I’ve been using Unity since 2015. About ten years closing. The Visual quality has stalled, unless you use HDR pipeline, and that is expensive. I must say, for the default rendering path, there hasn’t been ANY improvements since 2016. No advanced shadow casting for objects even for the directional lights? (Is this really so difficult to add even a simple box blur???) If I have simple 3d mesh, the shadows are NOT forgiving anything, and oh boy, if the angle is hard enough, the shadow casting quality is extremely bad. Like WTF, shadow casting box blur? Too much challenge???
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In Unity 6 the default is no longer built-in it’s URP or HDRP. Built-in isn’t getting anymore updates, it will probably be depreciated after Unity 6.
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Unity 6 in action
Time Ghost is the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo developed by the team behind projects like The Blacksmith, Adam, Book of the Dead, The Heretic, and Enemies. Presented at Unite 2024 in Barcelona, it showcases what can be achieved with Unity 6. The demo highlights advancements in visual quality, project complexity, and the practical use of machine learning workflows
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That demo looks really amazing. I don’t normally pay too much attention to the demos as they seem to be targeting cinema and use tools that the average game dev doesn’t have. I was looking over some of the past demos, it’s cool to see that the Enemies demo includes both the project and a downloadable exe. When I just see the video I’m not too impressed as it’s probably running on some high end machine and most of the work is done in some other 3d software like Maya. Being able to run the exe on my machine makes the demo more useful as I can get an idea of how it really runs. Hopefully Time Ghost will also release an exe at some point.
Not really sure how practical HDRP is for most Unity games. I’d probably only need it if I was working on a game that had funding for millions of dollars worth of art assets. At that point I’d probably just switch to Unreal. I find URP is good enough for mobile games or stylized graphics. I also tend to prefer games with stylized graphics over photorealistic graphics nowadays. It would be cool to see a professional Unity demo using stylized graphics, maybe something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
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By now there are many successful PC games with stylised visuals using HDRP. Would be cool to see a stylised demo though, reminds of this The Butterfly Effect - Unity Realtime Rendering Short film (youtube.com) can’t believe it was 11 years ago.
Most HDRP games I’m aware of are stylized, they use HDRP for PC specific rendering features.
Fool me once… etc.
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Would like to see a Unity breakdown of this, because there’s a lot going on there and it’s not clear what’s bespoke custom coded (vegetation management?), what was done using Editor tools, what came from 3rd party tools Houdini, Maya, etc (terrain?), and what animated, motion captured or motion matched? In the past Unity has often fudged these Demo’s where extensive work was done in expensive software out of the engine and then imported into Unity and rendered real-time. Enemies was very similar in that Maya was used to create the digital human and facial animations.
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There is a “behind the scenes “ session at Unite tomorrow that will be up on YouTube and as soon as I can I will share it here
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what facial animations 
they have the face covered with those masks. I wonder, I wonder, why we can’t see the faces 
well you can’t expect unity to do all these things, you need a pipeline with various software to create content for the game.
but what we expect is for the demo project, if they release the demo project, to actually work in a day to day unity versions, not in some specific custom versions that no one has access to.
Which never happens
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Well with the facial mocap, I was referring to Enemies and not Time Ghost. They had to cover up the face in Time Ghost because they didn’t want to go through even more trouble to do facial mocap. After Unity collapsed Ziva and has quietly killed Digital Human, they don’t have a character workflow pipeline and it’s painfully obvious. I am somewhat surprised to hear they’re considering future plans to integrate a motion matching animation solution back in, but I feel that is miles away in future versions.
Yeah I understand we need to use 3rd party software to do game creation, I don’t expect Unity to do absolutely everything. However, I do feel like Unity sends a lot of mixed messages with these Cinematic demos though. Granted, they want to show off the visual quality of what Unity can do. Unity just posted " Time Ghost – How Unity 6 made it possible" on YouTube and they tell you what they did to make it, but looking at that, a great deal of the design was done outside Unity using 3rd party hardware and software. Technically, they could have used 3rd party latest AI to generate a video and just ploped it on a video texture and said “Made in Unity” and technically it would have been true.
I do give props to them on things like the Hair and the new lighting for VFX is impressive and certainly done inside Unity and done well. The bespoke cloth and vegetation system though felt like a missed opportunity to deliver new tools to the editor so that developers could do more than just work to reverse engineer Unity’s work when they release the demo in a month.
I’m glad to see an end to the 3 pipelines in the future, I feel like Unity has wasted years of development on them, even though I use HDRP myself. Unity is getting better at the visual quality, the light and shadows in Unity 6 look much better than they do in 2021 LTS. It still has a long way to go though, the lighting configuration is way too complex to configure correctly to get impressive quality and performance. Maybe by Unity 7 we’ll be there for it.
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Hi there! Just a 2 cents. TL DR: I wrote a Youtube comment, but Youtube AI blocks anything too long or offending its sensibilities, thus could not post it/AI did not feel it was fair enough to its censor-ing-sensing sensibilities… Amazing Demo…congrats to that team of extremely talented devs who made it. You need a 4090 GPU, albeit it may run on 4070…they are tweaing it to make it not a ‘rich person’/pipe dream needing a 4090 GPU or a Intel 19000…new CPU (which costs an arm and leg).
'‘I am a solo game developer using the Unity engine, I wish to say something about this. It is a Realtime demo – not – a prerendered demo/offline; running on the Nvidia 4090 GPU card…yes, this is expensive, in terms of hardware; this toppest of the line (the best at the moment) GPU costs above 1000$, which for some is their budget/price, for an - Entire computer…not just the GPU alone. This is why Playstation 5 (later Playstation 6) or Xbox Series X2 whatever new version…are being bought, at sub-1000$ cost…these GPU cards, like 4090 GPU are only affordable for less than 0.01% of people; meaning rich people or people with a high salary, who can spend 2000$ on a sole GPU card. Albeit, I read somewhere, that Unity is almost at getting it to run on a 4070 GPU mid-consumer GPU (at about 30fps, all bells & whisles), which is much more affordable. On Steam, I think the stats say the people who have a 4090 are about, as said 0.01% of the population of gamers. At least, AMD is making them more affordable, like their Radeon RTX 6080; this one is better price value and is better investment than buying a 500-1000$ console…that will be underpowered…very soon (even if developers can ‘squeeze’ more power from the close architecture of consoles vs PC…you hit a limit…and this Tech Demo here would put Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X to their knees…meaning you could not even run them on them (at 30 fps); albeit, Unity have said recently that they are getting to running it on Nvidia 4070, so from this we can infer; that it could run on Playstation 5, Series X because of the extra power/squeezing of the closer architecture of consoles…PS5 / Xbox Series X are about Nvidia 3070 equivalent…thus, they will struggle to run this at 1080p (I’m not talking 4K resolution, which would reduce the frame rate by x4); this is where the DLSS FSR tech arrive…they allow these tech demos that can’t be runned…but to be runned at Lower Resolution…then upscaled to 2K, 2.5K, 4K…via DLSS / FSR. —Then, it is feasable…but not at ‘native’ 4K resolution in ’ real-time’ the PS5/X…are now underpowered…and not enough. Only PS6 and Xbox Series X2…will be able to run this at 4K real-time…even there I have doubts…because it very likely that PS6 (Pro) or Xbox Series X2 (Pro)…whatever new ones…will Not be Much More Powerful than the Nvidia 4090…nor the Nvidia 5090 coming soon; nor the Radeon RX XT 7080+ or 8000… series, in future, neither.
Thus, it means what?..it means that the consoles are now, underpowered, and always products ‘made at a loss’…meaning that PS6…would Normally cost 1000-1500$ but no one would buy that…so they sell it 500-700…$…at a loss; and hope to ‘make up’ in total volume/number of unit sold (PS5 sold some 30 million units so far…a proof in the console pudding…that PC GPU cards…that are too expensive…do not sell…nearly, at all, except the select rich people). It is wiser invesment, to buy a PS6 or Xbox Series X2 (so long at the PC games are ported to consoles - also; of course, we can’t predict that; but, most Big Budget AAA games end up on both PC and consoles, generally; it’s, mostly, indies who will only be able to stick to PC…if they can afford/port a Consoles version of their PC game); or a AMD RX GPU…but not a good investment in Nvidia, because there is not much ‘middle market’ with them (sure you can say, that’s the Nvidia 4060, 4070, 3060, 3070, 3080) and that the high-end ($$$$) is the 4080, 4090 GPUs…there is a substantial power gap between that 4070 and 4090…just ‘20’ more…but the price almost twice/triples…the power generally doubles to 2.5x more…rarely is it 3-4x–5x more powerful…only double, double +.5, almost 3x, or is less…in terms raw GPU compute power. The fact that this demo needed to be run on 4090…is a testament that this demo will struggle on ANY hardware right now…so you can forget about the 120fps 8K resolution thing…your GPU/Ps5/X…cannot run this at 30 fps 1080p unless using other techs, like DLSS, FSR, more stringent GPU occlusing culling/impostors/mesh combining/GPU instancing/ECS/DOTS…etc; it is too demanding; thankfully, Unity is trying to make it run on a 4070 or so GPU, they probably are using more occlusion, LODs, imposters and other tricks to reduce the weight on the engine; they use DOTS for the millions of foliage in the demo…this is impossible to run this without DOTS/ECS entities system…not the old game objects. Basically, this demo runs only on the Best of the Best PC, with the Very Latest Most Expensive Hardware…that’s what we need to understand. Yes, ‘‘It’s not surprise, it’s supposed to be the most ‘next-gen’ Tech Demo…that’s what it is…a Tech Demo Showcasing Unity 6’’…yes, obviously. As for the applicability…there is use to this tech demo…as they will release the tools on Oct 17…to download the scenes and view the tools…real time…in the new Unity 6 vanilla version/unmodified.
This is will help devs (like me, am solo dev using Unity for a 3D game(s) am making), now, of couse, one needs to ‘migrate’ to Unity 6…I won’t. Because, of the long time since I have been using Unity 2017…and am staying with Unity 2021 LTS…most stable one (bugs and all), most efficient and has .Net 2.1 c# scripting; which is required for all new assets. Later, I may upgrade to Unity 6. But, the graphics am making in Built-in render pipeline…are just as good…as this Tech Demo here…not as ‘vast’ or ‘deep’…but sitll very much CG quality graphics…same thing. This tech demo is CG quality using HDRP system, like Unreal 5/UE5 CG quality. Built-in Render…can also emulate that…with using Assets for Post-production…you can make it ‘look’ like HDRP…in built-in. That’s what I did. The Other, last point, to keep in mind from this…is that people make feel ‘duped’ by Unity Tech Demos – i.e. they Required A Huge Team…to make them…this is not something made by a solo developer…but by a Large Team…that worked months on end…to make this Tech Demo…it is not a Full Game…only a 4 min CG film…thus, you understand that ‘transposing’ this (for game devs) to a ‘Full Game’…is near-nigh impossible Unless we are Talking a Large Company AAA game company…with Tons of people making a ‘Time Ghost Game’…yes…is 100% feasable…but requires Immense Resource to make this. The Assets in this demo are ultra-quality CG film…very long, to ‘produce’ this (in production phase game dev). Each person that contributed to make this demo was payed a Salary (most likely) – let’s say 50,000$…there is easily 10-15 people on this…so by calculus…that’s one year to make this = 50K$ x 10 people = 500,000$ US budget, just, on wages…on the ‘low end’…it could be much higher than this… ‘Other’ expenses/costs not calculated. Who has 500,000$ to ‘spend’…to make a video game (or a 4 min short film) --no one------except AA/AAA game companies; they have millions of dollars. So this Tech Demo is what is ‘possible’ by a Large Team/AAA game company…don’t expect yourself and your 3 friends micro-team to arrive to this ‘easily’ (Unless, Outsourcing, of course; which 99% of larger indie devs do/have to do; or stuck making smaller games)…it’s hard Extremely Hard to do…expensive/time demanding/costly…in resources/time/manpower…and yes, money. Anyway, not to sound defeatist…I read devs and gamers say: ‘’ LOL…another Unity Tech Demo – useless—not 1 single Developer Ever made a game look like ANY of their Tech Demos…it’s fluff/‘unattainable’…only a AAA game company can do this – and NO company ‘uses’ Unity for AAA games…they (nearly) all use Unreal 5…so this is once more a Tech Demo that will be irrelevant ‘in general’ for Unity Game Developers…because they will never attain/replicate this quality in their game.‘’ There is some truth about this…it looks like a pipe dream…like some game ‘made in 2043…in Unity 17’…not ‘reality’…anyway. I think, instead, what devs need to think is can transpose some of these elements in my game ‘on a smaller scale/(vert) slice/scope’…That’s, I believe, a resounding, Yes. Thanks for reading, just a 2 cents.‘’
You’re not going to see anything going forward either as Unity 7 is removing the built-in rendering path.
It’s being deprecated, but like most Unity things, it’ll probably remain for a full 1 or 2 versions afterward.
It is staying around for the 6 generation, but is being completely removed in 7. There’s still plenty of time to move to an SRP before then.
All unity needs to do is updated the default skybox and integrate post processing by default. People will ‘think’ it looks better all of a sudden.
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Bold move considering how much cruft Unity has left in the engine for project compatibility reasons.
They’re removing a massive heap of it with 7, it’s a major part of the release, and it’s going to be great to see it all gone.
I’d probably have worse feelings about it if I hadn’t finally finished migrating all projects I’m supporting to LTS this month. BIRP’s gone long enough without updates.