HDRP provides us with a complete set of visual Debug tools, integrated in the Rendering Debugger window. The window can be opened through the top menu Window→Analysis→Rendering Debugger. The Rendering Debugger window can be used not only in edit mode, but also when running on a real machine. (To use the Debug window when running on a real machine, we need to check the Development Build option when building the project)
The way to open the Rendering Debugger window at runtime on the PC platform is Ctrl+Back key.
When using the Rendering Debugger window in the Unity editor, the window contains different options in the editing state and the running state. In the running state, there will be an additional Display Stats option, which can directly display the current frame rate and other information during runtime.
1. Material (material)
You can view the properties of related materials.
- When Common Material Properties is Smoothness, the whiter the object in the scene, the smoother it is. The maximum value is 1, which is pure white.
- When Meterial is Lit/***, it means that all materials using Lit shaders in the scene will display related *** information.
- When the Material Validator is Metal or SpecularColor, the red part of the scene indicates that the Metallic or Specular color on the corresponding material of these pixels is not within the acceptable PBR range.
2. Lighting
You can view information about lighting, such as shadows, direct lighting, and indirect lighting.
- When the four parameters under Show Lights By Type are not checked, it means that all light sources and reflection probes are turned off, and only baked indirect light and self-illumination can be seen in the scene.
- When the Fullscreen Debug Mode (Full Screen Debug Mode) is Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), it means that the screen space ambient occlusion is displayed in full screen mode, which helps us quickly see which areas of the ambient light occlusion may have problems.
- When Override Emissive Color is checked, you can specify a color for all self-illuminating materials in the scene.
3. Camera
In the Debug window, all cameras in the current scene have their own independent control interface. For example, there are: MainCamera, Camera-1 and Camera-2 cameras in the scene, plus the default Scene window camera. The Debug window will list the 4 cameras used by the current scene.
The Debug options are the same for each camera: Rendering, Lighting, Async Compute, and Light Loop. These options can be used to temporarily change the camera's Frame Settings without affecting how the camera is actually set up in the scene. This means that you can freely switch various settings in the Debug window to view the screen effect. After completing Debug, restore the default options in the Debug window.
Debug, Sanitized, Overridden, Default and HDRP configuration files, the relationship between the default Frame Settings and custom Frame Settings:
HDRP will check whether a function in each area works in the order of Default→Overridden→Sanitized→Debug.
- HDRP will first check whether a function is enabled in the camera's Default Frame Settings (in the HDRP Global Setting interface). (corresponding to the Default area)
- Then check if something is enabled in the camera's Custom Frame Settings (properties of the Camera component). (corresponding to the Overridden area)
- Finally check whether this function is enabled in the HDRP configuration file.
- According to the above three steps, finally decide whether to enable the Sanitized option.