High Definition Rendering Pipeline

In Unity

The High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) is another of Unity’s built in Rendering Pipeline made for more intensive projects.

HDRP makes use of the likes of physically-based lighting, linear lighting, and HDR lighting. To start checking out it’s features, we can once again upgrade our Sci-Fi scene we’ve been creating.

Much like upgrading to URP, we can either add the HDRP package, or make use of our exported scene as it’s own package, and add it to Unity’s HDRP Template.

Much like creating our URP scene, we run into a problem. Everything is pink! This is because all of our assets are using standard shaders as opposed to HDRP shaders. To fix this, we can go to Edit > Render Pipeline > HDRP > Upgrade Project Materials. This will swap out just about all our shaders to be compatible with HDRP, although there may be some that are missed due to having alternate shaders to begin with. Unless its something crazy custom, we can generally fix this manually by accessing the material and changing the shader property to one of HDRP’s — with the standard being ‘lit’.

Already, we can see there a lot more options in the standard Lit Shader alone with HDRP as opposed to URP. Keep a look out for more articles to come, making use of these features.