tallest and it should curve out in the direction that the wave is travelling in. You can set it up as a decal since you’ll be using triggers.
Lastly, you can set up another animated decal on the beach for the wet sand effect and trigger it when the wave decal touches it.
This is a lot of work to put together, but I think you can essentially get something that looks as true to life as you can get. You just need to have great textures. You can use Blender’s Ocean modifier to get your initial displacement map sequence and foam data. Perhaps you can even work with it to make the sequence for the waves. I haven’t tried but I’m sure with a bit of creativity, it can be done. The benefit of that would be the foam data and the curl and crash of the waves.
Good luck, and let us know how it goes if you try this! And for the love of all that is development-related, post tutorials or screenshots if you can!
Hello!
There are some restrictions in material creation, and tbh i cant get the good looking results just by mixing “moving textures and masking”, so i decided to make it more complicated and mix it with math generated surface. I’m very newbie at formulas, equations etc so i went deep into maths for the last couple of months. I’ve been experimenting with almost each equation i’ve found in the internet, from casual sine wave to more complicated trochoidal skewed waves. I am also trying to simplify it so it have less base parameters in material instance. Got some results and will post it as soon as i can. Didn’t work too much on speculars, reflections etc, it’s just all about surface movements atm.
Working on:
- realistic deep water motion
- shallow waves that not just move in one direction, but bends around the beach
- realistic wave interaction with the beach (forward and backward movement)
- also trying to add micro waves (only normal without wpo) that appear very close to the beach line and have high frequency) but unlucky atm
cheers \o/