[RELEASED] DirectX 11 Grass Shader

Here's what is happening with the blackness: Grass in real life is slightly transparent, or at least some of the light goes from one side reaches the other side, brightening it. In forward rendering that can be simulated (very simplistically) with the subsurface scattering setting in random-dir mode, in screen oriented grass mode the lighting is already faked to look good, so it's not a problem either. In deferred rendering, Unity handles the lighting by itself, so there isn't really a way of fixing the dark part of the models. I believe (I'm really not 100% sure myself) that the grass looks so dark compared to other objects in the scene, because the blades of grass have a lot of overhang, e.g. they are oriented towards the bottom of the world where ambient light is a lot less. I'll keep looking into this problem, but right now you should either use forward rendered grass, or play around with ambient and additional lights.

About the additional lights: I would personally try to create a script that adds fill light to your scene, for example let the light have the opposite direction of your sun light. You could also try adding multiple weaker lights and change their color for each time of day.

Just to make sure: did you delete the old grass folder before importing the new version? I'm a bit confused that it happens in your project, but not in a newly created one. Can you try using the deep profiling to see where the performance cost is coming from?

 

Fully get it on how the Deferred rending is rendering things, but it's really strange that it is that exaggerated, I have other tree shaders that are using Deferred rendering with leaves that are semi-transparent for some and it's not like this. But as you said, being on the ground is where there is probably less light

For the stuttering: Yes I fully deleted the former Asset before importing the beta. I also deleted the shader cache and GI cache just in case

I will try a deep profiling but I'm almost certain it will crash because just the regular profiling is already like 1 image per second

 

I don't know if you can do something from this, I'm not sure if I got the right thing also :/

 

So I'm trying this way now
That might be a limitation, or a bug but when doing that, indeed the grass shows up in Forward mode, but the inspector does not allow me to change settings that are forward rendering specific (like the random rotation for example)

 

Quick question, is there a way to increase the density for larger meshes?

For example, here is the density on a 1x1x1 plane:



But here it is scaled to 25x25x25:



This is with the current asset store version.

Thanks!

 

Yes, same here. I've honestly doubted my code a lot because of it, but in deferred rendering, there isn't really much I could do wrong? I think? Maybe the leaf shader is still using forward rendering. Maybe check the shader path in the editor (there this dropdown menu where you can select different render debug options).

Alright. Now that's quite interesting. I'm using a fairly small script to find the data folder of the grass shader, to make it possible to move it around without causing errors. Apparently I'm searching for that object every single update, instead of once at the start? In small projects, like my test project that doesn't make a difference, but in a large project like yours it seems like searching the asset database is quite a large task. Thanks for the image, I think I've fixed the issue now. I'll upload the update in the next few minutes, just check the website for Beta 4.

Right... Well, that's a bit annoying. I think I'll create a new copy of the shader without the deferred shader code, that way I'll be able to detect it in the editor. It'll be in the next beta as well.

That's one of the issues I've fixed in the beta. If you don't want to use (fairly stable) beta code, you could create your own mesh with higher polygon count, that should fix the problem. Otherwise, use mesh normalization on the Nature Mesh Filter component. Increase subdivision until you have the density you want. Don't forget to read the documentation on the website too, there are a few changes on how the shader behaves.

 

@Nonakesh Thank you for those answers, really glad that I wasn't going crazy about the stuttering
For the Deferred/Forward topic, I'll do some performances tests, so far I think Deferred is also faster, I saw quite a big regression in performance with just the pass {} deletion

I'll test the new Beta as soon as possible, that's great support here, thank you

But I'm on same boat with the previous user, on my quite small terrain, I had to push the density slider quite on the left (which of course drops the performance a lot)


Checking Normalize or rising Subdivision doesn't seem to have any effect, but maybe because it is a terrain and not a regular mesh? As I see it seems to create SubTerrain Mesh, so I guess it should work

Maybe it is because of the values below that needs to be updated, but I'm not sure how

 

No, you're right, I haven't implemented subdivision for terrains yet. That's more work than the other fixes though, so I'll probably look into it sometime next week.

And I'm quite happy to help, it's really nice to get some feedback from a larger production environment, these are issues I probably wouldn't have found on my own. Thanks for that!

 

By the way, Beta 4 is now online! @Necka_

 

So.. I have bad news :S

I deleted first the Beta 3 asset folder and as always, quit unity and deleted the shader cache

Imported Beta 4. I do see the new Forward only shader

To be "clean" I first created a new material, set the Forward only shader. I noticed that it's missing lots of settings at first. But for sure, no stuttering here. Ok, so let's add it to the grass renderer component


Stuttering are back like before, the features are now visible on both the Game Object and the material only, in both cases it's stuttering and as you can see, the Forward only features are still greyed out


I hope this helps, maybe something is missing or the package is a mix of Beta 3 and 4, I don't know, but I tried to do it from scratch to avoid conflicts on my side

edit: Did a profiler pass to check, the Path check is still here every frames

 

Well, yes. It does make sense that things wouldn't work when I'm checking the new cache, but not adding any elements to it...

Just replace the last line of the FileAnchor.cs script (the one with the return statement) with this:

Code (CSharp):

1. var newPath = AssetDatabase.GUIDToAssetPath(assets.Single());
2. PathCache[name] = newPath;
3.  
4. return newPath;

I'm not sure about the missing settings, that looks like an importer error to me. It's simply not using the custom editor.

 

Ok so after restarting Unity with this change, the stutter is almost gone, it's still a little bit suttering (not as smooth as Grass v1 inspector) but it is manageable now to change settings

But get this:

-If I open a Grass material from the project view, now the inspector is quite smooth
-If I open my grass object (the terrain) and then it's stuttering like before. Making me think there is something related to the Mesh Renderer component or how the material inspector is drawn in that view

Regarding my previous comment for the inspector showing less settings: that part is ok, it doesn't matter because as soon I add it to the grass renderer, it works fine

My biggest concern was on my second screenshot: The Forward specific options are still greyed out. The grass is rendered in Forward mode even with my Camera being in Deferred. But the material still act as it is Deferred and doesn't let me change options sur as the Random rotation

 

It's not working even with the forward only version? I'll have to look into it in more detail next week.

And concerning the stuttering, could you check the deep profiler again? That was extremely helpful before

 

No, not working with the material set with shader "forward only"

The shader indeed works as forward I can see it with the grass tint. But the options aren't usable. Forwards options are greyed out

I will try to analyse some profiler later today and give you some feedback

 

I looked through the code again and there are a few minor bugs in there. I guess it's really not a good idea to work on something in between other stuff. I'm uploading the fixed version now. I'm still looking forward to the profiler information, after a short check, I couldn't find anything that could cause the performance loss. I didn't try it on a terrain though, so that might be the problem.

 

Not related to the terrain, I switched to a standard plane to see if subdivision would help me to get more density without having to rise the density on the shader and the stuttering was here

I'll do some profiling now

 

Here is what I got now



EDIT:

Actually there are sometime two times per frame some stuff related to the grass renderer editor window:




Then checking on multiple frames I can see that

1 frame per example


A few frames later:

 

Finally started to play with the new interaction system
I really like how simple it is to setup

I have two questions related to it:

-Before there was the trail renderer and the displacement. With that, the character (or the sphere in the demo) would be standing still and the grass below it would be impacted/displaced. Then on movements the trail renderer would act. I can't seem to find a way to do the same (for a character standing still on the grass)

-Is there a setting that could be tuned to have the grass coming back up less agressive? Setting a higher life time doesn't change that when the grass comes back up it's very very visible, I saw the curves but I'm not sure if that would help and what is left/right on the curves

thanks a lot, this Beta really smell good. I have no idea about those fallback meshes/shaders but I'll wait for the documentation to point those out to understand properly (if I didn't miss it)

 

So far beta is working great, but I have a quick question.

My terrain is basically a modular set of tiles, and every tile is made of 2 colors in the texture: Grass and Dirt. Is there a way to have the Grass Renderer component not render on the parts of the mesh that are comprised of the dirt color?

 

One more quick question @Nonakesh I have 400 total mesh tiles. Is it better to have one Nature Mesh with these as sub meshes and one Grass Renderer, or a Nature Mesh and Grass Renderer on each individual tile?

 

Could that be achieved with the DisplacementCamera component that comes with this asset? That is what I used here:

You could raycast, check colour values then place this if true..

 

It looks like this one parameter is called way too often per frame. I'll have to look into that, not sure why it could happen. I'm not sure if I'll be able to work on it this week, but I'll definitely look into it next week!

The effect consisted of two parts:

• A interactor to push the grass away from the character, with high intensity, to override all other interactors.
• A trail renderer

I'll definitely have to add a section in the documentation for that...
The curve works like this: Left is high lifetime, right is low lifetime. If you have a linear curve, the strength and width will get smaller at a constant rate, but you could use a curve to let the strength be fairly constant until the end, where it resets very quickly.

You want to do the opposite of course. Maybe try setting the width to a constant, so only the strength gets smaller. Then use the curve to smooth out the change. A higher lifetime helps, of course.

I'm glad you like it! The documentation for the fallback system will be the next thing I'm working on (after looking into the profiler data), I'll post here when it's finished!

Not without a bit of processing, but you could use an image editor to turn your brown areas black and the others white, then use it as a density texture for the grass material! You could also use the grass painter, but I guess you'd like an automated system. It would also be possible to create the density texture from script, basically doing the same thing you'd do in the image editor.

It depends on your scene. If you are using forward rendering and have small light sources in your scene, performance might be better with small tiles, but otherwise I would try to render them all at once. However the Nature Mesh Filter can't combine meshes on its own, so you'd have to manage that yourself.

The shader doesn't support instanced rendering (yet), so in general having one large mesh is better. Look at the documentation on my website for performance improvement, by the way, there are a few general tips there.

I wouldn't use the interaction system (I renamed the displacement system, in case you're wondering) for static density. In your case it's perfectly fine, as you're dynamically changing the environment, but otherwise I would use a density texture.

 

When I use the beta and the mesh normalization tool on a mesh, it says: "Your mesh contains edges that have a length of 0. Mesh normalization can't be used in this case."

 

Was your mesh generated, or did you create it yourself? If its the second, your mesh has some edges that are invisible, because some of their points are at the same position. You should try to find them and delete them. For example in blender there is a "Remove duplicate vertices" (or something like that) option, which could help with the problem.

If that's not it, where did your mesh come from?

 

After looking into it, it doesn't look like the problem is coming from my end. Maybe I'm missing something, but could you try a different Unity version? Which one are you using at the moment? I've tested it in 2019.1 and everything seems to work fine.

 

Started in 2018.3 and I moved to 2019.1 and now 2019.1.3

Same issue, which does not happen in a small/empty project

I have this issue only with that component/material, no stuttering/slowdown with any other part of my project

 

I would like to thank you for this incredible asset. I reside in a small community in the internet world and your shader is doing amazing things for our golf courses.

I have a question regarding your currently available asset on the Unity store. I am stuck in Unity 5.2.3f unfortunately.

Is there a way that I could change the code to draw the grass at a set height above the mesh. There is a long explanation for the reason but I essentially need to bury your mesh 0.1 in the Y axis as we have a unique lighting that can't handle the z fighting with the mesh it resides next to. I can overcome this by increasing grass length but it does not look as good as if I could start the grass at the proper level.

I am a hobbyist, not a coder. If it is a simple fix, any help would be appreciated.

 

Well, i've not given up just yet. Have you tried it in an empty scene in you main project? Could it ie that there are a lot of components on your floor object?

The profiler logs don't really look like something is wrong (or as I said, I'm missing something), but it's just that the shader has a lot of options it has to display. Maybe i should try to put them into foldouts to reduce the amount of options...

Alright, with 5.2 you'll have to stay with the 1.x version of the shader. There it should actually be easy to move the grass somewhere else, as it has it's own separate mesh. Maybe I'm understanding something wrong?

 

Think of it this way. When using your shader, I have 2 meshes. However, when they occupy the same position in our game, the lighting in our game is such that it will clip horribly and cause visible flashing even with your shader.

The fix is to lower the mesh with your shader by 0.1. However, that starts the grass generation 0.1 below the other mesh. You can overcome this by lengthening the grass height by 0.1, however it does not appear the same as if the meshes were at the same height.

A cleaner way for our purposes would be to be about to set the startstart pos of your grass 0.1 above the mesh.

I can provide images if that is not clear.

Thanks for your help.

 

Yes same in an empty scene

The floor object is a plane it has only the nature mesh filter and the grass renderer

 

Hello, i cannot use your grass painter on large terrains. Small Terrains are no problem but if i scale the size there is only one piece of grass. But if i apply the material after scaling the gras density is very good but your grass painter still cannot handle the huge terrain. Do you have a solution for the problem? im using Unity 2019.1.1f

 

Alright, so basically you are using some sort of custom renderer that causes z-fighting with the ground plane of the grass shader, even though it doesn't actually render anything? In that case I think I can help you out!

I don't have the code for version 1.x right now, but this part shouldn't have changed.

1. Go to the GrassGeom.cginc file
2. Search for this line:
   Code (CSharp):

   1. pos += oPos;
3. Make a new line right after with
   Code (CSharp):

   1. pos.y += 0.1f;

I hope this solves your problem.

Do you have any other assets that change editor behaviour? A custom inspector serializer, or something like that?

How bad is the slowdown? Is it still usable, or does it basically break the editor? (In the first case, the foldouts might help, in the second, probably not)

Is the same slowdown when you edit the material directly? I think you said that when you select the material, the shader editor breaks and doesn't show the shader variant settings. Is this still the case? If yes, could you try deleting the grass shader folder and reimporting it? The editor should really work with both the material and the editor. Maybe you still have an older version of the shader somewhere.

It's probably not possible, but it would really help if you could send me your project, so I can look into the problem directly. Other than that, maybe you could try a different PC? Maybe the problem is with your installation?

Are you using the old version, or the beta version of the shader?

I don't really know what you mean by "only one piece of grass"? Is the painter not working, or the shader itself? Some screenshots would help too.

 

I tried the beta, but it throws a lot of errors on Unity 2019.1.1f thats because i use the Asset store version.
The shader is working but i cannot paint on Terrains with a scale of 100000x100000.
If i try to paint on a small terrain, its working but if i increase the size of this terrain. The gras density is very low and the painter shows no effect.
On the other hand, if i apply the shader directly on the huge terrain, the gras density is huge, but the painter still isn't working. I dont understand why.
I think your painter has this problem, because huge terrains have lower mesh density.
Just try to paint on very huge terrains and let me know what im doing wrong
Thank you in advance

 

Nonakesh,

That was exactly the solution I needed and simple as well! Many thanks.

 

What kind of errors does it throw? Could it be that you didn't delete the asset store version before importing?

And I can easily explain your problem: Your terrain is simply too large! The shader uses a single texture for density, even with Unity's maximum texture size of 8192x8192, you'd have a pixel size of 12 meters. If you set your paint brush large enough, it should work as expected, however it would probably be a better idea to split your terrain into smaller parts. For example 16x16 terrains with 6250x6250 size, that way a texture with 4096x4096 pixels would still have a pixel size of 1.5 meters, which is alright as long as you don't need fine details.

If you really need the single large terrain, you could try setting your density with the interaction system. Basically don't use a density texture, but burn away the grass where you don't want any. Not exactly a very elegant solution, but it should be possible.

Just out of curiosity: What kind of project are you working on that requires a terrain with 100x100km terrain size?

 

DirectX 11 Grass Shader Beta 6 is now on the website!

Here's the changelog:

• Reworked the grass fallback system, to be more customizable and easier to use
• Add subdivision support for Unity terrain.
• More tooltips, changes to the example scenes, and probably some stuff I'm forgetting... (I'll start improving those changelogs again, once it's out of beta )

 

I think you are right, more smaller Terrains would fix that.
Im working on a serious insect game and want to use your grass as moss and small billboard stones.
That looks great in combination with tesselated earth material. For insects a small forrest scene could be very large. Thats why i use 100x100km terrain. On the picture your grass has a constant density.

 

When using the mesh normalization feature of the beta, does it create a new mesh available for export?

I ask because as you know I'm stuck in Unity 5.2.3f.

I'm thinking of exporting my meshes and importing into a current Unity version. Normalizing the meshes and exporting then back to my project in the older Unity.

Unless, there's a way to normalize the mesh in the older Unity.

Let me know if there are reasons this workflow will not work.

 

Well, the normalizer simply creates a new mesh (or multiple) from the original, so in theory you could use an 3d model exporter script to export those files. However that would need some coding, so if you really can't update to version 5.6, you could try normalizing the mesh manually. For example open it in blender and subdivide that triangles that are much larger than all others. Once all triangles have reached approximately the same size (it doesn't have to be very accurate) all mesh artifacts should be gone.

Seriously though, I would really recommend updating to a modern version of Unity. I believe Unity doesn't even officially support version 5.6 any more.

 

Thanks for the advice. I will experiment with both Unity and Blender mesh conversions.

As an aside, I am not in control of the version of Unity for my builds. We essentially use a plugin that allows us to create golf courses and compile a build to play in a steam game.

That plugin only runs on Unity 5.2.3f. It's quite dated, tell me about it!... Haha...

Thanks for all your help, as always. I'm about to release a tutorial on how to add grass to our courses. You should see a small bump in sales of your shader.

 

I'm glad I could help!
Maybe contact me again in the next few weeks, once I've finished the video tutorials I've been planning and have published the 2.0 version (just just my posts, I'll definitely post here once that happens). Maybe I'll have the time to backport some of the features you need most. No promises, I don't actually know dependent I am on version 5.6.

 

I gave the above a try in Unity without any success. I think I just don't understand the new workflow.

I'm basically hoping to retopologize the mesh. I have scene obj exporter that should allow me to export a mesh.

I import my mesh and attach the nature script to it but can't see any changes to the mesh. Or, if it's creating a second mesh, where that mesh is located. Adding grass, it doesn't seem like the changes update either.

I was thinking clicking update cache might apply my mesh changes but that doesn't seem to do anything as well.

 

I understand your confusion! The mesh doesn't actually get replaced, the floor renderer uses the same mesh as before, but the Grass Renderer uses the changed mesh internally. The mesh is saved in the Nature Mesh Filter's Meshes variable. You'll have to modify your exporter to access and save this variable. Be careful, it's an array, as multiple meshes might be created.

 

Ugh, ok. Thanks for the quick response. I thought that might be the case. I don't think I have the skillset to handle that. I'll have to see if we have any coders in our community that might be able to give that a try.

 

Does anyone else has problems with the latest beta download? I'm getting disconnected short time before I finished the download. I got a slow internet connection, so it might disconnect anyone after a few minutes. I can only download about 240/289mb :/

 

Sorry about that... I really don't have a clue about web development. Maybe try it again later? If it still doesn't work I'll have to try to fix it somehow.

 

I already tried it with multiple browsers since 2 days :/ Now I reached the download limit. I've sent you an email to your support mail from the assetstore with my invoice, maybe you could upload it on your google drive or somewhere else?

 

Well, let me see if I can fix the problem tomorrow. If not, we can still use google drive as a last resort.

 

I've reset your download limit and changed a few settings, so I think it should work now. I'm testing it myself right now (with a throttled download), but you could try it yourself too.

Edit: My own test worked, so I hope it does as well for you!

 

hello,
i have imported it into uinity 2019.3.0a2 and got this alert:

Assets\StixGames\DirectX 11 Grass Shader\Editor\GrassPainterWindow.cs(386,4): warning CS0618: 'Handles.CircleCap(int, Vector3, Quaternion, float)' is obsolete: 'Use CircleHandleCap instead'

and this one too:

Shader warning in 'Hidden/Camera-DepthNormalTexture': Program uses geometry shaders, treating as if '#pragma require geometry' was present at line 406