How to Fix Screen-Space Heat Haze Distortion Not Showing in Unity

Heat haze warps the already-rendered scene, so it needs access to the camera color buffer. Without the opaque texture or correct queue, there is no source to distort. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Enable the Opaque Texture

In the URP asset turn on Opaque Texture so the shader can sample _CameraOpaqueTexture. Without it the distortion shader has no scene image to refract.

2. Render after opaques

Set the distortion material to the Transparent queue so it executes after the opaque texture is captured; rendering it too early gives an empty or last-frame source.

3. Offset by a distortion map

Sample the scene color at UVs offset by a scrolling normal/noise map scaled by a strength value. Animate the offset over time to produce the rising shimmer of heat haze.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.