Feedback Is double sided GI tied to double sided rendering?

From the FAQ:

Does this mean that to have double sided GI, we need to turn on actual double sided rendering?

That's pretty horrible. There are multiple reasons to have the GI representation of a material and the actual rendering of a material be different, so why are settings so closely coupled like this when they don't need to?

 

That coupling is only enforced by the editor GUI; likely in the hopes that maintaining consistency between rendering and baking would be less likely to confuse beginners. I would prefer having them as separate options, but I can see the rationale behind the design decision.

If you flip the inspector in to debug mode, you can still set "Double Sided Global Illumination" to whatever you want and the inspector GUI won't mess with it unless you change the "Render Face" option.

 

Thanks for the reply.

So is URP geared towards beginners then? Can I expect to find decisions like this one in other aspects of the URP?

 

I am just some guy, but I do get the impression that the UI elements and Shader Graph are oriented towards artists, designers, and non-graphics programmers if not necessarily "beginners" as such.

But that's only if you want to stay in the point-and-click sandbox. It's pretty flexible if you want to dive into the code.

I recently re-implemented a recursive portal rendering pass in the LWRP (2019.2), and found it to be easier and less convoluted than when I implemented the same thing with the old built-in pipeline.

I'm still learning the SRP system so I'm hardly pushing boundaries yet, but my first impressions have been pretty positive. Every time there was something I needed to do, there was some API designed to let me do it--once I managed to find it; the documentation was frequently outdated or nonexistent so hopefully that will start improving.

 

I am an artist, I want GI and actual rendering to be decoupled.

This "Artists want things this way" excuse has never ever been true.

Anyway, I guess SRP as a whole, is a thing that sounds like it is meant for people like me, but upon closer inspection, it's not, like most of Unity lately.

 

I wouldn't characterize it as an excuse as much as a design trade-off between functionality and accessibility, and if you think they are striking the wrong balance you should file a bug report. Interface design limitations and user experience failures are bugs just as much as underlying technical issues.

I think URP and Shader Graph are designed to give a lot of power to people exactly like you so if they are failing, that is a failure of execution rather than intention so you are doing them a favor by making some noise.

The main problem with Unity right now is that they executing a couple huge paradigm shifts with SRP and DOTS so there are a lot of cracks forming. That's not an excuse--just a reason--and time will tell if it pays off. I really like the direction they are headed, but they certainly aren't there yet.

 

Has URP been aligned? I didn't actually test it, but the latest URP manual FAQ page still implies it's tied to the actual rendering: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@15.0/manual/faq.html