Favorite vegetation system

What is everybody’s favorite vegetation system for rendering lots of realistic grass, bushes, and trees in a large open world with HDRP in Unity 2021?

I have worked with both Vegetation Studio Pro and Nature Renderer 2021. Unfortunately, both have serious drawbacks at this point.

Vegetation Studio Pro is half busted with HDRP right now (tree billboarding not working with HDRP and rendering an extra tree above the camera). Vegetation Studio Pro still seems to work well with the built-in rendering pipeline, but I need to use HDRP in my current project.

Nature Renderer 2021 relies too much on Unity terrains, so it does not scale well. For example, Nature Renderer 2021 does support tree billboarding but it renders each billboard using a separate draw call. I was testing Nature Renderer 2021 on an 8x8 map with lots of trees, and the draw calls were 50k to 100k.

Feel your pain. I dont use any vegetation system (and have tested many), i manually place trees, foliage, etc. This way (if you prefab your assets) you have more control, one change to the root prefab, changes/updates them all.

Optimization is another “ball game” in itself…

When you say manually placing, are you manually placing each prefab on a standard Unity terrain, as a game object in your scene, or with your own custom rendering script?

The best option now is GPUInstancer.but it dosen’t support the new detail rendering mode “Coverage Mode” for now.

the new SRP detail renderer in Unity terrain is also pretty fast so im using it for detail and using GPUInstancer for trees rendering.