Render pipelines - Unity Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this course, we're going to focus on materials, lighting, and post-processing right here inside Unity. These three subjects are intimately connected and are critically important for determining how your games and your visualizations end up looking. Now, in this long process of materials, lighting, and post-processing, your decision-making begins right here at Unity Hub at the project creation stage. Unity has at least three different systems for rendering. And so the settings for materials, lights, and post-processing are slightly different, depending on the type of project you decide to create. Now, this stage I'm using the latest version of Unity which is 2020.1.8. I'm going to create a new project here by simply choosing the new button, clicking on the dropdown and making sure that I select the latest version available. When I do this, I'm presented with the Create a new project dialogue allowing me to fill in the names of the project settings, the path where the project will be stored on my computer. But most importantly, over here in the left-hand side, in the Template section, I get to choose the project template to apply to my project. And this is where we're choosing automatically which version, which renderer Unity is going to be using for our project. By default, we have 3D selected. If we choose 3D, we're going to get a straightforward project with some pretty standard materials. And we're going to be able to support a lot of the different Assets we can download from the Asset Store. By choosing 3D, we ensure the widest compatibility with Assets from the Asset Store, but it's an legacy option. Because a lot of the newer features being added inside Unity apply to these two other templates which are the render pipelines. So the 3D option is great if you want to create a simple project that can run on a wide range of devices and can access a load of Assets. And we'll see shortly how the 3D system works when creating materials and lights. There's also the newest systems, the High Definition Render Pipeline which is a great option to choose if you want to get the greatest results and the best quality possible from the Unity renderer. The downside to the High Definition Render Pipeline is that it doesn't support the widest range of devices. This is intended for high-end hardware, high-end PCs and consoles, and other kinds of hardware that have a lot of power to support that extra graphical quality. We also have the Universal Render Pipeline, and this really gives us, or tries to gives us the best of both worlds between the 3D version and the High Definition Render Pipeline. It allows us to support some of the newer range of material types available that Unity has to offer giving us great graphical quality, but it also supports a wide range of devices. So when creating new Unity projects, your first decision as to which pipeline you should use will determine the types of materials that you can work with and the kinds of Assets that you can use from the Asset Store. In the next movie, we're going to take a look at the 3D system and the material types there. So I'm going to go ahead and choose the 3D option, and I'll create a 3D project. In the next movie, we'll begin from a 3D project and have a look at how to create materials in that pipeline.