Lux URP Essentials

Lux URP Essentials provide a growing collection of manually written and optimized HLSL shaders and custom nodes for Shader Graph. It reduces the gap between HDRP and URP by adding missing advanced lighting models and ships with a ton of various rendering features to cover a wide range of use cases.

Updating to URP 16.0.4

In order to update the package to URP 16.0.4. you will have to download it using Unity 2023.2.0f1 or above.

Updating to URP 15.0.6 (deprecated)

In order to update the package to URP 15.0.6. you will have to download it using Unity 2023.1.16f1 or above.

Updating to URP 14.0.10

In order to update the package to URP 14.0.10. you will have to download it using Unity 2022.2.20f1 or above.

Updating to URP 14.0.7 (deprecated)

In order to update the package to URP 14.0.7. you will have to download it using Unity 2022.2.16f1 or above. Recommended version is 2022.3 LTS.

Updating to URP 12.1 (deprecated)

In order to update to version 1.85 and URP 12.1 or above i recommend to make a backup of your project, delete your current Lux URP Essentials folder and reimport the new package which you should get automatically when using Unity 2021.2 or above.

Included

Environment related Shaders

Parallax terrain, mesh terrain, grass including high efficient grass displacement which does not need a 2nd camera, foliage, rock, water and tree creator.

Advanced Materials and Lighting

Skin, hair, cloth, transmission, clear coat, glass, fuzz, toon lighting, simple flat shading, lit and shadowed particles and Lit Extended (deprecated since URP 12) and Lit Uber.

Effects

Fast outlines, rim based animated highlights, hidden surfaces, screen space decals, billboards and volumetrics.

Shader Graph

Custom nodes for skin, cloth, transmission, clear coat, transparent, toon lighting and flat shading next to some handy helper nodes like procedural stochastic sampling or advanced parallax mapping.

Compatibility

Lux URP Essentials have been tested using URP 7.1.8, 7.2.1, 7.4.1, 8.2, 10.3.2, 10.7, 11, 12.1., 13.1.8, 14.0.7, 15.0.6 and URP 16.0.4.

In order to download the package you need at least Unity 2020.1. but you have access to older packages then in case you need these. You will get the latest package when downloading it using Unity 2022.2.16 (URP 14.0.7), Unity 2023.1.5f1 (URP 15.0.6) and Unity 2023.2.0f1 (URP 16.0.4) and above.

All shaders support Single Pass Stereo rendering — this includes shaders, which sample the camera depth or opaque texture like water, particles, decals and glass. Single Pass Instanced Stereo rendering needs URP when it comes to more advanced shaders. Single pass stereo rendering and single pass instanced rendering have been tested using DX11 and Oculus Rift.

Documentation / Toon Shading Documentation / Forum Thread

Environment related Shaders

Parallax Terrain Shader

Assign the parallax terrain shader instead of Unity's built in one and benefit from various fixes, advanced parallax mapping and stochastic procedural texturing which will fix all tiling issues automatically.

● Advanced parallax mapping and height based blending for the first 4 layers

● Stochastic procedural texturing on the first terrain layer which will automatically fix any tiling issues

● Fixed normal mapping

● Fixed light mapping

● Terrian mesh blending (deprecated since URP 12).

Mesh Terrain Shader

The mesh terrain shader lets you shade any custom mesh using up to 4 detail textures (albedo, smoothness and normal) mixed together based on a RGB splat map. It usually samples all textures according to the UVs allowing you to texture even cliffs and overhangs without any texture stretches – however the first detail layer may use top down projection to enhance mesh blending or hide texture seams at UV shell borders.

● Up to 4 different detail texture sets mixed based on a RGB splat map.

● Combine UV based texture mapping with top down projection to enhance mesh blending or hide texture seams at UV shell borders.

Grass and Foliage Shaders

The grass and foliage shaders allow you to place individual patches of grass as single game objects within your scene whose bending is globally controlled by a built in wind zone and a custom render texture.

● Global wind support.

● Fast and lively bending

● Touch bending or grass displacement (URP only, preview)

● Distance based fading

● Designed to work with layer based culling

● Foliage shader: PBS subsurface scattering

Rock Shader – including top down projection

The rock or top down projection shader allows you to add one texture set on top of the regular texture set based on the up direction of the normal in world space to create effects such as moss on rocks, eroded sand or snow.

The projected texture set is sampled in world space and thus gives seamlessly textured surfaces even over multiple objects.

● Top down projected texture set with albedo, smoothness and normal

● Proper normal blending without the need of going triplanar

● Feature rich blending

● LOD cross fading

● Optional support for metallness, ambient occlusion, emission and blend mask

● Optional scale dependent base texture tiling to keep texel density

Water Shader

The water shader offers fast yet compelling water rendering for rivers or lakes.

● Accurate refractions

● View depth based underwater fog

● Soft edge blending with the surrounding geometry

● Dynamically generated edge and slope based foam

● Supports perspective and orthographic projection

Tree Creator Shaders

The Lux LWRP tree creator shaders are a port of the built in tree creator shaders and allow you to use tree creator trees along with LWRP and URP.

Advanced Materials and Lighting

Skin Shader

The skin shader uses pre-integrated skin lighting based on the work of Eric Penner and adds transmission lighting from a static thickness map on top.

● Dedicated specular and diffuse lighting

● Mix standard and skin lighting within a single material

● Distance based fading of skin lighting

Hair Shader

The hair shader supports anisotropic Kajiya-Kay specular hair lighting and transmission.

● Up to two anisotropic specular lobes

● Anisotropic ambient reflections

● Support for alpha testing and alpha blending

Cloth Shader

The cloth shader supports Charlie Sheen and GGX anisotropic lighting to cover a wide range of different fabrics.

● Charlie Sheen and GGX anisotropic lighting

● Transmission

● Support for alpha testing and double sided rendering

Clear Coat Shader

Versatile clear coat shader that lets you use duo coloring, add metallic flakes and even mix clear coat with standard lighting within the same material.

● Duo Coloring

● Coat and base layer normals

Transmission Shader

Versatile transmission or subsurface scattering shader, that lets you create materials like wax or thin plastics and supports transmission as well as wrapped diffuse lighting and can mix transmission and standard lighting within the same material.

● Transmission lighting

● Customizable wrapped around diffuse lighting

● Opaque and alpha testing

● Single and double sided rendering

Refractive Glass Shader

The glass shader allows you to add refractive, tinted and bump mapped glass.

● Geometry driven refractions

● Bump map driven distortion

● Single and double sided rendering

Lit and shadowed Particle Shaders

The lit and shadowed particles shaders offer advanced lighting support such as additional lights, transmission and real time shadows.

● Support for directional, spot and point lights

● Real time per pixel or per vertex shadows

● Tessellation

● Transmission lighting

● Support for flipbook blending, soft particles and camera fading next to a bunch of blending modes and proper fog

Flat shading

The flat shading lighting shader and node allow your to apply flat shading to any mesh – regardless of its vertex normals.

Lit Extended Shader

This shader extends the built in "Lit" shader and adds support for stencil buffer operations and (animated) rim lighting.

● Lets you setup all kind of stencil buffer operations

● Adds (animated) rim lighting

Lit Uber Shader

This shader goes even further than the Lit extended one and ands parallax mapping and advanced lighting features.

● Advanced parallax mapping

● Fading towards the camera

● Horizon occlusion

● Geometric specular anti aliasing

● Bent normals

● GI to AO

Effects

Fast Outline Shader

The fast outline shader allows you to highlight objects by adding a colored outline to them without having to use any expensive full screen image effect. The shader instead is based on the stencil buffer and needs the objects to be drawn twice.

● No full screen image effect involved

● Based on stencil and depth buffer

● Adjustable outline color and thickness

● Lets you create various outline effects.

Decal Shaders

The decal shaders let you add screen space decals which act more or less like deferred decals.

● Add screen space decals on top of any arbitrary geometry

● Lit and unlit decals

● Distance based fading

● Lit decals support normal mapping, metallness, emission and occlusion

Billboard Shader

The billboard shader lets you create fully camera aligned or camera facing upright oriented lit and unlit billboards suitable to create e.g. light halos, UI icons or distant trees and objects.

● Camera aligned or upright oriented billboards

● Lit and unlit billboards

● Support for alpha testing and alpha blending

Volumetric Shaders

The volumetric shaders let you create fast volumetric light beams or simple box or sphere volumes.

● UDK based light beams

● Simple box and sphere volumes.

Shader Graph

The package ships with a number of growing nodes for Unity's Shader Graph. Currently included nodes:

● Toon lighting inspired by Unity Chan.

● Transmission

● Charlie Sheen cloth lighting

● GGX anisotropic cloth lighting

● Clear coat lighting

● Advanced transparent lighting supporting proper directional shadows

● Flat shading

● Procedural stochastic sampling

● Advanced parallax mapping

● Camera fade