HAZE - Volumetric Fog & Lighting for URP

HAZE was born from my own need for a volumetric fog and lighting pipeline that's easy to use and to art-direct. Now I'm bringing this tool for all of you to use and make beautiful atmospheric scenes.

Links

Documentation | Bluesky | Discord

About

HAZE is a froxel-based volumetric fog and lighting solution for URP, made using Unity's RenderGraph API. Its main purpose is to enhance the visuals of your scenes by providing subtle volumetric effects that are easy to control and art-direct.

Features

• Lightweight froxel-based implementation
• Global fog controls
• Local fog volumes for more granular control
• Integration with Unity’s volume system for
• Global fog visuals
• Overriding renderer feature settings
• Integrated screen-space multiple scattering effect (SSMS) to blur the scene in the distance based on the density of the volumetric fog
• Support for main light shadows
• Support for secondary lights and shadows (currently only in Forward+/Deferred+ pipelines)
• Light cookie support
• Support for height-based cutoff
• Supports illumination contribution from adaptive probe volumes (APV)

Project requirements

• HAZE is made for Unity 6+ versions
• HAZE is currently only supported in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
• HAZE is based on the Unity RenderGraph API, so it currently doesn’t support compatibility mode.

Known restrictions

• HAZE uses temporal reprojection in order to reduce noise and artifacts from lower-resolution buffers and perform better. Because of the way the history buffer is set up for temporal reprojection, HAZE doesn’t currently support multiple cameras.
• Because of the way secondary light data is stored by Unity, HAZE only supports punctual light contribution to the fog in the Forward+ and Deferred+ pipelines. This can be updated if there’s enough request for it, but it might come at a performance overhead.
• At this moment, all fog (global and local) share the same 3D noise texture which is assigned via HAZE’s renderer feature. Support for per-volume noise can also be added if there’s enough demand for that.
• HAZE only works with a perspective camera.
• HAZE does not have support for VR.

What HAZE is NOT for

While HAZE is a volumetric fog solution, the froxel-based approach doesn't allow for too much shape detail or detail frequency without a heavy performance hit. That being said, HAZE is not suitable to simulate denser effects like heavy smoke or clouds.

Active support

HAZE was made to suit my needs, but these will most likely be different than yours. I'd love to hear from you what sort of features you'd want in HAZE and find ways to support you and your project! So don't hesitate to reach out to me with any thoughts/ideas on Discord or Bluesky via the links above ✨

Scenes shown in the screenshots were made for promotional reasons and are not included in the package.