Question Trying to render a BatchRendererGroup (or Entities Graphics) batch with wrong cbuffer setup. Missing

It looks like the shader might be missing

#include "Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal/ShaderLibrary/Input.hlsl"

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Also, as a general GPU performance tip, I would recommend avoiding geometry shaders, and using a regular vertex + fragment shader configuration instead. That is likely to have better performance on pretty much every GPU.

 

The error occurs when Unity can't find the "UnityInstancingDOTS_InstanceVisibility" cbuffer, which it uses to tell the shader which instance IDs to actually render (the cbuffer contains the IDs from "visibleOffset", plus some internal data), and which is in turn used by all DOTS instanced property loading in the shader. If that cbuffer can't be found, then the shader will not render correctly, and the draw is skipped.

The typical reasons for getting this error are:

• Not declaring any DOTS instanced properties at all in a custom shader (i.e. not even the matrix), in which case the cbuffer is not used, and the compiler removes it. Regular Unity shaders and Shader Graphs always use at least the matrix, but custom shaders could contain anything.
• Not initializing instance ID correctly in the shader, in which case the cbuffer might end up unused and the compiler might again remove it.

 

You can have up to three metadata cbuffers: BuiltinPropertyMetadata, MaterialPropertyMetadata, and UserPropertyMetadata. You don't bind them manually, they are automatically filled and bound by Unity based on the MetadataValues that you pass to AddBatch.