Six Grass Rendering Techniques in Unity 

The king returns. You and Ben Cloward are Shader geniuses

EXCELLENT video! This is quality right here! It would have been cool to see the mixing of mesh, imposters, and billboard at different LODs implemented just to fully observe the effects - but what you DID show was also very helpful! Thanks for this, gonna look at your other videos now!

Thanks Daniel, this is exactly what I needed, love the detail you go into, thank you for creating this content!

thank you for your amazing grass assets, it was just what I was looking for. It's also really fun to play around with the settings

This helped me a lot. Thank you for the video!

Very clear and informative, I took some notes ! thanks :)

Thank You brother again for teaching me something new :) , Keep posting

This is a great overview of grass rendering methods. It's important to note that you can combine multiple solutions for near vs. far grass, but you have to get the colors/lighting to match and make the transition incremental. I like to use a pixel dissolve effect when transitioning from geometry to billboards, or when switching between imposter images at different angles. The approach I used that works well is to generate some number of square grass patches (I use 32) and randomly select from one of these for each terrain tile/chunk. Then these are drawn across the terrain using hardware instancing. I also generated several lower LODs by recursively finding the nearest pair of grass blades and merging them into a new blade with the sum of the surface area, the average of the color, and the average of the height. Each LOD is half the size, and they're all stored in the same buffer. Then for 4 different LODs you have up to 32*4 draw calls for each mesh of each LOD. In addition, I use hardware tessellation shaders to curve the grass blades when close to the player and apply a wind effect that scales with distance from the base to the tip so that the ends move more in the wind. This system can support a field of grass that stretches to the horizon at about 300 FPS on a GTX 1070.

Great video. Keep it up!

Great tutorial

Such an amazing tutorial. The procedural geometry way I can only get to render in one eye though for VR, trying to search how to fix this, seems ill need to add lines to the shader

OMG IM GLAD TO FOUND THIS CHANNEL

You are a God send. I have your book and was about to look at the computer shader grass section for a mobile VR project, but now here's a lovely video on multiple ways!

Cool video, I have known something new! What about others Terrain grass methods? (Instanced mesh,Grass mesh). I think they are somehow related to batching approach? Thanks for your work!

Great tutorial. is there a chance you could cover Mesh Shaders sometime? (Mesh shaders/meshlets?)

TIL you can enter functions into the transform position inspector!

i love grass, man. i work in win32 so not the same, i was figuring on using shells next time i want grass, and an abstraction (several layers of squares like uninterpolated wind positions). i don't know if i missed it, a good tip i herd was to mix the terrain normal for specular at a distance to reduce aliasing. anyway, here's hoping some folks out there get the good word about the abstract.

this was a great video, instructional enough for me to be able to choose what style would work for a world im making, spent days making multiple different meshes but painting the terrain with a grass texture worked great

Many thanks for this video. I tried to use the procedural instancing (with compute shader). That works perfectly on pc but the grass is not displayed in a PS5 build, an idea ?

Amazing content! Unfortunately procedural+compute grass crashes Unity 2021 and 2022 without console errors

how did you put everything from the winrar file? like grass ground and others ?

WOW! Where I can read more about "math functions" that you typed in the transform component in 3:50? I never heard about it! :O

Hey awesome video. The audio is quiet though, sound far away

when changing the max tesselation distance, it works for the most part but still leaves singular grass blades outside of this max distance. How can i fix it so that no grass whatsoever appears outside of this max tesselation distance?

Can you please do fur shader? thank you

this was so informative thanks, just curious what grass do they use in top-down games, I noticed that recent top-down city builder games such as Manor Lords or Farthest Frontier are literally littered in the grass , how is that not slowing the performance? in the past top-down games never had any actual grass just texture ...

I tried to run the procedural rendering with compute shaders one but I can't make it work. Console is throwing "out of range" error constantly. Maybe someone knows what's happening?

which one is the best for a mobile game with dense grass ( which aproch is the most optimized ) ?

What about Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced ?

How about DrawMeshInstanced vs the DrawProcedural, they seem similar, is there any performance difference?

Can I get your book even if I wish to specifically learn the Shader Graph only? I've always found shader code intimidating.

You should really lower the sound of music in your video. Great video though!

19:39 XD

HELP pls, when using the geometry grass method and upgrading it to unity 2022.2.18 for some reason the grass displaces to a diferent location than the objects one. for example if the object with the material is at X=0 and Y=0 the grass is at X=0 Y=0 but if I move the object to X=2 Y=0 the grass moves to X=4 Y=0 and so on and on. this makes the grass unusable because when the objects get a little bit away from the center of the scene (lets say 12 meters) the grass moves super away (24 meters) because for some reason it multiplies the distance by two in all axis. if someone can tell my why it does this ill be veryu thankfull :D ps: sorry for writing a full byble paragraph xd

Dose Billboard increase the overdraw?

how can you render grass in a 2D game using a single blade of grass and populating the world with it?

It apears the Link to your Book doesn't work anymore

nice video but music is way to loud...

You forgot the most important grass method, called Grass blending.. It's very common in UE and easy to do that there, whil;e in Unity, good god it's so little resources regarding this matter in Unity due to these reasons " 1. Normal blendings are expensive 2. It's very hard to implement in Unity

when you misinterpret "Go touch grass":

lets GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The music is very annoying and hard to understand you over it.

Using geometry shaders is a pretty poor idea

unreal engine is a way better than unity in all this grass and foliage thing as far i can see