Feedback Terrain detail mesh: bad quality, forced shader (bad and different grass visuals)

edit: this ended up being a bug, disabling light layers from HDRP asset fixes it. It's fixed in later 2021 versions as well.

 

I got better performance with native terrain detail renderer in hdrp.
Nature Renderer will lost 20% performance.
GPU instancer will lost 10% performance.
and all of them will give me same result like the picture above.
but i'm still using GPU instancer because it could let your detail objects direction follow the ground normal.

nature renderer and its shaders have some options will modify your object's normal and color tint,i guess that is the reason your objects looked good with it.

i'm not very satisfied with native terrain detail renderer, they should add the ability for detail objects to follow the ground normal.

or it is just useless for the people who choose HDRP for quality graphics.

 

Interesting,
Actually i used HDRP for this test.
about the image, the one in the picture isn't nature renderer, it's just normal mesh as gameobject.
But I tested with nature renderer and it looks about the same, which is how you'd expect it to behave.

The problem I think is detail mesh forces it's own shader on the grass, which looks really different, usually much worse and not how you made your grass. As you can see in the image.

Nature renderer also allows you to reduce density based on distance, which is really helpful.

 

The picture actually ended up being caused by a bug, disabling light layers fixes it and you get back your original grass look.

 

My general recommendation when it comes to render quality and unity provided stuff -> avoid it like a plague except for DLSS.

Either write it yourself or look into third party stuff. You will come back to where you are right now with sleepless nights and regrets as your trophies.

 

We did report this bug with light layers a while back, good job finding that.

 

Hello,
Whenever I enable Light Layers the Terrain Detail grass stops receiving any light and shadows, I have double checked that the Terrain and the Directional light have the correct light layers. As mentioned above, the only way I know around this is disabling the Light Layers option, which I can not do because I need to use Light Layers.

I am using Unity 2021.2.8f1 - HDRP Versrion 12.3.

Any info regarding this issue will be appreciated.
Thanks!