Since starting Crazy Wheels, I was using Unity's built-in Render Pipeline. It was looking fine, and I had on my task list to update it to using their new HD Render Pipeline. After focusing on the gameplay, I was mentioned that I should look into it. Seemed it was time to take this 8 month old ticket and bring it to the top of my list.
Crazy Wheels - Built-in Render Pipeline
For comparison's sake, here are a couple of screenshots of what Crazy Wheels used to look like under the Build-In Render Pipeline.
Crazy Wheels - High Definition Render Pipeline
Updating to HDRP was actually not that difficult. Unity provides a tool to update all the shaders and fairly thorough documentation. There are also quite a few tutorials around to help with the process. It took less than a month of work to get it working well, and another month to get the details worked out.
There were some specific things that were not that straight forward. I had to rework the see through shader, as well as update the water package (actually completely replace it since it doesnt support yet HDRP).
Here are a few screenshots from the HDRP version:
With all the changes and updates to the game, it was time for a new trailer, and updating all the promotional resources:
Conclusions
Unfortunately, moving to HDRP is not a perfect solution. A lot of assets on the unity asset store don't support HDRP yet or have a different version to support HDRP. I needed to replace or let go of a lot of those.
HDRP is not compatible with every platform. It doesnt work on mobile or on switch which can be a pretty important limitation, and it's not possible at this time to switch between Universal Render Pipeline and HDRP depending on the platform or have both in the same project. This will be a very interesting challenge to look at in the near future. (I already have an idea how to deal with it, even if Unity doesn't support it yet)
But in the end, seeing the results, I am impressed at what the game looks like now, and how far it's come. My future project will definitely be started in HDRP, and I have already started moving my other project to HDRP.
Time to get back to work.
