Realistic Smoke Grenade VFX

A smoke grenade visual effect asset for Unity supporting both URP and HDRP pipelines. The smoke looks volumetric and realistic thanks to a clever fake sphere lighting technique that simulates how light wraps around and penetrates a cloud of smoke, giving each particle a sense of depth and roundness rather than looking like flat billboards. The flipbook animation cycles through 64 frames of pre rendered smoke, creating smooth organic motion as particles spawn from a tight point and slowly billow outward, growing in size over their lifetime through a weighted curve that starts small and expands naturally. Particles drift gently with near zero start speed and no gravity, so the smoke hangs in the air like a real grenade cloud. Depth fade ensures particles blend smoothly where they intersect scene geometry instead of clipping harshly.

The HDRP version exposes several parameters you can tweak at runtime or in the inspector: color and alpha gradient to control the smoke tint and fade over its lifetime, normal scale and normal bending factor for adjusting how strongly the lighting reacts to the normal map, size over life curve, multiply alpha and multiply size for quick global adjustments, a force vector to push the smoke in any direction (defaults to a gentle upward drift), spawn position and radius to control where particles originate, and separate base texture and normal map texture slots if you want to swap in your own flipbook sheets. The URP version lets you adjust the main color, light highlight color (HDR), flipbook grid dimensions, depth fade distance, and soft particle factor through the material properties. Both versions loop continuously and can be dropped into any scene as a prefab or VFX asset with no scripting required.