🌳 Translucent Foliage Shader Graph

Plants, foliage and vegetation are really challenging to get right! It requires a custom made shader to tackle issues like translucency and wind. In this tutorial, I show how to create a foliage shader in the Unity URP (Universal Render Pipeline) Shader Graph. It supports all light types, shadows, and baked lighting, and includes several strategies for translucency, like separate normals for diffuse lighting and subsurface scattering. I also implement programmable wind animation and show a simple method to reconstruct normals. For grass billboards and tree leaf cards, I also demonstrate how to create double sided materials with normal map support.


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Lighting Math Explorer Try out Lighting Math Explorer to help visualize the lighting formulas showcased in this video.