In #Unity 22.2, Six-Way Lighting is now available in #VFXGraph. 1/ It allows to create smoke, dust, and steam #FX or hero clouds all working with any lighting condition & good performance thanks to pre baked lighting and absorption properties being evaluated in real-time.

2/ It uses a set of lightmaps containing the lighting response of the smoke for light coming from six different directions. These lightmaps are baked into a set of two textures, along with an alpha channel and an optional emissive mask.

3/ These lightmaps can be baked using various tools. We provide a plugin/HDA for @sidefx #Houdini (

4/ We also provide a @BlenderStudio_ #Blender3d add-on here to bake Six-Way lightmaps :

@BlenderStudio_ 5/ In @JangaFX #Embergen, you can use an option named “Six point” in the Render node (not officially supported because we don’t have control over the light intensity in these maps but you may still find it useful if you adjust it manually).

@BlenderStudio_ @JangaFX 6/ You can generate them in your own tool, baking from a directional white light for the six directions into the following set of 2 textures.

@BlenderStudio_ @JangaFX 7/ If you don't want to author your own textures, we provide a ready to use library with various effects (raw version provided as well):

8/ With these prebaked Six-Way Lightmaps, your effects can be dynamically lit by ambient, directional, point and spot lights.

9/ Six-Way lighting in #Unity #VFXGraph also works with the new Probe Volumes (APVs) to sample indirect global illumination.

10/ With this effect you can reuse the same smoke #FX in #realtime under multiple lighting conditions.

11/ To use it in #VFXGraph, use Six-Way lightmaps in a Particle Lit Output. Select it, in the Inspector, choose Six Way Smoke Lit in the Material Type dropdown and set the Positive and Negative Axes Lightmap in the Output context with the maps that you imported.

12/ We provide two different ways of applying color to smoke. You can achieve this either by deriving light absorption per color component from the lightmaps (for a more realistic behavior of colored smoke) or with a simple multiply (the cheapest way).

13/ This and other options allow to reuse the same map to create many variants of your effect.

14/ You can combine multiple six-way lightmaps to create more advanced effects. Check this breakdown of the explosion shown in the first message:

15/ Six-way lightmap is available in #Unity3d 22.2 using #VFXGraph and #HDRP. A #URP version is planned once we get a first round of feedback on this version. Share your feedback with us here:

16/ Read more on our dedicated Blogpost:

Very nice video explaining six-way lighting and volumetric fog output for #VFXGraph by @_kzr :