Terrain Detail Meshes not working in HDRP?

I can't seem to render detailed objects or grass on my terrain. I googled it and in 2018 there were no terrain shader available for HDRP. Is that still the case or am I missing something? Can you use grass, trees and detailed objects in HDRP or is that a future feature available in...I don't know 6 months maybe?

 

The Terrain shader is included by default with HDRP and we are using it. It is fantastic actually, once you get into height blending properly.

What you want isn't a terrain shader but detail mesh shader, and Unity are apparently working on this so I'll edit the title to clarify.

Unity really is dragging their butts on that one, it's pretty sad really. If it's not up by 2019.3 they've basically shipped HDRP with holes in it and not many details

 

Thank you, so we just have to wait and grass and trees will eventually be available for the terrain editor and HDRP.

 

Yep as far as I know @wyatttt has info on it. Could be a while though.

 

Ive been tooting my horn about this one for a while, its basically the only hole left to fill to make HDRP a one-stop solution that I will never return from for my current project.

Just FYI, its not that hard to get around, as in for now you can place meshes yourself using an other shader + polybrush for scattering. Its a pain in the *** but it beats having no detail meshes on your terrain.

But ofcourse whatever actual detail mesh shader unity produces will be better as itll probably include performance optimisations allowing placing a lot more stuff. But using GPU instancing you can do a great deal right now anyway, and even more if you avoid using game objects (graphics.drawmeshinstancedindirect or similar).

Good luck and post back if you have any issues getting a placeholder detail system working such as what I mentioned above!

 

When you say awhile, are we talking years?

 

Dunno, I'm not staff, but if there is one thing I absolutely 100% know about Unity is... don't wait. If it's not there now, consider it not there.

 

@hippocoder
Another question if you don't mind, in your first reply you said a terrain shader already comes with unity that support tessellation? It doesn't seem to be enabled by default, how would you change it? Just for reference here is what it currently looks like for me.

 

No, I have not said the Unity terrain comes with tessellation.

 

This Still isn't working with Unity 2019.2.10f1 and the latest HDRP packages installed. I'm actually trying to teach a Unity class and having this not working is a Huge Issue! I would like Unity to actually respond on a date that this will be fixed...

 

Afaik, this isn't going to get "fixed" as the grass rendering on terrain is terribly outdated atm which is probably the reason why HDRP never supported it. To me it feels like it's not a question if they are able to do it, it rather that they don't want their next gen renderer to draw grass in such bad manner. You can already treat your grass etc objects as trees and use that mode on terrain tooling like Unity did with Book of the Dead environment. Or alternatively wait for new terrain decoration tools from Unity (2020-2021?).

 

New landscape tools are introduced in 2020.1/.2 so terrain might get deprecated.

 

Highly doubt the terrain technology will be deprecated. Again, there's nothing wrong with it. The result I can achieve with it go far further than most AAA titles, but likewise also cost more to render. 8 full HDRP splats with crisp height blending is very, very good.

What are people smoking? The perf ought be addressed with some graphine based scheme or cache scheme, and then that's it.

It's only vegetation and lack of height blending and / or tool improvements needed. Hehe I said "only" but vegetation is a difficult job for most people.

 

I need this 4 years ago.

 

So you mean I just spent 4 hours trying to figure out why my detail rocks were drawing with a white texture, and its just because Unity was too... what? Lazy or indifferent to my mental health and limited time? I mean how hard is it to make a warning saying "This doesn't work in HDRP"? This keeps happening to me where I spend days trying to do some simple thing in Unity and it turns out its silently broken because they like it that way (GPU light baking not working if you use LODs! For god's sake and no documentation stating this! That was 2 days down the drain and very demoralizing). I get that HDRP is 'a work in progress' but I'm trying to create photo-real assets that will be compatible with Unity in the future (which is stupid I guess?), and I keep wondering why my simple friggin textured meshes are defective.

 

Unity just isn't ready for large open-world environments yet, at least out of the box. Even the old detail system in the built-in renderer is very slow and inefficient. If you are making a smaller-scale environment, you could just manually place your rocks, or scatter them with polybrush.

 

Is there any updates for this? I felt like I wasted my time doing the terrain only to find out after the fact that this feature is broken and no one seems to have an answer.

 

Dude, I'm joining the club.

using trees for rocks is cool but taxing.

 

2022 it is and still nothing have changed

 

This isn't true. Terrain Detail meshes for HDRP have been added since 2021.2 alpha, almost a year ago.

 

well, it would have been nice if it worked
see Unity Won't Fix
Unity Issue Tracker - Terrain detail meshes do not receive the correct lighting when using Light Layers in 2021.2 (unity3d.com)

 

Well the issue is marked as not being fixed in 2021 cycle
For 2022 forward it's fixed. You can wait on that or use the current beta leading up to the release if you can afford to do that.



I've never tried to use terrain detail meshes with light layers so this is the first I'm even finding out this was an issue.