Planar Reflections and Patrol Boats

One of the chapters in the first episode has you playing a harbour patrol police. He’s vehicle is a patrol boat and it will be used in the scene. I had some spare time and I decided to model this vessel.

Modeling a Boston Whaler Challenger 27

After a bit of resource gathering I found out that one fitting boat used by NYPD in 1990 was called Boston Whaler Challenger 27 from 1988.

I spent a few hours modelling this boat during the past few days, I only used my trackpad on my 13” laptop and the experience was not great. But I got the small boat done!

Only after looking at the boat in game I really really started to miss actual reflections on the water surface. So I begun to search online for planar reflections for Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline.

Planar reflections

At first, I tried putting in a flipped camera that would render to a render texture. It was ok, but had a few major drawbacks: the reflection would not get clipped at the water plane, but it would just be a flipped version of the scene overlaid on top.

I scrapped this idea and went searching for a better solution. I found a GitHub repo that had a pretty nice planar reflection tool. It required some experimental unity packages and kept throwing nasty looking errors, so I opted instead to purchase an URP compatible planar reflection asset from the Unity Asset Store.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fast-mobile-planar-reflection-urp-vr-ar-lwrp-142801

This seemed fine. The test scene loaded up and ran great. Reflections worked perfectly and seemed fast. The only problem was that the shaders it used were HLSL and I needed to merge the planar reflection with my pre-existing shader graph created custom water.

Luckily the system was pretty simple and the functionality was quick to replicate using the shader graph!

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