Official Shader Stripping Improvements in URP

Any chance of giving some "always include" override options for the PP stripping? For example right now if you want to use URP PP stripping and custom AO solution that still feeds into URP's Lit shader, only ways to not have the required parts stripped away is to either disable PP shader stripping, modify the URP package itself for this or enable built-in SSAO but set it's intensity to 0 and make it run before your real AO solution (this is quite hacky IMHO). Ultimately you'd want this system to be flexible enough to not forcing users to modify the URP package.

As another topic, I've mentioned this few times in other related threads: it would be nice if URP and HDRP shader strippers could coexist on same build. I don't know what exactly changed on 2021 cycle for this because this used to work in past Unity versions (or at least build times used to be very reasonable). Now if I try to make this kind of setup work it either results on one of the SRPs shaders getting fully stripped out or alternatively having one SRP including all it's shader variants - which obviously can't work as it would take forever to build anything like this.

 

Oh right, didn't see this alternative at all. I like this workaround more than just having the SSAO on your main data asset.

I don't have a good idea on what would be the ultimate solution for making this type usage cleaner, but I can imagine as URP grows more there will be other things beyond SSAO that users may want to bypass with some custom solution as well.

I don't expect it to happen over night but it's nice to hear that it's at least on some backlog.

As another note on the shader stripping: I'd love to have some kind of visual indicator on the unity inspector per shader if it was actually included or stripped away on previous build. Like just small note when you look at the shader telling it wasn't included on previous build etc. This would mainly be useful for custom shaders that may get stripped accidentally so wouldn't need to add them to that always included shaders -list "just in case they might get axed".

 

Alongside automatic stripping, IPreprocessShader interface is a powerful tool to strip unwanted shader variations.

Would love to see a built in tool (or user interface) that could show all shader variations in previous build and let users to decided which variations are unwanted so the get stripped away in the after builds.

 

Just want to chime in and note that "stripping is based on project content" is kinda dangerous, since often Packages or AssetStore content ships with scenes, post processing volumes, ...

Would be great if there was a visual post-build overview of "we included this and that variant because we think you'll need it based on this (pingable) asset".
Additionally, would be great if an alternative to this would be to specify an explicit list of assets to be used (e.g. just because I'm using post processing in a non-build test scene doesn't mean I want it to be in my build).

 

This is probably a similar complain t to @rz_0lento 's but I have a custom shadow solution (stencil shadows), which I am injecting into the screen space shadow map and then enabling in a render pass by calling

cmd.EnableShaderKeyword("_MAIN_LIGHT_SHADOWS_SCREEN";);

. I struggled for a bit to get this working in a build because the shader was being stripped. The solution was to create a separate URP Renderer called "DO NOT USE" with the normal ScreenSpaceShadowmapFeature, include it in the build under Quality Settings, and then never use it. But that seems very hacky.

I'd love for there to be some way to force shader variants with a certain keyword to be included even if the shader stripping thing does not detect that it will be used.

 

Unity 2021.2.2f1 and URP12.1 Bug case: 1381759

Build fails after hours trying to compile a custom URP Lit shader (of 900 000 variants).
Worth mention the memory leak is umbelivably high (~25GB of ram) while compiling variants. Btw nothing gets cached, if I start a new build the whole variant compilation process start from zero.

 

Still happens in Unity 2021.2.4f1:



Still can't build build always fail, editor crashes on a 64GB ram system. Doesn't crash on 128GB ram system but give a bunch of IL2CPP errors and all shaders contain compile errors too.
Worth mention that in the 128GB ram system the shader compilation is started again from zero (nothing gets cached) despite successfully compiling all shader variants for hours.

 

In the 128GB system, after few hours compiling my shader variants the build just fails with a bunch of IL2CPP errors. I then tried to restart the build and the whole shder variant compilation, starts from zero once again.
The 64GB system can't event get pass half of my shader variants compilation build because Unity crashes after reaching 60-61GB of ram trying to compile my shader.

 

We also met build crash after upgrading to 2021.2.6 from 2020.3. It seems unity ran out of memory.
OnProcessShader and ShaderVariantCollection is useless because too many variants be prepared.

Editor logs:

Compiling shader "Universal Render Pipeline/Lit" pass "ForwardLit" (fp)

  [6.75s] 100M / ~503M prepared

  [13.66s] 200M / ~503M prepared

  [18.39s] 300M / ~503M prepared

  [27.64s] 400M / ~503M prepared

  [32.40s] 500M / ~503M prepared

    94371840 variants, prepared in 32.56 seconds, starting stripping...

Obtained 0 stack frames.

 

It should at least warn you if you're going over even like 1000 (maybe 10k) variants of one shader. There's no call for that.

 

Did I miss something, when did Forward+ get added?

 

You didn't; it's still in progress.

 

Hello,
I just did a quick test and I build an empty URP project and it seems that the post processing Film Grain textures are included by default even if I don't use the post processing pass.

Unity v 2021.2.8f1, URP v 12.1.3

 

Any news about this?
Now that URP does deferred the workaround only works at the condition that rendering path is the same on both renderers.
Also not having such option makes it hard to distribute custom SSAO solution on URP because many customers requiring support for no AO in builds...

 

What is the point in compiling shader variantes that will be striped later?

if Variante.goingToBeStriped
Variante = DontEvenCompile_NextPlease();

 

Is there no option to entirely disable URP's terrible shader stripping and just let us do it ourselves? I've disabled the options available to me in 2022.3.10f1 and it still manages to strip variants I need in asset bundle builds.

 

In this specific case: All the variants of main light + main light shadow casting on/off + additional light + additional light shadow casting on/off + shadow cascades + shadow filtering quality. The game is a PC game where users can change their quality settings - so of course all of my shaders need all variants. What URP apparently expects me to do is to create a new "Render Pipeline Asset" with every permutation of every shader I want..?! Then the only way to include it is to clutter up the Quality Settings??? Just let me turn it off and do it myself.