Weather Maker - Volumetric Clouds and Weather System for Unity

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Overview

Weather Maker is the most complete weather, water, day/night cycle, volumetric cloud/fog/light, terrain overlay and sky system for Unity. With both 2D and 3D modes, Weather Maker is the last asset you will need for weather, sky and more in your Unity app or game. Full C# source code and shader code is provided! Just drop a prefab in your scene and it's ready to go! Weather Maker will save you thousands of hours of development time.

Rendering and Pipeline support

Weather Maker supports standard pipeline on Unity 2019.4 and newer, along with URP 17.3+ on Unity 6000.3 or newer. Color spaces of HDR, non-HDR, Linear, Gamma are supported. Deferred and Forward Rendering paths are also supported. No matter how you use it, Weather Maker just works. The one exception is alpha or beta Unity. I don't support those.

Value

Weather Maker is many assets in one. Weather, sky, day/night cycle, water, volumetric clouds, light and fog, lightning, ambient sound and more. You could spend 300 USD or more buying the pieces individually and then spend a few months integrating them together, or you could just get Weather Maker and have everything already integrated. AAA games, indie games, prototypes and apps are all a great fit for Weather Maker.

Performance

Weather Maker has been tuned for years for maximum performance. Weather Maker adapts to the Unity quality level to ensure maximum FPS. Performance profiles allow customization of various Weather Maker effects for custom solutions.

Floating Point Origin Offset

Weather Maker contains an easy to use floating point origin offset solution. For flight simulators or large worlds, you can pick a distance which will reset the camera position back to 0,0,0. When the camera exceeds this distance from the origin (0,0,0), Weather Maker will trigger a callback event. Weather Maker has an option to re-position all the root game objects for you, or you can do it yourself in the callback event. A cumulative offset is provided that you can use in any shaders that rely on world positions to generate noise. The current offset is also provided in case you need it to re-position game objects or do other logic.

Volumetric Clouds

Using state of the art shaders and performance techniques, volumetric clouds look beautiful and won't bog down your frame rate. Rolling, whispy and epic clouds react to ambient, directional lights and lightning for that AAA look and feel. Even cubemaps and water reflection show the clouds effortlessly. Cloud probes allow easy access to cloud density for any Transform component (and run on the GPU!). To top it off, you can fly-through the clouds and god rays are built into the clouds. Clouds play nice with the depth buffer and can receive cascade shadow map shadows.

Atmosphere and Sky

Weather Maker contains an industry standard, BSD licensed physically based sky and volumetric atomspheric scattering solution. The atmospheric scattering and sky sphere blend seamlessly with your scene, producing a gorgeous planet curve at the far plane, just make sure your camera has a large far plane. The sky sphere can render many texture types including night sky with rotation, along with day and dawn/dusk textures. No cube map is needed, just one 2D texture for each. Performance is superb. All of this is configurable.

Weather Effects

Weather effects include rain, snow, hail and sleet. Collision with scene is optional. Particle systems are lit properly by all lights in your scene. All weather effects fade cleanly both visual and audio to ensure a life-like and smooth experience. Wind is bundled as well and affects particles and trees. Sound dampening prefabs are provided to handle cases where the player goes inside. Animated puddles on ground available too. Null zones ensure that weather stays away from indoor areas.

Weather API Integration

Weather Maker integrates with open weather map out of the box, but it's super easy to create your own weather api provider.

Aurora Borealis / Northern Lights

Spice up your night sky with the beautiful aurora borealis. Customize colors, shape, detail, height, animation and much more. The aurora renders smoothly around your planet, even from space! Weather Maker does not use a texture lookup for the aurora, it is all done in a procedural shader, ensuring a life-like and natural look - without impacting performance. No other asset provides a 100% procedural aurora borealis nor one as configurable.

Weather Zones

Easily attach a weather profile to a collider and create a weather zone. As the player moves into the zone, weather changes randomly to the profile for that zone. Add null zones with a box collider (with rotation and scale) to block precipitation, fog, etc. from showing in a certain area (building, cave, etc.). Or just activate the global weather zone for instant random weather with one click! Integrates great with vegetation studio pro biomes.

Day/Night Cycle

Weather Maker contains a fully functional day and night cycle. Ambient light, directional light, shadows, latitude, longitude, planet axis and more are configurable. Sun and moon position is accurate to the date and time. Stars rotate during the night with just a single night texture. No cubemap needed.

Water

Water is built right in. Drop a dynamic water prefab in your scene and get one draw call full light support. Performance is great, even on mobile! Underwater mode with water fog is supported and looks great with the new post processing stack. Waves, caustics, shore-line, water profiles, tesselation and auto water height map give you the best water in the asset store.

Volumetric Fog and Lights

Weather Maker fog is a full screen effect that has been tuned to run on the lowest end devices. No branching and ray-tracing and one draw call and the fog still looks amazing. A fog box and sphere prefab is also included. Volumetric light is supported for point, spot, area and directional lights as well. The main directional light (sun) even has a volumetric shadow option! Other assets use slightly mad volumetric lighting which kills performance, but not Weather Maker. Fog + volumetric lights in ONE draw call!

Sound Manager

Weather Maker manages ambient and other sounds for you. All sounds fade in and out seamlessly and can run at different times of day (sunrise / sunset, dawn/dusk, or a specific hour range). You can create sounds zones throughout your scene or put one on top of your player for global sounds. Examples are provided and include crickets and owls at night, birds in the morning and general day ambient sounds.

Networking

Mirror networking is built in out of the box. Weather profiles and time of day are synced automatically. This can easily be disabled if you need a custom solution.

Lightning

Thunder and lightning - Weather Maker comes bundled with a piece of Procedural Lightning to give you the best storm lightning on the Asset Store. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Weather Maker is Integrated With:

Weather Maker is Compatible With:

Aura 2

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Titles using Weather Maker:

Please email me if you have a title to add.

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Support

I'm dedicated to making this the best sky and weather system, not just in the Asset Store but on the planet. I respond to emails and do my best to fix bugs and do feature requests. Please don't hesitate to contact me.

View the documentation / readme.txt here: View Readme.txt

Contact Me

I'm Jeff Johnson, creator of Weather Maker. Please send feedback or support requests to support@digitalruby.com.

Requirements / Known Issues

- Weather Maker requires Unity 2019.4 or newer. Ensure you are using Unity hub with the latest minor version of your Unity version.

- URP requires Unity 6000 or newer and URP 17.3 or newer.

- Weather Maker does NOT support WebGL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES or DirectX 9.0.

- Weather Maker requires texture array support.

- Weather Maker requires one license per human using the asset in the Unity editor.

Release Notes

8.0.5 (2026-03-11)

- Fix edge-case memory leaks.

- Improve cloud probes.

- Support SRP lens flares.

8.0.4 (2026-03-05)

- Crest 5.7 integration. See Window -> Weather Maker -> Integrations -> Crest.

- Fog/cloud/atmosphere shadow and lighting fixes.

8.0.3 (2026-02-28)

- Improve volumetric cloud performance.

- Fix cubemap/reflection probe rendering lighting issues.

8.0.2 (2026-02-26)

- Shadow fixes for both standard and URP pipelines.

- Revamp cloud profile ambient lighting to allow day/night ambient to be higher to avoid scenes being too dark. If your clouds are too bright, try setting ground ambient to 1 and sky ambient to 2 on the volumetric cloud profile.

8.0.1 (2026-02-24)

- Support URP 17.3 on Unity 6000+.

8.0.0 (2026-02-23)

- URP 17.3+ support (requires Unity 6000.3+).

7.3.7 (2024-12-23)

- Support Unity 6.

- Improve precipitation/mist.

7.3.6 (2024-08-12)

- Fix issue with Unitty 2022 and newer player.

7.3.5 (2023-05-17)

- Attempt to support fast enter play mode.

7.3.4 (2023-04-17)

- Allow to set performance profile using `WeatherMakerScript.Instance.PerformanceProfile = value;`

7.3.3 (2022-12-20)

- Fix flat clouds.

7.3.2 (2022-10-07)

- Crest integration compiler error fix.

7.3.1 (2022-08-17)

- Fix _CloudCover error in editor.

7.3.0 (2022-06-12)

- Fix issue with downsampling and artifacts around edges of geometry.

- Fix issue with sky depth fade being too sharp.

- Dithering and ray-march tweaks.

7.2.4 (2022-06-01)

- Reduce GC of cloud probe and screen space shadow command buffers.

- Fix null/off by one error in weather profiles.

- Adjust dithering of most cloud profiles.

- Fix sky depth fade property to work again.

7.2.3 (2022-05-24)

- Attempt to fix Android build error.

7.2.2 (2022-04-26)

- Fix an issue where dynamically loading the player would not render properly.

7.2.1 (2022-04-11)

- Fix issue with sound zone getting an index out of range exception.

7.2.0 (2022-03-12)

- You can specify a cloud seed in the full screen cloud script to get identical clouds. Leave as -1 for random clouds.

7.1.4 (2022-03-09)

- Add example of a launcher scene, main menu and game scene.

- Add launcher setup to readme.txt file.

7.1.3 (2022-03-03)

- Fix performance regression on Metal.

- Move auto clone profile option to WeatherMakerScript.

- Reduce grainy clouds.

7.1.2 (2022-02-16)

- Fix moon not showing when horizon scaling was disabled.

- Fix issue with weather map mask not working.

- Fix clouds not showing up in some cases.

7.1.1 (2021-12-12)

- Big performance boost for volumetric clouds (~15-20%).

- Fix popping of clouds in some cases at high parts of the clouds.

- Fix a bug with cloud coverage, density and type curves not animating smoothly.

- Add a cloud detail curve to control intensity of cloud details at various heights.

- Add option to disable scale moon at horizon.

7.1.0 (2021-12-08)

- Post processing options for weather map and clouds.

- Example post processing scene with a vortex and oil painting filter (DemoSceneCloudPostProcessing).

7.0.5 (2021-11-28)

- Command buffer fix.

- URP now requires URP 12 and Unity 2021.2.

- Fix clouds not showing in flythrough.

7.0.4 (2021-11-10)

- Fix for reflections and reflection probe cameras.

- Fix for clouds not showing in final build.

- Allow curves to control cloud coverage, density and type over height.

7.0.3 (2021-10-20)

- Fixes for URP and overlay cameras.

- Fixes for lightning artifacts and rapid transitions in volumetric clouds.

7.0.2 (2021-10-14)

- Fixes for VR.

- Allow atmospheric fog in VR.

- Fix artifacts during lightning.

7.0.1 (2021-10-02)

- Hotfix for allowed cameras.

- Bug fixes for flat cloud lighting.

7.0.0 (2021-09-27)

- Please backup your project before updating.

- For best results, remove Weather Maker entirely and then re-download.

- Further improvements to cloud noise, lighting and performance.

- Add cloud roundness parameter for improved shaping.

- Remove some and refactor other cloud profile properties.

- Auto set URP render pipeline asset to current quality level.

6.1.3 (2021-08-11)

- Improve clouds sharpness and overall appearance.

6.1.2 (2021-08-08)

- Improve cloud performance.

- Improve horizon fade.

- Improve fly-through profile and performance.

- Adjust cloud noise textures.

6.1.1 (2021-08-04)

- Fix for black sky on Android and iOS.

- Fix bugs with fly through clouds.

6.1.0 (2021-07-27)

- Revamp cloud profiles to improve variation and general appearance.

6.0.5 (2021-07-18)

- Re-upload to fix corrupted package.

6.0.4 (2021-07-08)

- Improve cloud variety via noise scaling and negation.

- Fix moon rendering and moon glow offset.

- Fix URP compile issue.

6.0.3 (2021-07-03)

- Wet Stuff integration, see bottom of Readme.txt for instructions.

6.0.2 (2021-07-02)

- Fixes for VR.

6.0.1 (2021-07-29)

- Fixes for fog box and sphere.

6.0.0 (2021-06-12)

- Re-enable URP! Unity 2021 and URP 11 or newer required.

5.9.18 (2021-05-08)

- Min version is now Unity 2018.4.

- Fixes for reflection/cubemap volumetric cloud shadows. Still not perfect but getting there...

5.9.17 (2021-04-14)

- Fix for cloud rendering on latest Unity versions.

5.9.16 (2021-01-22)

- Refresh version.

- Fix shadow strength on precipitation materials, was corrupted by previous Unity update.

5.9.15 (2020-07-11)

- Disable crunch compression, was causing crashes/freezing on newer Unity versions.

- Fix shader issue introduced by breakage in new Unity versions.

5.9.14 (2020-06-17)

- Fix issue with moonlight, fog and light absorption not playing nice together.

5.9.13 (2020-06-02)

- Improve fly-through scene depth handling, appearance and performance.

- Fix issue with origin offset and fog lights.

- Added airplane 3D model in fly-through scene from https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/711530.

5.9.12 (2020-05-24)

- Fix additional issues with cloud edges and cloud noisy areas.

- Fixes for VR (test on HTC Vive).

5.9.11(2020-05-05)

- Add sdf (signed distance field) option for volumetric cloud profile. Enabling for sparser covered clouds can improve performance by a good amount as it speeds up ray-marching.

- Adjust cloud depth buffer handling to be better. This is a work in progress, I'd love any feedback. The demo scene fly through now has a giant pillar that intersects the clouds for testing.

- Allow a box collider to be assign to the full screen cloud script. If assigned, the weather map and clouds will be re-mapped to this box using the x and z min/max coordinates of the box. The height of the clouds will still be determined by the cloud profile.

- Add option to performance profile to cast shadows using cascade shadow map on the volumetric clouds. See demo scene fly through for an example. Set shadow distance to 32768.

- Fix issue with cloud artifacts behind depth buffer and trees.

- Fix outline on clouds and geometry.

- Fix night stars not showing in the default sky profiles.

5.9.10(2020-04-22)

- Reduce shader keyword count.

- Support 3 quality levels.

- Add option in performance profile to show cloud shadows in reflection cameras.

- Auto blur cloud temporal reprojection if fov changes and AutoSetTemporalReprojectionBlendMode is true.

- Fix fog light absorption to apply properly.

- Add global ambient multiplier to full screen cloud script. Use this if your clouds are too bright when you change your ambient colors.

5.9.9(2020-02-19)

- Add texture support to sky box material (sphere texture mode only). Any textures set on the sky sphere profile will apply even if the sky sphere is not being used and instead you are relying on camera skybox clear flags and lighting material.

- Fix wind lerp of frequency and magnitude being swapped.

- Fix upside down VR depth buffer in Unity 2019.3.

5.9.8(2020-02-01)

- Enable Unity 2019.3+ URP support. for Unity 2019.2, only LWRP is supported.

- Change slightly how switching to URP/LWRP works. There is no longer a package to import, but instead you must manually assign render features to your profile. Instructions will show up when you click Weather Maker -> Enable Universal/Lightweight Pipeline.

- Change atmosphere and sky texture formats to try and fix mobile rendering artifacts on certain hardware.

- Fix shader errors building for Oculus Quest.

5.9.7(2019-01-18)

- Add option to WeatherMakerScript to auto-set performance profile from Unity quality level, default of true.

5.9.6(2019-12-16)

- Fix issue / workaround LWRP render order issue. Sky and clouds should render in correct order now!

- Improve sandstorm transition appearance.

- Add WeatherMakerIsPlayerScript, this allows you to override the IsPlayer and IsLocalPlayer methods. Add this script to your player objects that have a trigger collider.

- Fix night sky to honor background sky gradient alpha and curve just like day if the alpha is 0.

5.9.5(2019-12-04)

- Fix mirror networking compile error.

- Fix Vegetation Studio Pro compile error.

5.9.4(2019-10-20)

- Add option to set sky sphere ground color based on time of day.

5.9.3(2019-09-22)

- Add vegetation studio pro extension to sync rain/snow/wind to vegetation studio pro biomes.

5.9.2(2019-09-14)

- Fix issue with depth buffer not being generated for reflection cameras.

5.9.1(2019-09-05)

- MegaSplat integration, add WeatherMakerExtensionMegaSplatScript to a game object in your scene (Component -> WeatherMaker -> Extensions).