Why can't Unity HDRP correctly render AAA looking character models?

[DEEnvironment]

@hippocoder

Wondering if people even have proper cubemaps / probes set up. Those are unfortunately not optional, and HDRP’s SSS/transmission needs a modification to the map unless you know for sure the thickness amount is what is expected by this particular formula in this particular engine.

I don’t mean to be funny but you know a lot of people aren’t using assets made for HDRP, nor setting up scenes properly.

i have to fully agree with you on this point
i see post after post weekly about x vs x and feel for them as they don’t seam to grasp the basic ideas and expect one click solutions, HDRP can and does fully make this level of detail if they take the time to setup

HDRP is rapidly evolving and Unity’s level of progress just over the last year has been amazing, if they take a moment to see what is coming down the path not far ahead of them they may just praise unity for the hard work… Unity seams to use a gated process as we see much of the workflow comes in small steps clearing each milestone in its schedule. Not every one is always happy about this but it does keep unity controlled

@ keep up the good work and we look forward to the future

[Ruchir]

@impheris

A little example, i open the 2020’s hdrp template scene, i did not touch anything i just put a point light close to a wall and i have that light leakage (in fact i made a whole post for this some time ago)
Maybe i have to re-bake, maybe i have to add probes maybe something else, but with unreal i do not have to deal with this, i just add a point light in the “new scene template” on unreal and it works perfectly without this light leakage, this is why people like us got a little disappointed.

Well you didn’t enable shadows

[impheris]

@Ruchir

Well you didn’t enable shadows

ah yeah of course i forgot that, because in unity it is obvious that lights don´t need shadows, that is ok whatever… But, what about my old post with (Jun 7, 2021)
Post: https://discussions.unity.com/t/843838/7
That is the leakage i was talking about i just forgot the very obvious shadow setup for those rare cases where lights needs shadows.
in that post i have the bug in 2019 and 2021 (Whatch the videos)
also see the image

[cloverme]

The other thing is that the Digital Human doesn’t even have a forum for it. This is one of those “dump on github and run” deals that unity does. You can’t easily reach the people at Unity who put it together nor can you actually reach anyone at Unity to say, “Look, you’ve got a community of paying artists/gamedevs that want to put AAA-looking characters in our games, and you’ve left us with nothing. Because of that, we’re moving to Unreal”.

I’d love for someone from Unity to drop in here and go, “you’re wrong! Here’s a step by step tutorial how to achieve a custom character from xyz to Unity HDRP 10.x that is 1:1 with Unreal Metahumans”.

[jjejj87]

I have mixed feelings about this.

1. Unity HDRP normal rendering…and how it reacts to light source and all is a hit and miss for my liking. It just doesn’t produce results as I expected. Especially in high res environment, it feels like normals just become noise. I believe this is a tradeoff to achieve runtime rendering.

2. SSS helps but given that the SSS implementation is a quick approximation, it is very hard to achieve the typical rendered look, which just like 1), also understandable. I am not really complaining.

3. Hair rendering is hard to achieve and often ends up being a crude alpha clip. Also understandable. That soft hair is near impossible to achieve.

4. Every other showcase of human/organic rendering consists of many 4k textures, custom lighting and shaders. Also custom environment, and super high poly count for rigged. Not realistically feasible unless the model is used specifically for cutscenes…for indies, this is automatic no no.

5. The lack of indirect lighting and SSS detail makes every character’s head look much bigger even if they are proportionally correct, the depth correction is also an issue as the game camera cannot focus on characters when the camera is controlled by the player.

Provided all the above, I just ended up with the following. She is a vampire NPC in my game

The first image is how a NPC gets rendered in the game. SSS, with normal detail map. Then the second image, has light layer based 2 point lights (blue and green) from either side to give more depth and variation to the npc. This is only turned on when the character is talking to the npc (Skyrim style).

This is her in game. No blue and green lighting…but facial and skin details don’t play much of a roll as you will most likely keep some distance in FPS view.

It is not much, but realistically speaking, bumping up character detail further will kill more performance and just makes it not really feasible. And I don’t want one NPC to look great and other not so great. I want to maintain a steady level of detail throughout the game. She is a 100k triangle rigged character with 12 4k maps. On top of that 4 bone drive and blendshapes with mecanim already takes a huge chunk out of performance. All the IK and foot placement as well. I think I am already using way more than I should be.

The flatness that comes with PBR based lighting makes character rendering hard as lighting wasn’t designed for organic rigged mesh, but with a few tricks it gets better. The test scene is deliberately kept overcast so that I can keep a steady baseline of how things look.

Now, I am okay with this level for now, and probably for my next project (If I don’t move to Unreal Engine). But I don’t think I will be happy with this level in 2023.

Hope this helps!

[system]

@cloverme

Yeah, I mean, after I finish my current game, I’m moving over to Unity. I like the ease of development with Unity from a language (C#) and extensibility perspective, but what it offers in one area, has some significant drawbacks in others. The philosophy has become “use the asset store for functionality”. I’ve got 10k+ hours into Unity, been a presenter at GDC, and worked for 505 games, Microsoft, and Bioware, so it’s not like I just downloaded Unity and was like, “Uh, why does this look like cardboard?!?”. I get lighting, probes, shadows, shaders, etc… so I think I’ve boiled this down to, Unity can’t do what Unreal can do, which bums me out, but it is what it is.

I think u have not setup material, textures,
scene lighting and shadows properly… Try tweaking ambient lighting or use HDRIs or try using it in an environment and use point lights and area lights to see SSS effect because the effect does not look proper in directional light and add some minor details like skin pores, spots etc to the texture and use their normal maps… proper normal maps and specular maps are really important in creating realistic human skin… Highlight areas in the specular map where u want skin to be shiny to represent sweat or oil and setup the SSS profile properly and use multiple sss maps land also take a look at this use this color scheme and blend this with your skin texture this will instantly make your character look believable and if u have zbrush than u can sculpt minor details and bake the results to normal map and poly paint the above color scheme… the process is same for unreal if u are creating custom characters… metahumans has everything setup already and is tightly integrated inside it(maybe unreal looks better in custom charcters as well because of its out of the box realistic lighting… on the other hand in unity u always have to tune some setting for shadows, lighting, GI and exposure) if shaders is what giving u trouble than read the documentation, get help from forums or watch some tutorials or get another shader from asset store… If u want out of the box results u can take look at CC3

[system]

@jjejj87

I have mixed feelings about this.

1. Unity HDRP normal rendering…and how it reacts to light source and all is a hit and miss for my liking. It just doesn’t produce results as I expected. Especially in high res environment, it feels like normals just become noise. I believe this is a tradeoff to achieve runtime rendering.

2. SSS helps but given that the SSS implementation is a quick approximation, it is very hard to achieve the typical rendered look, which just like 1), also understandable. I am not really complaining.

3. Hair rendering is hard to achieve and often ends up being a crude alpha clip. Also understandable. That soft hair is near impossible to achieve.

4. Every other showcase of human/organic rendering consists of many 4k textures, custom lighting and shaders. Also custom environment, and super high poly count for rigged. Not realistically feasible unless the model is used specifically for cutscenes…for indies, this is automatic no no.

5. The lack of indirect lighting and SSS detail makes every character’s head look much bigger even if they are proportionally correct, the depth correction is also an issue as the game camera cannot focus on characters when the camera is controlled by the player.

Provided all the above, I just ended up with the following. She is a vampire NPC in my game

The first image is how a NPC gets rendered in the game. SSS, with normal detail map. Then the second image, has light layer based 2 point lights (blue and green) from either side to give more depth and variation to the npc. This is only turned on when the character is talking to the npc (Skyrim style).

This is her in game. No blue and green lighting…but facial and skin details don’t play much of a roll as you will most likely keep some distance in FPS view.

It is not much, but realistically speaking, bumping up character detail further will kill more performance and just makes it not really feasible. And I don’t want one NPC to look great and other not so great. I want to maintain a steady level of detail throughout the game. She is a 100k triangle rigged character with 12 4k maps. On top of that 4 bone drive and blendshapes with mecanim already takes a huge chunk out of performance. All the IK and foot placement as well. I think I am already using way more than I should be.

The flatness that comes with PBR based lighting makes character rendering hard as lighting wasn’t designed for organic rigged mesh, but with a few tricks it gets better. The test scene is deliberately kept overcast so that I can keep a steady baseline of how things look.

Now, I am okay with this level for now, and probably for my next project (If I don’t move to Unreal Engine). But I don’t think I will be happy with this level in 2023.

Hope this helps!

Aren’t u using any kind of SSS map?? It seems that your whole model is performing SSS… isn’t it possible to have the effect stronger in thinner parts like ears, nose and fingers of the mesh and more subtle in thicker areas via settings or by manually defining it through maps or vertex color???(because it’s quite simple to do in blender with thickness settings and material editor and if I remember unity does have these things in shadergraph and maybe in profile settings)

[system]

@cloverme

The other thing is that the Digital Human doesn’t even have a forum for it. This is one of those “dump on github and run” deals that unity does. You can’t easily reach the people at Unity who put it together nor can you actually reach anyone at Unity to say, “Look, you’ve got a community of paying artists/gamedevs that want to put AAA-looking characters in our games, and you’ve left us with nothing. Because of that, we’re moving to Unreal”.

I’d love for someone from Unity to drop in here and go, “you’re wrong! Here’s a step by step tutorial how to achieve a custom character from xyz to Unity HDRP 10.x that is 1:1 with Unreal Metahumans”.

Here is the process of creating realistic skin texture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcnmyLK-uw

There is always a lot of manual work to be done for creating charcters manually… does not matter what engine u use… So if u want to have AAA quality than u have to use the AAA methods to create a custom charcter… U can do this easily with CC3 and metahumans by the way

[Ruchir]

Here is the process of creating realistic skin texture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcnmyLK-uw

There is always a lot of manual work to be done for creating charcters manually… does not matter what engine u use… So if u want to have AAA quality than u have to use the AAA methods to create a custom charcter… U can do this easily with CC3 and metahumans by the way

Are there any sample AAA characters available for unity?

[system]

@Ruchir

Are there any sample AAA characters available for unity?

Yes, here it is https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/the-heretic-digital-human-168620 but only works properly in the mentioned 2019 version and later of that year

[jjejj87]

Aren’t u using any kind of SSS map?? It seems that your whole model is performing SSS… isn’t it possible to have the effect stronger in thinner parts like ears, nose and fingers of the mesh and more subtle in thicker areas via settings or by manually defining it through maps or vertex color???(because it’s quite simple to do in blender with thickness settings and material editor and if I remember unity does have these things in shadergraph and maybe in profile settings)

Yes, but often times it is not worth it. The upside to using Thickness map and SSS map, so 2 textures is that you get to fine control how thickness vs scattering happens. The downside, is that 2 extra textures are needed. Also, it is UV based, and UVs are made with texture detail and distribution in mind but not thickness. That usually ends up with a very small portion of the thickness and SSS map texture actually contributing towards the effect. Think of ears and nose size for the whole body. Unless you are prepared to have a separate map for the head, I don’t think it is worth the trouble. Usually a good adjustment of thinkness and diffuse profile is enough to the desired look. Also, with correctly working thickness, you have to be extra careful with light placement strength as it will react to it, which requires multiple testing in many scene settings. The fact that females mostly have their ear covered with hair also makes it not worth it.

Also, SSS doesn’t work very well with contact shadows, creating a line of shadows that looks really bad. I reported the issue using a bucket but Unity seems to think it is a fair tradeoff to keep things performant. And I agree to some degree.

Lastly, if my game spends most of its time looking close up to the head, then yes, I think the 2 extra maps are worth it. But so far, i think it introduces more work, more noise to rendering and extreme cases that restrict light placement.

I do use it for my vampire zombie as it is mostly naked with no hair and the SS on its ear shines. But for a female character with enough hair it probably isn’t worth it. Not to mention that it doesn’t look that great anyway.

[jjejj87]

Here is the process of creating realistic skin texture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcnmyLK-uw

There is always a lot of manual work to be done for creating charcters manually… does not matter what engine u use… So if u want to have AAA quality than u have to use the AAA methods to create a custom charcter… U can do this easily with CC3 and metahumans by the way

I think we are discussing why AAA quality models rendered in Unity do not render like it does in other Content Creation Suite. So not exactly how to create the asset, but why in default HDRP environment, shaders and textures lack quality and look “downgraded”.

[cloverme]

Here is the process of creating realistic skin texture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcnmyLK-uw

There is always a lot of manual work to be done for creating charcters manually… does not matter what engine u use… So if u want to have AAA quality than u have to use the AAA methods to create a custom charcter… U can do this easily with CC3 and metahumans by the way

I get your meaning, but the issue is really about quality fidelity between the character authoring tools and Unity. I have AAA character design models with high micro normals for skin, etc. The problem is that, hours and hours of tweaking in unity with Shadows, Light, probes, SSS, etc only get you about 40% of the way in terms of fidelity with HDRP, even if you use custom skin shaders, hair, eye, etc.

The workflow pipelines can be pretty complex, especially if you have a model that needs to express facial emotions (blendshapes or meshmorphs) and speak with synchronized audio. Some of these character design tools have exports, specifically for Unity HDRP, but they still produce a less than ideal Unity model for closeups with cutscenes. They’re great for if the camera is 10-15 meters away, but for cutscenes, you need to have the camera close. When that happens, the character details for skin, eyes, and hair are not very good due to how HDRP is rendering the models, even with high subdivision and 4k textures.

I’m not trying to diss your posts on advice, but I’ve already done all the things you have suggested. Normals, multilayer texturing, HDRI’s, 3 light studio configurations, shadow tweaking, etc. This is not so say that I haven’t had a “okay” result with these things, but it’s still a bit of a boondoggle to get a much higher quality result with Unity HDRP.

Update:
Recently, Unity posted information on a new tool called Lookdev studio, in that, they recently showed a fairly decent character model in Unity. LookDev Studio Unfortunately, they don’t talk about the workflow for that particular model, who designed it, what software they used, what the pipeline workflow was for import, etc. I’ve asked if they can share more info since it looks about on par with the digital human package, but I’m guessing it isnt the DH.

[system]

@cloverme have u seen the heretic digital human asset??? Did it helped you or not?? u can also take a look here in this forum post Unity SRP HD SSS they used default HDRP lit shader and achieved quite good result and there is also workflow available

[cloverme]

@cloverme have u seen the heretic digital human asset??? Did it helped you or not?? u can also take a look here in this forum post Unity SRP HD SSS they used default HDRP lit shader and achieved quite good result and there is also workflow available

Yes, I’ve already mentioned this a few times as I’ve seen the digital human asset. I know of two other experimental research projects that have used it to create examples, but it’s been quite difficult to follow. Honestly, 2 people using it out of tens of thousands of Unity projects and developers doesn’t make the tool a production ready asset.

-It’s mostly abandonware from Unity since there’s little to no official support, it’s on github, which means it requires the community to improve it, not unity.
-The asset only works with “4D clip import”, which no character creation tools used by artists can export.
-There’s a blog here: Unity Blog which shows how much of a one-off it is to create just 1 character.
-They had to use a custom pass that operates on the contents of the HDRP normal buffer with in the SRP.
-Some of the links to additional information have 404 errors on the blog now, several years later.

I don’t feel that the Digital Human asset is a good solution from Unity on importing AAA style model characters. Mostly because it doesn’t support any workflow pipeline from character design tools that artists currently use. You can’t use mocap tools from leading providers in the industry. Each character you want to try to use it for has to be custom tailored requiring customized granular tweaks per shader and shader graph per character.

A lot of the people are under the misconception that the DH package from Unity is a “tool” that will allow you take say, a character from Character Creator 3 (A popular character design tool) and somehow create a DH from an export. That’s simply not the case. In it’s current state, I would largely say, the DH package is unusable from an artist / developer perspective.

Yes, I’ve also seen that forum link, and the work is quite good there. It’s probably as close as most of us can get.

Here’s my own Unity HDRP example using a combination from CC/DAZ and tweaking the Lit shader
Unity HDRP 10.x:

Source from tool CC3:

[Ruchir]

@cloverme

Yes, I’ve already mentioned this a few times as I’ve seen the digital human asset. I know of two other experimental research projects that have used it to create examples, but it’s been quite difficult to follow. Honestly, 2 people using it out of tens of thousands of Unity projects and developers doesn’t make the tool a production ready asset.

-It’s mostly abandonware from Unity since there’s little to no official support, it’s on github, which means it requires the community to improve it, not unity.
-The asset only works with “4D clip import”, which no character creation tools used by artists can export.
-There’s a blog here: https://blog.unity.com/technology/making-of-the-heretic-digital-human-tech-package which shows how much of a one-off it is to create just 1 character.
-They had to use a custom pass that operates on the contents of the HDRP normal buffer with in the SRP.
-Some of the links to additional information have 404 errors on the blog now, several years later.

I don’t feel that the Digital Human asset is a good solution from Unity on importing AAA style model characters. Mostly because it doesn’t support any workflow pipeline from character design tools that artists currently use. You can’t use mocap tools from leading providers in the industry. Each character you want to try to use it for has to be custom tailored requiring customized granular tweaks per shader and shader graph per character.

A lot of the people are under the misconception that the DH package from Unity is a “tool” that will allow you take say, a character from Character Creator 3 (A popular character design tool) and somehow create a DH from an export. That’s simply not the case. In it’s current state, I would largely say, the DH package is unusable from an artist / developer perspective.

Yes, I’ve also seen that forum link, and the work is quite good there. It’s probably as close as most of us can get.

Here’s my own Unity HDRP example using a combination from CC/DAZ and tweaking the Lit shader
Unity HDRP 10.x:

Source from tool CC3:

I really feel like they should own an in-house game studio for creating AAA (or the highest level unity is capable of tbh) games and actually try scaling that game to cards like 1060 and normal user hardware.

Then they will understand the pain with current unity’s workflow and how not production ready many of tools are for games at big scale. I mean they recently added a card for adding support for surface shaders (which wasn’t a priority for them before), even shader graph isn’t a match for amplify shader editor after so many years (I really don’t know what they expect devs to do for things like weather or any integrated system). Documentation for most of the new pipelines are pretty scarce, there main pitch was to be able to create custom render pipelines or atleast customize the existing ones but I can be pretty sure I have no idea how to do that (At least Catlike coding did a series on this).

They should also allow for pull request from outside the company, I know there are quite a few talented individuals that can help with development of quite a few packages but they still haven’t figured out the licensing part since 2018 for some reason.

I really don’t think they have any real short term goals for this year sadly (Given they skipped the roadmap talk this year). And the next roadmap is surely going to be about DOTS. (It’s going to take quite a few years before unity return to being well documented and stable like it was when unity 5 launched)

[impheris]

@cloverme

A lot of the people are under the misconception that the DH package from Unity is a “tool” that will allow you take say, a character from Character Creator 3 (A popular character design tool) and somehow create a DH from an export. That’s simply not the case. In it’s current state, I would largely say, the DH package is unusable from an artist / developer perspective.

I do not think that Package (digital human) is a tool and from what i understand, that package is more like a tech demo that show what you can do with unity and custom shaders. Also you need to take into consideration that this package is from 2020.
Anyway your example looks very good in my opinion.

[impheris]

@cloverme Do you have that model and textures you show on your 4th comment? can you please upload those files? i thought i can export my models from metahuman because i saw the option but is not posible and i want to try it because i think we can achieve good results too with unity

[system]

@cloverme I wasn’t saying that the DH Asset is a tool… I was just saying to take a look at the material, texture, shader, sss setup and settings… Anyway u can also take look at these

Nodes for Shader Graph

http://u3d.as/1gkf 13 Nodes: - SSS Colors, - SSS gradient, - Parallax mapping, - Parallax Mapping iterrations, - Parallax Occlusion Mapping, - PerturbedNormals (World normal with NormalMap), - CreateNormalChannel (for individual texture channels), - CreateNormalFloat (allows to use procedural noises and stuff to create normals), - IfNode, - LightDirection, - ProceduralRock (procedural noise), - Range (procedural shape), - TilingShape (for convenient tiling shapes). All nodes wor…

(Scroll down a bit for the post by Andrey_Graphics about multiple sss and specular maps)

Unity - Manual: Secondary Maps (Detail Maps) & Detail Mask

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@10.2/manual/Mask-Map-and-Detail-Map.html

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.0/manual/Layered-Lit-Shader.html
And maybe use HDRP layered lit material for multiple detail,SSS, specular layers(if u don’t want to use HDRP Layered mat than use layered shader graph or just normal lit one)
Hope these help u to improve your character look a bit and keep SSS effect subtle because it doesn’t look great according to me
Also There are some tutorials by unity

Challenge: Configure HDRP Materials for a character model - Unity Learn

Preparing to texture and paint the character model - Unity Learn

Enhancing the character model - Unity Learn

Configuring the character model in Unity Editor - Unity Learn

[system]

@cloverme

Yes, I’ve already mentioned this a few times as I’ve seen the digital human asset. I know of two other experimental research projects that have used it to create examples, but it’s been quite difficult to follow. Honestly, 2 people using it out of tens of thousands of Unity projects and developers doesn’t make the tool a production ready asset.

-It’s mostly abandonware from Unity since there’s little to no official support, it’s on github, which means it requires the community to improve it, not unity.
-The asset only works with “4D clip import”, which no character creation tools used by artists can export.
-There’s a blog here: https://blog.unity.com/technology/making-of-the-heretic-digital-human-tech-package which shows how much of a one-off it is to create just 1 character.
-They had to use a custom pass that operates on the contents of the HDRP normal buffer with in the SRP.
-Some of the links to additional information have 404 errors on the blog now, several years later.

I don’t feel that the Digital Human asset is a good solution from Unity on importing AAA style model characters. Mostly because it doesn’t support any workflow pipeline from character design tools that artists currently use. You can’t use mocap tools from leading providers in the industry. Each character you want to try to use it for has to be custom tailored requiring customized granular tweaks per shader and shader graph per character.

A lot of the people are under the misconception that the DH package from Unity is a “tool” that will allow you take say, a character from Character Creator 3 (A popular character design tool) and somehow create a DH from an export. That’s simply not the case. In it’s current state, I would largely say, the DH package is unusable from an artist / developer perspective.

Yes, I’ve also seen that forum link, and the work is quite good there. It’s probably as close as most of us can get.

Here’s my own Unity HDRP example using a combination from CC/DAZ and tweaking the Lit shader
Unity HDRP 10.x:

Source from tool CC3:

I think layered lit + detail maps is the way to go for realistic results instead of standard lit or shader graph and looks easier as well and the above unity tuts I mentioned also used it … Unity also used it for photogrammetry the steps must be same for skin

7504646–924917–Unity-Photogrammetry-Workflow-Layered-Shader_v2.pdf (6.27 MB)