If you've used HDRP, what do you think of it?

Personally I really like it. Yes, as we've seen in other threads, Unity can be frustrating and hard to learn at times. But it can also be pretty amazing at times as well. The graphical upgrade from the standard pipeline to the High Definition RP actually surprised me a bit at how good it is. It actually makes me excited about the future of Unity (again I guess lol).

In short, the graphics are pretty cool in Unity now. PC oriented devs have something to smile about graphically. Thanks Unity.

Now with all of that being said, I wish HDRP could be production ready tomorrow

I just wanted to see what other people's thoughts were on it?

 

I mostly making fps escape game in unity like silent hill pt with puzzles and for me after gameplay most important thing is graphics.I really liked lights in hdrp especially tube lights.I think they did well on volumetric fog it is pretty realistic and nice.But for now I am not making any project in hdrp I am waiting for stable hdrp version =) go on Unity you rock!

 

I would like HDRP and LWRP would be the same pipeline.
HDRP would be extension of LWRP so you could switch it between.

 

For the most part they are since they're both running on top of the Scriptable Render Pipeline, but you would severely affect the performance of the LWRP if you made it capable of "upgrading" to the HDRP at runtime and you would severely affect the quality of the HDRP if you needed it to "downgrade" to the LWRP.

If you need a pipeline somewhere in-between the solution is to design and implement your own with these requirements.

 

I'm still an amateur at these, but my understanding is you could swap between the two in the same project if needed.

 

I am still learning as well, since it is very new to me. I think I'll have to keep up with it as it progresses -- especially since Unity itself is still building it as we speak.

Once it becomes "full-fledged" at some point, then it will be easier to learn, because there will be more tutorials on how to do things. Plus more asset developers making assets for it! Which is what I can't wait for as well.

Right now, I am banging my head against the wall just trying to get particles to work lol.

 

1. HDRP is the best graphics engine I have ever used, it's as perfect as I could ask for.

2. As mentioned, switching is not an automatic affair. This is not an important issue because HDRP is going to be on all mobiles before long and if more performance is required then the other pipeline is available.

3. Tool for the job: the old built in renderer is a swiss army knife but that comes with the understanding that it doesn't do everything particularly well.

Porting example:

So if you are on HDRP, and want to port it for a 4 year old android chipset then it would probably take your size of project (for one person it would be pretty small) about a week to clone the project and switch the pipeline and tidy up all the broken materials, change the light settings and setup any reflection probes.

Depending on initial project complexity, it probably won't take all that long to do. In my own experiments it took a day. With that in mind you can see it would indeed be a bad decision for Unity to create a brand new high definition renderer with one-click hardware raytracing support and then drag it down with cruddy 4 year old mobile support, which would immediately slow HDRP down, while extending it's dev times at least double, and prevent any new additions (because they don't work with crap hardware).

They would end up with built-in renderer again...

A port taking even a month is not a big deal at the end of a project, in fact it's extremely quick and if used to the process will take you a week at the most (obviously depending on scale).

I'll take that condition in return for the stunning visuals HDRP is giving us in realtime + future proofing.

Parting thoughts:

I do think people are way, way, way underestimating what Universal/Default/New-built-in is capable of though. LWRP will eventually do more than the builtin renderer can and much faster than it, so that's progress that cannot be ignored for titles that are planned to work on most things (with caveats for compute). So while it wouldn't quite be the old built-in renderer, it would do some things quite well that's supported on some hw but not others such as compute shader support, VFX, shader graph, DOTS-rendering and more. Things that built-in will never have by default.

People who want no porting problems and want to run on high AND low end hardware, you owe it to yourselves to be smart enough to look beyond what people are showing with LWRP (terrible, terrible name and wording - I've constantly mentioned to Unity it's a bad idea to frame it as mobile and VR).

Look at the following titles which can be properly and perfectly achieved with "LWRP-due-to-be-renamed":

Overwatch
World of Warcraft
Fortnite
God of War (new one, and would only need a couple of tweaks + GI support incoming...)

Bet that surprised, huh? Hardly mobile. But also, it requires a good understanding of the solutions AAA do employ, and a lot of it is just very much simple good art + correct application of the right tools for the job. Overwatch for example does not spawn a new light for every gunflash. It's just bloom.

 

Also want to take time to talk about Asset Store, so I'll do that here, in a separate post. I speak to a lot of asset store authors because I run into them a lot. I like them, they helped make Unity what it is today. Never forget that. They plugged the missing bits, they sealed the cracks and breathed new life into it.

So when asset store authors like @jbooth feed back about LWRP or HDRP, they do it not because they want to keep you on built-in but because Unity hasn't made it smooth enough or given enough incentive for the extra work. If Unity is able to promote SRP supporting assets to give that extra income stream + making the API forgiving enough, then this can change.

But sadly not everyone as is as smart as jb is so some of them will - like a bucket of crabs, drag everyone down to their level... these people are deliberately lying to and misleading their customers for no logical reason other than unlike the above, they refuse to be mature about progress.

So when deciding on a new game pipeline I recommend by default everyone picks LWRP, since it's actually a lot easier to go from LWRP to HDRP than it is the other way round since HDRP adds and LWRP subtracts.

I hope that LWRP becomes the default pipeline for Unity, and by default all new assets support it. To get there though, Unity has to promote the pipeline both on asset store and in general.


But what are the benefits for the customer using SRP and asset store?

Systems like water and clouds are very hard to get working properly with built-in pipeline, because there's very little access to the internals, everything is define hell and it's got to work on all hardware (even though the effect would be way slower on built-in). People complain time and time and time again about screwed up transparency and deprecated assets. Nothing gets deprecated faster than ocean rendering, for example.

You can fix that with SRP right off the bat, but convincing authors it's good business to do that, is actually impossible while everyone keeps dragging everyone back to built-in. And one really big reason for that is that they can't really port their work to SRP as effectively as they could.

How do you go forward with a problem if the past is the problem?

 

My assumption is that Asset developers will have to essentially build assets for the SRP from the ground up. Some might be able to port their assets from the built-in pipeline to the SRP to a certain extent, but then have to make major modifications to it?

I'm really just guessing on that though, judging from what I've seen with trying to upgrade some of my own projects from built-in to HDRP itself.

I think the incentive for Asset developers will come when people see how cool the new SRP is, and start wanting to switch over to it. With more people switching, then the asset developers will have the incentive to make assets compatible with it. I've never really been through an engine transition quite like this though, so I'm really just speculating.

 

My own experience is it's best to rely on asset store for tools or media only, since those are replaced easily without affecting the all-important runtime, for example we use RCSG for buildings, towns etc that sit inside terrain because it's iterative and non destructive and at editor stage, posing no risk to the game being finished.

We make our own props to decorate and pretty things up, but if we did not, then asset store would be a good choice to buy those ready made props from.

For runtime/code/shader/post assets, you are spending money on creating a reason your game will fail in the future, so if you can switch to an SRP even if it means dropping half of asset store, you're smart doing so.

If something cannot be done in SRP, then talk to Unity. They will make sure it can be done or show you how. Do this in the experimental area of the forum.

If it seems like you might downgrade your visuals, do not worry about it, just compromise. It is better to compromise and finish than not at all.

 

+1

 

It's pretty neat, but the real fun is in custom SRP setups, I'm finding.

 

Well i like unity because its very intuitive... i uninstalled HDRP after i wasted lots of time trying to get decent lighting. Srsly i dont have time to learn new workflows.

 

How do you have time to develop at all?

 

Learning is not developing.

 

I like SRPs in concept; being able to completely script the pipeline is great. But the lack of abstractions between them makes them extremely expensive to support, and the lack of shader abstractions for things like lighting means you have to fix something nearly every time Unity makes a change. Finally, it greatly splinters a market which is already too small to support the work required to make and maintain many assets. So the idea that people will code assets or tools for just one pipeline only applies to those who can afford to give away their work for free.

And it’s not like it’s just standard, lw and hd pipelines, any number of pipelines can be created, or customized by the user, causing a break in your asset.

 

You can't develop without learning, champ.

 

I LOVE! the rendering quality make no mistake about that, I personally think it's the best out there (love Unity so bias there) But! for some reason it doesn't like me.

For clarity, I started with Unity in 2012, learning from version to version, Paid and free courses and actual (private full game made to the quality of a full release as a personal test) so I some what know what I'm doing, I have been developing for the past three years (officially on my title) coming from a film background I understand light etc, so I have made my scenes look and perform fantastic with the standard pipeline.

So I thought I would have a tinker with 2019.1, you know just to perform some visual and performance tests and after spending at least 4 hours going back and forth and following the basic example scene provided I am at a loss with just setting up a basic scene, my camera keeps rendering nothing,Materials keep disappearing from the visual sphere to the actual materials themselves from rendering, and a good few other things and the final salt in the wound is the breaking, during the course of just setting things up and thinking I have this, something will cause some problem and I have no idea what (no error message or anything to indicate a conflict or problem) and it will reflect it's problem to the sample scene and every scene in the project that will result in a new project having to be built and the same again.

Even more context, I am the kind of person who likes to learn through repetition, just so the basics are as easy as 1,2,3 i.e setting up a scene with lighting, quality etc. because making something look good is not hard making it perform good is a fun challenge.
So doing the same in 2019.1 only makes sense, because setting up a scene to render correctly in HDRP is very different, so having done that in numerous scenes and projects with assets, each one yields a different problem and a problem I have no idea how to fix.

So that's my gripe but I will come back in December when I believe things will be better and Official (set in stone) guides are in place as the 2019 cycle will be just about ready for production, and I know this is new ground with unity so I am very forgiving and understand things a very much in early stages but I am left looking at HDRP through videos and images scratching my head my it's not working for me.

 

The only reason my game isn't on HDRP is simply because of 2 reasons.

#1 - Enviro Sky doesn't support it, and I have no clue how to make Volumetric clouds and light and fog.
#2 - Speed Tree doesn't support wind and such. Yeah I could probably make a shader do essentially the same thing. And I probably would, if #1 worked. Otherwise there's nothing really stopping me from making the transition now.

 

I realise you deleted your post but to answer anyway: it's because you can have infinite distance shadows in realtime with volumetric fog/light plus more features than you can shake a stick at when you dig in, full compute shader optimisations and more so when you do those 20 mile shadows (with zero artefacts) it runs like butter.

Also let's not forget the one-click raytracing you can do. Just seamless.

Meanwhile under that scenario, built-in becomes a flickery mess that dies, so there's that. That's why HDRP is a big deal. Now if you convert a built-in project to only be converted, it should look the same in HDRP... cos that is all you asked of it

(and yes it takes time to learn so it's best done as a side-project for learning over time, call it a hobby project if you like)

 

I'm going to try to hold-off on using HDRP until I release my current project. Then I'll upgrade the project to HDRP and re-release it as the "Remastered" edition.

 

HDRP is a pie sold to the masses before it was even half baked, sorry to say.

HDRP on the asset store is an absolute non-starter at this point, and it may ultimately prove to be an asset store killer (or at least an asset-store-developer killer). It's been over a year since HDRP preview was first released and Unity still has not developed the necessary backend adequately, still has not stabilized shader features and utilization, and it thus continues to be a losing bet for asset developers to develop for (and this makes it an actual impossibility to support HDRP-oriented customers!). Unity has taken a lot of feedback on this issue but I have not seen any progress that changes this basic problem.

The last time I looked at HDRP my experience was, similar to @Brian-Ryer, quite awful. I wasted a full day on trying to setup just a basic scene and I was so frustrated that I swore I wouldn't even attempt HDRP again until Unity gets it together and takes HDRP out of "preview". If even a veteran Unity dev like me has this much frustration with the new workflow than you can easily give a sloppy wet kiss good-bye to what made Unity such a success the past 12 years.

But infinite shadows you say? Butter you say? I might suck it up and give HDRP another try soon. But there's no way I'm developing for the new pipeline until Unity makes an effort to stabilize this mess.

 

Is this truly a problem though? I'm of the opinion that the HDRP is not aimed at developers that rely on the Asset Store to get the assets for their games but rather at studios that would have choosen Unity had the graphical capabilities been closer to those of the competition.

I feel like the Asset Store creators would be best off choosing the LWRP pipeline and if someone needs an HDRP asset they can learn how to adapt said asset themselves. If they can't at least figure that out they don't have any business using it.

 

I'm a coder first and foremost, I have vague idea about graphics and stuff needed to do to achieve actual things with it. This is true to the graphics pipeline and scripting and everything (shaders, etc).
So I gave up on HDRP for now, simply, because there is no assset support for it (so I don't have canned stuff to use), and I have to catch up on the how-to. And oh boy, it will be a long ride.
And then when I'm more confident and knowledgeable about these things I may come back to the HDRP to use in my project. But until then it will only be a playground for me.
This is absolutely not a complaint, don't get me wrong, the fact that I'm not a good enough gfx ninja is not a fault of this tool. And I don't have a bad taste in my mouth at all. I still follow what is happening with it.

 

@Ryiah It is only a problem because of the way Unity has marketed it as being the great shiny new thing. They used SRP (and really just HDRP) as a prop to sell people on Unity 2018 and their subscriptions waaay before it was ready to be pushed onto the masses. It was probably hard for them not to do so given the perceived graphics inadequacies compared to UE4, so can sympathize with them a little bit, however I don't think it was the responsible thing to do at all.

So it unfortunately WAS aimed at users of the asset store. Graphics sell game engines, and the lower you are on the developer totem pole the more true this becomes. I've had countless requests for my assets to support HDRP since last year. I've not had one single person ask me about LWRP. Not one.

 

I literally counted the amount of times they used the word "preview" in the blog posts about HDRP and it came up at least 17 times per, over 40 in one case. They made it abundantly clear in all materials that it's not production ready.

 

You don't think anyone pays attention to the warning label do you?

 

Warning labels I would hope. EULAs? Whatever.

 

It's a bit disingenuous to put "not production ready" on your marketing and then over the course of the next year make every marketing still, video, project, and asset you release to the public require the use your not-production-ready-yet pipeline. Check Unity's marketing videos since summer 2018, they all are pushing features only available in HDRP. Check the asset store for Unity's recent example projects... they are all using SRP (most of them HDRP) and many of them are already out of date and broken when you try to load them.

Frankly this is a dangerous game they are playing... the benefits of being on the bleeding edge have to be weighed by the fallout of user frustration, broken projects, and ever changing pipelines. When is stabilization coming?

 

See roadmap. 2019.3 - 2020.1 (in case of some unexpected events)

 

HDRP is actually WORTH dumping every single asset on the asset store for.

That's how highly I rate HDRP.

And that's what I did.

Please read and digest Natalya Tatarchuk's words in the following article to fully understand what a big gift HDRP really is at the price we pay. It's the reason I believe AAA studios should take a closer look at Unity. With DOTS and HDRP, you're looking at having millions of dollars of ongoing development done for you better than a lot of AAA studios are even capable of achieving - and you CAN quote me on that.

Anyway Natalya Tatarchuk's interview is here (and it's awesome): https://www.mcvuk.com/in-the-pipeli...graphics-to-the-worlds-most-used-game-engine/

 

I obviously can't agree with you on that point But I'll read the article you suggested...

 

Another benefit to SRP is that you can use Shader Graph. I imagine it's going to open doors for a lot of people. I struggle with editing shaders in raw CG and I know a lot of people don't even know where to begin with it.

 

I disagree.

But only because custom SRP is changing my life.

 

Maybe so if it reaches parity level with some essential shader functionality (vertex-->fragment data sharing etc.) Personally as it currently stands I see shader graph as a crutch rather than a pair of wings because the HDRP shader code is still unstable people are forced to use the graph even with it's limitations.

 

Here is my list of complaints about the HDRP:
-It is still under development.
-It is still not ready.
-It is still not finished.
-It feels unfinished.
-Some features are still missing because they are still under development.
-It is in preview.

Here is my recommendation to Unity on how to fix all of those issues:
-Get all of Unity users street address.
-Send specialized agents to mace them in the neck soft enough they do not die but hard enough they go into a coma.
-When they wake up in 2021 they won't have any complaints.

tl;dr Preview means under development.
WTF is some people expecting.

After it is finished, we will be living in the holy grail of game engines.
And the only price we have to pay is to wait.

Who could ever think that you can have C# and performance in the same sentence?
The mad lads did it!

Rewriting the whole engine in HPC# is their final goal, getting rid of all C++ low level code. The HDRP isn't a mere 'graphics overhaul' but a whole engine rewrite. Something to take into consideration.

EDIT: The only thing where complainers are correct is that during this period of instability Unity doesn't feel like a hobbyist engine at all

 

if your only real argument are artifacts that are far and almost not noticeable, then it dosnt excuse all the extra work.

 

Extra work indeed, but surely not more 'extra work' than the current effort it takes to get a high rendering quality in Unity. Read: Impossible.

 

Me too. It was liberating. No more will I get excited about Unity improvements, only to find asset store developers moaning about having to do some work as a result of changes. No longer will things I rely on suddenly be deprecated overnight. No more incompatibilities between assets that nobody is interested in fixing.

 

Having said that, I do have a huge amount of sympathy for asset store devs who want to support the new pipelines but have been thwarted by the way Unity have designed the systems or the timescale getting a particular pipeline mature or the lack of documentation etc etc.

I do look forward to a time where enough is in place that we can see which asset store developers are happy to embrace the changes, and which ones are basically done and now belong to a past era.

 

I'm currently using built-in for whats been a long term mobile project but I do want to switch to LWPRP later and then HDRP for a PC build at some point, so this is great insight, thanks.

I did try LWRP a while ago but some of the particle effects I use are from the asset store and at the time did not support LWRP/HDRP. This has since changed with a few of the more popular effects on the asset store and this is great to see. And with Amplify Shader Editor supporting all 3 pipelines hopefully we'll see more follow suit.

 

LWRP (excuse the poor name because that's changing at some point) is really best seen as a replacement for built-in but it comes with some AAA design restrictions. That is, it's not as easy to do the same thing as you would in built-in and doesn't have the same feature set.

VFX is headed to it and so are compute shader effects, so the (LWRP) visuals are upgrading as we speak. There's limits on lights with it for forward (but I'm not even hitting those limits on HDRP let alone LWRP, because I recycle lights and do proper development practises).

Having said that I'd be very, very, very surprised if people can't reproduce Overwatch with it identically. And if that game doesn't look good enough for most people I'm frankly shocked, since it's a 60fps game on everything because of the limits the developers smartly impose on themselves.

So that performance from (LWRP) can't be ignored - if it isn't always faster than built-in then it's a bug and Unity wants to see a case number so they can fix that for you.

And if something doesn't look as good in (LWRP) then post about it on the experimental forum (since that seems to be still a thing right now for this SRP) and it should get remedied. There's no reason it needs to look any worse than built-in does, and it should always perform better.

I sound like a big SRP fan because I am. I'm using HDRP though due to what hardware my game is targeting. I did the whole look at both SRPs and make a decision thing Unity wanted and it worked. LWRP could have been a consideration but I'm only aiming at higher end visuals.

HOWEVER... I think with the improvements coming to LWRP, it may not be a clear decision for a lot of projects and they may well prefer to use LWRP instead of HDRP. As it doesn't take much massaging to make them look the same for some games.

 

Renamed to be the Universal pipeline instead?

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/tree/LwrpToUniversal

 

I'd rather it be called default as Universal is so much typing but I think that's more of an aversion to typing

 

URP!

 

The rendering cost isn't increasing with the shadow distance? Does it have a fixed cost, regardless of distance? How did they achieve this?

 

It doesn't have a fixed cost but it does seem optimised and as for what it will draw, well that's my problem isn't it? So in the distance I have all the geo merged, and the cost is the same as if it were 500 units or 5 miles... give or take what I've run out of steam to optimise

My point is the quality is sustained, performance consistent - and this quality and consistency failed with built-in.

For me, built-in sits in a pasture of poorly rendered grass happily bathing in an almost-PBR sun.

 

Calling it "DRP" would most likely have people pronouncing it as "derp".

 

I'm kind of at the same point. I want:

1: Trees that work with HDRP
2: Particles that work with HDRP

Then I feel like I could run free with it from that point. Those are my two main obstacles right now. Can't wait for SpeedTree to get their trees working with it. But I feel like that might be months away. That's a lot of time to simply wait until I can upgrade my projects.....so for now I'm still developing in "standard" Unity.