// Overview
Crowd Cheer System is a ready-made solution for rendering large, lively crowds in Unity URP - with no rigged characters and no CPU load. The crowd is drawn on atlas-textured planes and animated entirely on the GPU in an HLSL shader, so it holds performance even on standalone VR (Meta Quest) and mobile.
In version 2.0 the asset went from „just a shader" to a full scripting system: one scene-level component drives the whole crowd, and waves and jumps fire from a key, a UI button, a collider or any gameplay event - no code required.
This is my own product, built from scratch and released under the Serwus Studio label. It is a separate piece of work from the crowd shader I wrote for Revocure - different project, different implementation.
// Demo / Showreel
// Key features
// GPU Shader
Atlas crowd shader (HLSL)
Crowd on atlas-textured planes, animated fully on the GPU. No rigged meshes - cheap on VR and mobile. Material-driven: density, animation speed, UV tiling, randomization, distance fade, tint, alpha clip.
// CrowdManager
One component per scene
A single slider controls density, speed, fade, color, randomization and quality across every crowd plane at once - from one place in the scene.
// CrowdController
Per-plane control
Atlas layout and UV tiling at the single-plane level. Uses MaterialPropertyBlock, so the shared material is never modified - zero extra material instances.
// CrowdWaveTrigger
Waves and jumps, no code
Fire a wave or jump from a keyboard key, a UI button or a collider zone. No code - ready for prototyping and production.
// La Ola + Jump
Mexican wave and bounce
Built-in La Ola wave plus a jump/bounce effect with wave-style propagation (a staggered, rolling crowd bounce).
// Clip Bounds
Clip to the stands
World-space clip bounds in the shader - clip the crowd to a box (e.g. stadium stands). Disabled by default, so zero cost when unused.
// Scripting API
Full runtime API
Control every setting and trigger effects from any event: TriggerWave, TriggerWaveFrom / Toward, TriggerJump and more.
// Custom Inspectors
Preview in Play mode
Custom inspectors for the Manager and Controller with wave/jump preview buttons in Play mode. Two demo scenes: Concert and Stadium.
// Gallery
// My role
- HLSL shader - design and implementation of the atlas crowd shader with GPU animation, La Ola wave, clip bounds and full material-parameter control.
- Scripting system - component architecture (CrowdManager / CrowdController / CrowdWaveTrigger) and runtime API, using MaterialPropertyBlock instead of instancing materials.
- Tooling - custom inspectors with in-Play-mode effect previews, so the whole thing can be set up without touching code.
- Optimization - profiling and tuning for standalone VR (Meta Quest) and mobile - keeping the frame budget with a large crowd.
- Product - two demo scenes (Concert, Stadium), prefabs, materials, EN + PL documentation, and publishing to the Unity Asset Store and Fab.
- Maintenance - supporting the asset after release: both Unity input backends (legacy and the new Input System) are handled behind preprocessor switches, so the package drops into a Unity 6 project without the customer having to touch it.
The tool the buyer actually uses
CrowdManager collects every crowd plane in the scene - 42 in this stadium - and pushes global settings to all of them at once. Wave direction, speed and width, jump height with propagation and per-unit delay, distance fade and quality profiles are all exposed as sliders. The separate CrowdWaveTrigger fires a wave from a key press, a collider zone or a UnityEvent, with a cooldown. Labels are bilingual EN/PL, and the inspector warns that play-mode-only buttons do nothing in edit mode.// Specs
ENGINE
Unity 2020.3 LTS+
RENDER
URP 10+
SHADER
HLSL (custom)
PLATFORMS
PC · Mobile · Standalone VR
VERSION
2.0.1
DOCS
EN + PL
// Tech Stack
Unity URPHLSL
ShaderC#
MaterialPropertyBlockCustom Editor
Meta QuestMobile Optimization