Discussion Unity's another shiny new demo

Cool, but why not make something that benefits small developers, aka 99% of any engine's userbase. Why not a character creator, maybe even creature creator, scanned asset library...anything?

 

https://blog.unity.com/technology/n...-in-action-and-the-future-of-weta-digital-for

 

Apparently muscle deformation will come to unity build?

If they develop the tools, it's no longer a flex and finally something useful.

Finally!

 

Honestly, it looks really cool, but 30fps for a rather empty scene and only two actors, while we still don't know about the workflow and if it can be used without needing 10 people working on it? (And we don't even know if it's going to be free)
Why can't they work on basic stuff that would help basically everyone instead? (like HLOD system for example)

Don't want to sound negative, it really does look great, but I'm not sure this is the kind of stuff that would solve the many already existing issues on the engine, but looks like another shiny demo/feature ending up being not that useful

 

Same is true of high end assets in Unreal to be fair. I just want to see some tools actually released in a stable, finished manner and judge for myself.

 

But grooming a lion now takes a couple of weeks instead of months.

It definitely won't be free, they are working on Adobe style subscription package where they'll pack all the recently acquired tools. At best, it'll be integrated with the current Plus/Pro sub, but I highly doubt it.

Because that's video games and the most money they make in video games is from mobile ads. This lion demo is aimed at TV/Movie and high end cinematics crowd. They're pushing into other industries.

Because that is what it is. A shiny demo for the non-gamedev crowd.

 

Still need Unity to compete with Metahuman and it's mesh feature. But unity seems to take a few years to add big features like that so I'm not holding out hope.

 

Wait till the siggraph is done and we will judge on the released video of the conference, it's between 9 and 11 and we are the 10, so expect something maybe in a week or a month? (trying to get large, week seems more likely).

 

Looks pretty, but id like a demo that is actually interactive; which is why 99% of people use Unity.

30fps for such a visually-limited linear pre-baked setup is... interesting.

Obviously a lot of work from smart minds has gone into the 20 seconds so no discredit there. Perhaps there is a longer video coming or more to the demo?

 

They are targeting mobile

 

Heres a screenshot of it on mobile.

 

OK...

1. Impressive (we'll see about scalability and push for that if needs be)
2. Unity has an actual plan to support hair rendering in 2023.x and I will share more when I get it (unless Unity gets there first!)

Now THATS exciting.

All we really want is more than github, more than just a video, and if the info I have is correct... we very much will have more. Maybe not time to set things on fire, guys. Lets see.

 

Would be interesting to see what that hair system can do on mobile. The fact that it supports all rendering pipelines (naturally with highest featureset only in hdrp) does show the aim for scalability. That's also by the way why this is rather not a pure Weta product for movies and similar.

Agreed that something interactible for once would bring some fresh wind and also give a better grasp on performance etc.

@hippocoder That does sound interesting~
As for 2023.1 suppport, that tweet higher up clearly asks to vote in the roadmap whether we want it.

 

Well it's not so much about film, but... you'll reach more customers if it works at scale. It is worth (IMHO) having the investment of proper native fur, hair, fluids etc, and having them all scale. It'll take time but it will be necessary, not optional, for Unity to support it in the long run.

 

I'm reserving further thought for after seeing the Siggraph presentation, but the ziva site has a free demo of facial capture... only on Maya.. salt to injury, in their mandatory address filling form, they don't reference my regional department, not even as part of France, while every other region is there, and we're among the wealthiest region (wealth inequality though), how is that not a curse. That's not pro.

On the demo, every cg demo have to have a casual flex, here the flex is that not only it's the lion king cg movie almost real time, you know a big reference already for offline rendering, but also casual physical contact to wow the specialist. Even for offline server based monstrosity that's hard.

 

It's compute base, it limit already the subset of mobile who can render it, also we do not have profile nor which hardware they used as basis.
But the demo is available on github, compile and try. I'll soon test on the absolute bottom tier of compute able platform, my own computer a gt 705. I'll report.

 

I guess this is rendered in HDRP?
What Unity needs is making standard toolset API agonostic so it's not pipeline dependant. Other of most importance is making SRP to become recognized as standard ecosystem of Unity.

There are a lot of concept artists who are using UE5 for rendering passes which undergo overpainting. What is most important concept artists can pass on the scene to level artists and vice versa. Which makes great dynamics in game development.

I haven't heard anyone doing this for Unity built in, URP or HDRP. This is why SRP need to become standard ecosystem.

 

It is urp too, as stated in the blog, also most tool used seems not to be unity engine dependent, in fact a lot seems based on Maya first. Unity is a mere viewer of generated data, who remember vertex streamer games on old hardware? That's basically the modern equivalent.

 

Unity user: can we have metahuman?
Unity: we have metahuman at home
Metahuman at home: Uma

 

Agreed an in

Surely the models of the lions, but not the dynamic hair\fur, is it?

 

Everyone expressed doubt that Ziva... that Weta... would bear fruit. But here it is. This is actually CG movie quality running realtime on 2080 card or less. This, running realtime on a PS5.

Now I don't know about you guys, but this is exactly what I think we've been asking for. Seeing these acquisitions Unity made. Seeing all the drama about stock markets and silly ad whatsits. All that fades into the background when you see film quality running on what is now midrange hardware.

What I see here is a glimpse of what brought people to Unity in the first place. High end graphics with a promise it will scale. After all it works with URP and HDRP.

Lets see if Unity will bring more magic.

 

There lion cub movement looks off at 0:12, but aside from that it looks good. Would be nice to have more info, as we had Blacksmith which looked good on video, but also used a ton of custom stuff....

 

Tis easy to nitpick tho, getting here is the main thing and thank goodness that was achieved. It's time to build on that, let Unity know of any extras. I asked them for hair card generation for a more scalable hair on twitter. I think they heard! So lets do some positive noise. Might be surprised. I was today when I saw this.

 

It's good, but nothing fades into the background just because of this.
It's an extremely simple environment, obviously the focus is on the fur system. HDRP has always been capable of quality of this level, there's other old demos and videos that are far more impressive then this, when unity adds all these systems officially in the engine, then I'll be impressed.

And unity has proven themselves to be untrustworthy, so I'll believe it when I see it.
Again, Not sure what differentiates this video from than the many demos and 'short films' made with HDRP, other than the promise of adding these packages in the future, which is good, but I'll believe it when I see it. (This is the way with unity from now on )
PS5 GPU isn't bad at all, by far the majority of the PC market has GPUs far below it.
It also doesn't seem to be running at a high FPS, although that could be intentional.

 

I haven't seen the specs yet, nor the entire workflow, nor the ground skill needed, nor the eventual price gating. And let see if goober youtuber can make that as a small bedroom movie like the concurrence do already do.

That said even with eventual barrier, it does lower the ceiling for middle range production. At least, bedroom movie maker and up are still own by the opponent.

I mean key aspect, how do you do the lion itself, is it trivial to do the skeleton and add muscle plus skin on top? Looks high-level artist to me, not meta human accessible.

It's good, but accessible I'm not sure yet. I hope they find the market and not just open the door to a quick reaction that would allow the opposition to come up with a better workflow. I mean there is enough pattern in animal skeleton and shape to generalize to an advence spore like creature editor, and machine learning animation is coming bout great, I have seen experinental things... who will shoot first is the question.

But it's currently not any of the average dev will be able to leverage at that quality, let's not fool ourselves. Though I'm still waiting for the video to assess.

But no matter if unity or someone else, the day of marvel movie in your bedroom is coming faster that you can believe.

 

They have listen GIGAYA is back from the locked Gigaya thread.
They tried afro hair too, well I have to applaud the effort. At least their on the same level than everyone else, I will look at this very carefully.

 

The Lion demo reminds me of a shorter more jittery version of this demo also done by Weta Digital from 2020.

 

I would assume Weta will utilize Unity HDRP for their next movie production.

 

Already shared that. The main difference is more fur interaction, longer fur, possibly more complex muscle interaction. With many of them resolved in real time from authored data. It's an evolution of that demo, the compute load is higher in the latter.

 

I'm not gonna lie, it's VERY GOOD. But not at that level, offline bruteforce def beat this. But as a previz that's perfect because that's so close and real time, editing of scene will be a breeze comparatively. Like having a game on medium and switching to high, where the image is globally the same but the details are better quality.

 

Enemies and Heretic proved Unity can be great offline bruteforce. Having Weta full movie production with Unity would be next stepping stone for pushing the engine to the limits.

I think they should have done this earlier since every new toolset requires about 2 years to have a production ready status.

 

All that may be true but it's still not showcasing anything we haven't seen done before. Especially since strand based assets already exist on the store. I will welcome any improvements there system brings though.

 

True, I'm waiting the Siggraph video to assess it more in depth too.

I can tell their curly hair is not good though, just like any solution from every body . It's more ignorance than the tech though, so I'll have to dug on the trench, possibly only updating the editor and nothing else.

 

I'm a long time cat owner, which means I'm more likely to notice small movement issues when felines are involved. Because I have a living example running around, meowing and demanding food every day...

 

I think it's intentional... Most cinematics prefer 30fps... I don't find any problem for it to run on as low as 1060 with lower quality fur and APV

 

They need a mocat technology ...

 

It will be problematic.

Spoiler

Due to highly flexible skeleton and ability to soft-body deform.

Right now, Stray is very popular and in videos I saw there are minor animation problems with cat being too rigid.

Honestly, the best cats I ever saw were in witcher. They didn't move much, but their loafing around was very convincing.

 

According to the blog post everything from hair to muscles was simulated in realtime using machine learning and BURST!! Only thing which was baked is lighting...

 

Has anyone tried the hair sample? I didn't realize that was there 3 years ago. I just tried to import it into a very simple URP project and got a shader error from the Package and the hair object is a card with a few magenta lines.

 

Technically the skin is stated to be real time, not the muscle, unless the video of the conference show someone controlling the lion in one sequence, I'll consider the result baked, hair is real time true. But is the overall quality of everything based on real time? That's why I used resolving instead.

I mean it's real time like the heretic is real time, ie sugar coating on top of baked data that is needed for that quality (wrinkle and beard are real time, so is skin lighting, but animation is a stream of high quality 3d capture, vest is alembic). It looks more oriented for film iteration on previz than game real time. Think game walk cycle vs cinematic walking animation, different problem.

Game need more complex blending that account for gameplay reaction, and generating a great variety of data. Meta human looks less impressive than enemy, but it's game ready, which mean flexibility, optimisation and compromise, result, instead of a single highest quality character possible, you have a wide range of possible high quality character. It's quantity vs quality, in the way of practicality vs ideal, specific vs generic, or in this case movie ready vs game ready.

Unity seems to go the movie ready way, while unreal hit the game ready way, the catch is that unreal is movie ready enough for a class of movie, and just an extra push with deep fake cover the last miles.

So we will see what that mean soon

 

Have you tried it? I imported it into a very simple URP project, and no bueno. See my reply here https://forum.unity.com/threads/unitys-another-shiny-new-demo.1319817/page-2#post-8353962

 

I remember people saying this about that demo they put out a while ago that was running in real time on the PS4. That forest thing with the orange sap? That was built off the back of a bunch of other stuff too and, honestly, we saw practically none of that manifest in any real significant qualities in the engine itself.

I'd say "once bitten, twice shy" but there's way more bites than that.

edit: Book of the Dead

Like almost none of this is as practically accessible in HDRP as people like to say it is, Unity still suffers from pipeline issues and there are still loads of issues plaguing the SRP stuff. At this point why should I take anything that's being alluded to in your post at the value you're putting it at?

 

I'd like to see if these solutions scale at all. Two characters in a nearly empty scene at suboptimal fps don't tell a lot, so I'll reserve my judgement until more is known. But it doesn't really apply to anything I'm doing. Biophysically accurate muscle group simulations and hair strand simulations are the stuff of AAA and TV/Movies and perhaps non-gamedev industries where a lot of processing power can be thrown at a few high-quality characters for training/info desks/etc.

 

Cats are fish .

 

The video is again nice, but just topline material. None-Technical people will like it, as it is designed to “blend” and show the public where all the dollars where spend when buying other companies. But as we all know (as developers), video is cheap, show real-time-live-interaction and show the tools how it was made.

This is a never ending story of experimental features and videos just to impress some other marketing/users what would be possible. Having the source on GitHub right now is nice, but also signals that the support is probably dead by now.

I guess unity has so much man power, but did not bring the power on the road. Or they targeting something else…

Currently unity tries everything, and is getting more and more a generalist and not a specialist.


Edit:

And saying it is running on XY hardware is easy, show me J. And, what does “is running” means?

 

As amazing and short as that trailer was, it's a beautiful glimpse into the future of Unity. But until the tools shown in this demo are fully integrated into the engine and can be used by artists such as myself and one man teams, it's a game of catch up with Unreal.

This trailer was Unity trying to flex

 

Agreed to a degree. While the video is really cool, if they had made just a "pet a lion cub" demo as interactive software, even if it required an RTX 3080 to be smooth, every other gaming site out there would have written an article for free about it!

Hmm, if the tools do happen to be free eventually, I'll try to turn my avatar image into such a demo X3

 

Having it interactive would be awesome. But at for rate, unity needs to make sure that it's tools are user friendly

 

Not sure but I think that it can do it :
https://twitter.com/_hackmans_/status/1557376618187952134?s=20&t=lcdXcvlXJE-ne91XSN7YJA
https://twitter.com/the_f_key/status/1557712353541734400?s=20&t=lcdXcvlXJE-ne91XSN7YJA

 

Is It on the asset store? Is there a tutorial on how to use it? Is it artist friendly?