Realtime aurora borealis for URP. A live cubemap drives per-flake sparkle color, so your snow and terrain are actually lit by the sky above them.Most aurora assets paint the sky. This one lights the ground.Aurora Borealis Snow is a complete night-scene toolkit for the Universal Render Pipeline: an animated aurora curtain system, a snow and ice mesh shader, and a snow terrain shader — built so that all three talk to each other.WebGL Demo (Aurora only)Live in App "lumasphere" on google play market or apple storeThe aurora is captured every few frames into a small realtime cubemap. Every sparkle on the snow samples that cubemap along its own reflection vector, which means a flake facing north picks up the green sheet drifting overhead while a flake beside it, tilted the other way, stays cold and blue. Nothing is averaged into a single tint. Move the camera, and the color of the ground changes with the sky.The auroraCurtains spawn around the camera in a configurable ring and track it as it moves, so the aurora keeps its apparent distance and reads as a genuine sky element rather than geometry you can walk into. Each curtain is a deformed plane driven by two sine waves, textured by two independent flipbook atlas layers that can be combined with Add, Multiply or Screen. Curtains fade in, drift, and fade out over randomized lifetimes, and they are pooled — nothing is instantiated at runtime.Every parameter lives on a ScriptableObject, so you can build several aurora moods and swap them in one field. An Editor Preview toggle runs the whole system in the Scene View without entering Play Mode.The snowTwo shaders, one lighting model. The mesh shader is built on URP's Lit stack with parallax offset, packed mask maps, and a transmission term that lets thin snow and ice glow when the moon — or the aurora — is behind them. The terrain shader is a full URP TerrainLit derivative, so you keep height blending, per-pixel normals for instanced terrain, terrain holes, deferred GBuffer output, lightmap baking, and multi-pass layers beyond four — with the sparkle and transmission model layered on top.Meshes can also melt into the terrain: a noise-driven ground blend reads the live terrain heightmap and softens the base of boulders and ice formations into flat snow, so nothing sits on the surface with a hard intersection line.Made to be readFull source, no compiled libraries, no node graphs to reverse-engineer. Every shader is hand-written HLSL you can open, follow, and extend, and the sparkle model is isolated in a single include file you can drop into your own shaders in three lines. A detailed manual covers setup step by step, explains every property, documents the global shader properties, and lists the known limitations up front.RequirementsUnity 6000.3 or newerUniversal Render PipelineForward or Forward+ rendering path (the terrain shader also supports Deferred)Linear color space and HDR enabled; a Bloom override is strongly recommendedAurora systemPooled, camera-anchored curtains — no runtime instantiation, no garbageTwo independent flipbook atlas layers with Add / Multiply / Screen blendingDual sine wave vertex deformation, anchored at the base and swinging at the topTexture-driven edge mask, so the quad silhouette never showsRandomized lifetime, drift, yaw, atlas frame and scroll speed per curtainSmooth fade-in / fade-out lifecycle driven by a single ScriptableObjectEditor Preview: full system in the Scene View without entering Play ModeAurora-driven lightingSmall realtime cubemap probe captures only the aurora, on its own layerTime-sliced capture with adjustable resolution (16–256 px) and refresh intervalPer-flake directional sampling — sparkle color varies correctly across a surfaceFade-weighted aurora direction and color published as global shader propertiesDisabling the probe removes the entire aurora contribution in one valueSnow & ice mesh shaderURP Lit based: shadows, additional lights, reflection probes, SSAO, fogQuixel Megascans packed mask layout supported directly (R rough, G AO, B transmission, A height)Parallax offset from the height channelSubsurface transmission from both the main light and the auroraDistance-stabilized world-space sparkle with albedo and slope maskingNoise-driven ground blend that sinks meshes into the terrain snowFull pass set: forward, shadow caster, depth, depth-normalsSnow terrain shaderComplete URP TerrainLit derivative — nothing lost from the standard shaderHeight-based layer blending with custom material inspectorPer-pixel normals for instanced terrain, terrain holes, basemap generationGBuffer pass for Deferred, meta pass for lightmap bakingMulti-pass support for more than four layersSame sparkle and transmission model as the mesh shader, so materials matchEverything elseFully commented documentation, no black boxesSparkle model isolated in one include — three lines to add it to your own shaderDetailed manual: setup, property reference, performance tuning, troubleshootingKnown limitations documented honestly, not hidden
