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Meet the Devs: The Heretic short film -- Post Your Questions

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by kristyna, May 1, 2020.

  1. kristyna

    kristyna

    Content person Unity Technologies

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    Hi!

    On Tuesday, May 12, Ashley Alicea is hosting the next episode of our Unite Now Meet the Devs series, talking to Robert Cupisz and Krasimir Nechevski from Unity’s Demo Team - it’s the team that made The Heretic, and before that, Book of the Dead, Adam, and The Blacksmith. They’ll talk about their process, show you the project in-editor, and take your questions. They also have a special announcement for you!
    This session is live and open to everyone, just register to join us here.
    If you have questions about the project that you’d like us to focus on during the session, please feel free to post them in this thread. Let’s talk about the things that you want to talk about!
    More info about the session here.

    Update: The second session on The Heretic "Meet the Devs: Deep Dive into The Heretic Assets" has been postponed to Wednesday June 17.

    Sign up now to join us for this live session.
     
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2020
  2. doppioslash

    doppioslash

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    The register link goes directly to the zoom meeting.
     
  3. AskCarol

    AskCarol

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    Heya @doppioslash! That means that you already registered - which is great :D The session will be happening at 9:00 am PDT on May 12th, so all you have to do is return to that zoom link and you can join.

    If you want to make sure you don't forget, feel free to add it to your calendar.
     
  4. UMaker

    UMaker

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    For something that is constantly changing, like the bird, are you bending those lines manually between each frame?
    Or, do you set some kind of wiggle protocol to waver within certain constraints and then see if you like how it turned out?
     
  5. cesarsmash

    cesarsmash

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    for people that would like to explore the implementation of alembic files, and unity as the main render tool in a pipeline what would you think is the best workflow that consern things created outside unity, specially characters, what would bet he maps the rigging techniques or how would be the most gratefull workflow to create quility short like "The heretic" for somebody just starting in this use of unity for film making, Thank you so much and i love your work
     
  6. fherbst

    fherbst

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    Thanks for a great presentation and some interesting insights, specifically into the Nested Timeline workflows!


    Repeating my questions about Dirty Details here since there wasn't time to reply:
    1. How many bugs (Core/HDRP) did you find throughout development?

    2. Were you able to stay on "vanilla" HDRP?

    3. Have you tried exporting to other platforms (e.g. VR)?

    4. Is Heretic now used as a test case for e.g. Engine/HDRP updates internally?
      (this was answered ambiguously - if some of the internal scripts are not working with the latest HDRP release the answer seems to be "only partially"?)
     
  7. UMaker

    UMaker

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    Is it the imperfect photogrametry input that causes an area on the top left of the actor's head to flex in and out the early render of the actor's head?
    It was on the right side of the picture early in the video showing the actor's face rendered in gray. It looks like he has a membrane on his head.
     
  8. UMaker

    UMaker

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    Besides a method for player input, what other work would still need to be done to make this into a game level?
    ex: If I tried to open this as a game, would everything fall through the floor?
     
  9. Mega_Optimus

    Mega_Optimus

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    You did an awesome job and I love Unity and where it's ging. There are, however, two problems that I just couldn't find an answer for:
    1. Are there any plans for developing realistic hair for Unity? Or at least something close to the current AAA title standards? There were some fine solutions that were discontinued, but sadly with no replacements.
    2. What happened with Jim Hugunin's cloth simulation? It looked even better than in Marvelous and had a great performance in Unity 3 years ago.
     
  10. valarnur

    valarnur

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    There is a place when corridor changes and player enter the cave.
    1. How did you do this? Was it used physics ?
    2. Could you add support for Unity default destruction physics?
     
  11. KrasimirNechevski

    KrasimirNechevski

    Unity Technologies

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    It is. The cleanup process is still experimental and there are many areas that have issues, such as lips, eyelids, neck, etc. We are already working on improving our methods for future productions.
     
  12. robert

    robert

    Moderator

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    Thanks for listening!

    How many bugs? Many. We started working on this demo way before HDRP was mature enough for a demo like this (by design, that's our mission), so we have run into all possible problems you could imagine, as the demo touched majority of HDRP features. We worked with the HDRP team to fix these issues before they reached users.

    We modified HDRP in multiple places, although kept the modifications small and localized, to manage upgrades. I think the HDRP team is doing great work anticipating which features will be needed, even if sometimes I would do things in slightly different order. But even with that I don't think it's reasonable to expect *any* medium-large production would take *any* stock engine and use it as-is. There will always be game-specific needs and the role of the engine is to provide a solid, well-rounded, modifiable base. With SRPs you get that: the code that's most likely to be modified, lives in user land as C# and shaders, and is understandable to a wide audience, debuggable, modifiable, etc. Some of the initial modifications we were able to remove later, with the introduction of the custom pass api or new shader graph nodes.

    Other platforms: internal console teams are interested in making the demo run, and we will probably collaborate on that.

    If you're asking if it's used for upgrade path testing, then the answer is that not (yet?) but I absolutely think it should be.
    If you're asking whether the demo is used by internal teams to test various features - it is and it will continue to be used like that, it's one of the big reasons we have made it in the first place!
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2020
  13. robert

    robert

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    I gave a talk about how I made Boston a short while ago. It covers only first part of the development and quite a bit came after that, but it should give you a good idea.
     
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  14. lassejon

    lassejon

    Unity Technologies

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    Regarding the first question, about hair: Yes, for one of our next demos, we have plans for a realistic hair solution. We are approaching this on three fronts: 1. simulation, 2. rendering, and 3. tools. The work is underway, and we currently have a relatively fast and stable simulation that is able to drive thousands of individual strands with collisions. I look forward to being able to share more on that. I could imagine that it would get a separate release similar to the digital human tech package, once we have put it through a production.
     
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  15. andrejpetelin

    andrejpetelin

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    Congratulations to the team on a really amazing project! I just opened the Facial animation sample scene and my first impression is you've passed the uncanny valley in a spectacular way - to the extent that looking at him moving makes me a bit nervous because he doesn't blink :)

    So the one thing I find really discouraging when starting a Unity HDRP project is that as soon as the sample scene pops up the first thing I notice is some really annoying shadow artifacts without even moving the camera. Since lighting is such a beast to handle and dynamic shadows are such an important part of graphics fidelity could I ask for any tips as to how to start going about setting up lighting, particularly the shadow cascades, so as to avoid noticeable transitions between higher/lower resolution shadows when approaching objects? How did you approach the lighting setup in The Heretic?
     
  16. Mega_Optimus

    Mega_Optimus

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    @lassejon Awesome! Looking forward to it!
     
  17. UMaker

    UMaker

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    Thank you
     
  18. doomquake

    doomquake

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    Fantastic!
     
  19. PixelPounder

    PixelPounder

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    Quick Question... wasn't the "Meet the Devs: Deep Dive into The Heretic Assets" webinar supposed to happened this past Wednesday? Is the one that is now on June 3rd... I wasn't able to attend the webinar that was on Wednesday and just want to make sure it's the same.
     
  20. MasonWheeler

    MasonWheeler

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    We only see a part of it, but to me, probably the most intriguing thing in this demo is the part where he takes off his jacket. The donning and removal of clothing has always been difficult to represent in 3D graphics, which is why it's generally avoided. At least as far back as Final Fantasy 8, game developers have been pulling tricks like fading to black and reskinning a character's clothing, or more recently just having it happen off camera while you're looking at something else going on nearby.

    But in this, we watched the guy take off his jacket. Or did we? From the camera angle, we only saw a part of it, and not the interesting part (pulling his arms out of the sleeves). But it's still more than I've seen in games. Was this just the latest trick, or did you guys get an actual, working solution to clothing removal?
     
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  21. transporter_gate_studios

    transporter_gate_studios

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    I just have one question... how in the world do have giant vistas like the city at the end? are we seeing actual geometry to scale with no clipping distance on the camera or is there some kind of 3d skybox / scale illusion going on? seems like there are are thousands of unique rock / building shapes and textures visible in that view. I can't wrap my head around it.
     
  22. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    Okay but will we be able to do natural african type hair? I don't mean exotic style big curl like unchatred 4 or beyond good and evil, I mean really tight small curl.
    I have been studying the issue and there is no paper, I find one attempts by Marschner BUT he was doing all wrong due to not understand the hair at all :oops: (he observe the hair is rougher and attribute that to the oval cross section, but his measuring

    I had also to devise a new classification to describe this type of hair beyond the Andre Walker system (the FIA system is not better). Basically I have further elements for type 4 hair, like stress (horizontal or longitudinal) and diffuseness (curl staying together or not ), and observe that many people aren't aware of some aspects that impact visual ("baby hair" edge) or "spiral perversion".

    Also that when the hair is flatten, there is a difference of texture with detangle hair and "ironed", where the micro structure are crumpled physically (or chemically), the same way you can't bring a slinky flat, it become cringly and have orientation all other the place (ie rougher as the normal relative to an area is all over the place), while in detangle hair, the highlight are a bit "wavy" (dotted regularly) because the structure is simply elongated. In my observation oval cross section make the hair finer and more fragile, visually there is a slight iridescence.

    For physics, the closest approximation is the central core system pixar did for brave for much larger curl, but idea can be salvage for real time game with minor modification of existing algorithm. But another big factor is "lockness" as curl can get entangled in each other due to the 3d nature, but that can be approximated like we already do with flat hair by interpolating around a control curve.

    It's important to note that spiral perversion have a huge influence in the physics (cause "shrinkage" by having the curl collapse into itself through overlap), twisty trajectory and creating locking in complex diffuseness (fun fact spiral perversion are created through mechanical longitudinal stress, combing that type of hair actually messier, that's why cornrow are used to protect the hair instead). Also african textured hair being more fragile mean that those parameter evolve along the length (tip tend to be looser due to continuous stress), braid and headwrap are ways to keep it healthy from stress. It's worth noting that horizontal stress, which push the 3d helix/spiral perversion toward a plane, is massively important in the visual, especially for silhouette.

    I have designed a way to do the traditional card method for representing all these feature to keep a usual game workflow too. If you can address these aspects, you'll be ahead of any engine/paper already and it just mean small adjustment with the state of art. I'm working on another method, that would provide a core mass as background, for cheap hardware by tracing modulo space (without using the limited modulo operator, by making a mathematical extension of the DDA algorithm to intercept a moving boundaries that is the regularly space primitive, though I struggle with interval as my math is rusty).

    I also want to address the skin shader. In my game, due to the setting being caribbean, I have been experimenting with skin shader applied to black character that are dark (i'm not dark skin, nor I have african type hair), but they all seems wrong in a way that match observation of AAA games by bleeding too much or not enough. I have reviewed the publications around skin shading (especially Jensen's work like spectral brdf for skin shading) and they all mention, when measuring the skin subsurface scattering, that black skin diffusion profile is actually different from white skin (due to the presence of mix of eumelanin and pheomelanin) but in game it seems we don't take that into account, and it make black character appear weird and downright white when the light is too strong (watchdog2 and I consider him brownish dark, when game don't actively avoid to make dark skin character, uncharted 4 isn't really good)

    .While many twitter drama... I mean debate, seems to point at many people believing that's a common behavior for dark skin, my actual observation and sourcing (i'm in the caraibe) don't match that belief, there is enough source with instagram now too. I was wondering if the next demo could take that into account as it seems that it's documented enough and the subsurface parameters just need adjustment (potentially a skin slider to adjust ratio of melanin type). While there is a whole artistic tangent to do about lighting a dark skin (keeping readability with specularity dominating instead of shadow), it's out of the scope of technical adjustment.

    Extra credit: Also I was wondering is there is a way to "bake" the subsurface scattering profile that unity preview in the editor into a ramp stack texture like penner's does with it's pre integrated skin shading? Or at least do you have any hint to where I should look in the code and how to do that? That would be massively cool! :D
     
  23. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    This is probably a preview of what unity is cooking
    http://unitytaiwan.blogspot.com/

     
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  24. crogers

    crogers

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    Hey, thank you for sharing such awesome work and having the zoom session!

    Is the Snappers rig used in the final film, or is that all 4D (vertex cache basically?) made with RussianScanner3d?

    Also, i cant access the Unity.DemoTeam package from my scripts even though the full demo is running. Rider can find it but Unity cant when it compiles.
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  25. unitymg

    unitymg

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    Can we use the Snappers system on our own rigged character?
     
  26. transporter_gate_studios

    transporter_gate_studios

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    Still would love to get an answer to my question.... thanks!
     
  27. KrasimirNechevski

    KrasimirNechevski

    Unity Technologies

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    The rig was not used to drive the geometry deformation. However we do solve each frame of the 4D cache to trigger wrinkle maps which are part of the rig technically.
     
  28. transporter_gate_studios

    transporter_gate_studios

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  29. Deleted User

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    Where can I download this project?!
     
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  30. kolygrey

    kolygrey

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    May 4, 2021
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    The register link goes directly to the zoom meeting.



    Kodi
     
    Last edited: May 5, 2021