MK Glow - Bloom & Lens & Glare

MK Glow is a high-performance, feature-rich post-processing effect designed to simulate the bright surface scattering of light. Tailored for artists, it offers an intuitive, adaptive workflow that makes it easy to achieve engaging visual aesthetics.

In addition to its powerful bloom effect, MK Glow includes highly customizable extras such as lens surface, lens flare, and glare. Whether you’re looking to add subtle highlights or dramatic lighting effects, MK Glow gives you the tools to bring your artistic vision to life.

Demo (MK Glow): Web GL

🔖One Of A Kind Glow🔖

If you are looking for an out of the ordinary glow shader, MK Glow delivers a distinctive touch, offering unparalleled customization and stunning visual effects to make your project stand out. Don't let your game look boring and "default" with the standard post-processing bloom that everyone uses. MK Glow provides you a unique, customizable glow that sets your project apart.

🎮Versatile Shading Features🎮

MK Glow is able to fit into any kind of scene and can be tweaked precisely towards your needs.

Luma Scale: Mix relative luminance into the glow for a more stylized or realistic look.

Bloom: Creates fringes of light extending from the borders of bright areas in an image.

Lens surface: Apply a dirt and a diffraction texture, which fades in into the glow.

Lens flare: Generate procedural lens flares including halo, ghosts and presets.

Glare: Creates glare light streaks, which fades into the glow based on a blending. Also presets are available.

2D & 3D: No matter your scene setup, including projection and geometry, MK Glow is able to sustain the visual appearance.

⚖️High Quality at a Reasonable Performance Trade-off⚖️

MK Glow is engineered to balance exceptional visual quality with efficient performance. Utilizing advanced optimization techniques, it minimizes resource consumption while delivering a high visual quality, making it perfect for projects of any size and platform.

⚡Two intuitive workflows⚡

Threshold: Make things glow based on the pixels brightness, threshold and emission. A very stylized way to make things glow.

Natural: No color cuttoff, no thresholding, just like real life, a very realistic behavior (Energy-Conserving), just raise the emission of your materials.

🟦Enhanced Customization🟦

Stylization: Fine tune the result in terms of quality and performance using a wide variety of options.

Blooming: Further enhance the glowing parts to give scene a more bloomy look.

Anamorphic: Morph the glow to create an anamorphic flair.

Resolution scaling: Same outcome independent from the screen size and resolution.

Emissive Sprite Shaders for the URP 2D Renderer: Emissive Sprite Shaders that can be used with the URP 2D Renderer are included.

Additional shaders: Basic Sprite & UI shaders with emission are included.

📱 Easy-to-Use Interface 📱

Designed with artists in mind, MK Glow features a streamlined and intuitive interface. Forget about complex setups and adjustments; with MK Glow, you simply perform the basic setup and immediately see results. The user-friendly design means less time spent tweaking settings and more time on your creative vision. Enable the shader, customize the effect, and watch your scene transform effortlessly.

✨Setup for every possible post processing API✨

The package provides components for the following post processing setups:

- Built-in: Legacy Image Effects Pipeline (Component on Rendering Camera)

- Built-in: Post Processing Stack V2

- Universal: Integrated Post Processing API via Scriptable Renderer Feature

- Universal: Scriptable Renderer Feature Only (skip the Post Processing API entirely)

- High Definition: Integrated Post Processing API

This also includes support for Render Graph related setups.

🔍Debugging🔍

When needed, certain parts of the rendering can be visualized. You are able to inspect every part of the render process, including the glow base map and the composition of the final glow.

🔗Compatibility🔗

The shader works seamlessly with any graphics API, ensuring flawless performance across all render setups, including XR in all render modes. Compatible with all platforms—PC, consoles, mobile, and web—the effect maintains consistent quality regardless of your project setup or render pipeline.

⚙️Included Tools⚙️

Install wizard: Fast setup even on scriptable Render Pipelines.

Builtin textures: Start easy by using the included textures for different features.

Custom editor: Easy to use inspector tweaked towards artists.

Render pipeline compatibility: Same look & feel & results across all render pipelines.

🪜Examples🪜

MK Glow comes with a variety of example scenes to help you get started quickly and effectively. These scenes serve as valuable guides, showcasing how to achieve specific effects and can be used as inspiring for your own creations.

💾Updates + Maintenance + Support💾

All of my assets receive updates, are maintained regularly and supported as best as possible.

🌈Do you have some cool stuff to show?🌈

I would love to see your results (high resolution screenshots / videos) using the shader. Just drop me a message.

💡Questions, bug reports, feature requests, feedback or just to say hello💡

Feel free to get in touch via support@michaelkremmel.de at any time.

Release Notes

Please keep in mind that non LTS versions can change rapidly. If you experience any issue just let me know

4.9.5:

Added 6.3 LTS support

Added 6.4 Tech support

Added 6.5 alpha/beta support

4.9.4:

- Updated package for latest 6.4 Beta and 6.5 Alpha

- Added support for glare / lens flare when single pass instanced rendering is enabled

- [HDRP] Fixed a compiler error

- [HDRP] Fixed a dynamic resolution issue

- Optimized performance when shader performs in ultra quality

4.9.3:

- Updated package for 6.2 Tech, 6.3 Beta and 6.4 Alpha

- improved automatic resolution scaling

- [HDRP] Fixed a metal api related render target issue

4.9.2:

- fixed a compiler error when the VR package was removed

- Updated package for 6.2 Beta and 6.1 Tech Stream

4.9.1B

- moved package from "_MK" to "MK" folder to be inline with the submission guidelines. At best you delete the old package completely and import the new update due to the path changes.

- Updated library for Unity 6.2 Alpha

- reduced package size

- improved antiflicker filter

- improve overall sampling technique

- fixed an error on the install wizard if domain reloading was enabled

- [HDRP] fixed an error when sampling the lens flare feature

4.9.0

- Updated library for Unity 6.1 Preview

4.8.0

- Fixed a shader error when dynamic resolution was active

4.7.3

- Fixed a compiler error when building using SRP's (shader was still working)