Unity Graphics

A collection of URP shaders and render features.

Developed and tested with Unity 2020.3.16f1 and URP 10.5.1.

Table of Contents

• Fog Skybox
• Blob Shadows
• Drawing
• Layered Grass
• Billboard Grass
• Geometry Grass
• Matcap
• Toon Terrain

Fog Skybox

A skybox shader that blends with fog.

Blob Shadows

A render feature that adds support for blob shadows:

• Either circle or box shape
• Can be used as primitive AO
• Includes an example shader that supports receiving blob shadows (an extension of Toon Shader Lite)

Performance

• Measured on Snapdragon 845 via Unity's GPU Profiler (OpenGL ES)
• Setup: ~20 capsules
• Blob Shadows:
  • All circles
  • Resolution per unit = 8 (further increase does not improve visual quality)
  • Shadow Distance = 15
• Shadow Maps:
  • Shadow Resolution = 256
  • Shadow Distance = 20
  • Soft Shadows On
  • 1 Cascade

Note: sampling shadow maps when rendering shadow receivers is NOT taken into account.

Results (in ms):

• Blob: 0.08 (Submit) + 0.21 (Render) = 0.29
• Shadow Maps: 0.05 (Setup) + 0.21 (PrepareDrawShadows) + 0.21 (Submit) + 0.13 (Render) = 0.6

Drawing

Runtime drawing on the GPU side with configurable brush (color, size, hardness).

Layered Grass

Grass shader made with the technique that is typically used for fur (Reference).

Warning: the shader has poor performance on both mobile and desktop platforms. It is only a technical demo, which might not be suitable for production even if further optimized.

Billboard Grass

Billboard grass shader:

• Automatic random spread
• Per-chunk frustum culling (in the screenshot above, chunk size is 15x15)
• LOD system: the further the grass chunk from the camera, the sparser it is
• Interactive: the grass reacts to contacts with other objects
• Receives and optionally casts shadows
• Wind animation

Geometry Grass

Grass implemented with geometry shader:

• Grass placement mesh is generated via Job System
• Automatic LOD system implemented in the geometry shader (controlled via material properties)
• Based on this tutorial

Matcap

Basic Matcap shader. Matcap textures are taken from this repo.

Toon Terrain

Lightweight toon terrain shader.

• Configurable ramp (specified as a texture)
• Shadow casting and receiving
• 4 layers (splats) max

Parallax Ice

Ice shader imitating depth.