Table of Content

• About
• Usage
• Troubleshooting
• Changelog

"Cartoon FX Remaster FREE" is a collection of stylized visual effects mainly made with Particle Systems (using Unity's CPU-based particle system 'Shuriken').

Featuring:

• Custom shaders with special effects such as dissolve animation, UV distortion, lit particles, edge fading, HDR colors, single channel textures for reduced memory usage, shadow casting and dithering
• Specialized shader to draw pixel-perfect circles and rings while reducing overdraw (using a low-poly ring mesh instead of a quad)
• Optimized meshes where relevant to reduce overdraw/fill-rate issues
• Custom script that can animate attached lights and perform screen-shake for relevant effects
• High-resolution hand-drawn textures
• Custom shader format that will only compile the code for the currently active render pipeline (Built-In Render Pipeline or Universal Render Pipeline (URP))

This is the free version containing a sample of effects taken from the four commercial packs.
The license is the same as the commercial packs, including commercial use of the effects in games and apps, according to the license terms.
The full license can be found here: https://unity.com/legal/as-terms (Appendix 1, End User License Agreement)

Render Pipelines

"Cartoon FX Remaster FREE" supports the Built-In and Universal Render Pipelines.

It uses a special custom shader format that will only compile the relevant shader code for the currently active render pipeline in the project.

If you change the render pipeline after having imported the assets, then you will have to reimport the shaders so that they compile for the newly selected render pipeline (right-click on the Shaders folder, and hit Reimport).

Legacy Effects

"Cartoon FX Remaster FREE" is called so because it is a made from scratch remake of the old "Cartoon FX Pack FREE" set of effects, released circa 2012.
Those old effects are still included if you are curious or want to use them: they are in the Cartoon FX FREE (old legacy effects) package and need to be extracted through Unity.

Spawn Effects

"Cartoon FX Remaster FREE" effects are provided as individual prefabs. Simply spawn the prefabs (e.g. using Instantiate) and activate the instantiated GameObject to play the effect.

GameObjects will auto-destroy themselves when the effect has finished playing. You can change that behavior in the CFXR_Effect script attached (to either Destroy, Disable or do nothing after the effect has finished playing).

CFXR Script file

You can change some global script settings in the CFXR_Effect.cs file, by uncommenting the global defines at the top:

• Disable Camera Shake: will disable all of the Camera shake code, if you don't need it or have your own solution
• Disable Lights: will keep the Lights attached to the effect deactivated
• Disable Clear Behavior: will disable the code handing the clear behavior after an effect has fully finished playing

CFXR Settings file

You can change some global shader settings in the CFXR_Settings.cginc file:

• Disable Soft Particles: in case you don't need that feature, you can globally disable it for all CFXR effects (Soft Particles in Unity's built-in shaders will still work)
• Orthographic Soft Particles: if you are using an Orthographic camera, then enable this to make soft particles work properly
• Global HDR Multiplier: some effects use HDR colors (colors that go above the [0-1] range), so that they work nicely with post effects like bloom and simulate illuminated particles.
  Depending on your bloom settings, you may want to adjust that multiplier value to tune up or down the final colors.
• Enable Point Lights: enables additional lights affecting lit particles (else they will only be affected by the main directional light). This is enabled by default.