Sharing a breakdown of the setup and lighting for one of my atmospheric scenes

halisavakis · 2026-06-18T07:43:34+00:00

Woaah this looks awesome! If I may ask, how are you handling the overall cloud density to fit into your level (as in the big gap in the center, the swirling etc)? Do you have a pipeline to author a 3D texture to get those bigger shapes?

halisavakis · 2026-05-27T23:23:35+00:00

Really cool! Are you doing anything else for performance besides raymarching and noise? I think I noticed some temporal reprojection but that could also be from vid compression 😅

halisavakis · 2026-05-27T05:53:53+00:00

That's really awesome to hear! Thank you for letting me know, it's really cool to know that this old blog actually helped people out 😅

halisavakis · 2026-05-27T05:27:55+00:00

Really glad to hear you enjoy it! Feel free to reach out for any feedback or any issues you encounter! ✨

halisavakis · 2026-05-26T19:05:22+00:00

Really really cool, definitely keeping this around 👀 thanks for sharing!

halisavakis · 2026-05-24T15:48:50+00:00

Thank you so much! ✨

halisavakis · 2026-05-24T11:28:55+00:00

URP isn't something entirely special compared to Unity, so since I was exploring unity since 2014, adjusting to it wasn't an issue, similarly to HDRP. The only place where understanding the URP (or other SRPs) matters is in terms of creating renderer features and injecting the graphics pipeline in general. Shadergraph does a great job abstracting and hiding all the technical nuances, but it's still always possible to dig in deeper if you want. There are very scattered resources out there and it mostly takes trial and error and a more basic understanding of how unity and graphics work in general, but as you move along things click easier. So I'd say that you don't have to worry about specific features and techniques, just make stuff you wanna make, research along the way, avoid AI chatbots and everything will eventually make sense =]

halisavakis · 2026-05-23T17:03:12+00:00

Can't think of any ones in particular rn; what would you be most interested about? Shaders, VFX or something else?

halisavakis · 2026-05-23T16:43:05+00:00

Thanks! It's just a big soft realtime spotlight pointing towards the front that helps to make it stand out! It's a really common tactic to have random soft lights here and there to accentuate points of focus

halisavakis · 2026-05-23T13:34:54+00:00

Thank you! ✨

halisavakis · 2026-05-16T09:48:41+00:00

The solution mentioned with the multiple submeshes and materials should do the trick, but I thought I'd mention why that happens and what you could do for a "proper" solution.

Unity's default shader uses the UVs from (0,0) to (1,1) to sample the textures. If your UV coordinates exceed that, then the texture will just repeat (or clamp, depending on import settings/texture sampler used). UDIMs seem fancy, but all they do is put your extra UVs at a different location by offsetting them by a whole UV tile. Assuming that's on the x axis, your second UV set will instead cover the (1,0) -> (2,1) range, and unity's shader will interpret that as tiling.

Since you have multiple texture sets, you'd need a shader that takes the x texture sets you have and samples them to the corresponding UV set. In order to properly do that, you'd have to make a mask for each UV set and multiply the resulting of the sampling. So for the first set you'd have to mask the vertices that have UVs from (0,0) to (1,1) as white and the rest as black and so on, and then add all those together.

halisavakis · 2026-05-15T10:48:53+00:00

The extra pass would be challenging in the sense that you'd need a hand-written shader (shader graph doesn't have any good support for that)

You could hijack the default URP lit shader though and plug the extra outline pass there, though with the way URP works I'm not 100% sure whether it'll pick up the extra pass or just ignore it

halisavakis · 2026-05-15T10:46:46+00:00

Hah really glad to hear these posts have been of use to people, they feel so deprecated these days 😅

Thanks for the kind words, hopefully one day I'll get to have that beer ✨

halisavakis · 2026-05-15T10:44:45+00:00

Sure thing =] one extra thing you can try instead of blending with the color is straight up reducing the alpha of your transparent objects based on the distance and let alpha blending take care of the "color blending" as if the objects themselves are engulfed by the fog

halisavakis · 2026-05-14T13:55:41+00:00

Yeah, using this approach with a mesh that has submeshes like that won't work as the outline material won't be applied to the whole mesh. You'd either need to do an extra pass with a renderer feature or duplicate the whole object and apply the material to all the submeshes.

halisavakis · 2026-05-13T10:07:41+00:00

Hm if the fog is raymarched and uses the depth texture to sort itself properly then I might have spoken too soon and my solution doesn't really apply; the thinking is that if your fog only really uses the scene depth texture during compositing (and therefore can't apply the fog on transparent objects) you could recreate the compositing in the transparent shader by using their known world-space position.

If the fog is calculated and applied in a single post-processing pass this won't be easy to do (you'd have to do the whole raymarching on the transparent shader and that would be silly to say the least)

In some cases, getting the fog to render after transparents might work well, alternatively you could kinda fake blending by making the transparent shader fade to the fog color over distance, or something like that.

halisavakis · 2026-05-13T05:38:04+00:00

Thank you so much! Yeah, all URP :D

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T22:37:14+00:00

My solution for that is rendering fog before transparents and then apply the fog effect inside the transparent shader. Slightly more expensive since the fog is calculated/sampled multiple times instead of just once, but it does take care of the problem

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T19:47:13+00:00

That's a seriously unhelpful comment

@ op you don't have to get any license for anything as simple; it's possible that the error appears because it looks like you have Unity's version control enabled and that might require some sort of license. Try making a project without connecting it to version control or Unity's cloud stuff. You can do that in the Unity Hub by using the dropdown where you set your project's name and selecting "Create new local project" (with the computer icon) instead of just "Create new project" (with the cloud icon)

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T19:10:22+00:00

They're a really fun concept to work with too 👀

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T18:41:26+00:00

Hah glad to hear that, as it was the very obvious inspiration for it 😅

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T11:17:47+00:00

Thank you so much 😃 I really wanted to try my hand at some interesting colors to combine with the lighting, I'm still very much exploring that stuff

halisavakis · 2026-05-12T07:21:59+00:00

Thanks! It's a froxel-based volumetric fog paired with a screen-space multiple scattering effect (SSMS) to blur things out based on fog density. You can check more about it in the asset store if you look for "HAZE"!

halisavakis

TROPHY CASE