Nature Renderer: Better terrain detail rendering ✅ PBR ✅ Custom Shaders ✅ Shadows ✅ Wind ✅ SRP

Are there any example shaders for HDRP? HDRP/Lit doesn't seem to perform particularly well here. Generates a warning "one or more shaders do not support procedural instancing". Also doesn't support tints.

 

This is, unfortunately, a limitation of the Lit shader. You would have to edit the shader code to add support for these features, but Unity resets all modifications by default unless you embed the entire HD render pipeline package.

What you can do is copy the "HDRP/Lit" shader into your project (outside of the HDRP package) and edit the shader code. Adding procedural instancing is fairly simple (and I can help you with this, just let me know the specific HDRP version that you are using), but Tint or other features requires diving deeper into the HD render pipeline code.

 

An update on Unity 2020.2 compatibility: everything is working.
A lot of changes were needed to get 2020.2 working, so I will spend a bit more time testing and verifying that all platforms and features are working correctly. You can expect an update next week, along with some more information on the changes.

 

More like next year?

A few plugins I have (like for water & weather) were broken with HDRP 10 update. Over the last few days they've been updating so I'm eagerly awaiting for Nature Renderer (no pressure!).

I didn't realize how much I have relied on Nature Renderer until it was broken with HDRP 10. It's like, I don't even want to open the scene to work. If I'm not gonna see my dense grass swaying smoothly and trees bending under the breeze, what's the point.

 

I got your preview of nature shaders and that seems to have improved performance a lot.

 

Hi, is it possible to globally change the brightness of the vegetation without changing every detail of every terrain?

Thanks

 

Hi there! I have a top-down game with procedural terrain that uses 3D grass models placed via terrain details. For the last year and a half I've been using ATG which has performed well, but during the asset sale I got really interested in getting some interactivity into the grass.

I tried a combination of The Vegetation Engine and Nature Renderer. Visually, both Nature Renderer's wind visuals and the interactivity that TVE granted looked great.

Unfortunately, the frame rate hit I'm taking is pretty severe (about half the FPS of what I got using ATG, 50+ down to 25-30) and the Boxophobic folk suggested I use larger grass groups. Since my procedural map generation already relies on something similar to terrain grass and I need the foliage to work on slopes, it's not really an option.

You can probably see from the video above, I don't really place thousands upon thousands of grass elements. I do use non-alpha 3D models so it looks its best from top-down, but I tried swapping out for old-school cross-shaped impostors and the speed was similar. I look down at the ground from a pretty high angle, so while my camera only shows a chunk of the terrain (the terrain is about 4 screens wide), I can't rely on just the distance fading to keep my perf up (I think ATG is pretty aggressive in rendering what's within the frustum).

I didn't know if there was any setting within NR that might help me in a similar way? Any particular tripping hazards I should know about?

 

HDRP 10 support is ready! You can see your grass swaying again

 

What brightness do you want to change exactly? The color? The specularity/smoothness? The easiest way would be to change the material of the terrain detail(s).

 

There are quite a few different methods that you can use to optimize performance, but it all depends on what the bottleneck is. Could you profile your game using the profiler window and let me know the results? I should be able to give you specific advice if I have some more details.

 

Nature Renderer version 1.4.0 is now available through the built-in updater and will be available on the Asset Store within the next few days. Go to Help > Nature Renderer > Check for Updates to download the update.

This update has been in development for the past 8 months, and it is a very large update to the shaders. (And also adds support for Unity 2020.2)

So, what's new?
The shaders have moved to a custom shader framework, and no longer use surface shaders or shader graphs.
Why? To improve the following:

• Improved import times for the Built-in Render Pipeline. The previous shaders could take up to 20 minutes to import. The new shaders only take a few seconds.
• The shaders are no longer limited by what Unity's surface shaders or shader graph supports. Especially Shader Graph was lacking a lot of features, and limited us in what we could implement.
• Better compatibility. Shader Graph was lacking a lot of extensibility and broke our shaders with almost every Unity update. Unity 2020.2 completely broke all extensibility for us, so we decided to move away from Shader Graph for now.
• Better performance. We now have full control over the shader code, so we can optimize everything for vegetation rendering.
• Faster updates. We now only have to update 1 shader, instead of a separate surface shader and shader graphs for 3 different render pipelines.

Please make a backup before updating to this new version. All materials and shaders in your project will automatically convert to the new shaders. The conversion has been tested a lot, and should be seamless. But it is good to have a backup, just in case.


Notes and Limitations

• Raytracing in HDRP is not yet supported.
• Converting the project in the built-in render pipeline takes a long time because the old shaders need to be imported multiple times. Assume it will take about an hour.
  (Converting for URP and HDRP only takes a minute or so)
• Some of the fields in the material moved around a bit, and some features changed slightly. I will update the documentation in the coming days to match with the new update.

Full changelog:

New:

• Support for Unity 2020.2
• Included Nature Shaders now use a new custom shader framework instead of surface shaders or shader graphs. This ensures compatibility with all render pipelines and all Unity versions.
• It is now possible to change the lighting quality for materials.
• It is now possible to change the blend mode of the translucency effect.
• Specular highlights on materials can now be disabled.
• Materials using “Standard”, “URP/Lit”, or “HDRP/Lit” shaders can now be converted to Nature Shaders automatically.
• It is now possible to disable translucency for materials in HDRP.
• Full support for deferred rendering.
• Improved UI of material editor and added links to relevant documentation.

Fixed:

• Detail objects no longer render in Prefab Mode.
• Internal materials for 2D grass textures are now correctly set up for all HDRP versions.

Changed:

• Added default grass material to resources folder to ensure that the correct shader variants are included in a build.
• Improved performance of all included shaders.

 

The color, and all of my grasses are 2d sprites, so they don't have a material. Would I be better off changing the texture itself for a very fast color change of my terrains? Thank you and sorry if I wasn't clear!

 

With mesh terrain support, this would be an instant buy for me.

 

They use terrain details and just render them in a better way. You'd need some vegetation data somewhere

 

If you have specific Healthy and Dry colors set for the grass then editing the texture would be fastest.
If you don't have specific colors set, then you can do the following:

1. Open the folder "Assets/Visual Design Cafe/Plugins/com.VisualDesignCafe.NatureRenderer/Resources" in your project window.
2. You will see a material named "Default Grass" in that folder. (Note: this material is only available in the latest version: 1.4.0)
3. Assign this material to the "Material Override" field of the Nature Renderer component. This will ensure that the material is used for all 2D grass textures.
4. Set the Color Method of the material to "HSL".
5. Increase the "Lightness" slider of the material.

You may have to change the "Double Sided Normals" field of the material to "Same" if the lighting is incorrect.

 

Nature Renderer relies on Unity's terrain data, so mesh terrains will be difficult to support. That said, if you convert an exiting Unity terrain to a mesh then you can use that mesh for the terrain rendering. Nature Renderer only needs the Terrain Data (heightmap, splat map, etc.), and it does not require the terrain to be rendered by Unity.

 

Thank you!

Quick question: Is there a way to hide grass or bend it, for example, when I drive a car on top of it? Right now the grass goes through the vehicle and I can see it from inside. Any way would work for me, I do not need a fancy bending effect. Cheers!

 

You beast! Awesome news, can't wait to test it out. Thanks

 

After importing the newest versions of Nature Renderer, Nature Shaders Essentials and Open World Nature into my 2019.3.14f1 project, I get this weird green sheen on leaves that are underneath / covered by other leaves. When I enable Double Sided, I can see that the opposite side is bright green, which in addition is bleeding onto the leaves like some sort of light-sim-bleed(?) even without Double Sided on. It gets progressively worse the higher I set Vertex Normal Strength.

I did not get that sheen before updating. How can I get rid of it?

We usually have Vertex Normal Strength at 0.56, which is the value on this first screenshot.


This second screenshot is with Vertex Normal Strength at 1.0 to show the difference

 

Can you let me know which render pipeline you are using?
It is most likely the Translucency effect. If you are using HDRP then this effect shows if the diffusion profile is either not assigned, or the HDRP settings are missing the default diffusion profile.
For other render pipelines it might an issue with the material settings.
Can you share a screenshot of the material settings?

 

Hiding or bending grass would be a shader-specific feature, so it depends on what shaders you are using for your grass.
Nature Renderer does not come with this by default, but you can use custom shader to achieve the effect you need.
The latest version of our full Nature Shaders package has support for interaction, so you could use that one. You can get access here: https://www.visualdesigncafe.com/nature-shaders/

 

Thanks! Got my nature shaders package! I suppose they will also work with 2D grass if I follow the steps you mentionned above? Cheers

 

Yes, that is correct. Just enable interaction for the material that you have assigned to the Material Override field.

 

Thanks. I might be in the wrong thread now, but we have editor tools that uses the bottom left part of the scene view. Is it possible to hide the "Nature Shaders Beta" overlay ? Thanks.
Edit: Oh, this overlay is even in my builds, hiding parts of my UI. A bit intrusive, is there a way to hide it? I'd gladly purchase a license even though you're still in early access.

Edit: I can't find any resource folder with a material to use for my 2d grass :


I'm on the latest version.

 

Thanks! We're on HDRP, so this looks like the culprit.

UPDATE: This was indeed the culprit, BUT I also had to go into all of our tree prefabs and add a Diffusion Profile to them individually. Can't remember if I also had to do something for the grass.

 

Hey, still getting a memory leak, unfortunately.
I've attached log txt file if it helps in any way.
Memory gets up to 40gb because of it.
This was tested on the latest version.

 

Ohh so that's why my builds are constantly piling stuff in memory!

 

Oh, I found out that the reason I was getting dll errors when importing nature renderer was because I was in windows 7. Switching over to windows 10 and everything imported fine. Just a heads up for people still working in win7/switching between the two.

 

It should be in the Nature Renderer folder (com.VisualDesignCafe.NatureRenderer), but I don't see it in the screenshot. Did you add Nature Renderer to the project as well?
And no, the overlay can't be hidden at the moment. It will be removed once it is out of beta and available for purchase. I understand if it is a bit intrusive, but adding an overlay is the only thing I could think of to separate the beta version from the licensed version.
I am planning for a release early next month, so I hope the overlay is not too much of an inconvenience until then.

 

Thanks for reporting this, I am looking into it for you. I managed to reproduce the error message, but I can also confirm that this leak is correctly caught by our internal cleanup system, so it should not result in an actual memory leak. Unity's leak detection runs before our own system, so Unity will print the error but then the memory is correctly released by our system after.
Can you run the Memory Profiler in your project to see if it can locate what is taking up those 40gb? I have never seen a memory leak that big, so I am not sure what could be causing it at the moment.

 

Can you let me know how much memory is being allocated in your build? It is very rare to see any memory issues caused by Nature Renderer in a build (if there are any, it is usually caused by editing in the Editor), so it would help a lot if I could get more info on this.

 

Yes, I added nature renderer, and I am using it on my terrains. Still don't see the resources folder. I did all recent updates through the visual design cafe package manager over the course of 2020. Should I try to reinstall it from scratch? Is there a way to get the missing material externally ? Thank you!!

 

I will try to dig and understand what's doing what in my memory. I spent an hour trying to understand how to use the memory profiler's data, but I'll keep trying. Basically, I start my game at a comfortable 800mb in mono, and as I leave the game open, it slowly keeps growing and never stops.

 

So, I need to get rid of the beta overlay for the time being, I will install it back when it's released. How do I uninstall Nature Shaders without affecting nature renderer?

 

That is strange. It may have been added to a different folder because of a GUID conflict in the project, or a moved folder. It's no problem though, that material was just there for convenience.
You can either create a new material yourself and set it up to your liking, or I have attached the default material to this post.

It sounds unlikely that this is caused by Nature Renderer (at least, there are no know issues that result in this behavior at the moment), but there is a possibility. You can do the following to find out:

1. Let the game run for a while to increase the memory. Ensure the memory has increased by a significant amount so that it is easy to spot later.
2. Go to Window > Analysis > Profiler to open the profiler.
3. Click anywhere in the Memory section.
4. Click "Take Sample Playmode" to get a detailed look.
5. Open some of the items that have a large memory usage (so that they are not collapsed)
6. Please send me the results (here or in an email to support@visualdesigncafe.com)

You can just install the latest version of Nature Renderer again. It will automatically overwrite the files of the beta version.

 

Thank you for your help.

Here it is

 

Hi,
I have a terrain with lots of grass types already set up using build-in terrain grass, is there a way I can easily convert these to use Nature Renderer?

Right now it only seems to work when adding new grass types to the terrain.

 

I noticed something interesting. In play mode in the editor, when loading new terrains (async), Nature Renderer seems to be creating GameObjects containing the grass material of each terrain. As I move and terrains get unloaded, the objects that were spawned by Nature Renderer are staying there. So it basically spawns those GameObjects every time a new terrain is loaded, and never deletes it when the associated terrain is unloaded.

 

Any estimate on the tree rendering more or less?

 

Hi, I have a question about Nature Shaders. Is it possible to make all billboard grass placed with terrain tool interactable?

 

It seems to be caused by Unity. Nature Renderer adds a (hidden) game object to the scene during building, to ensure that the shaders are included in a build. This is added in a build-processing script, and it looks like Unity is also calling this script while loading scenes in the editor. I am looking into it to see if this is expected behaviour by Unity, or a bug. It should be safe to ignore this though, as it does not happen at runtime in a build.

It looks like the memory on the managed heap is being fragmented. The main cause of this is usually a large amount of GC allocations.

There is one known bug in Nature Renderer (in the current version, it is fixed in the next update) that causes this behaviour if the Nature Renderer component is refreshed every frame. This can happen if a script in your project modifies the terrain every frame. Can you check if there are any components on your terrain, or scripts in your project that affect the terrain?

It is also possible that the GC allocations are from another script in your project. They show up in the profiler, so please take a look and see if you can find the source of the GC allocations. The GC allocations are shown as small red bars in the profiler timeline. There should be a very large amount of them somewhere.

 

They should automatically convert to Nature Renderer, depending on the grass type:

• 2D Grass Textures.
  These are automatically converted. There is no need to do anything.
• Prefabs
  They are automatically rendered with Nature Renderer, but to get all features you'll have to change the material of the prefab to one of the included Nature Shaders. ("Nature Shaders/Grass" in most cases)
  The material properties are automatically converted if you change them from the Standard shader to Nature Shaders. If the materials were using a custom shader then you may have to reassign some textures.

Let me know if you need any help with the above, or if anything is not working as expected.

 

Yes, that is possible. You can do the following:

1. Assign the "Default Grass" material to the Material Override field of the Nature Renderer component. (It is in the folder "Assets/Visual Design Cafe/Plugins/com.VisualDesignCafe.NatureRenderer/Resources")
   This will ensure that the material is used for all grass on the terrain.
   If you can't find the material then you can also just create a new material with the "Nature Shaders/Grass" shader.
2. Select the Default Grass material and enable the "Interaction" section in the material.
3. Add a Nature Collider component to objects that you want to enable interaction for. (More Info)

 

I just finished the code for importing/setting up trees, and the shaders for the trees. February is reserved for implementing the tree rendering into Nature Renderer. No specific estimate on when it will be finished though. As soon as possible, but I don't want to rush the development since stability and performance is the highest priority.

 

Just going to go out and mention that rotation is a big one on my wishlist for trees

Currently I just use them as prefabs instead with prefab brush but anything that improves performance is always welcome of course.

 

Thank you!

I have a problem though. I'm using Unity 2019.4.18f1 + Terrain Tools and the Beta version of Nature Shaders and I had a little development break for a few months. Now after setting everything up, there is no interaction anymore. My agents have the collider (capsule) and the nature collider on them and the manually placed bushes and the override material have the Nature Shaders/Plant + Grass Shader attached with interaction enabled, but still no interaction.

Unfortunately I'm too stupid to find your support email, otherwise I would have sent an email of course.

I stepped through the setup a few times but I can't figure out anything I might have missed.

Any hint would be welcome!

 

I just upgraded from version 1.3 to 1.4. I use it on HDRP v7.5 with VR single-pass instanced mode. In editor it works fine. All my grass and vegetation get rendererd. But in play mode, once the VR kicks in, grass and vegetation does not render and I get the following error for Grass shader:

Code (csharp):

1. invalid subscript 'stereoTargetEyeIndexAsRTArrayIdx'
2. Compiling Fragment program with PROCEDURAL_INSTANCING_ON STEREO_INSTANCING_ON DECALS_OFF USE_CLUSTERED_LIGHTLIST WRITE_NORMAL_BUFFER SHADOW_MEDIUM _COLOR_TINT _WIND_AUTO _TRANSLUCENCY _LIGHTING_QUALITY_HIGH _SURFACE_MAP_PACKED _ALPHATEST _NORMALMAP
3. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_FULL_HDR

What might be the issue?

 

What specific feature(s) would you like to have for rotation? Would having a random XYZ rotation for trees be enough, or do you need something with more control?

 

It looks like there may be an error in our VR-specific shader code that I have missed. I am looking into it for you, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Edit
I found the issue and fixed it for you. There was one line missing in our shader code.
You can replace the file "Assets/Visual Design Cafe/ShaderX/Templates/Lit.Input.Surface.templatex" with the attached file to fix the error.
I will publish an official update as well in the coming days.

 

It works! Thank you!