The Toby Foliage Engine

About The Toby Foliage Engine – Unity VFX & Shader Pack

Unity Foliage Shader and Wind System

The Toby Foliage Engine provides shader-based foliage animation with customizable wind, seasonal effects, PBR shading, and plant interaction. Its single-pivot approach uses mesh-based vertex position volumes to produce foliage movement, while material settings control wind behavior and other visual parameters.

Wind and Foliage Controls

The system includes a Global Controller for environmental settings such as wind and seasons, plus a wind-direction gizmo and two interchangeable wind modes: Gentle Breeze and Strong Wind. Seasonal controls support snow, wetness, randomized color variations, and contrast adjustments. Trunk and branch bending, leaf flutter, cloth wind options, and player or physics-based plant interaction are also included.

Shading Features

The vegetation shader uses PBR shading across Built-in, URP, and HDRP pipelines. Other rendering features include translucency AO, translucency fluffiness, vertex ambient occlusion, self-occlusion, custom secondary normal maps, emission, dual-color albedo control, perspective correction for grass, and configurable specular properties. An Uber Cliff Shader provides tri-planar cliff rendering with grass and snow coverage, while the terrain shader supports seasonal and snow effects.

The package also includes Amplify Shader Functions, full mesh shader integration, an Appendices System for attaching hanging objects to bodies or pivots, a Material Matcher, and a Terrain Plants to Prefab Converter. Amplify Impostor integration provides custom impostor shaders with TTFE texture packing, season effects, and Global Controller support. Nine example scenes are included.

Compatibility and Technical Details

TTFE supports Built-in, URP, and HDRP, with URP 6.3+ and 6.5+ supported out of the box. It has been tested with Gaia and Nature Renderer. Shader Model 4.5+ capable devices are required, including desktop and high-end mobile hardware. The system uses instancing; static batching is not supported, and cross-fading with instancing breaks instancing.

The included vegetation uses PBR materials and four LODs. Example meshes include grasses under 2000 triangles per clump, bushes under 4000 to 700 triangles, and several named tree meshes ranging from 24516 to 39849 triangles. Texture atlases are primarily 4096 × 4096px, with additional 2048 × 2048px, 1024 × 1024px, 512 × 512px, and 256 × 256px textures.

Use Cases

• Foliage-heavy environments requiring configurable wind and seasonal changes.
• Terrain-based vegetation workflows using the terrain shader and Terrain Plants to Prefab Converter.
• Projects requiring interactive plants affected by player or physics-based interactions.
• Scenes using Built-in, URP, or HDRP foliage materials with customizable PBR and translucency effects.

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