Introduction

What is Global Snow & Rain 3?

Global Snow & Rain 3 for Unity adds snow, rain, puddles and frost to a URP scene. You add one component to the camera and a Render Feature to the URP renderer, and the whole scene gets snow, without changing your materials.

Global Snow works on the deferred G-buffer. A top-down capture finds which surfaces are exposed to the sky, so roofs, bridges and trees keep the snow, the rain and the puddles off what is under them.

Key Features

Weather

• One slider per effect at the top of the inspector: Snow, Snowfall, Snow Dust, Rain, Puddles, Frost and Camera Frost. Set a slider to 0 to turn that effect off.
• Quality presets (Best, Medium, Fastest) and profiles that store your settings and blend from one to another.

Snow

• Three shading levels: Flat Shading, Normal Mapping and Relief Mapping, with glitter and shading toward the sun.
• Snow layer with a real thickness that buries what rests in it.
• Natural snow lines with minimum altitude, slope limits and bare patches.
• Snow on terrain grass with its own coverage and altitude offset.

Footprints & Marks

• Deep Marks that dig into the snow layer under characters, physics objects and vehicles, with raised rims and a Sink Depth per object.
• Footprints with a sole texture, one per foot, for characters with the Global Snow Interaction component or for a first person camera.
• Collision Marks where objects touch the snow, on the ground, roofs or anything else, with a plow mode for vehicles and blades.
• Dirt reveal with your own ground textures, and Impact FX snow bursts scaled by the size of the object.

Snowfall, Dust & Wind

• Procedural snowfall around the camera with weather presets from Soft to Blizzard, motion streaks, density waves and a distance whiteout.
• Snow dust puffs that drift near the ground and stay out of shelters.
• One shared wind for snowfall, snow dust and rain, set by hand or read from a WindZone.

Rain & Water

• Rain that wets the surfaces exposed to the sky, and walls under small roofs on the side the wind comes from.
• Puddles on level ground, with ripples from footprints, marks and impacts, and rings from the rain drops.
• Running drops that run down wet surfaces near the camera, merge and leave trails.

See Rain & Water for details.

Frost

• Surface frost: hoarfrost ice on the ground and on the lower part of walls, with plates, cracks and reflections.
• Camera frost on the edges of the view.

Coverage Control

• Layer Mask to choose which objects can receive snow.
• Per object exclusion with the Global Snow Ignore Coverage component.
• Coverage Mask texture with a brush in the Scene View to add or remove snow by area.

Tools

• Scene View preview and a Compare split view that shows the scene with and without Global Snow.
• Scripting API to change the weather at runtime and to mark the snow and the puddles from your own code.

Requirements

Next Steps

1. Quick Start - get snow running in a few minutes.
2. Setup Guide - Render Feature and deferred configuration in detail.
3. Parameters Reference - every option of the inspector.
4. Rain & Water - rain, wetness, puddles and running drops.
5. FAQ - common questions answered.