Procedural Lightning - High Performance and Shocking Lightning

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Procedural Lightning is the fastest, lowest price, best looking and easiest to use lightning on the Asset Store. No other asset provides the raw power, performance, customization, low price and prefabs of Procedural Lightning. Mobile, VR and desktop look and perform great! Drag a prefab in, configure and you are done! URP and HDRP render pipelines are fully supported.

Performance! Procedural Lightning has a built in pooling system, no garbage collection and heavily optimized code and shaders to give you maximum performance. There is even a multi-threaded option. Other assets use the Unity line renderer or expensive shaders with a few textures and have lightning that looks the same all the time. Yuck!

I've added a nice spell system with force lightning, lightning beam, lightning ball, charged bolt and lightning whip. Easily extensible and customizable.

If that weren't enough, you also get 17 high def thunder sounds. I've literally spent weeks on end of my life making this the best lightning in the asset store, and I know it will serve you well.

Here's the full run-down on what Procedural Lightning and Thunder for Unity can do for you:

- A configuration scene to help you get the exact look you want for your lightning. Tweak the detail, width, glow, duration, chaos, forkedness, direction and much more. Bolts can be randomized with a seed to get the same bolt.

- One click to get the exact code and script to reproduce your lightning bolt.

- Manual and automatic mode for the script. Trigger your customized prefab manually or let it run automatically.

- A robust lightning script that lets you create lightning strikes with a large selection of parameters with near infinite possibilities.

- Lightning works great in many scenarios: thunderstorms, magic spells, static discharge and much more!

- Lightning branches fade in, jitter and grow to make your lightning really come alive.

- Storm cloud particle system that looks stunning when lit up by lightning.

I've also included a more high level script if you just want storm lightning in your game without having to configure very much stuff. This script contains:

- Normal and intense lightning strikes with appropriate brightness, thunder delay and thunder volume.

- Cloud only lightning option.

- 17 distinct thunder sounds.

- Random range of time for the next lightning strike.

- Option to illuminate the skybox when there is a lightning strike.

- Random range of lightning intensity.

- Force a lightning strike via script.

- Lightning centered around the main camera by default.

- Option to try and make sure every lightning strike is visible by the camera.

- Dark cloud particle system for storm clouds.

- Demo scenes showing some terrain and water with the ability to call lightning with keystrokes. Procedural Lightning for Unity also contains an advanced lighting system that allows you to generate point lights along the paths of your lightning for that extra realistic effect. - Supports perspective, orthographic and orthographic xz planes.

This asset contains a batch of prefabs to create lightning bolts, sphere lightning, cone lightning, lightning fields, arcs of electricity and chain lightning. 17 high def thunder sounds, as well as a storm cloud particle system that looks amazing when lit up by lightning, are also included. You can even seed your lightning to get the same appearance.

Don't spend time making lightning effects yourself from scratch. Save yourself time and money with this powerful yet easy to use plugin.

This asset is demonstrated in a HereVR sci-fi pack video, viewable from here: http://u3d.as/guN

Games using procedural lightning:

- Doomwheel

- Halloween Night

- Project Demigod

Please read the Readme.txt file to get the most out of this asset. I am available at jjxtra@gmail.com to answer questions and help you out.

Best wishes for you and your project.

- Jeff

Release Notes

Thank you for choosing Procedural Lightning for all your Unity lightning needs. I'm available at support@digitalruby.com for questions, bug reports or other assistance.

3.0.1 (2026-03-02)

- Allow AudioCallback to ThunderAndLightning script to allow routing audio through custom audio systems (i.e. FMOD).

- Timing fix for too much lightning emitted at the start.

3.0.0 (2026-02-28)

- Big performance update (batching, buffering, dynamic mesh, caching, etc.)

- Memory leak fixes.

2.7.5 (2025-12-02)

- Unity 6000 support.

2.7.4 (2024-03-10)

- Fix null ref error.

- Fix interval using time instead of timeSinceLevelLoad.

2.7.3 (2024-02-01)

- Bug fixes.

2.7.2 (2023-06-19)

- Add timeout to attempt to fix deadlock.

2.7.1 (2023-06-19)

- Change coroutine to not allocate wait for seconds every call, use a pooled object instead.

- Improve multithreaded option to use latest concurrent collections from .NET.

2.7.0 (2022-11-03)

- Add AreaOverride (box collider) to thunder and lightning script to force bolt starts to the specified collider bounds.

2.6.0 (2022-04-03)

- Fixes for multi-threading.

2.5.5 (2021-09-14)

- Fix depth buffer shader error on VR.

- Support lumens (HDRP) using light intensity multiplier parameter.

2.5.4 (2021-02-26)

- Make flicker parameter easier to use.

- Added presets folder.

2.5.3 (2021-02-26)

- Attempt to support VR/XR.

- Unity min version: 2018.4.

2.5.2 (2019-09-09)

- Fix layer mask propagation to all child lightning objects.

2.5.1 (2019-09-04)

- Added DemoSceneCanvas showing top level UI, and game level canvas with lightning behind top level canvas UI and above game level canvas UI.

2.5.0 (2019-02-24)

- LWRP and HDRP support. Some tweaking of properties may be required to get the right appearance, the scriptable render pipelines do not look the same as the standard pipeline.

2.4.5 (2019-02-20)

- Add option to hide gizmos.

- Add option to change time to unscaled real time or game time.

2.4.4 (2018-09-05)

- Improve LOD calculations and fix bugs.

2.4.3 (2018-08-07)

- Improve GC for spline lightning. Add LOD option for lightning script.

2.4.2 (2018-07-20)

- Add separate elapsed time, delta time and time scale static fields to lightning bolt script. Set LightningBoltScript.TimeScale if you need to change lightning time speed.

2.4.1 (2018-05-08)

- Fix WebGL compile error.

2.4.0 (2018-04-04)

- Add intensity flicker properties to lightning bolt script. Great for flickering the lightning rapidly using a noise texture.

2.3.4 (2018-03-24)

- Fix lightning path demos. If your path lightning is not working, double check that Unity didn't delete all your path points.

2.3.3 (2018-02-27)

- Fix re-orderable lists.

2.3.2 (2018-02-14)

- Added AutomaticModeSeconds to lightning bolt prefab and Trigger function. This allows lightning to Trigger automatically until n seconds have passed.

2.3.1 (2017-11-17)

- Fix multi-threaded exceptions.

2.3.0 (2017-11-06)

- Added CustomTransform callback property to LightningBoltParameters object. This allows you to control the transform of the lightning mesh if it needs to manually rotate, scale or translate based on other transforms. See DemoSceneCustomTransform.

2.2.1 (2017-07-19)

- Added lightning bolt parameters Color property. This allows setting the color per bolt, allowing variation of color on bolts from the same script / material.

- Added chaos factor forks property. This allows a separate chaos factor for the forks.