Aurora is a Shuriken particle effect library which includes the titular meteorological phenomenon (provided with 5 different hues: Green-purple, green-red, pale-green, blue and red) and 17 healing/buffing effects inspired by mainstream fantasy games. All effects can be used straight out of the box. All effects take advantage of the new functions (noise, trails and lights) of Unity 5.5.
Real-time demos: Windows EXE, Android APK
In general, lovely! So much so that the awful default grass wobble is even more horrible and distracting than usual. May I humbly suggest turning it way down for your demo?
Also I suspect your aurora effect might be so realistic that some might disbelieve! You could show some real footage next to yours to prove how good it is!
Lastly the mobile demo is great but those buttons are just too small for my manly digits on a high DPI screen 
(please scale!)
Thx! (Yours, hoping it’s priced competitively since I’d previously planned on making an aurora effect myself!)
Thanks for your comments. You are absolutely right about the grasses in the EXE demo so I made them smaller and less wobbly.
About real-world comparison. I have to admit I have never seen any real aurora in reality and I am living in a subtropical city where no aurora can reach that far. So I was limited to online sources like Wikipedia and Youtube. Obviously I can’t use those on Youtube for copyright issue. Videos on Wikimedia (with Creative Commons license) are time-lapse so not quite ideal.
About the UI button size in APK demo. I have built a separate APK demo with larger buttons, but they turn out to be occupying 2/3 screen of my Samsung Galaxy Mega 2, but you can try this alternative build if you are really interested.
Lastly about the pricing. For competitive reason I cannot reveal the exact price tag until it hits shelf, but it’s close to other major paid assets of Moonflower Carnivore. We avoid under-pricing strategy not only because we want to make money. This may sound terribly cliche, but for the sake of market health.
Thank you again.
Finally the asset is on shelf for $15!
Just purchased this – they’re just what one of my game scenes needed. But one question: there’s some noticeable horizontal and vertical banding in the aurora (I’m using the 001, 002, 003 prefabs.) Is there a way to smooth that out?
Thank you and sorry for lacking instructions of your question in the documentation.
The horizontal banding is an artifact of low resolution texture Mip map which can be solved by disabling Mip maps in the setting of correlated aurora pillar texture in the “Textures” folder.
The issue of vertical banding is slightly more complicated. If you are not adding HDR Bloom to your camera as instructed in the documentation, you can first change the shader of aurora pillar material which is assigned to the “particle slave” children of the Aurora prefab from “Particles/Additive Intensify” to just “(Mobile/)Particles/Additive”. If you want the strands even smoother you can increase the emission rate of particle slave aurora trail from 0.4 to 0.8, but you may want to reduce the opacity of the start color of the slave emitter as well because it will get brighter.
Thanks for the quick reply! Those tweaks did the trick (even without HDR Bloom, since I’m using Beautify for bloom.)
This is a gorgeous set of effects, much appreciated!
Dave
V1.04 is now online which gives you the ability to easily slant the Aurora in real time. Both Windows and Android demos are updated. Also watch the new video demo with emotional music.
Since I upgraded to 2017.1.x i started having some real performance issues with the particle system in particular when i try to enable/disable the game object or change pre-arm for example - my gut feel is it’s engine related but are you able to test on latest available 2017.1.1p2?
Edit: the demo desktop scene is not working for me either after upgrade to 1.0.4 - particle effects buttons in top right corner of screen seem to work but not aurora.
I went back to 1.0.3 and the demo scene still does not want cooperate.
Appreciate some guidance. Thanks
ps: my work around for now is to let the particle system load at game start and turn down the _Glow to 0 till I need it to show.
Also vertical banding even with Bloom seems to pretty noticeable. I am working in VR. Thanks for any input to these issues.
Hi @ibyte . I have tested Aurora in 2017.1.0p4 and the desktop demo scene works fine. It seems Unity has changed how minMaxCurve valuetype works in script from 2017.1.1. Please download the attached script and overwrite the same one in “Scripts” folder.
About the performance issue (mostly caused by sub emitter), Unity technician has said that a fix will be delivered in 2017.1.p4 and 2017.2.0f2. So unfortunately we will have to upgrade the editor again.
I am currently working on a new method of rendering Aurora which is less reliant on particle system sub emitter (for reducing overdraw and gradient banding). This will be a free content update for the Aurora customers instead of a separate package.
That script fixed the demo scene. Thanks.
V1.05 is now online with the new 100-series aurora effect prefabs which is more performant. This update is available for Unity 5.6 and 2017.1
Hi is there anyway to have the the aurora switch prefab do realtime reflections to a surface?
Do you mean you want the “auroraLightFade.cs” originally in 000-series demo for 100-series Aurora? Sorry it is not in the 100-series demo scene. Here is a simple new script to handle the fade in/out of 100-series. Similarly you would create a new directional light object in your scene, set your target light color and attach this script, assign the 100-series Aurora gameObject to the “Aurora Master 1” property.
Obviously the light fades in when the particle system beings playing. When you “stop emission”, whether the remaining particles are still present, the light fades out anyway, so the default “step per frame” is now much smaller: 5e-07 or 0.0000005. It is designed this way because it’s seemgingly performance-friendly. Otherwise you would replace “isEmitting” in the script at line 22 with “isPlaying” so fade out only beings when the last particle is dead.
3471646–275819–auroraLightFade100.cs (1.23 KB)
Thank you for the reply. I am not quite sure I follow what you are saying. I use your Aurora 000 switch prefab. In that prefab, particle slave aurora trail 1 and particle slave aurora trail sparse uses material aurora_atlas_add_intensify. I use intensity to vary the brightness based on the volume of an audio file. This all works well.
I am in VR and standing on a platform. The platform material is highly reflective using a real time reflection probe but I do not see the Aurora reflected on the surface.
Do you have any suggestions on how I might see the reflection of the aurora in that surface?
Also what parameter affects how spread out the effect is? How would I keep the same scale but make it cover half the distance?
Thanks
Actually I made a bit of progress. On the reflection probe set to real time and Refresh Mode to every frame I can see the Aurora in the reflection.
The issue now is I see the corners of the reflection probe and there is no reflection when looking straight down. I have tried to adjust the probe location to no avail.
Sorry for the late reply. I want to discuss with you privately so please check your message inbox. Thanks.
Just for anyone interested in this reflection matter. The glitch is a limitation of reflection probe/cubemap with particle billboard render mode which the 000-series Aurora relies on. If you insist with cubemap reflection, you can use the 100-series Aurora which is in the same asset package.
Another workaround for 000-series (billboard-based) Aurora is to use camera planar reflection which is freely available on Unify Community wiki. This has been tested to work in Unity 2017 as well.
Hi The reflections are working and look good with that shader but unfortunately it doesn’t work so well with VR in Multipass or single pass.
