HAZE – Volumetric Fog & Lighting for URP

About

HAZE is a volumetric fog and lighting system, designed to help you enhance the visuals of your project. It is based on a froxel-based approach, making it quite fast to compute while offering a large degree of flexibility to balance visual quality and performance.

Get it now on the Unity Asset Store!

How to use

There is a detailed manual on how to use HAZE which you can find here:

HAZE User Manual

Screenshots

These are various scenes put together during the development of HAZE. These scenes or the featured assets are not included within the package.

What is HAZE for?

HAZE is useful for unifying the lighting of a scene, by applying a soft layer of atmospheric fog. It’s a great way to introduce more atmosphere into your levels without too much overwhelming visual bloat. It’s made with art direction in mind, rather than physical accuracy.

What is HAZE NOT for?

This is not a fully fledged system for dense volumetric effects like clouds and heavy mist. Because of the way froxel-based fog works, HAZE is not suited for very well-defined volumetric forms and shapes, especially in long distances. A raymarched approach would be more suited for effects like that, and HAZE currently doesn’t support that.

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
  • Support for both perspective and orthographic camera projection
  • Supports illumination contribution from adaptive probe volumes (APV)

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 does not have support for VR.

Roadmap

Here you can find a roadmap of some features that will potentially be added to HAZE: