Unity Engine proves that it is not far behind!

Advancing the foundational work they did on The Heretic – seen by four million viewers – our award-winning Demo team now presents Enemies, a brand-new cinematic teaser featuring major advances for photorealistic eyes, hair, skin, and more – all rendered in real-time and running in 4K resolution. See it live at Game Developers Conference (GDC), March 21–25.

A broader quality push

In close alignment with the roadmaps and development efforts of Unity’s engineering teams, the Demo team adopts all the relevant new technologies from a very early stage. It also fills the gaps between the various roadmaps by making improvements and fixes and contributing them, and develops new technologies when needed. 

With Enemies, our efforts went in three directions: Developing a solution for hair, improving the realism of the face, and doing all that in the context of a real content piece. 

This means that all the new, in-progress, and existing graphics and core Unity features were pushed to the max, including smooth interoperation, in order to raise overall image quality. More specifically, Enemies uses the entire feature set of Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), the new Adaptive Probe Volumes, ray tracing, NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and every other feature, big or small, that is relevant for our goals.

A new hair solution for Unity

We developed an all-new Unity Hair solution that comprises three parts, together creating the natural look and movement of the protagonist’s hair: 

The Hair system (with strand-based hair simulation) is an integrated solution for authoring, skinning, strand-based simulating, and rendering of hair. This system works with any authoring tools that output data in the Alembic format, so you can create your grooms in the tool of your choice. For Enemies, we used Maya XGen for the hair groom, and we are currently validating the pipeline with Weta Barbershop as well. The Hair system will work with the shader of your choice, depending on the render pipeline you use. It supports HDRP, Universal Render Pipeline (URP), and the Built-in Render Pipeline.

To enable realistic looking hair and fur, Unity developed Hair shading in HDRP, which is similar to a model often used in live-action and animated films (e.g., Marschner / Disney). This allowed us to create heightened visual results in any light condition without needing to change parameters for good performance.

Hair rendering lets us render very thin hair strands efficiently and reduces the amount of aliasing caused by strands not getting properly rasterized when they are too small on screen. In Enemies, we use a multisampled visibility buffer to reduce the aliasing from very thin strands and the shading is done in a separate shading atlas, decoupling the visibility from the shading.