Hey everyone — just published my second Unity asset on Fab: GPU Instanced
Foliage Renderer.
It’s a GPU-driven, compute-shader-based instanced renderer for scattering
large amounts of foliage, grass, rocks, or any repeated mesh across a
scene — with real terrain-aware placement, natural distribution, and
slope-based culling built in.
IMPORTANT: this is a renderer, not a content pack. No meshes or textures
are included — you bring your own mesh and this asset handles GPU-driven
placement, culling, and instanced drawing at scale.
Full source code included — read, learn from, and modify it freely for your own projects (redistribution or resale of the source is not permitted)
FEATURES
- Fully GPU-driven pipeline — placement, culling, and drawing all happen
on the GPU via compute shaders and Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect - Real terrain-aware placement — samples your active Unity Terrain’s
actual heightmap directly, auto-detected - Slope-normal alignment with a tunable blend, plus soft slope-based
culling (no hard popping at the threshold) - Natural, noise-driven distribution, blendable to a uniform grid via a
single Scatter Amount slider - GPU frustum culling every frame
- Dynamic wind system — 6 presets (Calm through Tornado) or full custom
tuning, switchable live at runtime via a public API - Distance-based LOD for texture sampling, alpha cutout support
- Runtime instance-count changes via a public Reinitialize(int) method
PERFORMANCE (real standalone Release build, not Editor Play mode)
Benchmarked on a 4GB legacy/budget GPU — NVIDIA Quadro M1200:
500 instances → 67 FPS avg (14.89ms)
2,000 instances → 48 FPS avg (20.78ms)
5,000 instances → 26 FPS avg (38.61ms)
10,000 instances → 16 FPS avg (63.66ms)
REQUIREMENTS
- Unity 2022.3 LTS or newer
- Built-in Render Pipeline (URP/HDRP not supported in v1)
- Compute shader support (DX11/12, Metal, Vulkan)
Available now on Fab: ** GPU Instanced Foliage & Grass Renderer | Fab**
(Unity Asset Store submission is in progress — will update this thread
once it’s approved there too.)
Full documentation/README linked on the store page. Happy to answer any
questions about the pipeline or performance on your own hardware.
— Tessaract Lab
Also check out our first asset: Tessaractic Infinite Procedural Terrain