HDRP, URP or just LWRP? (expertise opinion wanted)

Greetings, dear artists, developers and self-made Unity masters,

it would be just fantastic, if you were so kind to share your experience with humble me, that just chose to get familiar with Unity.

Optional introduction moved to the bottom, because of priority.

About the situation I came here for:

I'm finally getting started with Unity this year and as good as possible prepared for the long term learning experience. So while learning by doing around within the (3D) environment I'm planning to do my long term game project, I was wondering, if there's a proper constellation to start with when it comes to project creation choice (3D // 3D with Extras) and the Render Pipeline (LWRP // HDRP).​

The planned core assets:

• - Rome Fantasy Pack I & RFP II (this is the overall orientation for graphical style and quality in the end)
• - Gaia Pro for the total environment setup
• - Game Creator for quest, stats, entity- and event control
• - Umodeler, (hence my 3D experience, this does the magic) UMA, ect.

Genre:

• 3rd Person RPG in first place, by chances other elements will join in, but right now this is the way to go primarily.

Unity Core:

• The Unity version I use is the up-to-date one 2019.4.18f, as the time of writing, updated just today. I used this on my second test run. The first test project - as mentioned below - was executed within the 2019.4.12f1 build, until I recognized the eternal window layout loadup error, which brought me to the update.

Well! Next: The first and latest experience in Unity so far.

The first test project I've had in classical 3D project with standard LWRP settings without Gaia on board with some self made lighting setups. (3 directional lights from 3 directions with 1 throwing shadows, pretty bloody beginner's starting, I know, but the basic lighting always looked one too harsh for me) Learned a lot on how to handle movement and how UMA works in cooperation with Game Creator. Hard to get hands on that.

Second test project was created under the guidance of a getting started topic about setting up HDRP correctly. That's the point where I started using Gaia as well, which did the lighting for me this time, so I'd have to lie when claiming that I immediately saw a proper difference between LWRP and HDRP, because Gaia did the lighting/atmosphere setup much better than I ever could as a beginner, so...

My question about this (atm) solo long term project is, what project-constellation would be the best to start with from your, a more experienced point of view with the mentioned assets?

Thanks very much in advance for taking your time to look into this and helping a fellow collegue on it's first steps in this new engine-world!

Best health & wishes,
Thurelh

(Migrated from starters forum, as apparently barely people get lost there to maybe have a look)​

 

Would someone please be so kind and share his/her expertise with me?

I'm sorry if this seems to be a lot of text. I as well have no fun of writing down all that much for nothing...

 

Is built in out of consideration or are you confusing it with LWRP / URP? (URP is an evolution of LWRP, LWRP is not really a thing in newer versions of Unity).

 

Assets dont dictate what version to use, as they can be used in all of them. To be honest (where your new at unity), you would be better off using Builtin. With builtin you can use pretty much any assets and they will all work, but thats not true about SRP's (URP/HDRP).

I dont think a new person should use SRP's until they are well used to Unity engine itself. Some advise: get 2019 4.8F1 LTS (long term support), and DO NOT update or change to any other version for the life of the project, and ALWAYS make a backup of your project.

Heres the breakdown of the versions:
Builtin...used for PC and consoles.
HDRP...used for high-end PC's and consoles.
URP...used for PC's but mostly mobile games/2D.

Using a "3D Template" (builtin), will allow you to get things done faster, and with the best compatability with assets.
Hope this helped in some way, best of luck with your Unity learning/developing journey

 

I’ve been using URP and it’s fine for me. Released on iPhone and android.

it depends what graphics features you NEED as some aren’t supported yet or as well and some third part add ons do for built in. But considering yours is a long term project I’d go with URP as the plan from unity is to make it the default in time.

 

Agreed. You will save yourself many headaches with Built-in, OP.

 

Right in Advance: (Despite the fact that I am not through with the topic yet
Thank you very much for the input guys!
Apologies it took me some days to respond, I didn't have the time to even work on my project as some more important things, I promised to take care of before, came up the last days gone. Adjacting to this I needed to do a bit more recherching after I went through your shared thoughts posted here to maybe return at least a spur wiser.

BTT:

I totally was forgetting it in fact... I don't know how I could forget about the standard RP, thanks for bringing it back to consideration and rendering me able to sort out LWRP!

I recognized this as I tried to fix the shader problems with the RFPack 1|2 assets. Luckily there was a HDRP folder included and I "just" had to relink every prefab to its suitable shader. Made me start thinking if this was the best way to continue on. Yet I wanted to ensure a certain look for my game and am still not sure if I could deliver that with Builtin RP...

To paint the picture in colors, here's a first shot of the current look with RFP1+2, Game Maker, UModeler (Made the Watchtower with it + Base roof and Walkway edited asset from RFP) and Gaia of course:


This is nearly that quality level I wanted to reach with this long term project and thanks to Gaia looking good in early stages already. So the key question is, starting from this quality level:

=> Do you think this is a realistic thing to archieve with Builtin?​

Helped indeed - this made myself clear that I missunderstood a thing within this whole terminus. The clarified seperation in a nutshell was very helpful! For example, I thought URP is somewhat between Standard (Builtin) and HDRP quality-wise. Now I guess I can exclude URP for sure with this project, as I don't plan to do a mobile's release with this project.

So if I now understand it correctly now, there is:

• - Builtin RP
• - LWRP (Light Weight)
• - SRP (Scriptable)
  • - URP (Universal)
  • - HDRP (High Definition)

Is this listing correct so far?

(Backupping is a thing I do if any possible, yes!)

About the unity version...

• I downloaded the 2020.1.8f1 version simultaneously with the "2019.4.12f1", when I wasn't sure on which horse to bet, so meanwhile it's simply "just there", waiting to be deleted or if I learn otherwise.

• I've been starting with the 2019.4.12f1 version, (because of the LTS mark) downloaded in december. (after purchasing some of the awesome assets. I only got started delayed, because I at least knew that I needed more than just beautiful and functional assets to work with unity, so december wasn't the best month to start, yet I prepared a lot.)
  I did the testing with a normal 3D project selection and (as I didn't change it, I think it's default then) its builtin RP. New as I am, I was a bit underwealmed by the output and thought it could've been because I wasn't using HD version of the RP. I didn't recognize much of a change in HDRP at launch, so I learned that it's probably a matter of settings/tweaks. I updated from that version to "*.18f1"as I witnessed a reoccuring bug on launching that claimed that my window setup has failed to load. (Resetting didn't fix it for good)

• With the HDRP testing I'm on 2019.4.18f1 as of now. (Screenshot above taken from there)
  - @warthos3399 Hopefully this doesn't sound too bold, as it's not meant to be, but is this what you meant or is it just such a familiar number and you did in fact mean the 2019.4.8f1?

HDRP and shaders
Long story short: Is HDRP even a reliable long term solution?
(I've read that it'll be abandoned in some way in the future and you better stick with the builtin or other SRP...)

Long story: With a reason, why I asked this, is because I recognized that there are some development flaws going when it comes to HDRP, as some assets simply don't support this. I', not sure if it's just Gaia Pro, as I've read that HDRP generally has problems with grass (shaders?). So there seem to be some users that have scripted those themselves, but this may only be the tip of the ice berg I don't know of yet, so one question I keep asking myself (when wandering through the planning process about long terms) is what are the major drawbacks?

Thanks for sharing your experience with me, it's good to learn from an on-development user about URP's usage. Is URP really going to replace Builtin? Because if so, I may have no choice but to stick with a version, - as warthos suggested - I once started to keep my Builtin RP going..!

I definitely can imagine this and witnessed it with the shaders mentioned within this posting, but the main question is, is it cost/benefit ratio worth it? As I read it from the reports you guys gave me in this topic I come to the conclusion that my experience in Unity suggests itself to use builtin and delay HDRP for good with this project, as it may result in more issues to solve than a non-programmer could handle, right?

~*~
@All, again and in advance: Thanks for your time guys,
I really appreciate the feedback, suggestions and opinions you share with me! ​

 

Absolutely. A good skybox (and the resulting reflection probes), and a healthy dose of post processing are doing the heavy lift there. Nothing you can't get with built-in.

You may find miss the shadows of HDRP, in that case I would recomend picking up NGSS. Basically everyone uses it.

Not exactly. It's more like

• Builtin RP

• SRP (Scriptable)
  • L̶W̶R̶P̶ ̶(̶L̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶W̶e̶i̶g̶h̶t̶)̶ (deprecated) ---> URP (Universal)
  • HDRP (High Definition)

Eventually, yes. URP will become the default and Built-in will be deprecated. But we're still at least 1 year from URP from getting feature-parity with builtin (they've made clear it will not become default until it has parity), then maybe another couple versions until it gets deprecated.

Now, does that mean that built-in will be deleted from the engine in ~2 years? Absolutely not. They will probably keep it around for another 5 years or so. Nothing to worry there. Unity is very slow to retire legacy features.

No. As far as I know, there's no plans to do anything like that. In fact, it's the one getting more love right now, and will be the only one to receive next-gen features like raytracing.