>> Get it on the Asset Store
>> WebGL Demo
>> Android, Oculus / Meta Quest, PC VR, PC and Mac OSX Demos
>> Documentation
The simple and efficient volumetric lighting solution compatible with every platforms: Windows PC, Mac OS X, Linux, WebGL, iOS, Android, VR, Oculus Quest, AR, Built-in/Legacy Render Pipeline, SRP (URP, LWRP & HDRP)!
Presentation
Volumetric Light Beam is the perfect, easy and cheap way to simulate density, depth and volume for your spotlights and flashlights, even on Mobile!
It greatly improves the lighting of your scenes by automatically and efficiently generating truly volumetric procedural beams of light to render high quality light shafts rays effects.
Two different Volumetric Light Beam implementations, each one optimized for specific use-cases:
- SD Beams (legacy beams) are super fast with limited features (no true volumetric shadow nor cookie support): they are optimized to run on mobile and standalone VR (Oculus Quest).
- HD Beams offer more advanced features (true volumetric shadow & cookie) but are heavier on performance: they should be used only on high-end platforms (PC & consoles).
Showcased in great released games
Volumetric Light Beam is a production ready plugin proven by awesome released games featuring it:
-
BONEWORKS released for high-end PC VR
-
Carly and the Reaperman released for PSVR and high-end PC VR
-
Kingspray Graffiti released for high-end PC VR and Oculus Quest
-
Receiver 2 released for high-end PC VR
-
**Hexagroove **released for Nintendo Switch
-
Cloud Gardens released on Steam
-
subROV: Underwater Discoveries to be released on Steam
-
Covert released for PSVR, Oculus Rift and Oculus Go
How to use it?
Volumetric Light Beam is designed to be extremely easy to use. No setup is required. You donât have to link multiple objects together. You just need to use 1 simple new component. You can literally add a new light beam in 2 clicks!
In the Unityâs âCreateâ menu, browse to Light, and choose either one of the new entity:
- Volumetric Beam: creates a new standalone beam of light (no lights attached).
- Volumetric Beam and Spotlight: creates a new Spot-light with a beam of light attached to it.
In addition, you can add a Beam of light to any of your previously existing lights (or any GameObject) by just attaching the âVolumetric Light Beamâ component to them.
You can precisely customize the rendering of each beam of light by adjusting a set of user-friendly properties. For even faster nice looking results, some properties are automatically binded to the Spot light attached.
Features
- Supports Volumetric Shadows and Volumetric Cookies (HD Beams).
- Truly volumetric FX: works even if you are INSIDE the beam of light.
- Incredibly easy to use and integrate / Import it instantly / Zero setup required.
- Procedural generation: everything is dynamically computed under the hood.
- Add unlimited light beams everywhere: alternative solutions usually require realtime lights only: this plugin doesnât. You can make a baked light volumetric, or even add beams without any light.
- Dynamic 3D Noise feature to simulate animated volumetric fog/mist/smoke effects.
- Volumetric Dust Particles feature to simulate highly detailed dustlights and mote effects.
- Dynamic Occlusion: light beams can be blocked by moving geometry.
- Trigger Zone feature: you can track objects passing through the light beams.
- Fully dynamic: change or animate every properties during playtime from Script, Animator or Timeline.
- GPU Instancing: render and batch thousands of beams in 1 single drawcall. Try it by yourself!
- Super FAST w/ low memory footprint: doesnât require any post-process, command buffers, nor compute shaders: works great even on low-performance platforms such as Mobiles and WebGL.
- Optimized for VR: supports all Stereo Rendering Methods: Multi Pass, Single Pass and Single Pass Instanced or Multiview (see video)!
- AR Ready: supports both Apple iOS ARKit and Google Android ARCore.
- Smooth intersection with geometry and camera.
- In addition to working with the Built-in Legacy Render Pipeline, it fully supports the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and the High Definition Pipeline (HDRP).
- Supports many graphics variants: Deferred and Forward rendering path, Gamma and Linear color space, HDR colors, multiple blending modes.
- Highly configurable (layers, tags, render queue, 2D Sorting Layers and Order in Layer, shader passâŚ).
- Works with perspective and orthographic cameras out of the box.
- Supports Unity built-in fog.
- WYSIWYG: every modification is instantly visible in scene view: no need to toggle between editor and play mode to see your changes.
- Full source code available / no DLL. The light beam setup and handling is fully exposed through a powerful API.
- Detailed documentation
- Supports from Unity 2018.4.0, 2019.X, 2020.X, 2021.X, 2022.X and 2023.X versions.
- Sample scenes included: showcase demo and heavy Stress Test scene featuring 400 Volumetric Spotlights.
Note that this asset is NOT a fullscreen Post Process / image effect. This is NOT similar to Unityâs built-in Sun Shafts image effect.
Instead, Volumetric Light Beam will generate optimized geometry and material for each light beam. This technique has several advantages:
- More granularity: precisely customize each light beam independently.
- You can add light beams anywhere, even at locations where there is no light.
- When attached to a spot-light, it supports realtime, baked and mixed modes.
- Much easier to integrate with your own pipeline.
- Runs faster. No Post Process to add to your camera.
- Supports low-end platforms like mobile.
Limitations
- It only supports âspotlightsâ (beams shaped like a cone). Point lights or directional lights are not supported.
- *The plugin fully works with Deferred Rendering path: like any semi-transparent objects, beams are rendered using a Forward rendering pass on top of the Deferred one. This is a well known limitation of the Deferred Rendering technique.
- Since this plugin requires custom scripts execution, it wonât work for a VRChat world using the VRCSDK.
Hope you will find this plugin useful! Feel free to reach us if you need help, or to suggest some improvements/features.
Please consider rating and writing a review on the Asset Store page if you like it!
Thanks 
