Expanse is a state-of-the-art volumetrics tool for HDRP that empowers you to author stunning skies, clouds, and fog banks. With intuitive procedural modeling tools and advanced volumetric rendering techniques, you can create dynamic, emotive atmospheres—earthly, mythical, or stylized—in as little as 15 minutes.
Built on the latest production-focused research from conferences like SIGGRAPH and EGSR, every component of Expanse is physically based, delivering unprecedented realism and consistency across different lighting conditions.
The system is fully dynamic and can be adjusted in real time without precomputed lookups, enabling seamless animation of cloud coverage, fog density, and time of day through keyframes or scripts. All changes are visible directly in the editor, allowing you to fine-tune skies without entering play mode.
Expanse is performance-optimized for real-time applications, offering adjustable quality/performance tradeoffs to meet frame time requirements. On a last-gen 2080 Ti, it renders complete skies with volumetric atmosphere, clouds, and fog in under 0.7ms.
While not VR-first, Expanse supports single-pass instanced VR, with experimental support that will evolve toward production readiness as more users adopt it. It is compatible only with VR platforms supported by HDRP.
2026-03-18 00:00:00-update version:Expanse - Volumetric Skies, Clouds, and Atmospheres in HDRP v1.7.4
