Day 84 — Upgrading Your Project in Unity to URP
Hey and welcome!
Got a short one for you here to go over how to upgrade your project to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP for short) and also a little bit on what it actually is.
If you’ve been working in a standard 3D project and have been importing some outside assets it’s possible that you may have come across an issue where all the materials are showing as pink like this:
In order to go about fixing this you’ll need to go to the Package Manager which can be found under the Window tab at the top and then search for and install a package called Universal RP.
With that installed go ahead and make a Render_Settings folder, right click in it and choose Create > Rendering > Universal Render Pipeline > Pipeline Asset (Forward Renderer) in order to create a profile for URP.
When you’ve done that head over to Edit > Project Settings > Graphics and choose the profile you just created in the Scriptable Render Pipeline Settings option.
The pink material issue can be caused by other things but assuming that URP is the particular problem for you then you should be able to start seeing your pretty materials now:
The technical explanation for a render/graphics pipeline is that it’s a model that outlines the steps a graphics system needs to take in order to render a 3D space for a 2D screen.
It can be split up into 3 main steps, Application, Geometry and Rasterisation. The application step describes the changes made on the software level i.e. from within Unity. Geometry step deals with the operations handling the polygons and vertices and lastly the rasterisation step converts the Vector3 graphics specifically into a raster image that can be picked up by video displays.
It’s a bit complicated but the important thing for us to know is that there are multiple different pipelines to use that go through this process and URP is just an example of one that we’re using. There’s a multitude of features that the URP can handle such as its own way to deal with shaders, lighting and post processing.
There’s a bit too much to list off here so I recommend checking out the following link on it if you’ve taken an interest:
I’ll be working with this pipeline for the rest of this 2.5D project so I’ll probably mention bits on it here and there in the coming days.
