[RELEASED] DirectX 11 Grass Shader

Also I am not using object space mode

 

I'm looking forward to the next great update.Hope it coming soon.

 

There is a grass painter included with the shader, it should work fine with Unity terrain. Open it under Windows > Stix Games > Grass Painter. The painter can be used to create a density texture with all the right settings, if you want to start with a full field of grass, you could open the file in any image processing application and fill it with a white texture, then use the painter to remove grass where you don't want it.

Thanks for the heads up. I believe that won't be an issue with the new version any more, because it bakes the terrain to a mesh by default, but I'll check it when I get the time.

Can you post a few more pictures of your scene? I really can't tell what is going on there

I'm working on it, but the whole marketing/tutorial part of it is taking a lot of time. (And that part is kind of vital, for me to continue supporting this asset) The update itself is fairly finished, except for some bugs, but I might consider starting a beta test soon. If so I'll post it here, so maybe check the thread once in a while if you're interested?

 

Alright, thanks. I got it just about figured out but I need one more thing. Is there any way I could paint two different grass textures on the terrain? Like, be able to pain the flower one and not the regular grass material.

UPDATE
So I found out about the four different channels and can paint the different grasses that way - however, I can't get the flower to look cut out.

 

no problem! here is what my scene looks like. As you can see, the camera is looking downward to the grassland, and from that angle I get this kind of visible tilings, as highlighted in the red sqare:

 

Are you sure your flower texture has an alpha channel? I think in the currently public version the alpha cutoff was hardcoded to some value, so you might also have to try to manually change the alpha value, so the transparent areas definitely have 0 alpha.

It's still a bit hard to see, but I don't think the grass shader is tiling here, it really looks a lot like the grass floor texture itself is tiling. Have you looked at the floor? Maybe you forgot to change the UV coordinates for each tile?

 

Hey @Nonakesh, sorry to hassle you but I'm really after some timelines for when your future update(s) to this asset will be arriving?

I know there's a large update you've been working on that you've mentioned about in previous comments - is that likely to arrive soon? Are we talking days or weeks or months do you think?

My personal need is the fix to get the grass rendering correctly in VR with Single Pass Stereo Rendering, as it's currently broken - you mentioned you'd look at this following the release of the aforementioned update, so could you estimate when this might be?

My project is at a state where I need to get a working (VR SPSR compatible) grass shader implemented within the next few weeks (before end of March) and I'm hoping your DX11 grass will fit the bill - however that's dependent on how quick your update(s) arrive.

If you're unable to commit to an ETA for your update, then I'll need to quickly assess other grass shaders on the store and try to implement one of those instead (which I'd rather avoid due to the additional expense!).

Thanks and apologies for the pressure!

 

I honestly don't think that I'll be able to look into the Single Pass Rendering until the end of march. I'd personally recommend using regular multi pass rendering.
Or you could try working with the grass fallback in the new version! I'm starting a beta now, more about that in it's own post.

 

DirectX 11 Grass Shader 2.0 Beta 1:
As I'm probably going to work on the trailer and documentation for a few more weeks, I have decided to start a beta test now. It's pretty much feature complete now.

Documentation is basically missing, however I have moved most of the old documentation into tooltips, so it should still be possible to work with what's there.

If you're interested, go to this link and enter your invoice number: http://stixgames.com/grassshader/beta

If you find any bugs, please report them, either here or via mail!
(Also tell me if there's a problem with the beta downloader... web development isn't exactly my specialty)

 

Hi @Nonakesh thanks for getting back to me.

Unfortunately multi-pass rendering is not a viable solution for VR projects these days due to the overhead it introduces to the rendering. Single Pass is much more efficient, and Single Pass Instanced would be even better still as it reduces draw batches even further.

Thanks for opening up the beta for your new version - I'll register for that and see if it can mitigate any of the problems I'm seeing in VR.

However, I would recommend at least having a brief look at trying to add SPSR support to your grass shader as you might find it's actually a quick fix. A number of other FX asset authors have been able to quickly add SPSR, and even SP Instanced, support to their assets in very little time, so hopefully you experience a similar timeline.

The DX11 grass shader is an excellent asset for "flat" projects currently, but unfortunately it really isn't suitable for VR until it can handle single pass rendering.

Let me know if I can assist in testing any potential updates to the rendering as soon as you're able to look at it.

Thanks.

 

Hi @Nonakesh, thanks for the update!
No problem with the downloader, but after importing beta, i have a those errors (2017.4.21) :

 

Getting the same as @sipon on 2019.1. Re-importing isn't fixing it either unfortunately.

 

Fair enough, if I get the time I'll look into it this week. If it turns out that the update is very easy to do, I'll update the beta. No promises though.

I've had that problem in my first test, but I wasn't able to reproduce it myself... I was able to fix it by pressing reimport on the Grass.shader file.

Are you sure the whole package was imported? Can you look if your folder contained the IDisplacementRenderer file? You should probably delete the StixGames folder before importing the new package.

 

Same here, as with the previous message (in case you don't get a notification, if I don't mention you)

 

That's great - thanks for looking into it if you're able.

 

Yeah that was the issue, I didn't delete the old folder even though I should know better

 

I'm glad it wasn't anything more serious! Just write here if you need some help with any part of the beta.

 

You are absolutely right! It was the terrain's texture that caused the tilings! Stupid me

 

The painter doesn't seem to work with Unity 2018.

 

I just tried it in Unity 2018.3 and it worked perfectly, so let's try to find your problem:

1. Are you using a custom mesh? If so, you need to have UVs unwrapped, or it won't work.
2. Did you create the density texture yourself, or did you use the grass painter to create the file? There are a few importer settings that are necessary for the grass painter to work, however those problems should be visible in the error console.
3. If those weren't the problems, can you describe your process in a bit more detail?

 

I looked into Single Pass Rendering and it looks like everything should work as it is, so I'm assuming that Unity doesn't support Single Pass Rendering for tessellation or geometry shaders. Maybe I'm missing something, but there really isn't any reason it shouldn't work. Single Pass Instanced might work after some tweaking, but I've read somewhere on the forums that there are problems with instancing with tessellation in general and I don't have the time to try it out myself at the moment.

That said, I don't think the performance gain for Single Pass Rendering would be that great with the shader. As all the blades of grass are already rendered on the GPU, the overhead of transferring the geometry should be minor in comparison. Of course that doesn't help a lot, considering that the rest of the scene still profits from Single Pass rendering... So here's what I'd do in VR, if you are concerned about performance: Use the fallback grass. I've tested it in VR right now and works perfectly in Single Pass mode. It actually looks fairly nice too, in my opinion.

It's not exactly ideal, but you can still use all of the features the shader has, like displacement, multiple grass materials etc. Just set up the material as always and generate the fallback material, then deaktivate the GrassRenderer.

 

Hi @Nonakesh many, many, thanks for taking a look into this.

Although I need to run the DX11 grass in SPSR because of the performance benefits (potentially to this asset, but actually to the numerous other assets I also use in my project), the issue with the DX11 grass isn't actually to do with the performance directly.

@squallfgang touched on the problem earlier in your thread here:

Basically the density of the grass is completely lacking when rendering in SPSR mode. The odd thing is that in the editor, when selecting the mesh or terrain with the grass on it, the grass blades are all highlighted, they're just not rendered. For me the grass renders fine with multi-pass mode, but the performance hit in VR is too much to manage.

Although you don't have any SPSR specific logic in your shader, is there anything you can thing of that might affect the grass density when running with SPSR enabled?

No worries regarding the SP Instancing mode (for now! ) but being able to use your DX11 grass asset with SPSR enabled would benefit 2 of my current projects and no doubt is going to be a major factor for any VR developer hoping to use it in their projects (because it does look great!).

Thanks again!

 

Yeah, that's the same thing I found. The grass simply doesn't render when SPSR is active. Which really doesn't make any sense, it basically just renders the same object twice with different matrices, so almost the same thing as in multi pass mode... Even the documentation says that there should be no difference. Maybe I'm missing something... Well, actually I just thought of something, I'll probably look into tomorrow. But it's a bit of a far shot.

I'll probably look into it sooner or later. It's a bit exhausting that Unity doesn't offer a fallback for shaders that don't support instancing (it only renders for one eye), but I guess I understand having their priorities elsewhere.

In case the shader doesn't work in SPSR, you should really check out the beta with fallback rendering. Just open the new example scene and deactivate the GrassRenderer. The scale of the scene is completely off in VR, but I personally think that the fallback grass is actually not bad at all. And there's almost no overhead in getting it to work.

 

Alright, thanks for looking at having a further investigation into the SPSR side of things. Hope the far shot pans out!

I'll have a look for the invoice number (from a couple of years ago!) so I can grab the beta and have a look into the fallback rendering and its impact on performance.

Cheers!

 

The long shot actually worked out!

Apparently there is a bug where Unity doesn't give the right camera position to the tessellation shader, when SPSR is enabled. It was set to the world origin, where the grass was actually working. I'm uploading the beta and will update the download page once that's ready. Just download it here, once it reads "Beta 2".

 

That is absolutely epic! Great work @Nonakesh !!!

Looking forward to downloading!

 

If you have any questions, or find any bugs please post them here, or send me a PM!

 

Hi @Nonakesh - just had a look at the new version and everything looks great in the editor - nice one!

Just creating a build now to test performance, however:



That's a lot of shader variants!

Do you have any advice on how to reduce this?

Thanks!

 

I think I've written about that in the old documentation, but here's the short version:

Go to the Grass.shader file and look at the shader variant definitions (almost at the top of the file). Whereever you don't need the variants, comment out the line and replace it with #define GRASS_FEATURE_YOU_WANT (with the exact name from the variant line)
Editor changes will no longer work, but compilation should be a lot faster.

 

Thanks - after 5 hours it's gotten to the end of the Grass shader variants but has now hung! Grrrr!

Edit: I spoke too soon - it's just kicked off another load of Grass shader variants. 3,194,880 of them this time! Best press Cancel...

 

Hi @Nonakesh - quick note to say editing the Grass.shader file as you indicated worked a treat - building is back to normal! Thanks.

 

I'm glad you got it to work! I'll definitely have to remember making a tutorial about that.

 

Is this compatible with HDRP?

Regards,
Carlos

 

Not yet and it probably won't be supported until HDRP is at least fairly stable and has some documentation for custom shaders. Well, the stable part at least, when I get the time to work through their code.

 

Thanks for your prompt response. I appreciate it.

Regards,
Carlos

 

Hi @Nonakesh
Thanks for your DirectX 11 Grass Shader 2.0 Beta 1.
Dose it support Deferred path? I tested and it seems not?

 

Yes, it does support deferred. Are you sure you're not missing something? The shader should automatically switch to deferred, as soon as you enable it in the editor.

 

For those of you who are testing the Beta, I have started making the documentation and decided to do it directly on my website, so there is a central place that is always up to date:

http://stixgames.com/grassshader/documentation/general

I am always looking for feedback, both for the shader and for the documentation!

 

Hello @Nonakesh

I'm having an issue with your Shader using it with Enviro Sky asset.
When using Enviro clouds shadow, the grass turn black.
The cloud shadow is a Light cookie on the directional light. Apparently your shader doesn't support it

Is there a way to make it work?

 

Alright, after trying out light cookies on my own I found out two things:

1. You should be able to get them working by using the randomized orientation grass, light cookies work perfectly fine there. The problem is probably with hacking around with the grass normal (which is necessary for the grass lighting to work while each blade of grass is being rotated towards the camera)
2. Apparently my random calculation for grass positions wasn't working correctly and a LOT of blades of grass were being drawn at the same position. In other words, you just helped me optimize the grass beta quite significantly!

 

Also make sure you are using the Unity PBR lighting mode, in other lighting modes the cookie might either be ignored, or the grass will turn 100% black for some reason.

Honestly though, I'm really happy I found that performance problem because of this. I've been suspecting that there was something wrong with the beta, but I don't think I would have guessed this problem otherwise.

 

I was testing on the asset store version, not the beta so far
But I didn't like the grass with randomized orientation in the current version, but for me (without random rotation) the grass was all black, and I did use the PBR lighting mode

Will you do the update soon in the beta with the issue you found with the blades position? I'd download it then to test out

glad I could help somehow

 

I'll upload the fixed version soon, I'll post here when it's on my website.

However I probably won't fix light cookies for non randomized direction grass in the next few weeks, things like this always require a large amount of digging through Unity's internals and I want to concentrate on documentation at the moment. I hope you can get it working with your current art style like this.

That said, you could also fake the cloud shadow yourself, by using a Unity standard standard shader material and setting it to transparent, with a cloud texture. I've had fairly nice results with this in the past. Although I'm not sure if this would work with the sky asset.

 

I'll definitely have a look with the randomized rotation, the clouds are dynamic and moving (dynamic weather/ night and day cycle) so it would be nice to have it working like that. Worse case, the cloud shadows were more a visual bonus for me, it's not mandatory, but a nice touch.

While I have you around... I'm fairly new with your asset and I was wondering if what I was doing is correct, because it seems I can't get a real good density with the grass (holes here and there)

I used a large Unity plane (it's like 80x80) to put the grass shader on it. Is it ok to do that or the plane does not have enough vertices etc to handle it properly?
Should I sub-divided the plane mesh or would it be the same result?

 

Honestly, I would switch to the beta and look at the new documentation on my website. Instead of using the grass material directly on a mesh, the new version uses its own mesh filter that can subdivide and normalize (split large polygons and keep smaller ones to make the mesh more regular) the mesh automatically. I personally think that this is a far easier workflow than before!

 

Ok, I'm testing but with no success so far
The inspector is very slow when the grass material is opened and I apparently can't paint anything (it says, no grass object selected, despite having the plane with its nature filter, grass material and density texture applied)

EDIT: Nevermind, understood the new Grass renderer concept
But it's impossible to work with the material editor, something is wrong probably with the repainting, it is stuttering like crazy. I had no issue with Grass from the store

If the inspector window is closed, no issue it's smooth. But as soon as I open the inspector (even in demo or empty scene) for the grass material, it becomes super slow

I'm not sure I got the right profiler issue (it was even worse recording the profiler of course) but that is something I usually do not have:


edit: This is in editor, not in playmode

edit: So yeah, collapsing this component:


Makes everything stop stuttering

There might be just something overlooked in there that repaint/GC collect too much

 

Sorry to "spam", but I'm moving forward with the Beta, I'm so glad that it now works with this renderer component and nature filter, it allows me to use the grass on the terrain, while keeping my custom terrain shader. Thanks for that great feature!

I have some troubles setting up the grass though. In the asset store version I feel like the deferred rendering was better out of the box and I can't seem to get rid of my issue. I must have that scene in Deferred rendering
In forward, the grass looks quite nice, more simple but nice.
In Deferred it looks gorgeous when it does not have that issue I'm facing.

I made a quick video of it so you understand:

Basically many branches turns black (it's kind of a shadow or specular issue I'm not sure...) while my character is moving, I really can't figure out what's going on. in Forward with the same settings it doesn't have that issue (but the grass isn't affected properly by Shadows. In Deferred it is)

My Terrain is quite small (80x80)

I have those settings so far:




If you could help me figure out how to fix this "blackness" issue, I'd really appreciate

Edit: I guess it's because it's a Beta but it seems the Displacement isn't working. There is only "Mesh normal renderer" shader available and it's not doing anything (even burn doesn't do anything). But maybe I didn't set it up properly, I followed tutorial from version 1

 

I don't really know what is causing the editor stuttering. I think it might actually be the grass fallback? Did you enable that without noticing?

This problem I can explain quite easily: The old documentation is simply outdated! I have changed the displacement system (I'm also rebranding it to interaction system now, so sorry if you'll have to fix some missing scripts in the next beta version, but I think it's a lot more understandable and readable this way)

The new system basically has it's own render system. This adds some overhead, but it is a lot more flexible and should be compatible with basically any hardware. You don't have to change much:

1. The displacement/interaction camera needs the RenderTextureDisplacement (or RenderTextureInteraction in the next beta, which I'll upload today). I think this was necessary before, so not much change.
2. Each interaction objects needs a DisplacementObject/InteractionObject script attached. This script simply tells the renderer that the mesh has to be used for rendering.

On the other hand, it's no longer necessary to manage layers yourself, no more annoying colorful displacement objects everywhere. Also it makes new powerful features possible, like setting the burn color per object instead of per material. The disadvantage is that the limit of displacement objects is now in the hundreds instead of thousands of meshes, but it was necessary for compatibility reasons alone.

As to the lighting issues: The blackness is actually because the shader supports deferred rendering now. Previously it was still using forward rendering, even in deferred mode. In deferred the lighting is handled by Unity itself, the shader simply passes information to it. You could either try to fix the lighting in your scene, by increasing ambient lighting, or adding additional lights (those have less overhead in deferred, look at the performance optimization page on my website). Or you could simply remove the deferred rendering code from the shader file, to go back to the old system:
Open the Grass.shader file, find the render pass with Name "DEFERRED" and delete the whole Pass { } block.

 

Beta 3 is now available on the website!

I'm not really keeping track of changes, but I've done some progress on the GameScene, which is supposed to showcase the interaction system. Also performance should be a lot better because of the fixed bug mentioned a few posts above.

 

@Nonakesh thank you for all those information

So regarding the Interaction system: Good to know that it changed and how it did, I will try that with Beta 3, thanks a lot!

For the Blackness in my video. I understand how it supposed to work, but in my video the camera moves on the X axis with the character at the beginning. The light doesn't move and the view is from the top, it's like the player is filtering in and out things in a very weird way, I really love how Deffered grass renders now, but this part is a bit weird to me.
But you are right that I can try to tune the Ambient lighting, I didn't think about it and it might help maybe. As for adding more lights that would be difficult as it's a night and day cycle (in the video there is no cycle, I've set the light to be fixed to show my problem). At night there will be lighting placed by the player, I'm not sure how to handle that... or maybe just some "extra lights that don't cast shadows and would just be here to smooth overall lighting and improve the look of the grass?

Ok so for the stuttering part which is actually the most painful part of all, because moving any slider becomes a challenge

I do not user any other component, I do not know what is the fallback grass thing and I actually pruned all its keywords to limit variants and reduce keywords limit (did that on the other shaders too):



But I had the issue from the beginning.
That issue happens even by just clicking on a grass material in the project. As soon as the material tab is drawn in the inspector, the stuttering starts and is heavy

I just deleted the asset and imported Beta 3, I still have the problem
I didn't have that problem in the version 1 of the asset (from the Store)

The problem doesn't exist in a new project

I'd be happy to find a way to troubleshoot that issue, if you have any ideas