Rendering

• Draw Distance
• Shadow Distance
• Boost Rendering Quality
• Procedural Instancing
• Reduce Density in Distance
• Troubleshooting

Draw Distance

Nature Renderer overrides Unity’s detail draw distance. You should edit the detail draw distance in the Nature Renderer component instead of the default Terrain component.

If your detail object contains a LOD Group then the culling distance of that LOD Group is used instead of the Detail Distance from the Nature Renderer component. However, the culling distance of the LOD Group can never be larger than the Detail Distance set in the Nature Renderer component.

Shadow Distance

The distance at which shadows are rendered for grass and detail objects can be set in the Nature Renderer component. Most detail objects are small so their shadows are rarely visible at a large distance, therefore it is recommended to set the shadow distance to a small value while keeping the global shadow distance in your project settings larger.

Boost Rendering Quality

When enabled, Nature Renderer will alter (override) the texture filtering settings for the detail object's textures to improve the rendering quality. In general, this means bilinear texture filtering, an aniso level of 2, and an adjusted Mip Map Bias.

Procedural Instancing

"Procedural Instancing" is an advanced rendering technique that moves most of the rendering pipeline to the GPU. This results in a large performance boost and it is recommended to always enable this feature.

However, the shaders that are used by your detail objects need to support this feature. The Nature Shaders Essentials that come with Nature Renderer fully support this feature and it is recommended to use these shaders. It is also possible to add support for procedural instancing to custom shaders.

Reduce Density in Distance

This setting allows you to dynamically reduce the density of detail objects based on the distance from the camera. The density will start reducing at the "Distance Start" distance, and will be fully reduced at the "Distance End". Reducing the density helps reduce the number of objects that need to be rendered and can help to reduce overdraw in your scene, which will result in increased performance.

Troubleshooting

If the render/culling distance appears to be less than the distance that is set then it may be caused by one of the following:

• Some custom shaders (such as the shaders used by Nature Manufacture) have their own culling distance that is handled by the shaders themselves. In this case, you'll need to edit the culling distance in the material because Nature Renderer can't override the shader code.
• Objects can fade out due to mipmapping long before the culling distance. It is recommended to enable Mip Maps Preserve Coverage in the import settings of your textures to ensure that objects don't fade out too quickly.
• If the detail object has a LOD Group then the culling distance of the LOD Group is used instead of the Detail Distance that is set in the Nature Renderer component.