HelioPath – Geographically Accurate Sun

HelioPath puts the sun where it physically belongs.

Give it a location, a date and a time, and HelioPath drives your directional light to the astronomically correct altitude and azimuth, the same sun the real sky would show. No hand-keyed light rotations, no "close enough" day-night curves. On top of that accurate sun it adds a physically modelled atmospheric halo and procedural diffraction spikes, for a sun that does not just sit in the right place. It looks right too.

Unreal ships geographically correct sun positioning out of the box. Unity does not. HelioPath brings that accuracy to Unity. It runs in both URP and HDRP, with Single-Pass Instanced stereo for VR and AR, all from one drop-in prefab.

WHY HELIOPATH

Most "sun" assets either drift a light in a lazy circle, or bundle a giant weather suite you do not need. HelioPath does one thing properly: the correct sun, modern pipeline ready, with the optical detail that sells the shot.

Everything is customizable. Time of day and location can be set or animated at runtime, the halo angle and colour, the spike count, length, animation and seed, and the altitude-based colour temperature are all exposed. You can also run a pure sun-path mode with just the positioner and light, no effects, for stylised or indoor scenes.

PERFECT FOR

Architectural visualisation and sun/shadow studies (including on-site AR sun studies), urban planning, simulation and training, outdoor AR and VR, and any game that wants a believable sky and a sun that tracks real time of day.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

• HelioPathPositioner (sun position and light drive)
• HelioPathRadiance (halo, spikes, colour temperature).
• Three prefabs: pure sun path (pipeline-agnostic), URP, and HDRP.
• URP Renderer Feature and HDRP Custom Pass, sharing one HLSL algorithm.
• Two ready-to-run demo scenes (URP and HDRP).