Feedback new Official Unity HDRP demo - "Enemies"

Obviously it looks good, but to play devil's advocate I was wishing their next HDRP demo would be on a bigger scale. It all seems to be small interiors/rooms

Pretty cool how the demo uses APV, no lightmaps.
Also SSGI which compliments and works alongside APV.
Uses raytraced shadows & reflections.

The character is very impressive. Feels like an offline render. One thing I noticed was the teeth/mouth occlusion feels a bit off though.

What do you think?

 

Definitely looks more realistic then metahumans and other UE5 demos (does not feel uncanny at all like many of the UE5 demos felt) but it would have been even more crazy if everything was dynamic(with complete realtime GI, without RTX) and a bigger world running at 60fps... The Skinned mesh in this scene was using some kind of new GPU tesselation..... I hope it comes out for normal meshes aswell... they said it will come on consoles as well, hope that PS4 is on their list

 

Yeah it's not as good as their previous Ziva demo to lipread. It is still good though and I think the demo is impressive on a number of fronts. Unity tackles scale within a small scale, basically. It's great still for rendering, but I think a wider scale has to wait for a lot of CPU advancements, perhaps DOTS maturity? In any case, this is in the right direction, especially for HDRP.

 

I didn't use Ziva rob cupisz on Twitter: "We will migrate Enemies from 4D to Ziva in the coming weeks." / Twitter it will use it later

 

Yep I read it. Just leaving feedback

 

What kind of system do you need to run this on ?

 

No lightmaps is confirmed or just assumption? Based on my information APV is currently just addition to the lightmap system (replacement to the light probes/LPPV).

 

It's a shame that replicating anything seen in this video will be impossible because this is an Unity demo and these are always full of ugly hacks. Let's also not forget that this will be broken after an engine update or two. Yawn.

 

this might be true for some parts, but for me it was helpful looking at the Heretic Demo e.g. to get an idea of how to do skin shading with Dual Specular Lobe and stuff.
Some stuff like the 4D snappers seem to be too advanced though to be adapted by the average user.

 

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

https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505875759243612172

 

Yeah, It's totally convincing apart from the very end with the close ups (and yeah, the teeth / mouth feel a bit off).

It's stellar work. I always like this team's output, the mood and direction are always excellent (I think the 1st Adam is still one of my favourite shorts regardless of medium).

And yet... what I get from this is "Unity has an excellent team that produces demos". It doesn't really say anything about the engine itself in my eyes.

But hey.

The APV based lighting looks great in this. Hopefully it still looks good with less insane probe counts.

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505879288876253184
https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505879748840464393
https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505882333387309059
https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505897647584026624
https://mobile.twitter.com/robcupisz/status/1505927880810844160

oh no, a hair solution package that will (read: might) be released in Q2 and then be abandoned by Unity only for them to come up with yet another one-shot solution for the next year's tech demo!
oh no, they're going to migrate to ziva, something that only big studios will be able to use because it'll be locked behind a very expensive license even though the competitor next door has a *free* solution that flat out beats it!
oh no, a skin attachment system that is definitely going to be included as a bunch of arcane scripts/shaders that'll break upon the next major Unity update!
oh no, an ugly hack using custom passes which are by the way broken under a wide variety of circumstances!

i'll believe it when i see it running in my editor. until then i hope the shareholders are happy!!

(the demo itself is very pretty, though! i really loved it from an artistic standpoint. kudos to everyone behind this tech demo!)

 

Bigger scale is currently HDRP's Achilles heel, so a small room with few but extremely high polygon meshes sidesteps that.

Unity has a tradition of putting out very beautiful high end demos. Being used to produce similarly looking games, not so much.

 

Yea,don't expect a vast environment show from Unity.
Unity is just pretending they don't know that they didn't give any major update for terrain system more than 10 years.
look at the terrain system in unity,
nobody use native terrain material,
nobody use native terrain sculpting tool(Terrain Tool is good, but people have too much better tools already),
nobody use native tree renderer,
nobody use native detail renderer.
all terrain system doing is holding data for tons of plugins to read.
it's 2022,you still can't paint biomes with multiple trees and grasses together and no mask filters for vegetation painting, really??

 

1) How is lighting being set? Are there outdoor scene with exterior and second scene with human at the table having the same lights?

2) Please, could you make this project available for all users in HDRP 14 and future forward updates of HDRP? Maybe only the scene without human.

3) How did you set AVP so there were no light leaks?

 

I was expecting also open world environment with new terrain system. Although demo looks perfect, it is much below than my expectations...

 

This demo is just another...disappointment.

They just took one super high poly model, mo capped it or added quality animations and used the recorder to render it offline.

Don't know what Unity wanted to show or tell us. Maybe they wanted to show off the new HDRP hair?

At least don't call it "real time".

That is just low...

 

I find it really impressive for using AVP without light leaks. Skin and eye shader looks much better/realistic than in Heretic.
I wish to learn how they set up AVP and whole scene.

 

The demo is nice, but I feel like it's a demo meant to show off movie/cinematics technologies (and it does a really great job at it), not game technologies in any way.
They said a hair solution is going to be released, but is it a full system (with physics and such), or only a shader like older demos? I feel like nothing of the stuff being shown will be usable for us, locked behind the licenses of other softwares. (Also, slightly unrelated, why are blog comments disabled now?)

 

It's important for everyone to realise that the difference between "game technologies" and "movie technologies" is becoming rapidly bound only by budget.

 

It looks fantastic, but again, like with all Unity technology showcases, it's not useful in that the technologies showcased aren't easily accessible. The showcases are built by teams that focus on pushing the boundaries and when they encounter a "roadblock" they develop a custom toolset to work around those hurdles to show something off.

It takes Unity years, if ever, to put those things into the Editor, lately, they haven't been doing it all. An example is the Unity Digital Human from Heretic, they put it on Github, you couldn't use it (ie replace the character) and then they abandoned it there). Here they're showing it off again, but it's nothing anyone can use easily, it's all custom workflow that requires a team of engineers to use. Eye shader, "Oh it's custom, but it's coming to Unity!", "Oh the 4D human, well, it's custom", "Realtime GI, well, we used raytracing and had to develop something extra to make the light look right, it's custom". If everything is custom and you can't use it with a tutorial, these tech showcases are nearly useless to indie game devs.

 

They claim that no custom (hacky) tools were used... All was developed in vanilla unity editor without any source code modifications and all the tools and features used in the demo are already there or will land in 2022.2

 

That is true, in going back and looking at it, they do say that, from the presentation: "I should mention this entire project was made with stock unity there's no extensions to the source code um this is 2022.1"

I don't know, I'm pretty soured on Unity at this point, so I'm probably reading into it a bit too much.