HDRP for serious game production

[optimise]

I always hear a lot of people complaining that HDRP is really hard to use in game production and can say is not suitable to use it for game production. It’s like HDRP moves more toward to cinematic use case and forget about game production. Any plan to improve it significantly?

[SoufianeKHIAT]

Hi,
Currently the game release with HDRP is increasing every year
https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/UnityHDRP/
We continue to improve HDRP to simplify the user life.

[SebLagarde]

To complete previous answer, a lot of games are currently develop with HDRP and a lot already shipped.

V Rising, Construction Simulator, Slime Rancher 2, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Disciples Revolution, I am Fish, Lego Builder’s Journey (+URP for mobile and Switch), Road 96 (+URP for Switch), Metal: Hellsinger, Syberia The World Before, Len’s island,… and many others

HDRP have a more complex learning curve compare to other pipeline due to its physically principle based approach but we have release a lot of tutorial, ebook, talk to learn how to used it.

[Matjio]

@optimise
It is SRP Blitz day so a bit of history! (warning… a wall of text!)

We only released the first non experimental version of HDRP two and a half years ago (2019LTS), and to be honest, this version had most features and APIs in place to make games but was really requiring a lot of dedication to learn and use it. We know that studios and users who have tried have suffered. We did a lot of fixes and improvements, based on games productions feedback, and the 20LTS released last year was much much (much!) better. But because we changed a lot of things, users again suffered… upgrading from 19LTS to 20LTS was hell!

Now, since 20LTS, users feedback is mostly positive (most titles quoted above actually ended up shipping with 20LTS), and from that version on, upgrading from a version to another is much easier. We are at a point where we mostly optimize or add features rather than changing them, and we definitely recommend using HDRP for games productions.

Re. learning curve, there are 2 aspects of it:

1. HDRP introduced new workflows, and like anything new, it needs to be learnt.
2. HDRP offers a lot of features off-the-shelf working coherently with each other, because they can be afforded on PC and consoles (on mobile you would probably go for a more per game compact and partial subset of features in order to maximize performance). It is great because reaching the latest consoles and GPU visual quality expectations actually require a lot of these features, and implementing them would be very expensive. But that also means that each shader and each system has to take every other systems into account in order to offer a coherent system, and consequently, is generating much more complex code, making customizability also more difficult.

For new workflows, I am thinking in particular of the Volumes and volume override system, and graphics and camera settings. They can seem both confusing and complicated at a first glance, but they allow strong control over performance and scalability. To learn this I recommend reading this blog post.

Another new workflow is using Physical light units, which is a total change of mindset compared to how lighting was done in Built-in or how it is done in URP. For lighters who worked in VFX or animation, or in AAA studios, it is actually what they master and what they wanted for years. For most Unity users, it sounds complicated and broken. All you have to think is that HDRP works like the real-world being lit by a real sky with real lights and filmed by a real camera. Which means that if you have the wrong aperture the image is burnt, or if you have wrong sky exposure your objects will glow. The good point with this is that once you are correctly setup, everything works well together and looks “real”. Stylizing is then just bending that reality. To make this more easy, we have imprioved the UX and you can now directly set the right physical light unit using an icon which represents the real-life use case (eg: sunset, midday, moon, street light, spot light, candle,…). I also really recommend to watch this talk.

Finally, regarding the complexity of customization, we are providing a now complete customization framework composed of custom render passes (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2), custom post process (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2), custom render textures (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2) and custom shaders (using Shader Graph, and in the future code using Block shaders), which allow to abstract the major part of that complexity.

In general, I recommend reading or keeping somewhere next to you the HDRP ebook.
Also a good starting point is HDRP’s landing page.

Hope it helps!
Mathieu

[optimise]

@Matjio

@optimise
It is SRP Blitz day so a bit of history! (warning… a wall of text!)

We only released the first non experimental version of HDRP two and a half years ago (2019LTS), and to be honest, this version had most features and APIs in place to make games but was really requiring a lot of dedication to learn and use it. We know that studios and users who have tried have suffered. We did a lot of fixes and improvements, based on games productions feedback, and the 20LTS released last year was much much (much!) better. But because we changed a lot of things, users again suffered… upgrading from 19LTS to 20LTS was hell!

Now, since 20LTS, users feedback is mostly positive (most titles quoted above actually ended up shipping with 20LTS), and from that version on, upgrading from a version to another is much easier. We are at a point where we mostly optimize or add features rather than changing them, and we definitely recommend using HDRP for games productions.

Re. learning curve, there are 2 aspects of it:

1. HDRP introduced new workflows, and like anything new, it needs to be learnt.
2. HDRP offers a lot of features off-the-shelf working coherently with each other, because they can be afforded on PC and consoles (on mobile you would probably go for a more per game compact and partial subset of features in order to maximize performance). It is great because reaching the latest consoles and GPU visual quality expectations actually require a lot of these features, and implementing them would be very expensive. But that also means that each shader and each system has to take every other systems into account in order to offer a coherent system, and consequently, is generating much more complex code, making customizability also more difficult.

For new workflows, I am thinking in particular of the Volumes and volume override system, and graphics and camera settings. They can seem both confusing and complicated at a first glance, but they allow strong control over performance and scalability. To learn this I recommend reading this blog post.

Another new workflow is using Physical light units, which is a total change of mindset compared to how lighting was done in Built-in or how it is done in URP. For lighters who worked in VFX or animation, or in AAA studios, it is actually what they master and what they wanted for years. For most Unity users, it sounds complicated and broken. All you have to think is that HDRP works like the real-world being lit by a real sky with real lights and filmed by a real camera. Which means that if you have the wrong aperture the image is burnt, or if you have wrong sky exposure your objects will glow. The good point with this is that once you are correctly setup, everything works well together and looks “real”. Stylizing is then just bending that reality. To make this more easy, we have imprioved the UX and you can now directly set the right physical light unit using an icon which represents the real-life use case (eg: sunset, midday, moon, street light, spot light, candle,…). I also really recommend to watch this talk.

Finally, regarding the complexity of customization, we are providing a now complete customization framework composed of custom render passes (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2), custom post process (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2), custom render textures (using code or Shader Graph in 22.2) and custom shaders (using Shader Graph, and in the future code using Block shaders), which allow to abstract the major part of that complexity.

In general, I recommend reading or keeping somewhere next to you the HDRP ebook.
Also a good starting point is HDRP’s landing page.

Hope it helps!
Mathieu

Thanks for long reply. I would like to know did official approach the game company or person again that giving negative feedback and give up using HDRP last time to proof that HDRP now is usable?