Why can't Unity HDRP correctly render AAA looking character models?

After purchasing a Genuine License from the basic Female Character Provided by the initial trial version of CC4, we made it with Modify function on CC4 I applied the Hair System and Skin Package used in Unity Enemies.

 

looks off, like, you need to modify some settings

 

Looks amazing! Great work. It seems like CC4 is the way to go for Indies to get pain free realistic looking characters in unity. Also, it looks like TAA or something is causing the hair to have ghosting artifacts in motion.

 

I get that hair ghosting too in my own hair shaders

 

Reason for ghosting with TAA is often missing motion vectors. But even with motion vectors, you might get some ghosting, but much less.

 

Some updates, slowly getting there. Added Teeth occlusion, inspired from digital-human-package / Heretic demo character. Some more depth to the eyes, based on normal maps. And finally some custom lighting on the "ambient" side, as there currently is no real good solution for getting good ambient light in HDRP (APV seems still the best option). Next steps are facial hair and better occlusion for the eyes.

 

Wow she looks awesome! Great work!

 

Those hair stairstepped shadows are gonna be a pain to get rid of... also her skin could use some cavity maps to really sell the look.

But other than that, she is looking stellar

 

I made the cavity a bit stronger:

 

Now, that's more like it

 

Hi there, can someone help me with the hair demo workflow?

How do the Mapped Direction and Parameters Textures work?
What do the map channels do?


It looks like they can easily be hand painted, but what artist friendly (grooming) software can create/export them?

Unfortunately it seems the unity alembic (2.3.0) package doesn't come with samples anymore and the Mannequin_01_Alembic_Groom.abc mentioned in the hair/alembic unity learn tutorial is missing.
But maybe I am not looking right? Are there other alembic hairs available for testing?

I tried to export some from iClone but the Hair Asset says: "Configuration warning: Unable to locate curves in the alembic asset." Is that problem solvable?

 

For those who are not artists, Metahuman is a god send. I have built a humanoid and I had to learn blender as I went along. This tool would have saved me many weeks of trial and error. Even if I didn't do any tweeking, it would still be way ahead of what I have now - a high school quality space suit model. For someone like myself, there is no decision to be made.

 

The main decision for that is whether your project is UE-based or U based ( or has some level of restriction)
since Metahuman prohibits use outside of the engine.

For the educational project though, sure, if Rendering Engine doesn't have a limiting factor, it's still a great educational source to learn from too for sure.

 

I'm practically reverse engineering the facial rig for my own needs

 

MH has taken me over the edge. I have put Unity down for now and I am seriously evaluating UE5 for my first title. Not only does UE5 have everything a AAA title needs to start with, including a proven netcode layer, but now MH makes it possible for me, a programmer with little human features artistic skills, to make a AAA quality model in minutes. MH is a game changer for Indie studios.

Even if I don't polish the models like a AAA studio would, the results will still be superior than what I would expect on a limited budget.

But a disclaimer, though I now don't have to pay a modeler to build my human characters, I still need one alien race for my first title, and a second for my second title. MH can't help me with that. Anyone know of a good tool for generating alien models of the quality that MH generates with its human models?

 

You would have to modify the model in a program like ZBrush

 

In terms of character creators, blender and Reallusion have pretty good/on par systems for it, that can be as click and go as MetaHumans, of course Meta Humans is built from the Reallusion data from the mega grant, so that's expected, and since it's a single engine focus, UX can be much easily tailored.

So whilst there isn't necessarily a single dedicated renderer targeted character creator out there ( they're all multi tools) they do exist.

Character creation pipelines are extremely complex and lengthy, a whole production in it of itself and that's before grooming is applied.
That is as you say a potential game changer for many individuals or small studios assessing their end point renderers for sure.

 

I emphasized the part of your statement that I came to appreciate as I have been studying the docs on Unreal over the last few days and it floors me how they literally have EVERYTHING built in and ready to use with very little effort. Just when I thought I had covered all the built in features, I come across more.

 

I wish Unity would buy reallusion and integrate character creator into the engine.

 

There would need to be a way to optimize the models for performance and get the skin shaders, hair, and eyes looking proper.

And making sure they don't look too similar

 

Not bad, looks very good but the skin shader is not as good as MH in my opinion

 

Nope. But we can make our own shaders

 

i'd say the skin, eye, and hair shaders are the best parts about MH, the actual 3d models have this weird bobble head look going on.

 

Weird bobblehead look? What do you mean?

 

Lol it's probably a subjective thing of mine and not a big issue, I just feel like all of the preset MetaHuman looks have too large of heads for their bodies. Videos I've seen of them with custom bodies look a lot better to me though.

 

i can see that too, maybe it's just personal taste. Somehow for me their head seems too big

 

One of the things I have come to appreciate about video games is the use of visual cues to manipulate perception. Does the bigger head help form perception, or distract from it? Is it emphasizing something that you want to emphasize in a video game?

 

I guess so.

 

Any advice on creating skin shaders that look good ? I'm very bad at creating custom shader but managed to implement a detail mapping on URP and that leveled up quality little bit but I'm still unsatisfied. Also I test fake SSS that use Main lightning and thickness map but I did not find it useful for my case since I use probes and points light most of the time. Is there any thing to improve further?

 

If you use HDRP, you can use the digital human package from Github, this includes very good skin shader.

 

No, but I will check out to see how they handle. Maybe I could implement it in URP. Thanks.

 

In URP it will be much harder. You could buy and use e.g. Lux URP, which has some nice skin shader. URP out of the box does not have subsurface scattering, which is a must for good looking skin.

 

The skin shader that I've built uses HDRP and aside from having a great lighting solution, you also need to have an understanding of texturing your character, and definitely build a great looking eye shader.

 

unity has a great looking eye shader already, very cool btw

 

I think I saw it in enemies.

 

Yeah, here's the piece in the GDC 2022 talk about the eyeshader at the 7:13 mark.

The new shader should be in the Enemies demo which was just released last week:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/enemies-248975


Sadly, this again follows the same path Unity has been taking of "here's a demo, good luck" process of providing solution for a character pipeline workflow. It's the old "Hey! Look what you can do in Unity!!!!" with "you" being a 40 person team that was used to put that demo together.

 

yes exactly what i was talking, pretty cool...

Well, yeah i think they did that many times but at least with this demo or the eye shader it does not looks like that, idk if they already released the that eye shader (from the demo team) to the public but doing that is already different, also, making games with those graphics and that amazing level of detail needs work is not something you can do in 3 minutes alone, maybe 5 or 10 devs to do it in a decent amount of hours

 

There is a package called "digital-human". This includes all the high quality skin / eye / teeth shader being used e.g. in Heretic or Enemies demo. Enemies is using these shaders 1:1 without change, not even using the full feature set.
Enemies demo definitely helps in understanding how to use these shaders. The big issue remaining is the authoring of al the assets (mesh including rigging and blend shapes and texture maps), which Unreal solves with meta-human. In Unity you either need to use assets from Character Creator or DAZ (both now also have their own import pipeline, offering specialized shaders which are at least for Character Creator nearly on same level as the digital-human package), or invest lots of money in building your own characters, as unity did with the Enemies demo.

 

Despite the enemies demo, I have my own eye shaders which is on par with this. The problem with the Enemies version is the controls are overly complicated and technical on the outside.

The one I created is a bit more user friendly

 

Yep. And most indies DON'T have access to these pipelines or have the patience to sculpt and build digital humans

 

Awesome characters/hairstyles! Are you using HDRP? Every try to get a realistic hair strand material working in URP?

 

Thanks! Only using HDRP, there is no built in Hair shader in URP, so you need to rely on assets I guess. Lux URP Essentials does come with hair shader, but that's probably only usable for card based hair. Strand based hair needs different shader, and I only know of HDRP having a specialized shader. There was another asset from Unity Japan with some TressFX based hair rendering, maybe you'll also find an URP shader in that one,.

 

Anyone create hair strand materials for URP? If so, how did you do it? The example shader graph doesn't seem to work with URP. Thanks!

 

Thanks for the reply. Do you have a twitter/youtube channel? I'd love to see more of your work for inspiration.

 

Hey, where are those hair strand examples like in the image? Are they under "Package Manager > High Definition RP > Samples"? If so, do you know which exact sample they're under? Thanks!

 

That is URP
https://github.com/UnityTechnologies/URP-Defender-Character-Demo

 

Thanks, but that's using AMD's hair system. I want to use Unitys hair strand system. Unity's system works in URP, but they don't have any shaders to get realistic rendering for the strands of hair.

 

Hey, URP Defender demo also provided a physical hair (shader graph) master node from HDRP. You can find it here.

 

I think reallusion is officially necessary for creating realistic characters for indie devs. they're basically offering metahuman like services to other engines. Until Unity releases something similar in 5+ years this will be the way to do it.

 

This is good for those who need characters quickly and NPCs. But I'm wary of potential license issues and also loss of creativity. Character Creator suffers the same issue as Metahuman: the character start looking similar and bland