BEST WAY OF MAKING GRASS! looks a lot like speed tree grass, runs as fast and looks just as good!

@Cactus_on_Fire OMG, would you share your sample scene to learn from it? It's really awesome.

 

This thread is pretty old and as such i don't have the original grass i was working on (it was a first prototype), since then ive worked on using unitys standard grass placement on terrains for open world maps and tweaking settings so its not so obvious that it is a bunch of planes. I have also learnt how to make some decent grass meshes and if i have the time i will make a sample scene and upload it here for you with a few different ways of making spectacular grass. Here is what ive done using unity's grass placement method:

 

What settings did you use for the grass?

 

My grass texture is a 2468x1467 texture (wider than taller)

 

Thank you for the reply. And any grass asset you'd recommend using? I've been struggling with grass lately and it's all I'd need to finish a first version of my scene. Also I have some grass that's pre-colored, is there a way to keep that color schema without Unity's grass editor editing that up?

Thank you in advance!

 

After searching and searching i never really found any good grass asset or even textures and ended up taking my own photo and doing some Photoshop magic. As for the colour im not too sure how to keep the original colour but there are three colour options in Unity in regards to grass, two in the "Edit grass texture" tab as shown up above in my screenshot and in the terrain settings. Fiddling with these long enough should get your result!

 

You can make the healthy/dry colour white, then adjust the terrain tint to white.

There's an issue with unity terrain where it shades the grass to simulate cloud shadows, and you can't disable that.

Vote here to fix it - https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/terrain-system-touch-up

 

Interesting, but it's hard for me to see much of grass. Do you have closeup pictures of the grass, in sunlight, without image effects or in shadow?

 

@Cactus_on_Fire Looks amazing, OoO

 

Thanks man

After some time I figured out how to get rid of the skybox rendering between the opacity clippings so there are even less artifacts now. Here's another scene screenshot. These are straight from the editor view with no post-processing or any anti-aliasing applied, including the default forward camera anti-aliasing. I also decorated it with some amazing megascans stones to pretty it up =)

 

Ooooooh, so pretty.

 

@Cactus_on_Fire - that's amazing. Is this the same shader as you shared above?

 

Thanks

Yep

 

Very cool. Have you seen LushLOD Trees? https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-lushlod-trees-beta-v0-72.447579/

I'm wondering if applying a similar dithering effect to what you have might improve edges/density a bit.

 

They're using a screen door transparency which uses opaque rendering. I'm not sure if it can work with a transparent edged shader.

 

@Cactus_on_Fire

Amazing results!

Can I ask how your grass is setup? Is your grass setup using the standard Unity terrain Detail texture method?

Sorry if this is a naive question - I've been trying to solve grass aliasing (kills VR) for the past 3 days and I'm desperate for a solution. I made my own shader but I couldn't get shadows working properly with Alpha Blending (A2C.)

I tried using your shader but I couldn't get it to work as a Detail Mesh grass or forcing it on a Detail Texture grass. If you do use Unity's terrain grass, how do you apply your shader?

 

@Cactus_on_Fire This is sooo amazing. Would you share you sample scene. I love it so much!!

 

I would like to learn from it as well.
Can you offer it on the Asset Store if you don't want to share it in private?

 

+1 For release! Love your work!

 

i'm also curious about it. You never could have enough good gras.

 

Cactus_On_Fire 's approaches may be better than any of the available assets. Even if he sold them, and if they weren't good good enough, I would rate him 5 stars. I think nobody spent more hours with figuring all the cave-at's out and achieving the very best. Thank you, Cactus!

 

I still have his example screenshots set as my desktop background so I don't forget about this.

 

Cactus, could you share you setup?
This would be a tremendous chance for others to learn from it.
@jason-fisher Same here.

 

Sorry for the late reply guys, I was busy as hell lately

I found the time to compile the assets and upload the project. So here's the scene from the screenshots with some neat foliage textures

http://www.mediafire.com/file/tkbj6ag8bmhp5q4/Grass_Smooth+Cut.rar

 

Wow, thank you so much!! The textures are just amazing!!
Your project is so good, you're really talented!
Thank you!

 

Mille grazie!!

Do you plan to sell your work on the AssetStore? I would immediately buy it.
I would love to see more from you.

 

@Cactus_on_Fire Looked great on gamma + forward. Only issue was a bit of popping (which can be edited of course)

Really nice work!

 

Thanks man, enjoy it

I don't have much assets to sell on asset store, I was just experimenting on a soft edge shader really.

Yeah thats the drawback from it. It's probably impossible to achieve both hard and soft edges in one pass but with little sacrifice it creates a nice effect.

 

How would you add wind effects to this?
I tried but it resulted in the grass "shaking" in a weird way.

 

Make the color of the grass same as the texture for the ground.

 

Anyone possibly have the original "Grass" asset from the deprecated original TerrainAssets package that could possibly share it? As it's been said the current terrain assets only include the 2 grass textures. No more grass material. Nothing viable from any of the free assets I've found either. Not to discount any of the other grass solutions in this thread mind you, they look beautiful. And I just downloaded the Grass_Smooth+Cut project with intentions on checking it out, and thank you very much for sharing that Sir Cactus. But the OP had a very simple, lightweight, and good looking thing going as well and I would love to try that as well. Many thanks in advance to anyone willing to post a link.

 

have a look at @Cactus_on_Fire 's example scene he shared above, far better than using this method and has a few textures in there.

 

Cactus_on_Fire, thanks for the great looking foliage. It's one of the best I have seen for Unity this far. Unfortunately the shader does not work correctly with deferred rendering. Could it be anyhow possible to be fixed? It's a bummer, because otherwise this is really great stuff.

 

I'm not sure but there might be. I fiddled around until the edges of the foliage turned transparent on forward rendering, but with deferred it just shows the background. You might wanna change the render type and see what it does.

 

It's a bit strange but today all seems to be working ok with deferred. Not sure what has changed.

EDIT: It seems the issue is related to camera angle. Sometimes strange grey outlines are popping up to the edges of foliage when using deferred.

 

You make my life better. <3 hahaha

 

First of all really cool stiff, but my problem is, that if i plant them as trees they cast shadows even if disable cast shadows in the shader? In standalone it works.

 

Sorry this is months in reply i haven't looked at this thread for ages, but if you haven't fixed the issue or someone else is having the issue, off the top of my head i believe there is the settings for shadows in the tree editor, you could turn those off or the object itself should have a renderer (again off the top of my head im on the go atm) and you can disable the shadows from there, something like None, double sided, single sided, shadows only. Hope that helps i can have another look when i get home, haven't used this method of grass in a while.

 

Bump on this. Can't seem to figure out a way to add wind bending.

 

Unity's built in the wind bending into the tree, have a play with the settings in the tree editor and make sure you have a 3D object > Wind Zone in your scene aswell

 

Cactus_on_Fire that's totally awesome! Can't wait to try practicing on making grass. Just need to finish the installation of new tires and forged wheels on buddy's truck before I get the cheque and finally complete my computer build.

 

Go for it

 

I've just tried to make grass following first post, but I'm stuck at #5 point - I simply can't rotate leaf crossection, when I have selected leaf and rotation mode I don't see that "rotation spheres" (I don't know correct name of them) which you can drag by mouse to rotate objects.
Anyone got that issue too? Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

 

I had that issue too. I think what I did was made a prefab and rotated it and eventually had the cross section vertical. But as soon as I reopened the project it went back to the sideways cross section, so it didn't really work. I eventually gave up and bought an asset.

 

I had that problem too. I ended up just rotating it manually through the Transform component. If you set the X-axis rotation to 270, it should be upright!

 

I had the same issue, so i upgraded to Unity 2018 and now it works.
It seems like it only doesnt work in Unity 2017.

 

Ohhh, nice! In my case I must wait until 2018 goes out of beta, but still - great to hear it's fixed now.

 

My grass appears sideways for some reason when I do this! Please help!

 

I'm having the same issue. If anyone has a fix for this please place this soon. I really liked this technique. The first time I did it, it worked fine with no problems however, after I tried implementing this technique with other textures, it didn't work.