Hi everyone,
My name’s Eduardo and I work on the technical content team - we’ve been posting a lot on Discussions because we want to get our content right in front of our users and community. I work on advanced how-to content for artists, tech artists, and designers.
I’d like to tell you about some great resources we’ve launched on implementing the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) in your projects: two e-books, a demo project, and lots of supporting content.
Many of you already know this, but URP is the successor render pipeline to the Built-in Render Pipeline. It will provide all the functionality you are familiar with, but with better performance, greater customizability, and more productive workflows. URP is slated to be the leading renderer for mobile, XR, and untethered hardware.
OK! Now I’m going to dive into the content we have, starting with the two e-books.
Moving from the Built-In Render Pipeline to URP
First up is Introduction to the Universal Render Pipeline for advanced Unity creators. This is a foundational guide that will be updated for each LTS version (the 2022 LTS version of the guide will be available in January or February of 2024).
This guide will help you migrate your Built-In Pipeline-based projects to URP, or start a new project based on URP. At over 120 pages it’s a big one! It covers many important processes and details like:
- How to add URP to an existing Built-in Render Pipeline project
- Converting the scenes of an existing project
- Converting custom shaders
- Comparing Quality options between the Built-in Render Pipeline and URP (low and high settings)
- How to work with URP Quality settings
- Lighting in URP
- URP shaders for lit scenes
- Camera light limits when using the URP Forward Renderer
- Rendering path comparison
- Light Inspector
- Lighting a new scene
- Shadows
- Light Modes, Light Probes, Reflection Probes, Lens Flare, Light Halos & Decals
- Rendering layers
- Shaders
- Comparing URP and Built-in Render Pipeline shaders
- Custom shaders
- Includes
- Other useful HLSL includes
- Preprocessor macros
- Pipeline callbacks
- Post-processing
- Using the URP post-processing framework
- Adding a Local Volume
- Controlling post-processing with code
- Camera Stacking
- Additional tools compatible with URP
- 2D Renderer and 2D Lights
- Optimizing lighting and rendering in URP
We wanted to make this guide as valuable as possible and I encourage you to download it and keep it as a handy reference.
The URP 3D Sample
The Oasis environment from the URP 3D Sample
We launched the URP 3D Sample at Unite 2023 in Amsterdam. The URP 3D sample can help you learn how to use URP optimally across all platforms. It’s available in the Unity Hub and features four environments – the terminal, the cockpit, the oasis, and the garden. Each environment features different art styles, rendering paths, and scene complexity to represent the variety of 3D projects built with URP.
Read more about URP 3D Sample here and watch an intro to the sample here. The 2022 LTS version of the e-book also covers each environment in the sample in more detail.
A cookbook with 12 popular recipes for lighting and effects
An example of Screen Space Refraction from the URP cookbook
Our other URP guide is titled Recipes for popular visual effects using the Universal Render Pipeline. It lays out the steps for creating popular lighting and visual effects with the URP. It’s aimed at intermediate to advanced Unity users, and assumes a foundational knowledge of developing a project in Unity, URP, and using HLSL to write shaders.
The 12 recipes are for:
- Stencils
- Instancing
- Toon and Outline shading
- Ambient Occlusion
- Decals
- Water
- LUT for color grading
- Lighting
- Shadows
- Light Probes
- Screen Space Refraction
- Volumetrics
Everyone learns differently, but if you’re somewhat new to URP, I suggest that you tackle the bigger e-book first and then read the cookbook to apply the needed or desired URP-based effects to your projects.
We also made a video tutorial for one of the recipes, volumetric clouds. You can watch the video here.
Happy Harvest 2D URP sample project
I hope many of you will check out Happy Harvest. It is a labor of love for our 2D creators!
Happy Harvest is an official Unity demo that’s available on the Unity Asset Store. It shows you how to harness the latest capabilities for creating 2D lights, shadows, and special effects with URP in Unity 2022 LTS.
The upbeat farm game vibe is fully realized with many details: chubby cobs of corn, golden wheat, lolling lily pads, cheerful pigs, old-fashioned swinging lanterns, cozy fires in the hearth - even the shrubs are cute. All of the visual effects and lighting are based on URP and other systems like VFX Graph and Shader Graph.
The 2D global light applying a subtle green tone over the scene during day time
We explain the methods we used to create many of the lighting, animation, and special effects in a series of in-depth articles that are available together with the demo on its Asset Store page. I’m adding the links here too, and encourage you to read through the articles so that you can apply these same effects and visuals in your own projects. Here are the pages:
- 2D light and shadow techniques in the Universal Render Pipeline
- How to animate 2D characters in Unity 2022 LTS
- How to create art and gameplay with 2D tilemaps
- Create 2D special effects with VFX Graph and Shader Graph
That’s it for now. Check out the Unity best practices hub or via the best practices page in Unity documentation for more e-books and articles.
Thanks.