This asset allows you to synthesize a variety of FULLY PROCEDURAL, animated fire, smoke, and energy-like effect materials with just a SINGLE versatile shader that works not only on static meshes.
Solaris (Procedural Fire, Smoke, Energy and Trails Shader + VFX) v1.1.1 (19 Jun 2025) (Latest version)
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Description
The ULTIMATE -procedural- fire and smoke shader.
This asset allows you to synthesize a variety of FULLY PROCEDURAL, animated fire, smoke, and energy-like effect materials with just a SINGLE versatile shader that works not only on static meshes, but also with Unity’s particle system and trail renderer components.
Realtime transparent lighting is supported!
You DO NOT -need- (but can have, if you want) any textures or custom geometry, everything is generated by the shader, including tessellation (so that you can use simple quad, sphere, and cylinder primitives).
Example prefabs and a demo scene is is included, demonstrating:
🔗 Fire! – as in, for a fireplace, or camp fire.
🔗 Coloured smoke (for fire).
🔗 Volumetric fog w/ realtime lighting (particle system).
🔗 Colourful glowing fiery ember particles.
🔗 2D (spherized) energy shield.
🔗 3D (real sphere mesh) energy shield w/ multiple layers.
🔗 Wispy, smoke-like ‘magical’ trails.
🔗 Depth-based transparent outline mesh.
🔗 Overlay/intersection effects.
🔗 Velocity/position transfer (mesh bending based on movement).
🔗 Warpdrive/Hyperspace tunnels and effects.
🔗 Volumetric, colourful, animated light shafts.
🔗 Volumetric shadows…
You can even make LASER BEAMS (either with Unity’s lines, trails, or meshes) moving through volumetric fog/smoke. But that’s not all… how about:
🔥 Interactive fire/torches.
❤️🔥 Bendy, rotation-aware flamethrowers.
☄️ Particle fire trails and lit fog/smoke.
And so much more- be CREATIVE!
It’s an extremely adaptive shader/asset.
The shader is heavily parameterized with over 100 exposed values, meaning you can create a practically infinite variety of custom materials by tweaking the numbers, sliders, and checkboxes, which also allow for perfomance tuning (lower-end to high-end GPUs).
⚠️ MINIMUM Shader Model: 4.5
A second, more lightweight shader is included for rendering dense fog/smoke with the same lighting effects, using a base (texture) and normal map to avoid excessive procedural computation while still being able to randomize the output with procedural generation to hide repetition: If the procedural shader is too expensive for your use-cases and target hardware, you can the lightweight smoke shader to better manage the performance impacts of overdraw!
Technical details
Solaris is made with Amplify Shader Editor (ASE). You DO NOT need ASE to use Solaris, but if you have it, you can edit/open the shader(s) and see how things work.
