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

1.1.7

Minimum supported version is now Unity 2019.4.0 and URP 7.4.1

Added:

- Flatten normals parameter added. Lighting will treat the mesh as if its normals are pointing straight up.

- Build preprocessor script which strips shader variants for features only available in newer URP versions, improves build times

- Specular highlights toggle and smoothness parameter

- Support for Rendering Debugger and Decals in 2021.2.0b1

Changed:

- Bending renderer can now follow the current camera rendering, so is no longer limited to a single area

- Bending renderer, Mask Edges option is no longer needed, functionality now is incorporated into the shader, which is ultimately faster.

- Normals of grass meshes are now hard-shaded. This is required for the depth-normals pass in URP10+ and greatly improves the SSAO behaviour.

- Added option to disable jittering for trail benders (Force updating)

Fixed:

- Shader errors in Unity 2021.2.0b1 (alpha version is now obsolete, and will break instead).

Removed:

- Shadow bias correction option, unfortunately required to make room for newer URP features and reduce shader variants

1.1.6

Added:

- Preliminary support for Deferred rendering in URP 12+. Due to its nature, translucency will not work with this rendering path

- Configured _BaseColor as an exposed parameter for Hybrid Renderer v2 (more can be added following the same structure in the Input.hlsl file)

- Support for LOD crossfading in Vegetation Studio Pro beta 1.4.2.1

Changed:

- Improved LOD fading + workaround for URP bug where cast shadows flicker during the transition

- Color map rendering now supports terrains with varying height positions

- Trail grass benders now have their position slightly jittered, so their lifetime always updates even when stationary

Fixed:

- Material UI now showing the correct current wind strength, when a Wind Zone is used.

1.1.5

Revised demo content to showcase more grass and in larger varieties

Added:

- Flowers: Aster/Chamomile/Dandelions/Speedwell/Shrub

- Ground cover: Clovers/Daisies/Poppies

- Bending tint color, multiplies the base color by this value, where ever something bends the grass

- Spherify normals parameter, interprets the mesh as a sphere, resulting in fluffy shading

Changed;

- Refactored shader to more closely adhere to the standard URP structure. Now supports point/spot light shadows

- Trail benders now also support alpha blending (including particle trails)

Fixed:

- Colormap render not encapsulating terrain if larger than 4x4km and positioned extremely far from the world origin

- Scripting errors in URP 12/2021.2+ due to now obsolete code.

1.1.4

Added:

- Unlit shading mode, for projects using flat shading or targeting high performance

Changed:

- SSAO in URP 10 now also properly takes into account point/spot lights

Fixed:

- Bright sparkles in some situations where HDR is used and bright skybox lighting

- SSAO appearing with dithered artifacts on grass in URP 11

1.1.3

Added:

- Support for Depth Normals pre-pass and SSAO in URP 10+

Changed:

- Minor UI improvements for clarity

1.1.2

Added:

- Billboarding mode, this requires the "GrassBillboardQuad" mesh. A new prefab configured for billboarding has been added.

- Line Renderers can now also be used for grass bending

- Angle fading feature, dithers the faces not directed at the camera, making the mesh's planes less noticeable (works best without shadow casting)

Fixed:

- Skybox reflection and fog are temporarily disabled when rendering a color map, as their effects may end up being rendered into the texture

Changed:

- Improvements to grass bending, where any flickering is now entirely eliminated.

- Color map is now rendered by rendering terrains with an unlit shader for increased color accuracy. Previous method still available through a checkbox, when using a third-party terrain shader.

- Minimized CG allocation in grass bending render loop

- Enabled LOD crossfading on all prefabs by default

Removed:

- Support for directional lightmaps, this is unlikely to ever be used with grass and halves the amount of shader variants

1.1.1

Added:

- Support for Curved World 2020. This has to be activated through the Curved World shader activator. Options will then appear under the "Vertices" section. Grass bending not supported.

- Support for GPU Instancer, this must be enabled at the bottom of the material UI

Fixed:

- Render features like third-party post processing effects no longer inadvertently apply to the color map render.

- Shader errors for grass bending when using Single Pass Instanced rendering

Changed:

- Polished material UI through new template. Sections now smoothly expand/collapse.

- Main color parameter is now HDR-enabled, allowing emissive grass

1.1.0

Added:

- Colormap Renderer can now also render a scale map for grass, based on terrain layers. Allows grass scale to be determined by painted terrain layer strength.

Material now has a Vector3 field to control the scale influence for the XYZ axis. The "Apply scalemap" toggle must be enabled on a material.

- "Shadow banding correction" toggle. Offsets the shadows received by the grass a tiny bit. This avoids unwanted self-shadowing (aka shadow acne).

- Support for LOD dithered crossfading (requires to be enabled on LOD group)

Changed:

- Height offset for mesh grass benders is now also applied to the wireframe gizmo

- Active color map is now re-assigned whenever scene is saved, to avoid the link to the shader being broken

- "Bending" section in material UI was renamed to "Vertices".

- Bending render area edge masking now also works when not in play-mode.

- Added additional edge loop to LOD0 of meshes. Added a LOD2 mesh with fewer vertices.

Fixed:

- Color Map Renderer

* Render area calculations when terrains have a negative position

* Handling cases where terrains are entirely flat

- (Preemptive) Warning about obsolete method in URP 9.0.0+ (2020.2)

- Shader error in URP 9.0.0, due to changes in URP lighting functions.

- Environment reflections not correct when a normal map was used on curved meshes.

Removed:

- Specular highlight parameter, this was broken to begin with and translucency ends up offering the same visual result.

Note: Prefabs in Vegetation Studio Pro have to be refreshed to avoid shadow flickering issues

[ Rest of changelog is in the package itself! ]

Stylized Grass Shader