Universal Render Pipeline - Unite Copenhagen 2019

welcome everyone I hope you're enjoying you night so far it's a I must say if anyone who came to Berlin last year the food is much better this year so I'm here to talk to you guys about a universal render pipeline but more specifically how it was used in the boat attack demo that you might have seen at the keynote and there has been in development alongside what was lightweight were in the pipeline but now called Universal render pipeline my name is Andre McGrail and I am a technical artist at unity so here's a short overview of what I'll be talking about today I have a short intro just show some like some awesome old kind of footage from boat demo and where it's come from I'll briefly go over some of the features that I've used just in universe huapi in general like very basic kind of the quality settings the render pipeline asset that kind of stuff just briefly go over there then we'll dive into shader graph I'll show you some of the shaders that were set up from a basic one to a more complex one with a custom function nodes etc jump onto chemical Mex these replaced kind of the old callbacks in unity so they're good to know and understand and then move on to render pass features which is kind of our a nice easy wrapper for creating extra passes or customizing the render and Universal render pipeline so at the very early version of the bodemer looked quite a bit different this wasn't any kind of like show on the actual like where you're in the pipeline at the time obviously it just started out at a very basic phase already back here we had the ability to be able to pull off planner reflections this head obviously changed quite a bit since it was created then different callbacks etc and now this is what it will look like at you know I bill and which was just over a year ago I think now again quite you know a lot more is in there we've got water we've got you know the planner of fictions coming in and that kind of stuff but we didn't have any of the render pass features and the custom renderer stuff that wasn't really integrated into light way we're into pipeline at the time we had it back internally as we were using it in the actual forward renderer but it wasn't exposed and it wasn't a nice easy kind of clean API for users to be able to pick up on and then this is kind of what it looks like today here you can see we added the day/night kind of circuit cycle we've got planner of fiction's going on stool but now they're using the new callbacks there's some renderer features that are adding extra details into the water which can go on about and a lot of heavy kind of shader graph usage because this is kind of very nice at this point so I'm gonna dive into the demo now here's the link for the boda check github repo i've got it in the actual tree the branch demo work this is the branch we've been using for unite so this has a lot of the more recent updates and it is recommended if you're gonna load up a 19.3 to use this version so just dive over into the editor here and first off let's just have a look at what it what it please like who was it an instant crash nice best way to start a demo look at that yeah that's that one again so some things I'll show you here is that we we got up reading on essentially wide range of devices we had it running on six devices live on stage at the keynote which was actually quite terrifying for me you know never bring six devices live onstage to demo at once it was definitely a kind of a heart palpitating moment so if we have the demo and see if we can play at this time we're gonna get in a infinite crash loop no we're going okay so it's just you'd make use of cinema sheen here by the way and I've got this greedy camera taking all the control so I'll just go back to the bog so essentially the idea of this demo was to create a vertical slice of a boat racing game you know a big thing we started to do recently at unity is the production driven development and this is really needed now he's crashed I made it this is like it's super useful like we make sense to build a use case and then test those features that we create at the same time because we could go ahead and make a feature but without trying it out and real you know world like scenarios we're not going to know whether it ticks all the boxes or I can do all the things we would like it to do so here I've managed to make use of quite a lot of features there in Universal Arena pipeline we're using a shader graph so that's used quite heavily you use a custom renderer features which is also the custom render pass system this was used to add caustics in the water it was also used to add the essentially there's a water effects pass that creates the foam and the trails of the boats it also helps create little foam splashes around each of the floating objects it makes use of the burst system so c-sharp jobs they're used to calculate height positions in the water so we can figure out whether you know certain parts of the boat underneath the water and apply buoyancy back on it so it was a good mesh of features and it has been very useful every time we've done massive changes to the universe or in the pipeline to see if we've broken anything or if something needed some more work and polishing so to get it running on all the devices that we showed off at the keynote it is one project we can literally go through and switch between all the build targets build out and then that's what we have to do and this was kind of achieved by now the fact that we've got you know if you've used lightweight before I've used script or inner pipe lines you know that we can add in the script we're in the pipeline asset and the graphic settings we've now added this ability to override this on a per quality level basis and this is really useful because now you don't have to try and create a script or kind of create your own system to switch out these render pipeline assets depending on for more maybe the capability of the device that you're building to so here we can see we've got a render pipeline a set high and if we go down to medium got a medium one low etc and this is just where we shaders recompiling this is where we can like turn off certain things so for example the low quality sitting doesn't have shadow cascades because there's a lot of extra objects that we're rendering and you know we get blurry eye shadows but you know it's fine especially if it's on a mobile device you've got a small screen you're not going to notice this difference and then we can go up cascade so shadow like resolution up throughout these if these aren't assigned here then obviously or just fall back to the one that's it in the graphic settings but it's a super nice convenient way to handle quality levels in scaling across these platforms as you can see here I don't even allow like high to be used on mobile devices if you get stripped out and then things like WebGL only has low and it's it for that okay so let's have a look at some shader graph shaders because I love the tool I didn't know how to write a shader before I joined unity which was just over two years ago I had to learn very quickly being on the graphics team it turns out you need to know a lot about shaders and there's a lot to know about shaders so I quickly learned but to be fair when shader graph came in I was like well it's just it's just easier especially if you want to do just some quick experimental stuff you want to try out some ideas before even committing to code it's just a nice easy way to get there and the shader code that shader graph producers it was actually really quite nice so for example I'm going to show you one of the shaders that are made which is called yeah well a cliff shader it seems she is used on all the cliffs in the level the first iteration of this all the texture maps and etc were begged down just out of substance painter so these were using the normal litter in Universal and you know I painted grass on top of the cliffs you know the kind of rocky on the sides and down where they entered the water I got you know darker or in a more like glossy so this was you know it looked okay but I wanted to reuse rocks over and over again I don't want to have you know a ton of unique textures for each rock depending on where it was so being able to utilize shader graph something like this made a lot of sense so at this point I can take that information and shader graph I can take the objects position the hype the normals etc and build these shaders they react to the environment around it which means you kind of get the semi procedural kind of world building which is great so for example if we move this cliff down we can see this kind of a darkening gradient around the bottom of it where it is also getting quite glossy so if we move in here good we can see it is quite shiny at the base of it and this is also the same for the grass so the grass starts happening at a certain level and it also fades off depending on the angle so now we can rotate and the grass will stick on top and on the sides the rocks will come so no longer did I have to worry about you know keeping all my rocks that I had hard-coded painted down shaders I mean textures sorry at the positions they were painted for so now I could if I'd like the top of a rock and I wanted that just poking out of the ocean somewhere I could do it and it would look like it's meant to be there so we have a look at the shader and let it compile now it's fairly large but I have a little bit of a step through of it so the great thing about shader graph is now we've got the ability to group up things and you know this did not look this neat not long ago it was a giant mess and I was like well I gotta show this to a ton of people and they've got to make sense of it I'm used to making noodles and yeah big spaghetti mess but to be able to explain or show off something you really want to be able to use groups and also helps in if you're in a big team being able to share shaders around and people can you understand what's actually going on so it makes use of some normal things such as you know the grass coming in grass comes in with Victor's of the normals and we can blend that in so this is just grabbing the grass the normal and tiling it across the object down here we then have the actual mask between the rock and the grass we go back here we can see it's a position of it so it's using the position here to essentially get whereabouts it is height wise and this can give us the mask for you know a rocks way down close to the water line it's not going to have a grass growing on it but if it gets up high enough in the mountains it'll get some grass appearing seam here with the witness it's also using another position to add that you know higher level of gloss around the base and then we do things like actually I create the rock smoothness there is no smoothness map as such so the input map is actually if we head back here for the albedo texture I get the color for it but I'm also using the Alpha Channel to store some cavity maps so they're starting to think about terms of legs something like substance designer and/or substance painter we've got these kind of masks generated kind of maps so this would just pump straight out of substance as a cavity map and then I can bring it into shadow graph and actually create you know shading properties based off the sceva D map using you know meth remapping all that kind of stuff and it means you can create this kind of reusable procedural shader system which is really convenient and I mean this is the same shader that's running on the mobile device there's no difference from the phone version to the console version it's it's performed and performant enough that we can just use it everywhere so if we go back have a look at another shader which is a bit more complex and using some more some more of the kind of key features of shader graph if we go to the vegetation so here we got some palm trees like that again and you can see we've got kind of like a subsurface effect now this is an subsurface shader that's with universal this is just a shader graph shader and we can achieve stuff like this now with things like the custom function node which it's us to be able to use some hlsl inside shader graph there's some other abilities that we can do here that's going to be hard to see but essentially there is if we drop down to low quality sitting we should see the lords take over nope it's Krang goes way down okay now we can see my lovely billboards that I made they're not that great but essentially we can make use of the LOD information coming from the Lord component on the game object and we can make use of this and switch out between our high res mesh and our low bail like low res billboard so it's open up this so this graph looks a little simpler in terms of the amount of nodes but that's because of two things one it's using custom function node so it's doing some code calculations within a single node and the other thing is that makes heavy use of what we call sub graphs so sub graphs are seems to be a graph within the shader graph and these can keep going deeper and deeper so for starters the trees themselves have a bit of sway with the wind they you know the leaves float around the tree itself bins and this is all the like entirely encapsulated in a sub graph the cool thing about this is that we can reuse it in another shader graph if we want it if we wanted to create another variation of the vegetation shader we can just straight full drag and drop in this video and deformation and if we go into this will then load up the sub graph there fullscreen so that's not gonna work and here we have the essentially the node network that is deforming these vertex positions and we've got essentially you know it's it's similar to a shader graph shader itself it has properties and these properties seen as the inputs to the sub graph node that you get and the outputs on an output node and here you can also add as many as you want there different types name them etc and they'll appear back up on the sub graph here we've actually got you know this is a suti taking vertex positions it's figuring out the origin it's doing some sine waves to bend essentially the vertex positions based off a few vertex colors so the vertex colors are used as masks so is simply a copy of the technique that was used in crisis for the vegetation there and there's a really good write-up on GPU gems but we can see here there's a custom function and there's also this this is smooth triangle wave this is a actual another sub graph so we can open up this and we go yet another layer deeper into this graph and this is a bit more simpler but we've got some nodes they just come in they're doing some calculations on the victor individual victor components of this now this could all be done probably in a custom function node the custom function node could contain the entire HLSL information for the vegetation deformation but it is really nice also being able to do it and a node based system is very artist friendly you can look at it and if you know if you used to know bay stuff it's a very nice way to work and the code that it generates is going to be pretty much similar performance wise to the code that you'd write anyway and again I won't go into this but this is another sub graph as well this moves to curve so now if we go back up to vegetation I'm sure but about the custom function node so here we have a subsurface scattering kind of group that I've made and the main reason this uses this the custom function node is for getting the light information that's in Universal render pipeline so here I've just got a group it's called main light this is currently the code I've put in only makes this vegetation shader work with a one main directional light I haven't put in the looping code to handle multiple lights but here we need the world position of the actual object so we're getting Medan and in this custom function node is actually looking at an external HLSL file called custom lighting here we also have a name so this is the name of the function that it will look for in that custom lighting function hlsl file so I was looking for a function and they Accord main light here are the outputs that that function has and also the input so the only input is the world position but then it outputs the direction the color some of the attenuation of this light so I'll just load up and show you what this custom custom lighting function though it looks like so we have two methods in here I've added a second one this is for used actually in the cloud shader that I've got and it's just to get the ambient lighting so this is quite handy and I'll show you I can quickly show that later as well but the one we're talking about now is the main light so you'll notice that in the name of the actual custom function note that I had I only had main light I didn't have main light underscore half and this is how shadow graph can do precision based on the nodes so in jeddah graph now supports either float position or half position depending on you know whether you need the edge information this is especially important when you're looking at mobile devices you want to be doing half wherever you can if you don't need the extra precision values here is a little bit of code for the shader graph preview because the shader graph preview itself isn't using the render pipelines it's using the built-in renderer to render the preview node so it has no knowledge of the actual lighting that's in Universal RP so this is why when we're talking about the preview we're just giving it some preset values that are you know just safe values we know it's going to handle these and then we have essentially what is a snippet out of universal app he's lighting loops so in Universal RP there's a lighting HLSL file it has tons of functions essentially about getting lights and getting the information back this is a very similar kind of sniff it out of that that goes through get cell light it gets our main light position color and etcetera based off where our objects are really vertices are and then we are setting the all of our outputs which defined here up in the actual function as else and then we're good to go so this feeds back into our shader graph shader as variables that we can then just hook up to anything so now we're getting the direction of the light we're getting the color of the light and with these things we can do you know a dot product to get our you know lighting shading on our normal surface and then there's just some you know and multiplications and some coloring from the albedo etc I also do some masking based on whether it's a leaf or a trunk and this is a nice way how you can kind of extend a lot of shader types in Universal RP without having to you know write a completely custom shader from scratch if you just need some lighting information you want to do a subsurface you know new translucency maybe you wanna do a clear coat that's another thing you can just bring in some code just to give you the information that you might not be able to find as a preset node ready to go one last thing I want to show in here is the keywords so if so shader keywords or essentially they simply duplicate your shader so they make have multiple versions that have a certain part of code may be turned on or turned off so for example when here I have a keyword to control the vertex animation so there once the shader gets compiled there'll be a version of it without the vertex animation included and there'll be a version of it with the vertex animation included now this makes it so we can have you know quite efficient shaders if I don't need the the tree itself to to be reacting to the wind I can turn that off and it skips all of that shader code if I didn't use a keyword and I just did a branch in the shader say I did a switch between them it's gonna have to look at that when it goes to render this object it's gonna have to check I'm doing both for these it's more pressure at the time of rendering whereas here we can upfront go here's two different versions of the shader we're only going to use the one that we wanted the time these can just be the Edit through the shadow graph inspector at the blackboard and there are two types there's a boolean and there's an enum the boolean is essentially gives you a tick box of on and off its keyword that's on or off an enum will give you a list and then you can add it multiple entries to the list so say for example you might want to do a debug like drop down for your shader and you have multiple things you might want to debug out you can then have this as a switch as you see here it comes in this is the vertex animation one this is the boolean type one it comes in as an on and off you can feed in what comes in if it's off you can feed and what happens if it's on and then you get the like the output at the end of it so that was a bit about the shader graph and now I want to jump over to the camera callback stuff so to do the planar afflictions and the spoke demo it seems she we want to check before any camera renders whether at the game view here or the scene view we want to go okay no we need to render another camera we need to render a camera that's flipped and we need to save that out to a texture that then we can use later on the water shader so if we have a look at the planner of fiction script in this project which is stored in a package still funnily called lightweight render pipeline water system but you will see there the core banks themselves are quite easy to use so first off here we subscribe to it so on enable you want to grab the render pipeline manager and here we're looking at begin camera rendering now this will get called every time a camera and Universal render pipeline starts its rendering every single individual camera there's a few here we can choose from we have begin camera rendering which was what we're using begin frame rendering which happens before we near the cameras have started you know setting themselves up and it will actually give you a list of all the cameras that are going to be rendered for their frame the big begin camera rendering will give you the reference to the camera that's currently rendering and then we've got in camera and in frame as well so here I'm just assigning this explainer of fictions me that I've got and if we move down one thing we also got to remember as to what you think do you locate from it but if we come down to our planner actions method down here so execute plan our fictions and this takes two just curious because it's been so we've got a script we're into context which is provided from the render pipeline itself this is essentially a lot like a container of information that the renderer is holding on to stuff like the camera or the actual coloring etc and then we get the camera that is currently rendering and executing this callback so in here I just simply go well is it a reflection camera or was a preview camera if so I'm not worried about it I don't want to do planner afflictions for either of those camera types and then it does all my code in here which is sitting up an upside down reflective camera creating the rendered texture itself if it hasn't already been created and you know heading off a render in Universal render pipeline previously this was done with camera dot render but in Universal we're in the pipeline to make it really nice and easy weave in to make sure we avoid things like nested infinite loops of rear-ending we have this Universal render pipeline render single camera and what this lets you do is as soon as she it renders a single sharp with the renderer that's currently applied to the given camera so here I'm just going I want to render a single camera I provide my reflection camera that I've just sit up and it's going to render into this render texture because I have assigned it as the target teacher here and this can be useful for sorts of things depending on whether you want to just run some code at the beginning of the frame beginning of the camera or the end so now we want to jump over to essentially the render features so the scriptable render features all the scriptable render pass two of them were created for the steamer if we compile their script maybe I broke something severe I'm gonna go with I probably did break something so let's just get rid of that again start again so a few if any of you here were for the talked earlier about Universal render pipeline and the general overview of it all you would have learned a bit about how the rendering architecture kind of works and the idea is that Universal has these scriptable renderers that you can plug in plug out the forward renderer that we supply is currently one of them the 2d renderer is also one we will be providing a deferred renderer and you can make your own in boat demo project we don't actually create a new renderer we're just using the default forward renderer but we have created a few script or render passes and script or window features and these are most notable the caustics which we have here under the water and then also the water effects where you can see the trails behind the boats so first I'll talk a little bit about the caustics one and if we go to our renderer we can see our list of renderer features up here we've both the caustics renderer feature and a water effects renderer future now the caustics one is pretty straightforward it's got a caustics material which is just a shader that does i'll explain it a little bit and a mish that then it renders so it's similar to the render objects render feature that is included in here in the universal render pipeline but the difference here is that i know i'm when you're going to render one object i only need to render that object exactly a certain way so i wanted a nice lean render feature that just did this so I also added a debug so we can look at exactly what it's doing and it seems to here you can see a plane a giant plane that's getting scaled up quite large it follows the camera it's got this caustics material assigned to it and what it does is it takes the depth texture that's currently been rendered by the universal render pipeline inverted to world space coordinates and then uses those coordinates as UVs for this caustics texture their thing gets you know tiled across in a bit of a UV noise to make the wobbling and this is quite nice because here if I look at any of these render pipeline assets I've got two renderers assigned ones the boat demo renderer which has the water affixed in the caustics and once the plan our reflection renderer the planner of fiction renderer doesn't need to do caustic so it doesn't need to do the water effects because it doesn't see the water it's rendering underneath the water and is used purely for the reflections so why waste rendering time with this extra feature when we can only we only need to have it for the vote for they're essentially the main camera so this is a again making use of effect there we can have a default one here which always use the caustics and the water fix and then when I create the planner of fiction camera I tell it to use the second renderer that's listed in the pipeline asset if we now look at the water affects the water effects is it's hit after rendering the Opaques and this is essentially a a off-screen texture so it's rendering to render texture it's used to control foam and the offsets so I did attempts to add a debug but I failed miserably and it just turns off post-processing is engineering so it's good of the frame debugger and actually show you what's going on there so if we go into gameplay make sure you get to a part where we can see some trails from the bone I'm probably gonna have to turn off the said machine camera again all my laptops are really hating me today and it's locked up again oh let's come to life okay so let's just turn off this jumper you can and yeah that'll do okay so now if we go down to the frame debugger so we can see essentially the the makeup of this frame we enable it I'm just gonna collapse down these in here you can see it again it's a bit a bit small so we have all the essentially script for in the passes that are getting executed and we have things like oh wow first off we were rendering our planet reflection camera actually currently my render pipeline assets aren't and in debug mode but if I was to have it in debug mode you would see multiple camera Vince essentially so we'd see the planner of fiction camera event getting called as its own standalone group and then the main camera the reason we have this in a debug mode on the render pipeline asset is because getting those pointers and getting the names of the cameras cause garbage collection and we don't want that in your final games so it's only in the debug mode it's therefore essentially if you want to see what's actually rendering and going on while you're making these systems so here we're rendering the planner afflictions and then we go on to rendering our normal camera so we need our shadows we get our shadow map and now we go into our water effects so here we're sitting up it seems to a clear color of these were the values that are needed for the maps that I was creating so this texture was used to doing normals and for doing a foam as well as the water displacement so there's why it ends up being a society when it fills it in with so this is essentially what the boats of rendering in this is some custom shaders that have a certain shader pasinetta called water effects and the custom renderer feature that I created essentially looks for any shader passes that have water water effects in the name and it only renders those shaders so these are getting rendered all the time there essentially trail vendors that are attached to the boats and particle renderer that's attached to the boat and the user getting picked up by this renderer feature only they're not seen by the normal rendering so this is creating well yeah here we can see all the passes it's creating but this red channel is used for the phone the green and blue channels are the normal channels I can then reuse to create the offsets and the water shader and then the Alpha is actually the displacement so that's why we're at a mid gray so that we can go up and we can go down and anything can get rendered into this so you can create a you know a particle that's shaped like a wave and we can have that near the shoreline and okay wave information that will then get rendered and used in the water shader to you know create foam and displacement and that I think about wraps up everything in here essentially yeah the the code itself is quite straightforward I'll quickly show you some of that just to explain will savor the water caustics for example so if we open up the water caustics feature we have essentially our scriptable render feature here and this is again our data container this is where it holds our water caustic settings which is our material our mesh in our debug tick box his little note is if you do make a essentially a class that holds your settings and then you make a public variable called settings the renderer feature list will automatically display these settings there without you having to create a custom editor and in here there's some settings for the debug because it's changing the essentially the blending of the shader so that we can see it in debug mode and it goes back to the crease blending if we're not in debug mode we add our in to pass and then here is our script for in the pass which is our render water caustics and this is so we can see in the frame debugger and see it where it's getting injected in the name of it here we've got a quick null out if we don't have a material then we just exit out we don't want to try and render anything and from our rendering data that we come and get gets passed to us and the execute method of our render pass we can get the current cameras position which is going to help us keep where the the caustics plane is following the camera we make a matrix for feeding in to our mesh then we draw here with the caustics material and then we can just execute the command buffer and release it as well afterwards and this is essentially a custom way of rendering us a mich itself you can use to do draw mesh instance you can do it to draw a full screen quad and do like a blitz style shader if you have a look at our universal rendering examples github repo which we had in previous talk today there's so much more full out examples in there of how to set up your own descriptive or render features so I'd like to thank you all and we have a bit of time for questions if anyone has any [Music] you

Channel: Unity

Views: 12,904

Keywords: Unity3d, Unity, Unity Technologies, Games, Game Development, Game Dev, Game Engine

Id: Dx9Kzx2POKc

Length: 38min 32sec (2312 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019