Foliage Shader

ArkerionFoliage is a lit Shader Graph (Built-in, URP, HDRP) that sways meshes in the wind with vertex animation. It needs no scripts and works for grass, leaves, bushes and small plants – with flat colours or with textures.

Use it on your own foliage

1. Assign the shader to a foliage material.
2. Apply the material to a mesh.
3. Make sure the mesh has vertex colours (see below).
4. Adjust wind, colour and SSS in the material.

Vertex colours

The shader uses vertex colour to control how much each part moves:

• Black (0) – no movement (the base of the plant)
• White (1) – full movement (the tips)

A vertical gradient from bottom to top gives stable roots, moving tips and natural wind.

Textures (all optional)

• Main Tex (albedo) – the base colour; used as the base when the gradient is off
• Normal Map – a standard tangent-space normal map; Normal Influence sets its strength
• SSS texture (thickness) – greyscale; white = thin areas with stronger scattering, black = thick areas. Typically used for leaves.

The shader also works with flat colours only.

Colour gradient (optional)

• Gradient Strength – 0 turns the gradient off (pure Main Tex), 1 is the full gradient
• Top Color – for the upper parts, usually brighter and warmer
• Bottom Color – for the lower parts, usually darker to ground the plant

Subsurface scattering

Light passing through thin foliage:

• SSS Color – tint of the scattered light; yellow-green tones work best
• SSS Intensity – overall strength; 0 turns SSS off
• SSS Power – sharpness: lower is a softer glow, higher gives tighter highlights (0–5)

Wind

• Scale – wind noise scale. Higher values give larger, slower waves. Recommended: 0.5–2
• Wind Speed (X / Y) – direction and speed in world space (X = world X, Y = world Z). Different values avoid uniform motion.
• Wind Strength – overall movement. Recommended: 0.05–0.2
• Phase Strength – how much instances move out of sync. Lower is synchronized, higher looks organic. Recommended: 0.05–0.3

Lighting

• Normal Influence – how strongly normals affect lighting; high values can look unnatural on foliage
• Smoothness – keep it very low (0–0.1); higher values give plastic-looking highlights

The darker bottom of a plant comes from the lighting, not from the colour settings.