Showcase TV Animation using Path Tracing

Long time Unity user who works in TV animation. I work in the Dev department at Industrial Brothers, a full service animation studio with shows currently streaming on Netflix and Disney+. We're experimenting with Unity to try and create animated television faster, cheaper and better looking. Our latest pitch is for a sci-fi series aimed at kids 6+. Its about really tiny sized heroes with advanced tech living in the forest.

We created some dioramas to showcase different aspects of the story world and put Unity through its paces. I wanted to share our results thus far.

Rendered in Unity 2022.2.0b7 with Path Tracing.






This is one of the more elaborate sequences from the pitch.

Overall, Unity proved really powerful and this project would not have been possible in a traditional pipeline with our team size and budget. Results will vary depending on hardware and I was using an RTX 4090 for most of the project.

Strengths
Even without optimizing assets for the engine and stress testing sets with 200+ lights, Unity held up admirably.
The Scene view was responsive and as fast as similar DCC like Maya, Houdini, etc
Customizing the interface for the workflow we needed was invaluable and pretty straight forward
Timeline makes managing lots of animation data easier
Really great depth of field and motion blur with the Physical Camera

Rendering
Rendered with Path Tracing -not real time Ray Tracing.
Render at 1080 resolution with accumulation set between 512 and 2048 samples.
Render times varied from 45 seconds to 3 minutes per frame.(on an RTX 4090) This is faster than traditional offline renderers like Redshift, Arnold and Vray which we've used in production on other shows.

Extending Path Tracing
There are a few key features that are currently incompatible with Path Tracing that would really help in animation production:

Decals
This would save tons of time currently spent adjusting surfacing details in Substance Painter.

VFX Graph
Details like explosions, sparks, smoke, etc currently don't work with Path Tracing. Hard to make a show without them. And I'd rather not comp them in.

Graphics Compositor
This would be a game changer. Like most studios our post work is done in Nuke; either to a single beauty render or a comp of multiple layers(character, background, foreground, etc) Post processing the beauty render in Unity is great, and allows us to move some of our workflow out of Nuke. But the Graphics Compositor would allow us to separate out the image into multiple layers -each with their own post processing. This would move upwards of 80% of our post work from Nuke into Unity and give us real time feedback instead of waiting a day or more for renders to come off the farm.

Render Time
When the shutter interval is less than 1 the effective samples are reduced but the render takes as long as if all the samples are being used. For example, with 4096 samples and the shutter interval set to .25, the effective samples are reduced to 1024. But the render time is as long as if all 4096 samples were being calculated. The render could stop 25% in and be denoised without waiting the extra 75% of the render time.

Camera Stacking
Not as essential as the other features, but its so useful for certain problems it'd be great if it worked with path tracing.

As a long time Unity hobbyist working in animation by day, I've seen so many ways the industry would benefit from adopting game engines -and Unity specifically- due to to its power, ease of use and flexibility. Looking forward to all the future developments for Unity's Path Tracing.

 

Is the support of VFX Graph for path tracing is scheduled ? It would be so awesome to have this

 

This is incredible work, congrats!!

 

"Graphics Compositor"


We're working on something that may interest you.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.visual-compositor@0.29/manual/index.html

 

That looks great -and exactly what I need. I'll download the sample and check it out. Thanks.

 

The Visual Compositor is really great. It'd be a nice fit for many of our productions. I use path tracing as well, for the highest quality renders, and unfortunately it doesn't work with PT at the moment. Any chance it can be made compatible in the future?

 

I'm still experimenting and getting closer to the desired goal. I'll take another look at the sample projects and see if I can sort it on my end. Either way I'll document the process and see if I can get you a sample project if I can't get it working.

Thanks again for your continued feedback.

 

Just wanted to chime in and say that VFX graph compatibility with the path tracer is the last piece of the path-traced puzzle for using unity as a complete rendering solution for high quality offline projects (at least with my particular workload/use-cases). I am currently experimenting with doing the VFX as a second render pass using the new ray traced VFX feature and then compositing them. That may work as a temporary solution but requires re-rendering with path tracing disabled and the VFX set to their own layer in the camera.

 

Thanks! I greatly appreciate it. It's not currently listed on the public roadmap. I did submit it as an idea when I noticed that last week.

 

I also submitted the idea to the roadmap. That’s cool that it’s now considered !

 

Any updates on supporting VFX Graph for path tracing? I don't see it on the public roadmap, and guessing the lack of resources has not improved since last May, but hope that it's still being considered!