UPDATE: After I made or was recommended notable improvements to the shader, and many beginners asked I make a more straight forward walkthrough, I decided I'll be making a new streamlined tutorial that showcases upgraded functionality. I am currently working hard on another massive project so please understand I'll return to this when I can.

My hearing still hasn't fully returned to normal, and I only recently got my mic and stuff all set up, so I apologize in advance if my audio sounds bad or anything.

Hello! This is amazing!!! Some things you mentioned that I thought I would try and help with:

If you'd rather skip all of the information in regards to issues / lessons learned with the previous methods and simply jump right into the solution, here: 25:03 (You'll miss explanations of various node setups and stuff tho.)

if using object for "particle grass", you can edit the object's normal all the way up ( "auto smooth normal" must be ENABLE) , that way the grass will always look shiny and receive shadow.

Thank you for sharing this and for going into detail explaining logic behind all the shader variations. It's extremely valuable. I can't believe that people are complaining after you took the time to share the knowledge for free, even providing the blender file. I really appreciate it! :) Looking forward to new stuff you make.

im a bit surprised i only found out about this tutorial just now. i wanted to find somebody to make this tutorial since i dont do any content on youtube and dont have an internet presence, but im glad its out here now. What i like most about this shader is that you can finally also animate it. Ive been doing this kind of grass for a while now and it makes every scene look so good :D

if you could do a tutorial where you showed everything you did for the last one step by step that would be fantastic. No pressure, it'd just be helpful to people like me who are just starting out. I'm currently trying to follow along using the file and struggling quite a bit.

hey that works pretty nice! I checked out the file too, it was very useful in understanding what's going on. Thank you!

The emission shader at the end isn't needed - the rest of the setup already determines the absolute colour of objects, so a viewer node should work fine. The map range is like a colour ramp, but with more control (and you can push min/max beyond 0,1). Changing the "to" values will darken or lighten the whole thing (like using add/subtract), while changing the "from" numbers works like the colour ramp, or level editors in photography software. Flipping the 0 and 1 "to min/max" inverts the outcome, like manually inverting the colours on a colour ramp. Map Ranges are useful as masks, especially in procedural textures.

In my opinion, Kidane's methods produces a higher dynamic range of shadows. Maybe you just chose some different color values but the "Shader 3.0" produces a more'washed out visual, which isn't neccessarily bad. I'm just glad that the issues you seemed to have with shadows are extremely simple to fix/avoid in Unity.

I hope someone makes an actual tutorial out of this ...

Yes! This what we need to end the Ghibli Arms Race!!

Thanks for all the good work!

thank you so much man ! this was so helpful