Unity Digest: Adding a Realistic Look with Shaders

Check out 5 Unity packs from Kronnect that would help you add a realistic look or a camera effect to your scene in no time. 

Beautify 2

Improve the image quality of your scene in real-time with Beautify 2.

Key Features:

  • Enhances visual features, restores or augment image detail, producing sharp images - in many cases the change can be dramatic, like switching to High Definition.
  • Improves pixel color when needed, without oversaturating the image.
  • Removes the extra blur caused by many antialias post effects.
  • Reduces or completely removes banding artifacts in gradients, usually seen in skyboxes due to color quantization.
  • Improves perceptual texture quality - even low-resolution textures look better.
  • Works with forwarding and deferred rendering paths as well as linear and gamma color spaces.

Volumetric Fog & Mist 2

Grab a shader for volumetric fog and mist production.

Features:

  • Fog areas: create any number of fog areas, of any size and features.
  • Fog voids: now you can create several fog voids easily in the scene making 3D holes into the fog.
  • Multiple point lights: which can illuminate the fog with additional global controls for intensity and range.
  • Native URP directional shadows including cascade option.
  • Fog of war with interactive editor which allows you to paint, clear or color the fog areas with a brush or using scripting.
  • Terrain fit option: ability to adapt to any kind of surface below the fog.
  • Sunlight diffusion and specular effects.
  • Wind speed and direction
  • Turbulences.
  • Profile-based: create and share settings among multiple fog areas or scenes.
  • Fly-through-clouds: create floating clouds that can be crossed.
  • Works in SceneView as in GameView.
  • Volume-based rendering: it does not use Post Processing Stack. It's not a camera effect.
  • Simple workflow: add fog volumes as you would create and move/scale gameobjects.
  • Optional custom depth prepass render feature to account for specific transparent object support like lakes, ocean, rivers, etc.

Volumetric Lights

Check out a solution for a fast volumetric light creation. 

Features:

  • Smooth or 3D noise based volumetric effect.
  • Profile based. Share settings among lights.
  • Real volumetric effect.
  • Shadow occlusion.
  • Dust particles.
  • Colored cookies.
  • Customizable boundaries.
  • Fast!

Compatibility:

  • Unity 2019.3+.
  • Built-in Pipeline.
  • Universal Rendering Pipeline 7.2.0+.
  • VR Multi-Pass and Single Pass Stereo support (only built-in pipeline).
  • Perspective and orthographic camera support.
  • Timeline / Animation support.

Global Snow

Add realistic snow to your scene with Global Snow shader. 

Some details:

  • PBR Relief Mapping, a full PBR + optimized volumetric approach which produces a 3D effect of snow bumps.
  • PBR Normal-mapped snow, uses albedo, normals, and specular workflow.
  • Flat shading, a faster mode without normal modification which still looks great!
  • Simplified unlit mode, simple yet convenient effect.
  • Integrated Occlusion and Glitter.
  • Unity shadow system compatible.
  • Compatible with Global Illumination.
  • Compatible with Deferred and Forward rendering paths.
  • Compatible with Gamma and HDR color spaces.

Sun Flares HDRP

Check out a sun flares HDRP that would help you add realism to your project.

Features:

  • Sun disk
  • Corona rays
  • Light diffraction with animation
  • Ghosts with circular, hexagonal, pentagonal or octagonal shape
  • Halo with chromatic aberration
  • GPU-based, all features render in a single pass
  • Depth-based automatic effect occlusion
  • Volume-based, Post-processing effect
Published 24 March 2021
Ellie Harisova
Editor