archived-hdrp

[mellow condor]

that looks nice

is this a scene you've alid out and built?

or is that an asset?

[dawn sorrel]

I "built" it

but trees etc are just assets not done by me

so really no other way out?

[full steeple]

its definetely something else, my pc is fairly good but i cannot figure out what because this is happening over multiple projects

[shrewd moon]

Simply creating the post processing overrides again might be one of the smallest tasks when upgrading, since the lighting system is quite different
Also note that HDRP upgrade is one way, so use version control or backups

[dawn sorrel]

Yeah

I think I found an old open source volumetric light for builtin RP

Pretty old, 7 years, but looks damn good on pics

So guess I'll try that first

[shrewd moon]

Sure I'd consider those first
BiRP has a lot of useful resources made for it over the years

[dawn sorrel]

But honestly though

What are the chances to build a very realistic environment with only BiRP because at this point Im wondering

Or should I just switch to UE5

Especially since I know C++ better than C# lol but Unity seems fairly easier for beginners

[shrewd moon]

"Chances"? You can do something that looks realistic in in all render pipelines even if they're not equal
I can't speak for what's best for you but HDRP and Unreal are very similar in their graphics tools and workflow

[digital spire]

From my brief adventure time to Unreal the past month. HDRP feels like Unreal 4.

Unreal 5 is Unreal 4 on steriod. but there are many perf gotcha to watch out for when you use their cool shiny things. it mostly involve shader that have vertex animation.

You can get realistic looking scene 100x easier in UE5. compare to HDRP. I've been working in HDRP for almost 2 year already. Rendering thing are just easier there.

[dawn sorrel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AShGmWyFamY

this is what i consider realistic, maybe my expectations bar is set too high lol

[digital spire]

Yeah that will be VERY hard to make that in Unity OR GAME at all. this is like realtime path tracing stuff. and lumen cranked up to this quality will tank your frame rate.

Unless you're not making games?

[dawn sorrel]

nop

goal is recreating the "Caumasee" somewhat, just for fun

[digital spire]

Then I present you this
https://github.com/Pjbomb2/TrueTrace-Unity-Pathtracer

[dawn sorrel]

Do you think making a whole map out of this would kill my computer?

👀

but ty

[digital spire]

this is the twitter of the project owner.
https://twitter.com/Pjbomb2

[digital spire]

IDK. I have never used it. But based on the twitter, you need fairly high end to make this somewhat realtime.

and since it's path tracing, it scale linearly* with the amount of triangle on your scene. (I might be wrong but that's what my experience with Unity's ray tracing)

[dawn sorrel]

Good to know

Waiting for the super quantum technology to make hyper realistic games like this possible

imagine

[digital spire]

That's why it so much easier to do this stuff in UE5. If you don't care about real time perf or your storage space.
You can throw bajillion triangle model at it then nanite will handle the rest for you.
Then lumen will handle the rest of the lighting pipeline.

[fluid merlin]

This is where one begins to realize that Unity has painted themselves into a corner with HDRP. There's a growing number of voices asking Unity to go back to one pipeline and frankly, while I like HDRP, everything about the lighting is very hacky. Volume probes, reflection probes, baking artifact workarounds. I think this is why we see a lot of seasoned unity devs working on projects to replace the lighting system. The crossroads for HDRP belies a contradiction in design with Unity since you can realistically, only use lowpoly models and then struggle with lighting, which then, if you want a fantastically lit scene, you suffer greatly in performance. So HDRP becomes a game of balancing and making tough choices as a designer... You can try to create something that matches your vision but then be prepared for the 1% of gamers that can only run the game at 30fps on the latest hardware, or compromise your vision and allow people to run your game at > 60fps on relatively current hardware. The savage blow that UE5 dealt to Unity wasn't really specifically Nanite or Lumen, but the way it was crafted into the engine so that the workflow of the creators vision wasn't compromised by polycount or lighting. Granted, you still need a pretty powerful system to run it, but having that option is something that HDRP greatly lacks.

[formal crow]

no, pathtraceing existed for decades it can run on any hardware rly but if you wanna run it in realtime you need at least an nvidia 40 series GPU

[dawn sorrel]

does that include NVIDIA RTX 4060?

Because that's all I have 😛

[formal crow]

yeah

[dawn sorrel]

That's some good news

[formal crow]

i have a 2060 and i used unity's pathtracer

[formal crow]

i mean technicly there is only 1 pipeline, the scriptable render pipeline, URP and HDRP are just SRP templates

i consider BiRP legacy since it no longer gets any new rendering features, so i wont count it

[scarlet hull]

"SRP" isn't really a pipeline, but a list of APIs to be able to write you own renderloop.
You can't do anything with "just" SRP.
HDRP and URP are pipelines implementing those APIs

[formal crow]

if it isnt a pipeline then why is it called a scriptable render pipeline

done

[scarlet hull]

Depends how you want to interpret it.
Yeah, ok, it is a pipeline in the meaning that it a series of things executed one after the other and the SRP api allows you to inject commands to different parts of this pipeline

But, when you start a bare buit-in unity project, all the SRP apis are here, just unused, doing nothing

It is only when you install URP / HDRP or write you own custom RP that it does something

[formal crow]

personally i dont see a reason to use BiRP anymore other then legacy support or you do something that doesnt have anything to do with graphics

[fluid merlin]

[loud leaf]

Has anyone experienced horrible ghosting with DLSS in latest HDRP? I recently upgraded from 2021 to 2023, and it's smearing everywhere. It's really coming from DLSS, without it, it's super clean.

My 2021 HDRP project doesn't have this issue either.

[long scarab]

No issues in 2023.1, which version are you on?

[loud leaf]

2023.3

[long scarab]

I guess motion vectors and skinned motion vectors are active?

[loud leaf]

I'll try a couple of versions, I feel like I need to downgrade anyways since the HDRP Global Settings have turned into complete bloated chaos.

[loud leaf]

Yep, I use them myself for a couple of shaders (I did debug if the smearing is coming from there, it's not)

[frail tendon]

if I have a custom pass that renders to the entire screen, how can I have unity render my custom pass, and then render the scenes volumes so it can be layered ontop?

[loud leaf]

So, this seems related to:

HDRP: Improving DLSS ghosting artifacts a little bit, by using a better pre-exposure parameter. Fixing reset history issues on DLSS camera cuts. (UUM-37205)

Which is this part in HDRenderPipeline.PostProcess.cs:

// For now we clamp the exposure to a reasonable value.
passData.parameters.preExposure = Mathf.Clamp(hdCamera.GpuExposureValue(), 0.35f, 2.0f);```

I can scale the value / use a different clamp to get rid of the ghosting, but it affects the final composition in a negative way.

[loud leaf]

Alright, for anyone wondering, HDRP 15.x (Unity 2023.1.x) is the last HDRP version with the "old style" HDRP Global Settings, and it can be modified to run on Unity 2023.3.x with minimal changes to some VFX files. This is the setup I'll be using. 👍

[twilit swift]

Hi, is RTX/DX12 actually VR supported or not yet? There's a thread of someone asking this back in November 2020: "In the HDRP changelog is the first entry:

• Ray tracing support for VR single-pass

In the Ray tracing section is written that DirectX 12 is needed for RayTracing:
"You need to change the default graphics API of your HDRP project from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12."

In the VR section is written that only DirectX 11 is supported."

Then, a mod said that they were still working on it (this was November 24, 2020).

So my question is, are they still developing it or is it actually working? (We are going to make 4 years since this now, I really hope there's some progress on it).

[scarlet hull]

It might be worth trying, but event if it is technically working, I would just not recommend it.
Having a constant 90fps rendering for VR with VR and the targets required resolution is probably very hard if not impossible to achieve in the current state.
Maybe once VRR/FoveatedRendering and DLSS3.5 with ray reconstruction are available in unity

[twilit swift]

How long do you think it will take for that to happen or RTX to work fine in VR?

[scarlet hull]

For "fun" I'll try to find time to run the HDRP template in VR this weed to see how it goes, but I have absolutely not ETA for the changes I mentioned.
I know it is on the roadmap, but I don't know for when.

[loud leaf]

No need to, check out this thread, I've been testing/reporting this for years:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/dxr-in-virtual-reality-possible-or-not.992183/

[loud perch]

Anyone knows whats happening here?
This black area between sails. I got this when using volumetric clouds + some shaders with vertex displacement.

[hot pivot]

Hi ! 👋
I would need some help to setup my environment correctly.

My problem is that currently the sky is also reflected in the interiors.
I've tried tweaking some settings but nothing convincing. If I remove the Physically-based sky it solves my problem, but it would be nice if I could use it to render the earth's atmosphere 🤔

I think there is a way to disable sky reflections in defined areas but I can't figure out how.
Do you have any tips or resources to help me ?

Thanks ! 🙂

[long scarab]

A reflection probe should solve this issue

[hot pivot]

Hummm... I've tried it.
It override the reflection, but doesn't affect the ambient lighting. Am I missed something ? 🤔

I think it is something related to light probe but it doesn't give any convincing result.
I think i'm doing it wrong

Oh nevermind I think I've got something using light probes

[eternal laurel]

If your objects are static mark them as such and bake the reflection probe, otherwise they try to sample the scenes lightsprobes and if there arent any they fallback to the sky ambient probe

Or you can use a realtime reflection probe

[round pulsar]

are decals supposed to contribute to baked GI? emissive or otherwise?

[orchid heart]

cant tell where would be best to ask this but.

does anyone know of a free skydome creator? i want to make my own hdri's but the only thing ive seen is either using blender nodes, Ai or terragon4... does anyone know of a free app that i can use to make seamless skydomes with?

[fluid merlin]

I haven’t tried it for emissive, but I don’t think so. I use decals and never have seen them with a lightmap.

[round pulsar]

dang

thanks

[final pagoda]

Hello, I have installed the package of "HDRP", once that happened, all my texture were turned in pink, I then panicked and unintalled it and was reverted back to normal, I then realised up-close that the game was more contrasted than before, I don't know how to fix this issue, HDRP did it probably, any help ? Left was before and right after.

[dawn sorrel]

About the pink part, you likely forgot to convert the materials to HDRP in the HDRP Wizard

[blissful dust]

im getting this subsurf artifact

idk how to fix it

[long scarab]

I's hard to understand what you mean, how it's supposed to look like and what you think is an artifact.

[blissful dust]

the lines

[long scarab]

I guess you need to spend a bit more effort in order to get help;) the image is very small, and which lines do you mean? how does it look without SSS? I cannot even see what's supposed to be displayed in it the image

[ocean mulch]

Hey guys! I have a doubt.
I change my skybox in runtime, using a Volume with HDRI Sky and I want to keep the first one HDRI Sky lighting. Do you guys have any idea how can I make this?

[round pulsar]

is there any information on the new GPU Occlusion Culling, and Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing?

I see that GPU Resident Drawer information is here https://forum.unity.com/threads/gpu-driven-rendering-in-unity.1502702/

[fluid merlin]

Not sure exactly what you mean other than just setup HDRI sky lighting in both volumes? Need some more details on what your "from" and "to" states are.... Also, there's a performance "bug" when swapping out skies. It's mentioned earlier in this channel... someplace....

[fluid merlin]

Wondering the same thing as well... I'm hoping for a hi-z no-bake gpu occluder...

[stoic sand]

I hope to see Dynamic APV in the alpha of unity 6. What do you guys think is gonna happen with that?
Enlighten desperately needs replacement

[median beacon]

what is spatial temporal?

[mellow condor]

i'm more impressed they got a unity vulkan application the quest 2 to not crash

[fluid merlin]

I think that's a given... it's sort of what they've been talking about a "like lumen" type of bolt-on to make GI responsive so you can do "day to night" scenes.

I'd like to see them dump the current lighting approach completely though. There's a few devs out there working on bringing different approaches to scene lighting, that I think Unity isn't paying attention to, like voxel based stepmarched lighting, and sdf-based lighting. I think the current workflow methodology of scene lighting with respect to GI & shadows is incredibly flawed with tweaking probe volumes and performance murdering reflection probes.

[shrewd moon]

Dumping it would be pretty drastic since Unity does lighting the same tried and true way virtually every other engine does

[fluid merlin]

Eh... My UE5 lighting in workflow is no where near as complex as with Unity and it looks better. So, I'm not sure I'd agree... How many "how to I make the room dark" threads have we seen in here?

[shrewd moon]

Workflows are definitely different, tech mostly not

If you're already familiar with lighting in other modern engines, HDRP will have no surprises there

[fluid merlin]

Maybe... Can Unity do amazing lighting in HDRP? Sure, but you have to spend ages to get there... Plus, you have to par-bake RTGI to make it work. I don't think the the tech is the same, maybe at some level but it feel like a lot of the Unity lighting solutions are afterthoughts to address gaps, like the volume probes.

[shrewd moon]

The lighting has room to be better and easier to use, definitely, but any system they could replace it would be much newer tech with teething issues
Unreal, Blender, Godot and I'm sure other engines have been using light probes for years
APVs are just a more modern implementation of the same standard thing

Still I think to stay competitive they will need something that aims higher than merely standard

[formal crow]

In progress

my guess it will be that it will come in unity 2024, or unity 7?

[ocean mulch]

Hi.
I want to maintain the original illumination example in others sky box.
Like this:

To this, without change the object color:

So... For now, I resolve creating a box with rendering cull front, and this box following the camera position, to not change the original light color.

[vale walrus]

anyone got any idea why volumetric clouds show in the scene editor but not in-game?

[gray parcel]

Hey there is a setting for this. I was having the same issue a few weeks ago.

[vale walrus]

do you know what it is?

ive enabled this one

[gray parcel]

Im checking, gimme a min

anyone got any idea why volumetric

[digital spire]

Weird thing. I remember downloading alpha version of HDRP months back to test stp. But I couldn't find it anywhere on latest alpha or 2023 tech stream 🤔

[loud leaf]

stp?

[digital spire]

The new upscaler they showed at Unite

#archived-hdrp message

[mint urchin]

guys i got a problem, for some reason i can look completely through my mesh if i look through a part that should be transparent. Someone who knows how to fix this?

[fluid merlin]

Set that blue material to double sided.

[mint urchin]

ohhh damn yeah i can just put the blue to opaque and then it does show

bro you're a live saver, thanks to you i thought of something i didn't think of before

[twilit swift]

Help please, I've been having this issue for so long, first it appeared in another project I was working on, but now it did in my main project. I have no idea what is causing it, it was just working fine before, but I did nothing important and it's already doing it again, when I select something it deselects itself, like this:

This is only happening in the HDRP projects for now.

[twilit swift]

Someone knows which Unity HDRP version is this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU7X5xICkc8

[long scarab]

APV is integrated since 2021.2, but highly experimental. It came out of experimental /preview in 2023.1. But it still gets improved in later versions, some major fixes will be in 2023.3 / Unity 6, too

The dynamic part will more likely end up in 2024 / Unity 7 / whatever next version will be called as it seems

[mint urchin]

is it normal that shadows are so hard when using lights?

[tough pulsar]

local volumetric fog volume works in hdrp with raytracing ? (2023.2.0f1 DX12 version)

[shrewd moon]

It's up to your shadow settings and shadow filtering quality

As well as light source size/diameter if using high quality filtering

[twilit swift]

How can I change the Unity folder?

I want to change all Unity Editor versions and Unity Hub into another disk that is not C.

[shrewd moon]

Unlikely to be related to #archived-hdrp

[twilit swift]

Where do I ask then?

[shrewd moon]

#💻┃unity-talk

[narrow spindle]

No more space in the 2D Cookie Texture Atlas. To solve this issue, increase the resolution of the cookie atlas in the HDRP settings.
UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent (int,intptr,bool&)

I know it says I have to change it in the HDRP Settings, but can anyone specify where exactly?

I found it, but I put it to the highest setting and I'm still getting the error, how do I fix it?

I am following a tutorial on a night sky, but there is a part where he plugs in a 2d texture on the directional light to make it look like a moon, but ever since I did that I get this error

So I thought the file is too big, but its just 1k, and I can't download a lower res one

and he uses the same 1k variant of the texture but it works for him

Sooooo, how do I fix it?

[shrewd moon]

Are you sure that's right? Light cookies and the visual appearance of a celestial body are two entirely unrelated things

[narrow spindle]

Yes I'm certain. See that surface texture variable? When I remove the texture the errors disappear.

[narrow spindle]

Do you know how to fix this? @shrewd moon

[narrow spindle]

nevermind, the problem fixed itself lol @shrewd moon

[lucid gate]

Hey, getting this errors straight from the template, 2022.3.13f1 but also newest 2023

[jagged prairie]

Reinstall HDRP and the CoreRP Package. If that doesnt work try deleting the Library/Packages folder and restart

[lucid gate]

are you sure i should do this? just cautious hehe
also i can replicate it, seems more like a template mistake/gizmohelper thing:
As soon i click on Reflection Probes on a fresh HDRP project, doesn't matter which version. Or i miss sth.

[jagged prairie]

I remember having the same problem where it also gave an error on proxyvolumes, which prevented me from entering playmode. U should definetely try to delete the CoreRP thing and reinstall that on the newest/right version, that fixed it for me (and maybe do a backup )

[lucid gate]

i see you are typing, please continue :) just want to show that i told shit, with the last version (i guess unity 6?) it seems not the case

[lucid gate]

cheers! i'll give it a try

can i ask, would you recommend the last solid editor version anyway? i'm used to work in the last lts, but i'm new to hdrp

[jagged prairie]

Really excited about their dynamic occlusion culling stuff.. We just need autolod now (smth like nanite)

[jagged prairie]

If ur just playing around, you can use the tech/beta versions although it might be a little buggy sometimes

Definetely use LTS if ur working on something you want to ship

[lucid gate]

okee so the usual, LTS then, i'm *** serious lol jk on what are you working?

[jagged prairie]

Mee??

[lucid gate]

just saw 2022.3.14f1, is ready, wouldn't be surprised if the error is gone with it, on a new project at least

[fluid merlin]

Check out Nanotech, a developer is working on bringing nanite to Unity. It's pre-alpha right now, but the dev is trying to pitch it to Unity because it's very close to Nanite and somewhat better because he's working on Skinned Mesh support. The dicord channel are more updates, etc.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/nano-tech-similar-to-nanite-high-detailed-rendering-for-hdrp-urp-and-built-in-rp.1292223/

[jagged prairie]

Already know that, really hope he manages to publish it

And really surprised how unity still hasnt bought that

[fluid merlin]

Unity really pisses me off when it comes to HDRP performance, batches, culling, and instancing... the new GPU resident drawer is like 150% slower than GPU Intancer on the asset store, which has been out for like 5 years. I did a test with a 500k asteroid belt, GPU Resident Drawer was like at 45 fps, GPU Instancer was at 322fps... It's like... why are they so stubborn and backwards about things.

[jagged prairie]

Yeah right.. You can achieve beautiful lighting in hdrp but the performance always kills it

[fluid merlin]

Exactly... performant lighting is really tough to achieve in HDRP. There's like a quadrillion different settings, components, and options to mix together and then trying to get artifact free baking mixed it for indoor & outdoor blended scenes is a full blown workflow nightmare.

Maybe Unity is trying to get back on track with Unity 6, I don't know, but I hope they realize that getting great lighting in a scene shouldn't take a weeks of worth of work.

[loud leaf]

There's so much great skill & experience in the HDRP team, the company has so much money. Sometimes I think, what exactly is going wrong? Building something like Lumen is not rocket science.

[minor depot]

We already have SSGI, but something more like lumen is the exact opposite of scaleable and performant

Lumen is really cool but only really caters to ultra high performance systems for film or visualizations

(Lumen is amazing tech, but honestly, I couldn't care less about having it in unity until at least the next console generation)

[fluid merlin]

I get 115+fps in UE5.3 Lumen on a RTX 3080 on a scene with 29M+ tris... I get YMMV though on hardware.

I think though Unity keeps doubling down on the current GI makeup, whether that SSGI or Enlighten, it's simply not good enough anymore after 10 years. Yeah, they add probe Volumes, adaptive or otherwise to help but it also consumes massive memory on large scenes. There's always this penality that Unity has with its lighting system components... They'll do a jaw dropping demo and then later during the 1 hour explainer, there's always this small addendum of well, we had to do this, and that, and this, and that and well, this will out next year, etc. It's the same Unity story over and over.

[jagged prairie]

I mean we have realtime raytraced gi which is the equivalent of lumen and it does look really nice, but
"I get 115+fps in UE5.3 Lumen on a RTX 3080 on a scene with 29M+ tris..." is NOT really doable with that (hardware) raytraced solution

They really need to get on track and start pushing features that dont come with a catch, like their water system which is beautiful

[fluid merlin]

Agreed, the HDRP water is a nice addition

I wouldn't cry if they added volumetric fire/smoke and maybe a weather system, or a vegetation biome system....

Water is only 2022 upwards still right?

[lucid gate]

yes sir

[digital spire]

Useful number. Really put things into perspective. Would be great if you post that in the GPU resident drawer thread. https://forum.unity.com/threads/gpu-driven-rendering-in-unity.1502702/page-2
So developer can point out what and why. My guess is that 500k asteroids is still taking massive CPU time because the new system since they are doing frustum cull & other stuff on CPU, not fully GPU indirect renderer like GPUI. I've never use GPUI myself though, but how's it handle LOD cross fade? or more real world scene where there are multiple mesh/material?

from that thread, I think there are still some bug/edge case to the new system that people actually get worse result from regular static batching...
I think what is happening is that they are trying to push feature to make the cut before 2023 goes feature freeze and then will fix it later 😂 One way to play the unity no back port policy

[eternal laurel]

Can you profile what is taking the most time for the Resident Drawer or send me the scene? Im interested in why it is so much slower

[desert rain]

Hey friends. So i never actually released a game and was at this point, but when im running my builded game, 100% of my rtx 4080 gets used… that isnt normal as for the most games i only have like a 30-40% usage 😂 I already tried limiting the fps to 60 but didnt do anything. I also noticed that when i build an completely empty scene and run it, still 100% of my gpu gets used… Does anyone have a solution to this? I could image its just a simple line of code which tells the system to not use 100% of the gpu, as this isnt needed. Also im on hdrp.

[south girder]

Is it possible to use billboard assets on HDRP? 🤔 Or do I need to make my billboard solution

This page says

Yes. Only with VFX graph.
How does that work? Can I use VXF graph to render billboards?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/visual-effects-lines-trails-billboards.html

[shrewd moon]

Hmm are you looking specifically for a way to render billboard assets, or just billboard alignment in general?

[south girder]

A way to render them

Didn't find any free packages to generate billboards so I thought I'd make my own

If it's not possible in HDRP, some other way of rendering would work too

I guess these are more like imposters

[shrewd moon]

Makes sense
I'm more familiar with billboard techniques in particle and sprite context unfortunately, rather than lod/imposter context
The billboard assets always seemed ancient and a bit cryptic to me

[south girder]

Yeah ok, maybe I will have to make some sort of custom renderer. Maybe possible with shaders, I gotta think about this a bit

Would like to do the alignment/UV offset on the GPU instead of CPU

I'll look into the VFX graph thing, maybe it could actually work here

Persistent objects as VFX just sounds sketchy to me 😄

[south girder]

Man, I can't find anything about using Billboard Renderer with VFXGraph, even though the manual page says it's possible

Other than this page saying that it's not possible
https://www.mvrlink.com/unity3d-render-pipeline-feature-comparison/#:~:text=No Suggested alternative%3A Use VFX Graph.

[frail bramble]

Hey I've got a bit of a weird issue here with building my scene, or rather a shader not having the behavior I want in game but it works inside of the unity editor

this is how it should look (taken from the editor)

and this is what it looks like

I compiled a dll for it containing multiple c# scripts to no avail

however when I sent a friend of mine my dll for his project where we're using the same assets it works

by renaming the dll to be exact with the game name

using version 2019.3.15 - hdrp 7.4.3

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/winter-environment-nature-pack-142750 using this asset

[long scarab]

I guess the reason is the ancient HDRP version 😉 The asset does not seem compatible with this old version, lots of changes happend in the very early HDRP phase

[frail bramble]

it's got compatibility for hdrp 7.2.1

[long scarab]

it says • HD Render Pipeline (HDRP) 10.2.2+

[frail bramble]

yeah but 1 sec

starting up unity

friend of mine did get it to work

thing is my friend tried both 2019.3.15 and 2019.4.0

and worked on both for him

[loud leaf]

Why are you guys on HDRP 7?

[frail bramble]

old game

I'm not the developer

just making a map for it

[long scarab]

only idea from my side is to ask the publisher for an older version of the asset (as it seems it had compatibility before)

[frail bramble]

will ask

[tough pulsar]

material.SetTexture("_BaseColorMap", texture);

is that correct ? Want to assign texture to material

[pulsar skiff]

Maybe try it and see for yourself instead of asking a question and sitting there, waiting for an answer

Or google it

[twilit swift]

Hi, for some reason in this project I'm working on rn the reflection probe menu makes the editor go so slow when unfolded, but when folded everything goes smooth, this doesn't happens in another project that I have, and both are the same Unity HDRP version 2022.3.7f1, what can I do?

[mellow condor]

? I compiled a dll for it containing multiple c# scripts to no avail what are you trying to do?

i see

are you commissioned to make this level?

[loud leaf]

Little update on this, 2022.3 is the last version that does not have this DLSS issue. However, the weird thing is, when running HDRP from 2022.3 on a 2023.1 editor, the issue immediately pops up, so it's on the editor side.

[frail bramble]

Yes

[pulsar skiff]

Anybody got the answer to this? Planar probes and normal baked ref probes also cause this for me

[mellow condor]

this is tough. you will have to use the exact version of unity needed for the game, then if you absolutely need to use this asset, you will have to make the appropriate modifications to it to be compatible with that version of unity

[twilit swift]

How do I prevent the lights from the other room to show? There's a wall between both rooms and lights keep showing.

[frail bramble]

I think the faster way would be making my own shader at this point

[twilit swift]

HELP PLEASE! MY WHOLE PROJECT GOT REMOVED AFTER I KILLED THE PROCCESS OF IMPORTING OF AN ASSET!

I WAS IMPORTING UNITY HDRP TERRAINS AND TOOK 78H SO I ENDED PROCCESS AND NOW MY WHOLE PROJECT WAS REMOVED!!!

WHAT CAN I DO???

PLEASE, THIS IS MY WHOLE LIFE PROJECT, I HAD NO BACKUP SINCE I MOVED DISKS!!!

[shrewd moon]

Use version control for life projects next time

[stark wigeon]

Is realtime GI possible without setting static? I make new meshes at runtime and would like them to be influenced by GI

I know probes are a thing but those are sadly not an option too

[stark wigeon]

Aren't you just not in the scene? or are folders missing too?

[twilit swift]

Didn't you see the screenshot?

[fluid merlin]

You need to use SSGI too in order to pick up instantiated gameobjects. The biggest issue with RTGI/SSGI are any lights that change quickly, like flickering or flashing. Unity heavily relies on the CPU for RTGI/SSGI.

[fluid merlin]

Sorry to hear that... After being in IT for more than 30+ years, it's more than likely all the data is destroyed, it was likely deleted on your disk and hours of random writes probably overwrote the sectors on the drive. With no backup, it's possible that your PC might have been setup for a volume shadow copy. Click on the properties of your drive where the data was stored, click on the Previous Versions tab and see if anything is there. If it's blank (likely), you're looking at data recovery as the only option. Best in the business is drivesavers, but pricey. Aside from that, you can try r-studio recovery software. Again, it's more than likely it was all lost. This is a difficult lesson many people have had to grapple with over the years.

I've never known Unity to be destructive with data, but I guess it's possible. I recently had to rebuild my own project from backup after just updating one small version, Unity is harshly unforgiving, so you always need to have backups.

[jagged prairie]

Backups are so important. Almost lost a whole 2 year project, backuping every month since that happened and it already paid off a few times.

[sand helm]

Hey everyone! Im trying to get the right post processing in my scene and Im currently playing around with Visual Environment settings
https://i.gyazo.com/64fbdb1361ce249704c308e1664044c7.png I really like how the scene looks like with "Physically based sky" but it really bumps up my normals aswell
Enabled
https://i.gyazo.com/b963e379a02e3ee8cad91455dd189358.png
Disabled
https://i.gyazo.com/fcf8f51879421e10b397bb45a02524ad.png

I know that I can turn down all my normal maps values, but I rather find the source of the problem instead

[stark wigeon]

Ah that's a very clever solution! Can you tell me why it's cpu bound though. I'm not really a graphics wizard

[fluid merlin]

When Unity was developed, GPU’s weren’t looked at for compute resources. As time goes on, Unity is slowly starting to use the GPU for compute. Maybe 4 years ago they added GPU compute baking.

Other devs are currently working on SDF or other GPU based lighting replacements for Unity to offset the performance factors of GI on the cpu as well as other improvements.

[stark wigeon]

I see that's interesting. Thanks for sharing!

I hope the available resources aren't too intensive

[twilit swift]

But why did It happen? All I was doing was importing Unity HDRP Terrains, but for some reason It was taking so much time to import (78h), so I ended the proccess with the project manager and then opened the project again and nothing, the only folders there were the VR plugins that for some reason didn't got deleted, and the stupid Terrains.

[fluid merlin]

Anything in the editor log? Depending on how many times you've opened the editor, there might be the log from when you did the import. Could help shine a light on the cause.

[twilit swift]

Not at home today, but will check tomorrow.

[modest bramble]

this happens everytime i use planar reflections. It just uses screen space, and the planr output just pops on screen. Please help.

[long scarab]

SSGI taxes on GPU mostly, at least without RT

[mellow condor]

don't use screen space reflections. use a planar reflection probe. it appears you are already doing that.

[modest bramble]

Ok

[calm frost]

Hi everyone... earlier today I watched a video on the Unity water effect and tried to follow the steps to make an ocean. That worked, but in the video the ocean flowed nicely in unity hub. In mine it rendered it but it rarely moved and was choppy.

I'm using a MacBook Pro with an M2 chip and 32GB RAM. It's the default GPU but I would expect that to be fine.

Is there a Mac issue or setting I missed? Thanks...

[calm frost]

Okay so, it all works fine IF I go and click the "view tool." Something the tutorial didn't mention, but probably fogured everyone knows. Lots of time wasted on that, oh well!

[calm frost]

Sorry for a longish post...I have been playing with the hdrp water system, and it's pretty cool. I do need to be able to do a few things that it may not support, so I'm hoping someone can suggest a workaround. I'll be using the ocean setting.

1 - I need to change the wind direction and velocity in small sections of the playing field. If I have an area with say a 2 mile radius, I need to create areas that are perhaps 0.25 mile radius with a different wind velocity and direction, and move these along the larger area. Similarly, I need to make one side have a slightly higher wind speed than the other. Of course the ripples need to adjust accordingly. This is needed to simulate wind shadows from nearby objects.

2 - From videos it seems the current can not change in different areas. This is something I need to do as well. In this case it's less important to change the direction, but in real life, current runs more slowly in more shallow water and along the edges of a river. Also, sometimes two rivers dump into the same bay and cause "tide lines."

I'm very new to all this, and would greatly appreciate suggestions. Thanks!

[dim arch]

For making bullet holes in HDRP, do I just spawn a new instance of a HDRP Decal projector every time I hit a surface?

[pulsar skiff]

Yes. If you have a vfx graph for impact effects however, you can skip that and just add a decal renderer in your vfx graph. That way, fading out decals will be much easier if you need that sort of thing

[dim arch]

Thanks, i'll try to remember. I havn't done much graphical yet, i'm just trying to make a basic FPS system for HDRP at the moment, and was unsure how to do bullet holes. I will probably just want them to disappear instantly rather than gradually in this case

[crimson bronze]

hello, I'm trying to optimize my HDRP setting as frames are being held up by something for ~30ms at times

I would appreciate it if anyone felt like sharing their debugging methods; what should I try to determine which settings are most likely the issue

[scarlet hull]

Isn't that VSync ?

[crimson bronze]

how could I check that?

[scarlet hull]

It is in the Quality/Rendering settings "V Sync Count" : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-QualitySettings.html#Rendering

[crimson bronze]

alright, I've had a look and tested with each of the three options for Vsync Count but none had any (noticable) effect on the time the frame spends waiting for the gpu

[scarlet hull]

It might also be cause by some thread "stalling" the main thread that is waiting for them.
You can scroll in the timeline view of the profiles to look what is happening on the other threads.
You should also check the "Rendering" section and details of the profiler.

[crimson bronze]

can confirm that all the workers are idle while the main thread is running Semaphore.WaitForSignal

[crimson bronze]

do you know of any gpu debugging tools that might help me find what the gpu is spending so long on?

[scarlet hull]

You can also llok at the GPU profile module : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ProfilerGPU.html
It will give you timings for each gpu command.

Else you have the frame debugger if you really want to go in depth

[crimson bronze]

how much impact does the intensity of lights have on performance?

[scarlet hull]

It should have no impact

[ivory orchid]

where can i find the hdrp equivilent of unity's default fog and density settings? i just want things to not have to be far away to have noticeable atmospheric perspective

[dim arch]

Does anyone know a solution to this issue? I'm using the Decalprojector component component and setting it as a child of the hit gameobject, then giving it the transform position equal to the surface normal * 0.001f like so
instance.transform.position = hitPoint + hitNormal * 0.00001f;

[dawn sorrel]

hi so this isn't 100% related to unity, but I wanted to know if someone could summarize how the cloudlayer effect is generated? to maybe recreate or modify in another program

I looked at the source code but I don't understand much of it

[spiral shadow]

yo can chose who material is afected or not with decals in the material options

actually the first page of the documentation mention this

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Decal.html

[dim arch]

Yeah but, I want the ground to be able to receive decals as well, so this isnt an option

Im using a weird rock thing in the recording in place of a bullet hole decal

[spiral shadow]

Using Decal Layers

When you enable Decal Layers, a Decal only affects a Mesh Renderer or Terrain if they both use a matching Decal Layer. You can use Decal Layers to separate Meshes from specific Decal Projectors in your Scene. To do this:

Click on a Decal Projector in the Hierarchy or the Scene view to view it in the Inspector.
Use the Decal Layer property drop-down to select which Decal Layers this Decal Projector affects.
Click on a Mesh Renderer or Terrain in the Hierarchy or the Scene view to view it in the Inspector.
Use the Rendering Layer Mask drop-down (See MeshRenderer for GameObjects or OtherSettings for Terrain) to select which Decal Layers affect this Mesh Renderer or Terrain.

"You can use Decal Layers to separate Meshes from specific Decal Projectors in your Scene."

[dim arch]

The way that i interpret that documentation, is that it is not viable, since every material needs to be able to receive the bullet hole decal

[spiral shadow]

i learn alot of time ago this so i make a demo escene:

this is the project

i just use the decal layers, the dificult part is activate the layers in the HDRP config

[spiral shadow]

try to reduce the size of the cookie image in the image import settings, i use a max size of 512 depend of the project but sometimes lower resolutions looks more realistic

[eternal laurel]

Make the projector itself very flat and try different angle fade values. Decal layers will not solve your issue at all

[mild wing]

Ping me if anyone uses virtual textures here please.

[narrow spindle]

Tysm!

[dim arch]

Just woke up, ill try this - but do you know if its possible to have the decal only apply to its parent? I know its possible with a shader, but im clueless as to what the performance penalty would be of having every bullet instance do that

[eternal laurel]

Afik, no its not possible, anything inside the projection box will get the decal

[dim arch]

damn. well it probably won't be a huge issue since the bullet holes will be much smaller than the big ass placeholder in the video

[eternal laurel]

Well yes, we just made our bullet decals really thin, set the characters on a different layer and we haven’t had issues

[dim arch]

You don't have decals in the world, ground, etcetera? I guess it wouldnt be a problem if you don't have moving physical objects like in the clip I showed.
For characters, giving bullet holes (and other decals like blood spatters in the future, i assume) having a separate layer for moving enemies definitely seems like something I should do. Just not that far yet

[eternal laurel]

We do have moving objects, lights platforms etc and yes they are on a different decal layer than the environment decals

We also have a system to turn layers on and off, for example blood splats, the object that gets the splatters gets that layer turned on

[dim arch]

neat - that'd probably practically eliminate the issue. Would you mind telling me how you programatically assign the layer of a decalprojector based on the object you hit, e.g. with a bullethole decal?

I know how to set the layermask with the .decalLayerMask property, but i'm interested in how you store that info on the object you hit

I guess you could check if it has an "Enemy" component attached, or "MovingPlatform", etc. and then default to the default layer which shows on everything

but this might get tedious?

[eternal laurel]

We set the layermask of the object to accept the decal, the decal is already on the "blood layer" for example

[dim arch]

right, but in my example I don't know where the decal should be shown until runtime. I only know if the bullethole decal should have the mask "Moving Object" or "Environment" or "Enemy" depending on where I have shot

if that makes sense

[eternal laurel]

Like I said dynamic objects have a different layer, when we hit an object we know if it's dynamic or static from its Hittable Component

I'm not understanding your question

[dim arch]

Maybe I misunderstood your answer, as what you just wrote is what I was looking for.
As I understand now, your moving platform has a HittableComponent script/component attached, which contains data of which decal layer should be used to apply a decal on the platform

[eternal laurel]

it contains data on which decal should be applied in general, wood hiy metal hit etc etc

the dynamic objects simply pull decals from a different pool where the decals are the same but on the dynamic layer

so we essentially have two variants of the same bullet hole

static and dynamic

[dim arch]

oh okay, I see

makes sense. thanks

[mellow condor]

chatgpt gpt4 gives a correct answer to your exact question, where can i find the hdrp equivilent of unity's default fog and density settings? i just want things to not have to be far away to have noticeable atmospheric perspective
you can also ask it

User
Give me example values for the HDRP fog override that will cause object to disappear behind atmospheric fog relatively quickly.

[mellow condor]

ChatGPT
To make objects disappear quickly behind atmospheric fog using HDRP in Unity, you can adjust the Fog override properties with the following example values:

Fog Attenuation Distance: A smaller value here will increase the density of the fog, making objects disappear more quickly. You might try setting this to a low value, such as 50 meters or less, depending on your scene scale.
Maximum Height: Setting a lower maximum height will concentrate the fog closer to the ground. You could set this to 10 meters or less.
Max Fog Distance: This value should be large enough to cover the area where you want the fog effect, but not so large that it becomes too spread out. A moderate value like 100 meters could work.
Color Mode: Set this to Constant Color and choose a color that matches your atmospheric conditions.
Volumetric Fog: Enable this option.
Albedo: Choose a color for your fog. Lighter colors will make the fog appear denser.
Volumetric Fog Distance: Set this to a lower value to make the fog appear thicker and objects to disappear quicker. A value that corresponds to the Fog Attenuation Distance can be used, like 50 meters.

[dim arch]

Just a quick update in case you or anyone else is interested. I decided to do it like this for now. Change the layermask of bulletholes dynamically depending on what they hit.

[Required]
[SerializeField]
private int DecalLayerMaskIndex = 8;

// inside the method bullet decal spawn method, I do this
var hitDecalLayerMask = hitObject.GetComponent<Renderer>().renderingLayerMask >> DecalLayerMaskIndex;
var decalProjector = instance.GetComponent<DecalProjector>();
//hitDecalLayerMask contains flags, so if multiple decal layers are selected, this method might cause problems
// - alternative is to bitshift the hitDecalLayerMask value to get each individual enum value
decalProjector.decalLayerMask = (DecalLayerEnum)hitDecalLayerMask;

[dawn sorrel]

is upgrading to HDRP recommended? I hear that its unstable and demanding, but I would love to try more advanced lighting

[loud leaf]

You could always make a sideproject to test it out. And don't forget to use version control for your projects, so if you decide to upgrade a project to HDRP and things don't work out, you can always revert.

[dawn sorrel]

that's true, thanks for the tip I'll do that

[scarlet hull]

It is demanding for sure, but stating that it is unstable is a bit harsh. Games already shipped with it.

[dawn sorrel]

I've never tried it personally so I was wondering what people think of it. Thank you for your answer it's reassuring and I think I'll make a URP backup and try working with HDRP. Thanks again <3

[eternal laurel]

I think it’s the best damn rendering pipeline out there

[dawn sorrel]

sometimes the best things far exceed the capabilities that you need to make what you wanna make

[eternal laurel]

Ok?

[lone kite]

Hey everyone,did anyone else observe this strong fluctuation in batches count when profiling?
What is causing this?

[twilit swift]

Hi, for some reason the package manager takes forever to load assets, I'm on 2022.3.7f1. Anyone knows what can I do?

[mild wing]

Get better internet?

[twilit swift]

It only happens in 2022.3.7f1.

[naive vessel]

Good evening guys, I was working on my HDRP project, and I tried to integrate the Unity HDRP water system (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/WaterSystem-use.html), I did the setup, but the system just doesn't render, everything appears right but the water is not rendered. I'm using version 2022.310f1, can anyone answer me if this version is not fit and which versions are?

HEEEEELP

[minor depot]

Try looking through framesettings for anything to do with water

[naive vessel]

Everything related to water is turned on..

I think I'll try to update my version to 2023.2.2f1 to see if it works

[naive vessel]

it finally worked!! It was probably a bug in my version

[tawny acorn]

i just spent 3 hours trying to figure out why terrain holes aren't working in my built game. after like 50 forum threads with no answers, i come here and use the search button and find out that it's a quality setting that's disabled by default within seconds

[pulsar skiff]

2022 hdrp is fd up. It has so many bugs that haven't been patched yet, like water mesh not showing(but the underwater effects show). And srp lensflares not being openable in the inspector

They haven't fixed any of these even in the latest 2022 LTS

So you just have to switch to 2023 and deal with the new pricing model

[formal crow]

only unity 6 will be affected by the pricing model, the 2023 tech releases are not

[pulsar skiff]

Huh, i was sure i read all versions 2023 and up would be affected

[minor depot]

2023LTS is affected, but that's been renamed unity 6 and pushed back a bunch

The tech streams are fine afaik

[twilit swift]

Hi, I have an issue where reflection probe component makes everything go slow af, this wasn't happening before but now it is. I usually have a lot of issues with my project, first in other of my projects when I selected something or created a new file it would deselect a sec later, later on that got fixed in some way, Idk how. Later, in the same project for some reason reflection probe component tab made everything go slow af when unfolded, couldn't find a fix yet. Now I'm experiencing the same in a whole different project which is very recent, this one is like 20GB and the other was 80GB, but the 20GB project started doing the same than the other project, first the deselection issue, then it fixed somehow and now reflection probe tab making everything laggy af, what can I do? I'm in 2022.3.7f1.

Ping when reply.

[pulsar skiff]

Im having this issue and have seen 2 other people post this issue here, were all using 2022, currently no fixes available

Im not sure about this but it might be fixed in the 2023 version like many other hdrp bugs

[twilit swift]

So is it a general issue found in all 2022?

[pulsar skiff]

Ive tried two versions and both of em had it 🤷‍♂️

[twilit swift]

They want us to forcedly upgrade to 2023 or what? Because I don't want to, and since they said that all the new pricing shit would be automatically changed to "Pay per download" if using 2023 and over.

[pulsar skiff]

👆

I thought that too but apparently the pricing model is onlt for only for 2023LTS

[twilit swift]

Dude, that's the problem we are talking about 💀.

Why would we want a tech release, if we are complaining about bugs and issues 💀.

[pulsar skiff]

Idk man just go to 2023, it fixes some other bugs like hdrp water not showing up and lensflares not being editable.

[twilit swift]

I don't have any issues with water or lensflare yet so.

[twilit swift]

Do you know that you have to enable water in the project settings, and then add a "water rendering" component to a volume, also need to enable it 💀?

[pulsar skiff]

Yea yea. I get underwater posr processing but nit the mesh

You can see more people complaining about it in here and unity fourms

[twilit swift]

Then it must be you cuz I had no issues at all with water.

[twilit swift]

Maybe it was an older version than 2022,3,7f1.

[upbeat sorrel]

How can I modify Ambient Occlusion or shadows in HDRP so that their texture is dithered? Should I do this with a Render Graph or Custom Pass?

[scarlet hull]

This is the kind of thing that would certainly require custom lighting, and HDRP doesn't easilly allow do to this.

[upbeat sorrel]

I was also thinking about something like fetching the ambient occlusion texture (something like ctx.hdCamera.GetPreviousFrameRT((int)HDCameraFrameHistoryType.AmbientOcclusion);), modifying it in the shader, and applying it to a full-screen shader, but I'm not sure if that's the right direction.

[scarlet hull]

1. As the name implies, you'll have the AO with a one frame delay. On some fast moving scenario, it cas be very visible
2. You would need to write it to the AO buffer of the new frame, not as a screen full-screen effect, else you will double the AO amount.

[upbeat sorrel]

Yup, thank you @scarlet hull, if I may ask about 2, am I able to save it back to the buffer without extracting the HDRP package to the embedded for modification?

[scarlet hull]

See here for injection points in HDRP : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.0/manual/images/HDRP-frame-graph-diagram.png

As you can see, if you use deferred rendering, there is no available injection points to modify the SSAO buffer before the lighting, or even the forward opaque rendering.
So you would need to make modifications to the render loop to add you own injection point.

[upbeat sorrel]

Thank you very much, this is very helpful.

[digital spire]

Anyone know how to fix TMP result in blocky text when it is rendering with custom pass?
My goal here is to render 3d object on top of UI...

[scarlet hull]

Looks like some shader issue ?

[digital spire]

yes. but alas, TMP is abandoned.

[scarlet hull]

It is not abandoned, it has been integrated in unity.

Does the same text render correctly when displayed in a regulat 3D TMP text in the scene ?
Since you are rendering it in a custom pass, are you also rendering it with the expected TMP material ?

[digital spire]

I have to only the render background elements with custom pass (the darker bg and dust) and have to leave everything else with Overlay canvas

but ugh, it's ugly. have to have 2 canvas and manage to sync state between them

[scarlet hull]

Why can't you render the darker bg and dust with the same Overlay canvas as the text elements ?

[digital spire]

because If I render them with overlay canvas then I can't render the 3d book on top of them

[scarlet hull]

Ah, yes, sorry, makes sense 😅

You don't have to use a canvas for these though, you could also use a fullscreen custom pass.

[digital spire]

You're right. I'm weighting on which way I should do it. After some consideration, I decide to go the canvas route I think It's easier for me currently since the bg contain weird line like this.

[digital spire]

Ah also, forget to answer these question
-Yes. It render correctly with Overlay canvas/ worldspace
-What would expected TMP material in this case be? I didn't check override material with the custom pass and use TMP/Distancefield (TMP 3.0.6)

[scarlet hull]

iirc, tmp distance field shader should work, it's not really clear to me why the same object would not render properly in a custom pass when not overriding the material.
Might be a legit bug, in that case it would be nice to report it with a minimal repro project

[pastel oracle]

Anyone that can explain emission in HDRP a bit better to me? I have to set the intensity to 500 000 to get an effect?

These are my shader settings

[south girder]

"Bloom" post processing effect is what actually makes it glow. Play around with the settings on that

Can also try different Intensity Unit in that Emission node.

[pastel oracle]

But doesn't bloom affect everything? Lets say I just want this object to glow like a car brake light? Then I should use such large intensity? I don't really have an issue with it but such large values seem computationaly expensive?

[minor depot]

HDRP uses physical light units. If you want something to visibly glow when lit by sunlight, it has to be extremely bright (conveniently the units match up to real light units, so you can exactly match the illumination of a specific real world light bulb if you know how many lumens it gives off)

It all has to do with exposure, I highly recommend watching this tutorial in its entirety, it's one of the best learning materials on lighting in HDRP overall https://youtu.be/yqCHiZrgKzs?si=6K-TCTjFXqMRABWO

[digital spire]

I almost always use exposure weight 0 on the emission node because physically accurate intensity for bloom is hard to manage, at least for my project.

[pastel oracle]

Thanks! Will check it out

[pastel oracle]

Oh okay thanks, will do some tests with this

[lucid gate]

Hey guys, can someone with some experience give me a hint what could cause the brightness change after the enemy falls to the ground?
The volumes are placed correctly, i tried without any lightsource tho. Also played around with all the different post postprocessing values, first on the local, after on the global volume. No change.
Any idea?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/886316442256027668/1182707145578393710/image.png?ex=6585acdd&is=657337dd&hm=25409a4c67ebabde6d283d09fe13df03af9226a88058688dc9caa9cccc828a07&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/886316442256027668/1182707146140426300/image.png?ex=6585acdd&is=657337dd&hm=310918bef727119e31bcc996458b4f5d0721104dbab415efb927a0e26dd1f9e9&

[minor depot]

It looks like the ragdoll isn't receiving contributions from either ambient or reflection probes. Is it a seperate mesh? If so, post a screenshot of the inspector

[lucid gate]

Thanks, for the answer.
I disable the character controller and the animator, otherwise i do nothing with it, before applying the ragdoll. Do you think it's related to that? Do you see something wrong here? New to this, so it's a lot guessing from my site. Slowly processing the meager documentation 😅
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/517108768933281843/1182791843856011295/image.png?ex=6585fbbe&is=657386be&hm=18ac12e797e10d2033d197cd422f5c5a8bdda934980c39c137f445ed31183e2b&

oh i should add; as i moved the character controller up (screen, not visible in the screen on the zombie, but it shows how i move the character controller), the brightness get back to normal, so it's somehow height related? or the ground does something with it 🤷🏽‍♂️ I like to show the light settings/volumes, but don't want to spam ^^
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/763208817592762420/1182751277780828171/image.png?ex=6585d5f7&is=657360f7&hm=daf8322432396a46f442bc4112d4fae95509eab790fd9b6dee231c19071b84aa&

[minor depot]

What's your lighting setup? Do you have a sky on the exterior? Are you using light probes? The mesh renderer itself seems fine

[lucid gate]

Yes, i added screens of the global and the local volume, the third screen should show that the "room" is covered from the volume and shadow proxy. Ngl the whole setup to even work on it is kinda a pain but most likely i just do it "wrong". In short the zed is clearly inside the local volume and the reflection probe/proxy.

[minor depot]

This part is kind of the most interesting, do you mean that moving the camera up changes the lighting on the ragdoll? Or moving the ragdoll up does?

[lucid gate]

the second, when i move the character controller in the wordspace up while the zed is lying; i tried to catch it in the screen, now as you can see it's really dark (desperate act, i have switched off all direct lightsource), second screen if i leave him at the ground (it also looks kind of really bad, like a lod, but this mesh is not using lods)

[minor depot]

Quickly try changing your sky type in the visual environment to gradient sky and setting it to black, just to check if it's a problem with the ambient probe

[lucid gate]

did upload a video to show the problem, it difficult to explain for me in english, this particular one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ADnLJ4o_U

but tbh i think that fixed it ! sec.

i have the sky still on gradient sky, now it's fine:
thanks! i will play around, but if you can tell me more, that would be great!

edit: switched back to my hdri sky and it's still like it should 🍻

[minor depot]

Alright then 👍 Glad I could help

[worldly lodge]

bro why is it so hard to make sum damn grass

[fluid merlin]

No biome tools.... Unity has to rely on asset store devs to carry the weight where it falls down in a few key areas. Performant vegetation and biome generation is an area Unity has ignored. Your best bet is to pick up Nature Renderer & Microsplat Core when they go on sale.

[robust hill]

I have this strange bug in game view, it is showing scene view camera, why? how can I fix this please? If I tweak any of material values of that "damaged" area, it is fixed in playmode. but I am spawning this as a prefab and it happens every single time, please?
https://streamable.com/3dbacl

[robust hill]

Anyone?

[fluid merlin]

It almost looks like a shader error, I've seen weird shader effects like that for shaders written for earlier versions of HDRP and then moving to a higher version causes a similar effect. Like the shaders was written for v10 and then an upgrade to v12 breaks it. If it's just that specific gameobject, and nothing else, that's probably an indicator of something wrong with the material/shader. For a test, try assigning the standard HDRP material to the gameobject and see if it does it (the same material on the cube for example).

[pastel oracle]

So I'm doing work for client and they want a room for elderly people to look something like this:

This is a render they let a certain office make. They want to see it in Unity in VR. I currently have this. But something feels off and I don't really know what to do to increase the believability/make it better. Any tips. It's all realtime and should stay realtime. I also can't change the textures

[fluid merlin]

The lighting feels flat, likely due to the global illumination settings. Baked will give you the best GI, but if you need realtime there's some options, the screen space rt gi isn't too bad, but your materials aren't reflecting much. You need to change settings on the materials though, if you can't, that might be the best you can get, you need more metalicity for sure in there. Check out the archviz tutorials on youtube for archviz interior hdrp lighting, this guy does some good ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSMzb0iINek

[pastel oracle]

Thanks, I'll look into it

[digital spire]

I'd try ssgi, ssao and realtime-time slicing ref probe.

[pastel oracle]

Okay will look into it, ssao is already active but ssgi isn't

[pastel oracle]

This is with SSGI on, it's indeed a bit better already

[eternal laurel]

Does your time of day change? SSGI is going to be expensive for VR. What is the target hardware?

[pastel oracle]

Yes time of day changes. I can have it run on a 4090, 64gb ram and i9

[eternal laurel]

Well then sadly lightmaps wont do. A cheaper option is to set up APV bake out several scenarios and blend between them when the time of day change happens. Another tip I can give is to make sure to have ambient occlusion on with bent normal maps and also add surface imperfections to the materials via the detail maps

Baking out light cookies for all the lamp fixtures will also increase the believeability

[pastel oracle]

Thanks for the info. i'll see what I can come up with 🙂

[jagged prairie]

If you have a 4090 and the game targets high specs, you can use raytraced gi and reflections,..

[pastel oracle]

Yeah I’ll try that tomorrow and check the framerate

[atomic flame]

I have a project I am working on in 2023.2 and HDRP 16 with. I have to use realtime lights because the app is specifically for moving lights around a scene. I was using ray traced SSGI but for some reason the ceiling was not receiving any indirect light. I turned on path tracing and that resolved that issue but it leads to another issue. Many of my light fixtures are surface mounted to the ceiling and go "into" the ceiling, basically like a hole cut into the ceiling and a tube with a light placed into it.

With normal ray traced SSGI I was able to create a transparent material with depth write checked and depth test set to never. Then if I made the ceiling a transparent material (with alpha set to 255 so it was still basically opaque) it would "cut" a hole in the ceiling for the fixture. This method doesn't work in path tracing. I have looked for depthmask/stencil shaders for HDRP that would do the same but can't seem to find any. A day worth of searching led me down a lot of rabbit holes but nothing that works with path tracing.

Anyone know of a way to do a stencil/depthmask shader that would work for path tracing or otherwise "cut" a hole in geometry to reveal something behind it?

[scarlet hull]

Path tracing does require "real" geometry for most of the cases, so stencil is not an option.
I'm surprised that the ceiling didn't receive SSGI when using raytracing, it should, maybe some other objects we blocking the ray, or you have to raise the ray distance.

[atomic flame]

Thank you. I kind of figured that was the case but couldn't find any supporting information on that. I may have to find a way to cut holes in the geometry with Boolean operators but from what I have researched on that it seems that's no easy task.

With ray tracing the ceiling (at least in my test environment) is just a flat plane. Like I said its a transparent material with opacity at 255 (effectively opaque). But for whatever reason it never receives indirect light. I have tried replacing the plane with a cube thinking it was a backfacing issue. No luck. Tried other materials - including the standard lit HDRP material that the walls and floor have and still it does not receive light. I have increased the ray length and played with ALL the ray tracing settings and still no luck. I'm pretty stumped here.

[scarlet hull]

I didn't understood that the ceiling was also set to transparent when using raytracing. And indeed, this is one of the limitations of SSGI that needs opaque objects (or at least, depth write transparents) to work.

Maybe you can get away by using an opaque ceiling and decals (optionally with parallax occlusion mapping) to make the light "holes"

[atomic flame]

I'll look into that. Thank you!

[upper onyx]

I have a HDRP space sim game and trying to add some global volumetric fog. But it seems there is only height-based fog - is that correct?

[steel sage]

bit of a long shot here, but I'm totally stuck on the same issue, did you ever get this resolved? 😅

[tall lynx]

can you refresh my mind? the original message "could not be loaded"

[steel sage]

oh weird sorry, you were having an issue with spot and area lights not showing anything at all in hdrp lighting

It was a good while ago, I was keyword searching in the channel to see if someone else had had the issue

[tall lynx]

have you tried to increase the intensity by a lot? 🙂

what type of lighting do you use, real time or baking?

[steel sage]

I have, its at the max :/

realtime

[tall lynx]

try max * 10 (go over the max)

just put it to a ridiculous amount, for testing purposes

[steel sage]

alright

[tall lynx]

have you switched between baked and realtime lighting?

[steel sage]

Baked is greyed out

though, I'm following a unity learn course and it's running me through a realtime workflw

though I created a new lightight settings asset to try to fix the issue and that seems to have brought on a whole new set of issues, let me resolve that rq

[tall lynx]

im pretty sure i had some problem in my pipeline settings, just have a hard time remembering what exactly, it has been a while hehe

[steel sage]

man, think I deleted something I shouldnt have, let me restart and catch back up to where I had the issue, you cool if I ping you if I run into it again?

[tall lynx]

sure, ill try to help, just cant promise much haha

[steel sage]

no worries haha, totally get that was a while ago

[tall lynx]

yup, also not the most experienced in unity hdrp stuff to say the least 😉

[steel sage]

yeah very fair, though definitely better than me 😅

first time touching it

[tall lynx]

good luck! 🙂

[steel sage]

Heyoo, now it's working, whacky

[fluid merlin]

Yup, the fog is pretty limited unfortunately, height based, no fog of war, has a high perf cost vs quality, and is non-reactive. Best you can do is local fog with a 3d noise texture and sort of fake it.

[atomic flame]

So I managed to render holes in my ceiling by using a render texture being passed to a shader as a texture sample that then gets passed into the alpha channel for alpha cutout. This works but requires me to have a second camera in the scene that is rendering only the mask objects. It doesn't seem very elegant or scalable - in fact if the ceiling changes distance or size I'm fairly certain it all falls apart.

There are so many options for a depth mask / see through effect in URP but I can't seem to find anything on HDRP. I figured with custom passes it would be easy.. I was wrong... Is there possibly other search terms I may not know that may help me find a better solution?

[fluid merlin]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what you're doing. You're rendering holes for recessed lights?

[atomic flame]

Yes, that's exactly it. I'm building an app in HDRP where you can move lights around the scene to do some lighting design. But recessed lights dont work on a solid ceiling because most of the fixture is up in the ceiling. So I need to cut out the ceiling wherever the light is.

This image shows the issue. The one on the right is being cut off by the ceiling. The one on the left is using my hacky solutions.

[fluid merlin]

Just an idea here, you might have tried this out, but what about using a fake interior shader for the light can? It’s a technique used for windows to create a fake depth interior for a room. This case, the “inside” would be the inside of the light can fixture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=-7DC_goylAbyyHP0&v=rC4BHR-Cx0s

[atomic flame]

Thanks! I did try that - its one of the samples for amplify shader that they have in their sample pack for HDRP. It works - but I have somewhere around 30-40 fixtures that will be in the app. Not all recessed but it would still take a lot of time to make all the cube maps and it appears too flat. I'm also using actual CAD for the fixtures so being able to see the geometry is pretty important in this case.

[fluid merlin]

Ahhh I see, okay, we’ll one more idea. I had a similar challenge because I wanted to create bullet holes in a mesh and stumbled across this shader. At about the 30 second mark in the first video, you can see holes being cut in the mesh with what looks like a raycast. Anyway, something like that might work, but not sure. There’s another shader by the same dev that does a dissolve in a similar effect.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/dynamic-radial-masks-144845

[digital spire]

Should definitely try stencil. I remember getting it working on hdrp but don't remember how 😂

oh ops, just read the above posts and apparently you can't use stencil because path tracing?
If you're using path tracing, I'd honestly just procedurally cut the mesh in real time. It is slow but you're using Path tracing already 😅

[atomic flame]

I can use ray tracing or path tracing. Just need REALLY good lighting (doesn't have to be perfectly real time) because this project is all about lighting. I have tried stencil but apparently from everything I have read HDRP doesn't expose stencil to shader graph? only in custom passes. I'm new to HDRP so I don't fully understand all of this but I have played with custom passes for a full day and couldn't get anything working.

I have looked into doing boolean mesh operations at runtime and it isn't a simple task at all lol.

[atomic flame]

Looking through the docs for this and this may work. I'll have to read into it more. Thank you. Either way that shader is absolutely amazing. Shader artists are IRL magicians IMO.

[digital spire]

I have the set up in my project but I can't open it right now.

This is the prefab

seems to be using custom pass to draw stencil mask

[atomic flame]

This definitely adds some weird effects in my project but I imagine its because I don't have the correct materials or layers as you do in yours

[digital spire]

yeah.
#archived-hdrp message
I cobbled together how to do it from these posts

[fluid merlin]

I know right? I wish I had shader skills, but I can't graph workflow at all... Every time I see the inside of shadergraph or Amplify shader editor, I crumble.

[digital spire]

Oh by the way, i know the main culprits that make gpu resident drawer slower than GPU instancer now.
Resident drawer have limit of 1023 instance per draw draw call. So scenes like the meteor sample of gpu instancer where there are million of instance are still have perf hit. Also, the version u tried didn't have gpu culling yet. It just got introduced in a17+

[fluid merlin]

Nice, yeah I didn't get back around to testing it out again but figured it had something to do with Unity failing back to standard rendering when it exceeded some limit, I thought memory maybe, but yeah that limit makes sense as well. Maybe if I have some time this weekend I can download the latest versions of things and play around again.

[atomic flame]

Ah I just read through that conversation. You can actually achieve the effect I want with 2 transparent materials. In that setup you don't even need custom passes. Just 2 materials, the "ceiling" is transparent but set to alpha = 1. The mask is set to alpha = 0 and you can check the depth write property and set it to never. That is what I originally was using.
BUT - the ceiling was no longer receiving indirect lighting for some reason?

[minor depot]

What's limiting the resident drawer to 1023 instances? Constant buffers? Do indirect draw commands have a limit? What allows regular gpu instancing to ignore said limit?

[digital spire]

Regular gpu instancing(drawmesh instance/render mesh instance) also have this limit. It's the indirect instancing version (drawmeshIndirect/RenderMeshIndirect) that doesn't have limit.

[digital spire]

Right, have u enable depth write for the ceiling material?

[digital spire]

the current version of gpu resident drawer is using instancing.

[atomic flame]

Yes it also has depth write. But no matter the setup when I set the ceiling to transparent it no longer received indirect lighting and I can't seem to figure out why...

[digital spire]

Is your ceiling an emissive material?

[atomic flame]

Nope. No emission.

[digital spire]

Something must be going on 🤔 I don't use raytracing myself but there shouldn't be anything that prevent it from receiving gi.

[atomic flame]

Yeah I have no idea why its happening. It was occuring in 2022.3 and 2023.2

[atomic flame]

Either way, the AmazingAssets Dynamic Radial Mask asset @fluid merlin linked above works like a charm. Even works with path tracing! and can definitely do a lot more than alpha cutouts for later projects 🙂

[versed oriole]

Hello i am new, Is HDRP worth it right now or is it better to go with URP still?, i plan to make a small project at least for now, a dungeon crawler rpg game level.

[fluid merlin]

Hey... well, sort of depends. HDRP has a heavy footprint tech wise, it's meant for high end gaming rigs and consoles. This is a good place to start to help decide:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/render-pipelines-feature-comparison.html

Very low-poly stylized with low res textures is probably more geared towards urp or built-in

[vocal fulcrum]

hello! i'm just wondering if anyone has experienced weird physics when using accumulation, when using the video recorder in unity, in conjunction with path-tracing or ray marching?

accumulation enabled -> something is off, it feels like the joints are moving less? more stiff even? I assume it has something to do with time/framerate

accumultation disabled -> this is what is should behave like

[topaz ravine]

Muse Demo: HDRP Environment 🙂 crafted with Muse, Unity HDRP content and few external assets, hope you like it 🙂 Music by me and a friend.
https://youtu.be/NwuM9j7LMz4

[dawn sorrel]

damn that looks nice

[loud perch]

Did anyone encounter missposition with fit to water script in water system?

[tall lynx]

what did you do?

[steel sage]

literally just regenerated the lighting cache and it worked fine, not sure what I did differently this go around 😂

[tall lynx]

nice!

[leaden meadow]

Hi Guys , Is there a way to see a preview in HDRP of what exactly you're going to bake ? Preview seen in raytrace / path tracing differs a lot from lightmap

[shrewd moon]

How much different?

Even though lightmapping and ray / path tracing settings can have a big impact on the result, generally the way light reacts to your materials should be very similar

[leaden meadow]

@shrewd moon Sorry for the late answer. Left hand side Baked , Righ hand Side Path Tracing

[formal crow]

no, but its on the roadmap "in progress"

[leaden meadow]

@formal crow tks volt!

Was also noticing that textures are not baked. I can see only colors , is that normal ? I'm still learning Unity sorry about that

[formal crow]

yeah its normal

It is not using texture UV's its using lightmap UV's

basicly every static object in your scene has a 2nd UV map for lightmaps

after all the light calculation is done, those UV's hold the lighting data

basicly a light texture thats applied on top of the object

[leaden meadow]

Ok ok perfect , so there's no way to save the albedo + light pass? I only get saved that one ? @formal crow

[formal crow]

im not sure what you mean by that

[leaden meadow]

I mean the full bake including textures and lighting

Is there a way to save it ? Like we de in blender cycles when saving the combined

[formal crow]

why would you need a texture to be part of a lightmap?

[leaden meadow]

in order to export it

WebGL , WebGPU and so on

[formal crow]

why not just export the texture UV's and lightmap UV's separately?

[leaden meadow]

I mean something like this

[formal crow]

i see, i dont think unity does something like this

[leaden meadow]

mmm okok

[formal crow]

tough a workaround would be to just screenshot the object in the scene from an ortographic view lol

[leaden meadow]

ahha nope that's not

i thought unity was able to bake albedo + light and combine them into lightmaps

[shrewd moon]

You usually don't want this
Lightmaps tend to be a lower texel density than textures, whereas textures can be reused

[upbeat sorrel]

I'm experimenting with customizing HDRP, and I would like to change this dithering pattern (or make it bigger). I'm looking around the PCSS_Directional function, but so far without success. Does anyone have any ideas?

[minor depot]

The actual code that generates that pattern is somewhere deep in HDRP's shader library, I honestly couldn't tell you where, though searching for terms like directional or shadows in every file in the shaders folder (using vscode or any prefered way to search many files) would be where I would start

unfortunately the shaders in SRPs are almost completely undocumented, so it's up to you to either make it yourself or try to find code responsible for it

[fluid merlin]

I see some people in other discords complaining that pathtracing isn't fast enough for FPS games... anyone experimented with it enough yet on performance?

[digital spire]

It's not fast enough on my 3060 laptop. Needs at least seconds to render + denoise a SINGLE frame at relatively low sample count (64)

No idea on 4090, but I also assume getting 5 fps is already a stetch. I think path tracing in Unity is gearing for physically correct, brute force path (like most offline renderer) instead of aiming at realtime content

good for film/visualizing stuff or to made ground truth image for reference when doing lighting

[loud leaf]

HDRP's path tracer is just a regular unbiased path tracer, real time path tracers (like in Cyberpunk 2077) are completely different beasts that use different samplers/denoisers/etc

[shrewd moon]

It's not being marketed for use with games at all, so unlikely that it's developed with that use in mind either

[tender oracle]

Any idea if AOV output is being deprecated from the Recorder package? I was looking at these packages recently ( Timeline / Recorder / etc ) and kindof blown away by how good of a job Unity has done putting them together, pretty great for film+media/cutscenes/etc..

But using AOV's are kindof a no brainer for post-production if using Unity for film+media, so it seems odd that it's marked for deprecation after v5 of Recorder in some areas of the docs, although the docs for v5 seem to still talk about it.

[scarlet hull]

I think it is because AOVs are getting their own dedicated recorder package : https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.aovrecorder@0.1/manual/index.html

Or, regarding at which version the deprecated text appears in the doc or not, it was considered at some point to have a separate package, but then keep in inside the recorder

[tender oracle]

yeah i saw that, think it's dated 2019 though not sure if maybe they'll just keep that as an optional package to streamline the aov stuff out of the Recorder package.. i hope the plan is not to get rid of aov's altogether.

[scarlet hull]

No, definitively they are going to stay 😄

[tender oracle]

makes sense with Unity's hdrp capabilities etc to encourage more content creators outside of the gaming space to use Unity as a tool for production.. similar to what Unreal have done and afaik they've recently announced that Unreal will no longer be free for people using the engine for non-game stuff.

was really impressed by how solid Timeline and Recorder felt to use, so couple that with HDRP and some of the raytracing stuff and it could be just as powerful as Unreal potentially for animation/shorts/etc

[buoyant drum]

Is it good? Made the animations, then I saw something about that and thought I'd try it. Then things were out of position

[tender oracle]

Recorder allows you to pick a target framerate so even if your scene only runs at low fps in the game view you can choose for example 60fps in recorders output settings and it will render the scene to your output at full 60fps ( even if it takes longer to render it - you just have to wait for it to complete ), hope that makes sense.

[buoyant drum]

Nice

[buoyant drum]

This recorder does it just record what's going on in the game view or is there more I need to do

I'm gonna have cutscenes pre rendered anyway

[tender oracle]

It renders the game view to your target output format, you press start and it does the rest. Honestly is pretty simple to use.

[buoyant drum]

Nice

Thanks

[fluid merlin]

I've never had good luck with Recorder, it always seems to get super laggy and the output was always overly compressed. Everyone seems to say to use OBS so I gave up on trying to use recorder. Has it made any improvements lately?

[leaden meadow]

Guys i've got a really noob topic...I'm trying to develop a code to simulate texel density vs number of total lightmaps for 3ds max. As long as I've understood , Unity sees all objects as a unique mesh and it makes a specific numbers of lightmaps according to texel density assigned to each mesh considering the lightmap max resolution right ?

Furthermore is there a way to create a custom shader in order to plot albedo into lightmaps in order to create a sort of Combined baked like blender in order to export it externally ?

[buoyant drum]

worked for me

nice and smooth

[buoyant drum]

I did use obs for that recording there

[fluid merlin]

Hmm... I'll give it another try... 👍

[buoyant drum]

This little intro scene is way more smoother here with recorder

[fluid merlin]

Nice animation on the guy running... is that motion mapped or raw animation?

[buoyant drum]

Yeah it's mocap

[fluid merlin]

Buttery smooth on that there

Great with the fog/smoke too... I wish Unity had responsive smoke though that deformed when meshes go through it

[buoyant drum]

Thanks! Although the running animation is actually from mixamo though so credit to them

[buoyant drum]

Hahaha

I'm sure there's some systems that's been made for that

[fluid merlin]

that's really good for mixamo.... I've always run into foot sliding with their anims.

[buoyant drum]

Yeah I had that aswell had to alter it at the start to get it right

[fluid merlin]

Ahh... yeah mixamo feet animations are usually like a duck on roller skates

[fluid merlin]

Someone must have monitoring the universe, I just got an email about Zibra Smoke & Fire on the asset store 😅

[tender oracle]

you can choose the output file format and fps etc so really it's just a matter of settings.. if you were getting lag it could be playback of the video itself, for example if it was a large file size with little or no compression it can play back choppy, so coulda been that.

[tender oracle]

good job!

[buoyant drum]

Thank you!!

[untold pagoda]

Hi, I'm pretty new to Unity and just have 2 questions.

1. Is HDRP good to make small games or prototypes?

2. What reason would anyone choose to create animations or films in HDRP instead of Blender?

[fluid merlin]

HDRP is more or less targeting higher end hardware, so if your game or prototype needs HDRP features, use HDRP.
Here's the table on what pipeline has what: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/render-pipelines-feature-comparison.html
Chances are if you're just starting, you'll find more flexibility in URP unless you're looking at something that needs raytracing or screen space global illumination.

As far as film making, Unity tried to pivot hard into the film post production and VFX scene in 2017 with HDRP as an "option" but really it's not exactly the tool of choice. A few film makers, more on the indie side have used it. Blender has become more like the swiss army knife where Unity HDRP is more like a can opener. You'll find more extensibility and a larger base of indie film animators using Blender than say with Unity HDRP.

Maya has been the gold standard in the area of animated film making for decades. Blender is attractive for those bootstrapping indies because it's free, whereas Maya is like $200 a month or so. Blender's base has been growing larger and larger over time, as more gets developed for it, so there's a growing community around it as well. I would say using Unity for film making is a very rough road, while there are people who use it for that, I would say it's probably people who were already using Unity for something else to start with.

Probably the largest use case of Unity HDRP for making a film was Neill Blomkamp's Oats studios, they used it to make the short film series Adam for example. However, they also had to use Maya exclusively because Unity has no character workflow pipeline, so without Maya, they couldn't have made it. Even the last Unity big example Enemies used Maya at some point. So, I mean, unless you're hard pressed to use Unity HDRP for something, you'll be better off in Maya to make an animated film. Much to the chagrin of Unity, Niell has moved on to Unreal to use it to make "Off The Grid", a sci-fi cyberpunk game, a cinematic episode to promote it was done with UE5.

[untold pagoda]

I was thinking of using HDRP to create some prototypes, but I'll probably just stick to URP

[fluid merlin]

Other than raytracing, you'll find that the asset store has bolt-ons to fill in the gaps missing in URP, like water and volumetrics, etc.

[atomic flame]

Is there a way to control the color of bounced lighting with raytracing enabled? I have a blank box/room with a brown floor and white walls/ceiling and it appears VERY brown because of the floor. Wondering if there is something I can reduce to make the effect more muted

[loud leaf]

It's all based off the material properties, so try playing with the smoothness of the walls/floor.

[atomic flame]

Thanks!

[tender oracle]

Only thing I'd chime in with there is re what tools do what. For example it's not generally going to be a choice between using Blender and using Unity, or between using Maya and using Unreal - any project put together and rendered in Unity or Unreal is going to most likely also use other 3rd party dcc apps for modelling, often animation, etc etc. The choice then is what is used for putting everything together and rendering. At which point it's a comparison between offline renderers in like Maya/Blender/etc ( which require renderfarms and much larger rendering time and budgets ) to realtime engines like Unreal and Unity which have a lot more constraints but use the benefit of realtime game engine tech to produce visually similar results with much less rendering time..
So you're seeing a lot of people working in different industries like architectural visualization, products and marketing, even short film and animation and vfx start to use game engines for rendering because why spend all that time and money rendering when you can do it at a fraction of the cost in a game engine..

[fluid merlin]

Hopefully with Riccitiello out of the picture, Unity figures out what it is and what it isn't. They need to stop chasing after markets and tooling Unity for things the majority of it's users will never use it for and get back to core development as a game engine. I think HDRP was a good idea, but not as a film animation suite pipeline. I feel like URP is leveling out with HDRP and at somepoint, I mean, why 3 pipelines for a company that's struggling? It just doesn't make sense... I bet by Unity 7 they're back to 1 pipeline...

[tender oracle]

I kinda agree to a point as i think there's potentially so much overlap between rendering for film and animation and gaming that why not build the render pipeline out to be as flexible and capable for both as possible, where it's modular and just a case of enabling/disabling features and ramping up/down quality settings depending if your target is realtime mobile or offline rendering for post-production..
Just to add that Unreal are already firmly doing this and embedding themselves into those markets for those reasons, in fact they recently announced that the engine will no longer be free to use for people using it for non-gaming purposes so there's definitely a source of revenue there to help fund further development of the engine ( and of course we all benefit from that )..

I do think it would be mucj less annoying to just have one unified pipeline tho, it's a bit of a pain to say the least having to choose and switch between HDRP/URP and even BiRP :/

[loud leaf]

I mean the choice is pretty easy no?

[tender oracle]

It is yeah, having a whole different set of options though is kindof annoying, wading through which renderer does what, what tools are compatible, what assets are compatible, etc etc.. and then there's shader compatibility etc..

[digital spire]

I mean, those are easy choice still. And even if you have one render pipeline, you still have to consider these. Something work only with deferred. something doesn't work in VR single pass. something only work with compute. something only work on DX12/vulkan blah blah blah. This are just the reality of game dev.
It's the authoring experience that seperate HDRP from URP and BiRP
HDRP go with the physically base exposure and light intensity which cascade into all the part of the pipeline, (light set up, internal pre-exposure shader calculation lighting/etc). How would you made this compatible with URP? you either use physically light unit and exposure or you don't. there is no merging both ways.
Although they are getting them pipeline close together, I don't think entirely merging the pipeline is ever gonna happen. sharing shader yes(but u still need to check platfrom/driver compat non the less). Sharing set up? never.

[buoyant drum]

well personally for #2 because I havent bothered to learn how to do it in blender 😆

dont think ive ever used blender for animation. all the ones ive ever made are in unity

[tender oracle]

This is pretty fair comment yeah, i guess it would be difficult to merge into a unified pipeline even if that would be preferable. I do feel that the setup and options for both URP and HDRP are a little too verbose and scattered especially for any casual or new users, scriptable objects for this and that with hundreds of options for many many overlapping things scattered around, even as someone who's been using render engines for many years it's a headache. At least take a hierarchical approach to options ie you can drill down to more parameters if you want/need to but for the most part most of those parameters shouldn't even be visible. They try and address this by having quality presets for various things in HDRP but again it's scattered all over and very confusing what affects what etc, really the UX is pretty terrible there. But UX aside it's really impressive what they are doing technically, i'm quietly confident Unity will hold it's own against for example Unreal in the rendering department in the not too distant future thanks to the work being done on the graphics pipeline.

[ornate bough]

Hello! My name is Ricky, and me and a friend are making a simple horror game, in a forrest within a maze. We are having massive performance issues, and it does not make a whole lot of sense to us.

We have been using Unity Terrain - HDRP Demo Scene (and ofcourse HDRP) and removed most of the demo stuff, keeping 1 terrain tile of a 1kx1k.
We are using simple toy bricks for the maze walls that use nearly no verticies, and are using everything grass and plants related straight from the package.

Can someone help me suggest why performance might be so terrible?
I've noticed that the HDRP Sample Scene by unity also runs this poorly.

Couple interesting notes:

• Yes, my pc is not in a great state anymore but it should run properly. (Result: 15-50fps)
• My friend has the same issues with a mid-end pc. (Result: 20-60fps)
• We tested this on another friends high-end pc and it got better, but still not good (Result: 30-80fps)
• URP has the same issues at first glance
• We already tried enabling Occlusion culling, but it did not do much for the performance
• We are no experts in HDRP and dont really understand lighting and how it all works. Consider us noobs

Any help is greatly appreciated! 😄

[ornate bough]

Hello! My name is Ricky, and me and a

[dawn sorrel]

Anyone know how to stop these weird artifacts with contact shadows on HDRP?

[strong elbow]

I just started a new HDRP project in Unity using the HDRP core template, and on two different versions, the entire skybox only in the scene view is black.

Any changes that I've made have not made a difference upon creating the project initially

Any ideas why that would happen?

[sacred veldt]

I just build game and everything is just blue like render from camera, everytime i do anything in editor I also need to disable camera and reenable to see anything

this only happens on some pc setups idk why, CI builder is fine or rest team

[formal crow]

make sure you have skybox turned on in scene view

[strong elbow]

It is turned on

[formal crow]

i think is because you are in unlit mode then

click the light bulb in the toolbar

[strong elbow]

I'm not though cause my objects are receiving lighting

Only the skybox isn't appearing

Nevermind

Apparently there's this button that I've genuinely never seen in my life

[odd sundial]

love my life, can anyone help me? everything in my scene is invisible, the first picture is in shaded mode, the second is in validate albedo mode, as a little info, i downloaded this off my friends github that he sent me so i could download it and help him with some stuff, but i opened it and it looked like.. nothing.

and yes it uses HDRP and i have installed

and no the normals arent flipped

and yes i just created that cube

[shrewd moon]

I would clone it again and see if there are any errors or warnings at any point
Also I'd ask the friend to clone it themselves to verify

[lucid gate]

When does it make sense for scene props in general to use "Contribute to GI"? When should i choose lightmap, when lightprobe?
I checked the docu, and the settings of the hdrp starter pack props but unfortunately, I haven't really become any wiser as a result 😄

[fluid merlin]

So, contribute to GI is an artistic choice for the most part on what you want to both receive and contribute GI. As an example, you have a neon sign (with no light component) that's emissive and you want the wall behind to get some of the bounced light from it. Another example, might be a table near a baked light source and you want the table to receive some of that light. In general, Lightmaps are for static objects, light probes for dynamic objects (objects that need to move around). There's a lot of minutiae involved in all of that as well as considerations for different lighting configs, etc.

[lucid gate]

Thanks! It's more or less what i thought then, someone said only for emissive material or light sources, thanks for the clarification.
Can you say a thing or two about: "Static Shadow Caster"

In the HDRP unity example, they don't use it very often, but for me it sounds, every static object that cast a shadow should have this one ticked?

[fluid merlin]

In theory, say you have that table and the light in the room. You can check the "static shadow caster" on the table and say the light is set to On Demand for shadows, Unity will cast that shadow into the shadowmap and cache it. As long as the table and light never move, it can save on performance. If either moves, you have to tell the light to update the shadow again. You have to do this via a script to tell the light to update the shadow map manually.

I haven't had much success with it in terms of performance because in general, Unity has terrible shadow performance. In fact, turn shadows off on everything that doesn't need them and never use a point light with a shadow if you can help it.

[lucid gate]

Thanks for the advice 🙏🏽

[digital spire]

if your have many light casting shadow you need to have a manager to register/unregister lights around the player 🙂 if you reached max cached shadowmap size, some light will not render shadow at all

[eternal laurel]

Heres hoping gpu shadow culling will be in soon

[jagged prairie]

Any news about GPU occlusion culling? Like will there be shadow/light culling or support for meshes like terrain, skinned mesh? Saw the burst oc but i think it currently only supports dots projects..

[minor depot]

Some kind of initial version is in the latest alpha I think. It also has STP and FSR2 if I remember correctly

[fluid merlin]

There's some info below, also it's only in alpha 2023.3.0a18 and later.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/gpu-driven-rendering-in-unity.1502702/page-3#post-9524425

It's buggy though right now though according to the Unity guy in the thread.

Also requires GPU Resident Drawer too

[dusky trench]

Any tips on how I should troubleshoot Unity 2022.3 crashing when opening a project after installing the HDRP package?

[fluid merlin]

Look at the editor log and see why it crashes
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LogFiles.html

Sometimes the log doesn't have much, but it's a start. Usually when it crashes right after opening, you have to rebuild the Library folder.

[dusky trench]

    Native Crash Reporting
=================================================================
Got a UNKNOWN while executing native code. This usually indicates
a fatal error in the mono runtime or one of the native libraries 
used by your application.
=================================================================

=================================================================
    Managed Stacktrace:
=================================================================
      at <unknown> <0xffffffff>
      at UnityEditor.Handles:Internal_DrawCameraWithGrid <0x000a7>
      at UnityEditor.Handles:DrawCameraImpl <0x005e2>
      at UnityEditor.Handles:DrawCameraStep1 <0x000b2>
      at UnityEditor.SceneView:DoDrawCamera <0x00ac2>
      at UnityEditor.SceneView:DoOnGUI <0x00de2>
      at UnityEditor.SceneView:OnSceneGUI <0x0001a>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.IMGUIContainer:DoOnGUI <0x00a1e>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.IMGUIContainer:HandleIMGUIEvent <0x0040a>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.IMGUIContainer:DoIMGUIRepaint <0x0054a>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIR.RenderChainCommand:ExecuteNonDrawMesh <0x00683>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIR.UIRenderDevice:EvaluateChain <0x0137a>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIR.RenderChain:Render <0x006e2>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIRRepaintUpdater:Update <0x00252>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.VisualTreeUpdater:UpdateVisualTreePhase <0x000d5>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.Panel:UpdateForRepaint <0x000aa>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.Panel:Repaint <0x00272>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIElementsUtility:DoDispatch <0x00186>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIElementsUtility:UnityEngine.UIElements.IUIElementsUtility.ProcessEvent <0x000f2>
      at UnityEngine.UIElements.UIEventRegistration:ProcessEvent <0x0008e>
      at <>c:<.cctor>b__1_2 <0x0002a>
      at UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent <0x0005c>
      at <Module>:runtime_invoke_void_int_intptr_intptr& <0x00095>

[fluid merlin]

Try removing your scene from the project that it's crashing on, see if Unity will open and will allow you to create a new scene or open the template scene for HDRP.

If you're just moving to HDRP, I always recommend starting a new blank HDRP project. You never want to try to "upgrade" your project, the upgrade wizard is like doing surgery with a chainsaw.

[dusky trench]

I think rebuilding the Library worked

[fluid merlin]

Must have been a small project

[dusky trench]

yes, just a modding SDK for Lethal Company

Thanks for the help

[shell yoke]

Having a strange Ray Tracing issue... There's this bright line that follows the camera around and gets brighter when in emissive source.

If I turn off Screen Space GI it goes away or if I change it to Ray Marching it goes away.

[shell yoke]

oof im an idiot lol

It was the capsule mesh for the player LOL

[boreal fiber]

Hi i'm trying to make a HeatVisualizer in unity and want to be sure I got it right.
The objective is to be able to render fullscreen "temperatures data" for each object in scene taking in account lights and maybe transparency.
With HDRP i intend to set up CustomRenderPasses, one to render temperature data on camera pov, one more to modify these data by light influence, and maybe one more to apply it to the camera render texture (from what i've understand of FullScreenPasses in doc).
How can I setup specific data by rendered object for the first heat phase ? I build a material from a shader but i need to access each object and modify the material rendering each one with each object properties, i know i could set each layer to specific heat but that would force object to specific "heat steps", before lights modifications.
How can I retrieve light scene data in the second pass ? Do i have to render only light influence on one texture and merge heat and light ?
Is my idea in the right direction ? Thx for your help !

[pulsar skiff]

Quick question, will increasing the camera far plane cost more performance?

I want my level to look large, even though the player cant go far. The source engine uses 3D sky boxes to do this, its a small extention to the level, placed out of bounds and created at 1/16th the size of the normal level, it is then rendered by a second camera and the main camera is rendered on top to create the illusion of a large level

It saves performance on the source engine but im not sure if t will be the same here

Will it?

Or is it fine if i just expand my level but with less detail

Im thinking of ysing the compositor with two cameras but wouldnt that cause a horrible framerate issue?

[boreal fiber]

I've been able to render different colors for different layers, but i'm not yet sure how to specify color or maybe texture for each object in scene later.

[hollow osprey]

This might be a dumb question.
But I am trying to place grass down and paint other details on the ground,
how ever I am getting this error and I have no idea what it means

[boreal fiber]

I've been able to have the same results with much less code (like none). I'm still not sure how i can setup materials for each object in scene without one layer and one custom pass per object

[jagged prairie]

detail prefabs such as your grass cannot contain a LOD component

Your grass should use the terrain grass shader and you should set that up based on how much is on your scene/is rendered on screen, else your framerate will cry

[pulsar skiff]

Push

[shrewd moon]

No, unless it also means the camera is now rendering more stuff
Increasing the far plane may decrease z-buffer accuracy and will decrease shadow quality though

[shrewd moon]

Compositor is not meant for anything performance-sensitive
As I understand it's not meant for games at all but rather something like visualizations

[shrewd moon]

It's not really a rendering performance thing on Source, but rather because of how poorly .bsp format deals with big spaces, as well as to reduce z-fighting for very distant objects

[shrewd moon]

I expect it would be fine
You might also be able to use the custom pass system to make such a 3D skybox

[pulsar skiff]

Thanks for all the info!
When you say custom pass do you mean rendering a second camera then using a full screen custom pass to render it behind things?

[shrewd moon]

I'm not super familiar with it but it's something I'd look into
Generally you don't use extra cameras with HDRP because of the expense
But you can get a similar effect by rendering the 3D skybox behind everything and moving it with a script a proportion of the player's movement to give it the distance illusion

[pulsar skiff]

Yes i know about the second part, what im asking is, did you mean to tell me to use two cameras to render the 3d sky box and the main level seperately, in that last message?

[shrewd moon]

Not specifically
If you can economically do that, it's a good option
But I suspect you don't need to, and don't have to
As you should be able to get visually the exact same result by using the custom pass and the offset script

[pulsar skiff]

How am i supposed to use a custom pass for this? A vertex shader?

[shrewd moon]

Not a shader pass, but the custom pass feature
https://youtu.be/vBqSSXjQvCo
It can be used similarly to URP's render objects for overriding depth

[pulsar skiff]

Unity has a draw objects and a full screen custom pass. Which one am i supposed to use for this? There arent many tutorials on custom passes that i could find

[shrewd moon]

What do you mean by "draw objects"?
Custom Pass seems to do what you need, and it has detailed documentation https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Custom-Pass-Creating.html

[pulsar skiff]

Nvm it was draw renderer

It replaces materials and changes draw orders and stuff like that

Havent used it very much tho

[shrewd moon]

Try the Custom Pass first

Seems to be better supported with more options

[pulsar skiff]

When i click the plus button on the custom passes list it gives me these two options

Draw renderer and full screen

[shrewd moon]

Oh, I thought you were referring to the script method of the same name
Fullscreen custom pass would be used for fullscreen effects, whereas DrawRenderers lets you control rendering of specific gameobjects so that's what you want

[pulsar skiff]

So thats the one i should use right? I dont see how i can modify vertex data without modifying the material of the skybox game objects

[shrewd moon]

You shouldn't have to modify anything related to vertices or materials
Only to place the skybox meshes between the sky and the scene in render order

[pulsar skiff]

Why would i even use custom passes then, i mean if my skybox go's are already to-size, and big enough that they already appear behind the levels geometry, whats the point of modifying the draw orders?

I thought you were saying i can use custom passes, to do the camera stacking thing with the 1/16th size skybox meshes

How can you make the objects look bigger without modifying vertex data

[shrewd moon]

Making them big is one option I suggested
The other option would be to something like camera stacking to avoid making them big, but since HDRP doesn't let you practically use multiple cameras, you can get a similar effect with a custom pass instead

[pulsar skiff]

How am i supposed to use custom passes to do this thoooo

[shrewd moon]

How big objects appear is entirely contextual
If you have a miniature 1/16 3D skybox and another camera in it, and the camera moves at 1/16 of your movement speed within that miniature, it appears 16 times bigger to the viewer
If the skybox camera doesn't move at all, the miniature skybox appears 'infinitely big' regardless of its actual size

But if we want to avoid using another camera since cameras and especially compositing are so expensive, the other option is to attach the 3D skybox to the player's own camera instead, and move it with a proportional offset to the camera's motion

Same deal but flipped roles

Still, the illusion doesn't work unless the 3D skybox's render order is modified so it's drawn behind the scene, but in front of the sky

That's what the custom pass system could do for you

It could potentially be done by modifying the shader render queue rather than with custom passes if that seems easier

I'd forget everything about "vertex data"

If that all seems tricky, you could go with the first option and just make it big

The only drawback to that is that you may get z-fighting issues by stretching the clip planes so far apart
And you'd also have to bundle up shadow cascades closer to the camera

[pulsar skiff]

So this is basically what you are telling me to do, right?

[shrewd moon]

yes ^^

[pulsar skiff]

Thank you 🙏🙏

For you patience

[shrewd moon]

I've only read about the Custom Pass system so I'm a bit hazy about how it precisely works
But if it seems it can't do the draw order thing we need, then overriding Render Queue directly with scripts should still work for this

[knotty stump]

Hello !
I'm writing a Custom Pass that rely on Compute Shader and I'm struggling sampling the CameraDepthTexture from the Compute Shader. The pass is set to After Post Processing. Using CustomPassUtils.Copy from the depthbuffer to a custom Color Buffer give me a black texture (the Copy is not appearing in the Frame Debugger). Does someone have already achieve this ?

[boreal fiber]

Thermal Vision

[pulsar skiff]

Do shadow masks in hdrp just make far away things, display a pre determined shadow(kinda like baked shadows) instead of just, having no shadows?

[eternal laurel]

Its a bit more complicated https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightMode-Mixed-Shadowmask.html

[open tree]

what's the best way to cover a large open area with lots of grass? I tried unity terrain grass but the performance hit is massive. Feels like I am missing something, I have seen games rendering way more grass than this and performance is fine. I have heard about geomtry shaders but not sure how to implement it on HDRP.

[pulsar skiff]

If you are trying to make nature and terrain in hdrp i would recommend you check out the official book of the dead(or whatever its called) asset on the asset storr. Its a scene in nature made in unity hdrp by unity

@open tree

[open tree]

Thanks I will check it out

[shrewd moon]

Usually grass is drawn with gpu instancing, which is what I think the Terrain uses also but people still often complain about poor performance with it
VFX graph is particularly good at drawing a lot of geometry and there's an official demo for using it for grass somewhere, that's deformable too

Geometry shaders as I understand are a bit of an experimental thing that don't have very competitive performance

[open tree]

VFX graph.. very interesting idea. Yeah I think it will work great for my case.

[boreal fiber]

How can i use the exposure node in hdrp ? I've tried to display it using a custom pass and a fullScreen shader to observe light exposition on the entire screen but i only see black, do i have to apply some modifications on the exposure values ? Can't find anything in documentation

[fluid merlin]

You need a GPU instancer that can do what's called "indirect instancing" to get dense grass & vegetation to be performant. In the example below, I'm using Nature Renderer on a RTX 3080 for >300fps grass.
https://i.imgur.com/yZIkghs.jpg

A few things you need to know... You have to use an asset at this point, while Unity has the capability to do indirect instancing, there's nofree tools from Unity to leverage it for vegetation for the terrain tools. In fact, Unity terrain details doesn't do LOD either, so you need something that can bypass Unity's detail manager as well. So you need vegetation biome tools like either Microverse or Gaia which can spawn the vegetation. GPU Instancer & Nature Renderer only do rendering, not spawning.

The hope is that in the future, Unity decides to make biome mangement and performant vegetation tools a priority at some point in the future, until then, it costs a good deal to add this functionality to your project.

[open tree]

@fluid merlin I see. So I need a 3rd party plug in to use "indirect instancing".

[fluid merlin]

Not unless you want to spend a year or so writing your own using https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.RenderMeshIndirect.html

Otherwise, I'd recommend Nature Renderer.

If you're using a lot of 3rd party shaders for vegetation (Naturemanufacturer, etc), you'll want to use The Vegetation Engine with it to convert the shaders to use Nature Renderer.

Expect to invest a day or so to learn it, there's some tutorials and documentation, but it can get a little squirrely at times if you're using other vegetation tools like Gaia or Microverse.

Unity is putting in some kind of GPU occlusion into 2023.3.0a18 with Render Drawer, it's hard to say whether or not the occluder & the GPU render drawer will be as performant (I have doubts).

Unity has been working on it since the MegaCity demo from 4 years ago, whoops, 5 years ago so whether or not it is going to be awesome in Unity 6 is up for debate.

[open tree]

@fluid merlin got it. well I am new to unity so definitely not enough knowledge to make my own solution lol. Also I was just experimenting with it, not making any game or such.

[fluid merlin]

Ah, I understand... oddly enough, vegetation is one of the harder things to do in Unity.

[pulsar skiff]

Hey clover, you got any good free alternatives for these vegetation assets you provided?

[fluid merlin]

Yeah, you can try "Mega World" and https://github.com/Myrmecoman/Unity-GPU-Vegetation-Instancer-HDRP_URP
YMMV though on Unity versions, shaders, etc.

Let's hope Unity makes a vegetation biome pipeline in the future.

[buoyant drum]

Anyone made a bright day scene

and had issues with lights when it comes to buildings

every light does nothing unless its the directional

also im still just constantly getting: d3d12: Attempting to bind a NULL or empty texture. Perhaps the texture contains no image data or has an invalid size.

and nothing tells me what it is

[fluid merlin]

It sounds like you've got some oddness happening with your Exposure value maybe. The standard "outdoor" HDRP default scene isn't terrible. You can some decent profiles from the Unity template demo scene.

Not sure what you mean by lights & buildings... lights on the buildings, reflecting off the buildings, or like emissive windows?

[buoyant drum]

inside lights

ill try and just redo the scene pp

right after i figure out why upgrading to 2023.2.3f1 has just got rid of all my hdrp stuff and wont recognise any of it now

tried uninstalling and reinstalling and doesnt come up so im trying to create a new pipeline asset

that doesnt seem to be a thing either

[fluid merlin]

Moving forward in new versions of HDRP can cause problems with custom shaders for previous versions.

[buoyant drum]

I get that but like

the actual render pipeline asset

i cant see anywhere to create one

[fluid merlin]

Oh... I see

[buoyant drum]

and the previous ones i had are just not showing up

tried reinstalling multiple times and still the same thing

[fluid merlin]

I've had the best luck creating a new project and then copying over assets piece by piece. I haven't had a good upgrade in HDRP ever, always new installs, new projects.

[buoyant drum]

its a GREAT THING I decided to make a backup right before upgrading to 2023!

[fluid merlin]

Backup is critical, even when not upgrading, but especially so... even up minor revisions.

[buoyant drum]

yeah

whats the best way to go about it

github or?

cause ive just made a rar im gonna save somewhere

stupidly i havent made many backups as you can tell 😆

[fluid merlin]

People swear by version control, but I've had mixed results. Yeah, rar works pretty good with unity projects. I use Macrium Reflect so I can restore bare metal or individual files. It runs in the background off hours so I don't have to think about it.

[buoyant drum]

nice

ill check that out

thanks

[primal arrow]

sorry if this isn't the right place to post, but my goal is to create kind of a "gloomy" cabin

i've added fog as you can see and i was curious what some opinions on it were, to much, to little, or something you'd change in general

[warm ledge]

why don't you use URP instead? its more optimized and flexible.

[warm ledge]

you can add dust particles inside instead of fog

even add a baby doll with blood stains on top of that bed to create a little story for this cabin

use resident evil 7 house for inspiration

[primal arrow]

bc to be honest the particle system really confuses me 😭

[warm ledge]

asset store?

[primal arrow]

i'll look around

[shrewd moon]

Not very gloomy when the lighting is leaking from the outside
You can try alleviate that by setting up a reflection probe for correct specular lighting, and an indirect lighting controller to reduce ambient lighting (or baked lighting)

[primal arrow]

i don't mean gloomy as in dark

i mean it as in like

if you walked in there

it would be extremely uncomfortable in terms of surroundings if that makes sense

[warm ledge]

outlast

[shrewd moon]

Currently it's lit as if it's reflecting the sunny outside, which isn't really conducive for a gloomy atmosphere

[warm ledge]

play or watch outlast or other horror games

[primal arrow]

alr

[shrewd moon]

That seems irrelevant for the topic of gloomy cabins

HDRP is plenty optimized and flexible but with different goals

[warm ledge]

just made a suggestion

[buoyant drum]

fixed the lighting issue and now i got this lol

one after the other lol. Anyone know a way around this? Using the HDRI sky and visual enviro the water doesnt have a material its just default

[shrewd moon]

That's adaptive exposure in action
It's not exactly an issue

[buoyant drum]

adaptive exposure?

On the skybox?

Im just trying to change it from being so dark without messing with everything else in the scene

[shrewd moon]

On the exposure volume override

@buoyant drum https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Override-Exposure.html check out how the different adaptive exposure modes work

[fluid merlin]

Use some reference images to help align your vision with what you're trying to build out, you can find stuff pretty easily around the internet searching around for gloomy rooms, creepy cabins, etc. In any case, at first glance, some darker corners. You're getting light leaking in and giving you some specular lighting on the floor which shifts light balance of the room. The dark corners aren't dark enough so you need some lighting work on it for sure. You might also want to consider some decals to add some water leak stains which will help age the materials in there a bit. The volumetic fog is a nice touch, you can switch to local fog add noise to the fog and a vector value to it which will "animate" the fog a bit as well so your lightbeams/godrays through the window won't stay static. However, you're still at the mercy of Unity's lighting system which is on the best of days difficult to use.

[dawn sorrel]

Does anyone know what is causing this in my HDRP project? Any UI or transparent object is affected, however only if the skybox is behind it

[eternal laurel]

The easiest way for me at least to make someone feel uncomfortable in a space is to make that space as unusable as possible. Broken furniture, moldy walls, wet floors that you cant even sit on, badly lit with deep shadows especially in the corners so that your peripheral vision starts playing tricks on you. Also in terms of realism the fog inside the cabin wont be so thick or at all present.

[boreal fiber]

I have multiple pass drawing on camera in greyscale, a pass to convert greyscale in gradient in the custom buffer and one more to draw from custom to camera (since doc say to not fetch and draw at the same time on the same buffer) but the gradient pass work sometimes well in shader graph preview but only render white in frame debugger, how is this possible ? The screenshot is supposed to help ^^', u can ask me details if needed. Thx !

[primal arrow]

also one question, is hdrp suitable for an actual game? i was mostly looking into it because of the graphics, but some forum posts say that hdrp should really only be used for movie making and simulations

[eternal laurel]

Well those forum posts are 100% wrong. My studio is making a fps game with HDRP now.

[minor depot]

Sons of the forest, hardspace shipbreaker, and V rising are some examples of finished games in HDRP

Lethal Company too I think

[digital spire]

We are making games with hdrp, It is absolutely possible. But you need custom culling solution that's not Umbra if you have dense scene. Custom terrain renderer as well if you want high density foliage. Although both point can also be true if you want to optimize other pipeline. You'll just run into the bottlenecks faster with hdrp

[fluid merlin]

Yeah, it’s far easier to make a game than a movie or something like that with HDRP. Yeah it’s pretty tough to make a AAA style game with HDRP, it’s missing a lot of performant workflow pipelines for things like characters, vegetation, hi-z culling, and an easy high-quality lighting system. Assets sort of fill in the gaps where Unity has fallen short. They are adding stuff into the newer alphas but it’s unrefined and not suitable for deployment today. Maybe in a year or so… other than some of those things, it’s not impossible, just painstaking at times.

[short cairn]

but can URP ever look close to what HDRP can do? (new user)

[shrewd moon]

Depends what you mean by close but the new URP samples should give you some idea of what's possible even without any third party assets
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/URP3DSampleScenes

You certainly won't feel the loss of the most cutting edge triple-A workflows on HDRP if you're not pushing past its limits, which are far beyond URP to begin with

and URP is plenty capable even for "realistic" stuff

[short cairn]

Very cool, thanks!

i'll give it a go then

[onyx lark]

I need to calculate the illuminance produced by a light source at a specific point in space. Is there a convenient way to do this without having to do the calculations myself?

I'm using this, along with global illumination data, for a stealth system.

oh

oh, nevermind, that's just how you configure the light's intensity if you're using lux

[scarlet hull]

No convenient way no 😦

[onyx lark]

i'm currently falling down the luminosity function rabbit hole

The math doesn't seem so bad for computing luminance, at least. I just need to get these units straight!

[scarlet hull]

Now, if you ignore stuff like the volumetric fog attenuation, iirc HDRP follows the simple quadratic attenuation rule.

[onyx lark]

Point and spot lights both fall off with radius squared

Area lights sound more annoying

[onyx lark]

(and i'm not sure the player will notice that blue lights are making them more visible than they should)

[onyx lark]

I was previously just using GI data. I sampled the color from light probes and then used the value to get brightness.

One thing I'm unsure about, actually...what physical light unit does the color that a light probe gives you correspond to?

It's a measure of how much light is passing through that point in space

So, lux? That's lumens per square meter.

[scarlet hull]

Probably not lux, more lumens, or nits, or "ev100"

[onyx lark]

ah, yeah, because nits are candelas per square meter, and candela measures directional intensity

And I have seen good agreement between the log2 of the value from light probes and the EV100 value in the rendering debugger on a diffuse white surface

(for a baked directional sun)

[ebon yarrow]

I have a shader that manipulates alpha values depending on input fed by a MB script. And I would like to know if it's possible to sample a point from MB to know if that point is alpha 0 or not during that frame.

[onyx lark]

Doubt it, unless you're drawing to a render texture that you can then sample from

You might just need to recreate the shader's logic in C#

[open tree]

bit of a weird problem. I made this custom snow shader and overlays on these rocks using a custom pass. And it works fine in editor, but it vanishes from some objects in build version.

editor

build

I have no idea what's causing it.

those objects have a custom shader graph shader. These are rocks from the unity terrain demo scene. if that helps.

[orchid bridge]

anyone on 2023.3.0b1 has these same spikes? nearly empty scene with a 4080

[digital spire]

havn't downloaded it yet.

but the above pic discoraged me lol

[orchid bridge]

it's DX12 related. not happening in DX11.
and it's also not project related because i have this in a totally new one with an empty scene. so, 2023.3.0b1 + HDRP + DX12 is broken

[buoyant drum]

is this something to worry about? Always pops up sometimes spams

[primal arrow]

could i just ignore this and go about my life

[dawn sorrel]

So annoying that you have to have a mask map and cant just have separate slots for all maps

But in standard you do

It seems like you can trick unity into making a mask map for you automatically though, by converting the standard mat into hdrp mat

[spiral moat]

any ideas how i can use a shader as my skybox ?
i don't have the skybox material option inside Lightning > Environment in HDRP

the idea is to have a animated sky shader

[ancient karma]

is there a way to implement occlusion culling for a procedurally generated mesh? As in, I want the faces on the mesh I'm not looking at to not be rendered.

Or is it a better practice to split the mesh into separate chunks, and implement occlusion culling for each chunk?

[jagged prairie]

theres some plugin called channel packer where you can generate the mask maps inside unity

[ancient karma]

Shaders modify the materials they are applied to based on instructions. Shaders are a tool to make materials behave certain ways.

That being said, you must go to your volume and add thr HDRI sky ovveride

Then you can add an hdri texture

[spiral moat]

yes but my material isnt showing because it isnt a HDRI ?

[jagged prairie]

theyre working on realtime oc (also with some kind of auto lod or auto culling for small objects). im not sure if that'd work with procedural meshes and that kind of stuff but its already available in the latest beta i think

[spiral moat]

so my question is more about what type should i output with my shader/linked material to make it usable in the Hdri Sky selector

[ancient karma]

Thanks, I'll check it out

[ancient karma]

I don't think you can use the material/shader, because the shader on the material must be cubemap . Perhaps you can try to copy and modify the cubemap shader code ? Or try to replicate the desired animation with the hdri sky properties

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@10.2/manual/Override-HDRI-Sky.html

[spiral moat]

ty for the directrrions, i'll lookout
after writing my message i got an idea and i think it worked

i create a shader graph, added "custom render texture" target
created a custom render texture, added the shader material inside
added the custom render texture in the "hdri sky" parameter

incase someone is interested

now ill test some stuff with time and see if it doesnt broke

[fluid merlin]

Been using hdrp for years and I still feel like I’m doing something wrong

[dawn sorrel]

😍

[dawn sorrel]

Yeah lol

[cerulean dew]

Does anybody know why my HDRP settings doesn't have the "Deformer" option for water?

[eternal laurel]

You are probably on a older version

[full steeple]

why is this happening every time i save a shader, my pc is pretty decent so i'd say its not my pc. but especially as someone who works alot in shadergraph this is really annoying and often it doesnt even load anything as far as i know. does anyone know how i can stop this from happening every time i save a shader?

[digital spire]

If it happenes every single time you save shader graph then this seem like a bug...

[vital locust]

anyone know how to swap scenarios in code for probe volumes?

theres nothing in the docs about it

theres a post on the forums i read last night how to do it but now i cant find it

[vital locust]

nevermind i found it https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-to-make-an-interior-look-dark-when-looking-at-it-from-the-exterior.1415301/#post-8930781

[full steeple]

it is not every 'single' time but i think 8/10 it happens, yesterdays peak was 36 minutes loading for just changing the smoothness value, thats just insane to me.

i mean i like develloping but from the 6 hours a day i work on the project i wait almost a quart of the time

[shrewd moon]

Seems like a bug of some kind
Never had that happen in any render pipeline or version

[digital spire]

I get where you're coming from. Editing large sg is very very very slow, but minutes for a change is too much. If you can, use Amplify in the mean time. then to fix the sg issue, you either create repo project.(should be doable for sg bug) Or find the workaround/ fix the bug yourself. Imo, waiting for unity to fix a reported bug is at least 1 month away. Better spend time porting shader to ase or fix it yourself.

[full steeple]

thanks for both yours opinions, ill check out amplify, never heard of it but i'll check it out, my project at this point has around 1200 materials, idk wheter that has to do something with it. if i cannot figure it out i'll let you know in a few days.

[buoyant drum]

Before and after

working on this today aswell, before and after

[jagged prairie]

I love backrooms games and this one looks promising!

[buoyant drum]

Thank you! Theres a bunch of posts and more coming for the progress of it on my channel. If you wanna see more of it. Level 0 has gone through loaaaads of redesigning

[loud perch]

Does anyone know how can i handle issue with Water System where visual effects/particles are seen under the water while camera is above the water?

[full zephyr]

a quick tip: disable single pass (makes hdrp run faster)

[jagged prairie]

🤌

[long scarab]

you mean the XR setting Single Pass? Turning it off should have no impact if you don't use XR, but will make things slower if you use XR.

[full zephyr]

It gave me an fps boost once I turned it off

Without XR too

[long scarab]

did you measure GPU and CPU time in a build?

you can't measure performance in a reliable way in Editor, and FPS is the worst measure to use

[full zephyr]

While FPS is a bad way to measure, its good enough to know that turning it off improves on PC, I noticed an avg fps increase from 55 to 72 afterwards

No changes in anything different, just disabling the single pass

[long scarab]

in a build?

you should do a bug report if this is consistently reproducable

[full zephyr]

I did it in editor so I also had slightly more cpu time due to the editorloop

I can most likely reach a 100 fps in build with the current setup tested on a GT 1030 so hdrp can be made to run well

[long scarab]

I guess you just toggled a HDRP asset reset with the change, and thus you got some FPS increase. Happens to me all the time in Editor. Thus measuring in Editor does not really help most of the time.

[loud perch]

Thanks to myself - I manage to fix this.... For anyone intrested -> i had to change in Visual Effect Graph from Output Particle Octagon to Output Particle Quad

[muted nest]

Is it possible to have a custom pass in a volume that only effects one object in the scene?

[tacit kraken]

Hey everyone. I'm playing around with Unity's hair strand rendering system. It works, but I'm not getting "soft" results in HDRP. As you can see from the screenshot, it's very strand-looking and not realistic. The docs talk about enabling "high-quality line rendering", but I can't find that in the HDRP asset. Does anyone know what I can do it make it look better? Thanks.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@16.0/manual/use-high-quality-line-rendering.html

[dawn sorrel]

You can enable it in Quality > HDRP in project settings, and then add a High Quality Line Rendering assset to the Volume

[tacit kraken]

Thanks for the info. Have you enabled it and got better results with the strand rendering?

[jagged prairie]

Do you use some kind of AA?

[tacit kraken]

I'm using TAA since the new scene defaults to that

[jagged prairie]

Maybe try playing around with quality settings or other AA cause you can clearly see jagged edges around the eye, mouth, skin, etc.

[silver lichen]

Hello, I've recently converted from URP to HDRP and whenever i try put a decal down the script gives me an index out of bounds error i do not know how to solve. Decal materials i also try to put into the decal projector automatically switch back to the default one. It still projects the default decal however, so i'm not sure.

more error code

[open tree]

So currently I am working on a personal project and found something. I am changing the sun intensity using a c# script, changing the intensity based on time of day. Mainly because I dont want to keep the skies lit up longer after the sun sets. But updating the sun intensity real time has significant performance cost. Any idea why? or how to overcome this? I just the sun to be around 100,000 lux at noon then lower the value during sunrise and sunset.

[scarlet hull]

Are you useing the physicially base sky in HDRP ?
This sky is the most computational heavy, in particular when some parameters are animated, because the athmospheric scattering and some look up table need to be recalculated, so moving or changing the sun intensity will cause performance drops.

Also note that the sun intensity is automatically changed (not visible in the inspector, but in the rendering) when you rotate the light object, as the PBSky does take the angle in consideration for the lighting intensity.

[whole fossil]

guys, I found something unexpected for me. The quality of the LocalVolumetricFog relies heavily on camera FOV. Is that expected? Is there a way to mitigate it?

these 3 screens are different only by camera FOV

[shrewd moon]

Volumetric fog uses a 3D grid of voxels distributed in the view frustum so it at least makes sense that there is an effect
Not sure about mitigation

[whole fossil]

that makes sense, thanks

[scarlet hull]

You can change the settings for the volumetric fog rendering in the fog volume override

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@14.0/manual/Override-Fog.html

[whole fossil]

do you have some particular setting in mind? Cause I don't know what should mitigate it apart from the quality/budget which changes a lot in terms of performance

I mean it improves the quality but the overhead is much greater than increasing the fov

[scarlet hull]

You can go in advanced mode an set youself the screen "divisions" as well as the depth slices

(named screen resolution percentage and volume slice count)

Or simply tweak the "Resolution Depth Ratio" that automatically handles the ratio of those two settings (the more screen resolution, the less depth slices)

[open tree]

makes sense. I know the intensity changing when rotating the sun but I want to have some control over how much it changes. Anyway, I guess the best solution would be updating it in some interval.

[digital hedge]

I am using the new unity water system and i am trying to have it in a cube form so what i did was make 2, 1 for the underwater part and 1 for the top, and then stack them but i would like the sides of the water to be straight even if the water moves how would i do this? is it a settings i just can't find or is it not possible to make the sides straight (PS: i know this is not exactly what the system is made for :)

[scarlet hull]

Not easy to understand what you are trying to achieve.
So, you want a big cube of water, with the effect applied on all it's faces ?
This is currently not possible with the water system, as it is made to have "horizontal" water.
I don't get what should be shown in the first screenshot

[digital hedge]

Ow no i am trying to get horizontal water but with clean sides but if i try to make the sides clear it becomes blurry, so i stack it on cube thats seetrough. I just want a water cube lol.

[scarlet hull]

Do'nt you use a simple water surface ? Why do you apply it to a cube mesh ?

[digital hedge]

i applied it to a cube so it has sides

[scarlet hull]

You should use one mesh or water surface for ... well, the surface.
And an other mesh for the sized (supposely, glass panels of an aquarium ?)

[digital hedge]

Yeah thats what i am doing, but the problem is the sides slowly move wich means they are out of sink and that looks a little weird lol. Any way to fix that make the sides of the water not move?

or maybe a better way to make a water cube

[patent topaz]

Hellooo, I'm currently playing around with SSGI for project. On the documentation there is a reference to the "Ray Miss propety". However I can't find it in the Unity inspector. I'm using Unity 2022LTS. Thanksss very muchh

[kindred gale]

It looks like you should set the geometry type to custom in order to provide your own mesh. Then as Remy mention the simulation works on a 2D surface, but you can make a custom water shadergraph and edit the verte shader to force the horizontal deformation to stay in your cube on the top faec, and force it to 0 on the sides

[stuck kraken]

Hi folks. I´m using the HDR Render pipeline and I already created an Asset for it. As you can see in the attachment. I really would like the user to chance the "in game settings", but "SetMSAASamples" is red. using UnityEngine.Rendering; is at the top as well... I think I miss something. Any help is much appreciated 🙂

[kindred gale]

you probably should use rendering layers for that. You can enable Rendering Layer Mask Buffer in HDRP asset and then use the HDSamlpeBuffer node in shadergraph to test the rendering layer of an object at a given pixel

[kindred gale]

you can override the msaa sample count in the camera's framesetings (by default it's set to 'from hdrp asset' but you can change that how you want)

[kindred gale]

enable the additional properties in the three dot menu fo the SSGI component

[stuck kraken]

Thank you for your quick answer. I will try. Mega

[patent topaz]

Alright I’ll take a look at it. Thank you very much !!

[digital hedge]

ow how do i force the sides to stay 0 (i have bin looking all over the place what setting )

[stuck kraken]

thank you again, worked 🥳

[kindred gale]

it's not a setting, it's in the shadergraph, you don't evaluate the deformation node in the vertex shader for some vertices

[digital hedge]

owww, thank you!

[jagged raven]

hey guys im having probs with post processing, when i turn them on they just sometimes work sometimes dont, i cant work it out, there is no logic to it

in the past they worked perfect but on unity 2022.3.12 they dont work around 95% of the time, has anyone has issues with this? especially with changing them at runtime

literally spent a week trying to spot any logic at all, weirdly some always work like chromatic abberation

[jagged prairie]

if your modifying the overrides in runtime, you need to use the function Override() instead of chaning the parameters themselves. Had same issue and it took ages to find this out, very bad UX

[jagged raven]

thanks! actually simply needed to delete my volume and add a new one, DOH.

u can still do stuff like this though right?

tempGLITCH.offsetStrength = new ClampedFloatParameter(Random.Range(0.1f, 1f), 0.0f, 1.0f);

hmm maybe ur right i`ll check if thats actually working lol

[jagged prairie]

yes this is what i tried and this does not work on some overrides i think so u need to use that function then instead

[jagged raven]

awesome thanks, you're right!.. its a shame there is more hdrp post processing fx..

isn't

glad i ran into you zingzang lol 😄

[topaz ravine]

work of the day about clothes and hair (cotton material from samples)

[jagged raven]

nice!

[topaz ravine]

did anyone play with the fullscreen pass samples recently? the Camera Rain is modify the scene view hardly 2023.2.5

ah before transparent is working, i may raise a quick ticket

[jagged raven]

no what are they, link ?

looking for good fullscreen fx

[topaz ravine]

package manager> HDRP package > samples tab 'FullScreen Effect"

So camera Rain is a prefab, just drag into the scene, it may be my hdrp settings so, tell me if you have the same scene view issue

[topaz ravine]

do your custom pass use DrawRenderer using a replacement material? bcs I have the same issue in build using a custompass and a replacment material

I suspect culling parameters

[open tree]

yes. I fixed it by turning on Lit shader mode to forward or both

[topaz ravine]

erf I don't replace with a lit myself

it's a custom unlit, that may point to a direction

[opal mica]

Hello! Does anyone know if there's some kind of standard practice for rendering first person arms on top of the main camera in HDRP, like camera stacking? I've seen people talk about the graphics compositor and custom passes, but I haven't been able to find any complete answers anywhere that actually explain how to do it. Thanks in advance!

[opal mica]

Thanks for the help!
Are you saying that I can assign an overlay camera in the camera component? Because I can't find anything like that?
Also, could you explain further what you mean with the render feature/render pass? Are you talking about a custom pass volume?
Thanks!

[eternal laurel]

Standart approach would be to use custom passes due to the perf impact of multiple cameras in hdrp here is a example https://github.com/alelievr/HDRP-Custom-Passes/tree/master/Assets/CustomPasses/FPS Foreground You need to set up the pass at two points such as here

[opal mica]

All right, thanks, I’ll check that out!

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

[topaz ravine]

another solution that is more heavy than custom pass is the graphic compositor, you can have camera stacking with :https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@10.0/manual/Compositor-Main.html

[pulsar skiff]

Idk why but this always causes issues for me with ssao of the world, rendering on top of the thing that is being rendered in front

[shrewd moon]

Camera stacking is very inflexible for things that are expected to physically exist in the world, especially since you can't practically get shadow casting I believe

I find it better to shrink the viewmodel towards the camera, and optionally also squash it to simulate FoV changes, and move it to avoid poking through obstacles which looks believable too

[azure osprey]

Wait quick question, I brought an environment from the asset store and then a gun import (which needed hdrp) and then overwrote all the materials in my environment to hdrp, is there a way to revert it or is it just going to stay like that?

I have neon white grass and some other neon pink stuff lol

[scarlet hull]

You could just force reimport the environment assets

[azure osprey]

Yeah I manually changed a decent omount of settings and scripts didn't wanna go through that

Ty tho

[final pagoda]

Hello, I installed HDRP, and quickly realised it broke some texture that were turning pink. Afterwards, I uninstalled it. But I remarked the visuals we slightly more contrasted, this is seen more with a more darker ambient light. How to revert this and basically go back to the standard lightning ?

[digital spire]

1.it doesn't broke texture, the HDRP need other type of material (HDRP/Lit) instead of (Standard)
2.If uninstalling doesn't fix, maybe check the graphic setting and see if the render pipeline asset is still assigned there. get rid of it.

I have never uninstalled HDRP from a project before. Not sure how many cluster will it leave inside the scene. So It is worth checking your camera and light to get rid of the possible missing component from (HDAdditionalCameraData) and (HDAdditionalLightData)

[scarlet hull]

It might also be the colorspace of the project, maybe you were initially in Gamma, but HDRP only uses Linear.

[inner palm]

does anybody have some tips on how to avoid this for non-realtime applications

im using the timeline to render out some stuff but occasionally this will happen, i think ray tracing is responsible here edit: ive managed to get it to continue to happen even while all my ray traced effects are disabled, ray tracing isnt responsible

although I did bump this setting up as high as it would let me

this isn't fully path traced, its just a bunch of other ray traced effects

my GPU VRAM is only like barely over half used

but the likelihood of it happening increases when i increase the resolution nevermind changing the resolution changes the shape of the boxes but they still cover the same area

can replicate it in the editor

it happens really infrequently but it seems consistent in the angles that it happens

yeah actually seems like it is directly correlated to the amount of light sources in the area

ill figure something out but i would still appreciate any other advice

i have a lot of real time lights because the results of baked lighting for me have always been really lackluster with some of the baked lights straight up not even having the light baked, might be due to a janky UV setup on the meshes as well i suppose but

[scarlet hull]

@smoky orchid Hey, I think you question (#archived-shaders message) is better here.
What is more specifically your issue with volumetric clouds and transparency ?

[smoky orchid]

@scarlet hull i'm trying to have a planet physically rotating around my scene. The reason why i want this is because there are several planets and moons in the sky, and their shadowing has to be in correlation with the sun light direction. So what I would do is use a transparent shader to fade the planet into the sky like so. However when is use the volumetric clouds provided with HDRP, the transparent object is always visible through it

when the object is opaque it is correctly occluded by the clouds :

[scarlet hull]

I think a good approach could be to use additiona direction lights as Celestial Bodies

It works really well with the physically based sky. In recent versions, the base "outdoors" hdrp scene has a moon set up with this that you can take as reference

[minor depot]

You might want to try messing with the depth related settings in the transparent shader you have. Other option is to use a custom opaque shader which just fades to the correct color while still depth writing

[smoky orchid]

this would probably work as intended indeed, but if I do this i cannot have other moons rotation around this object, that's a tradeoff

[smoky orchid]

i tried making a custom opaque shader for this but cannot sample the sky color in HDRP, it's a feature only for URP so far

[scarlet hull]

So, moons rotating around moons ?

Indeed, you can't do it this ways as regular gameobject and simple local rotation, but those "sub"moons are just additional celestial bodies after all, where you'll need to manually alter the directional light rotation and the angular size value.

[smoky orchid]

well yes i can still try to apply some trickery by deactivating the light when it is supposed to be behind the other planet, though that would be my last solution since it looks quite complicated and i'm also concerned about having 4 or 5 directional lights for performance

[scarlet hull]

The other approach could be to handle this with a PBR sky material

[smoky orchid]

you mean an animated skybox ?

[scarlet hull]

Bascially, yes

[smoky orchid]

that is indeed a good idea, i wonder if i can use a render texture to display an animated sky this way

[scarlet hull]

Probably