Weatherscape — Introduction

Weatherscape makes the materials of a Universal Render Pipeline scene age and react to the weather the way real materials do. It is not a tint or a dirt decal: every material family fails by its own mechanism, in the places where that mechanism acts.

• Paint crazes, blisters and flakes along its cracks, showing the plaster underneath — it never shows the brick directly.
• Plaster spalls where damp and running water work it, showing the brick or stone.
• Steel rusts where water stays: lower edges, horizontal faces, crevices, around chips in its paint.
• Copper browns everywhere, then turns green where the rain washes it.
• Wood silvers in the sun, checks along its grain and rots near the ground.

Snow settles on what faces the sky, dust settles in sheltered places, rain darkens porous surfaces, and wind moves flags, awnings, grass and plants — all from one scene-wide Weather.

Not released yet

Weatherscape is not on a store yet. These pages describe the package as it is being prepared for its first release, so details such as the price and the store page will follow.

The one idea to remember

Weather — what happens now: wind, wetness, snow, dust, age × Exposure — where each point of a surface is: its edges, its sky, its sun, its rain, its height above ground → the material's response — each family ages by its own physics.

The Weather is one component per scene. Exposure is estimated from each surface's orientation, and an Exposure Group bakes it from the real geometry in a few seconds. The materials are ordinary Unity materials with Weatherscape shaders, tuned in their inspectors.

What ships in the package

Area	Details
Unity	6000.3 or newer, in linear colour space
Render pipeline	Universal RP 17.3 or newer. URP only — no Built-in or HDRP
Graphics device	Shader model 4.5: DirectX 11/12, Vulkan, Metal, recent Android GPUs
Rendering paths	Forward, Forward+ and Deferred, with SSAO, decals, light layers, Unity and Bakery lightmaps, light probes, reflection probes, fog and the SRP Batcher
Material families	8 — Wall, Masonry, Metal, Wood, Plastic, Glass, Fabric, Vegetation — over one shared shader library, plus a library of ready-made materials for each
Climates	4 — Temperate, Tropical, Arid and Alpine, each a small asset you can restart from and tune
Source	Full C# and HLSL, no DLLs, in four assemblies: Runtime, Editor, Samples and Tests
Tests	EditMode tests for the exposure bake, the Weather globals, wind (including GPU/CPU parity), material defaults and a shader compile matrix over every pass and keyword set
Demo	Samples/Demo/Weatherscape Demo.unity — nine stations and a runtime weather panel
Textures	Made by Deepwave. The base images were created with generative AI (OpenAI image generation), then processed with Deepwave's own tools: seam repair, re-tiling, derived normal, roughness, height and occlusion maps. The shared data textures are procedural. This is the generative-AI disclosure the Asset Store requires

Highlights

• One Weather for the scene — wind in metres per second with direction, gusts and turbulence, plus wetness, snow, dust and an Age multiplier. Presets (Calm, Breezy, Rain, Storm, Snowfall, Dusty) set them in one click, and every value can be animated or scripted.

• Eight families, eight failure modes — a Wall is paint over plaster over brick or stone; Masonry covers concrete, stone, brick and tiles; Metal covers steel, copper, zinc and aluminium; Wood, Plastic and Glass each get their own model; Fabric and Vegetation move in the wind.

• Works before any bake — assign a Wall material and it is weathered at once, from an estimate of its exposure. A bake teaches materials the real geometry: edges wear, grime collects under ledges, water streaks run down from sills, damp rises from the ground and rust runs down from iron.

• Wind that gameplay reads — the analytic wind field is the same on the CPU and the GPU, so Wind.GetVelocity returns the wind the shaders show. Wind Sources (directional, radial and shelter) change it locally.

• Fabric and vegetation in the same wind — flags and awnings sway, billow and turn with the wind; grass, leaves, bark and brush bend, twist and flutter, with correct motion vectors.

• Editor tools that explain themselves — inspectors list what is wrong and offer one-click fixes; the Weatherscape window gathers the scene's weather, the material library and the debug views; Create From Maps builds layers from your own PBR textures.

What it deliberately is not

• Not for Built-in or HDRP. Weatherscape is URP only.
• Exposure is baked for static geometry. Moving and unbaked objects read a coarse Exposure Volume or the orientation estimate.
• Glass is transparent, without refraction. It is forward-rendered in every rendering path, like URP's own transparent materials.
• At most eight Wind Sources act at once — the ones nearest the camera.

Where to go next

• Getting started — a weathered wall, a Weather and a flag in the wind in about five minutes
• Tools overview — see Weatherscape alongside Deepwave's other Unity packages
• The package's own Documentation/Manual.md and Documentation/Technical Reference.md (included with the install) cover every concept, property, texture format and performance figure in detail.