We’re excited to finally be able to share the next demo from Unity’s Demo Team, creators of “Adam”(2016) and “The Blacksmith” (2015).
Their newest project, Book of the Dead, is a first-person interactive demo showcasing the capabilities of Unity 2018 for powering high-end visuals for game productions.
The trailer is representative of the actual gameplay experience.
Unity’s Demo productions drive advanced use of the Unity engine through autonomous creative projects. The team consists of experienced game professionals led by Creative Director Veselin Efremov, who writes and directs the demos and is responsible for their final look.
Dont want to get your hopes up hippo cause I know youve been waiting a long time, but I think this might actually be a new terrain engine! Cant wait till 2018.1 beta!
I’ll believe it when I see it rendered! But the BOTD demo doesn’t show me any terrain that cannot be achieved with current terrain and good shaders - microsplat for example would manage it. What I am seeing a lot of are photogrammery based assets… What I mean is I’m not really looking at terrain but lots and lots of assets.
Quixel assets can potentially look repetitive (not their fault) because there aren’t actually many assets to go around so it would probably make Jim Sterling stumped but he might not see the wood for the trees and let it slide… I am joking of course.
But what 2018.1 SRP (with HD asset) does show off well is the great work @SebLagarde and his team have done with the HD pipeline. There some beautiful choices made with the foliage rendering. I cannot wait to see more, I feel like a kid again.
The performance? I think the choices the team made will result in good performance but naturally there is optimisation missing on the Unity side IMHO.
Looks awesome.
But the real question is: Will anything of that be usable in Unity? Can I buy some art assets from Asset Store, throw them into a scene, change some renderer settings, bake some GI lightmaps, press play and it will look anyway near it?
Or do I need a team of “experienced game professionals” working 2 years on a few short demo showoff sequences that will never work in a game, rewriting Unity’s render pipe in the process and investing 100k in ‘professional’ art?
Yes it is all Unity SRP and post, nothing you can’t have. The assets are already largely available on the Quixel store, they are just top quality photogrammary based meshes and textures. You can use what you like.
Obviously within reason and know there is not one size fits all for settings anywhere in this industry
It’s definitely beautiful - well done to the team. My biggest gripe right now is that to get this level of fidelity, you have to buy quite a lot of addons. If the unity terrain engine sees an upgrade that allows for custom shaded (or even standard shaded) objects, it’ll be a huge upgrade over what we have now. The terrain engine has barely changed since 2.0.
Many Unity users bounce from thing to thing never getting a clear answer. The HD pipeline is heavily asset dependant, you will need great quality assets. So I think a lot of the problem is that users get sucked into Asset Store quickly and do not spend time on baseline Unity capabilities.
This demo shows the Unity’s new HD Render pipeline power to build high quality scenes using high quality assets. I hope the workflow can be as easy as it is right now with standard deferred. Looking forward to see more in depth news.
With this render capability, Unity will safely become an easy choice for more developers in the AAA quality game community.
Wouldn’t expect that. Just hope reality will hold up to the hype only a little bit. As a coder I’m hitting the invisible art border all the time. More high quality art assets in the Asset Store (or somewhere else) would be nice. But thats OT.
Looks awesome! I love the tree people. I’m very interested in how the wind and foliage animation are being handled. I’m not really familiar with the Quixel store but it doesn’t seem like the trees and ferns have baked animations included; is this a new wind shader? Any chance we can get any info on the future of trees? These look way better than SpeedTree, but I’m guessing these are all hand-placed regular mesh objects and there’s a lot of baking and short camera distances, probably not designed to have hundreds of them with any sort of auto-LOD or billboarding or anything?
Foliage animation is most likely from the shader in the HD RP - (Lit Shader)
Took this Gif in the “WindTest” scene included in the HD Pipe that you can test from github - Under Releases or from 2018.1 b3 templates. Pretty cool stuff so far.
As far as LODs we’ll have to wait for info on that. What I do know is that Unity (Unity Labs) is working on a Auto LOD/HLOD system that’s pretty sweet from what they showed so far. No clue if its used in Book of the Dead but its something to look out for.
