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

Yes

 

A notification for everyone looking here on the forum:

✈️ I am out of the office until August 21.
Visual Design Cafe's assets are created and maintained by me as a solo developer. After working on assets, updates, and support for 3 years non-stop, I am in need of a vacation. Unfortunately, this means that I temporarily won't be able to provide support. If you leave me a message on the support form then I'll get back to you as soon as I am back in the office.

Regarding Unity 2022
The Unity 2022 compatible versions of Nature Renderer, Nature Shaders, Realistic Meadow, and Open World Nature Kit are in development and almost finished. They are expected to be released in September.

- Max

 

Have a good vacation Max!

Once you come back, would appreciate it if you could let me know if we can somehow get LOD Fade working on NR 2021 before 2022 comes out!

 

Enjoy your vacation and thanks for building and maintaining such a vital tool.

 

Can anyone tell me if NR 2021 works out of the box in 2022LTS in the BIRP? I have NR 2020 and it doesn't work in 2022LTS. Waiting on NR 2022 and will use NR 2021 for now if it works.

 

Using 2021 in 2022.3 without issues since a while, but it's got some missing features (LOD Fade, no support for the new terrain coverage system). It also shows a message on the component saying it's not supported but I don't even notice it anymore.

 

Afterthought - sign up for the free 2021 trial and just see if it works for your needs.

 

@Bwacky, could you send a link to the trial for 2021? I cant find it on visualdesigncafe.com

 

It seems like they recently removed it - it's gone from the Unity Asset Store, where it was before available for free. Similarly, it appears to be gone from their website. I can't tell you why that is, I'd assume the sub was not worth keeping up and most people went with the perpetual license? Hard to say.

 

Any update on the release date for 2022 and the upgrade options for it? Is there an exact date yet?

 

Could nature renderer works alongside Gaia pro,GTS And naturemanufactur environment stuff? Also I care about 2022 version

 

Nature Renderer works alongside terrains and objects so yes, it's as simple as adding a new component to the terrain you made with Gaia most of the time.

 

It seems quite amazing script. GPU instance best render at same time working with gts ( which is shaders that affects terrain as well)

 

Nature Renderer doesn't affect the terrain - only the grass. Which is why it should work together with GTS.

 

You mean the one's that got painted or added through editor as grass or is based on LOD ? So for example some trees could get rendered as well or some grass that you added as prefabs for example it could a collectible for your game?

 

Terrain details / grass only.

 

Looking forward to 2022 Version!

 

Got it. Thanks a lot

 

Hi everyone,
I'm having some trouble getting my 3D Grass Reeds to work well with Nature Renderer.
I'd like the grass blades to react with turbulence but the reeds continually get all warped when I use any turbulence with or without Baked Data and convert to Nature Asset.
I've tried setting the shader to plant/grass, but in all cases turbulence has to be turned off completely.
Reviewing the documentation it states the green channel and alpha are what should be painted to control movement for grass/plants but the NR demo grass asset (ie: Detailed Grass 01 Variant 2) seems to use the red channel? When I paint them green or red I don't seem to see much difference either. Probably because turbulence is turned off?
It mostly seems to be reliant on the vertex alpha. So is there a way to mask out turbulence in vertex color or do I need to run 2 separate shaders one for the grass blades and one for the reeds? I was hoping I could paint out the turbulence for the reeds and still keep turbulence on the grass blades.
Any help would this would be appreciated.
Thanks!

 

Does anyone use the Perspective Correction feature in Nature Shaders 2021? I am finding that it doesn't work right in Unity 2022 and because my game uses a lot of overhead views, it's really hurting the look of the game. I submitted a bug but haven't heard anything, presumably because Max is working on NR 2022.

 

Hey @Visual-Design-Cafe can we get a progress report? There is chatter around the Unity Terrain community that Nature Renderer and Nature Shaders have been abandoned. I'd like to think that is not the case as you have a wonderful product. Some news would be appreciated for those of us that rely on it.

 

Both Nature Renderer 2022 and Nature Shaders 2022 have already been submitted to the Asset Store. They are currently being reviewed by Unity, but we have no estimate on how long that will take. Unity does not let us know the timeline.

If you have an active subscription for Nature Renderer then you can already download Nature Renderer 2022 from your account on our website.

There is a large backlog of support requests after I went on vacation, so it is taking a while to get back to everyone. My apologies for the inconvenience and lack of communication. I am working hard to get back on track with the support and updates.

 

This is great news. Thanks for letting us know.

 

Wonderful news!
1. Any info or patch notes on what we can expect coming in Nature Renderer 2022 (other than 2022.3 support? )
2. Have you considered hiring some cheap, small support person to handle support tickets so that you can actually focus on developing the tool?

I'll be honest, NR is so simple to use out of the box (ignoring bugs that can happen to anyone for a variety of reasons) that I can't imagine what sort of support requests people might even have. I'd wager 90% of your time wasters are things like "Performance is worse!!!" without realizing they just enabled many features they didn't have access to before, on their completely unoptimized meshes...

 

Follow-up: Seems Nature Renderer 2022 just went live on the Asset Store.
I see almost no differences in the asset description or functionality compared to Nature Renderer 2021 nor the documentation on the website.
Also took a look at the limitations section and seems that LOD crossfade is not supported, as well as all the other limitations from 2021 still apply. Additionally seems that Raytracing in HDRP is not supported is a new limitation for the 2022 variant.

Crossfade was the primary reason I somewhat wanted to update since 2021 works just fine in 2022.3 other than the annoying pop-up on the component when added to the terrain.
Can we please get some sort of info sheet on what changed between the versions?

EDIT: So I see the change log on the asset store page now.

• Forward+ rendering in URP
• Rendering Layers in URP
• Area shadows support in HDRP
• Probe volumes support in HDRP
• Large internal compatibility fixes for Unity 2022 (whatever those may be)

1. Does NR2022 now support the new terrain detail coverage mode as well?
2. Can we hope for something like LOD CrossFade? Maybe detail and tree self-occlusion like what GPU Instancer does?

I asked about these two back when 2021 came out and was told that's on the planning board. Are those plans abandoned now for the 2022 release cycle, since 2021 won't get anything like this for now?

 

@Visual-Design-Cafe the upgrade discount was very much appreciated

Regarding your backlog of support tickets. If you had a community discord channel, it would take some of the burden off you providing all the support.

 

Raytracing in HDRP is not supported

Does that mean the grass meshes aren't added to the BVH or that they don't take ray traced lighting into account at all?

 

Just bought the 2022 version, good to see it updated !

Would love to see in 2022

LOD crossfade
Amplify imposters

Happy you are getting back to it after the well deserved break! @Visual-Design-Cafe

 

@Visual-Design-Cafe Could you answer this please? If it's just using a Unity default lighting function then there should be no issue.
Sure, foliage won't contribute to GI but that's actually not that bad.

 

i bought 2022 and imported, the package not has the included files like in documentation. i only have two packages. embedded and uas, so what is it for? i use urp and want urp package like in docu. for now i imported uas one and now i got error like ShaderX not found

 

The main thing I am working on now is spawn rules for the vegetation. I'd like to add other features as well such as LOD Crossfade and Occlusion Culling but the work that I can get done as a solo developer can be quite limited between handling support requests and fixing things that Unity breaks in each update.

Regarding raytracing, nothing changed in the level of support. I just noticed that it was not yet explicitly mentioned in the description so I added it.

 

Grass meshes are not added to the BVH but they should be sampling raytraced lighting since they use Unity's default lighting setup. However, I have not fully tested this so I can't guarantee that it works.

 

You have to import the nature-shaders.embedded package first and then the nature-renderer.uas package. These imports should be triggered automatically after importing Nature Renderer from the Asset Store but it is possible that it stops if you either cancel the import or if there are any compilation errors in your project before importing Nature Renderer. In that case you have to manually import both.

The first package (nature-shaders.embedded) contains the included shaders for the vegetation and the second one (nature-renderer.uas) contains Nature Renderer.

 

Hi! I updated my project from 2021.3 to 2022.3 Unity version and was using Nature Renderer 2021, so I installed the 2022 version. After installing it im getting this errors and the grass is not working anymore:



Appreciate any help,
Thanks!

 

Are there any decent vegetation biome spawners for trees, grass, etc that work well with Nature Renderer? Painting them by hand drives me crazy...

 

You could check out MicroVerse. It's not cheap than but well worth it if that's in your budget.

 

If you want something free I built something using the spline system:
https://github.com/Wolfos/Adventure-RPG/blob/master/Utility/SplineTreeSpawner.cs

It's slightly broken (only works for clockwise splines) but free.

EDIT: Also uses Odin for the buttons. Sorry.

 

@Visual-Design-Cafe Hi!
Wanted to ask, if we just want Nature Renderer but don't want all that ShaderX or the Nature Shaders stuff, can we somehow decouple it from the nature renderer package? I have no use for the shaders that come with it and whenever doing absolutely anything in my project, those damn things pop up and take a while to import/reimport. At this point I'd like to simply kick them out, but not sure how to go about it. All I want is the terrain rendering really.

 

Hello, did you ever figure this one out? Seems like caching issues and a library rebuild is required but that's 3 or 4 hours of time wasted

 

Newbie here. I am trying to use NR for a VR project on Quest 2 and 3. With Oculus Link, everything works like a charm and the frame rates are great. However, when I build a scene to an APK and run that on the headset, only trees that were not painted on the terrain show up. I tried building with OpenGL ES and Vulcan, and have tried with the NR Camera script attached to the player (center eye anchor) and without, but the vegetation doesn't show up. Tried with the 2021 and 2022 versions of NR. Can someone help?

 

@Visual-Design-Cafe
Is it possible for the number of instances to bottleneck the process of sending data to the GPU and produce spikes in the renderer profiler indicating innocent prefab instances as culprits?

I'm trying to figure out why my scene renders quite slow despite using optimized materials with fine shaders and GPU instancing. I was pretty sure it was my stuff being borked, but I did two reproductions and in both cases, I get insane spikes even in the nature renderer demo scene on objects that are fine as long as the scene is fairly empty.

Take a look at the video here. At the bottom of the profiler it displays the nature renderer demo prototypes like flowering plants, white flowers, etc. I rotate the camera to renderer them in/out and ms is fine, rarely goes above 1 ms. I add my scene data with my vegetation, so the amount of instances goes up by a fair bit.
Once my data is in and the amount of instances jumps from the 140-150 thousand in the nature renderer demo to about 400 thousand with my objects added in, it starts giving up.

Unity_HI0B7moy6V.webm (dropbox.com)


I tried replacing all nature renderer demo objects (so the grass and trees used by you in the demo) with my instances, 1 by 1 to find a culprit in one of my meshes, but I saw no difference in performance.
My prefabs and shaders are perfectly fine and perform just as the ones used in the demo.
I can not find any fault in the prefabs, meshes, or shaders, and even tried Nature Shaders, but there's no difference.
I'm using Boxophobic shaders with some optimizations and features disabled, which should not be an issue.
Most of my vegetation is atlased and all trees are using impostors on top which are essentially just flat planes.
Frame debugger says mostly everything is batching nicely.

Generally, the result is that as long as the amount of prefabs isn't too varied, the result is a fine framerate and low ms. As soon as the instance count goes up (due to prefab variety, and not amount of objects) the GPU ms value in the profiler goes sky high even on your demo instances.
The problem here is that an open-world scene with 3 tree types, some grass and maybe 5 flowers is a massive no-go. This is not usable in open-world scenarios where you tend to have a lot of prefab variations and prototypes.

Can you please explain what's going on here exactly and how I can figure out why Nature Renderer is choking with this? I've frankly never noticed that issue in other projects I work on using GPU Instancer (which I don't particularly enjoy).
Would appreciate advice on this