GrassCore – Stylized Grass & Vegetation System

Create large stylized landscapes filled with grass, flowers, bushes and trees, then make them react to the world around them. Walk through vegetation, mow it, burn it, cover it with snow, send shockwaves through it, create paths with splines, place custom vegetation areas and build environments that actually feel alive.

I built GrassCore from 10+ years of experience working with Unity, with a focus on three things: good visuals, practical tools and performance.

GrassCore is designed to be easy to start with, while still providing enough control for more advanced environments.

📄 Documentation

🌱 Grass & Flowers

Create and customize different Grass Species and Flower Species with control over height, width, density, shape, wind response and rendering.

Use procedural blades or your own custom meshes with multiple LOD levels.

GrassCore also includes a collection of ready-to-use vegetation species, including grass, flowers, trees and bushes.

🗺️ Vegetation Areas

Need flowers only in one part of the level? Taller grass around a lake? A dense patch of vegetation in one biome?

Grass Vegetation Areas let you assign specific Grass and Flower Species to individual areas and override properties such as density, height, width and shape locally without modifying the original Species Profile.

The same Species can be reused across multiple areas with completely different settings.

✏️ Spline-Based Workflow

Create natural areas and paths directly inside the Scene View using editable spline points.

Use splines for:

• Grass removal
• Roads and paths
• Soft edge falloff
• Vegetation areas
• Rivers and water areas
• Terrain surface painting
• Irregular custom-shaped masks

Paths can optionally paint an existing Terrain Layer with smooth blending along the edges.

🫸 Dynamic Vegetation Interaction

Grass and bushes can react to players, animals, vehicles and gameplay objects in real time.

Vegetation bends away from interaction sources and smoothly returns to its original position.

GrassCore also supports more specialized interactions such as:

Rotor Downwash & Shockwaves

Create radial airflow, turbulence and expanding impact waves through grass.

Mowing & Cutting

Cut grass to a specific normalized height. Leave it untouched, shorten it, or remove it completely.

Optional grass clipping particles can make mowing and cutting feel even more physical.

🔥 Burning Grass

Create burning areas at runtime and let vegetation visibly transition through the effect.

Grass can glow while burning, become damaged and gradually disappear, allowing fire effects to leave a visible result in the environment instead of being purely cosmetic.

❄️ Seasons & Snow

Transition your vegetation between different seasonal appearances, from fresh green grass to dry vegetation, autumn colors and winter.

Snow can accumulate on vegetation and react to interaction.

🎨 Dynamic Color Zones

Change vegetation appearance locally using world-space areas.

Useful for dry terrain, swamps, poisoned ground, magical areas, biome transitions and other gameplay-driven effects.

✨ Bioluminescent Grass

Create glowing or magical vegetation with emissive tips, pulsing effects and proximity-based reactions.

Perfect for stylized fantasy, alien or nighttime environments.

🌊 Lakes, Rivers & Underwater Vegetation

Define water areas using volumes or splines.

Underwater vegetation can use slower current-based movement instead of regular wind, while river vegetation can automatically follow the flow direction.

Water-related systems are modular and can be disabled when they are not needed.

🌳 Trees & Bushes

GrassCore also supports stylized Trees and Bushes alongside grass.

Use procedural vegetation or your own custom meshes with multiple LOD levels.

Features include Tree and Bush Species, manual placement, area-based placement, wind animation, leaf flutter, interactive bushes, optional fruits and flowers, optional lightweight tree colliders, custom Tree and Bush meshes, multiple LOD levels and Billboard / Impostor support where configured.

GrassCore includes 40+ ready-to-use Grass, Tree & Bush Species to help you quickly build different environments.

🪓 Interactive & Destroyable Trees

Trees can optionally react to impacts and gameplay interactions.

Destroyable trees can receive damage, shake when struck, release leaf or wood particles and eventually break and fall physically to the ground.

The lower stump remains in place after the tree has fallen, creating a much more believable result than simply deleting the entire tree.

Destruction is optional and can remain disabled for projects that do not need it.

🧩 Custom Mesh Support

Grass does not have to live only on Unity Terrain.

GrassCore can also place vegetation on supported mesh surfaces, making it useful for custom landscapes, islands, stylized environments and modular level geometry.

⚙️ Performance Focused

GrassCore was built with large vegetation scenes in mind.

The system uses techniques such as GPU instancing, LODs, distance-based rendering, culling and low-complexity vegetation geometry.

Optional systems are kept modular so projects can use the features they actually need without turning every vegetation instance into a heavy GameObject.

🛠️ Designed for Artists and Developers

Most GrassCore tools are available directly through custom Unity inspectors and Scene View controls.

The package includes a Setup Wizard to help new users get started and a complete PDF documentation covering setup, Species Profiles, vegetation areas, interaction, splines, trees, bushes, performance and advanced features.

GrassCore is intended to give you a strong starting point quickly, while still giving you enough control to build your own vegetation style.

Create it. Shape it. Interact with it. Make the environment feel alive.