Sequences, HDRP, and little unexpected behaviors

Hi, I have been trying to upgrade my project from the built in render pipeline to the HDRP pipeline, but been hitting a number of smaller strange issues. Sharing in case of any interest (or people have brilliant solutions).

1. "Overridden properties cannot be applied or reverted when in Animation mode". When I try to revert an override property with Sequences, I often get this warning. I can click the "Preview" button (to turn it off) to make a change, but its confusing why. The object is not being animated in the timeline. I hit this one a lot because I put prefabs into the scene. You can change a property if not set (overridden) before, but to change a second time or revert, you have to turn off preview mode. This might make sense if the property was animated, but its not. There is not even an animator component on the object most of the time.


2. A strange little quirk about the upgrade - lights in scenes don't work until I single click on them in the game hierarchy. Then they start working. I don't make any changes, just select them. I assume some sort of caching which gets cleared when I select the object. Strange though! (Workaround - open scene and go through each shot and click on the lights once.)

3. Occasionally shots the Scene window shows shadows, but the game window does not! The shot before and after have shadows (so overall they do work). I have not worked out what is going on here yet! No errors in Console window. I replaced the camera in the shot, the light in the shot, no difference. I am wondering if some kind of buffer overflow (too many shadows so it gives up?), but have not worked it out yet.


4. Sometimes the clouds shimmer. See 1:07 of the trial video below. I might need to look at resolution settings somewhere for clouds perhaps? Its just the default "sparse" clouds option.

5. Gravity and bone dynamics feel a bit different. Second half of trial video has hair flopping all over the place at start of scenes. I wish I knew why this was happening - its not in all shots, but many are weird. The workaround is to start the animation for a few seconds before turning the recorder on (so the hair flops down first). If you look at second half of video you can see hair flopping.


Current work in progress (just trying a render to see how things are looking)

Next? Fixing some pink assets here and there, rain shaders on windows, more reliable wind and tree movements, storm clouds, night lighting, ... sigh!