Nature Renderer: Better terrain detail rendering ✅ PBR ✅ Custom Shaders ✅ Shadows ✅ Wind ✅ SRP

Community Showcases
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jcpusx
Nature Renderer
Download Nature Renderer ›

Render vast amounts of vegetation without slowing down your game.
Nature Renderer improves the quality of your vegetation rendering by replacing Unity’s default terrain details system. Everything works with your existing data: use the same grass, vegetation, and trees and keep your existing terrains. We just level-up your renderer.

Supports all platforms and all render pipelines
The correct assets are automatically imported into your project. More details and an exact list of supported versions are at the end of the description.

One-click install
Just add the Nature Renderer component to your terrain and everything works instantly.

Website • QuickStart • Documentation • Twitter

FEATURES
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Physically Based Rendering
Get accurate lighting and more detail on your grass, vegetation, and terrain details. You can use full PBR shaders on your detail objects. Such as the Standard Shader or any other.

LOD
Use Level-of-Detail on your terrain detail objects to reduce complexity in the distance and increase performance.

Shadows
Enable shadows for grass, plants, and other terrain details.

Wind
Better wind for your vegetation. The included wind shaders provide accurate and lifelike wind for grass, plants, and trees.

Custom Shaders
Use any custom shader for your terrain details to achieve special effects.

Align to terrain
Align your grass and objects to the terrain surface. No more floating grass or objects clipping through the terrain.

Familiar Tools
Use Unity’s default terrain, detail, and tree editing tools. No need to change your workflow.

Live Editing
Results show both in edit-mode and at runtime. And all changes to your terrain are updated immediately.

Additional features

  • Fully multi-threaded for best performance.
  • Fade out vegetation in the distance.
  • Efficient culling of vegetation.
  • Works with multiple terrains.
  • Minimal GC Allocations and stable consistent performance.
  • Works with multiple cameras.
  • Floating Origin support for large worlds.
  • All data is compressed for optimal memory usage.
  • Easily disable rendering when a player is indoors or can’t see the terrain.

Comes with Nature Shaders Essentials
Includes a collection of essential vegetation shaders that enable Wind Animations, Translucency, Color Variations, and more.

Now Available:
Download Nature Renderer ›

11 Likes
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Reserved

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Reserved

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Looks very interesting. How much of a frame rate increase have you seen using this?

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Is there HDRP support?

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Does it work on mobile?

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It depends a bit on the settings you use, but as an example, the scene from the video at the top gives the following results:

  • Nature Renderer: 60-70 FPS. (With full PBR shaders and high-resolution shadows for all grass.)
  • Unity: 40 FPS. (With a basic shader, no shadows, and a reduced density. Unity has a vertex limit so it couldn’t handle the density).

Edit: Some additional specs:
Resolution: 2560 x 1080
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
Using 2x MSAA

3 Likes
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Yes. HDRP is supported straight out of the box.

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Yes. You just have to make sure that the minimum system requirements for GPU Instancing are met.
GPU Instancing is available on the following platforms and APIs:

  • DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 on Windows
  • OpenGL Core 4.1+/ES3.0+ on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android
  • Metal on macOS and iOS
  • Vulkan on Windows, Linux and Android
  • PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
  • WebGL (requires WebGL 2.0 API)
2 Likes
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Sounds good. I am assuming VR isn’t be an issue?

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just subscribed. Really excited about HDRP support!

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VR shouldn’t be an issue, although I haven’t had the chance to directly test it on a VR device yet.

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Could we get more realistic scenes rather than stylized? I would love to see how it comes out.

Thanks!

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What about seasons? snow / wetness

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I don’t have any specific demo scene for a realistic style, but I just put together a few assets from the Book of the Dead in a new HDRP project so you can get an impression of the results. You should be able to get much better results if you put a bit more effort into setting up the lighting/render settings/materials.

Also, I noticed a few issues with the HDRP version that I am fixing now. So full HDRP support might be pushed back a few days after launch with version 1.1

5035046--493676--Nature-Renderer-HDRP-Book-of-the-Dead-Test-Scaled.jpg

4 Likes
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Not supported by default. But you can add it quite easily because Nature Renderer supports the use of custom shaders. So you can download any existing snow/wetness solution and use it with Nature Renderer.

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I hope it can work together with Map magic 2, that would be great great render with map magic placement

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I just gave it a try with the evaluation version of Map Magic and looks like it works without any problems. Just add the Nature Renderer component to your terrain and disable Map Magic’s terrain detail rendering and everything works.

3 Likes
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That is great to hear!

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I am happy to announce that Nature Renderer is now available on the Asset Store!
Download for free on the Asset Store ›

Please let me know if you have any feedback or questions after downloading Nature Renderer!
(And a new update with full HDRP support and LOD is coming soon)

2 Likes