Discussion Unity's another shiny new demo

Hair in Enemies is interactive, it starts here

https://youtu.be/tz3dpl7FlH4?t=1116

 

Erm... Kinectimals?

 

Oooh, yeah. Now that's what I'm talking about! Now show us how to use it and what software is compatible with it. What is the required hardware

 

I saw the new hair tools. Looks good

 

I think you're asking where to find it but apologies if not. The package is on github but I heard there's pretty much no documentation so not very artist friendly. I think the preferred workflow is authoring the hair in an external program like Ornatrix and then importing it into Unity as an alembic file.
https://twitter.com/unitygames/status/1557539950983249920?s=20&t=9-30VrIVRZBuESt0w7wzUg

 

Sadly, I don't have that. And I don't use Maya as my DCC tool

 

Is it possible export hair from blender as alembic ( i think it's possible) ??? It would be really great if it is!! The in-editor tools for placement are very simple..

 

It's possible, but the last time I tried it I had extremely mixed success when doing it from Blender to UE4 and UE5. I'm not sure if the issues were on Blender's end or on Unreal's, however.

 

There should be tools internally for stuff like this

 

I might try this with Modo since it supports alembic

 

It looks like it is possible in blender! There are a lot of tutorials on youtube of creating exportable hair in Blender, so I would just follow those steps up until the get to the export. Since I'm sure Unity and Unreal have different importing flows.

 

Top one is excellent but looks like a non simulated alembic export. Can't tell, non conclusive relative to the hair simulation I'm discussing. Also it's using an easy hairstyle that is commonly use to mask the lack of dynamic applied to that type of hair.

Bottom link is terrible and looks like a 5mn job. It lack variations, the curls are too uniform, they lack stress events over their "timeline", it show a complete ignorance about the curl structure and have weird elongated spike that look bad.

The problem isn't just that are able to do some hairstyle, but the simulation should be generic enough for all hairstyle, which it is from flat hair to big curl hair. Small curve like the top link are super limited to the few same coded style that are easy. Ie short hair, locks, cornrows, ie anything that avoid cute fluffy or flamboyant coily hairstyle. And there is so many mechanics that are not even addressed, like how wet could hair react differently and things like shrinkage, and many other small stylistic miss like baby hair on the edge, etc...

 

I have the same error, missing script on root object and camera and shader error in hairvertex.hlsl (redefinition of unity matrixpreviousml)

 

Ive seen some mention of the Lion demo being interactive; is it though? I havent seen footage yet of someone pushing buttons/joysticks and things happening contextually.

 

I'm reasonably certain that they're referring to it being at interactive framerate, as in the speed at which it renders is enough to allow you to move a camera through it without it doing any stepped rendering techniques.

 

Not a proper fix obviously but I did just comment out that line in that shader and it works after that

 

https://store.zivadynamics.com/facetrainer the cloud tool of Ziva for facial animation is now live!! I wonder what it's price because I heard that it costs $1800 per head!! Is Ziva rt unity player going to be different from this and will it be free/cheap for unity users??
EDIT:-
http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/08/ziva-dynamics-launches-ziva-face-trainer/
Free for unity I guess??!!

 

I believe only the Player is free for Unity, as in being able to playback the result that's made outside Unity. The $1,800 training session is separate from the Player. The process of preparing your own mesh in the recommended way also includes other software like R3DS Wrap and Maya, which are an extra $1000-1500/year subscriptions at a minimum. This is still out of reach for non-AAA devs.

EDIT: Also, probably offtopic? Unless this is also considered a shiny new demo.

 

Interactive framerate =/= Actually interactive.

Id like to see the lion move in context to a joystick being tilted.

 

Or even just being able to move the camera with a controller/ keyboard and mouse in realtime with 30 FPS+ (ideally 60, but i would take a stable 30)

We all know its not realtime as in interactive realtime though, this is realtime the same way Eevee in blender is "realtime"

 

Also Nvidia omniverse is proposing a very similar services (face animation simulated by underlying muscle, automatically fitted to your face mesh). It's also essentially what metahuman do well without fancy techniques.

 

Yeah. And this is why I'm relying on pure skill to work on my character faces

 

I mean I entirely agree, but there's been a lot of muddying the waters in those definitions by a lot of people and I am pretty sure "interactive" here does not mean "truly interactive" and instead "it's not offline rendering"

 

I think the distinction is "interactive" and "realtime".

"realtime" is "it is not offline rendering".
"interactive" is "it responds to your actions"

 

Nothing about this contradicts what I'm saying.

 

Oh ok I see what you mean.
Just curious, do we have examples of what you're describing being simulated in real-time, this seems to be pretty advanced stuff. I can think of animated movies but not games.

 

It's a problem of clash if culture and scope, movie definition of real time and interactive is way more lax by necessity.

Slide show is real time for them when a frame takes sometimes days to render. Anything that finish fast enough they can't stand up to make coffee is real time, heck if they make a coffee a frame rendered that's still real time.

Pretty sure than seeing a lion rendered in a frame at 33ms is absolutely more than need, because a movie itself is 24 ms and that's 41ms, so we are rendering the award looking lion too fast. Pretty sure their first order will be to crank resolution, gi quality and motion blur quality, on their inaccessibly powerful mainframe, until it's a slide show, and claim, "I effing love real time, it's so fluid".

And interactive mean they get to have the art director paint on the screen projection wall, and have a choppy rendered update not only in the same day, but in the same session, as they speak. The stake are just not the same.

The opposite is like when a film maker was impressed by LA noire, but was like the face expression are primitifs, to the shock of player. Different priorities.

 

Who are "they" in this case?
I remember one of Unity's promotional videos where they were advertising tools for animation makers and presented how they animators could design the scene in nearly full quality.
So yeah, ~33ms on reasonably a actual workstation hardware is surely the aim. And that is indeed a big jump from what the industry used to know. Albeit I wonder whether at Disney studios they still have serverfarms and animate on polygonal blobs like in the old "Behind the scenes".

However the more frustrating that Unity shows vids and not an executable.

 

Movie people, especially cgi movie people.

 

https://twitter.com/the_f_key/status/1558611743772971012?s=20&t=B45As5NPIGDEfND5I7Aw_w

 

I was about to post it here, but looks like you're faster than me !

I actually really like that they both allow you to change the speed of the animation AND to move around with the camera. cool stuff !

I really hope that they will also give us the unity project so that we can see how it's working.

 

I agree broadly for their demos, but this one in particular is a PS5 demo, isn't it?

 

Just release the Siggraph talk already mkay?

 

Thats nice and all but even integrated tools like Animation Rigging have gone nearly a year without a proper update. While still functioning like a collection of scripts rather than a full toolset.

I wonder if the authoring is similarly barebones...

 

It likely is, even Unreal which has had strand based hair for years has little to no authoring of their grooms, relying on imported hair from other programs instead.

 

I expect these toolset be nothing more than obscure github repo. While the competition catch up building useable interfaces, I forsee the unity talents jumping boat. The demo prove that level of quality is possible, I expect competition to quickly follow through.

 

Can unity make a game is now also: can unity make full cgi movie on their own.

 

I know they can and for added challenge, do it with Unity out of box

 

To be frank that was a jest, the requirement to make a movie are a lot less stringent than a game, you can break scene anyway you want and assemble it anyway you can.

But I'll be impressed by a full movie on the lion demo quality only handled on a unity build in real time, with all the bells and whistle of a movie like vfx composition, post process, instant scene transition, morphing effect. Even more if it has credible human characters to make that ziva acquisition worth it's money.

But the unnecessary cherry on top is a good story with solid art direction, water effect on fur, and black character with 4c natural hair. That would be a flex, their afro type hair showing is pretty poor, in an age the competition is showing how to author afro type hair, like the recent omniverse from Nvidia, because that's the next technical horizon.

It's a shame that unity thinks he is doing breakthrough stuff, but the competition show at the same time they had one step ahead. Unity is talking about their muscle tech, Nvidia is making something similar available, showing the tool and how the ergonomy make your life easier. All we got is some code on github, and that's not even the cutting edge stuff.

 

That lion may or may not come. Is there even info if it's realtime? So I'm crashing this thread just to show what's already possible right now with realtime gameplay. Scene is set up super easy and super fast within an hour. Actually faster, but I had to set it up again because I wanted to toy around with the upcoming Unity Water. Assets used is in the description.

 

This is super cool

 

That's the quality expected from the quality of the assets, it's not a 30mn job since the time cost is the assets. Also what is the specs.

The whole point is that authoring all assets at that quality with a specific project on mind. We know unity can make good archiz already. That's a far cry from a complete game with humanoid character having diverse looks and features, animated and with interactive hair. Static hair is just geometry, we solved that long ago when grass became common. The the racoon is bit too shiny and lacking in contact shadow. The animation is old school, that's not comparable to what's shown with lion.

 

And looking at the hair, I wonder how the performance is on midrange hardware. I might use the strand based hair as long as I can keep the framerate smooth. Otherwise I'll stick with hair cards

 

Let's get back to that in about 3 years when you still won't have that lion.

 

And it takes weeks, if not months to design an asset of this quality. Usually when I design my own characters, it literally takes me weeks from sculpt to final design to reach that quality.

 

You can probably keep it "smooth" but it's more about dropping your target framerate with effects like this, to 60 or even 30. I think it would really depend if you're getting enough use out of strand hair to make it worth it. If it's on the main character and adds a lot of visual detail then maybe. A lot of other cases, probably not.

 

If the camera is far enough from the character, I'll just stick with hair cards

 

ReStir presentation

 

Unity needs to implement this ASAP.

 

3090 was used in presentation. I wonder how would ReStir scale to lower end GPUs. For a game it would need faster denoiser.