How Games Fake Water

A deep dive into how real-time water rendering works in games, covering the mathematical foundations from sine waves to fractional Brownian motion. Topics include vertex shader displacement using sum of sines, analytically derived surface normals via partial derivatives, Lambertian diffuse and Blinn-Phong specular lighting, Gerstner vs. exponential wave shapes, domain warping, and reflection techniques including ray tracing, screen space reflections, and cubemap-based image-based reflections with Fresnel approximation. The piece also honestly addresses the tiling limitation inherent to wave-based approaches.