ZLZ Environment Shader
ZLZ_Environment_Shader is the main surface shader of the package. It renders everything you sculpted yourself — ground, cliffs, rocks, trees, leaves, buildings, props — every mesh that comes out of Maya or Blender runs on this one shader.
The package ships three shaders, each with its own clearly separated job:
| Shader | Used for |
|---|---|
| ZLZ/Environment/Shader | Every general surface |
| ZLZ/Environment/Grass | The blades and flowers the Grass system plants |
| ZLZ/Environment/Water | Water surfaces |
- Path :
Assets/ZLZ_EnvironmentShader/Shaders/Core/ZLZ_Environment_Shader.shader - Inspector : a dedicated ZLZ GUI (
ZLZEnvShaderGUI) — the same layout and the same habits as ZLZ Anime Shader
What This Shader Solves
- Not tied to Unity Terrain — paint up to 4 texture layers onto meshes you sculpted yourself. A cliff leaning at 70 degrees can be painted. A cave with a ceiling can be painted. Neither is something Terrain can do
- Paint data stored two ways — into a Mask Texture, or into the mesh’s Vertex Colors. Pick whichever suits your pipeline (Vertex Color costs you no extra texture at all)
- Four customisable brushes — painting normally means Unity Terrain, where the brush is whatever Unity gives you. Here one slot is the built-in soft circle and the other three take any Texture2D you drop on them, so shaping your own brush takes seconds
- The anime look is the baseline, not an add-on — Shadow Color and ToonRamp Smoothness are part of the locked core, so an environment sits next to a ZLZ Anime Shader character correctly with no tuning
- Turning a feature off really removes it — every disabled feature is stripped out of the compiled shader variant, not multiplied by zero. A material using only Albedo and ToonRamp ends up about as cheap as a plain unlit shader
- Works with URP the way an environment shader should — Lightmaps, Shadowmask, Subtractive, SSAO, URP Decals, Unity’s own fog, GPU Instancing and the SRP Batcher all work with nothing to change
Feature Mask — One Texture, Three Features
Metallic, Smoothness and Emissive do not each carry their own texture. They share a single Feature Mask (RGBA), and each one picks for itself whether it reads the R, G, B or A channel.
So a wet rock that needs metalness, gloss and a glowing seam costs one extra texture instead of three — saving both VRAM and the number of texture reads the GPU has to make.
And when a feature’s channel is set to None, its slider simply applies evenly across the whole surface. If no feature uses the mask at all, the GUI strips the texture read out of the shader for you, leaving no cost behind.
ZLZ_Env Dashboard — The Piece That Installs Everything
Materials using this shader should always live under a ZLZ_Env Dashboard.
The reason is that Environment features do not end at the material. Reflection needs a Renderer Feature, and Planar Reflection a component on the floor as well. Fog needs both a Renderer Feature and a controller in the scene. Grass needs a ground-colour camera and a renderer of its own. Asking a user to install each of those by hand in the URP Asset is easy to get wrong — and the symptom when it goes wrong is “I turned the feature on and nothing happened”, which is the hardest kind of problem to trace.
The Dashboard solves this by installing all of it the moment the component is added, and by watching for any piece that goes missing afterwards.
- Add it from
Add Component > ZLZ/Environment Shader/ZLZ_Env Dashboard - Or right-click a GameObject and choose
ZLZ > Setup Env Dashboard
The Dashboard Sections
Every section carries a status strip telling you whether its pieces are complete. When something is missing, the button that repairs it is right there — no hunting through the URP Asset.
| Section | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Vertex Paint Storage | See where each painted mesh keeps its data and which source model file it is linked to — edit the model in Maya/Blender, re-import, and the paint follows it across |
| Screen Space Reflection | Status of the Screen Space Reflection Renderer Feature, how many materials under this Dashboard use it, and an install button if the feature was removed |
| Planar Reflection | Status of the Renderer Feature, URP_Reflection and the floor components, with a Repair Reflection Setup button |
| Water | Every water body listed, toggled on and off one at a time, its material managed, and the Foam Flow baked |
| Underwater | Status of the Renderer Feature behind the underwater view |
| Environment Fog | Status of the fog Renderer Feature, plus a button that creates the Fog Global in the scene |
| Grass | The heart of the grass system — choose which surfaces grow grass, manage Grass Types, paint extra by hand, Grow All / Clear All, and set the ground colour |
| Grass Performance | Switch on the half-resolution grass pass |
| Grass Color Capture | Status of the ground-colour camera, with a repair button |
| VFX Features | Target Darken settings for this group |
Components the Dashboard Adds for You
| Component | Added to | Why |
|---|---|---|
ZLZ_EnvPlanarReflectionPlane |
Every floor under the Dashboard whose material uses Planar Reflection (Screen Space needs no component) | Tells the mirror camera where the reflecting plane is |
ZLZ_EnvWater |
Every mesh already wearing a water material | Holds what a material cannot — the wave rhythm curve, and that pond’s own underwater fog |
ZLZ_EnvGrass |
The Dashboard itself | The root of the grass system |
ZLZ_EnvGrassColorCamera |
The Dashboard itself | The camera that samples ground colour so grass blends into the surface below it |
ZLZ_EnvVFX |
The Dashboard itself | Receives the Target Darken calls from your game code |
The last two grass pieces stay hidden until you actually start growing grass — a bare enable checkbox on idle plumbing only invites turning half a system on by hand.
Split the Scene Into 3 Dashboards : Terrain / Env / Water
The recommended layout is three groups, one Dashboard each (see Demo/Prefab/Base_Terrain, Base_Env and Base_Water for a working example).
| Dashboard | What lives inside | Which shader |
|---|---|---|
| Terrain | Ground, cliffs, landscape — the surfaces that grow grass, take painted textures, and reflect when wet | ZLZ_Environment_Shader + ZLZ_Environment_Grass |
| Env | All props — trees, leaves, rocks, buildings, mushrooms, set dressing | ZLZ_Environment_Shader |
| Water | Every water body in the scene | ZLZ_Environment_Water |
ZLZ_Environment_Shader therefore belongs under both Terrain and Env — which one depends on what the piece is for, not on which shader it runs.
The split is not just tidiness, it changes behaviour: a Dashboard works on every mesh underneath it. Keep them separate and the Terrain Dashboard only ever sees surfaces that should grow grass, while the Water Dashboard only ever sees water — with nothing crossing over.
Renderer Features the Dashboard Installs
Adding a Dashboard installs these five Renderer Features straight away — and installs them on every Quality Level, not only the tier that happens to be active.
| Renderer Feature | Installed for |
|---|---|
| ZLZ Env Screen Space Reflection | The screen-space reflection method — the default Reflection Type, traced per pixel through the frame (new in v1.1.0) |
| ZLZ Env Planar Reflection | The mirror-camera reflection method — shared by wet floors and water alike |
| ZLZ Env Fog | The scene atmosphere : distance haze, ground mist, and a sky that matches |
| ZLZ Env Grass Resolution | The grass performance mode — drawing grass below full resolution and compositing it back |
| ZLZ Env Underwater | What the camera sees while submerged : underwater fog, and the transition on the way down |
It also creates two extra renderers that do not ship with the package but are generated inside your project:
- URP_Reflection — a renderer used only by the mirror camera (with grass set to Quarter), so the reflection camera cannot recurse into itself, and so the reflected image never costs what the main image costs
- Grass Colour Capture Renderer — a bare renderer for the top-down camera that samples ground colour for the grass
Installed at import time. This runs on package import too, so you do not have to add a Dashboard first — open a demo scene and it already looks right. On a version update, existing projects pick up any newly added Renderer Feature automatically. Every step is idempotent: run it any number of times and nothing is ever duplicated.
Scripts the Dashboard Does Not Manage
Two groups sit outside the Dashboard, because their scope is different.
Object level — on the things that move, not on the scenery
| Component | Goes on |
|---|---|
ZLZ_EnvGrassInteractor |
A character or object that should part the grass as it walks through |
ZLZ_EnvWaterInteractor |
A character or object that should send out ripples on touching the water |
ZLZ_EnvWaterFloater |
Anything that should ride up and down on the surface — a boat, a buoy, a log |
Scene level — one each per scene, shared by every Dashboard
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
ZLZ_EnvWindController |
The scene wind that trees, leaves and grass all sway to together |
ZLZ_EnvGrassController |
LOD distances and Quality Presets for all the grass in the scene |
ZLZ_EnvFog |
The scene’s fog values |
ZLZ_EnvDarkenManager |
Drives the scene darken from game code, with a settings asset for its timing |
The first three are created together in one click from GameObject > ZLZ > Setup ZLZ Global, which groups them under a GameObject named ZLZ_Global.
The Dashboard deliberately does not create the Global for you. A GameObject that appeared in the scene simply because you opened it would leave every scene you merely looked at dirty and asking to be saved, with nothing actually changed.
The Dashboard Costs Nothing at Runtime
The Dashboard holds no data of its own and runs no code at runtime — the real data lives on the materials, in the ZLZ_EnvGrassData asset, and in the link registry. All of the UI is editor-side code that is compiled out of builds.
Two things follow from that:
- In a shipped game it is an empty marker that costs no CPU at all, and platforms that strip unused scripts lose nothing by dropping it
- The automation still works with no scene open, and works the same whether the Dashboard lives in a scene or inside a Prefab