Neon

Neon is a set of animated screens, billboards and neon signs for Unity 6.3. It is built around one shader, Neon/Billboard, which works in URP, HDRP and the Built-in Render Pipeline. A material made in one pipeline renders the same in the other two.

WebGL demo

Put a Neon material on a quad, add the NeonBillboard component and pick a source:

Slideshow. Frames come from one texture atlas and change on a timer, with a transition between each pair.

Flipbook. Frame animation that runs through a chain of atlases, each at its own frame rate.

Video. A single clip or a playlist, with shader transitions between clips. Brightness can follow the audio.

The shader has 25 transitions between frames, including crossfade, slides, dissolve, iris, radial wipe, card flip, pixelate, CRT off/on, glitch burst, TV static and shuffle tiles. It also has 20 screen effects that you enable per material: interlace, scanlines, LED matrix with RGB subpixels, chromatic aberration, block glitch, line jitter, vertical roll, TV snow, flicker, channel flicker, pulse, hue shift, ticker scroll, dead pixels, LCD viewing angle, grime, posterize and more. Effects you leave off add no cost.

Neon signs use a segment mask. Broken letters flicker on their own, and PowerOn() lights the sign one segment at a time. NeonBillboardEcho draws a tunnel of fading copies behind a board.

Any number of billboards can share one material. Each one picks its starting frame and timing from its world position, so a street full of screens does not change frames all at once.

Included:

• Neon/Billboard shader with full HLSL source
• NeonBillboard and NeonBillboardEcho components with full C# source
• Demo scenes for URP, HDRP and Built-in: a night street and a grid of 193 effect materials
• Test atlases, a neon sign with its segment mask, a test video
• Documentation