Aurora Borealis Snow

Publisher

Dmitry Andreev

Please Note

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Overview

Most aurora assets paint the sky. This one lights the ground.

Aurora Borealis Snow is a complete night-scene toolkit for the Universal Render Pipeline: an animated aurora curtain system, a snow and ice mesh shader, and a snow terrain shader — built so that all three talk to each other.

WebGL Demo (Aurora only)

Live in App "lumasphere" on google play market or apple store

The aurora is captured every few frames into a small realtime cubemap. Every sparkle on the snow samples that cubemap along its own reflection vector, which means a flake facing north picks up the green sheet drifting overhead while a flake beside it, tilted the other way, stays cold and blue. Nothing is averaged into a single tint. Move the camera, and the color of the ground changes with the sky.

The aurora

Curtains spawn around the camera in a configurable ring and track it as it moves, so the aurora keeps its apparent distance and reads as a genuine sky element rather than geometry you can walk into. Each curtain is a deformed plane driven by two sine waves, textured by two independent flipbook atlas layers that can be combined with Add, Multiply or Screen. Curtains fade in, drift, and fade out over randomized lifetimes, and they are pooled — nothing is instantiated at runtime.

Every parameter lives on a ScriptableObject, so you can build several aurora moods and swap them in one field. An Editor Preview toggle runs the whole system in the Scene View without entering Play Mode.

The snow

Two shaders, one lighting model. The mesh shader is built on URP's Lit stack with parallax offset, packed mask maps, and a transmission term that lets thin snow and ice glow when the moon — or the aurora — is behind them. The terrain shader is a full URP TerrainLit derivative, so you keep height blending, per-pixel normals for instanced terrain, terrain holes, deferred GBuffer output, lightmap baking, and multi-pass layers beyond four — with the sparkle and transmission model layered on top.

Meshes can also melt into the terrain: a noise-driven ground blend reads the live terrain heightmap and softens the base of boulders and ice formations into flat snow, so nothing sits on the surface with a hard intersection line.

Made to be read

Full source, no compiled libraries, no node graphs to reverse-engineer. Every shader is hand-written HLSL you can open, follow, and extend, and the sparkle model is isolated in a single include file you can drop into your own shaders in three lines. A detailed manual covers setup step by step, explains every property, documents the global shader properties, and lists the known limitations up front.

Requirements

• Unity 6000.3 or newer
• Universal Render Pipeline
• Forward or Forward+ rendering path (the terrain shader also supports Deferred)
• Linear color space and HDR enabled; a Bloom override is strongly recommended