HelioPath - Geographically Accurate Sun
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Put the sun where it physically belongs: astronomically correct position for any location, date and time, plus a real atmospheric halo and diffraction spikes. URP and HDRP, VR and AR ready. HelioPath puts the sun where it physically belongs.Give it a location, a date and a time, and HelioPath drives your directional light to the astronomically correct altitude and azimuth, the same sun the real sky would show. No hand-keyed light rotations, no "close enough" day-night curves. On top of that accurate sun it adds a physically modelled atmospheric halo and procedural diffraction spikes, for a sun that does not just sit in the right place. It looks right too.Unreal ships geographically correct sun positioning out of the box. Unity does not. HelioPath brings that accuracy to Unity. It runs in both URP and HDRP, with Single-Pass Instanced stereo for VR and AR, all from one drop-in prefab.WHY HELIOPATHMost "sun" assets either drift a light in a lazy circle, or bundle a giant weather suite you do not need. HelioPath does one thing properly: the correct sun, modern pipeline ready, with the optical detail that sells the shot.Everything is customizable. Time of day and location can be set or animated at runtime, the halo angle and colour, the spike count, length, animation and seed, and the altitude-based colour temperature are all exposed. You can also run a pure sun-path mode with just the positioner and light, no effects, for stylised or indoor scenes.PERFECT FORArchitectural visualisation and sun/shadow studies (including on-site AR sun studies), urban planning, simulation and training, outdoor AR and VR, and any game that wants a believable sky and a sun that tracks real time of day.WHAT'S INCLUDEDHelioPathPositioner (sun position and light drive)HelioPathRadiance (halo, spikes, colour temperature).Three prefabs: pure sun path (pipeline-agnostic), URP, and HDRP.URP Renderer Feature and HDRP Custom Pass, sharing one HLSL algorithm.Two ready-to-run demo scenes (URP and HDRP).Astronomically correct sun position: real altitude/azimuth from geographic location, date and time. Drives your directional light automatically.Full time and location control: set or animate time of day, and enter or read it in a location's local time with automatic daylight saving. Time and location changes glide the sun smoothly along its real arc, or snap instantly when you want.Clean C# scripting API: drive time and location from your own code, subscribe to solar-event callbacks and run almanac queries (sunrise, sunset, solar noon, day length, and civil/nautical/astronomical twilight) for any date. Fully documented.Physically modelled 22° halo: A real atmospheric refraction ring, not a glow sprite.Procedural diffraction spikes: fully texture-free, animated, with per-spike view response. Scale automatically from your authored sun disc size.Works with Unity's procedural suns: HelioPath sits on top of Unity's own sky. The spikes scale from the sun disc you author the normal Unity way (URP/Built-in: Skybox/Procedural material; HDRP: Physically Based / HDRI Sky with the directional light's Celestial Body enabled). The halo radius is a fixed angle, independent of the disc. The included demo scenes show this set up end to end.Altitude-based colour temperature: the sun warms realistically toward sunrise and sunset, tinting both the light and the effects.VR and AR ready: Single-Pass Instanced stereo in both pipelines. The effects are a pure angular, FOV-independent construction, so they also render correctly in passthrough AR on headsets that use the standard stereo render path (Quest and similar). Ideal for onsite AR sun and shadow studies.Pure sun-path mode: use just the positioner and light, without the effects, for stylised or indoor scenes.Render pipelines: URP 14.0+ and HDRP 14.0+ (Unity 2022.3 LTS). Primary development target Unity 6 with URP 17.4.Claude (Anthropic) was used as a coding assistant to help write and refactor the C# runtime, the HLSL shaders, and editor tooling. The package architecture, the physical/astronomical model (solar position, refraction halo), the multi-pipeline design (URP/HDRP), VR support, testing, and all design decisions were authored and validated by the publisher. AI was not used to generate any art, audio, textures, or marketing imagery.
