unity-vfx

A guide for creating visual effects in Unity, such as particles, impacts, trails, ambient effects, and destruction effects. Unity is a game-development engine.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan particle budgets, distance-based quality reduction, effect culling, reusable effect patterns, pooling, and C#-triggered effects.
Why use it?
It helps choose between Unity’s newer VFX Graph and older Particle System, while addressing common performance issues such as excessive transparent-particle drawing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the hades plugin — 22 skills, 6 commands shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thearcforge/hades/unity-vfx
Any agent
npx skills add TheArcForge/Hades --skill unity-vfx
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheArcForge/Hades

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install hades, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 6 commands.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,955 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00032 $0.05955
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.02978
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.01191
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00596

Measured 3d ago against content hash fa1c0824af87, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

unity-vfx scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

ClaudeCodePlugin/skills/unity-vfx/SKILL.md · 674 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 674 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Unity VFX

Deep decision framework for visual effects in Unity. Covers VFX Graph vs legacy Particle System selection, per-effect performance budgets, LOD and culling strategies, common effect patterns, and pooling for frequent spawns. Profile overdraw first — transparent particles are the most common GPU bottleneck in Unity projects.

When to Apply

Activate when the conversation involves:

  • Choosing between VFX Graph and the legacy Particle System for a new effect
  • Profiling or reducing GPU overdraw from particle effects
  • Scaling particle counts or quality across device tiers
  • Implementing LOD or culling for effects at distance
  • Building reusable VFX patterns (impacts, trails, ambient, destruction)
  • Pooling VFX instances to avoid Instantiate/Destroy cost
  • Triggering effects from C# (SendEvent, parameter injection)

Do NOT activate for general rendering performance questions — those go to hades:unity-performance. For shader authoring inside VFX Graph, cross-reference hades:unity-shaders-urp or hades:unity-shaders-hdrp.

Project Context Check

Before making recommendations, gather project-specific context so advice is calibrated to the actual codebase.

  1. Determine the render pipeline — this governs VFX Graph eligibility:

    • Call project_settings(section: "renderPipeline") — VFX Graph requires URP or HDRP. If Built-in is returned, VFX Graph is not available and all advice must target the legacy Particle System. Do not suggest VFX Graph if this returns Built-in.
  2. Audit existing VFX usage:

    • Call graph_query(edgeKind: "references", edgeTargetNamePattern: "ParticleSystem", edgeTargetKind: "Class") — inventories legacy particle systems in the scene. Large counts on mobile are an immediate concern for CPU emission cost.
    • Call graph_query(edgeKind: "references", edgeTargetNamePattern: "VisualEffect", edgeTargetKind: "Class") — inventories VFX Graph instances. Shows whether the team has already adopted VFX Graph.
  3. Check documented VFX decisions:

    • Call recall_memory("VFX particles effects") — retrieves any particle budgets, platform limits, or effect decisions already recorded by the team.
    • If a new decision is reached, call propose_memory_update to record the budget or pattern for future reference.

Read the full file on GitHub · 674 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 674 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A fa1c0824af87

Subscribe to this mod's changes

unity-vfx is a skill published in the GitHub repository TheArcForge/Hades (27 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 5,955 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories