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

is it possible to use Natural Renderer beside Vegetation Studio ?
Does Natural Renderer optimize a terrain that is made with vegetation studio ?

 

Nature Renderer is more of an alternative to Vegetation Studio for rendering. In URP/HDRP your best bet is NR.
Using them together makes little sense, NR currently optimizes grass and tree support is coming soon. The only thing VS has majorly going for it compared to NR is rule-based vegetation placement, which to my knowledge will also someday come to NR. Just a matter of patience

+1, randomization for XYZ in trees would be amazing, even more so being able to rotate them on our own after spawning but that's probably a lot of work to get going.

 

You can still use good old TerrainEdge for rule-based detail placement, in combination with Nature Renderer.

 

It seems like Nature Renderer is overriding the render queue in my painted Details, setting it to ~2500

Is there any way to not have it set this?

 

Hi there, I'm using HDRP shaders and the grass don't render in the Camera view, only grass shadows are visible.
But they render fine in the Editor view. I checked the demo scene and it's the same.

I'm using Unity 2019.3 and HDRP 7.1.8.

 

No, that won't be possible. Nature Renderer would replace Vegetation Studio in this case. Vegetation Studio uses its own rendering system and does not make its data available to other rendering systems, so we can't support it.

As @Black-Abyss said, we are working on tree rendering and rule-based placement as well.

 

I'll add it to the list of things to look into. Technically speaking it would be possible, but it would require custom UI and tools since Unity's terrain tools do not support it.

 

I looked into it for you and it is indeed always overridden to 2500. It is usually the most efficient for alpha testing to render the detail objects with this render queue, but I can add an option for you to use a custom render queue. I'll add it and send you a custom build later this week.

 

This is a known issue in that specific version of HDRP. There is unfortunately nothing that I can do to fix it, and the only fix is to update to a higher HDRP version. Unity 2019.3 with HDRP 7.3.1 should work fine.

 

Sorry, didn't spot this one.
Random Y rotation would already be a great improvement to increase (perceived) variation in trees. Being able to rotate them ourselves would also be useful in some situations, but not what I'd call a requirement.

The rotation would have to be deterministic somehow. Can't have it be different in a build. That might mess up things.

 

In some scenes, on some terrains - while my trees work perfectly fine, the grass sometimes just floats above my scene view camera. Any ideas what could be causing that? Screenshot to show what I mean. I don't know how I actually cause it or why it pops up.

 

What shader are you using for the grass?

 

Problem fixed thanks to you - updated Boxophobic Vegetation Engine and had to reinstall the Nature Renderer support for it. That explains why it seems to happen at random - I randomly update my assets once every few weeks.

 

Would appreciate that! I've got some large bushes that need to be rendering behind my transparent effects

 

Hi!

Is it currently possible to get HDRP decals to be rendered on nature renderer plants? If I remember correctly, it used to work in some earlier version, but cannot find a way to enable it now

 

I have a fix ready for you. Could you send an email to support@visualdesigncafe.com with the render pipeline that you are using? Then I'll send you a download link.

 

I double checked it for you and it is not possible at the moment. The code for that needs to be added to the shaders, I am looking into it for you to see how much work that would be. If it is doable then I'll add it for the next update.

 

Thanks!

Another thing I was wondering is if there is any way (or in plans in future) to be able to disable wind for given game objects without changing their material. I have tree objects that I want to be able to be cut down and I would like to disable wind while they are falling down and while they are lying on ground (as it causes quite a stuttering when they are wrongly aligned to wind calculations as well as moving). I could of course change the whole game object for them when they start to fall, but as I have no need to do it otherwise, I'd rather just set some flag on some component for them to disable wind.

 

The wind is handled by the shaders, which are controlled by materials, so the only way to disable wind is to edit the material (it is technically impossible to do it any other way). If you don't want to manually create two variants for each material then you can edit the materials at runtime when cutting down the tree.

For example:

Code (CSharp):

1. using VisualDesignCafe.Nature;
2.  
3. // Loop through all renderers in the tree to find the materials.
4. foreach( var meshRenderer in GetComponentsInChildren<MeshRenderer>() )
5. {
6.     var sharedMaterials = meshRenderer.sharedMaterials;
7.     for( int i = 0; i < sharedMaterials.Length; i++ )
8.     {
9.         // Create a copy of the material, since we only need to edit the material for the tree that is cut down.
10.         var copy = new Material( sharedMaterials[i] );
11.         sharedMaterials[i] = copy;
12.  
13.         // The NatureMaterial class can be used to easily modify materials that use nature shaders.
14.         var natureMaterial = new NatureMaterial( copy );
15.         natureMaterial.Wind = NatureMaterial.WindMode.Off;
16.         // "Validate" should be called after editing any material properties. This will update the keywords and other internal settings for the material.
17.         natureMaterial.Validate( false );
18.     }
19.     meshRenderer.sharedMaterials = sharedMaterials;
20. }

Note that this example creates unique materials for each tree. You may want to cache and reuse the materials so that all cut-down trees use the same material.

 

Hello, Is there a way to enable this feature or only when using older version?

• LOD calculations now ignore camera field of view.

In my game I have items like camera and binoculars with huge magnification lenses. With normal Lod calculation, when zooming all grass and stuff should be loaded from culled state if item on screen percentage is large enough.

I can try adjusting detail render distance when FoV decreasing, but maybe there is some other way?

And second question, is there a method to reduce loaded draw cells? With large render distance, all cells in radius are loaded, what I want is load only cells in front of camera (like camera frustum + some offset).

Thanks a lot, the tool is amazing and my scene FPS is so much better.

 

hey hi

any news about the 2020.2 version ?
also does it work on with the nintendo switch ?

best
richard

 

I don't know anything about Nintendo Switch support but I'm using Nature Renderer with 2020.2 and it works just fine.

 

The asset should work on Switch, but the shaders might not.

 

did you manage a 60 fps ? with a lot of vegetation ?

 

Unity 2020.2 is fully supported since version 1.4.0.

Nintendo Switch should work fine. All the features and shaders are compatible with Switch, but I don't have a dev kit here so I have not been able to verify full compatibility myself. (If there is any issue on Switch then it is definitely fixable)

 

w

update, i can see the grass on PC, but not in the switch, i don't know if it's a shader thing or a resources problem,

 

I had a similar problem on the Xbox platforms and it was fixed by adding a wind zone in the scene.

 

ok nintendo said " We do not support Third party plugins. You should reach out to their support.
GPU instancing should work on the Switch

i guess this is because of the dll, is there a way around ?

 

Depending on the other settings, I can get 4K 60 FPS with Nature Renderer.
But you gotta make sure that everything is set up correctly, using Nature Renderer Shaders, or custom shaders implemented over them. Also, can't stress this enough, but enable GPU instancing.

For a pet project, I have hundreds of trees and thousands of grass with 5000 draw distance set in camera. With a good occlusion, correct volume settings, I am able to get 4K 60 FPS.

I.e. this is a very old an example:
https://twitter.com/Tanshaydar/status/1312683756298395648

And this is the 4K video of it:

I have a very large terrain with all of it having painted grass.

Nature Renderer mostly works out of box, but rest of the scene setup & other settings usually play a bigger role.

 

Yes the grass shader is very optimized, the performance are unbelievable yes! the only problem is that the grass don’t show up in the switch,

 

Does it show up if you use the standard shader?

 

if i change the grass shader, it work on the switch, but on the PC and on the switch, i go from 1,4k tris to 1M tris
so i guess there is something, in the shader, but i'm no shader expert.. i have no idea how to modify it, or force it to build

i think it's the way the shader is set up

(edit 21h)
ok so trying to build with the shaders in "always include" give me some error :

Universal Render Pipeline/Nature Shaders/Grass has too many Shader variants(10616832).To resolve this, go to Project Settings > Graphics and remove this Shader from the Always Included Shaders list.For more explicit control over how Unity includes specific Shader variants in a build, use a ShaderVariantCollection.

 

Is’t not the shader. I created an empty scene, with one terrain, I put some grass using the nature renderer instancing and I also put the same grass prefab directly in the scene

I can see the grass prefab on both switch and pc,

so the shader is working

but the grass using nature rendered instancing is only visible on the PC,

If I change the grass shader to a basic urp shader, I don’t think it’s using the nature renderer instancing, because the tris on screen goes from 1.6k to 1million

 

well there is a issue ,)

 

The triangle count changes due to the way Unity counts the triangles:

• When using Nature Shaders all the object instances are generated procedurally on the GPU, which can't be counted by Unity, so the total triangle count does not show up correctly.
• When using other shaders the object instances are calculated on the CPU first, and are then sent to the GPU for rendering. In this case Unity can count the triangles correctly and the total triangle count shows up as 1 million.

The actual number of triangles being rendered is the same in both cases. It is just the counter that shows an incorrect amount.

It sounds like the rendering issue is caused by the Procedural Instancing feature of Nature Renderer. Can you try to make a build with "Procedural Instancing" (in the Nature Renderer component) disabled? (The performance will be worse, but it is just to identify the issue)

 

I made a test animating the “Procedural Instancing" bool the grass show up, then disappear as soon as it’s on, (in the switch)

 

Hi,

Since there's no way to dig through the source code of NR, I wanted to know if NR keeps a reference to detail layers in its component, hidden somewhere?

I deleted a detail layer on a terrain and now every time it loads I get this weird error that I can't find anything about on the internetZ: Detail removed : Invalid detail layer 26

This is called by an OnGUI method so I doubt this should have any effect on our build, but still, something's weird there. Detail layer 26 isn't there anymore, so what's looking for it?
Thanks!

 

Thanks! That should give me a good start to figure out what the problem might be. I'll send you a debug/test build later this week.

 

No, Nature Renderer does not store any data or references at all. Everything is loaded dynamically, so if there is an issue like this then restarting Unity should always fix it. If it keeps showing up then I recommend submitting a bug report to Unity, it is most likely an error from Unity and not related to Nature Renderer.

 

Thanks!

 

great !!

 

@biscito I have sent you an email with a new version that should fix the issue. (At least, I am assuming it was you that sent the support email. If not, please let me know and I'll send you a build as well)

 

Ok !!! Got it !! It works !!! You’re the best !!

 

How do I get rid of the Nature Shaders Beta UI in the lower left corner during development other than removing the Shaders completely? I tried unticking "Interaction" in the custom terrain grass shader, but it's still showing.

Are the shaders purchasable by now?

 

I hope this renderer will be updated to work on normal meshes, not only terrain meshes.
I love to take advantage of the faster rendering on all my vegetation, also the manually placed on meshes.

 

I can finally say: Yes! Nature Shaders is available now. It has just been published and the official announcement is coming tomorrow (I am still updating the website text and some URLs).
Here is the link to the store page: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/189644?aid=1011lK8Q

 

It is something that is on the list for a next update. It will most likely be added along with the tree rendering, since it needs the same system. No promises though, as it is still in research.

 

Thats great to hear! Hope the research will be succesfull

 

Alright, that's great news!

 

I bought the Nature SHdaers, is it possible to ahve a flat shading on grass for stylized stuff ?



Normals -> Same / Flip dont work