DOTS Render Pipeline

[Sylmerria]

Hi guys,

Did you have any information during the unite about the DOTS render pipeline introduced during the keynote ?

I’m very curious about the purpose, time window, etc

Thanks

[Joachim_Ante_1]

It was released 7 months ago. Improvements are being released with each package update.

[Sylmerria]

Hi @Joachim_Ante_1 ,

Do you speaking of hybrid rendering package ? Because I stayed on the idea that Package was temporary, waiting for a better solution.

[Joachim_Ante_1]

Yes. The hybrid rendering package is here to say. We used it on megacity and it clearly demonstrated it’s strengths there.

Curious to hear what gave you the impression that it’s not something here to stay?

[SubPixelPerfect]

Hi @Joachim_Ante_1
This was said almost a year ago:

@Joachim_Ante_1

What vitautart is writing is definitely the right approach. Ultimately i would love to make it so that

struct TeamColor : IComponentData, IInstanceRenderProperties { public float4 Color; }

And it automatically gets bound to the material via MaterialPropertyBlock. Extra cherry on top would be to have shader graph generate the C# struct.

There is nothing preventing you from doing this today by forking the MeshInstanceRendererSystem code. And we will add something like this at a later point.

But unfortunately to set shader properties per instance is not something you can do right now without forking RenderMeshSystemV2, please correct me if i’m wrong.

This is the only thing that stopping me right now from starting to use DOTS in production

[sngdan]

V2 has taken some of the rendering to engine side, I don’t think you can add the instance color anymore, or at least not as easy as in v1.

With DMII (drawmesindirectinstanced) you can achieve this quite easily at the cost of loosing V2 features.

If I find time next weekend, I will put a system up in the old 2D thread where we experimented with sprite rendering, this has 3 implementations of DMII, but I found them to be complicated and too focused on stress testing. I left a concept idea in the thread that I never implemented, maybe next weekend

[Grimreaper358]

@SubPixelPerfect

Hi @Joachim_Ante_1
This was said almost a year ago:

But unfortunately to set shader properties per instance is not something you can do right now without forking RenderMeshSystemV2, please correct me if I’m wrong.

This is the only thing that stopping me right now from starting to use DOTS in production

DOTS Instancing with Shader Graph is being worked on. In the latest version, you can find options to enable it (Actually the DOTS Instancing option has been in shader graph for a while now) Hybrid Instanced is what’s new and for each property created.

Don’t know if they actually do anything yet as I don’t code but not too long ago some updates showed up on Github - https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/commits/dots-instancing

As far as I know, the Hybrid Render just converts mesh to their ECS representation with the proper components needed so that just sits on top of HDRP, URP, (and probably Custom SRPs)

[Joachim_Ante_1]

instance material property overrides are part of the next entities / hybrid renderer release.

[SubPixelPerfect]

@Joachim_Ante_1

instance material property overrides are part of the next entities / hybrid renderer release.

Awesome news

[Sylmerria]

@Joachim_Ante_1

Curious to hear what gave you the impression that it’s not something here to stay?

From the name firstly, since 2 years “hybrid” is the adjective for temporary module waiting “pure” rewritten module.( maybe rename it to DOTS renderer package so ?)
And from conversions here and there because this package was made for megacity with a specific logic in mind ( loading data from subscenes) which no covers not all cases ( procedural for example)

[SubPixelPerfect]

@Sylmerria

From the name firstly, since 2 years “hybrid” is the adjective for temporary module waiting “pure” rewritten module.( maybe rename it to DOTS renderer package so ?)
And from conversions here and there because this package was made for megacity with a specific logic in mind ( loading data from subscenes) which no covers not all cases ( procedural for example)

it is in fact hybrid as long as it uses objects for models and materials

[sngdan]

as mentioned above, i posted in the other thread, much less polished than other solutions there, but in my view simpler + should be more performant

200k dynamic animated sprites at 80fps page-2#post-5024381

[DizzyTornado]

@Grimreaper358 @Joachim_Ante_1 is this feature still present in Unity 2020.3 Shadergraphs? I still see options for GPU instancing but not for DOTS Instancing.