Setting up a URP project with Unity

What is URP?

URP stands for Universal Render Pipeline. According to Unity Docs it is a prebuilt Scriptable Render Pipeline, made by Unity. URP provides artist-friendly workflows that let you quickly and easily create optimized graphics across a range of platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles and PCs.

This is perfect for our Sci-Fi Lab Room scene. Unfortunately, we started the project in a standard 3D project scene in Unity. It is a little difficult to upgrade our project into URP when we create a Unity project. The easiest way around this is to create a brand-new project and use the URP template in Unity Hub.

How can I transfer my assets into a new project?

Good question! We can create a Unity package! Let’s navigate to it:

Assets > Export Package > Export…

Name the package something that will be easy to find.

Now, we create a new project using Unity Hub and finding the URP template. When naming the new project, add “URP” to separate it from your original project.

After it loads, we can now import the assets we packaged from the previous project.

Assets > Import Package > Custom Package…

When it imports, we find and open our scene. However, you might notice something unusual. The assets look pink.

How can we fix this? We have to upgrade our materials to be able to see it. First, we find our assets and select each material in each folder.

After selecting each material and then we navigate to a specific location:

Edit > Rendering > Materials > Convert Selected Built-In Materials to URP

When you click this, it should change to a teal color. This is Unity calculating the lighting with the new upgraded material.

The final result looked like this.

It looks the same, but now we can use the URP to make this scene look even better!