Official Introducing Enemies: The latest evolution in high-fidelity digital humans from Unity

You not gonna like this but is what I believe

Same as with the "The Heretic" "demo" that remained just a concept, this new video just showcase false promises.

There is no way for simple normal users like the majority of us to create something even remote to this video in unity at this stage or in the next few years.

For example, there is no engine module to create hair. I know this because I've tried for the past two years to make decent hair work. If it was not added in the last few days there is no module to create, animate or add hair to a character, not even in early alpha. Maybe it will be added in the near future and even then it will take years till will be implemented inside the engine. IF the development starts on this hypothetical module.

This demo needed a team of experienced professionals that used third party advanced modules.

Made in unity, yeah right.

Also, same as with the heretic demo it will not be available for user to look at since to get this result some modifications to the engine had been made that are not available for all of us.

It looks nice but pointless. It showcases that if one have a million dollar can create this demo. Nothing for me as a simple user.

 

Is raytracing and SSGI in HDRP 14 API agnostic? Does it run the same on Nvidia/AMD system?

 

Hopefully Unity is moving towards technologies that are useful to real projects with all these acquisitions they are doing. Would be great to see.

 

Unity isn't targeting just "simple normal users" but even if it were the case we've had plenty of them asking for a hair solution for at least as long as I have been in this community. Plus all of these demos are intended to attract high paying customers and investors. A "simple normal user" is neither.

Contrary to past demos we've been told that all of this technology is not custom and will be made
available as packages. Check the "When can I have it?" section of the blog post.

https://blog.unity.com/news/introdu...on-in-high-fidelity-digital-humans-from-unity

You don't need a million dollars to create this demo.

 

I'm not follow your logic. High paying customers know that right now unreal can do exactly what is showcased in this proof of concept. There is hair, characters, skin, whatever. All the building and walls is not a big deal if you throw system power at it.

So why these high end paying customers could chose to invest money, wait for the development time to get stuff working, probably years, when they can just use that other engine right now?

So this is why I've said that this demo showcase false promises for people like me that 2 years ago looked at the "The Heretic" video and got tricked in thinking that could be possible in unity without having a huge budget.

Well this time I will not fall for this. And if I don't fall for this, a big studio will not get tricked for certain.

About releasing this demo for all of us to see, that is in the future and I hope you are right, but I bet that it will never be released except in a limited form, and it will work with one particular unity version and throw errors with any other future version.

I don't know how much this cost, but it is not unrealistic as you may think that unity invested some big bucks into this video. maybe is not one million but is not 100 dollars that is for sure.

 

Yes, indeed, you're too busy falling for your own logic. I'm getting a very different vibe this time around. Historically Unity was always slow to commit to the release of the assets they used and never gave an indication that any of them would be useful in any way. I'm willing to put some faith in them this time and I'm usually slow to do that.

We must have very different definitions of "big bucks" then because while I said I don't think it cost a million dollars I never said anything about it being practically free either. I can very easily see this in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range if we assume a few artists and a programmer or two working over a period of six to twelve months.

I imagine the bulk of the budget went into the human in the scene whereas the environment could very easily have been assets purchased online. Running Google's new image search on one of the images immediately brought up multiple cathedral asset packs on various stores.

Hopefully we'll find out on the 25th.

Edit: I just discovered the credits for the demo team. It's likely more expensive than I thought but if it were like the company I work for I don't see why you couldn't combine the staff a bit better. My company's management makes some of our artwork, for example.

https://unity.com/demos/enemies

 

Out of curiosity how much did you think initially that this demo costed?

 

All the modifications made to engine are already there or will land in 2022.2 vesions

 

How do you know this? The changes are listed somewhere? Can you give me a link?

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505876192519499784

 

good news then. we will wait for later this year to check the hair out of curiosity. better late than never. too late for my project but if unity actually get a hair solution, preferable one that works with normal hardware would be positive

 

Saw the GDC stream today. Hair package and tension map stuff looks amazing!

 

They are marketing to shareholders, when stakeholders are their main bread and butter. Unity needs to embrace what it is and stop trying to pander to a market that has no interest in them. Just take a look at the stock.

Unity needs to focus on generating consistent reliable income for investors to take the bait. With the Meta market being estimated at $8-$13 trillion dollars, Unity needs to focus on accessibility as well as ease of use to achieve a broader market. Things like high fidelity can come later, which will attract even more income.

My fear is that Unity has spread itself too thin, trying to accomplish too many goals that are taking too long to achieve. DOTS, UIToolKit and the "New" Input System as examples. All are not complete even to what Unity wants. All have been in production for years. So why would a high paying customer want that insecurity?

 

Is there any ETA for the demo / digital human 2 package? Was stated that it will be 1 - 2 month from GDC, which makes us be in that range now Cannot wait (I expect there’s lots of usable stuff at least for me, like skin tension, hair, improved eye shader; but then there was already lots of usable stuff in meta human 1 already. I see the demos more like something to learn from, less a ready made Toolbox).

 

Ideally I think they are planning to included them in some form when the 2022 will get out of beta and the 2023 version will be revealed. So around August/September this year. But it will be part of the alpha version so the features will be early alpha also, and they will not be recommended to use for production.

It will be part of the 2023 version. It will be a showcase of new stuff for that version.

So for using them "reliable" you need to wait till mid summer next year when the 2023 will get out of beta.

If all goes well.

 

2022.1 will probably go out of beta soon. Also the given timeline for publishing the demo and the hair package was Q2, and more specifically 1-2 month from GDC. The hair package will be separate from Unity release, and at GDC it was explained that all features used in the demo are already integrated into 2022.1. Actually, the demo runs on 2022.1 beta, unmodified. So not sure how you came to your conclusions?

 

Based on my experience with unity.

 

Not the OP & I probably disagree on 95% of the things with @dorusoftware ; but considering Book of the Dead, Mega City, & The Heretic, having a stable 2023.1 release for the said package is a little bit optimistic.

 

I don't even mind whether it's "stable", whatever this means for a demo. I just like to take some stuff out of it and integrate it. I remember when Heretic demo came out, this was possible on day one; e.g. take the skin shader and integrate at least parts of it into own shader graph, minus the 4D stuff.
I am most interested in the hair simulation stuff, which looked VERY advanced in the GDC demo, and better than I have ever seen.

 

I gotta agree as taking things from these demos and integrating into existing projects is also something I did. I even did the same, took the skin shader from Heretic Human demo. I can recognize Book of the Dead assets in some games.
But that's not what I'm talking about here. And most of the people are frustrated but unable to put it in the words correctly.

The first time I saw Adam demo, I was like "that's it". And?
When I saw the Heretic, I thought it was something I could do inside Unity. And?
Same goes with Mega City. My jaw just dropped watching it. And?
The human hand touching the tree bark in Book of the Dead. How it's made? Is it baked? Is it IK? Where is it?

And now with this demo, even though I still loved watching it, I am not really investing in it.
Do I trust & wait for Unity to release a really usable tools & engine version, or do I go implement my own solution and incorporate solutions from asset store?

Will I get it if I start my project with Unity 2022.1 and go through 2022.3 LTS? Are my other solutions & frameworks gonna work with these versions? The solutions I got from asset store, will they also be updated?

I'm still butthurt about Water system for HDRP. In order to be able to use it, I have to upgrade my Unity version, which means half of the solutions/frameworks/assets won't work. I'll either wait for them to be updated & be compatible, or scrap them. Or just sit with the current version and make do, & go use some other solution that works for the said version which means pouring a couple of hundred bucks into asset store in hope the asset will be maintained.

I've been using Unity since 3.5 and I've been earning my life through Unity for more than 6 years. I'm not known for complaining, but when it comes to demos, these are my thoughts, and I don't really think this demo will provide me something I can use in my projects.

Unity is more than welcome to surprise me though.

 

Any news on this? It has now been more than 2 months, and still no sign of the promised hair package, nor the demo. Really looking forward to this. So far I only saw a small update of digital human package in an own branch from like two weeks ago.

 

@LeonhardP would be good to get an updated timeline for the release of the hair and digital human package, if possible. Even if it is rough, it would help a lot.

 

Hopefully it's coming out soon. Looked like the best hair tech I've seen for unity by far.

 

there is the beta program

https://unity3d.com/unity/beta

once any of these new packages or the new editor is announced you will probably find about it there first, if you are part of the beta program.

there is no alpha or beta for the hair yet from what I'm seeing (but I'm not part of the beta program maybe they are visible only for the participants)

this could mean either there is nothing to show yet (for the initial alpha period), or that it will be included in the next editor version. so they are sitting on it to reveal all at once, for the hype effect.

either way once is out it needs to get trough alpha, beta, then normal cycle, then LTS. this takes years, realistically.

the rest of this comment is my speculation so I may be wrong on everything.

the recent acquisitions made by unity may be a clue of a change in paradigm about how the editor is released. I think they are planning to stop using years as identification and get back to using a version number or maybe some code name like apple does.

this will help ease the pressure on the dev team to have all these alpha, beta, normal, lts versions all over the place every year.

a smart move would be to unify all these tools/packages that are all over the place, half finished because of lack of dev time.

then release new versions slowly but version that are reliable and work. downloading the editor every week to get a fix to a bug and then introduce ten new bugs is ridiculous.

 

Sometimes they have standalone project/gits and stuff like that, which I prefer. I personally stopped touching Unity alphas and betas years ago because that stuff is always unpredictable and frequently broken.

 

This sounds contrary to what is announced and to the way Unity is heading to currently.
Hair is announced to be an own package on Github, same for the updated digital human package (which IS already partly updated in an own branch).

And for the core product / Unity Editor:
What we see since a few years is the move from monolith to individual packages. Which is basically equivalent to what is happening in the software industry since at least 10 years to be able to work in a more agile way. I personally think it's a good thing to do, but it comes with several pitfalls Unity seems to run through currently:

• You need to have dedicated teams for dedicated packages / services, which need to be constantly maintained and in best case improved, at minimum team needs to be able to fix bugs fast and do changes to maintain compatibility with the Unity editor.
• You need to be able to move fast. Find bugs fast, fix them fast. If you do agile development and deliver often, you should be prepared to introduce more bugs more often (fail fast). And the preparation is to have better QA processes and teams willing to do bug fixing as a priority. For me it seems that is what Unity is struggling with at the moment.

 

The packages are a good idea obviously, I was referring to the editor itself. There are so many versions supported by unity devs at the moment which means they need to fix and provide updates for all these versions.

You can chose to not include a certain package in your current project which is great. This "include if you need" approach results in an optimized game and lower file size. This is what you were referring to i think.

But this distinction between packages and the editor is not so decoupled as you may think. Different versions of packages will work with different editor versions.

Meaning that you can't use the latest URP package with all improvements with the 2021 editor version or even certain 2022 editor version

So they are decoupled but this doesn't mean you will get the new stuff in an older editor version.

Finally these are my opinions which may or not be true.

I'm trying to provide a realistic expectation for you because I was in your place two years ago thinking that if unity announce something it will work and be released just around the corner. I was burned myself.

As you can see there was no fast answer to your questions. It takes some time till they answer, if they answer.

The explanation I've provided is just my theory on why they didn't answered your question. I mean you can understand it if they are preparing some nice reveal they can't talk about it.

In the future we can expect same thing as the past two years? maybe not, there was no unreal 5 back then so unity may be forced to streamline, have stuff ready faster because the competition they have at the moment is not a joke.

 

A certain bug with Dynamic Resolution (DLSS / AMD FSR) was fixed in later HDRP versions which work with later Unity editor versions. If you are stuck with, say, 2021.3 LTS, tough luck you don't get to access this fix because specific fix is in a specific file which is specific to later HDRP versions. Later HDRP versions don't work with 2021.3 LTS either. Another butthurt for me

Also, Enemies is shown to work with 2022.1 in GDC, not 2021.3 LTS.
But this time I don't think it will turn out to be like Book of the Dead, i.e. non-existing custom HDRP version.

 

Yeah I just got asked to fill out a customer survey by Unity the other day and my main complaint was all the branching stuff is driving people bonkers. I started with Unity 4. So pure. Fun to work with. Now it's like what landmine are you going to step on because of all this branching stuff.

 

Very excited to test this out I been working with the heretic shader still need alot of work

But excited to test new skin shader hair and eye I been working with alot of female scan heads my goal is to make the same effect


Hopefully tech demo is still released Q2 2022 July 1 starts Q3

 

It's getting down to the wire with the 2nd quarter. I was wondering if there is any new news on the digital human package 2.0 yet?
Even if things have changed from what was originally stated an member of the team can at least chime in and give us a update, even if it's something people don't want to hear. Any info is good at this point.

 

Completely agree. It is a good and necessary habit to give information about delays in promised timelines, if you have paying customers.

 

This is a bit confusing; did the Enemies demo not run on 2022.1.x unchanged as announced? And what about the Hair package? Any new timeline for this?

 

I can totally understand any delays in development, we all know that it’s happening more often then not. But communication around such delays could be much better. Also would have been wise to not announce a time frame for an apparently not even close to be finished feature.

 

Called it

 

Ouch, so that means it wouldn't be production ready until 2023 LTS in 2024

 

Yes this does not sound usable in a stable version for a loooooong time yet. Oh well, will be something cool down the road.

 

I was wondering are the UV on the eyes for the heretic The same as the female in Enemies? Also can you tell us the other maps that Enemies has for the skin

Head Skin

Shader graphs/DigitalHuman_Skin

Albedo Map

Normal Map

Detail Normal Map


Detail Smoothness Map


Mask Map


Subsurface Map

Thickness Map

Cavity Map

 

this doesn't have the skin shader the heretic has. you will need to wait for the project to be released to have access to that shader. Also they have used expensive professional capture hardware taken from a real person. You will not get the same skin quality using normal textures made in photoshop.

As I've said a few months ago a normal user can't create something like this. You need a team and money to make this work. Even if you get that shader today is in any case overkill for normal users as you will not have good quality data to feed inside the shader.

The fact that the project, or pieces of project, are not ready to be released is understandable because the complexity is high.

What is not understandable is why they have published on the blog that will be soon available back when the video was released.

Also they did the same mistake just a few posts above with the hair package. That hair from the video, is hard to believe we will have access to the package for the current editor version. The engine can't run this at the moment. It has issues with multiple alpha polygons stacked one on top of others. So is more likely it will be included in the 2023 version. Why they promise to release the hair package in a few weeks from now is strange.

Actually the hair is really way more complicated than the skin shader in my opinion. it needs spline physics and shaders and whatnot.

 

I agree about the hair being more complicated. not sure what you mean with alpha polygons being stacked, but I see main challenges in the rendering / anti-aliasing of hair. Physics of the hair will be done with separate compute shaders and should not depend on Unity version at all. Also it was only promised to give new information in a couple of weeks, whatever this means. I lost hope that we'll see anything meaningful in the near future. Funny that the exact same thing what happens now regarding the delay of features was predicted by you and others above. Interesting how Unity team was confident to put a timeframe on the initial announcement.

 

dorusoftware I was just wondering if the eyes in heretic had the same uvs as the Enemies demo watching gdc tech demo it looks like same uvs just new shader functions visualize eye caustic

I'm just trying to rig my models to heretic or Enemies tech demo eyes also I'm trying to test how the new shader does in light the heretic does terrible in different light but both my games are made for dark environments. Most of the models I been working with are around 15 K or less without clothing but working on cloth physics and VFX particles-effects now ready to rig and add animations to my game. But thanks for reply

 

they can't have the same UVs these are different 3D models.

they are made for "dark" environments because skin details will not look so great in a full blown environment. adding the shadows and nice lightning is half the job

 

I guess I will just wait until Unity release the Enemies tech demo but take your time Unity your doing amazing job and excited to see what 2023 has to offer hopefully we get environment weather effect on player model and environments maybe some vfx particles-effects

https://youtube.com/shorts/lenwFDs-H_E?feature=share

Thanks again but take your time Unity

 

the video is your work? that is quite nice

 

I'm gone go ahead and say it. This project, we will not get it. Similar with gigaya it is most likely abandoned.

 

Hello Unity Dev.
Are there any new announcements at siggraph about Enemies?
I can't wait to see this in my Unity editor.