Hey everyone,
As someone who thrives on combining creativity, technical precision, and a dash of polymath curiosity, I’m excited to share some insights into one of Unity’s most powerful tools: the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). Whether you’re just starting out in game development or diving deeper into your craft, HDRP can help you create visually stunning worlds that truly stand out.
Here’s the plan: we’re keeping it simple, approachable, and packed with practical advice so you can get the most out of HDRP, without feeling overwhelmed. Ready? Let’s get to it.
Why HDRP?
Unity’s HDRP is built for those who want to push boundaries both visually and propgramatically. It’s all about achieving cinematic visuals, using principles with realistic lighting, and a level of polish that screams "next-gen." It’s ideal for high-end PCs and consoles, but to get the best results, you’ll need to master a few key principles.
5 Essential Tips for HDRP Artists
1. Start with Optimisation in Mind but don’t Pixel Tweak
HDRP is a beast, but with great power comes great responsibility (to optimise). Here’s how to stay efficient:
- Prioritise assets: Focus your high-res textures and complex shaders on areas players will notice most, the Playable ‘in-your-face' areas are the most critical and most resource intensive, but it’s only small like, less than 20m in many cases.
- Cull what you don’t need: Use Unity’s Shader Variant stripping to keep your build lean and consider working in multi project arrays to handle asset workflows
- Modular all the way: HDRP excels and scaling, but only if you put the effort to make your choices scalable.
- Leverage incremental builds: You can build fast and first with IL2CPP and incriemental building. Shaders take a long time to compile and if you rely on 3rd party shaders, compile early, it could save you a ton of time.
- Don’t sweat the details: Go gold with a solid structure first even if this is MVP with a verticle slice of greyboxing, it’s better and more efficiant than tryign to save or understand why 1 object is 13ms and 10,000 are too, just keep moving smart.
2. Perfect Your Lighting
HDRP’s lighting system is where the magic happens, but it takes a thoughtful and structured approach before you can get real artsy.
- Use real-world units: Physical Light Units like lumen and Lux bring authenticity to your lighting setup, you use study materials from the Camera and cinema world to help you better handle this, practice with shooting with your camera phone in PRO modes.
- Experiment with world lighting: Reflections, Volumetric Fog and Clouds can add serious atmosphere, and so can Physically Based Sky, these are all lighting based ans you shoudl account for them early on.
- Light before you post: Yup, the most common problem I see modularise your volumes so that they have a focus, like Light/Features/ Postprocessing/ animation.
- Balance performance: Ray Tracing is gorgeous but demanding—test thoroughly before committing and knoe your hardware and consumer targets!
3. Nail Post-Processing
Post-processing is HDRP’s secret weapon for refining your game’s look, but use it wisely and like sprinkles:
- Ceate the perfect vibe, but subtle hints and goals for post processing, whether it’s to create the best Tone or Camera, post processing is a way to get that finished polished look, you can even use it to help building game mechanics like player visual feedback or tension with story telling.
- Learn about post processing with cross industry resources like the film and vido industry, you can learn so much here.
4. Harness the Power of Volume Profiles
HDRP uses Volume Profiles to control settings like lighting and post-processing. Create unique profiles for different scenes or areas of your game for variety and efficiency, the entire SRP is built in this stack, master it.
5. Keep Creativity and Performance in Balance
HDRP encourages you to think big, but always keep your players’ experience in mind. A stunning game is great, but it’s the smooth gameplay that keeps players coming back, control feature creep by keeping a list of your best features, and try not to stray from in unless absolutely game changing for your project.
Behind the Scenes at HIBIKI
At HIBIKI, we’ve used HDRP to craft vibrant, immersive worlds that leave a lasting impression. One of my favourite moments was seeing how a simple lighting tweak transformed a static scene into a living, breathing environment. It’s moments like these that remind me why I really enjoy this industry and why I’m so passionate about sharing what I’ve learned with you, it is hard and if its helpful to you, then i’m doing things right.
Your HDRP Journey Starts Here
HDRP can feel a bit daunting at first, but trust me, you’ll get the hang of it. Take it step by step, experiment, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. That’s where the real learning happens. And remember, the Unity community and other industries are amazing resources lean on them
If you’ve got questions or just want to share what you’re working on, I’d love to hear from you. Collaboration and creativity go hand in hand, so let’s keep the conversation going, you can join us on our Discord.
Until next time, go get!
