Good leaf shader/leaf material practices

Unity Engine
1

The only asset I’ve found that explicitly deals with foliage shaders is the Advanced Foliage Shader Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making It hasn’t been updated for Unity 5.3.5 so I hesitate to buy it. Are there any others?

Also, before I buy anything, I want to be sure that I’m using Unity to the fullest. All I’ve done in the below image is create a cut-out standard material and add a leaf albedo. I don’t know how to add translucency, shine, or whatever else you’re supposed to add to leaves to make them look good! I haven’t found any tutorials on this.


So, any advice about good foliage shaders or tutorials on how to make foliage look good in Unity would be appreciated!

2

When working with things like leaves, etc, you should generally turn off culling of faces, as you would want to see both sides. If you do this, you will have to invert the normals for the backface (using VFACE, multiple passess, etc). There is a really well made translucency shader on the unifywiki, that should be good when used double sided.

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Translucent_Shader

The best place to learn shader writing, from my experience, is the Unity Docs:

1 Like
3

I also found this shader: [Shader] Moving Trees Grass in Wind Outside of Terrain - Community Showcases - Unity Discussions
It works well, and adds a wind effect to non-terrain trees.

I guess my task is to combine that shader with the translucency shader!