Solaris is an advanced all-in-one shader for generating fully procedural fire, energy, and smoke-like effects without the use of any textures or complex mesh geometry. It works not only with static meshes, but also with Unity's particle system and trail renderer components, while supporting advanced custom transparent lighting + translucency. There are over 100 parameters available for adjustment in realtime, able to be tweaked and toggled for balancing performance against features.
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The minimum required Shader Model for Solaris 4.5.
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Main demo scene (included).
Despite it’s complexity, the basis of Solaris is simple: masked fractal noise.
To get an idea of the basics, open the aptly named Basic scene under Mirza/Solaris/Scenes/Basic/.
Basic materials scene (included).
Here’s you’ll see a straightforward layout of materials on Unity’s default quad mesh, with increasing complexity from left → right. The first is simply the mask, following by introducing noise, then colour and some basic vertex editing, followed by the final animated green ‘warp flame’ on the right.
Solaris features an advanced, custom material editor which allows you to preview the differences between materials when multiple materials are selected. This makes it easier to identify the differences. The only difference between the first and second basic material is Noise.
Multi-select materials and set Filter Properties to Only Different to preview the differences.
Solaris’ material editor organizes its properties into logical foldout groups, with a live preview.
You can enable lighting and adjust the scale of various properties, such as the influence of the main directional light, and additional lights thereafter (point, spotlight…). Naturally, you’ll likely want to reserve these settings for non-emissive materials, such as smoke and fog, rather than fire.
Swap XY to rotate the base UVs going from bottom to top → left to right.
Most UV sampling is done using the mesh surface (texture) coordinates, but you can choose to switch to world space or the transform’s local object space UVs instead. The latter two are useful in cases where you want to sample noise volumetrically and/or when the actual texture coordinates aren’t mapped to your liking on the mesh itself, etc… These are just example use-cases.
Control some of the per-particle properties using by this shader/material. There are other properties that are applied on a per-particle basis, but they are grouped with other non-particle properties that they are directly related to for better organization, which you’ll find in other foldouts.