15 animated energy shield shaders for Unity 6 URP: hit ripples, impact flashes, activation and destruction effects. Drop on a sphere or wall, drive it with one component.URP only (no Built-in/HDRP). Tested: Unity 6000.0.58f2, URP 17.0.4, Forward+. Enable Depth Texture, Opaque Texture and HDR; Bloom recommended. Add the Energy Shield Outline Renderer Feature (needs Render Graph, not Compatibility Mode). Use SMAA/FXAA; MSAA not supported by the outline.Energy Shield VFX gives your game 15 ready-to-use energy barriers, from a classic sci-fi force field to fire, ice, water, runes, deep space and acid slime. Every shield reacts to gameplay: it powers up, takes hits and breaks apart.15 unique shields:Energy, Hex, Matrix, Scanlines, Crystal, Plasma, Runes, Ice, Fire, Holy, Dark, Space, Wind, Water, SlimeBuilt for gameplay:Hit ripples sized by the projectile, a light flash and impact sparksActivate, Idle and Destroyed states. The dissolve spreads from the point of the killing hitCrystal and Ice shatter into flying shardsWorks on spheres, domes and flat walls with the same materialEasy to use:Add a material and the Energy Shield Controller. That's itThree lines of code: Activate(), RegisterHit(), Destroyed()Previews its states right in the Editor, no Play mode neededShields can share a material and still animate independentlyFully customizable: every material exposes colours, glow, fresnel, patterns, outline, ripples, distortion and each theme's own layers (flames, runes, caustics, stars and more).Perfect for sci-fi, fantasy and magic games: player shields, boss barriers, force fields, spell wards and base defences.Includes 3 demo scenes and a PDF quick guide.Technical detailsUnity 6 (6000.0 or newer), Universal Render Pipeline 17+15 shield shaders + 15 ready materialsFully procedural: no textures, and the look stays sharp at any sizePatterns scale to the mesh automatically, or lock to a fixed world sizeScreen-space glowing outline (URP Renderer Feature)Refraction and background distortion (requires Opaque Texture)Contact glow where the shield meets geometry (requires Depth Texture)HDR glow designed for BloomHit ripples displace the real geometry through tessellation on the Energy and Slime shields, with an automatic fallback on hardware without tessellationPer-shield control through MaterialPropertyBlock: the material assets are never modifiedFull C# and HLSL source code, namespace UnicornWay.VFX, Assembly Definitions includedDemo content kept in a separate folder, safe to delete3 demo scenes: interactive showcase, all-shaders overview, camera flybyPDF documentation includedI used Claude Code (Anthropic), an AI coding assistant, throughout development. I directed all of the work: I set the look of each shield and reviewed every result in the Editor. I tuned the final material and component values myself and asked for changes until each effect matched my vision.What the AI helped with:Writing and refactoring the HLSL shader code for the 15 shield variants and the shared shader library, based on my descriptions and feedback.Writing the C# scripts: the shield controller, the URP outline renderer feature, and the impact, shatter and demo scripts.Optimizing and debugging shaders and scripts, and checking that builds work.Setting up the demo scenes and the procedural backdrop mesh, and capturing demo videos and screenshots.Drafting the documentation, which I reviewed.No AI-generated art is included in the package. There are no AI-generated textures, 3D models, audio or images. All visual effects are procedural shader code, and the meshes are Unity primitives or procedurally generated.
