clearwater
Real-time, photoreal shallow water in a single HTML file. WebGL2, no libraries, no build step.
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
GITHUB · launched Sep 23, 2026 · 471 upvotes (top 1%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive 3d web simulations · 157 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▼ -47% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
- caustics
- fft
- realtime-rendering
- shaders
- single-file
- water
- +1 more
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 157 launches in interactive 3d web simulations →
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 : 654 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 655 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 323 days after the earliest competitor.
- open-water · github · 2026-10-20 · 113 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- Ultra-Water · github · 2026-10-28 · 523 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- ClearWater6.1 · github · 2026-09-29 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- minamo · github · 2026-10-24 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Realistic-Water · github · 2026-10-06 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- he-drowns-mv-v2 · github · 2026-10-02 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- web-ocean · github · 2026-10-16 · 800 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- caustic-volume · github · 2026-09-26 · 162 upvotes · similarity 0.52
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.