Default Volume Profile Settings seems confusing to me

I’m currently upgrading from Unity 2019.1 to 2019.3, and with it I’m going from HDRP 5 to HDRP 7. So far, the most confusing thing has been the Default Volume Profile Settings that seem to have been introduced either in HDRP 6 or 7.

First, it’s pretty confusing that all of my scenes were suddenly rendering completely differently, and were completely blown-out, lighting wise. Even creating a brand new scene, it was a blown-out mess. There’s nothing in the scene itself that gives any indication where these settings are coming from. Only after digging into things did I discover it was coming from the default scene settings. So, just that concept alone is pretty weird. It seems cleaner if a new HDRP scene just contained a prefab with a global volume profile on it, so that it’s not such a mystery where those settings are coming from.

(Incidentally, the reason for the scene being blown-out seems to be because the default Exposure override sets exposure to 11? Is that really supposed to be 11? That seems massive to me.)

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Second, it’s not clear how those defaults interact with the existing profiles in the scene. For example, the first scene I opened already contained a global volume profile. Yet, despite that, it also applied all of those defaults. So, even though my scene contained a Global volume profile with HDRI in use, it still applied that “Exposure 11” in my scene. Here’s my existing global volume profile, which exists in the scene as a prefab:

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So, how do the defaults interact with my explicit volume profile? Do I have to override every single field that’s specific in the default in order to undo it? It seems that like I should be able to choose to Override “HDRI Sky” without worrying that the default is also acting on HDRI Sky.

I totally agree. Why make it simple when you can do it the complicate way. No answer yet probably because everybody is confuse too.