Quick tip — Upgrading your Unity project to High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)

Luke Duckett
2 min readJan 13, 2022

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In this short article, I will show you how to upgrade your project from the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) to the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).

The first step is to create a backup package. I go over how to do this in my previous article.

Next, open a new project with the High Definition RP selected.

When Unity has finished creating the project go to where you stored your backup unity package and double click to install it.

This will bring all your assets into the current project.

Open your scene and you’ll notice your materials are pink. To fix this go to “Window” > “Render Pipeline” > “HD Render Pipeline Wizard”. Click “Fix” if you have any errors and then click the “Upgrade Project Materials to High Definition Materials”, you will get a confirmation window, click “Proceed”.

This will begin automatically updating your materials. You might end up with some materials that failed to update, if this is the case you will need to manually update them. I’ll give an example of that now.

In my scene, my terminal game object did not update. I will find the material in the project tab by selecting the game object and, in the “Mesh Renderer” component, opening the “Materials” drop-down and clicking on the material”

From this point, we can update the shader to “HDRP” > “Lit”. We can now add our textures back into their correct inputs.

That’s all for now.

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Luke Duckett

🎮 First Nations Unity Dev from Wonnarua country 🏞️ | From Player to Lifelong Learner: Crafting Games, Debugging Code, and Embracing New Technology