Introduction

What is Global Snow?

Global Snow is a drag-and-drop snow solution for Unity that transforms any scene into a winter landscape with a single component. It supports both the Built-in Render Pipeline and URP (Universal Render Pipeline), shipping as two separate packages in one purchase.

The effect renders realistic snow coverage over your entire scene using deferred or forward rendering techniques, with automatic occlusion so snow does not appear under roofs, inside buildings, or beneath other geometry.

Key Features

Snow Rendering

• Realistic relief shading — raymarched 3D waves over the snow surface with occlusion shadows and glitter.
• Automatic coverage — zenithal depth pass detects which surfaces are exposed to snowfall.
• Quality presets — Best Quality, Medium, and Fastest presets for quick tuning.
• Distance optimization — simplified shader for far-away snow to save GPU cost.

Snow Interactions

• Footprints — human-shaped footprint decals with fade-out duration.
• Terrain marks — collision-driven deformable trails from any object (characters, vehicles, projectiles).
• Snowfall — built-in particle system with configurable intensity, speed, and wind.
• Snow dust — wind-driven dust particles near ground level.
• Camera frost — screen-space frost overlay for immersive cold environments.

Coverage Control

• Layer mask exclusion — exclude entire layers from snow coverage.
• Per-object exclusion — attach GlobalSnowIgnoreCoverage to any GameObject.
• Coverage mask — paint snow on/off using an alpha mask texture with a built-in Scene View editor.
• Snow volumes — trigger-based zones that disable snow when the player enters (e.g., indoors).
• Moving object shader — dedicated Standard-based shader for characters and vehicles that need stable snow coverage.

Pipeline Support

• Built-in RP — deferred (recommended) and forward rendering paths.
• URP — deferred rendering path with Render Graph compatibility.

Requirements

Package Contents

Next Steps

• Quick Start — set up Global Snow in under 5 minutes.
• How It Works — understand the rendering techniques behind the effect.
• Parameters — full reference of all inspector settings.