Global Settings

Some global settings (common to all volumetric lights in the scene) can be accessed by clicking on the “Show Global Settings” button at the top of any Volumetric Light inspector:

The “Global Settings” is a special volume which contains 3 custom passes:

– Volumetric Lights Depth PrePass: performs a custom depth pass to compute transparent objects depth (useful if you need to treat some transparent objects like opaque, like lakes). This custom pass is disabled by default.
– Volumetric Lights Translucent Render Feature: required by the translucent shadow maps. This custom pass is enabled by default but will only be executed on lights that have the “Translucency” option enabled in the inspector.
– Volumetric Lights Render Feature: this custom pass lets you customize the result of the volumetric effect by choosing the blending mode, smoothing the result (reduces noise) and/or applying a downscaling factor (which improves performance if required).

Volumetric Lights Depth PrePass options:

– Target Color Buffer/Target Depth Buffer/Clear Flags: keep the default values.
– Transparent/Alpha Cutout Layer Mask: use them to specify which objects would be included in this pass. For cutout shaders, the default Alpha Cutoff will be used only if the material does not expose a “_CutOff” property.

Volumetric Lights Render Feature:

– Blend Mode: the blending mode for the final composition.
– Brightness: global brightness for the final composition (this value multiplies to the actual brightness of each individual light).
– Downscaling: reduces the resolution of the intermediate light buffer. This option will improve performance.
– Blur Passes: number of blur iterations. The higher number, the softer the result.
– Downscaling: reduces the size of the blur buffers. This option improves performance at quality expense.
– Blur Spread: increases the kernel radius of the blur pass. Can produce softer results in combination with the blur passes and downscaling.
– Blur Edge Preserve: makes the edges of the objects sharper. This setting is very useful when the blur used to make the shadows look smooth reduces the definition of the objects.
– Blur HDR: uses a high range buffer during blur passes. Disable this option to improve blur operations performance but it can affect the visuals of the volumetric light.