Stylized Grass Shader

« For use with Unity 2021.3 - 2023.2 »

📄 Documentation | 🟣 Discord | 💬 Forum | ⚙️ Compatibility

🌿 Key features

• Lush wind animations, supports dynamic speed/direction changes (through a Wind Zone)

• Easy to use interaction system. Bending and flattening through trails, meshes, lines or particle effects.

• Color blending with terrain surface (supports tiled setups and mesh terrains)

• Per object and per vertex color variation, breaks up visual repetition

• Sun light translucency rendering

• Perspective correction, for optimal coverage when viewed from top-down

• Angle fading, fades out faces not oriented to camera

• Near/far camera fading

⚙️ Technical

• SRP Batching compatible

• Physically-based or simple shading mode (similar to the Lit and Simple Lit shaders)

• Bending functionality does not use a 2nd camera! Best in class performance! (No overhead for additional culling and batching)

• Expertly crafted hand-written shader, for optimal efficiency.

✔️ Compatibility

• Universal Render Pipeline (URP) 12.1.8+ (excluding the Built-in RP & HDRP)

• PC, macOS (OpenGL/Metal), Consoles.

• One-click integration for Foliage Renderer, Nature Renderer (2020-2022), GPU Instancer, Curved World 2020 and Vegetation Studio/Pro.

• Does not support Render Graph

🚧 Limitations

• Not a grass placement/render tool (documentation includes tips)

• Not suitable for mobile platforms.

——————— 🔶 Legacy Version – Read Before Purchasing ———————

This asset was originally released in 2020, and has been continuinly updated and improved through complementary updates, including one major revision. As of 2024 it is no longer under active development. However, it is subject to minor fixes required to keep it working in its supported Unity versions. This version is mature and stable and works as advertised.

Unity 6 introduced a fundamental rendering architecture change which requires a separate shader implementation and rendering paradigm.

Because of this, Unity 6+ is supported through a new dedicated version of the asset, that can be upgraded to at a discount. Release is set pending Q1 2026. Updates are shared on Discord.

[ Asset Store Refund policy ]

Release Notes

Please consider leaving a review if this update proved to be benefitial :)

1.4.6

Fixed:

- Patched critical shader errors when using APV in Unity 6 (not supported)

1.4.5

Added:

- Billboarding, parameter to control the amount of vertical rotation

Changed:

- Removed shader error workaround for MacOS added in v1.4.4. The related bug is now fixed in 2022.3.36f1+

Fixed:

- Hotfix for OUTPUT_SH4 and SAMPLE_GI shader macro errors in Unity 6000.0.9f1+

1.4.4

Added:

- Foliage Renderer integration

Changed:

- Implemented proper error handling for Unity 6.

- Improved handling of grass benders below the grass, which should not apply any force.

- Corrected LOD Group set up on GrassPatch_Realistic prefab.

Fixed:

- Shader compile error on MacOS when using 2022.3.15+ (workaround for known URP bug)

1.4.3

Fixed:

- Wind gusting not respecting the wind direction configured on a material.

- Shader error when building for PS5

Removed:

- GrassBendingFeature script file (obsolete since v1.3.0)

1.4.2

Minimum supported version is now Unity 2021.3.16f1.

Added:

- Parameters to choose which vertex color channel is used for shading, wind and bending features.

Changed:

- Optimization improvement for runtime usage of color map baking (~22-60% faster). The render result is now kept in memory and the GPU->CPU coping normally done for saving is skipped.

- Shader code no longer requires editing to support DOTS instancing.

Fixed:

- Entity Graphics rendering not having any effect in a build in Unity 2022.3+.

- Shader error when Probes Volumes was enabled.

1.4.1

This is the last update supporting Unity 2020 LTS

Added:

- LOD Crossfading support for cast shadows in Unity 2022.2+

Fixed:

- Script compile error in Unity 2022.2 (only)

- Shader error in Unity 2023.1.7+ (URP v15.0.8) due to now backported code from Unity 2023.2

- Grass turning black when Entity Graphics was in use without MaterialProperty components to define a color

1.4.0

Verified support for Unity 2023.1.f1

Added:

- New general Grass Render Feature, this now handles Bending, Perspective Correction and Dithering in one render feature.

- Support for runtime Color Map rendering (GrassColorMapRenderer.Render()).

- Hue Variation Height parameter, allows limiting the hue shift to the tip of grass geometry.

- Option to use the camera's forward direction for Perspective Correction (on the render feature).

- Additional wind gust texture variant (omni-directional).

- Support for Rendering Layer Mask (lights and decals).

Changed:

- Improved UI for the Colormap Renderer inspector to provide more concise instructions and notifications.

- When saving a Colormap asset to a file, the texture is now saved as a separate .PNG file. This will allow Unity to properly compress it.

- Grass bending can now be disabled on the render feature.

- Angle/Distance fading now uses a dithering texture (assigned on the render feature).

- (Unity 2022.2+) LOD crossfading now uses the same shader function now native to URP.

- Hue variation is now applied on a per-pixel basis.

Fixed:

- Colormap not taking effect when entering Play mode, if it was saved to an asset.

- Non-terrain objects always rendering on top of terrains in a Colormap render output.

- Colormap Renderer, non-terrain objects not being restored to their original Y-position after rendering.

- Colormap Renderer, fresnel reflections potentially still being visible when using a third-party lighting system.

- Ensured the flower prefabs have a centered position by default.

- Grass benders not rendering using the SRP Batcher, if enabled.

- Shader error 'redefinition of sampler_linearClamp' in URP 14.0.7+

- Material UI, not respecting individual texture assignments when selecting multiple materials.

Removed:

(Deletions aren't tracked by Unity packages, these must be performed manually on your end)

- GrassBendingFeature class.

1.3.4

Added:

- Colormap Renderer, texture detail parameter. Allows to filter out high frequency details.

- Stylized Grass Renderer component, wind zone Main and Turbulence multipliers. Allows wind to be normalized to match potentially other wind-enabled shaders using the same Wind Zone.

Changed:

- Colormap Renderer, will now restore the terrain's original vegetation drawing setting after rendering (Nature Renderer use case).

- Colormap Renderer, will no longer enable Directional Lights that were intended to remain disabled (eg. lighting system with a disabled moon during daytime).

- Colormap Renderer, now creates a temporary empty renderer through script, to prevent any third-party post processing effects from interfering

Fixed:

- Console warnings about demo scene scripts not being part of an assembly

- Wind gusting accelerating over time when tied to a Wind Zone

Deleted:

- Stylized Grass Shader/Runtime/Renderers folder, now obsolete

1.3.3b

Hotfix for shader error regarding invalid cast

1.3.3

Added:

- Integration for Nature Renderer 2021

Changed:

- Vegetation Studio Pro integration is no longer default, as to not interfer with the Hybrid Renderer.

Fixed:

- Preemptive shader error fix for Unity 2023.1.0a26+

- Shader warning thrown in 2021.2+ related to using the Graphics Debugger

- Materials not receiving shadows, or showing banding artefacts, when a single shadow cascade is used. (In Unity 2021.3.15+, or versions released after December 15th 2022)

1.3.2

Added:

- Support for Unity 2022.2

- Support for the Forward+ rendering path

- Support for dynamic wind directions from a Wind Zone component

- Wind: Gusting speed material parameter

- "_Seed" parameter for use with the Hybrid Renderer in DOTS (0.5.0 and 1.0.0+)

Fixed:

- Min/max material parameters not displaying override options on material variants

- Grass bending pass no longer executes for overlay cameras.

1.3.1

Fixed:

- Terrain material being overriden when using the Colormap Renderer with specific settings.

- Preliminary fixes for Unity 2023.1.0

1.3.0

IMPORTANT: Read the update guide here https://staggart.xyz/sgs-130-upgrade-guide/

Minimum supported version is now Unity 2020.3 and URP 10.3.2

- Reworked the grass bending functionality for greatly improved performance.

- Restructured folders to follow the UPM standard. Scripts now in a separate Runtime/Editor folder.

Added:

- Prefabs specific to use with the terrain system (without LODs)

- Normal maps for all grass textures

- Masking Sphere component. Fades out the grass towards a single point, with a given radius.

- GI support for DOTS Instancing (Hybrid Renderer)

- Options for near/fade camera fading

Changed:

- Recreated most grass textures for improved shape and density.

- Scale map is no longer experimental

* Transitions between different terrain layers are now seamless

* Grass scale defaults to 100% for any layers not configured

- Translucency shading is now greatly improved for orthographic cameras.

- Color Map Renderer now respects individual materials assigned to terrain tiles.

- Reworked material UI to support multi-selection and Material Variants. This causes the following parameters to be reset:

* Normal parameters

* Distance fading parameters

* Environment reflections toggle

Fixed:

- Alpha clipping value no longer influences the angle fading functionality.

- Color map rendering as completely red if the terrain had 0 height.

- Grass appearing shorter if the "Apply scale map" option was enabled, yet no scale map was present

- Sparkles appearing when the grass geometry occupies <1px on the screen and MSAA is enabled.

- Certain terrain layers not being configurable in the layer-based grass scale options

1.2.2

Fixed:

- Grass bending appearing flipped in Unity 2022.1

- Edge fading being inverted when using the OpenGLES graphics API

1.2.1

Minimum supported version is now 2019.4.15f1

Added:

- Emission color parameter (HDR)

- Vegetation Studio Pro LOD debug now also shows on grass

Fixed:

- Wind direction not matching up between ambient wind and gusting

1.2.0

Added:

- Translucency

* Offset parameter. Controls how much the effect wraps around the mesh

* Falloff parameter. Controls the size of the effect (previously hardcoded to a value of 4, which is now default)

* Indirect strength parameter. Shading can now also be performed for light hitting the front of the grass.

- Parameters to control normals are now available in VSP (requires the prefab to be refreshed)

Changed:

- When activating the Nature Renderer or GPU Instancer integration. Filepaths in the shader are now automatically rewritten based on their current install location

- Grass bending now fades out at a constant 2 units towards the edge of the render area, no matter its size.

Fixed:

- Translucency shading being wrongly affected by the grass color as it appears after lighting

- External material changes (eg. source control) not being reflected in the material UI

1.1.9

Fixed:

- Color map renderer not being able to find the necessary renderer when first set up

- Grass bending not taking affect at higher elevations

1.1.8

Fixed:

- Shader not compiling in WebGL builds in Unity 2019.3-2020.2

[ Full changelog is in the package itself! ]