Man you do some fantastic work! I have been looking for a video like this forever. I would love to see more videos on shaders in the style of breath of the wild!
I'll have to spread them out so that I don't exhaust my audience with Breath of the Wild tutorials, but games like that are an absolute gold mine for new effects to discover. There's a very high chance I'll be coming back to it for tutorials for a while!
Here I'll post any notes or clarifications on the tutorial! I forgot to mention the directives required to make the tessellation shader work (though they're included in the GitHub code). In the same place as '#pragma geometry geom', you'll need to put '#pragma hull hull' and '#pragma domain domain'. And in the same vein as '#pragma require geometry', you'll need to put '#pragma require tessellation tessHW'!
In your demo project you are applying two materials to meshes that only have one submesh. This is less performant than adding a pass that does something simple like apply a base texture with diffuse shading, or something like that to create the visual of the dirt underneath the grass. If this technique is not used then the mesh itself appears transparent when it is viewed through the gaps in the grass. Would it be possible to make a modified version of this that has an additional render pass to apply a base texture to the ground?
Following along with this tutorial on MacOS, on an older MacBook Pro. I'm also getting the "Shader not supported by this gpu" error that some others have received. However, I did find a workaround. By going to Player Settings and changing the rendering API from Metal to Open GLCore, I'm seeming to have better results so far into the tutorial. Still am having trouble rendering the triangles, but at least the shader is supported.
Thank you for this amazing grass tutorials! I recently started my journey with shader just because I want to replicate this. But I have one question. How do we use it on terrain??
The final looks are so good! Btw to think a Switch which has much weaker hardware than today phone can show us a field full of grass, is just too impressive in terms of optimization.
Agreed - I got my Switch on launch day along with BotW and I was blown away by how it looked in handheld mode. I'm not actually sure what techniques they used to optimise the grass but they did a great job.
I absolutely love this video! Getting into grass shaders currently and I love the application here! I do want to mention an issue I don't super understand. The grass seems to receive shadows only when Cascade Count is set to 1 in the URP settings. I am currently using Unity 2021.1.16f1 and URP 11.0.0. Any pointers would be great!
Changing the """#ifdef _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS""" in the fragment shader to """#if defined(_MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS) || defined(_MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE)""" worked for me
This doesn't seem to be affected by my directional light in URP 2021.3.1f1. Setting cascade count to 1 lets it receive shadows, but the grass itself doesn't seem to react to lights. Any idea why?
Can you apply a geometry shader to a generated mesh from an empty object? (generating grass) I tried with just creating the vertices, then adding triangles and I still get nothing. I feel like this should work but maybe its not passing a direction for the generated triangle or something?
In my scenario, I am generating terrain using noise applied to a height map, which is then applied to a terrain chunk. I then make a copy of that height map and create a mesh out of it, and then assign the grass material to this mesh, and assign the height map to the grass material instance on that mesh. For my scenario, this works out so that grass is only present on terrain that is of a certain height or higher, which is how I wanted it. Performance wise I'm running a few million blades of grass on about six visible chunks and getting over 200FPS on a 1660, so it's working for me. To note, there is chunkloading being utliized to improve FPS. This is in URP 2021.3.8f1. There are no doubt better ways, but this worked for me so you might give it a try.
Very good video, well explained and very detailed! The only problem I see with this method is the fact that the grass is based on a mesh. It means that you need a plane or whatever other mesh to show grass on top of it and it uses a material for the grass. So it means that if I have a terrain that I want to cover with grass, I can't, unless I cover it with another mesh that follows the terrain deformation which double the number of vertices. Maybe there is another solution to this or I missed something, if that is the case, let me know a good way to do this, I would appreciate it.
Any clue why the grass shader acts extremely weird if added to the same scene as unity terrain? It will start bouncing around and snapping to the edges of the terrain "visually" despite its location remaining static?
I hade the same problem, I was able to fix it by changing the code on the shader. There is a problem when converting world coordinates to Object coordinates and vice-versa. I fixed it by making it convert back and forth to world/object space coordinates.
when the screen bottom edge is placed just between the top of grass and its original mesh surface, it seems unity does not render that mesh so the grass just disappear suddenly. Is there any solution for that?
I've got the shader fully working, but is anyone else having a problem with the geometry not lining up with the game objects selection outline? for example if i move the gameobject 10m in the X direction, the grass ends up at 20m. No idea why 🤔
PLEASE PIN THIS : IF HAVING ISSUES WITH SHADER POPPING TO DIFFERENT LOCATION DEPENDING ON ANGLE First make sure in the inspector your Shader is set to Geometry for the queue. Then go to your current renderer settings (In my case URP-HighFidelity) which can be found in Assets/Settings. There is an option below renderer (Make sure renderer is set to forward) and make sure "Depth priming mode" is set to disabled. This fixed the issue for me. When I created another material using the same shader the issue reappeared and this was how I solved it: when using multiple materials that do this effect you have to set them on different render layers as in since it's geometry the first one would be 2000, second 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. This is because when they are on the same layer they mess each others calculations up.
Hey, dude. Thx for your enlightenment, XD. My grass still telepotated after disabled depth prime mode and set queue to higher values. But it is such a drama that it works after I set its queue to a lower value like 1999. I guess it does work with the render queue that may store past cache and then calculate up with the new. However, Im such a freshman to figure out what happens behind the engine and renderer. Hope my measure could help others alot.
Hi Daniel, I tried to run your project in my unity, it showed "Custom/BotWGrass shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)", and the grass material turned pink. Plz help!
Strange - which Unity version and render pipeline are you on? Sometimes certain subshaders don't work on certain hardware so it also could be related to the computer you're using or which platform you're building for. Not all platforms support geometry or tessellation shaders (which this effect uses quite heavily).
As a beginner on shaders, this tutorial is quite confusing... It would've helped a lot to see the entire code file once every while, and how to apply the shader (I created a new material at 5:14, dragged it onto a plane and got a different result than you have, but without the main code file overview I don't exactly know where it went wrong). Of course the Git link is there, but that's the final product and not the learning steps. I'll go watch some more beginner-friendly tutorials and then come back to this one!
It can be, but it gets better performance if you load your world in chunks, to prevent rendering things way off in the distance that shouldn't be so detailed. Additionally, you can make an LOD controller component that adjusts the material used by the object (to lower quality variations) based on the distance from the camera
Hi, so i dont know why but the tesselation shader is using a huge amount of the gpu if its set to 0.01, even though there is no gras rendered. Is there a way to better the performence because i cant use the shader with this performance. An answer would be great! Best regards :)
ok so i tested it and the reason is probably that the tesselation is done on the whole map, which is far to big. So is there a way to do the tesselation only near player distance?
You can't make *exactly* the same thing because Shader Graph does not support geometry shaders. There are other techniques for making large fields of grass like this one, although I'm unsure if Shader Graph supports them.
I know this is a late reply but it's not very performant. I myself don't know much about shaders but I do know one thing, Geometry Shaders are slow, so using them for something like grass is guaranteed to be very bad for performance. The youtuber Acerola has a couple of videos on how he made a performant grass shader (not a step by step by any means but maybe you can make sense of it)
For some reason the grass is completely invisible on my computer (using the GitHub source). Tested on newer versions of Unity as well as the project version, on URP and Built-in. The issue occurs specifically when the Geometry shader is activated (geometry is still visible when the #pragma is commented out, and vanishes when it is uncommented). The wireframe disappears too, but the orange Edit Mode selection does not. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? My working theory is that it's something with GPU compatibility, or the geometry is being placed outside of the clip space, but I'm not skilled enough with shaders to figure this one out.
Hi, maybe you grass is not in the world origin (0, 0, 0). I discovered that the object with this shader needs to be at the origin, if you move this object you will see that the position and rotation is a bit off. At the current time i'm trying to solve this myself, but no progress until now.
I attached a second material to the grass mesh for the 'ground'. You could create a second plane but it's probably far easier to just use a second material.
Cutting grass is an interesting effect for sure. You can probably implement it using this existing shader if you were to update the grass visibility map at runtime by detecting where you are swinging your sword, making the texture black at that location, and then spawning a few grass blade particles at the same position.
Seems like this won't work with webgl : Custom/BotWGrass shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable) Sad :/ great tutorial anyway.
Ahh that's a shame. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think WebGL supports geometry or tessellation shaders at all? I'd be interested in revisiting this effect with a different approach which would work with WebGL, but I'm not sure when I'll get round to it.
HELP pls, when using this 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
Unfortunately not with this approach - Shader Graph doesn't support geometry shaders at all, and tessellation support only recently got added to HDRP, but not URP. Maybe in the future this will be possible, but geometry shaders don't appear to be on the planned feature list: portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/tabs/7-shader-graph
You would probably need to change a couple of things - HDRP isn't my strong suit so I'm unsure how much would need tweaking, but certainly in the Tags section of the shader file you'll need to change the "RenderPipeline" from "UniversalPipeline" to, I think, "HDRenderPipeline". But yes, I think this would work with HDRP!
Yeah, geometry and tessellation shader support across different platforms seems a bit shaky. Generally, I only test these shaders on desktop PC platforms so I'm unsure how to get this working on PS4 I'm afraid!
I had a quick look and not all mobile platforms support geometry and/or tessellation shaders, so you might need to use an entirely different approach for mobile. I'm not sure if that's the problem you're facing exactly, but I'd certainly be interested in revisiting this effect using an alternative method that would work on mobile.
Unfortunately, URP doesn't support multiple geometry-rendering passes inside a single shader. What I did instead is apply two materials to the same mesh: one which draws the grass, and the other draws the ground underneath.
@@danielilett Also, is this supposed to be extremely slow? At even just a little more grass than you show, I get about 15-30 FPS and it maxes out my R9 290X. Sorry for the many questions.
Nope! The geometry shader I'm describing is taking vertices from a plane mesh (Unity's default one) and using those as kind of 'origin points' to build the grass blade meshes. The grass blades themselves are created manually inside the for-loop partway through. In that entire process, the original plane is removed (because I don't add its original triangles back to the triangle stream). The tessellation shader is taking that same plane mesh and adding extra vertices between the existing ones without modifying the shape of the mesh. This runs before the geometry shader, so the result is that we get much thicker grass because there's more of those 'origin points'. PS: geometry and tessellation shaders are rarely used at the beginner level, but this video is intended in part to kind of just mention they exist and give a brief overview of what they do. They are a lot more technical than vertex and fragment shaders so this might be a video to come back to once you've got a bit more experience!
The grass in Genshin Impact (which I haven't played) looks very similar to BotW, so honestly you could probably use this tutorial for that! There's quite a few properties you can tweak if you need it to look a bit different.
ALSO PLEASE PIN THIS : FIX CONSTANT REGENERATION OF GRASS PLACEMENT ON OBJECT MOVE: replace #pragma geomVertex geomVert with : #pragma vertex vert and make it so the original vertex just returns v and nothing else, as in don't assign to it.
Does anyone experience an error with this shader where when you view the surface at some combination of a certain angle (around 30 - 45 deg) and a certain minimum distance the grass effect gets culled completely? Running on Unity 2020.3.14f1 URP... EDIT: Im just noticing now that the grass isn't actually culled but rendered at a completely different position than it is supposed to be, and can be seen way off in the distance.. Here is an image if interested @Daniel Ilett drive.google.com/file/d/17l43Rl5v7M2Sue8jBB8FOTI21ZXtZlBf/view?usp=sharing
I'm having the exact same issue, Even weirder if I move a VFX graph I have in the scene it moves with that graph after the culling/teleporting issue. If I delete my VFX from the scene it disappears completely. I am trying to figure out why this is, I have been researching forever but can't find anything on the topic. It got to the point where I was copying his github code to use in my proj and it still happened. Also also in his code he sets the Queue to "Geometry" and in order for my shader to render it has to be set to transparent in the inspector, even though the Queue in code says Geometry. I think it may have something to do with my SRP that generates Outlines on all objects before transparents are rendered and it may be messing with it's UV or Normals. I will post an update comment if I figure anything out.
Ok, I figured it out, First make sure in the inspector your Shader is set to Geometry for the queue. Then go to your current renderer settings (In my case URP-HighFidelity) which can be found in Assets/Settings. There is an option below renderer (Make sure renderer is set to forward) and make sure "Depth priming mode" is set to disabled. This fixed the issue for me.
As an addendum to this when using multiple materials that do this effect you have to set them on different render layers as in since it's geometry the first one would be 2000, second 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. This is because when they are on the same layer they mess each others calculations up.
This is the best video I've ever seen in my entire life
Man you do some fantastic work! I have been looking for a video like this forever. I would love to see more videos on shaders in the style of breath of the wild!
I'll have to spread them out so that I don't exhaust my audience with Breath of the Wild tutorials, but games like that are an absolute gold mine for new effects to discover. There's a very high chance I'll be coming back to it for tutorials for a while!
@@danielilett I'm looking forwards to it
Such a well done video, I've always loved the grass in this game and how insanely optimized things can be these days. Thank you for sharing!
i cannot believe how little attention this has gotten. def deserves way more gj man
Here I'll post any notes or clarifications on the tutorial!
I forgot to mention the directives required to make the tessellation shader work (though they're included in the GitHub code). In the same place as '#pragma geometry geom', you'll need to put '#pragma hull hull'
and '#pragma domain domain'. And in the same vein as '#pragma require geometry', you'll need to put '#pragma require tessellation tessHW'!
In your demo project you are applying two materials to meshes that only have one submesh. This is less performant than adding a pass that does something simple like apply a base texture with diffuse shading, or something like that to create the visual of the dirt underneath the grass. If this technique is not used then the mesh itself appears transparent when it is viewed through the gaps in the grass. Would it be possible to make a modified version of this that has an additional render pass to apply a base texture to the ground?
Nice!
Hope you'll talk about the camera work on the grass bending aswell
A year late, but its not working for me. Either Its completely transparent or there's no grass at all. Nothing visible
Lol i was praying to god there's a link to this in the description.. thxx!
Following along with this tutorial on MacOS, on an older MacBook Pro. I'm also getting the "Shader not supported by this gpu" error that some others have received. However, I did find a workaround. By going to Player Settings and changing the rendering API from Metal to Open GLCore, I'm seeming to have better results so far into the tutorial. Still am having trouble rendering the triangles, but at least the shader is supported.
how did this end?
Thank you for this amazing grass tutorials! I recently started my journey with shader just because I want to replicate this.
But I have one question. How do we use it on terrain??
Brilliant, thanks a lot!!
The final looks are so good! Btw to think a Switch which has much weaker hardware than today phone can show us a field full of grass, is just too impressive in terms of optimization.
Agreed - I got my Switch on launch day along with BotW and I was blown away by how it looked in handheld mode. I'm not actually sure what techniques they used to optimise the grass but they did a great job.
@@danielilett the grass and the sky, omg the sky is chef’s kiss 💋
@@danielilett im pretty sure they added a picture onto a plane and made it move around or smth but i may be wrong
@@danielilett One of the technique is frustrum culling and LODs. Acerola explained those in a detail in his video. You should check that out.
I absolutely love this video! Getting into grass shaders currently and I love the application here! I do want to mention an issue I don't super understand. The grass seems to receive shadows only when Cascade Count is set to 1 in the URP settings. I am currently using Unity 2021.1.16f1 and URP 11.0.0. Any pointers would be great!
Changing the """#ifdef _MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS""" in the fragment shader to """#if defined(_MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS) || defined(_MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_CASCADE)""" worked for me
This doesn't seem to be affected by my directional light in URP 2021.3.1f1.
Setting cascade count to 1 lets it receive shadows, but the grass itself doesn't seem to react to lights.
Any idea why?
how would go about making this work with lighting?
Edit: I also found that its not very friendly on performance :(
Is there a way to add this into a shader that i made using shader graph for my terrain ?
Btw really nice work, looks pretty neat.
Can you apply a geometry shader to a generated mesh from an empty object? (generating grass) I tried with just creating the vertices, then adding triangles and I still get nothing. I feel like this should work but maybe its not passing a direction for the generated triangle or something?
Thank you ! Very nice tutorial !
Just one thing, how would you do to use this type of grass on a unity terrain ?
In my scenario, I am generating terrain using noise applied to a height map, which is then applied to a terrain chunk. I then make a copy of that height map and create a mesh out of it, and then assign the grass material to this mesh, and assign the height map to the grass material instance on that mesh. For my scenario, this works out so that grass is only present on terrain that is of a certain height or higher, which is how I wanted it. Performance wise I'm running a few million blades of grass on about six visible chunks and getting over 200FPS on a 1660, so it's working for me. To note, there is chunkloading being utliized to improve FPS. This is in URP 2021.3.8f1. There are no doubt better ways, but this worked for me so you might give it a try.
Instant subscribe
Very good video, well explained and very detailed!
The only problem I see with this method is the fact that the grass is based on a mesh. It means that you need a plane or whatever other mesh to show grass on top of it and it uses a material for the grass. So it means that if I have a terrain that I want to cover with grass, I can't, unless I cover it with another mesh that follows the terrain deformation which double the number of vertices.
Maybe there is another solution to this or I missed something, if that is the case, let me know a good way to do this, I would appreciate it.
Awesome shader, but how can we make it lit?
Any clue why the grass shader acts extremely weird if added to the same scene as unity terrain? It will start bouncing around and snapping to the edges of the terrain "visually" despite its location remaining static?
I hade the same problem, I was able to fix it by changing the code on the shader. There is a problem when converting world coordinates to Object coordinates and vice-versa. I fixed it by making it convert back and forth to world/object space coordinates.
when the screen bottom edge is placed just between the top of grass and its original mesh surface, it seems unity does not render that mesh so the grass just disappear suddenly. Is there any solution for that?
I've got the shader fully working, but is anyone else having a problem with the geometry not lining up with the game objects selection outline? for example if i move the gameobject 10m in the X direction, the grass ends up at 20m. No idea why 🤔
found any solution for this?
Hope you recreate this vid for new Unity
PLEASE PIN THIS : IF HAVING ISSUES WITH SHADER POPPING TO DIFFERENT LOCATION DEPENDING ON ANGLE
First make sure in the inspector your Shader is set to Geometry for the queue. Then go to your current renderer settings (In my case URP-HighFidelity) which can be found in Assets/Settings. There is an option below renderer (Make sure renderer is set to forward) and make sure "Depth priming mode" is set to disabled. This fixed the issue for me.
When I created another material using the same shader the issue reappeared and this was how I solved it:
when using multiple materials that do this effect you have to set them on different render layers as in since it's geometry the first one would be 2000, second 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. This is because when they are on the same layer they mess each others calculations up.
Hey, dude. Thx for your enlightenment, XD. My grass still telepotated after disabled depth prime mode and set queue to higher values. But it is such a drama that it works after I set its queue to a lower value like 1999. I guess it does work with the render queue that may store past cache and then calculate up with the new. However, Im such a freshman to figure out what happens behind the engine and renderer. Hope my measure could help others alot.
@@Moyi0v0 And in my case it worked with a higher geometry queue. I used Geometry+10 and it's all good now
Hey! Good job man! I'm wondering if this works on HDRP though
Can you show how we could cut the grass?
Do you have any idea how to increase the performance of this? It maxes out my R9 290X and gets me 15 FPS when I add a little more grass.
You can't because it's using every single vertices on the mesh you could decrease vert but It Will help a little bit
Is there a way to use this with Unity's terrain painter tools. Like paint the shader onto the terrain.
you figure that out?
Hi Daniel, I tried to run your project in my unity, it showed "Custom/BotWGrass shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)", and the grass material turned pink. Plz help!
Strange - which Unity version and render pipeline are you on? Sometimes certain subshaders don't work on certain hardware so it also could be related to the computer you're using or which platform you're building for. Not all platforms support geometry or tessellation shaders (which this effect uses quite heavily).
Hey any idea why it's not supported? I'm on a 2019 MacBook Pro, maybe an M1 will support it
As a beginner on shaders, this tutorial is quite confusing... It would've helped a lot to see the entire code file once every while, and how to apply the shader (I created a new material at 5:14, dragged it onto a plane and got a different result than you have, but without the main code file overview I don't exactly know where it went wrong). Of course the Git link is there, but that's the final product and not the learning steps. I'll go watch some more beginner-friendly tutorials and then come back to this one!
It is normal that the shadow dont work even on the git project
When I slapped the material on a plane it directly became invisible any idea what may have caused that ??
you have to make the object have 2 materials so it dosent become invisible
Hi ! How can i paint that grass on my map please ?
I go to assist, thanks men.
Why does my grass still wreegling when the object is moving ?
Can you make subsurface scattering in urp tutorial? please
I might do one day - subsurface scattering is something I've never really done before, but I think it'd be interesting.
Shadows don't seem to work in URP 12+, just as an FYI.
Anyone test the performance with this method in an open world setting? Wondering if it’s viable to use on a real game
It can be, but it gets better performance if you load your world in chunks, to prevent rendering things way off in the distance that shouldn't be so detailed. Additionally, you can make an LOD controller component that adjusts the material used by the object (to lower quality variations) based on the distance from the camera
Did the latest Unity update kill this method?
Hi, so i dont know why but the tesselation shader is using a huge amount of the gpu if its set to 0.01, even though there is no gras rendered. Is there a way to better the performence because i cant use the shader with this performance. An answer would be great! Best regards :)
ok so i tested it and the reason is probably that the tesselation is done on the whole map, which is far to big. So is there a way to do the tesselation only near player distance?
okay nvmd, i finally did it!!!! Holy moly after 1 month i finally got it to work. Awesome! Thanks to your ground work ofc, Thanks!!
@@bounzerus4676 can you share how did you solved this, please.
could u make the samething with shader graph?
You can't make *exactly* the same thing because Shader Graph does not support geometry shaders.
There are other techniques for making large fields of grass like this one, although I'm unsure if Shader Graph supports them.
any hope of seeing this compatible with unity terrain?
Hi! Do you solve this problem? I found the shader has a display error when there is a unity terrain in the project
Great video! How performant is this? Is it a good idea to use this on mobile devices where optimization is trivial?
I know this is a late reply but it's not very performant. I myself don't know much about shaders but I do know one thing, Geometry Shaders are slow, so using them for something like grass is guaranteed to be very bad for performance. The youtuber Acerola has a couple of videos on how he made a performant grass shader (not a step by step by any means but maybe you can make sense of it)
@@Hietakissa thanks. Really appreciate it.
Do we need to download something
For some reason the grass is completely invisible on my computer (using the GitHub source). Tested on newer versions of Unity as well as the project version, on URP and Built-in.
The issue occurs specifically when the Geometry shader is activated (geometry is still visible when the #pragma is commented out, and vanishes when it is uncommented). The wireframe disappears too, but the orange Edit Mode selection does not.
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? My working theory is that it's something with GPU compatibility, or the geometry is being placed outside of the clip space, but I'm not skilled enough with shaders to figure this one out.
Hi, maybe you grass is not in the world origin (0, 0, 0). I discovered that the object with this shader needs to be at the origin, if you move this object you will see that the position and rotation is a bit off. At the current time i'm trying to solve this myself, but no progress until now.
@@vitor-a12 same problem, did you solve it?
Sorry for the noob question. How can I write shader code in URP? I only know that shader graph in URP. (Create->Shader Graph->Lit...)
your creating a shader graph, while you need a just a shader. Create->Shader->Unlit Shader
@@Michael-fp9rl Thank you :)
the bottom of my grass is invisible do i need to creat a second plane?
I attached a second material to the grass mesh for the 'ground'. You could create a second plane but it's probably far easier to just use a second material.
you should make a video about cutting the grass like in botw
Cutting grass is an interesting effect for sure. You can probably implement it using this existing shader if you were to update the grass visibility map at runtime by detecting where you are swinging your sword, making the texture black at that location, and then spawning a few grass blade particles at the same position.
Seems like this won't work with webgl : Custom/BotWGrass shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)
Sad :/
great tutorial anyway.
Ahh that's a shame. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think WebGL supports geometry or tessellation shaders at all? I'd be interested in revisiting this effect with a different approach which would work with WebGL, but I'm not sure when I'll get round to it.
HELP pls, when using this 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
I'll be making my ork of this soon, I had made a more robust version for the built-in renderer and now I have the tools to make it work on URP.
Hi, haven't found a solution to this problem yet?
Any idea why when using in the same scene as a terain the grass and the plane offsets?
Honestly, no clue! I noticed this while making the shader and I'm completely mystified as to how something like that even happens.
@@danielilett Ah, I came here to ask the same question. It's so strange. 😅
same
Is it possible to recreate this with Only Shader Graph?
Unfortunately not with this approach - Shader Graph doesn't support geometry shaders at all, and tessellation support only recently got added to HDRP, but not URP. Maybe in the future this will be possible, but geometry shaders don't appear to be on the planned feature list: portal.productboard.com/unity/1-unity-platform-rendering-visual-effects/tabs/7-shader-graph
Should this work in HDRP?
You would probably need to change a couple of things - HDRP isn't my strong suit so I'm unsure how much would need tweaking, but certainly in the Tags section of the shader file you'll need to change the "RenderPipeline" from "UniversalPipeline" to, I think, "HDRenderPipeline". But yes, I think this would work with HDRP!
This shader works really well but i think ps4 doesnt support it because the grass turns like a plane pink
Yeah, geometry and tessellation shader support across different platforms seems a bit shaky. Generally, I only test these shaders on desktop PC platforms so I'm unsure how to get this working on PS4 I'm afraid!
Great Bro! Can you upgrade for mobile, it's not working on mobile ( android device)
I had a quick look and not all mobile platforms support geometry and/or tessellation shaders, so you might need to use an entirely different approach for mobile. I'm not sure if that's the problem you're facing exactly, but I'd certainly be interested in revisiting this effect using an alternative method that would work on mobile.
@@danielilett yes, thank you for replay.
I can get the grass perfectly, but I can't get my plane to have a solid color beneath it. It's just air.
Any ideas?
Unfortunately, URP doesn't support multiple geometry-rendering passes inside a single shader. What I did instead is apply two materials to the same mesh: one which draws the grass, and the other draws the ground underneath.
@@danielilett Also, is this supposed to be extremely slow? At even just a little more grass than you show, I get about 15-30 FPS and it maxes out my R9 290X.
Sorry for the many questions.
It is amazing but I dont know how to use it xD. I mean how to draw it on terrain or something xD
Best
As a beginner I'm super confused....like do I have to add grass mesh from blender???or what?
Nope! The geometry shader I'm describing is taking vertices from a plane mesh (Unity's default one) and using those as kind of 'origin points' to build the grass blade meshes. The grass blades themselves are created manually inside the for-loop partway through. In that entire process, the original plane is removed (because I don't add its original triangles back to the triangle stream).
The tessellation shader is taking that same plane mesh and adding extra vertices between the existing ones without modifying the shape of the mesh. This runs before the geometry shader, so the result is that we get much thicker grass because there's more of those 'origin points'.
PS: geometry and tessellation shaders are rarely used at the beginner level, but this video is intended in part to kind of just mention they exist and give a brief overview of what they do. They are a lot more technical than vertex and fragment shaders so this might be a video to come back to once you've got a bit more experience!
@@danielilett Thank you 100 senpai
Still here xd
you said this would be a shader graph tutorial in the thumbnail. :(
Yeah my bad, thanks for letting me know. I change the thumbnails around occasionally and sometimes make mistakes like that get through.
47 hours later...
2 years later
is this too advance for beginners?
It might be a bit advanced if this is your very first shader, but the overall technique might be interesting to you!
@@danielilett could you also make a follow up tutorial on how to make the grass from Genshin Impact?
The grass in Genshin Impact (which I haven't played) looks very similar to BotW, so honestly you could probably use this tutorial for that! There's quite a few properties you can tweak if you need it to look a bit different.
ALSO PLEASE PIN THIS : FIX CONSTANT REGENERATION OF GRASS PLACEMENT ON OBJECT MOVE:
replace #pragma geomVertex geomVert
with : #pragma vertex vert
and make it so the original vertex just returns v and nothing else, as in don't assign to it.
Это потрясающе! Но я нихуя не понял как ты это сделал.
Does anyone experience an error with this shader where when you view the surface at some combination of a certain angle (around 30 - 45 deg) and a certain minimum distance the grass effect gets culled completely? Running on Unity 2020.3.14f1 URP...
EDIT: Im just noticing now that the grass isn't actually culled but rendered at a completely different position than it is supposed to be, and can be seen way off in the distance.. Here is an image if interested @Daniel Ilett drive.google.com/file/d/17l43Rl5v7M2Sue8jBB8FOTI21ZXtZlBf/view?usp=sharing
I'm having the exact same issue, Even weirder if I move a VFX graph I have in the scene it moves with that graph after the culling/teleporting issue. If I delete my VFX from the scene it disappears completely. I am trying to figure out why this is, I have been researching forever but can't find anything on the topic. It got to the point where I was copying his github code to use in my proj and it still happened. Also also in his code he sets the Queue to "Geometry" and in order for my shader to render it has to be set to transparent in the inspector, even though the Queue in code says Geometry. I think it may have something to do with my SRP that generates Outlines on all objects before transparents are rendered and it may be messing with it's UV or Normals. I will post an update comment if I figure anything out.
Ok, I figured it out, First make sure in the inspector your Shader is set to Geometry for the queue. Then go to your current renderer settings (In my case URP-HighFidelity) which can be found in Assets/Settings. There is an option below renderer (Make sure renderer is set to forward) and make sure "Depth priming mode" is set to disabled. This fixed the issue for me.
As an addendum to this when using multiple materials that do this effect you have to set them on different render layers as in since it's geometry the first one would be 2000, second 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. This is because when they are on the same layer they mess each others calculations up.
@@LM-cc7qz Thanks!! Changing the render queue for each material using this shader solved the bug for me.