The title is almost self-explanatory
Those who feel the same way are asked to vote on this post.
Pipeline Texture Conversion TOOL for URP/HDRP and YES also Built-in
The goal is to migrate old projects back and forth and also for new assets with textures, coming from different pipelines like PBR, or one of the pipelines from unity you don’t use normally, or for that certain project. I think such tool is just as important for small projects, although this definitely applies to large projects.
And I am not talking about the materials or shaders! I mean the textures itself!
URP combines smoothness textures differently than HDRP. Now you would say, hey Unity can do that already. Yes, but in a very lean and unstable way. Because, when using the “material converter” it can’t manage a huge material library without crashing. If you have a small project you won’t notice it. If you work on a big project, it will crash after a certain number of conversions. I tested these with 2021 LTS, as well with 2022 LTS. And going to HDRP never brought me correct smoothnes/metalic/AO conversions on the textures.
However, this should be a separate tool for the package manager, that reads out the main names of the texture, list them, and then checks for the “smoothness”, “metalic” “AO” naming and add them, then converts them into a correct new combined texture (alpha channels/normal map flip, if necessary). A tool that manages all pipeleines and at least the regular PBR format.
What do you do, if you have a new asset and it uses PBR texture set, or a combined smoothnes texture that comes from the opposite pipeline you use? I would even go that far, that I would implement a Unreal profile for their format too, where Normal maps are flipped and so on. This is a big loss for those who want to migrate or implement new assets with different texture layout. Especially when it comes to massive bulk jobs. Please keep this in mind.
And if a good programmer is reading this, take this idea, make a tool and I buy it immediately!
Given these facts, I imagine a real TOOL and not just a button that does something you can’t control.
Just one thing, please spare me some “use photoshop with actions” suggestions. The way I described the tool, with its file search abilities, is far from what photoshop can achieve. The tool needs to deep search each file, by comparing if the name is the same and then check its endings what kind of texture it is (smoothness and so on) and this by searching deep into folder trees, list them and then be able to convert them. OF COURSE preferably with the materials and unity’s internal shaders together.
VDB support:
- VDB’s that can be influenced with objects/volumes etc., as in unreal
- Animated VDB’s
- Shaders for VDB’s