Ultimate Jelly shader for Unity 6 uses a back-face thickness pass; URP and HDRP builds
A developer has released Ultimate Jelly, a jelly shader for Unity 6 on the Asset Store, and explained how it works in a Reddit post. The approach centres on a thickness texture and has four quality levels, including one aimed at XR and mobile.
Digital Developer Desk, 7d ago, 2 min read
Ultimate Jelly is a jelly shader for Unity 6, released on the Asset Store by its developer, who described the technique in a post on r/Unity3D. This is the developer's own account and we have not tested the asset. It is sold as separate URP and HDRP versions.
The core idea is thickness. Before the jelly is drawn, a separate pass renders its back faces into a texture. The shader then knows how much jelly the light travels through at each pixel, so thin edges stay pale and clear while the middle goes deep and saturated. The developer says this accounts for most of the difference between jelly and coloured glass.
On top of that, the shader refracts light going in and again coming out through the back face, with some colour dispersion. It adds a short ray march through the volume for scattering, internal glow and slow-moving noise. Other layers are a clear coat, micro normals, small surface glints, twinkling sparkles inside the volume and optional floating particles.
Caustics and the tinted ground shadow are faked. They use a procedural pattern projected under the object in the shape of its footprint, not traced light. The developer says this looks right on a flat floor and less convincing on uneven ground, so check your level geometry before relying on it.
There are four render quality levels. Ultra uses a 16-step march with 6-tap spectral dispersion. High uses a 9-step march with RGB dispersion. Medium uses a 5-step march. Low skips the back-face pass and the march and estimates thickness from a simple box, which the developer calls the most performant choice for XR and mobile.
The package includes 8 shapes in 18 colours as prefabs, and the material works on any mesh. An optional idle sway/bob is included, but it is plain animation and not soft-body physics.
Sources
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