clearwater
Real-time, photoreal shallow water in a single HTML file. WebGL2, no libraries, no build step.
Details
- External ID
- 1383489293
- Source
- GITHUB
- Company
- —
- Product
- clearwater
- Website domain
- github.io
- Launched
- Sept. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 471
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9875736612861901
- Tags
- caustics, fft, realtime-rendering, shaders, single-file, water, webgl2
- Fetched at
- Sept. 27, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 27, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- single-file webgl water simulation for developers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Creating a single-file HTML/WebGL2 wrapper is easy, but authoring custom real-time shallow-water physics equations, caustic rendering, refraction shaders, and numerical stability requires deep computer graphics and shader math knowledge.
What it would actually take: To build photoreal shallow water in WebGL2, one needs a 2D heightfield shallow water equation (SWE) solver running in fragment/compute shaders with ping-pong framebuffers. Rendering requires custom GLSL shaders simulating refraction, caustics via ray marching or photon projection approximations, Fresnel reflection, and wave attenuation. Deep graphics programming expertise in GLSL and numerical fluid simulation is required.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 219 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 220 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 319 days after the earliest competitor.
- caustic-volume · github · 2026-09-26 · 162 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- coastal-simulation · github · 2026-09-19 · 45 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- A zero-to-hero, spaced-repetition guide to WebGL2 and GLSL · hn · 2025-12-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Turn raw HTML into production-ready images for free · hn · 2025-12-24 · 152 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- koi-pond-garden · github · 2026-09-27 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- WaterCuda · github · 2026-09-19 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- 35mm.photo · github · 2026-09-17 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- ocean-simulation · github · 2026-09-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
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