If you've used HDRP, what do you think of it?

News & General Discussion
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Personally I really like it. Yes, as we’ve seen in other threads, Unity can be frustrating and hard to learn at times. But it can also be pretty amazing at times as well. The graphical upgrade from the standard pipeline to the High Definition RP actually surprised me a bit at how good it is. It actually makes me excited about the future of Unity (again I guess lol).

In short, the graphics are pretty cool in Unity now. PC oriented devs have something to smile about graphically. Thanks Unity.

Now with all of that being said, I wish HDRP could be production ready tomorrow :smile:

I just wanted to see what other people’s thoughts were on it?

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I mostly making fps escape game in unity like silent hill pt with puzzles and for me after gameplay most important thing is graphics.I really liked lights in hdrp especially tube lights.I think they did well on volumetric fog it is pretty realistic and nice.But for now I am not making any project in hdrp I am waiting for stable hdrp version =) go on Unity you rock!

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I would like HDRP and LWRP would be the same pipeline.
HDRP would be extension of LWRP so you could switch it between.

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For the most part they are since they’re both running on top of the Scriptable Render Pipeline, but you would severely affect the performance of the LWRP if you made it capable of “upgrading” to the HDRP at runtime and you would severely affect the quality of the HDRP if you needed it to “downgrade” to the LWRP.

If you need a pipeline somewhere in-between the solution is to design and implement your own with these requirements.

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I’m still an amateur at these, but my understanding is you could swap between the two in the same project if needed.

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You can not switch between the two without just like that. It is a one-time upfront decision for each project.
If you want to switch there might be some considerable work involved changing the assets of your project to work with the changed pipeline.

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I am still learning as well, since it is very new to me. I think I’ll have to keep up with it as it progresses – especially since Unity itself is still building it as we speak.

Once it becomes “full-fledged” at some point, then it will be easier to learn, because there will be more tutorials on how to do things. Plus more asset developers making assets for it! Which is what I can’t wait for as well.

Right now, I am banging my head against the wall just trying to get particles to work lol.

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  1. HDRP is the best graphics engine I have ever used, it’s as perfect as I could ask for.

  2. As mentioned, switching is not an automatic affair. This is not an important issue because HDRP is going to be on all mobiles before long and if more performance is required then the other pipeline is available.

  3. Tool for the job: the old built in renderer is a swiss army knife but that comes with the understanding that it doesn’t do everything particularly well.

Porting example:

So if you are on HDRP, and want to port it for a 4 year old android chipset then it would probably take your size of project (for one person it would be pretty small) about a week to clone the project and switch the pipeline and tidy up all the broken materials, change the light settings and setup any reflection probes.

Depending on initial project complexity, it probably won’t take all that long to do. In my own experiments it took a day. With that in mind you can see it would indeed be a bad decision for Unity to create a brand new high definition renderer with one-click hardware raytracing support and then drag it down with cruddy 4 year old mobile support, which would immediately slow HDRP down, while extending it’s dev times at least double, and prevent any new additions (because they don’t work with crap hardware).

They would end up with built-in renderer again…

A port taking even a month is not a big deal at the end of a project, in fact it’s extremely quick and if used to the process will take you a week at the most (obviously depending on scale).

I’ll take that condition in return for the stunning visuals HDRP is giving us in realtime + future proofing.

Parting thoughts:

I do think people are way, way, way underestimating what Universal/Default/New-built-in is capable of though. LWRP will eventually do more than the builtin renderer can and much faster than it, so that’s progress that cannot be ignored for titles that are planned to work on most things (with caveats for compute). So while it wouldn’t quite be the old built-in renderer, it would do some things quite well that’s supported on some hw but not others such as compute shader support, VFX, shader graph, DOTS-rendering and more. Things that built-in will never have by default.

People who want no porting problems and want to run on high AND low end hardware, you owe it to yourselves to be smart enough to look beyond what people are showing with LWRP (terrible, terrible name and wording - I’ve constantly mentioned to Unity it’s a bad idea to frame it as mobile and VR).

Look at the following titles which can be properly and perfectly achieved with “LWRP-due-to-be-renamed”:

Overwatch
World of Warcraft
Fortnite
God of War (new one, and would only need a couple of tweaks + GI support incoming…)

Bet that surprised, huh? Hardly mobile. But also, it requires a good understanding of the solutions AAA do employ, and a lot of it is just very much simple good art + correct application of the right tools for the job. Overwatch for example does not spawn a new light for every gunflash. It’s just bloom.

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Also want to take time to talk about Asset Store, so I’ll do that here, in a separate post. I speak to a lot of asset store authors because I run into them a lot. I like them, they helped make Unity what it is today. Never forget that. They plugged the missing bits, they sealed the cracks and breathed new life into it.

So when asset store authors like @jbooth_1 feed back about LWRP or HDRP, they do it not because they want to keep you on built-in but because Unity hasn’t made it smooth enough or given enough incentive for the extra work. If Unity is able to promote SRP supporting assets to give that extra income stream + making the API forgiving enough, then this can change.

But sadly not everyone as is as smart as jb is so some of them will - like a bucket of crabs, drag everyone down to their level… these people are deliberately lying to and misleading their customers for no logical reason other than unlike the above, they refuse to be mature about progress.

So when deciding on a new game pipeline I recommend by default everyone picks LWRP, since it’s actually a lot easier to go from LWRP to HDRP than it is the other way round since HDRP adds and LWRP subtracts.

I hope that LWRP becomes the default pipeline for Unity, and by default all new assets support it. To get there though, Unity has to promote the pipeline both on asset store and in general.

But what are the benefits for the customer using SRP and asset store?

Systems like water and clouds are very hard to get working properly with built-in pipeline, because there’s very little access to the internals, everything is define hell and it’s got to work on all hardware (even though the effect would be way slower on built-in). People complain time and time and time again about screwed up transparency and deprecated assets. Nothing gets deprecated faster than ocean rendering, for example.

You can fix that with SRP right off the bat, but convincing authors it’s good business to do that, is actually impossible while everyone keeps dragging everyone back to built-in. And one really big reason for that is that they can’t really port their work to SRP as effectively as they could.

How do you go forward with a problem if the past is the problem?

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My assumption is that Asset developers will have to essentially build assets for the SRP from the ground up. Some might be able to port their assets from the built-in pipeline to the SRP to a certain extent, but then have to make major modifications to it?

I’m really just guessing on that though, judging from what I’ve seen with trying to upgrade some of my own projects from built-in to HDRP itself.

I think the incentive for Asset developers will come when people see how cool the new SRP is, and start wanting to switch over to it. With more people switching, then the asset developers will have the incentive to make assets compatible with it. I’ve never really been through an engine transition quite like this though, so I’m really just speculating.

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My own experience is it’s best to rely on asset store for tools or media only, since those are replaced easily without affecting the all-important runtime, for example we use RCSG for buildings, towns etc that sit inside terrain because it’s iterative and non destructive and at editor stage, posing no risk to the game being finished.

We make our own props to decorate and pretty things up, but if we did not, then asset store would be a good choice to buy those ready made props from.

For runtime/code/shader/post assets, you are spending money on creating a reason your game will fail in the future, so if you can switch to an SRP even if it means dropping half of asset store, you’re smart doing so.

If something cannot be done in SRP, then talk to Unity. They will make sure it can be done or show you how. Do this in the experimental area of the forum.

If it seems like you might downgrade your visuals, do not worry about it, just compromise. It is better to compromise and finish than not at all.

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+1

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It’s pretty neat, but the real fun is in custom SRP setups, I’m finding.

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Well i like unity because its very intuitive… i uninstalled HDRP after i wasted lots of time trying to get decent lighting. Srsly i dont have time to learn new workflows.

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How do you have time to develop at all?

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[quote=“Murgilod, post:15, topic: 748124, username:Murgilod”]
How do you have time to develop at all?
[/quote] Learning is not developing.

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I like SRPs in concept; being able to completely script the pipeline is great. But the lack of abstractions between them makes them extremely expensive to support, and the lack of shader abstractions for things like lighting means you have to fix something nearly every time Unity makes a change. Finally, it greatly splinters a market which is already too small to support the work required to make and maintain many assets. So the idea that people will code assets or tools for just one pipeline only applies to those who can afford to give away their work for free.

And it’s not like it’s just standard, lw and hd pipelines, any number of pipelines can be created, or customized by the user, causing a break in your asset.

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You can’t develop without learning, champ.

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I LOVE! the rendering quality make no mistake about that, I personally think it’s the best out there (love Unity so bias there) But! for some reason it doesn’t like me.

For clarity, I started with Unity in 2012, learning from version to version, Paid and free courses and actual (private full game made to the quality of a full release as a personal test) so I some what know what I’m doing, I have been developing for the past three years (officially on my title) coming from a film background I understand light etc, so I have made my scenes look and perform fantastic with the standard pipeline.

So I thought I would have a tinker with 2019.1, you know just to perform some visual and performance tests and after spending at least 4 hours going back and forth and following the basic example scene provided I am at a loss with just setting up a basic scene, my camera keeps rendering nothing,Materials keep disappearing from the visual sphere to the actual materials themselves from rendering, and a good few other things and the final salt in the wound is the breaking, during the course of just setting things up and thinking I have this, something will cause some problem and I have no idea what (no error message or anything to indicate a conflict or problem) and it will reflect it’s problem to the sample scene and every scene in the project that will result in a new project having to be built and the same again.

Even more context, I am the kind of person who likes to learn through repetition, just so the basics are as easy as 1,2,3 i.e setting up a scene with lighting, quality etc. because making something look good is not hard making it perform good is a fun challenge.
So doing the same in 2019.1 only makes sense, because setting up a scene to render correctly in HDRP is very different, so having done that in numerous scenes and projects with assets, each one yields a different problem and a problem I have no idea how to fix.

So that’s my gripe but I will come back in December when I believe things will be better and Official (set in stone) guides are in place as the 2019 cycle will be just about ready for production, and I know this is new ground with unity so I am very forgiving and understand things a very much in early stages but I am left looking at HDRP through videos and images scratching my head my it’s not working for me.

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The only reason my game isn’t on HDRP is simply because of 2 reasons.

#1 - Enviro Sky doesn’t support it, and I have no clue how to make Volumetric clouds and light and fog.
#2 - Speed Tree doesn’t support wind and such. Yeah I could probably make a shader do essentially the same thing. And I probably would, if #1 worked. Otherwise there’s nothing really stopping me from making the transition now.

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