At GDC 2019, Unity has unveiled another breathtaking demo which showing the power of Unity Engine: The Heretic. The film was created by Unity’s award-winning Demo team, who is creators of Adam and Book of the Dead. It’s a real-time cinematic running at 30 fps at 1440p on a consumer-class desktop PC.
Unity said The Heretic uses a broad range of Unity’s graphics features, including every possible aspect of the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). In 2019, it is possible to achieve close to cinematic visuals in real-time with the help of Unity’s built-in area lights, high-quality shadows, volumetrics, reflections, advanced materials and more. HDRP is now a fully featured, production-ready working environment.
The cinematic look of The Heretic demo was achieved with the latest version of Unity’s post-processing features: motion blur, bloom, depth of field, film grain, color grading, and Panini projection. In Unity 2019.1, they have been upgraded to be more physically correct and are now deeply integrated with HDRP.
The Visual Effect Graph is used throughout the project for various effects, in order to achieve increased volumetric ambience and to augment existing code-driven VFX.
The Heretic is lit entirely by real-time lights. This meant super fast iteration for the artists, while maintaining a high quality bar and performance. The Demo team is working on a probe-based lighting solution to solve use cases currently not covered. A first iteration of the new system solution was applied in the Megacity demo and is being extended for the full version of The Heretic.
One of the biggest artistic and technical challenges is creating photorealistic, animated humans. The Heretic is Unity’s first attempt to tackle this, and is scoped very conservatively with the primary purpose to establish a pipeline and a bar of quality.
The Demo team’s pipeline combines 3D and 4D scanning in order to obtain both a high-quality set of textures and poses, and believable, realistic movement. It is based on the services of commercially available vendors: Infinite Realities for the high-quality scanning, Russian 3D Scanner for highly accurate data pre-processing, and Snappers for facial rigging.
The 4D scanned data, which preserves the realism of the actor’s performance, is supplemented by bringing back the micro surface details, wrinkles, pores, etc., obtained through the 3D scanning. This approach gives better results than using any of the two techniques individually. The pipeline for the reconstruction of the digital human was completed by attaching the eyelashes, eyebrows, stubble and hair with the help of dedicated attachment tools. The shaders for skin, eyes, teeth, and hair are based on HDRP.
The Demo team is preparing a package with the tech and shaders used for the digital human in the film so you will be able to use them in your own projects.
You can get Unity Free version 2019.1 beta here!
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