A real-time Unity technical art study focused on procedural moss materials, shell-based short fur, subtle VFX, and atmospheric look development in URP.
Preview.mp4
This project explores how a stone statue can be transformed into a soft, moss-covered subject through procedural shading, layered shell geometry, VFX Graph, lighting, and post-processing.
The visual direction combines short moss fibers, granular surface detail, soft highlights, floating particles, and shallow depth of field to create a dreamy macro-photography atmosphere.
- Procedural moss and stone material built with Shader Graph
- Upward-facing moss distribution driven by surface normals
- Shell-based short fur with layered alpha clipping
- Noise-driven variation in moss coverage, length, bump, and smoothness
- Shader debug modes for inspecting intermediate masks
- Three subtle VFX Graph layers for silhouette glow, surface sparkle, and airborne dust
- URP look development using Depth of Field, Bloom, Vignette, Film Grain, and color grading
- Height-masked vertex animation for vegetation wind
The moss material combines object-space procedural noise with an upward-facing normal mask. This makes the moss distribution independent from most UV distortion while still favoring naturally exposed upper surfaces.
Additional controls include ambient occlusion, Fresnel response, smoothness variation, procedural bump detail, and adjustable moss coverage.
Stone variation · Moss noise · Upward mask · Final moss coverage · AO factor · Moss lighting · Final material
The shader also includes debug views for checking the major intermediate masks during material tuning.
The short moss fibers are created by rendering multiple shell layers around the base mesh.
Each shell is displaced along the surface normal according to its layer index and the configured moss length. Outer layers use stronger alpha clipping, creating a dense base and progressively sparser tips. Noise is used to vary the local fiber length across the surface.
Base mesh → increasing shell layers → final short-fur silhouette
Three VFX Graph systems support the final presentation:
MossSurface_BaseDust— soft green particles around the statue silhouetteHighlight_Sparkle— subtle random sparkles on the surfaceFloatingMicroDust— slowly rising airborne particles
These effects are intentionally restrained and are designed to work together with lighting, Bloom, and Depth of Field rather than appear as isolated effects.
The final atmosphere is shaped with Bokeh Depth of Field, Bloom, Vignette, Film Grain, color adjustments, and separate shadows/midtones/highlights grading.
Supporting plants use height-masked vertex displacement. The lower part of each mesh remains stable while the upper part receives stronger directional movement, producing a simple wind-swaying effect.
- Shader Graph material development
- Procedural moss mask design
- Shell fur implementation
- VFX Graph setup
- Lighting and post-processing
- Vegetation vertex animation
- Shader debug views and parameter organization
- Scene integration and visual presentation
- Engine: Unity 2022.3.62f1c1
- Render Pipeline: Universal Render Pipeline
- Shader Development: Shader Graph
- Visual Effects: VFX Graph
- Main Scene:
Assets/Scenes/statue2.unity
- Clone or download this repository.
- Open the project with Unity 2022.3.62f1c1
- Open
Assets/Scenes/statue2.unity. - Enter Play Mode.
- Performance profiling and overdraw analysis
- Quality presets for different performance targets
- Further scene and vegetation refinement
All 3D models used in this project were sourced from third-party asset websites and remain the property of their respective creators.