HDRP Weapon shader?

Is it possible to make a shader in HDRP that will be drawn on top of everything without second cameras and all that S*** (for weapon)? Because in legacy render it was impossible.

 

I would like this but I do not know how to achieve it with current HDRP. I don't want to use multiple cameras for performance reasons.

 

With the default pipeline you can do this with stencil buffer, we will have to wait for Shader Graph to support that or if you can add it to a version of the Lit shader yourself. I actually don't know if HDRP will have Stencil Buffer or if it's something else that's basically the same, we will have to wait and see.

 

Not impossible in legacy, i did it but it had a few limitations. But it did work very well and with just one active camera :
https://forum.unity.com/threads/fps...nt-shadow-support-and-independent-fov.356711/
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/camera/first-person-view-2-67929

I've not been able to replicate my solution in the new renderer, i can't use the same logic for that.

I'd love to see Unity implement a first person render natively into the renderer. That would be fantastic

 

I think that weapon rendering is such an integral and common feature that it MUST have native support. It's something Unity's competition has perfectly solved.

We waited a decade for decals, lets not wait another decade for decent first person support in rendering

 

I would like to know about this too, maybe we should summon Sebastien here so we can get a focused discussion about FPS rendering with SRP?
ummm @SebLagarde mind to chime in?

 

Not sure what was meant by Unity's competition. UE4 doesn't support this but CryEngine does when using their legacy GameSDK (they haven't ported this over to new systems afaik). I'm sure many proprietary engines can do this but they really aren't Unity's competition as we can't access those. I'd like to add tho that this hack has really bothered me on many games, I'd always prefer if guns just moved away from walls instead of hacking the rendering to show impossible to have visuals, it just breaks the immersion and depth perception. To me, it's just feels like cheap hack to fix something that would take more effort to fix properly. I'm pretty sure this is also why engines like UE4 don't even try to solve this on rendering.

There is one case where this makes more sense and it's when you are in a dense foliage, you can render the weapon on top of grass / bushes which isn't as disturbing than rendering the whole gun even when it's clipped into a brick wall.. But the foliage case can be solved otherwise too (bend the foliage out of the way).

 

The question was simple - it is possible or not. God, I just hate when someone pushes their opinion into the technical discussion.

 

I gave people doing this alternative solutions (make guns dodge the wall, bend the foliage), I also mentioned that biggest Unity competitor doesn't do this either as it was presented here as (somewhat false) argument. In addition, I explained why this hack is technically bad (not just an opinion): it really messed up with depth perception with objects drawn in places where they can't be. But I can tell my input isn't appreciated here so I'll just unsubscribe from this thread. Don't expect any further help on your issues with that attitude

PS. This is a discussion forum - opinions and discussion around the topic are both allowed as long as they don't offend others or derail it.

 

Yeah I already do that. I need to nudge it a bit further because when you move or rotate away as I do you're just displacing the problem, plus when enemies attack (game is mostly weapon based melee) they penetrate shields, so it's not just a gun vs wall problem.

So I need a way to prioritise the drawing of objects in front of the camera a little, in addition to the measures I already take - doesn't need much but would make a nice difference.

Seb Lagarde mentioned that I could reserve a range of depth but I'm not sure how to achieve that process.

 

There was nothing technical about it. Also, I think he was just trying to help. If you are asking questions on the forum, perhaps you should appreciate the help first. If you hate that too, then don't ask for people's opinions. Go find out on your own.

 

Yeah although I'm not hating anyone and would appreciate pointers eventually (whenever)

 

Could you just mess with the render order enough to force it into position? If you look at the gun/hands/etc material the order option should be in the material or mesh renderer section. Press yourself firmly up against the wall first to activate unwanted (wanted here?) clipping then go ham on the render order value/s.

 

Unfortunately in my case, these are melee weapons that I've de-penetrated and rotated as far as I can already. It's just a polish pass though, to remove the final visual bugs really.

All games experience some clipping but they're able to mask the final but with some nice tweaks to depth range or whatever, I do not currently know how that would be achieved in HDRP.

 

Any noise on this guys? Hate to bump but it's still an issue, thanks!

 

i guess we wont' get an FPS renderer for now

 

Theres multilples ways to achieve this. Change the render queue value in your weapon material. Or add an additional pass to the render loop that will render weapons after everything else. Or as Sebastien suggested, reserve some depth range value for your weapon (make sure it has the higest values close to 1.0).

 

How do I achieve the mentioned things? I do not know where to begin. My expertise with shaders very much ends around mobile vert/frag shaders. SRP is a lot of stuff I don't know how to alter yet

 

You are on HDRP right? I'll try to put out something today, just need to finish a hurry up commit and then I'll give it a go.
PS: HDRP is really not meant to be altered, at least till it's finalized, lot of things changing within almost every day. Unless you wanna grow white hair quickly. ^^

 

The white hair is coming, believe me. but yes - I can wait and you are right - I just wanted to make sure this sort of common thing is designed-for built in feature to avoid the decade or so of problems people had with it in older versions of Unity.

 

sorry for being bit out of topic, i'm suddenly wondering long time ago unity have fps shooter demo with lerpz as main character, how do they handle the fps rendering back then, two camera?

 

Yeah ye old 2-cam trick... Thing is this is a problem for VR as well. In my game I have everything pretty physical in 3D space. So I can't do other subtle tricks like scaling the weapon smaller but bringing it closer to the camera to compensate. This would ruin the interaction with other characters.

It's a trick that works well for overwatch I think, maybe (brigitte's melee).

 

Lol i did use that scalling trick on mine, and yeah handling the interaction are the tricky part.

 

Thing is, the fake render will be really messed up in VR as you literally see the guns dimensions where your brain says it can't be.

 

@tatoforever you mention "sebastien suggestion to reserve depth range" where did he explain about this one
Edit : nvm i found the thread

 

...and how does one even do that? with graph or?

 

Not sure yet, i'm still hasn't cracked this problem yet. All that cracked is my head

 

Hey Man,
I totally forgot about you. Right now I'm like super loaded working on multiple stuff at the same time.
As you probably find out, this problem is a tricky one, specially in VR. What I'm going to do is add an additional opaque pass to the HDRP loop.

 

Follow up on the Weapon pass.
I added a new custom Forward (only opaque) pass after default one to the HD render loop and it didn't do anything.
I also added a custom depth pass after default one and again nothing changed.
It's probably me being silly, i did that super quick. I'll give it an other go today and let you know how it goes.

 

How do you do that, if you don't mind i'm asking? it's just hdrp are bit confusing for me

 

Get ready to pull your hair out I certainly did while trying to figure out how to do what i did with the normal render (even with the limitations).
Very interested to see if you can get something like this to work with HDRP. I've been wanting to try again, but i still haven't spent any time with HDRP.

 

especially when hdrp are keep changing

 

@Reanimate_L
Easycheesy, add the render passes to your custom rendering shaders, then add the rendering passes to the rendering loop.

@eskovas
I've been working intermittently with HDRP for a while now. It's not only hairy it's also quite advanced because it's state of the art rendering stuff. But if you understand how renderers in general works you can follow. The code is clean and well commented.

Still I don't think HDRP is ready yet. The render loop creates huge garbages spikes, the API still evolving and new features are coming/improving. But it's getting there.

 

@tatoforever isn't HDRP using built in render queue, which mean it is already predefined from 0-5000?

 

I just found a DepthBiasZ setting in decal shader that make the decal rendered on top of everything. Might help
@hippocoder @tatoforever

 

Oh! hmmm....

 

well i'll be damned, don't mind the shirt, it's still using built in HDRP material .
But hand and the gun are rendered on top of everything now

 

But as you can see, lighting little incorrect

 

Yep, the depth buffer are broken, so the SSAO are broken in these shader. still doing some more tweak now

 

@hippocoder well i guess now you can just disect the FPS Sample demo then. Since there's an FPS Mode and FOV option on the HDRP Lit in it

 

I will simply thieve with wanton abandon.

 

and at this point i'm confused though, where the hell is this function running at

 

Ooooooo niiiiice! Finally an official solution for HDRP and seems to be working quite well.
This will be game changer for FPSs with the new renderer.
Will need to try this out more!

 

Time to find a new line of business...

 

Mine still works with default renderer, so its ok i have a new asset coming soon anyway

This new official solution is great for everyone, including me!

 

Is there a reason the normal 2 camera setup is not good to use?

 

For one really good reason: it's removed in 4.2.0-preview SRPs and forwards. From 4.2.0-preview's changelog:

 

I had a quick test of this (by accident) and at the moment at least, you can still render a second camera to a rendertexture. I'm using it to do a replacement material rendering to a render texture for pixel perfect selection.

Not that this will probably help much for this problem as only 1 camera will render to screen at a time now. Though maybe you could layer the render texture on top?

 

RT's are still supported as they should be, no modern game engine could do without.

 

I don't understand the graphics pipeline well, but what's the difference between rendering 2 cameras to the screen vs rendering 1 camera to the screen and 1 to a rendertexture and just rendering the render texture on top of the camera view?