CrowPSX – Retro Rendering Shader Suite

🎮 Give your Unity project the character of early 3D games

CrowPSX is a complete retro shader and material-authoring toolkit for Unity's Built-in Render Pipeline and the Universal Render Pipeline.

Create unstable geometry, warped textures, limited-color lighting, and the unmistakable visual energy of the PS1 era, without restricting every material to the same look. CrowPSX can produce anything from harsh survival-horror environments to colorful stylized worlds and retro-inspired PBR scenes.

🧰 More than a single shader

CrowPSX includes a complete family of shaders for surfaces, vertex-painted materials, animated foliage, terrain, particles, projected decals, and procedural skies.

Build environments with moving vegetation, layered ground materials, atmospheric skies, glowing signs, graffiti, smoke, distortion, painted surface transitions, and inverted-hull outlines while maintaining one consistent visual style.

Default, Lite, and PBR options let you balance appearance and performance for each material. Retro effects can be subtle and stable or deliberately exaggerated depending on the needs of your project.

🔁 One material, both pipelines

Every lit shader carries a Universal and a Built-in SubShader in the same asset, and Unity selects the one matching the active pipeline. Materials keep working when a project switches pipelines, with nothing to copy, reassign or upgrade, and no separate URP shader menu. Detection is automatic, and builds strip the passes belonging to the pipeline you are not using.

🎨 Powerful material creation without the clutter

A custom themed inspector organizes CrowPSX's extensive controls into a clear, searchable workflow.

Presets provide useful starting points for different retro styles, while contextual guidance and material diagnostics help identify ineffective, expensive, or incorrectly configured settings. Modified-property filtering makes it easy to see exactly what has changed.

For larger projects, the included Material Manager can find and edit compatible materials across selections, scenes, or the complete project. Convert materials, copy settings, apply presets, and update rendering options in batches. It can also scan an entire scene or project for material problems in one pass, with the fixes one click away.

🌍 Built for complete environments

CrowPSX is designed to support an entire game rather than a single showcase material.

The package includes:

• A self-contained playable demonstration scene
• Example environments, materials, and effects
• A first-person sample controller
• Material presets and setup helpers
• An installation validator
• Complete documentation and troubleshooting guides

CrowPSX also supports stereoscopic rendering and includes comfort controls for adapting retro geometry effects to VR.

📷 Optional free camera-effects companion

Want to push the presentation further?

CrowFX is a free, open-source companion package for adding camera-level effects such as virtual resolution, palettes, dithering, RGB bleed, channel jitter, ghosting, edge outlines, and more.

CrowFX is completely optional. CrowPSX works independently and does not require it.

⚙️ Compatibility

• Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer
• Built-in Render Pipeline or Universal Render Pipeline. HDRP shaders are not included.
• Under URP, depth-volume decals and outlines need a renderer feature on the active Universal Renderer. The material inspector detects this and adds it in one click, and the installation validator reports it.
• The sample first-person controller uses Unity's legacy Input Manager, so the demo scene needs Active Input Handling set to Input Manager (Old) or Both. The shaders themselves have no input dependency.
• Polybrush and Bakery are supported as optional workflow additions but are not required.

📜 Third-party notice

CrowPSX includes JetBrains Mono under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; selected Screaming Brain Studios and Kenney assets under CC0 1.0; Unity Built-in Terrain source under the MIT License; Pixabay sample audio under the Pixabay Content License; and publisher-authored Tree It model exports under the Tree It output terms.

See Third-Party Notices.txt in the package for complete details.