HDRP: is it production ready or is actually just a nice feature to experiment?

Unity Engine
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Hello all,
after many months I’ve updated from Unity 2018 to Unity 2019.3, and I did some test with HDRP.
I like the new user interface and some features that HDRP introduce (maybe a little pasted and copied from Unreal, but it does not matter for sure).

My opinion, after a couple of days, is that does not seem to me to be very stable.
I’ve experienced several issues, for example:

  • procedural sky that does not update the ambient light (totally black but disabling and enabling the “Visual Environment” look right… for a while)
  • directional shadows that look dithered (but after a reload of the scene look right)
  • at a certain point, without any modify, bloom everywhere and incorrect lighting (but deleting the sun and created it back look right)
  • materials preview not showing in project panel (totally white), but correct in Inspector
  • progressive CPU lightmapping that does not stop (I had to quit Unity)
  • distortion for transparent materials is available only with Unlit shader, but Unlit shader does not seem to me to use any reflection probe (obviously since it does not have any metallic/glossiness parameter)
  • the new UI it seem to me much less responsive, compared to the old one
  • the documentation is not updated
  • many other small issues that I’ve not tracked

I’m totally new to HDRP, so maybe I’m missing something, but in general I’d be quite a lot afraid to start a project in this way.

May I ask to the community if, in their opinion, Unity 2019.3 + HDRP is stable enough for a real project (and, so, it’s just a matter to better understand how it work), or not?

Many thanks!

1 Like
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While I agree with what you have said, and trust me, I think I’ve encountered so many issues with HDRP I am two minutes away from going completely mental…the truth is even the standard Unity is like that. Development is a constant fight with unstable tools…photoshop crashes…maya crashes…substance crashes…etc

In that regard, HDRP is not really that bad. It works and it crashes…same as any other development tool.

As for my personal experience, I did ship a game to Steam just few days ago, proudly HDRP 7.3.1 with Unity 19.3.10f1

Would you like to know how many times the editor crashed during development? I’d say 2~3 times a day.

Would you like to know how many times the final build crashed? Not once, at least according to my memory and my customers :slight_smile:

So, really the real question is,

are you ready to withstand the pain…?

Hope this helps!

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Heya, im in no way insulting you guys, but ive never experienced any crashes, or problems like you report, and neither have my students. Now to be honest, HDRP is a different monster, than say the built-in renderer/lwrp versions. It takes a bit to get used to and start using HDRP correctly.

Advice is check out documentation, and tutorial videos, and get used to the actual HDRP system/settings/effects, etc. HDRP can be touchy, one wrong setting can cause hell, lol.

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Thank-you jjejj87,
I totally agree with you about crashes and issues during the development.
I work with 3ds max, that is in my opinion the the most buggy software all around, so I perfectly understand what you mean. It’s a nightmare, everytime (P.s. I never had any crash in Photoshop, in all my life).

But, unlike 3ds max, or others bugged softwares, for my experience Unity (up to 2018) was a rock. I never, never had any issue with it, that’s why I’m quite surprised to experience so many bugs in my workflow with the new release and HDRP.

Thank-you warthos3399,
I understand that it’s a new way, maybe a new software, I had issues with the most basic scenes for test (in my personal opinion bugs, or exceptions not managed), just trying to pushing something up or down.
I’ll dive into the settings, as you advice, and… finger crossed for a new release :smile: !

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Meanwhile, someone could tell me how to use “distortion” with unlit shader, since unlit shader does not have glossiness parameter, and so does not use refletion probes ?? :smile::smile::smile:
Maybe I’m really missing something… ?

P.s. for warthos3399
documentation and tutorials ar not up-to-date, unfortunately

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Ok, lets put things into perspective (per your info):

“after many months I’ve updated from Unity 2018 to Unity 2019.3, and I did some test with HDRP”. Cool, but any time you "upgrade/update, during a project, you risc problems. Not a good practice, stick with one version of unity for the length of your project (preferably LTS build).

“directional shadows that look dithered” (but after a reload of the scene look right). Gotcha, same here, just reload, save scene, move on.

“materials preview not showing in project panel (totally white), but correct in Inspector”, ignore, happens all the time, sometimes modifying textures updates it, sometimes not.

“distortion for transparent materials is available only with Unlit shader, but Unlit shader does not seem to me to use any reflection probe (obviously since it does not have any metallic/glossiness parameter)”, once again agree.

“the new UI it seem to me much less responsive, compared to the old one”, wrong. With hdrp, if you change any shader related parameters, it has to update (bottom right hand corner, where baking navmesh happens), wait for the update, it may add a bit more time, but worth it.

“the documentation is not updated”, once again agree.

“I’m totally new to HDRP, so maybe I’m missing something, but in general I’d be quite a lot afraid to start a project in this way”. Relax…take a breather :slight_smile: HDRP isnt anything like built in renderer, or LWRP/URP. Its a different monster, lol. Just be more informed (tutorial videos/documentation) of HDRP and its systems.

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Unity as a whole is no longer ready to use, for one noone knows which pipeline to use and what is good for, they will remove standard too and both HDRP and URP are ever changing, so i would just wait a bit more until the pre beta stage everything is now finishes at last and unity is production ready again like before pipelines idea was started.

2 Likes
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Its easy, 2D/Mobile = URP,
3d = Built-in/HDRP.
Pick your poison…

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Actually I don’t think anyone is confused…

Physically correct render → HDRP
Everything else → URP

Legacy is just getting too old to survive.

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Ok, i’m trying to manage HDRP a bit more. I think that actually is not so useless, but…
The UI !!! wtf… At 1st I was pleased, now I’m quite hungry.
I can’t understand where a component end, and where a new one is starting.
Look at this picture

it take me a while to see the Planar reflection component…
I know, this is not the right place to talk about it, and I’ll switch on the proper forum, but… wft…

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As of last month, URP had a serious shadow bug that was really distracting (bug fix in progress last I heard). Hdrp and the lightmapper are both extremely frustrating too. I think you should go with standard, the list of known issues every patch has been growing instead of shrinking. Things in standard actually work, you still can’t upgrade a srp project from 2019.3.x to x+1 without your scenes turning pink.

I have spent so much time trying to debug things in srp that ended up on a known issues list has made me start scoping out a mid-project switch to ue4.

Unity also changed their asset store license retroactively which took away our right to let our freelancers use our assets, so yeah, I would say either standard or else try out ue4

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I’m using HDRP now for the third project and it became my new standard for Unity. Back then I started using HDRP when it was still in preview, so believe me, nowadays you’re lucky with the state of HDRP because in the early days it was really horrible to work with. I personally do not use URP because of missing features like the realtime point light shadows. So I use HDRP to have the artistic freedom and then scale everything down depending on the target plattform.

You can do pretty games with HDRP but it depends on the needs of the game features. The biggest downside right now is the missing new Realtime GI system for HDRP. You could start developing now and using the old Enlighten, but it is really not recommended. I just did it once, the result were just ok. And because of that current state of HDRP games like dynamic open worlds will just not work. Also terrain are still not production ready.
The other downsides are things like no tesselation in shadergraph.

Also HDRP improved, because in the past you did not have custom post processing and custom passes and even no render textures with alpha. So more possibilies are open (for skilled dev teams).

So if your games does not need things like mentioned above, it’s probably fine to use.
Unity will hopefully catch up with the missing features, at least Realtime GI is on the roadmap.
I also hope that realtime raytracing become stable because at the moment Unreal is way better in terms of it and Direct12. But of course not every game needs that.

Conclusion:

  1. AAA dynamic light open world = Not Unity
  2. AAA photorealistic with all possibilities and realtime raytracing = Not Unity
  3. Stylized PBR = Why not HDRP
  4. Everything other type of game or just between = Give HDRP a try

Because of the conclusion, I do my other project with Unreal 4 because it requires a heavy photorealistic look. They also did support realtime raytracing a lot faster and more stable than Unity.

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Hi, see documentation here: “Transparency inputs”:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@7.4/manual/Surface-Type.html

Glossiness parameter is in blue channel:

Distortion Vector Map

Make HDRP use the red and green channels of this Texture to calculate distortion for the light passing through the Material. HDRP also uses the blue channel to manage the blur intensity between 0 and 1. By default, a texture has values between 0 and 1. To be able to produce distortion in either direction, you must remap the distortion texture between -1 and 1. HDRP provides two values you can use to remap this distortion texture. It takes the original value from the map and multiplies it by the value on the left then adds the value on the right. For example, to remap the original values, from 0 to 1, to -1 to 1, enter 2 for the first value and -1 for the second value.
This property is available only for Unlit Materials.

Note: Distortion vs Refraction

Refraction is for lit material that handle lighting, refraction is based on index or refraction and use screen space refraction and refraction probe with smoothness for blur intensity. In a way you can think of it as physically based transparent objects.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@7.4/manual/Refraction-in-HDRP.html?q=refraction

Distortion is a screen space effect - don’t use reflection probe - For artistic purpose.Thus why it is available on unlit (But for legacy reasons it is also available on Lit master node but shouldn’t have). Screen space effect affect also the object creating the distortion. The main usage is for artistic effects.

If you use shadergraph you can sample scene color and scene depth, with HDSceneColor, SceneDepth node and do you own refraction effects.

(Improvement are coming step by step to doc).