In an ideal world, starting a new High Definition RP project in Unity would mean simply creating the project, deleting all the sample content, and getting to work. Unfortunately, the default template includes a number of project-wide settings that directly reference the sample assets, which can cause unexpected behavior if you just delete those assets.
It takes less than an hour to untangle this stuff, but if you're like me and you like to spin up lots of prototypes in rapid succession, it gets tedious real fast. So instead, I created this actually empty HDRP project in Unity 2020.3.2f1. You can fork the repo if you want, but you may prefer to use it as a template or just download the zip archive so you can start a fresh repo for your own project.
From the Unity Hub, I created a High Definition RP project and made the following changes:
- Added the
UserSettingsfolder to .gitignore (GitHub's premade .gitignore for Unity doesn't include this) - Moved HDRP*Quality.asset files from
Assets/SampleSceneAssets/SettingstoAssets/HDRPDefaultResources/Settings - Moved VolumeGlobal.asset from
Assets/SampleSceneAssets/Settings/VolumestoAssets/HDRPDefaultResources/Settings/Volumesand renamed it to DefaultVolumeProfile.asset - Replaced the contents of Diffusion Profile List with default assets from the HDRP package
- Changed Fixed Timestep from
0.02to0.01666667to match the 60Hz tick rate elsewhere in the engine - Removed reference to SampleScene.unity from the Build Settings list
- Deleted the
Assets/ScenesandAssets/SampleSceneAssetsfolders - Deleted a missing AudioImporter preset from Preset Manager
At the time of writing this README, the entire project is under 700 KB on disk. That's quite an improvement over the 100+ MB just for the Assets folder of the High Definition RP template! I hope this encourages you to try more quick, silly things in Unity, without having to repeat this process every time you start.
❤️ George Kokoris (Burning North)