URP is far too restrictive to replace legacy/BiRP

I’m struggling to do fairly simple things with URP that were easy with previous pipelines. I mean I used to be able to have a complete custom lighting solution replacing the built-in one. I appreciate more complex effects are there out of the box but others are now missing completely.

  1. Lighting changed from BiRP and is not customizable (without editing the package itself) so you can not even go back to linear lighting or use the old Half life, Half Lambert model for example. The only reason for this is because it is a more realistic lighting calculation but for low-end, procedural graphics, stylized graphics, the ‘realism’ route is not always the right one.

  2. What happened to the stencil buffer? I only see it as part of the Render Objects Render Feature which provides one way to do portal, impossible geometry effects, however it has many limitations and breaks AO for that rendering section!! You can modify generated shaders to add stencil support but again it breaks AO and may need frequent updates.

  3. Shader graph has many benefits to manage shaders over a changing engine, but want to add some custom function (because a super complex node system instead of a few lines of code is not good)? It gets tricky as nothing seems documented, you may have to search the shaders in the packages to find out how to access the screen buffers and other useful snippets

Please let me know if these are solvable or on the roadmap or changed in Unity 6

This on roadmap for Unity 7 that theoretically will be released in 2026

There will be the only Unified Renderer as replacement for BiRP, URP and HDRP
And there will be Block Shaders that must allow good and easy customisation like change lighting model

But I think complication with stencil and AO can stay. So we need to grab early versions of new system give big amount of feedback on early experimental stages so they have chance and time to create more robust solution :slight_smile:

Great news. Let’s hope this new renderer will be as easy and as intuitive as the older BIRP was… and NOT like the difficult confusing and misbehaving rubbish that the other two are at the moment.

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