Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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✔️ Works in 2020.3

In this video, I show how to create a sand dune material using Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP) Shader Graph! There's no textures required - instead I use various functions to construct the needed shapes. The finished graph includes color, shines, and a normal map. In fact, I go over a way to create a smooth normal map from a generated height map.

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💬 Video transcript
► docs.google.com/document/d/1o3lJrNfRPGfrm7aF4lgUl4ozTv-yeKO9NuhxV9cbth8/edit?usp=sharing

📜 Required scripts
► gist.github.com/NedMakesGames/d2b511d5bb911ec646031e70eb4dc25b

⏲️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Project setup
1:37 The height map
6:05 Color
9:12 Simple normals
9:50 Shines
12:15 Adjustable normals
16:10 Wrap up and credits

🎖️ Credits and references:
• 3dEx: Substance Designer - Stylized Sand Material- youtube.com/watch?v=bUBtT4f89jM
• Unity Technologies: Polygon Node - docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.shadergraph@7.1/manual/Polygon-Node.html
• Ronja Böhringer: White Noise - ronja-tutorials.com/post/024-white-noise
• Ronja Böhringer: Tiling Noise - ronja-tutorials.com/post/029-tiling-noise
• Adam Bielecki: Earth like Planets - assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/packs/earth-like-planets-32790
• Yakov Galka: Calculating a normal vector from a height map - stackoverflow.com/questions/5281261/generating-a-normal-map-from-a-height-map

Music:
Unwritten Return by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4570-unwritten-return
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license

#GameDev #IndieDev #Unity