High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)

The entire asset creation pipeline follows well-established physically based rendering workflows. You can be confident that the worlds you craft will be rendered at their best.

Furthermore, HDRP offers advanced shaders out of the box, with subsurface scattering, translucency, iridescence, anisotropy, and real-time tessellation, all customizable using Shader Graph.

HDRP enables you to reproduce a wide array of realistic opaque and transparent surfaces, from a combination of complex dielectric and metallic surfaces to more computation-heavy materials such as hair, fabric, eye, and multilayered materials.

Creators at all levels can light their scenes beautifully thanks to an advanced industry-standard HDR lighting pipeline with physically correct light attenuation, real-world units (Lux, Lumen, EV) for the entire lighting and exposure pipeline, and advanced light types and shadow options.

HDRP offers a range of techniques, from traditional rasterization (such as Reflection and planar probes), light baking, ray marching and ray tracing (SSAO, SSGI, SSR, Contact or ray traced shadows), full-frame path tracing, and multiple anti-aliasing options that can be easily toggled or mixed to scale performance and fidelity across platforms.

Create beautiful skies and dramatic clouds. Unity supports multiple types of sky, from the simpler static gradient and HDRI skies to physically based procedural skies that can automatically simulate different times of day in real-time.

To increase the perception of depth in your scene and produce a denser atmosphere, you can use the Volumetric Fog and Local Volumetric Fog, which realistically react to lights and shadows.

Volumetric Clouds and Cloud Layers can help you increase the dynamism of your skies to create jaw-dropping weather conditions, from awe-inspiring sunrises to stormy afternoons, with minimal performance impact.

Produce a cinematic look that mimics the artifacts of real-world lenses and films. Post processing effects like Depth of Field, Vignette, Motion Blur, Bloom, and Film Grain simulate physical camera parameters. You can also access professional yet user-friendly color grading tools.

An advanced lens flare system allows you to create procedural lens flares with automatic occlusion. It comes with many ready-to-use flares to help you get started quickly.

For broadcasting and virtual production, the Graphics Compositor enables you to composite multiple rendering inputs. This means, for example, that you can integrate a video of a real actor on a green screen into a virtual background, or vice versa.

Create worlds of realistic vegetation that reacts to the wind with Terrain details, tree-painting tools, and SpeedTree integration. Achieve a high level of detail using real-time tessellation, and perfectly anchor into the world with translucency, shadow maps, ray traced shadows, contact shadows, micro shadows, baked lighting, and ray-marched or ray traced ambient occlusion and global illumination.

Use decals, meshes, and projectors to quickly stamp details on top of your geometry, like cracks, dirt, or painted signs. Locally alter materials placing puddles, leakage, carving, or covers to break repetitive patterns.

Optimize the performance of high-fidelity 3D games running ray tracing at 4K on consoles or for fast rendering of path-traced frames on PC. HDRP leverages Burst and Jobs technologies, runs as many systems as possible on the GPU, optimizes graphics memory using a render graph, and integrates state-of-the-art upsampling algorithms like NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR.

Adapt performance to different user configurations using the rich and powerful settings system to hierarchically override settings and toggle features at various levels of the project.

The powerful Rendering Debugger helps you to visualize in-Editor or runtime rendering stats, debug views, Volumes override, and more.

HDRP provides advanced controls to customize lighting and rendering, as well as node-based tools like Shader Graph and VFX Graph that empower technical artists to create their own shaders, passes, and effects. It also features C#- and HLSL-based frameworks to create custom pass, post process, render textures, clouds, and skies, as well as materials and graphics API to build custom rendering systems.

With HDRP and the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), your rendering pipeline is not a black box. It is accessible and modifiable in C#, with the Scriptable Render Pipeline framework. You can patch the code at the end of a production when the version is locked, or even create your own flavor of HDRP.

Learn and experiment with making games, films, or non-gaming applications using the HDRP sample scene, Cinematic Studio or Auto Showroomtemplates.

To get started with specific features or setups, the HDRP package contains samples of materials, scenes, and ready-to-use assets.

Visit the Asset Store to view thousands of supporting assets and plug-ins, including some free packs offered by Unity, such as the First- and Third-Person character controller starter assets, The Heretic Digital Human, Real-time Rascals (and character pack), or the Terrain Sample (pack, demo).

To learn how to handle larger productions, we provide more complex projects like the Spaceship Demo.