Linear Blend Skinning with Hybrid Renderer V2 Not Working

I'm experimenting with Hybrid Renderer V2 and Mesh Deformations, and I'm having a problem where the object's I'm creating using a Material based on a Shader using "Linear Blend Skinning" becomes invisible after being converted to an entity.

The project is using Unity 2020.2.0b9, the HDRP (10.0.0-preview.27), Hybrid Renderer (0.10.0-preview.21), and I've added the definition "ENABLE_HYBRID_RENDERER_V2" to the project to enable Hybrid Renderer v2.

I constructed a VERY simple shader using Shader Graph following the documentation from the Hybrid Renderer package on Mesh Deformations (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.rendering.hybrid@0.10/manual/mesh_deformations.html) that uses Linear Blend Skinning. Here's a screen shot of the shader design from Shader Graph:



I created a simple scene with 3 cubes. Two which use "Convert to Entity (Convert and Destroy)" and one that's just a regular Game Object. The regular game object uses the material based on my simple shader, as does one of the cubes that will be converted to an Entity. The other cube being converted to an Entity was just assigned the DefaultHDMaterial material (that's the gray cube in the screenshots below).

Here's a screenshot of the Scene and Game windows in the Editor before playing (the 2 red cubes are the ones using my custom shader):



When I hit play however, the cube using the material based on my custom shader that gets converted to an Entity becomes "invisible" (you can see the wireframe in the Scene window, but in the Game window it's not there). The cube using my custom material that is a Game Object is still visible (this is the red one), as is the one that uses the DefaultHDMaterial and gets converted to an entity. Here's a screenshot:



Here's a screenshot of the properties on the material based on my custom shader:



Is there something I'm missing in my setup that explains why this doesn't work?

I realize that the Hybrid Render v2 is still under very active development and that Mesh Deformations in particular are "highly experimental", so if the answer is that this functionality simply doesn't work right now then that's a fine answer. However, based on the documentation it seems like this should work, and I believe that I followed the documentation correctly, so I wanted to ask the Forums if there was something I was missing.

 

It does. That's a huge help. Thanks for all of the feedback.

 

hi @Jebtor ,

Note that the documentation of the package com.unity.rendering.hybrid has a broken link to DOTS Animation Samples.:

Mesh Deformations
This page describes the functionality to deform meshes using skinning and blendshapes, similar to what SkinnedMeshRenderer does. Generally, you want to use this in combination with DOTS Animation. Samples of setups and usage of the systems can be found in the DOTS Animation Samples.


correct link should be
https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...b/master/UnityAnimationHDRPExamples/README.md