Requires Blender 5.0 or newer. AtmosRay 1.2.1 remains the release for Blender 4.2–4.5.

The real volumetric fog stays the base. 2.0 adds optional layers on top of it; none of them is switched on in an existing scene.

Added

• Ray Cards — clean additive light shafts drawn through the openings of the Ray Blockers pattern, plus a cone for the Gobo Projector. They start with four shafts, the ones nearest the middle of the shot; Shafts raises that, up to the whole pattern. Their brightness is worked out from the fog: Intensity 1 matches it and blends in, the default of 3 lets the shafts stand out (10–26% brighter inside the shafts in the built-in moods). Shafts stop at the surface that blocks the light, follow the Sun in all three lighting modes, and never light the scene. Controls: Shafts, Intensity, Length, Softness, Dust and Refresh Ray Cards.
• Cinematic Finish — an optional compositor pass with Glow, Halation, Vignette and Grain. Nothing changes until Apply; Restore and Remove put the compositor back exactly as it was. An existing compositor setup gets one node added before its output and is otherwise untouched.
• Shadow Haze — a faint colour of the fog's own in the parts the light does not reach, for warm rays against cool shadows. Off at 0.
• Back Left and Back Right Sun aims — three-quarter backlight, about 2.7 times brighter than side light in open fog.
• Scene-Safe in EEVEE — the ray Sun lights only the atmosphere there too, as it already did in Cycles.
• Denoiser preference — OpenImageDenoise or OptiX, saved for all projects. Best Setup, Update and the quality profiles keep your choice.
• Ray Doctor suggests Ray Cards where thin shafts will render soft or noisy, and warns when cards are on with nothing to shape them.
• Ray Cards and Shadow Haze settings are saved in user presets and shot profiles.

Changed

• Cycles, Scene-Safe with ray blockers: fog renders about 1–10% darker (Forest God Rays 1%, Cathedral Rays 5%, Dusty Warehouse 10%). The fog is now on its own light's shadow list, so the light dims as it crosses the fog instead of reaching the far side at full strength. Raise Sun Strength slightly to match an older render. Scenes with Ray Blockers set to None, Physical and Match Existing are unchanged.
• EEVEE now honours Scene-Safe. The ray Sun no longer lights your surfaces there. Switch to Physical Scene Light if you relied on that.
• Cathedral Rays, Forest God Rays, Dust Through Blinds and Golden Hour Haze gain warm light and cool Shadow Haze when the mood is applied again.
• Generated blockers lit from a diagonal Manual angle are larger and sit further back the next time they rebuild, so they cover the whole fog.

Fixed

• Generated blockers now follow the Sun when the aim changes. Before, they stayed aimed at the old direction until Regenerate.
• Blockers lit diagonally left an unshadowed strip at the edge of the frame, and a corner of the fog poked through into full sun.
• Dust Motes: the particle size curve now links on Blender 5.
• A generated blocker or the Ray Cards object deleted by hand now comes back on the next update. Before, the blocker stayed gone until Regenerate, and the cards came back empty until Refresh Ray Cards.
• Rebuilding Ray Cards (Refresh Ray Cards, or a change to Shafts, Length or the Sun aim) could send a shaft straight through a floor, wall or pillar. The cards being replaced got in the way of the new shafts' ray-casts.
• Ray Cards cut by a wall, pillar or other object no longer end in a hard diagonal line. The cut now sits exactly on the edge that casts it and the light fades back in beside it; Softness sets how much.

Known limits

• Ray Cards follow the generated blockers and the gobo, not real windows in the scene. In Cycles they do not show in mirrors or through glass.
• In EEVEE a Scene-Safe scene renders darker overall than in Cycles, where the lit fog also bounces light onto surfaces.
• Generated blockers are sized to the fog volume. In a narrow real interior most of the pattern lands outside the walls; light such a room through its own windows with Physical Scene Light.
• With the generated blockers, Back Left and Back Right give softer shafts than Backlight, Side or Top. No built-in mood uses them.
• Shadow Haze is in the main fog only; Fog Planes and Ray Cards do not carry it.
• Ray Cards add Cycles render time: about 10–20% for the few shafts they start with, up to twice as long with twenty. EEVEE is not affected.
• Cinematic Finish covers the main compositor output, not extra File Output branches.
• The OptiX denoiser path is tested with a stand-in; it has not been run on an NVIDIA machine.

Added

• New one-click Create Best Setup workflow.
• Automatically reuses a selected or assigned scene Sun.
• Chooses the strongest enabled Sun when multiple Suns exist.
• Opens the invoking viewport in Rendered mode for immediate feedback.
• Pro mode now displays estimated base transmission across the atmosphere volume.

Improved

• Existing Suns remain completely read-only.
• No redundant ARAY_Sun is created when matching an existing Sun.
• Without a usable Sun, AtmosRay creates a Scene-Safe Sun and generated blockers.
• The creation button becomes Update Atmosphere afterward and preserves Pro-mode edits.
• Fog Amount now interpolates physical extinction, producing more natural density changes.
• Dusty Warehouse’s default visibility improved from approximately 178 m to 59 m.
• Dust Through Blinds now provides stronger indoor atmospheric depth.
• Ray Doctor now evaluates fog using optical depth, volume size, and scene-unit scale.

Preserved

• Best Setup does not change the existing Sun’s direction, color, or energy.
• Camera lens, framing, exposure, and render engine remain untouched.
• Existing saved scenes retain their authored density until the mood or Fog Amount is adjusted.