Adding More Depth to Particles in Unity

3D/Technical Artist Florian Gelzenleuchter, also known as FLOGELZ, has shared a neat VFX trick the artist discovered while setting up a stylized dust cloud shader in Unity. The author's trick consists of making a Heigth Map for a particle and using it as an offset for the Soft Particle feature in Unity. According to FLOGELZ, this method allows adding more depth to the VFX and making the particles "less cardboardy".

And here's the entire workflow behind the dust cloud FX:

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