Grass popping in build but not in editor

[sterile sluice]

Here's a quick clip, the grass in the middle of the screen kind of pops a bit and only is happening in the actual build, I don't see anything like this in the Unity editor. Why does this happen and what do I need to change? Thanks.

https://streamable.com/riu0zk

[proud vault]

Use opaque grass alpha cutting

depth pre-pass could maybe help but I think that's only with deferred rendering

oh, forward+ does have it. It's called depth priming mode. Anyway, that can potentially help but it'll introduce some blending problems so really best bet is opaque foliage

[visual swan]

Aren't those something different?
As I understand depth priming is just something to speed up the shading of opaque geometry

[proud vault]

There's a little hackyness with it when it comes to transparent sorting. You can kinda get some sorting from it, but it won't overdraw, discarding any blending behind it.

and considering there's no real blending going on here, it may actually work fine, but it may throw some artifacting at the edges

oh, unless you mean that death priming is something totally different. Maybe, by reading the docs it sounds like it?

[visual swan]

Since there's no semitransparency I'd go with opaque alpha clipped as suggested

[visual swan]

Yes, as far as I can tell it just helps manage the internal render order to avoid unnecessary shading
Which I suppose would mean opaque overdraw?

[visual swan]

I know of the "empty pass" trick to do this, are you referring to some other technique?

[proud vault]

Yeah, I guess it doesn't do what I was thinking, but reading the documentation it does sound like you can force transparents to write to depth then discard the overlapping from blending. Godot does similar to that with it's depth "pre-pass" but I'm not too sure how that whole pipeline works.

Really it sounds exactly what deferred pipeline does so I'm kinda confused what's the purpose lol

Rather, what godot does is it takes the full opacity of a transparent and considers it as opaque which is pretty cool

No clue how performant it is as a whole

[visual swan]

I thought the same, but it seems it's not an option for deferred rendering because that is how it works anyway
Also thought opaque geometry is always rendered front to back so overlaps would be skipped by the depth test anyway, but I am hazy on those details

[visual swan]

Often wondered why this isn't more common
But it seems like it might require opaque alpha clipping to work, which can be more expensive than transparency if the alpha for the clip is noisy or otherwise "uncertain"
And the transparent parts would have all the same transparency sorting issues anyway, although they could be much more localized
Still, not a process I fully understand either

[pallid vale]

From the clip it looks more like an issue with shadows rather than sorting. But not entirely sure why.

Can see some grass casting shadows so could be something with self-shadowing. Though I'd expect that to also appear in editor.

[visual swan]

Maybe depth popping that's only made apparent by the shadows?
It really looks to be only happening where there's shadow but hard to tell

[sterile sluice]

yes heres another clip. i noticed it was shadows actually that are the problem. there's a clear line a fixed distance from the player. ive tried toying around with the cascade distances thinking that might help but nothing yet. any thoughts? https://streamable.com/6bo6pj

still only happening in a build, editor looks perfectly fine

[sterile sluice]

i think it might be a unity 6 issue. i recreated the project in 2022 and everything seems fine. ill just work out of 2022, was early on prototyping anyway