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

1.0.9

Verified compatibility with URP 7.4.1

Added:

- Support for Nature Renderer's "Procedural Instancing".

* An option has been added at the bottom of the grass material to switch between Vegetation Studio and Nature Renderer integrations

- "GrassSingle" model/prefab. A version of the GrassPatch prefab but with a single tuft.

Changed:

- Revised demo scene

- When using the Simple Lighting mode, the color map is now also sampled per-pixel (texture would otherwise multiple over it)

Fixed:

- Bending area being flipped in URP 7.4.1

- Scenario where objects other than terrains could be rendered into the color map

- Sun light adding additional light when at a steep angle, causing color map to not match up with terrain

- Translucency now handles HDR light colors better

1.0.8

Changed:

- Bending renderer now moves to follow target transform intermittently, rather than constantly. This eliminates any possible movement flickering in the grass.

- Corrected settings for BendParticles prefab, it can now also be used as a child object.

- Wind gust tint no longer applies to emission, so will respond correctly to lower direct light intensity (eg. dawn/dusk/night)

Added:

- Wheat texture and prefab

- Thin grass texture and prefab

- StylizedGrassRenderer script now has a static SetPosition(Vector3 position) function

1.0.7

Minimum required URP version: 7.2.0. Tested in 7.2.1/7.3.1/8.0.1

Added:

- Alpha to coverage toggle to shader, reduces aliasing when using MSAA

- Thick grass texture and prefab

Changed:

- Wind gust tint is now applied after translucency, resulting in more natural lighting behaviour.

- Set all grass textures to "Clamp" to avoid thin lines at tip of grass at lower mipmaps

- Expanded state of material sections are now saved until Unity is closed

1.0.6

Minimum required URP version: 7.2.0. Tested in 7.2.1/7.3.1/8.0.1

Added:

- Perspective Correction parameter. Controls the amount by which the grass is gradually bent away from the camera as it looks down. Useful for better coverage in top-down perspectives

Changed:

- Improved visual quality of demo scenes through added color grading LUT and skybox

Fixed:

- Bug when using an override texture on a color map asset would cause it to be modified when re-rendering

- Bug where grass would still sample a color map when switching to a scene without one active

- Deleted hidden cameras from demo scenes, which caused a significant performance drop (development remnants)

- Bright pixels at tip of grass in situations where translucency is prominent and MSAA is used.

- Bending render area being flipped in URP 7.3.1

1.0.5

Minimum required URP version: 7.2.0. URP 7.3.1 compatibility verified.

Note: Color maps have to be re-rendered in order to update their information to a new format!

Changed:

- Color map textures are now compressed, resulting in a substantial memory saving.

Fixed:

- Errors thrown on the ColorMapRenderer component when no ColorMap asset was assigned

- Bending render area being flipped in URP 7.3.1 (Make up your mind, Unity!)

1.0.4

URP version requirement: 7.2.0+

Added:

- Sorting layer to Grass Bender component. Higher layers are drawn over lower layers. Can be used to control which benders should overwrite other benders.

- Particle trail prefab, as an alternative to using a grass bender with a trail renderer.

- Color map height parameter, allows the color map to only take effect at the root of a grass mesh

Changed:

- Grass benders using a particle system in World simulation space are now supported

- Grass benders outside of the render area are no longer processed

Fixed:

- URP installation dialog not having any effect due to changes in the Package Manager

- Color map not rendering correctly if terrains were moved away from the world origin

- (Preemptive fix) Grass bending render area being flipped in URP 8.0.1+ (Apparently was a mistake in 7.2.0)

1.0.3

Changed:

- Translucency color is now mixed with grass color through overlay blending, instead of directly using the sun color.

A white directional light on green grass results in a yellow-ish tint, as expected.

Fixed:

- Renderer component incorrectly displaying an error regarding URP installation

- Added missing materials for Alien and Tall grass prefabs

- Grass bending render area being flipped (Occurs since URP 7.2.0)

- Error on MacOS when using OpenGL regarding unsupported render texture format

1.0.2

Package now requires Universal Render Pipeline 7.2.0+

If the package is imported without the URP installed, a dialog will now open with the option to install it.

Fixed:

- Dark edge showing at borders of shadow cascades (Occurs since URP 7.2.0)

- Warning in Lighting shader library

1.0.1

Added:

- Grass Renderer component now has a WindZone field. When enabled, ambient and gust strength are influenced by its "Main" value

Changed:

- Wind tint is now masked by shadows

- Translucency effect now fades out when Directional Light approaches to the horizon

- Shader UI will show warnings about reflection settings when incompatible scene lighting settings are used

Fixed:

- Tiling/Offset values for normal map had no effect

- Color map rendering from mesh terrains can now automatically calculate the correct render area size

Stylized Grass Shader