Description

Features:

– Truly volumetric FX: works even if you are INSIDE the beam of light.
– Incredibly easy to use and integrate / Import it instantly / Zero setup required.
– 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.
– 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.
– GPU Instancing: render and batch thousands of beams in 1 single drawcall. Try it by yourself!
– Super FAST w/ 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.
– VR Ready: supports all Stereo Rendering Methods: Multi Pass, Single Pass and Single Pass Instanced.
– Smooth intersection and blending with geometry and camera.
– Fully supports the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) and the High Definition Pipeline (HDRP) introduced in Unity 2018.1 with the Scriptable Render Pipeline experimental feature.
– 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…).
– 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 5.2 to the latest 2017.X, 2018.X and 2019.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:

For now, the current version of this asset has some limitations:
– This asset doesn’t generate volumetric shadows. To compensate this limitation, the asset features the ‘Dynamic Occlusion’, but it only computes an approximation of the occlusion which can’t be ‘partial’.
– It only supports ‘spotlights’ (beams shaped like a cone). Point lights (beams going in all directions equally) are not supported.
– ‘3D Noise’ feature requires shader capabilities equal or higher than Shader Model 3.5 / OpenGL ES 3.0. Any mobile devices released after 2012 should support it.
– ‘Volumetric Dust Particles’ are only supported on Unity 5.5 or above.
– Since this plugin requires custom scripts execution, it won’t work for a VRChat world using the VRCSDK.

Roadmap:

Volumetric Light Beam is actively developed. The current price is discounted and will be increased as more features are added.
– Improve density rendering when looking from the inside
– Support box and rectangle beams to simulate volumetric area lights
– Support custom shapes and simulate light scattering via cookie textures
– Support skewed beams
– Expose events in a public API