Grass: quality and performance¶

The PERFORMANCE group on the Grass tab edits the rig's Quality Asset, shared by every patch under the rig. It holds what your project can afford; the look profiles hold how grass looks. The "Shipped preset" column is GrassQuality_Preset, which new rigs get.

Draw Distance¶

Setting	What it does	Default	Shipped preset
Max Draw Distance (m)	Blades further from the camera are not drawn at all.	200	100
Fade Length (m)	How many metres before Max Draw Distance the fade runs. The far field also thins across this band, so thinning and fading always agree.	50	25
Density Scale	Share of each patch's blades that are drawn, 0.05 to 1. Lower thins every field at once, with no rebuild: always the same subset of blades, not a different one each frame. Use it for a grass amount option in your game's settings.	1	1
Fade Mode (MORE)	Smooth shrinks blades into the ground; Dither dissolves them with a screen-space pattern.	Dither	Dither

A status line shows the result, for example Full density to 75 m · faded out by 100 m.

Camera Splay¶

Blades near the camera lean away from it, so a top-down view sees blade faces instead of the gaps between upright blades. Patches with Camera Effects off ignore it.

Setting	What it does	Default	Shipped preset
Strength	How hard nearby blades lean away. 0 is off.	0.65	0
Radius (m)	Radius around the camera inside which blades splay.	12	89.1
Max Offset (m)	Largest tip offset.	0.45	0.45

View Facing¶

Blades are flat cards. Near edge-on, a blade turns its width toward the camera so its paper-thin edge never shows; its bend and lean stay as planted, and blades already facing the camera keep their facing. Patches with Camera Effects off ignore it.

Setting	What it does	Default
Strength	1: a blade edge is never visible. 0: off.	1

Interaction¶

See Grass: interaction.

Shadows¶

Setting	What it does	Default
Cast Shadows	Blades cast shadows on the ground and on each other. It costs a full shadow pass and can show a cascade boundary that follows the camera. Cloud shadows do not need it.	Off
Shadow Strength	How dark shadows falling on the grass get. 0 is unshadowed.	1
Shadow Tint	The colour a fully shadowed blade tints toward. Match it to your ground materials' shadow colour, or the grass sits in a differently coloured shadow to the terrain.	Pale blue

Terrain Map¶

The capture behind terrain blending. Project settings, not art.

Setting	What it does	Default
Layer Mask	Layers captured into the ground colour map. Put the ground on its own layer and pick only that one to keep props out of the map.	Default
Resolution	Texels across the map, 128 to 2048.	512
Real-Time Update	Capture the map every frame. That renders the scene a second time, from a top-down camera, each frame: leave it off unless the ground colour actually animates.	Off
Scaling (MORE)	How tightly the capture frames the ground. Lower frames a wider area at lower detail.	2.5
Grass Render Layer (MORE)	Layer the grass draws on, left out of the capture. Your cameras' culling masks must include it.	10

Where the capture saw nothing on the Layer Mask, the map holds a neutral grey, and blades there blend toward it. Blades past the edge of the map take the colour at its edge.

Diagnostics¶

Setting	What it does	Default
Force CPU Instancing	Ignore compute-shader support and use the CPU instancing path, the one WebGL 2 runs. Use it to preview a web build's grass and frame rate on desktop.	Off

What costs what¶

Blade count is the main cost: density × area, capped by Max Instances. On the compute path each blade holds two 64-byte matrices on the GPU, so 200,000 blades take about 25 MB.
Draw distance and Density Scale cut what is drawn each frame without a rebuild.
Cast Shadows draws the grass a second time for the shadow map.
Real-Time Update renders the scene a second time every frame.
Interaction keeps two half-float render textures of Map Resolution squared, about 2 MB each at 512, and updates them once per frame.
Cloud shadows redraw the mask once per frame; memory is 4 bytes per texel.