DE Environment - Powerful shader solutions for Unity

Community Showcases
1

Hello everyone :slight_smile:
I’m so excited to introduce DE Environment, this is a massive pack of shaders with additional tools such as mesh optimization and ability to bake vertex wind into most 3rd party models even if they did not have vertex wind before.

Asset Store:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/de-environment-183775

Webpage:
http://deenvironment.com/

Email:
contact@deenvironment.com
support@deenvironment.com

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DeEnvironment

Discord:
https://discord.gg/W7VThzw

MAIN SHADERS:
Over 100+ highly optimized shaders covering all your project needs in one package.

billboard / cutout/ surface / stochastic / planar / triplanar / parallax / bicubic / skybox/ two-sided / water / glass / grunge / dissolve / voronoi / custom lighting / color shifting / moss / snow / rain / digital display / UI / sprite / emission / tessellation / terrain / vector displacement / melting / xray / outline / cloth / wind / detail / ++ many more

FEATURES:

Advanced Optimization
● Texture packing for single packed texture mapping ambient occlusion, smoothness, metallic,
● Advance sampling and reuse of core sampler states for best performance,
● Vertex baked ambient occlusion & translucency mapping fully supported,
● Built with (ASE) Amplify Shader Editor, ASE editor is not required to use DE Environment shaders. A large set of pre compiled examples are fully included pre optimized for the most commonly used configurations needed in your game production.

Please visit DE Environment and check documentation for a more complete listing of all the advanced features.

Modular Core Shader Construction
● A powerful set of shaders built using module construction with Amplify Shader Editor (ASE) function nodes. Modules can be added to any of the core shaders in countless configurations giving you what your project needs when you need it.
● Modules: wind / moss / snow / detail map / grunge / dissolve / rain / tessellation / vector displacement / emission / light UV reveal / color shifting / ++ many more.
● Modules for snow, moss, color shifting and emission include built-in controls for world or object space

Advanced Mesh Tools – Bake Wind Animation
● Add wind animation into any 3rd party models, easy to use with just a few clicks and your 3rd party vegetation will work with wind scripts even if models did not have any baked vertex color before.
● Baking vertex color works within Unity directly into source mesh or FBX models without the need to export into other external modeling programs.

Advanced Wind Controller
● Basic global controller for wind, snow & rain.

Advanced Mesh Tools – Repair Vertex tangents and Vertex Normal
● Repair game object prefabs with damaged, missing or poor vertex tangents and normal to give your assets the best possible visually correct lighting within Unity.
● Repairing normal and tangents works within Unity directly into source mesh or FBX models without the need to export into other external modeling programs.

Advanced Mesh Tools – Bake AO Ambient Occlusion
● Bake AO ambient occlusion into game objects/prefabs improving project performance and quality.
● Baking ambient occlusion works within Unity directly into source mesh or FBX models without the need to export into other external modeling programs.

Advance Texture Tools
● Texture combiner tool for textures packing or repacking texture channels giving your project a more highly optimized workflow.

Compatible with:
Amplify Shader Editor
AE Alexander Elert
Nature Renderer
Vegetation Studio
MTree Tree Creation
The Vegetation Engine
Sinespace

Need Help or Have More Questions?
Please visit DE Environment to learn more and or chat with us in real-time on Discord

Technical details
DE Environment is made up of two different shader packages called “DE Shaders” and “DEC Shaders”. DE Shaders are the most advance largest set and DEC is a smaller set commonly used to support to 3rd party asset developers

Supported Unity Render Pipelines – DE Shaders
Standard Render Pipeline:
● Unity 2018.04.20 or higher
High-Definition Render Pipeline:
● 10x api 10.4.0 or higher
● 11x api 11.0.0 or higher
Universal Render Pipeline:
● 10x api 10.4.0 or higher
● 11x api 11.0.0 or higher

3 Likes
2

Well they look very cool. Might I suggest a video or two (especially for the wind ones)?
Also I notice you’re using Amplify – any plan to support other graphics pipelines?
GL!

3

thank you
Render platforms are current set to all by default, however I have not fully tested in every one, if you do use other platforms and find issues please let me know

Direct3D 9 | Direct3D 11 9x | Direct3D 11/12 | OpenGL 3.x4.x | OpenGL ES 2.0 | OpenGL ES 3.x | IOS/Mac Metal | Vulkan | Xbox 360 | Xbox One | PlayStation 4 | PlaySation Vita | Nintendo 3DS | Nintendo Wii U

In the future I do plan to make many videos as we have been making games and actively working with a number of studios and hoping to make a few renders soon

4

Hey, thanks for the reply. Sorry, I should have said “URP” and “HDRP” (since I thought Amplify Shaders works with those, no?)

5

Yes DE Environment has two sets of shader in DE and DEC shaders

the smaller set is already supported in HDRP and URP with exception for the water shader i have not added it into HDRP

for roadmaps on the larger set I plan to fully port them into URP first. I feel the best time to do so is about the same time Unity releases 2020.2LTS and they add support for deferred in URP… according to unity this should happen very soon !!

at the moment 99% all the required functions to port the larger set are fully built into the shaders already for porting now
we have been using the smaller set DEC shaders to work out any bugs in SRP to make the transition more manageable

for details you can also join are discord https://discord.gg/W7VThzw
we have a beta channel also in discord for verified users who can get the latest builds as they happen

6

This is the definitely solution for replace the unity standard shaders.

7

I’m very happy with the HDRP shaders, really great work!

1 Like
8

DE Environment Mesh Tools

MESH OPTIMIZATION
● Repair poor or damaged vertex tangents
● Repair poor or damaged vertex normals

WIND VERTEX COLOR
● Bake vertex wind animation into models thru vertex color

AMBIENT OCCLUSION
● Bake ambient occlusion AO into mesh thru vertex color

9

Hello @DEEnvironment ,

I’m using your shaders through a 3rd party package, namely Nature Package - Forest Environment by @ALP8310 :

I noticed the DEC shaders increase the build times dramatically. I did a test in a empty URP project in Unity 2021.3.5f1 where I solely added the DEC Surface Wind shader (12X) and added it to a cube in a empty scene.

Without the single DEC shader I get these build times (on an Intel 10700):
first build: 39 seconds
subsequent build: 8 seconds

When I use the DEC shader on the cube I get these build times:
first build: 29 minutes
subsequent builds: 121 seconds

In one of my actual projects where I tried to use the Forest Environment, the first build times were up to a few hours and about 15 minutes for subsequent builds, which is very high for my use case.

Do you have any tips or advice to decrease the build time while still using the wind shaders? I know it’s mostly a Unity problem (see Improvements to shader build time and runtime memory usage and Shader Stripping Improvements in URP - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions ) but maybe you have a some workarounds? Do you experience the same issues?

From what I understand, the use of many shader keywords can dramatically increase the build time. Is this the case with the DEC wind shaders? And would this behaviour occur with many Amplify shaders or just when using specific features?

10

hello
the shaders in that package are a bit aged with its first released on 12x still in Tech-release api 12.1.0 and yes a number of changes have happen since then including more optimized keywords from unity and better systems for unity stripping un used keywords

the DEC shaders in that package are a small sample from a the larger DE shader package and updated regularly

However that 3rd party asset is based in Ukraine and due to the ongoing war I have no way to update them for this developer…

in DE Environment we include all the functions and source code so they can be optimized a lot by removing features not used thru amplify editor

I also recently started including custom templates that work with amplify to further improve and optimize keywords even more… some even bigger updates coming soon

11

Hello DEEnvironment,

Thank you for your quick reply. Do you think there is a big difference in build times with the up-to-date (tree) shaders or will there still be a >10x increase? (when comparing in an almost empty project as I did)

12

Absolutely every update is always focused in continues improvements

in the much older shaders that you have now, unity has made a number of changes about how shader stripping works and every update we keep up with latest methods. Unity is actively still working on this even in 12x with changes almost every few weeks. most of the problems for keyword management actually fall into problems in unity stripping systems. We keep up with the changes to ensure that keywords required by unity are correctly organized for optimization and applied when needed by unity. our shaders do not add any custom keywords other than a few registers for connecting with wind scripts and its about unity keywords that we see most of the issues.

along with Unity our editor based on amplify editor is undergoing a number of changes to help improve performance such as we removed some pass that is no longer applicable since your version of shader was released and countless code changes resulted from unity due to ongoing optimizations

over the next month more changes are still ongoing within unity. however, they have made progress with the new shader striping systems

I note you are working in URP, it’s my opinion that URP is further behind in development than HDRP as URP 12x is getting optimized much slower than HDRP within unity. With URP most of the changes are getting added in 14x and higher and then later would be expected to roll back down into 12x … we will keep a good look out for this to get back ported by unity in URP hopefully sooner than latter