This weekend i watch the first time that Book of the Dead was shown, at Unite 2017… and i have to say, what huge improvement from there to what it is now…
congratulations to the team 
I’m sorry, are you asking if something that you can quickly slap together can look as good as something an artist spends a lot of time creating?
Isn’t it a bit like asking, if you place a camera in a random location, if it’s going to have as good a composition as if you spend tons of time on the placement?
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Looks great! Although it would be good to see everything a bit more crisp and a little less faded/blurred.
Also would love to see some hard surface stuff, such as a room or a courtyard, as this is much more difficult to get right IMO than photogrammetry nature assets, which tend to have very subtle and complex lighting detail already in the maps.
Looks gorgeous. The key questions, to me, are “How does it perform?” and “What is it running on?”
The “How much effort did it take to make?” question is also key, but that ball isn’t necessarily/fully in Unity’s court.
Hello everyone. Quixel has some amazing assets, but i failed to find complete trees. Are they from somewhere else? Also is the unity terrain automation used in this scene or is everything by hand? Could a scene like that be used commerially as gameplay?
What you are seeing is achievable in stock Unity with superb assets. I don’t see any terrain and indeed HD doesn’t have a terrain shader. The HD renderer just will do the equivalent visual slightly sweeter with more speed, and far cleaner. Also it has some nice features like transparent shadow receiving among others.
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I contacted quixel and told me that some assets were demo exclusives and maybe trees were from somewere else. Turbosquid has some photorealistic trees but with very high price. Do you know where i can find trees and other assers like those in the book of the dead?
Maybe they just photoscanned and tweaked most of em themselves like the page says. SpeedTrees are one way of getting trees but don’t expect finding like the ones in video for free or even cheap from much anywhere.
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But will this benefit Unity developers in general?
The area lights from the Adam Unity demo uploaded to Github won’t be updated for forward rendering or single pass stereo support, for example… VR perhaps isn’t a general case, but still, Unity seems to be very hard on the fact that everything they do needs to work on all platforms, which I think is why the shadows are still really poor in Unity, and apparently so poor that they weren’t good enough for the last demo…
…so forgive me if I feel that these demos are a bit disingenuous. But I guess that’s only because they seem to come from “the official Unity”, and I should instead focus on the fact that it’s a PR “demo”.
You can find them starting page 15 and more there:
https://unity3d.com/files/solutions/photogrammetry/Unity-Photogrammetry-Workflow_2017-07_v2.pdf
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Maybe you missed the whole point of the demo and did not read the page… but it’s demonstrating the new graphics pipeline in Unity 2018 which main purpose is to get rid of that massive, support everything rendering and allows users use or customize stuff based on their needs.
“The project is built on the new High-Definition Render Pipeline template shipping with Unity 2018 and various powerful customizations enabled by the SRP.”
Yeah it means VR will be a lot faster so VR developers can achieve more. (For LW/VR pipelines)
So maybe this is me being cynical again, but what would the Adam demo be without the area lights? And where are those area lights today? Languishing on Github… which is why I’m pessimistic about this new demo.
Our company actually got a specific request about Unreal this week, and we’re having a difficult time reproducing their level of fidelity in Unity so we might have to jump ship.
Sounds like Area Lights could be languishing in your project instead.
I’m not really seeing how this isn’t your problem. It seems pretty clear that you can do practically anything here.
Sounds like you should spend time reading the blog posts and about SRP in general. If you don’t want to then there’s nothing anyone can do…
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For me, it’s rare for a non-trivial project to not include some kind of custom tools or functionality on top of Unity, either custom built or licensed. It’s important to me that I can extend things as I need to, because I don’t expect their general-purpose built-in stuff to meet every one of of my project-specific needs perfectly.
With that in mind I see no issue with them doing the same for their own demos, demonstrating the kind of things you can do when you extend Unity, as long as it’s clear when they’ve done so. It’s kind of the same as me not expecting them to stick to art assets from their example packs, because I sure as heck wouldn’t do that when making a game either.
Well, I guess I should have expected these answers in this forum.
But then again, the reality is that Unreal seems to have cornered the market for architectureal and product visualisation for a reason (which is what I work with).
But I am certainly interested in seeing if 2018 will level the playing field. Right now, though, it looks as if I have to learn Unreal because of my job.
(EDIT: And I know that Unity can be made to look gorgeous. The trouble is I know of exactly one highly specialized firm that manages it, and that’s ZeroLight, so you can’t argue that it takes a quite high amount of skill to pull that off. Meanwhile on the Unreal side, everyone and their grandmother seems to manage to make equivalent gorgeous visuals, and I guess I’m a grandmother. So, 2018, bring it! I want to see.)
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ONE BIG QUESTION
Will we have to see what inside this demo? And how everything work?
Can’t wait to see this demo.
or maybe someone could say what directional light intensity used in this demo?
Did you edit texture colors of megascans, cuz they look a litle bit over brighted and oversaturated, sometimes less brighted or use them as is ?
What kind tonemapper you use here?
Did you use custom skybox solution? Or it simple cubemap sky?
Atmospheric fog?
We will have more information to share at GDC. We’ll be working to share the knowledge with everyone as we continue into 2018 though!
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Ok, nice to hear it.