Official Introducing the new URP 3D Sample (Beta)

Introducing the new URP 3D Sample
We are excited to share with you the public Beta for our brand-new 3D Sample for the Universal Render Pipeline!

We have created 4 vignette environments with different art styles, rendering paths, and scene complexity, to represent the great variety of 3D projects built with URP. This sample targets a wide range of platforms, from mobile devices, to consoles and PCs, as well as VR headsets.

We wanted to make a visually engaging experience to showcase the customizability and scalability of URP, while taking into account the many hardware limitations that impact cross-platform development.

We have ironed out most obvious bugs, however because this project is still in Beta phase, we expect you will encounter issues we haven't run into. Therefore, we are looking forward to hearing your inputs, so we can make this sample, and URP as a whole, better. Please see the How to give feedback? section below.

You can download the project right away from GitHub, please check the Getting Started section below. By the end of the year, we will release the project directly via the Unity Hub. Regularly, we will post updates on the forum to let you know about our progress as we approach the final release, and whenever we update the repository with major changes.

Now, let’s take a look at the different environments we created!

Terminal
Recommended minimum configurations: iPhone 6S or similar

This environment offers a radical bump in visual quality compared to the current URP Sample (i.e., the mini construction site). We took inspiration from various modern museums, airports, and sci-fi architecture designs. In particular, this scene takes advantage of physically-based materials and the GPU Lightmapper to offer a realistic rendering.



In the main outdoor area, a large platform surrounded by water lets you review your assets in a neutral environment with calibrated lighting conditions. Once on the ramp, you can enter 3 rooms which will teleport you into universes with radically different art styles and platform reach: the Garden, the Oasis, and the Cockpit. To initiate the teleportation, focus on the Unity logo above the teleporting device for a few seconds (requires Play Mode).



Garden
Recommended minimum configurations: iPhone 6S or similar

This environment offers a more stylized rendering, with painterly materials and more organic geometries. Have a stroll in the courtyard of this quiet and nocturnal Japanese building (inspired by Shoin-zukuri style, or visit one of its interiors for a cup of jasmine tea.



This environment scales effortlessly on mobile devices and higher end platforms. It features a modular architectural set relying on the default Lit shader, beautifully crafted vegetation (SpeedTree), interconnected interiors, a gentle water stream meandering across the garden, stylized visual effects, as well as numerous decorative dynamic lights to take advantage of URP's Forward+ (or Deferred) rendering path.

Oasis
Recommended minimum configurations: iPhone 8 or similar

Enjoy the warm glow of the sun setting on this peaceful oasis. Walk down the sandy hill, and you’ll find a traditional Bedouin tent set up for the night.



This environment targets handheld consoles and higher end devices, with the use of more complex Shader Graphs for sand, water, fog, and vegetation. This level is an opportunity to demonstrate the ability for URP to reach a higher level of visual quality when the content is tailored for platforms with more performant GPUs.

Cockpit
Recommended minimum configurations: Meta Quest 2

Jump into this ultra-stylized rollercoaster where your fleet is under heavy attack from an unknown alien faction. You start your ride inside a hangar ship, and quickly realize your armada isn’t a match for the opposing force.



This environment is specifically tailored for VR headsets and lower end mobile devices: it is designed to run at high frame rates, while still featuring beautifully stylized visuals. Furthermore, we offer a custom lighting model to showcase the ease of customizability of URP.

Getting started

• Install Unity 2022.3.7f1 via the Unity Hub or the dedicated download page
• Download the project from GitHub using the "Download ZIP" button under the "Code" menu
  
• Add this project to the Unity Hub
  
• To display the tutorial, in the Editor toolbar, go to Tutorials > Show tutorials

Note: Later this year, this project will be directly accessible through the Unity Hub, it will not require GitHub anymore.

What's next
We are aiming for a final release at the time of Unite 2023 (mid-November), when the project will be directly available inside the Unity Hub. Until then, we will keep on polishing the project on the GitHub repository, based on your feedback and our internal plans.

Before this final release, we will also provide an in-depth In-Editor tutorial, with step-by-step instructions and documentation, similarly to the one available for the HDRP 3D Sample already available in the Unity Hub. You can also get some insights watching our GDC talks: Cross-platform game development with the new URP sample scene, and How to Build for PS VR2 with URP.

Currently, our focus is on the Unity 2022.3 LTS version. After the final release, our objective is to maintain the project, and integrate new features developed for Unity 2023 and beyond.

Known issues
Build Times: Due to the wide variety of use cases, target platforms, renderers, and features presented in these samples, some URP configurations can result in large numbers of shader variants, which take a long time to compile. To reduce build times, we recommend only building with one Quality Level, a subset of scenes, and toggling VR on or off. We are currently working on optimizing the shader compilation times.

General performance: For this public beta, we focused on getting each scene running at the target frame rate for the recommended minimum configurations. However, you may see significant slowdowns in areas where multiple scenes/cameras are active at the same time, for the teleportation mechanic. Profiling and improving performance will be the main focus for us over the coming months so you can expect improvements there.

Forward+ on mobile devices: We are investigating a bug in Forward+ that causes light flickering on mobile devices.

In-Editor warnings: We are still in the process of cleaning up all out system integrations so you can expect the occasional warning in the console. All of them should be safe to ignore.

First editor run: When opening the editor, navigating the scenes and entering game mode for the first time, many shader compilations will happen.

Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA): TAA is a set on the camera and is currently not set per quality level.

Oasis: The wind is currently turned off in the Oasis. It will be re-added in the upcoming months.

Misc: Changing the resolution at runtime (such as scaling the game view) will cause the screen textures to have incorrect resolution. This might break the teleportation effect.

How to give feedback?
Please take a look at the Known issues above, before reporting issues.

We invite you to share your general sentiment, ask questions and request help directly in the forum. We also encourage you to experiment with the content of this project and share your findings.

Furthermore, we are also interested in the level of performance you are getting on your devices. This may help us to identify performance issues on certain hardware configurations.

For bug reports and crashes, we invite you to discuss them in the forum as well. However, we may ask you to also formally report bugs that aren’t trivial for us to reproduce.

Thank you!

 

We enabled Include Git LFS objects in archives now so you can download the project using the Code->Download ZIP button if you don't want to pull with git

 

On the topic of making games at Unity: while we don't publish our own games, we still do a lot of game development at Unity through development and co-development consulting services. We have a lot of engineers partnering with Unity customers to make real games and get them to market. So we do have a lot of input from these consulting teams that helps improve the engine.

https://unity.com/solutions/accelerate-solutions-games
https://resources.unity.com/unitenow/onlinesessions/benefiting-from-unity-professional-services

edit: I wanted to share a few resources on the topic of making games. But this isn't the topic for this thread, so let's focus on the new sample project here

 

@DevDunk Thanks!
I'll look into the null reference right away!

The answer to most of your questions is that it was an oversight by me. So thanks for pointing these things out!

1. Simply because it is default and I didn't go over the Android player settings yet. I'll update it today
2. Oversight. I'll remove the old system
3. From my understanding this is a load time optimization at the cost of build time. I haven't done any thorough testing but for now I prefer the options that saves on build time
4. It should be. Will update
5. I honestly don't know about this one. I've asked internally to know cost/benefits and will get back to you
6. My mistake. Fixed
7. I did a quick test and didn't see any difference in total frame time (project is very much GPU bound). We are using deferred though so we kind of have to use Vulkan so I'm keeping the settings you proposed.
8. It's not. Oversight
9. Nope. Enabled
10. In forward it shouldn't make a difference but I've enabled it in deferred
11. Good Idea!

Updates are pushed to the repo

 

I'd like to add some input on question #7 regarding Vulkan + graphics jobs.

Unity's Vulkan graphics jobs relies on secondary command buffer, which is poorly supported by low-end mobile GPUs and higher-end mobile GPUs prior to Adreno 650 and Mali G710, resulting in extra invocation overhead and sometimes disabled hardware optimization. This could lead to performance regression on a lot of Android devices.

Therefore, unless you are targeting newer high-end Android devices, it would be wise to keep graphics jobs off. But ultimately, it's also project/hardware dependent so run your own profiling before making the decision.

 

Great feedback, thank you!

Regarding the teleportation optimization, this is something we discussed internally in the past, and using a reprojected cubemap could indeed be a great solution (especially on lower end devices).

Having a static image on the screen and a full black dissolve was also considered for the most problematic devices (potentially with a forced player position to initiate the teleportation). But so far we went for a more brute force approach to maximize the "cool factor".

It's definitely on our list of things to improve already.

 

@vertxxyz Great stuff!
Input is now blocked if the cursor is unlocked
Defocusing game view will now pause the idle timer.
Collision mesh in terminal is adjusted

All pushed to the repo

I'll look into the parallax bug but I need to find a way to reproduce. My Nvidia card doesn't repro but I am seeing some issues with the parallax on android so maybe fixing it there will fix it on your end as well.

I think we might add a configurable fps cap to an in game menu along with settings for mouse sensitivity, resolution etc. Can't say for sure when that will be added though.

 

@Pitou22
Removing old input system did indeed break the Benchmark UI. This doesn't seem to reproduce in latest 2023 so we are investigating if a fix needs to be backported. Thanks for reporting!

I'll take a look at WebGL and see if I can get it to build. I do want to add that WebGL isn't a platform that we are focusing on with this project. It should still build though

 

@Pitou22 We pushed a fix to the Benchmark not working after removing the old input system.

 

@bnmguy good proposal to fine tune the shader precision! Regarding the other proposals I want to make sure I understand what you mean:
Baking down high poly objects: We manage our poly count using LODs. Are you suggesting that our lower LODs have even less geometry or are you thinking about something else?
Combining materials: We rely on the SRP Batcher to optimize draw calls. SRP Batches do not break per material but rather per variant so I'm not sure if combining materials would be much of an optimization. Could be worth a try though! I'll add to the backlog
Lighting tricks: What kind of tricks are you talking about? A couple of examples of what we currently do: Fade out lights based on distance, use cookies in stead of shadow maps where it makes sense, use shadow mask in stead of real time shadows on low end, use shared lightmaps between LODs.

If you have any more suggestions about improving performance I'll be more that happy to hear them!

 

@Avinash-pdy thanks for testing the project! I'll see if I can get my hand on devices that reproduce these issues. On the Redmi 12 did you run it in Mobile Low or Mobile High?

 

@Avinash-pdy
I looked a bit into it and the Mali-G52 MC2 is bellow our minimum spec. You could experiment with running regular forward and GLES3 (in stead of Vulkan and deferred) but expect light popping. Before final release we will probably add some additional scaling like varying vegetation density and shader tiers to give some more headroom on lower end.
The investigation did surface a bug in native render pass though which I'm hoping is also causing the artifacts you're seeing on the pixel. I'll get back to you once we have news on that.

 

You read it right, the URP 3D Sample is distributed under the UCL.

I have also double-checked with the SpeedTree team, and they are more than happy for you guys to use the respective assets created for this URP 3d Sample. In short, you can indeed use the SpeedTree assets in a game or demo.

What will be highly frown upon is repacking these assets as is and reselling them.

 

@Avinash-pdy I tried running the benchmark on M1 Mac in deferred and wasn't able to reproduce your issue. Which Quality level are you using?

 

@Avinash-pdy It certainly is in active development. I haven't pushed our changes to the public repo in a while since there haven't been any fixes to issues discussed in this thread but I'm happy that you are interested and have now pushed our latest changes

 

In addition to @Jonas-Mortensen's message, we've been polishing most levels, cleaning up the project here and there, adding more optimizations, and fixing internally discovered bugs.

One of the biggest visual improvement, is the wind support and improved subsurface scattering for all the vegetation in the Oasis.