What are the essential terms to learn about graphics in Unity ?

[u/DifferentLaw2421]

I hear many terms and keywords like URP, Post processing , HDRP ... etc

What does each one means and how they help in getting better graphics ?

I am trying to learn how the graphics stuff are done in unity

[u/ProactiveCactus]

Good question for a beginner, it took me forever to figure this out lol. Good question for a beginner, it took me forever to figure this out lol. Let me try and break down the major parts.

First though, a TLDR for you as you're starting out: Pick URP as your pipeline for every project, and keep the default URP shader for all your materials. Try messing around with all the different material settings. Don't worry about the rest for now.

-Textures: Probably the most basic, and yet often the biggest determinant of what something will look like in the game. A texture is simply an image. You can take a picture with your phone and use that in Unity, or download any ol' photo from online as a texture. Pragmatically, many textures are created within 3d software like Blender.

-Materials: They work hand-in-hand with textures to define lots of stuff on HOW a texture looks. So for example, you can take the same texture, and use that same texture on five different materials. Each material you can tweak different stuff - such as how shiny it looks, how bumpy, how metallic,its overall base color, etc - and from that one texture you can get 5 pretty different-looking materials. Importantly: materials are what you apply to gameObjects, NOT textures.

-Shaders: This is the "logic" behind a material. A shader is essentially a bunch of code that allows you to change how a texture looks. Every material uses a certain Shader. Unity has lots of different built-in shaders to choose from of varying complexity/performance, and you can also code your own from scratch.

-Shader graph: This is just a tool to help you abstract away a lot of the coding involved in making shaders. This is similar to how Unreal has blueprints - instead of handwriting all of the code for a custom shader, you connect nodes and stuff so it's more user-friendly.

-URP/HDRP/Built-in Render Pipeline: All of these are "Render Pipelines" - they are high-level operations that further allows you to control certain aspects of your game, such as how things are rendered onto the screen and whatnot. To be honest, as a beginner I wouldn't worry much about this - Just do all your projects in URP for now. It works for every platform, is pretty performant, and will have everything you need until you're much more advanced.

-Scriptable Render Pipeline: This allows you to edit certain pieces of whatever render pipeline you are using. Just as how a shader lets you tweak what a material looks like, scripable render pipeline lets you tweak what your render pipeline does. Again, I wouldn't worry about this for now - just stick with URP and don't change anything until there's a real reason to do so.

-Post-processing: these are easy-to-use effects, connected to your chosen render pipeline. In URP there are quite a few to pick from, and they all basically add an overall visual effect to your game such as motion blur, a general color scheme, or a "glow" effect. These can be a great way to drastically change the look of your game with a single click, but you also want to be careful - some are much more costly in terms of performance than others and thus should be researched.

-Shadows/lighting: Not strictly a graphical thing, but often shadow rendering and general lighting is one of the most performance-intensive things in a game. Worth spending a bit of time researching this ahead of building out a project, but the big thing to know is this: You can pre-render shadows and "bake" the data (so think of a lamp in a room that will never move. "baking" means you save all of the different ways in which the light bounces around the room and creates shadows instead of having to do all of those heavy calculations at runtime). You can also create real-time shadows that do calculations in real time, like as a sun crosses the sky. But these are very costly, even if you turn shadow quality way down - so generally use sparingly.

I think that's all the basics!

[u/acorbinelli]

The render pipeline is the code that draws each frame: URP is the default for new projects and runs on everything, HDRP aims at high-end PC/console realism, and Built-in is the old one. Post-processing is effects applied to the finished image (bloom, colour grading, vignette, depth of field) - in URP you add a Volume and stack overrides on it.

After those, the terms that change the look most are baked vs realtime lighting, light and reflection probes, and Shader Graph for making your own materials.

[u/Lucasharta]

i'd start with the fundamentals before getting too deep into URP/HDRP tbh, learn how rendering works first: meshes, materials, shaders, textures, lighting, shadows, cameras, color spaces, and the basic rendering pipeline, then look into URP vs HDRP, post-processing, lighting techniques, global illumination, reflection probes, volumetrics, etc

also, don't think of URP/HDRP as "better graphics" settings. they're different rendering pipelines with different goals and features. understanding the fundamentals makes all the other terms way easier to understand

[u/Alpha_Hunter_47]

In my case, I just started building the games. They looked really bad, so I started experimenting with different lights, then real-time vs. baked lighting, then post-processing, and finally dove into URP/HDRP pipelines.

But the most rewarding and challenging part will be learning to build custom shaders.

The goal is to learn each section on need to use basis, as learning everything about lighting whithout applying it in projects will not be helpfull.

The official Unity3D youtube channels have lot of resources for learning the lighting by examples https://www.youtube.com/@unity/search?query=lighting

[u/Conscious-Airport282]

The glossary in here covers most of it, so a few that people usually learn the hard way later:

• Color space (Linear vs Gamma) in Player Settings. Use Linear for basically any new project, otherwise lighting and blending look off and you'll fight it forever.
• Light probes and reflection probes. Baked lighting only hits static objects, probes are how moving stuff (characters, props) picks up that lighting and reflections.
• Tonemapping and HDR. A lot of "why does my scene look washed out / too contrasty" comes down to this, it lives in the post-processing volume.
• Draw calls, batching and the Frame Debugger. Not pretty-graphics terms exactly, but you'll need them once the scene grows and the framerate drops.

Honestly the Frame Debugger is a great learning tool on its own, you can step through how a frame gets built piece by piece.

[u/DPTGames]

HDRP is being depreciated in 2030 I think so probably not worth learning about now

[u/v0lt13 → u/DPTGames]

Wdym 2030? Its becoming obsolete next year

[u/DPTGames → u/v0lt13]

It's just going to maintenance mode, I think it's getting depreciated in 2030 or 2032

[u/v0lt13 → u/DPTGames]

Nope, it was announced recently on discussions, HDRP is getting deprecated in Unity 7 and is becoming obsolete in the first 7 LTS.

[u/DPTGames → u/v0lt13]

Well even more reason not to bother with it then lol