Lighting and environments in the High Definition Render Pipeline in Unity 6

In Unity 6, the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) delivers physically accurate lighting, high-fidelity materials, and cinematic effects to make your scenes more immersive.

This is the fourth edition of our HDRP guide, now covering all the capabilities included in HDRP in Unity 6 and 6.1. Use it together with HDRP documentation to get all the know-how and inspiration you need to create beautiful visuals in projects targeting high-end consoles and PCs.

All of the HDRP updates in Unity 6 and 6.1

Here's a sample of some of the Unity 6 features and systems covered in the book:

- Lighting: The LightBaker v1.0, a GPU Baking Profile for the GPU Lightmapper, Adaptive Probe Volume (APV) updates, Area light improvements

- Environment effects: Planet parameters, Physically Based Sky Volume, volumetric clouds, updates to the water system

- Performance and optimizations: Dynamic resolution, GPU Resident Drawer, variable rate shading (VRS)

- More updates: For the Package Manager samples, as well as lens flares, hair, and fur

You can find all of Unity’s e-books for experienced developers, artists, and technical artists in the Unity how-to hub and the best practices section in documentation.