Does Terrain Detail Mesh work?

Im having the age old problem of, 'My terrain detail mesh is not showing'.

Ive looked around on Forums & YouTube, ive tried the solutions of 'Draw', 'Draw Distance', .blender to .fbx etc etc. Ive looked at the Unity documentation & YouTube for FAQs & how to set up detail meshes, no such documentation exists.

Has anyone managed to get this working? From what I can tell from the community, in seriousness, it does not work.

Grass texture works fine. Detail mesh, does not.

 

I wouldnt hold your breath for an answer, it seems the unity devs in this subforum will only reply to questions about probuilder. I have asked this question in many different ways, I even have a thread going right now about hDRP grass but I just am not getting any answers.

Hopefully someone will give us an answer at some stage as its getting very irritating being given the run around constantly.

 

From what I can tell from other threads, there is no answer, which sadly makes the feature somewhat, redundant...
Agreed.

 

latest 2018, and HDRP

@wyatttt Thanks for getting back!

 

I've also run into this issue over the years.

A few things can help:

• Make sure your detail prefab doesn't have a collider;
• Make sure it's made up of only one mesh;
• Make sure it only has one material;

If all these things are true then I think the detail mesh works.
It just makes it much harder to use because a lot of assets won't be compatible without some extra work.
I purposely setup CityGen3D defaults to only use billboard texture detail, for this reason.

 

So this has annoyed me on and off for ages and I worked out another reason that can cause seemingly unexplainable situations where a mesh shows up fine using standard shader but the Unity detail wind shader doesn’t render it or only render bits of it.

In short the issue is that the detail shader will assume an alpha cutoff of 0.5, so if you have an alpha map that requires a lower setting, that’s where your problem is.

So check your alpha cutoff setting on your mesh. If it’s really low you need to redo your alpha map to work correctly with 0.5 cutoff and you can have lovely detail meshes that work.

Or in other words, set your alpha cutoff to 0.5 on standard shader to reproduce how the detail shader will currently render it. If all or some of the mesh appears hidden, then you fix the alpha map until it works at 0.5 cutoff.

I hope this helps someone!

 

Is there a way in which we can replace the shader with something that renders correctly?

 

The naturemanufacture grass meshes are unusable because of this

 

I hope everyone in the world wants to use detail paint as easily as the folliage feature of UE4.
I don't know how many years it will take, but I hope the answers will be posted in this thread.