GSL Flow Toolkit

GSL Flow Toolkit is a modular Unity URP Flow Shader Toolkit for creating animated directional movement across textures and surfaces.

Use it to build flowing water, lava, energy, magical effects, moving surface details, sci-fi patterns, animated masks, and other directional texture effects — without being locked to a single predefined visual style.

The Toolkit includes both Ready To Use shaders and materials for immediate results and a reusable Shader Graph Sub Graph for building custom Flow effects.

Two complementary workflows

Ready To Use

Prebuilt Shader Graphs and configured Materials provide ready-made Flow effects that can be used immediately and customized through exposed parameters.

Included workflows demonstrate:

• Single directional Flow

• Dual independent Flow layers

• Flow-driven Alpha Clip

• Flow-driven Emission

• Masked blending between Flow states

• Two-phase cyclic Flow with crossfade blending

These examples show how the same Flow mechanic can be adapted for animated surfaces, energy effects, moving masks, emissive materials, layered motion, and seamless looping animation.

Build Your Own Shaders

The included SG_GSL_Flow2D Sub Graph exposes the fundamental Flow mechanic as a reusable Shader Graph building block.

The core Flow block provides directional coordinate movement with separate Direction, Speed, and external TimeSeconds controls.

Direction is safely normalized internally, allowing movement speed to remain independent from the magnitude of the Direction vector.

The reusable Flow block can be:

• Used directly in custom Shader Graphs

• Combined with other coordinate-processing mechanics

• Used before texture sampling

• Layered into multi-flow effects

• Driven by masks

• Integrated into larger shader systems

Because the Toolkit is built around reusable coordinate processing rather than one fixed visual effect, the same Flow mechanic can be adapted across many different materials, VFX styles, and shader workflows.

The included Demo Scene provides a technical reference for all Ready To Use shaders and the Phased Loop composition example.

GSL Flow Toolkit is designed as part of the expanding GSL Shader Toolkit Library, where each Toolkit focuses on one fundamental shader mechanic that can be used independently or combined with other compatible Toolkit blocks.

Experiment. Combine. Create.