Is someone even want to have their own render pipe?

[BattleAngelAlita]

At first, everybody was very excited that unity adds ability for everyone to write they own custom rendering. But what i see now - everybody sticks to URP/HDRP and refuse to make custom rendering. What happens? It is fear of bus-factor? Fear of some-maybeee-future-bugs that unity fix sometime in *RP? Artist refused to work without shader graph? Some specific feature of *RP?

[koirat]

For me.
It’s not about your own complete render pipeline, It’s all about modification/extending the existing one.
But for now the promise behind HDRP is good enough. I will be very happy when promise becomes reality.

[AcidArrow]

I used to want to make my own, early on, even did some tests. Then the complexity of SRPs rose without better documentation.

Also I now view SRPs in general as a mess, which kinda makes me want to avoid them as a whole.

With all that said, I’ve been asking for a subforum that is intended for people that want to write their own SRPs. Even if it’s not very popular, I’m sure it would be educational.

[Matt-Cranktrain]

I found Jason Booth’s thoughts about “owning the graphics stack” [in this thread]( Can Unity please try documenting changes to the shader system? This is absurd. page-2#post-6333861) very helpful when it comes to the question of whether or not to maintain a fork of an SRP or a customised-from-the-ground-up varient:

So what was delivered was, for the most part, what someone working on a 30 person team with several graphics engineers would want. This makes sense, as a large portion of the people hired likely worked on those types of teams before joining Unity. But this doesn’t fit how most existing Unity studios work- most of the studios I contract for have no in house graphics engineers. They rely on a combination of assets and simple ways to inject slight modifications into the renderer instead of wanting to own it fundamentally. If you look back on the initial reaction Unity had to people asking for features like Grab Pass, it was essentially “Oh yeah, super easy, just modify the SRP to have another pass and do whatever you want”. And if you’re going to own the rendering stack top down, that makes total sense. But this doesn’t work at all for the existing community, which wants to inject extra passes and not modify the SRP, or wants to buy an asset that does. Owning the graphics stack is at least a $200k a year proposition, and that’s only if you can find and convince a good graphics coder to work on your project.

[BattleAngelAlita]

So basically answer is “expensive”. Funny how unity force everybody to switch from “cheap to modify” Standard to “expensive to modify URP/HDRP”.
But how about unique features that can offer custom SPR? Point light shadows;), dynamic GI, heavy stylized game graphics, switch ↔ 4k scalability, portals, grab-pass after all?