Source Engine Water
An Iris shader pack that recreates Source Engine water by reverse-engineering its 2004 and 2007 water-rendering implementations
Source Water
Shader pack for Iris that replaces vanilla water rendering with a reconstruction of water from Source Engine games. Its goal is to bring the appearance and behavior of classic Source water into Minecraft without turning the pack into a general lighting or art-style overhaul.
The implementation is based primarily on the Source 2007 renderer, with the 2004 renderer preserved as an optional classic normal-animation mode.
The main inspiration for this pack was a random YouTube video about Chinese cs 1.6 F2P version where some Source graphical features was packported. Such as water!
This project contains AI-generated code. See AI_USAGE.md for details.
Recreated Source behavior
- Source's expensive and cheap water rendering paths, with a distance-based LOD transition between them.
- Material-specific surface and underwater fog colors, fog ranges, refraction, reflection distortion, and normal-map flow.
- Fresnel-driven reflections, three-layer Source 2007 normal movement, and the original 29-frame Source 2004 animated normal map.
- Separate underwater material behavior and optional full-screen water warp.
Adaptations
- Source planar reflection render targets are replaced with screen-space reflections for visible scene geometry and a sky fallback when SSR cannot provide a result.
- Source environment cubemaps are approximated with a light-aware Minecraft sky reflection, including the cheap-water path.
- Source-unit fog distances are converted to Minecraft blocks, while the expensive-to-cheap water transition is configured in chunks.
- Vanilla underwater tint and fog are removed so that the selected Source material controls underwater color and visibility.
Included materials
- Half-Life 2 — Canals 03
- Half-Life 2 — Canals Clear
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast — ATI
- Half-Life 2: Episode One — Riverbed 01
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two — Riverbed 01
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two — Riverbed 02
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two — Silo
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two — Tunnels
- Counter-Strike: Source — Militia
Pairs especially well with Squake.