Your ship's entire visual identity from one config asset: propulsion, lighting and hull, authored live without code and driven by your gameplay at runtime. URP only.Unity 6.0 LTS minimum [hasn't been tested with older versions].Only Compatible with URP.A complete ship-FX framework for Unity 6 and URP. Not a prefab dump.ShipVFX treats a spaceship's entire visual identity as data. Thrusters, plasma trails, reactor fire, sparks, smoke and heat distortion share one live config with every navigation light, rotating beacon, LED ribbon, window glow and hull emission. You author it once in a no-code Configurator, and it rebuilds identically in your player build.Official Ship VFX Website - Documentation, demos & full feature overviewAUTHOR IT LIVE, WITHOUT WRITING A LINE OF CODEThe Configurator opens in a guided 7-step Beginner wizard and switches to a full Advanced panel in one click. A fly-around Live Preview flies your ship in an isolated scene while you work: every shape, colour and socket updates in real time, the trails stream and bend through the turns, and the visual states preview as you tune them. Every one of the 292+ parameters carries a plain-language tooltip, mirrored in an always-visible help bar.IT REACTS TO YOUR GAME, NOT TO A TIMELINEMost FX packs are cosmetic loops. ShipVFX reads your live gameplay values:- SetThrottle(0..1) grows the plume length, brightness and trail with engine power- SetBoost(bool) kicks the afterburner and surges the whole exhaust- SetWarp(0..1) spools a charge glow that stretches the flame past full- SetDamage(0..1) makes engines misfire, with random cut-outs and struggling relights- SetThrustVector(x, y) gimbals the plumes and bends the trail through the maneuverPlus five visual states (Idle, Selected, Moving, ReturningHome, MiningReady), each with its own brightness, length, width and particle rates, and OnStateChanged / OnFxRebuilt events. All of it works in shipped builds: the runtime resolves configs by name with no AssetDatabase, so the editor preview and the player render identically.TWELVE VISUAL SYSTEMS FROM ONE CONFIG ASSETVolumetric thruster plumes (10 cross-section shapes x 6 procedural patterns x 6 shader-driven motion modes), dual-layer plasma trails with a Powerhouse reactor core and shock diamonds, a flight-path contrail, nozzle ignition flame, engine sparks and smoke, opt-in heat-haze refraction, engine-cluster and unlimited custom point lights, port/starboard navigation lights on the real maritime convention with 5 blink patterns, a rotating beacon (LED columns or lighthouse beam), a bendable 3D LED ribbon (KITT scanner, flow, strobe), window glow and breathing or scrolling hull emission.IT SCALES TO ANY SHIP, AND TO ANY DEVICEOne preset reads correctly on a 1-unit fighter and on a 50-unit capital ship: FX scale auto-fits the measured hull and light ranges scale with it, so there is no per-ship re-tuning. Cheap additive defaults everywhere, with explicit Powerhouse tiers (reactor trail, 256-particle curl-noise smoke, heat distortion) you opt into for desktop and console.MEASURED, NOT PROMISEDAn automated 17-scenario benchmark, ships at full throttle filling the screen:- RTX 3090, 1080p: an 8-ship fleet at 460 fps on the Mobile tier, 314 fps with Powerhouse on all eight. Each figure is the median of a 3-pass run on a working machine we do not quiet first.- OnePlus 5T, a 2017 phone on GLES3: the Mobile tier holds a locked 60 fps, one ship and an 8-ship fleet alike. That is the panel's ceiling, not the package's.- The plasma trail animates entirely in the vertex shader: 0.0 ms on the 2017 phone.- 30 second soak with live state cycling and FX rebuilds: flat memory, zero errors, both platforms.BUILT TO BE READ AND KEPTFull C# source, no DLLs, in three clean assembly definitions (runtime, editor, tests). Eleven readable HLSL shaders with no Shader Graph and no third-party packages. A 76-test automated suite ships with the pack so you can verify the claim yourself. Append-only enums and config migration mean your saved work survives updates. Everything lives in one folder, Assets/ShipVFX, and your own configs are saved outside it so upgrades never touch them.CONTENT INCLUDEDTwelve complete preset looks (Shock-Diamond Jet, Blue Plasma, Ion Propulsion, Crimson Core, Violet Warp Drive, Cyan Spiral Vortex Drive, Furnace Burn Thruster, Magenta Vacuum Thruster, Jade Shock Pulse, Lime Spiral Vortex, Thermal Thruster, Afterburner), 8 one-click colour themes plus any custom colour, JSON export/import, a press-Play showcase scene, a hex-grid 4X demo, an optional engine-audio module, and offline documentation (README, QuickStart, Manual, API, Changelog, plus a single-file HTML reference).ABOUT THE DEMO HULLSo the Configurator has something to demonstrate on without you supplying a ship first, the package includes one AI-generated test hull, with a finished rig for it (three engines, nav lights, window glow, custom point lights) - load that single config and you are flying a complete ship. Nothing loads it for you: the showcase stages no model by default and presents the twelve preset looks until you load a config yourself. The hull is a fixture, not content: no modelling or art pass has been done to it, and it is not representative of ShipVFX output. It carries no separate licence, the standard EULA covers it like everything else, but as raw generator output it is a poor choice for anything you ship. It is the only model in the package, nothing else depends on it, and deleting its folder breaks nothing. ShipVFX supplies the effects; bring your own ship.REQUIREMENTS- Unity 6 (6000.x, developed and tested on 6000.4).- Universal Render Pipeline only. Built-in Render Pipeline and HDRP are not supported. A URP asset must be active in Project Settings > Graphics.- Bloom strongly recommended: the plumes are HDR-emissive by design. The pack includes a one-click Recommended Grade (Bloom + tonemapping) and a one-click revert.- Exotic heat distortion additionally needs Opaque Texture enabled on the URP asset.- No third-party packages, no DLLs, no Shader Graph, no VFX Graph.- Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, WebGL.WHAT THIS IS NOTShipVFX is cosmetic propulsion and lighting FX. There is no turret, hardpoint or weapon system.It is not a ship-model pack. The ships shown in the screenshots and video are our own demonstration assets and are not included. ShipVFX drives the effects on your models, any FBX or prefab.The single exception is one AI-generated demo hull, bundled purely so the Configurator has something to demonstrate on without you supplying a ship first. It is not staged for you: the showcase loads no model by default and shows the twelve preset looks until you load a config yourself. No art pass has been done to it and it is not a sample of the package's quality. It carries no separate licence - the standard EULA covers it like the rest - but as raw generator output it is a poor choice for anything you ship. Deleting it breaks nothing.AI was used in two ways in this package.1. THE DEMO HULL IS AI-GENERATED.Assets/ShipVFX/Demo/DemoShip/ contains vfx_demo_taxi.fbx and its four textures (base colour, normal,metallic/smoothness, emissive), generated with Meshy on a Pro plan under a private licence. It is included as a test fixture so the Configurator has a model to demonstrate on out of the box. It carries no separate terms and is covered by the standard Asset Store EULA like the rest of the package.No modelling or art pass was performed on it. Processing was limited to making it load correctly in URP: the embedded textures were unpacked and the FBX re-exported without them, the separate metallic and roughness maps were recombined into the single Metallic/Smoothness mask URP Lit expects (metallic in R, smoothness in A), and the maps were resized from 4K to 1K with the emissive at 512. The topology, UVs and texture art are exactly as generated, and it is 30,936 triangles for a shape that needs a fraction of that. The package documentation states plainly that it is raw generator output, that it is not representative of what the package produces, and that it is a poor choice for anything a buyer ships - as a quality warning, not a usage restriction.The rig supplied with it (taxi_demo.asset: three engine sockets, two navigation lights, a window glow and two custom point lights, each placed and scaled by hand) is authored, not generated.2. AN AI CODING ASSISTANT WAS USED DURING DEVELOPMENT.Claude (Anthropic), used through Claude Code, was used as a programming aid across the C# source, the shaders and the documentation. All output was directed, reviewed and tested by the author. The package ships a 76-test automated suite that runs in the buyer's own project, so the behaviour can be verified independently rather than taken on trust.
