Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Ocean Water Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Dec 16th 2024
Updated On: Mar 2nd 2026
Software: Blender

Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic ocean / lake water material.

Reference

Here's a photo of an ocean / lake surface. Water at this scale reacts a little differently than water at a small scale, you can generally forget about the fact its transparent and instead deal mostly with how reflective it is.

Software Agnostic Material

The basic ingredients are as follows:

Shading: Regular Diffuse and Spec
Color: Black
Spec: Very reflective and very smooth
Bump: A medium frequency perlin noise

Ways to make it more realistic:

Ocean waves are actually more complex than a simple perlin noise, but for most cases perlin is fine. You can try more complex procedural patterns for the bump like multifractal.

Blender Example

Here's the shader for Blender...

Make a Grid for your water surface.

Apply a Principiled BSDF material. Base Color Black.

IOR level 1, roughness 0 (to make it very reflective). You can also play with increasing the IOR, but 1.5 should be fine.

Add a bump node to the normal slot of the material. Add a noise texture node to the height slot of the Bump node. Adjust the noise Size, likely larger such as 30 depending on the scale of your scene. To increase the strength of the bump, adjust the bump node's distance value.

Here's the resulting render.

Here's the blend file, Blender 4.5: ocean_water blender.zip This file uses the hdri "night.exr" that ships with Blender in the datafiles directory.