Summary

SRP Surface Shaders are a similar concept to Built-in surface shaders. You can define a surface function that describes the physical characteristics (albedo color, normal, emission, specularity, etc.) of the surface of a lit geometry without the need to write shaders using complex low-level shader programs.

Intended Outcome/Use Case

Writing shaders that interact with lighting is complex. There are different light types, shadow options, rendering paths, rendering features, and code variations to accommodate various hardware and platforms. More importantly, low-level shaders are tightly coupled with the rendering pipeline backends making them hard to transfer from one pipeline architecture to another.

Surface Shaders is a code generation, pipeline agnostic approach that makes it much easier to write and maintain lit shaders than using the low-level shader language and APIs. Surface Shaders allow technical artists and coders to customize and define the look of geometry surfaces in a more intuitive way through handwritten shaders.

Summary

Exposure is a linear scaling operation performed on a scene-referred image before tone mapping to fine-tune the brightness or darkness of the image. URP allows for manual adjustment of exposure of the final render using Color Adjustment post-processing effect depending on the lighting conditions and brightness of the scene. Automatic exposure as a post-processing effect will allow for dynamic adjustment of a rendered image's exposure according to the range of brightness levels available on the image.

Intended Outcome/Use Case

The human eye can function in both very dark and very bright areas. However, the eye can only sense a contrast ratio of roughly one-millionth of the total range at any single moment. The eye functions well in multiple light levels by adapting and redefining what is black. Similarly, Automatic Exposure dynamically adjusts the exposure of rendered images according to the range of brightness levels within the image.

With this feature, you will be able to set up environments that vary dramatically in lighting conditions without the need to make adjustments to the exposure based on predefined values when the camera moves from one area to another.

These adjustments take place gradually, which means that the user can be briefly dazzled by a bright outdoor light when they emerge from a dark area. Equally, when moving from a bright area to a dark one, the camera takes a moment to adjust, mimicking the human eye behavior and adaptation concept.

Better documentation for Universal's Shader Library, Shader API, and Shader built-in variables.

Summary

Shadow Maps Caching provides performance improvement by allowing the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to update the shadow maps for Lights only when necessary, therefore reducing the number of shadow casters to be rendered for each frame.

Intended Outcome/Use Case Not every Light and Renderer is constantly updated in a Scene; therefore, rendering shadow maps for static Lights and Renderers in every frame is unnecessary and expensive.

With shadow maps caching, similar to HDRP's Shadow Update Mode and Mixed Cached Shadow Maps workflows, you can granularly configure the calculation method URP uses to update individual Lights shadow maps. This would give you more control to optimize your rendering performance based on your Scene setup and content requirements.

Unity currently supports advanced ray tracing in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). We are exploring the possibility of extending similar capabilities to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This exploration includes evaluating the integration of ray tracing effects using DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Vulkan, and Metal APIs for a range of devices, including high-end mobile phones and laptops.

Potential Ray Tracing Effects for Consideration:

• Ray-Traced Shadows (Ambient Occlusion, Soft Shadows, etc.)

• Ray-Traced Reflections

• Global Illumination

Technical Considerations:

Integrating ray tracing into URP involves navigating complex technical challenges. Our primary goal is to ensure that any enhancements do not compromise the flexibility and customization options that URP users rely on. We are carefully evaluating the impact of ray tracing on the core architecture of URP, ensuring that any potential implementation aligns with the pipeline's design principles and user needs.

Performance Impact:

The integration of ray tracing effects could significantly enhance visual quality but may also impact performance, particularly on untethered or mobile devices. We aim to investigate the balance between visual fidelity and performance efficiency.

User Feedback:

We are interested in your perspective! Please vote on this card to express your interest in ray tracing effects for URP and to help us understand your priorities. Your feedback is valuable in guiding our exploration and potential prioritization.

Platforms:

• Desktop (Windows, macOS)

• High-End Mobile Devices

APIs:

• DirectX Raytracing (DXR)

• Vulkan

• Metal

Status:

Exploratory Phase

With volumetric fog, you can add realistic fog to a scene and manipulate its color, density, and how it interacts with light.

To read more about volumetric fog, check out: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@7.2/manual/index.html

Blob Shadows are "fake" shadows created by drawing a 2d shape and projecting it on the ground below the object you'd like to cast a shadow, instead of having the object cast real shadows.

Camera-relative rendering would allow the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) to render distant GameObjects (with large world space coordinates) in a more robust and numerically stable way compared to the built-in render pipeline.

The absolute precision of floating-point numbers decreases as numbers become larger. This means that GameObject coordinates become increasingly less precise the further the GameObject is from the Scene's origin. The Mesh faces of distant GameObjects close to one another may appear in the same place and produce z-fighting artifacts. To fix this issue, camera-relative rendering replaces the world origin with the position of the Camera.