Rocket Truster

Rocket Truster is a GPU rocket engine effect for Unity 6. 

WebGPU Live playing demo

Flame, dark flame tongues, smoke, sparks, heat haze and ground impacts are simulated in one compute shader and drawn with hand-written HLSL shaders. Version 3.0 has no Visual Effect Graph or Shader Graph dependency and runs the same effect in URP, HDRP and the Built-in Render Pipeline.

Drop a prefab into the scene and drive one value, Overall Boost, from a throttle, a boost mechanic, an animation or a Timeline track. Ignite(), Shutdown() and Misfire() add engine start with an ignition flash, cutoff with residual smoke, and stutter.

Layers

•  Flame: flipbook fire with HDR color over life, rate, lifetime, speed and length
•  Dark Flame: dark opaque tongues that cut into the bright flame
•  Smoke: soft flipbook smoke with size and frame rate over life
•  Sparks: fast particles that hit and bounce off the ground
•  Heat Haze: refraction strip behind the nozzle
•  Mach Diamonds: shock diamonds that appear at high thrust

Ground impacts

Sparks hit any collider on the chosen layers and spawn ground smoke and ground flame. Impact presets: Scorch decals that glow, cool down and fade, Ricochet, Shock Ring, Dust Cloud, Steam and Lunar Dust. An optional impact light follows the hit point and takes the flame color.

Burn and fire

•  Ground Burn: the flame leaves soot on terrain and meshes through the included Lit Burn and Terrain Lit Burn shaders, with optional wound maps and burn holes
•  Surface Fire: the flame sets the hit mesh on fire. Burn spots grow, spread fire and smoke over the triangles, follow a moving target and leave char marks
•  Smoke Column: a launch smoke trail left in world space, without gaps at any rocket speed

Flame Jet

Jet mode turns the effect into a flamethrower or gas burner. A hot straight cord opens into a wide burst, bends when the nozzle sweeps, splashes along what it hits and rolls fire over the ground. One preset is tuned for a side view, one as a first person weapon.

More

•  Atmosphere from sea level to vacuum: in space the exhaust fans out wide and leaves no smoke or haze
•  Nozzle Cluster: nine nozzles driven by one effect at about the cost of one
•  Camera shake driven by thrust and distance
•  Timeline Thruster Track with blending clips
•  25 thruster prefabs per pipeline: colored rocket flames, SRB, RCS, ion drive, afterburner, 3 x 3 cluster, impact variants, flamethrower

Demo scenes

Each pipeline has two demo scenes. The showcase scene holds every prefab, a burn station and a rocket launch on four SRB engines. The flamethrower scene is a first person game: burned enemies char, fall and leave soot, and a rocket lifts off for every kill.

Owners of version 2.x: the effect component has changed. Read the changelog before updating.

Need a lightweight GPU trail for comets, projectiles or ion jets? Check out Comet Core & Tail VFX

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