Unity Water Caustics 🌊, Ubisoft FPS AI 🤖, UE5 Lighting 💡
🌊 Sharpen Your Unity Game Feel
Making Unity Water Feel Alive: Interactive Caustics with Ray Marching
Ashen One HP’s HPWater shader shows how far you can push water in Unity, adding interactive caustics that react believably to touch and falling objects. The effect uses cascaded Depth/Normal GBuffers, ray marching, and Atomic Add operations, followed by denoising, mipmap generation, absorption, and chromatic dispersion for extra realism. It’s a great reference if you’re exploring advanced water rendering. The piece also points to KWS2 Dynamic Water System for large-scale ocean scenes.
6 Low-Effort Tricks to Make Your Unity Game Feel Juicy
Starting from a generic character controller and grey boxes, this video shows exactly how to inject “juice” into your Unity game. By first sizing the world around the player’s jump height, then layering on a strong color palette, skybox, fog, and bloom, the level suddenly looks intentional. Reactive audio, bouncy animations, dust bursts, glowing coins, and subtle player flashes on collect turn every input into satisfying feedback. If your core loop is solid but your game still feels dull, this is a practical checklist to fix it.
🎮 Smarter Production & Performance
How Ubisoft Uses AI to Predict Console FPS in the Editor
Snowcap is Ubisoft Massive’s AI-powered profiler for the Snowdrop engine, predicting console performance in real time directly inside the editor. Trained on millions of frame-level metrics from internal playtests, it estimates FPS and dynamic resolution scaling for PS5 and Xbox builds without deploying to devkits. Developers can generate performance heatmaps, inspect GPU/CPU metrics, and spot bottlenecks early in level and art creation. The system runs on a tiny 18k-parameter neural net, proving simple ML can meaningfully reshape AAA optimisation workflows.
How to Build a Steam Next Fest Demo That Actually Converts
Steam Next Fest can seriously boost your wishlists, but only if your demo is built to sell, not just to gather feedback. This video explains the key differences between playtests and demos, ideal demo length, and how to cut complex systems to spotlight your core loop. You’ll learn why you shouldn’t start at the very beginning, how to end on a cliffhanger, and how to design with content creators and Steam “window shoppers” in mind.
đź’ˇ Visual Polish in Unity & Unreal
Argentum Studio Releases UE5 Lumen Lighting Tool, Free for a Limited Time
Argentum Studio, known for the Groom Hair Cinematic Tool, has launched a new Lighting Cinematic Tool aimed at Unreal Engine 5 artists. The tool centralizes key Lumen global illumination settings into a single, structured interface, cutting down on setup time and common lighting glitches. It helps teams quickly achieve stable, cinematic-quality lighting without digging through multiple UE5 systems. To promote the release, Argentum is giving the tool away for free until February 19th via an ArtStation promo code.
Animate Textured Planes in Unity with Dervish’s New Free Shader
Unity tutorial creator Josué "Dervish" Ortigoza has shared a handy new shader that makes animating flat textured objects—such as flags, plants, and water—fast and painless. Built from sine-function experiments, the shader serves as a plug-and-play solution for environmental motion and decorative VFX. Ortigoza is also developing The Shader Survival Guide, an upcoming Unity 6 e-book packed with exercises and projects that cover industry-standard shaders and effects. The shader is available today, and the book can already be wishlisted.