Real Rain — 2D Screen-Space Rain, Lens Droplets & Thunder

Real Rain turns any scene into a rainy one with a single fullscreen pass. It is built on the Volume framework, so rain blends between areas like every other post effect, and it renders the same look on the Built-in render pipeline, URP 17 and HDRP 17. Nothing in your materials changes.

What it draws

• Parallax rain sheets — up to four layers of procedural streaks on a camera cylinder, from motion-blurred drops near the lens to a fine curtain in the distance. World-stable: turn the camera and the rain stays where it is. Near drops refract the background instead of being painted over it.
• Wind, gusts and sheeting — streaks lean with the wind, gusts add lean and speed over time and slow density waves roll through the curtain.
• Wet surfaces — rain-facing ground darkens and glosses up, puddles gather on flat open ground, drops ripple the water film and the scene reflects in it (screen-space reflections with a sky fallback). Derived from the depth buffer and the occlusion map: no per-material setup.
• Splashes — expanding rings, crown flashes and spray at every fresh impact near the camera, every impact its own size, fading smoothly with distance.
• Rain occlusion — a top-down height map keeps rain, splashes, wetness and lens droplets out from under roofs, awnings, arcades and bridges. No colliders, no particles, one hidden camera.
• Lens droplets — beads in many sizes that land, sit a while and evaporate or run off; running drops with a short tail and a drying wet track; fogging and a wiper mask. The lens follows the camera: moving forward drives more running drops, turning makes them slide against the turn.
• Backlit rain and lamp glow — streaks catch the sun with a back-scatter lobe and pick up the four nearest point/spot lights; lamps get a soft halo in the rain haze.
• Overcast — the rain dims the scene's sun and pulls cloud cover over the frame as it builds, and restores the sun when it stops.
• Depth haze — exponential rain mist with its own colour, range and sky blend (URP has no volumetric fog; this does not need it).

What it does not need — no compute shaders at runtime, no VFX Graph, no changes to your materials, no per-object setup. Perspective cameras, Unity 6000.3 or newer.

Eleven presets — Drizzle, Light Rain, Rain, Heavy Rain, Storm, Tropical, Night City, Windshield, plus a Stylized family (Rain, Storm, Night) with flat bright streaks and no wet layer for cartoon-style games — as Volume profiles (URP/HDRP) or component values (Built-in), all editable and blendable from script.

Setup in one click — Window ▸ Real Rain ▸ Setup adds the renderer feature (URP), registers the custom post process (HDRP) or the camera components (Built-in), creates the Volume with the chosen preset and retargets the sample materials. Two sample scenes ship with baked lighting.

Shader globals (_RealRain_Intensity, _RealRain_Wind, _RealRain_Ripple, _RealRain_CameraMotion, the occlusion map) are exposed for your own puddle and wet-surface materials.

Rain audio and thunderstorm

Original rain ambience is complemented by many short spatial rain events. A compact screen-space depth and contrast probe varies their placement, distance and tone as the camera moves. Master sound enable/disable, volume and Audio Mixer routing are available.

Thunderstorms add branched visible lightning, a soft glow and illumination flashes. Strike distances and the intervals between storms are randomized; configurable bursts allow several strikes in quick succession. Each thunder event arrives after its distance delay, and a voice pool lets the rumble tails overlap. Lightning and thunder can be disabled independently.

This is a perceptual approximation from visible scene depth, rather than acoustic ray tracing or a room simulation.