Official Book of the Dead

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.

 

It looks fantastic! I wonder what hardware this is running on though. And what resolution and framerate.

 

When are we getting access to an updated terrain engine that can actually batch modern shaded objects? (Like in this demo?)

 

More info will be coming soon! Look forward to a deeper dive into it at GDC this year.

This demo was created using Unity 2018.1b1. So you have that to look forward to!

 

The forest areas are probably the best I've seen.

 

Not sure if I was just watching a nature documentary or actual Unity real-time footage

 

a "terrain & vegetation" demo that made in unity and unity didnt update the "terrain & vegetation" system for years......

but,good demo.

hope we could achieve the vegetation shaders in unity with no shader coding in the future.

 

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.

 

Ultimate proof Unity > Unreal

 

Absolutely amazing!

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.

 

Think it's a bit easier due to the integrated node based shader graph.

 

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.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/cn/2018/0...ting-with-automatic-performance-improvements/

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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...

 

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.)

 

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!

 

Ok, nice to hear it.

 

where is this HD RP - (Lit Shader) shader?

 

In the new Render Pipeline HD preset. Will be out with 2018.1 prolly

 

SRP - HD Pipe is needed

If you've downloaded any of the releases on GitHub or create a project from the templates, you'll have this shader. It's the default shader for the materials now, equivalent to the Standard Shader currently in the default renderer.

Any new material created with the HD pipe in use will automatically use it.

 

It was said at the beta forum that HD pipeline will remain experimental in 2018.1 release and will be production ready only later this year, like in .2 or .3

 

I think that was for the lightweight one.

 

I thought the lightweight one was supposed to be the one closest to pre 2018 rendering and thus having a higher priority.

Hmm.. I could not find the original post I remember reading the comment from but here are a couple that could indicate the same about HD

https://forum.unity.com/threads/wil...new-quality-in-rendering.512495/#post-3354431

https://forum.unity.com/threads/convert-to-srp-hd.514377/#post-3372386

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fee...e-render-pipelines.470095/page-5#post-3369301

 

This is fascinating to me! Has anyone tried this out with some more detailed trees? Alternative to speed tree perhaps?

 

I've used it on some smaller foilage (ferns and grass) and it worked fine. I haven't tested it on any trees yet though.

 

Do share! How do you do this?