Volumetric Light Beam

WebGL Demo | Android, Oculus Quest, PC, Mac and VR Demo | Documentation | Forum

The simple and efficient volumetric lighting solution compatible with every platforms: Windows PC, Mac OS X, Linux, WebGL, iOS, Android, VR, Oculus Quest, AR, Consoles, Built-in/Legacy Render Pipeline, SRP (URP & HDRP)!

Continuously updated asset: tested over each new Unity release, 50+ updates over the past 5 years with new features and optimization.

The perfect, easy and cheap way to simulate density, depth and volume for your spotlights and flashlights, even on Mobile!
It greatly improves the lighting of your scenes by automatically and efficiently generating truly volumetric procedural beams of light to render high quality light shafts effects.

Two different Volumetric Light Beam implementations, each one optimized for specific use-cases:
- SD Beams (legacy beams) are super fast with limited features (no true volumetric shadow nor cookie support): they are optimized to run on mobile and standalone VR (Oculus Quest).
- HD Beams offer more advanced features (true volumetric shadow & cookie) but are heavier on performance: they should be used only on high-end platforms (PC & consoles).

A production ready plugin proven by awesome released games showcasing it:

- BONEWORKS released for high-end PC VR
- Carly and the Reaperman released for Playstation 4 PSVR, Oculus/Meta Quest and high-end PC VR
- Kingspray Graffiti released for high-end PC VR and Oculus/Meta Quest
- Receiver 2 released for high-end PC VR
- Hexagroove released for Nintendo Switch
- Cloud Gardens released on Steam
- subROV: Underwater Discoveries to be released on Steam
- Covert released for Playstation 4 PSVR, Oculus Rift and Oculus Go

Features:

- Supports Volumetric Shadows and Volumetric Cookies (HD Beams).
- Truly volumetric: works even if you are INSIDE the beam of light.
- Incredibly easy to use and integrate / Import it instantly / Zero setup required.
- In addition to the Built-in Legacy Render Pipeline, it fully supports the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and the High Definition Pipeline (HDRP).
- Optimized for VR: tested with high-end headsets (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index...) and standalone hardware (Oculus Go, Oculus Quest...), supports all Stereo Rendering Methods (Multi Pass, Single Pass and Single Pass Instanced or Multiview).
- AR Ready: supports both Apple iOS ARKit and Google Android ARCore.
- GPU Instancing & SRP Batcher: render and batch thousands of beams in 1 single drawcall.
- Super FAST and low memory footprint: doesn't require any post-process, command buffers, nor compute shaders: works great even on low-performance platforms such as Mobiles and WebGL.
- Procedural generation: everything is dynamically computed under the hood.
- Add unlimited light beams everywhere: alternative solutions usually require realtime lights only: this plugin doesn't. You can make a baked light volumetric, or even add beams without any light.
- Supports many graphics variants: Deferred and Forward rendering path, Gamma and Linear color space, HDR colors, multiple blending modes.
- Highly configurable (layers, tags, render queue, 2D Sorting Layers and Order in Layer, shader pass...).
- Dynamic 3D Noise feature to simulate animated volumetric fog/mist/smoke effects.
- Volumetric Dust Particles feature to simulate highly detailed dustlights and mote effect.
- Dynamic Occlusion: light beams can be blocked by moving 3D geometry or 2D sprites.
- Trigger Zone feature: you can track objects passing through the light beams.
- Fully dynamic: change or animate every properties during playtime from Script, Animator or Timeline, move and rotate light beams around in real-time.
- Includes very cool runtime Effects collection to easily animate your light and/or beam with effects such as strobe/flickering and pulsing/flashing.
- Advanced features: full Light Color Temperature support, HDRP Camera Exposure support, Smooth intersection and blending with geometry and camera.
- Works with perspective and orthographic cameras out of the box.
- Supports Unity built-in fog.
- WYSIWYG: every modification is instantly visible in scene view: no need to toggle between editor and play mode to see your changes.
- Full source code available / no DLL. The light beam setup and handling is fully exposed through a powerful API.
- Detailed documentation.
- Supports from Unity 2018.4 to the latest 2019.X, 2020.X, 2021.X, 2022.X and 2023.X versions.
- Sample scenes included.

Note that this asset is NOT a fullscreen Post Process / image effect. This is NOT similar to Unity's built-in Sun Shafts image effect.

Instead, Volumetric Light Beam will generate optimized geometry and material foreach light beam. This technique has several advantages:
- More granularity: precisely customize each light beam independently.
- You can add light beams anywhere, even at locations where there is no light.
- When attached to a spot-light, it supports realtime, baked and mixed modes.
- Much easier to integrate with your own pipeline: nothing to mix with your own image effects or post-processing stack, no command buffer, doesn't require compute shader capabilities.
- Runs faster. No Post Process to add to your camera.
- Supports low-end platforms like mobile.

How to use it?

Volumetric Light Beam is designed to be extremely easy to use. No setup is required. You don't have to link multiple objects together. You just need to use 1 simple new component. You can literally add a new light beam in 2 clicks!

You can precisely customize the rendering of each beam of light by adjusting a set of user-friendly properties. For even faster nice looking results, some properties are automatically binded to the Spot light attached.

Limitations:

- It only supports 'spotlights' (beams shaped like a cone). Point lights or directional lights are not supported.
- The plugin fully works with Deferred Rendering path: like any semi-transparent objects, beams are rendered using a Forward rendering pass on top of the Deferred one. This is a well known limitation of the Deferred Rendering technique.
- Since this plugin requires custom scripts execution, it won't work for a VRChat world using the VRCSDK.


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