MK Volumetric Lighting - Sun Shafts & Light Beams for URP
Michael Kremmel
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Your lighting is now volumetric. A simple setup, turns the lighting you've already built into atmosphere. Your existing Unity lights drive the effect, with realtime and baked light working together.Requirements:- Unity 6.3 or newer- Shader Graph (for transmission shader)- Compute Shader support: 4.5-class features.Supported render pipelines:- Universal: Integrated Post Processing API via Scriptable Renderer Feature- Universal: Scriptable Renderer Feature Only (skip the Post Processing API entirely)- Render Graph Optimized⤴️Unity 7 Ready💡 Your lighting is now volumetricMK Volumetric Lighting adds sun shafts and volumetric lighting to your scene using the lights you already have. Just activate the effect - 1 click setup - no extra light components to configure and it works directly with realtime, baked and mixed lighting. Its lean, approximate rendering approach balances visual quality with performance.Demo: Try In Browser🔥HighlightsInline Integration (1 Click Setup): Activate the effect and all your lights are volumetric and even bake automatically. Adjust intensity and shape, everything responds without complicated setup or additional components.MK Light-Interval Ray Accumulation: This custom algorithm accumulates volumetric light along viewing rays, selecting relevant lights and skipping empty regions to reduce unnecessary calculations.⚙️ Lean volumetric renderingHow does it work? A custom raymarcher approximates volumetric lighting using existing URP data, without simulating multiple light bounces.Shared light tiles: narrows light candidates using Forward+ tile reuse or shared compute-prepared tiles where supported, with automatic fallbacks.Efficient filtering: uses shared-memory compute filtering where applicable, with a raster fallback.Per-pixel light cap: bounds lighting and shadow evaluations.Light-volume intersections: focus samples where lights can contribute.Reduced-resolution integration: renders into 2D targets without building an intermediate 3D lighting volume (but we still gain adantages of froxels).Quality Presets: Use pre-built quality presets or tweak a custom mode.Slim Package: Just a few MB if you untoggle the examples folder🔦 All light types supportedUse your existing Unity lights for both scene lighting and volumetric effects. Baked area lights join the same effect through a custom volumetric baker.Directional: sun shafts and haze from the main light.Point: volumetric lighting around local sources.Spot: focused beams from lamps and headlights.Area (baked only): rectangle and disc lights.☀️ All light modes supportedAll light modes supported (realtime baked, mixed)Use all three together in the same scene.Custom volumetric baker for fully baked lights.Automatic updates generate volumetric shadow data after Unity’s lighting bake.Baked Data load asynchronously and stream within a configurable GPU cache budget🪟 Light through colored glassLet stained glass color your sun shafts and local beams. Optional Transmission works with supported flat glass visible to the camera, including shafts seen behind a pane.Colored beams: use the glass texture and tint.Separate control: adjust volumetric transmission independently of surface opacityLight Transmission: screen spaced approximation and custom shader support for semi transparent light transmission.🎨 Artist-friendly workflowWork directly with the lights and materials already in your scene. Shape the atmosphere through familiar controls, with no shader editing or custom components needed.Simple setup: one Renderer FeatureVisual controls: tune light intensity, color, haze density and height falloff.Flexible workflow: local Volumes or Global settings.Quality presets: Performance, Balanced, Quality or Custom (fine tune towards your needs).Direct control: URP light components directly control the volumetric light🎬 Six editable example scenesExplore different lighting setups with editable settings.All six scenes tackle difficult volumetric lighting situations. They are designed to challenge the effect under demanding conditions, rather than show only carefully staged, ideal results.Sun Conservatory: architectural sun shafts and local Volume blending between rooms and outdoor areas.Chromatic Block Gallery: moving colored point lights and sweeping spotlights show realtime volumetric lighting.Golden Hour Garage: sunlight through door vents, workshop lamps and headlights show independent control over sunlight and local lighting.Underground Platform: a Mixed and Baked lighting study, including baked rectangle and disc area lights.Shutter Hall: roof slats and a steel grille shape sunlight and spotlight beams, showing realtime volumetric shadows.Emerald Crypt: a stained-glass screen colors the beams inside a Gothic crypt, showing transmission through glass and shafts viewed behind it.🛠️ Updates & SupportAll of my products are actively maintained and continuously improved. I care about the quality and longevity, with regular updates focused on compatibility, stability and support for evolving Unity versions and render pipelines.🚀 Performance / Trade-OffsYes volumetric lighting is not free, even this fancy stylized algorithm. I’ve tuned the shader for performance, but I’m not a magician. Light overlap, sample count and render resolution still affect the work your GPU has to do.• Start with Balanced (enabled as default). Adjust for your scene and target hardware.• Additional Light resolution: lower it when you can trade fine detail for less rendering work.• Visual trade-off: lower resolution can soften thin beams or cookie detail and create noisy especially for difficult scenes. Light Transmission is screen spaced, meaning if the object is not in camera view, light shafts fallback to original color.• Profile your target GPU: There is no fixed frame cost for every scene and device.🔧 Graphics requirementsThe effect checks the required graphics features before rendering.• Shader support: 4.5-class features.• Compute: 64-thread groups with 8×8 capability.• Render targets: at least two.• Formats: RGBA16F and R32F rendering and sampling.• Baked rendering: texture arrays and copying, four fragment storage buffers, and GPU completion tracking.⚙️ Rendering and light limitsCustom single-scattering ray integration uses reduced-resolution 2D targets and depth-aware reconstruction. Quality settings control the amount of work.• Main light: one directional light.• Additional lights: up to eight contributors per effect pixel.• Custom sample setting: 8–64.• Local-light resolution: adjustable separately from the main effect.• Forward+ tile reuse: version-guarded, with fallback culling paths.• Frame history: no temporal accumulation.🧱 Baked lightingBaker automatically stores static visibility for fully Baked lights. Camera-dependent scattering still renders at runtime.• Light types: directional, point, spot, rectangle and disc.• Automatic updates: enable Update After Lighting Bake in the Baked Lighting settings or bake manual at any time.• Static shadows: moving or deformed objects are not captured.• Area lights: approximate shading and hard shadows from a central point.• Mixed lights: use the native realtime path and approximately fades into the shading.• Unity GI and lightmaps: remain separate from this visibility bake.💾 Baked data and buildsBaked Data load asynchronously and stream within a configurable GPU cache budget.• GPU cache: 128–512 MB. Default 256 MB.• Small budgets: can delay or prevent light/detail residency.• Normal builds: include data for their scenes and baked additive dependencies.🪟 Fog• Unity scene fog: Linear, Exponential and Exponential Squared fading is supported🧩 Setup and dependencies• Renderer: add MK Volumetric Lighting to your Universal Renderer.• Volume mode: enable the Intensity override, raise it above zero and enable camera post-processing.• Global mode: raise intensity on the feature. Camera post-processing is optional.📌 LimitationsThis project is focused on a good trade-off in terms of visual quality and performance. Therefore i keep performance as a priority.This is an approximation of direct volumetric lighting. Keep these limits in mind when planning your scene. Subject to change of course and future improvements possible :)• Mixed-light shadows: use available realtime shadow maps. Baked shadowmask and probe occlusion are not sampled.• Indirect lighting: bounced light from lightmaps or probes does not illuminate the volumetric medium.• Area lights: rectangle and disc support is Baked only, with approximate shading and hard static visibility (matches URP usage).• Colored glass & Transmission: filters volumetric beams through supported camera-visible panes. RGB transmissive shadows on ordinary surfaces are not supported by the engine.• Glass coverage & Transmission: off-screen or opaque-hidden panes have no captured filter. Existing opaque shadow data still blocks light.• Baking: the volumetric cache is CPU-only. Runtime volumetric rendering uses the GPU.• Image detail: lower resolution and sample counts can soften or miss fine beam and cookie details.📜 Third-party noticesIncludes StbImageSharp under the MIT license and Poly Haven example-material derivatives under CC0 1.0. See Third-Party Notices.txt in the package for details.
