Animation

Now the sprite is reflected but it will always be there. Independent of water.

Reflection with out our soon to be explained shaders

To make the reflection only show up on water we will use the stencil buffer, We will have to make two separate shaders to do this. This water surface shader and the reflection shader. Both of these shaders will be based off the default unity sprite shader. Any thing that you want the reflection to show up on should use the surface shader. Any thing that you want to show up as a reflection should use the reflection shader.

Add this to the water surface shader

Add this to the water reflection shader

The stencil buffer basically sets a flag when the water surface shader passes. Then when the reflection shader passes it throws out all pixels that don't have the flag set. Resulting in reflections only on top of water. The stencil buffer is a little more complex than that but that is all we need to know for this effect. Finally since the water reflection shader uses the default unity sprite shader we can lower the alpha a bit in the editor to blend it better. Reflection complete!

Distortion



Water Normal Map In our reflection shader we will add properties for our distortion texture, the scroll speed, and the magnitude of the effect. The distortion effect is done completely through the reflection shader. The basic idea is that we sample from different positions of a distortion texture over time to displace the pixels in our sprite texture. The distortion texture could be any thing but since it is a water effect a water normal map works well.In our reflection shader we will add properties for our distortion texture, the scroll speed, and the magnitude of the effect.

We will also want to get world pos in our vertex shader. We will use this for the position to sample our distortion texture so that it will move as the game object does.

Finally, in our fragment shader we will sample from the distortion texture and use it to displace pixels in our sprites texture.



Here is the full code for the surface and reflection shaders

A lot of the work of the reflection is done through the C# script. The script creates a new game object with the sprite renderer of the original object, mirrors it, and puts our water reflection shader on it. You can see it below.A couple things to note with this technique. First, everything done in this script could be done manually through the editor. It is only for convenience and does not have to be done at run time. You might want to add [ExecuteInEditMode] to this script if you plan on using it. Second, this is kind of a crude way of doing things. Animations, lighting, or anything else that effect your sprite will not get reflected. For animations you could use the script to copy the animator. Then use it as a wrapper for your animator to keep the two animators in sync. That is what I do in the gif below. But if you have a lot going on this could get messy quick. For any more advance scenarios you may be better off using multiple cameras and render textures.