ShipVFX

A complete ship-FX framework for Unity 6 and URP. Not a prefab dump.

ShipVFX treats a spaceship's entire visual identity as data. Thrusters, plasma trails, reactor fire, sparks, smoke and heat distortion share one live config with every navigation light, rotating beacon, LED ribbon, window glow and hull emission. You author it once in a no-code Configurator, and it rebuilds identically in your player build.

Official Ship VFX Website - Documentation, demos & full feature overview

AUTHOR IT LIVE, WITHOUT WRITING A LINE OF CODE

The Configurator opens in a guided 7-step Beginner wizard and switches to a full Advanced panel in one click. A fly-around Live Preview flies your ship in an isolated scene while you work: every shape, colour and socket updates in real time, the trails stream and bend through the turns, and the visual states preview as you tune them. Every one of the 292+ parameters carries a plain-language tooltip, mirrored in an always-visible help bar.

IT REACTS TO YOUR GAME, NOT TO A TIMELINE

Most FX packs are cosmetic loops. ShipVFX reads your live gameplay values:

- SetThrottle(0..1) grows the plume length, brightness and trail with engine power

- SetBoost(bool) kicks the afterburner and surges the whole exhaust

- SetWarp(0..1) spools a charge glow that stretches the flame past full

- SetDamage(0..1) makes engines misfire, with random cut-outs and struggling relights

- SetThrustVector(x, y) gimbals the plumes and bends the trail through the maneuver

Plus five visual states (Idle, Selected, Moving, ReturningHome, MiningReady), each with its own brightness, length, width and particle rates, and OnStateChanged / OnFxRebuilt events. All of it works in shipped builds: the runtime resolves configs by name with no AssetDatabase, so the editor preview and the player render identically.

TWELVE VISUAL SYSTEMS FROM ONE CONFIG ASSET

Volumetric thruster plumes (10 cross-section shapes x 6 procedural patterns x 6 shader-driven motion modes), dual-layer plasma trails with a Powerhouse reactor core and shock diamonds, a flight-path contrail, nozzle ignition flame, engine sparks and smoke, opt-in heat-haze refraction, engine-cluster and unlimited custom point lights, port/starboard navigation lights on the real maritime convention with 5 blink patterns, a rotating beacon (LED columns or lighthouse beam), a bendable 3D LED ribbon (KITT scanner, flow, strobe), window glow and breathing or scrolling hull emission.

IT SCALES TO ANY SHIP, AND TO ANY DEVICE

One preset reads correctly on a 1-unit fighter and on a 50-unit capital ship: FX scale auto-fits the measured hull and light ranges scale with it, so there is no per-ship re-tuning. Cheap additive defaults everywhere, with explicit Powerhouse tiers (reactor trail, 256-particle curl-noise smoke, heat distortion) you opt into for desktop and console.

MEASURED, NOT PROMISED

An automated 17-scenario benchmark, ships at full throttle filling the screen:

- RTX 3090, 1080p: an 8-ship fleet at 460 fps on the Mobile tier, 314 fps with Powerhouse on all eight. Each figure is the median of a 3-pass run on a working machine we do not quiet first.

- OnePlus 5T, a 2017 phone on GLES3: the Mobile tier holds a locked 60 fps, one ship and an 8-ship fleet alike. That is the panel's ceiling, not the package's.

- The plasma trail animates entirely in the vertex shader: 0.0 ms on the 2017 phone.

- 30 second soak with live state cycling and FX rebuilds: flat memory, zero errors, both platforms.

BUILT TO BE READ AND KEPT

Full C# source, no DLLs, in three clean assembly definitions (runtime, editor, tests). Eleven readable HLSL shaders with no Shader Graph and no third-party packages. A 76-test automated suite ships with the pack so you can verify the claim yourself. Append-only enums and config migration mean your saved work survives updates. Everything lives in one folder, Assets/ShipVFX, and your own configs are saved outside it so upgrades never touch them.

CONTENT INCLUDED

Twelve complete preset looks (Shock-Diamond Jet, Blue Plasma, Ion Propulsion, Crimson Core, Violet Warp Drive, Cyan Spiral Vortex Drive, Furnace Burn Thruster, Magenta Vacuum Thruster, Jade Shock Pulse, Lime Spiral Vortex, Thermal Thruster, Afterburner), 8 one-click colour themes plus any custom colour, JSON export/import, a press-Play showcase scene, a hex-grid 4X demo, an optional engine-audio module, and offline documentation (README, QuickStart, Manual, API, Changelog, plus a single-file HTML reference).

ABOUT THE DEMO HULL

So the Configurator has something to demonstrate on without you supplying a ship first, the package includes one AI-generated test hull, with a finished rig for it (three engines, nav lights, window glow, custom point lights) - load that single config and you are flying a complete ship. Nothing loads it for you: the showcase stages no model by default and presents the twelve preset looks until you load a config yourself. The hull is a fixture, not content: no modelling or art pass has been done to it, and it is not representative of ShipVFX output. It carries no separate licence, the standard EULA covers it like everything else, but as raw generator output it is a poor choice for anything you ship. It is the only model in the package, nothing else depends on it, and deleting its folder breaks nothing. ShipVFX supplies the effects; bring your own ship.