Getting started with Unity

Question

Hello. I've recently gotten started with the ArcGIS SDK for Unity. I've had a look at the examples available on GitHub, specifically the XR Tabletop example, as my application uses a VR headset.

For now, however, I'm just trying to get going and understand more of the SDK. I've not gotten far, and I'm already having some issues. I'm stuck on v1.5.0 of the SDK for now, since my Unity project uses Unity 2021.3.x and upgrading at this time is a no-go. I would like to eventually try to recreate the aforementioned XR Tabletop example in my project, but at the moment I'm just trying to display something (if someone has any tips on getting something similar to that demo in Unity 2021, let me know).

I've added the SDK via tarball in the UPM, and I've also added the samples content via the UPM. My project uses URP, so I've navigated to the Tabletop scene in Assets/Samples/ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unity/1.5.0/Sample Content/Scenes/URP/Tabletop, and added my API key in the ArcGISMap compoent. I get something, but the map is flickering and is mostly just black.
 Have a look at this gif:

As I mentioned I have only just gotten started, but I feel like I'm already having issues, so it's a bit difficult to know what's the next course of action.

Also, as a side-note: I find it extremely annoying that there's some component that turns off dynamic clipping on the scene camera. With it off, I mostly can't see anything when moving the camera around. Why is this default?

MarkusFynd · Answer

More investigation. It seems the flickering is related to some wonkiness with the normal maps? In this gif, you'll see that everything looks normal when going over the material overrides in the rendering debugger, until I get to the normal maps:

I made a new test project using Unity 2021.3.x and imported the SDK v1.5.0 via tarball, and this is not an issue in the plain test project. Here the material overrides for normal maps look fine.

In any case, I've also realized that the flickering only happens when I have medium selected in quality settings:

So I can continue my testing for now, although I'm gonna need to be able to use the medium preset later, when building to standalone VR headsets...

MarkusFynd · Answer

Can you confirm what rendering pipeline you are using in the Project Settings > Graphics please?

As mentioned, my project uses URP.

can you test the HDRP version of the table top scene

This gif is from the HDRP scene, but I have not changed the project to HDRP. My project is quite large, so I don't want to mess with settings that might break things.

As for you comment about default setting of dynamic clipping, this is unfortunately something we deal with on a regular basis. We aren't sure how to get around this aside from changing the setting every time it resets to default.

No I'm saying I want dynamic clipping. The ArcGIS SDK turns it off all the time, resulting in not being able to see anything in the scene view which is very annoying. Like this:

Just leave it on, I don't understand why you turn it off 🤔

MasonGaw · Answer

Hi there,

Can you confirm what rendering pipeline you are using in the Project Settings > Graphics please? If it is set to HDRP, can you please switch it, then navigate down to Packages, find the ArcGISMaps SDK for Unity and right click on it and click reimport.

If this does not work, can you test the HDRP version of the table top scene to see what the behavior is as well, specifically if this issue is replicated in both HDRP and URP.

As for you comment about default setting of dynamic clipping, this is unfortunately something we deal with on a regular basis. We aren't sure how to get around this aside from changing the setting every time it resets to default.

Please let me know if you have any other issue.

Mason