very impressive, wonder what minimum specs are for it to look like that! wow. looks like loads of photogrammetry/megascans trees and rocks etc perhaps?
very impressive, wonder what minimum specs are for it to look like that! wow. looks like loads of photogrammetry/megascans trees and rocks etc perhaps?
And the art level of fidelity is only the smaller of the problems visible here. How would a character navigate through this without struggling?
looks like first person so i'm betting it's going to be on rails and just enough to enable a look at the pretty scenery.
"The environments are built in a way that allows the player to move around and explore. The camera is a continuous first-person camera, and when the player is teleported to a different location, the transition feels like a cinematic cut."
Sounds to me like how VR players currently move with the teleportation.
i just based my comment on the video. makes it look like a narrow corridor, more or less on-rails with perhaps some wiggle-room. it's a demo anyway.
watching it again i think i would have liked it to have an uplifting last-guardian kind of moment at the end, not some encounter with a treebark-monster. at least they didn't go for duck-walking bearded 'operators', props for that!
God knows how much I hate those demos from Unity devs. They show what the engine is capable of, but "forget" to mention that you have to have a graphics programmer in order to create something similar. Those demos don't show out-of-the-box features, instead they show custom solutions tailored for particular scene, and average user or a small team cannot achieve the same quality.
Remember their volumetric fog with light shafts and atmospheric scattering? It doesn't work anymore, and when it worked it had to be used with some custom shader you wouldn't want to use anywhere else. What about their realtime area light? Welp, it doesn't work anymore and last time I checked its github page was abandoned. Same goes for a number of other features they used to fake what the engine can do. Hell even terrain they used for Viking Village was not default Unity terrain, but instead a custom mesh. You won't use custom mesh terrain for 99% situations in your games.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
It just pisses me off ever since the Blacksmith demo, they tease all these great graphics, but when you download the project files it turns out they have a custom terrain solution with a custom script for placing vegetation while the default terrain system is kind of useless.
If I remember correctly in some other demo they used an experimental antialiasing method that either wasn't released for a long time after the demo or not released at all.
If it was just that they develop new features for those demos and then integrate them into the editor, then great. As it is, it's just shameful and misleading what they do.
As far as I'm concerned these demos are worthless, they don't showcase what the engine or the Unity as a package is capable of.
That's kinda the case with any end product though, you develop towards it...
Unity is a bit more general than Unreal so a lot of the niche features are probably going to be missing. Being fair to Unity, Unreal only really just got proper volumetric lighting in 4.17 late last year...
The fact that you can implement a lot of those shaders so easily in Unity is what makes it better than Unreal in my opinion. The scriptable render pipeline will only make it better in this regard.
I need to have a play with it at some point though
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
A "demo" has always been a way to show off your graphics programming skills. People are still making c64 demos with custom hacks.
God knows how much I hate those demos from Unity devs. They show what the engine is capable of, but "forget" to mention that you have to have a graphics programmer in order to create something similar. Those demos don't show out-of-the-box features, instead they show custom solutions tailored for particular scene, and average user or a small team cannot achieve the same quality.
Remember their volumetric fog with light shafts and atmospheric scattering? It doesn't work anymore, and when it worked it had to be used with some custom shader you wouldn't want to use anywhere else. What about their realtime area light? Welp, it doesn't work anymore and last time I checked its github page was abandoned. Same goes for a number of other features they used to fake what the engine can do. Hell even terrain they used for Viking Village was not default Unity terrain, but instead a custom mesh. You won't use custom mesh terrain for 99% situations in your games.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
as someone who doesn't program graphics further than drawing on paper or in zbrush, does this differ much from how Unreal shows off their tech demos? do they require as much work as the unity ones or are they more 'out of the box' capable than unity provides?
God knows how much I hate those demos from Unity devs. They show what the engine is capable of, but "forget" to mention that you have to have a graphics programmer in order to create something similar. Those demos don't show out-of-the-box features, instead they show custom solutions tailored for particular scene, and average user or a small team cannot achieve the same quality.
Remember their volumetric fog with light shafts and atmospheric scattering? It doesn't work anymore, and when it worked it had to be used with some custom shader you wouldn't want to use anywhere else. What about their realtime area light? Welp, it doesn't work anymore and last time I checked its github page was abandoned. Same goes for a number of other features they used to fake what the engine can do. Hell even terrain they used for Viking Village was not default Unity terrain, but instead a custom mesh. You won't use custom mesh terrain for 99% situations in your games.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
as someone who doesn't program graphics further than drawing on paper or in zbrush, does this differ much from how Unreal shows off their tech demos? do they require as much work as the unity ones or are they more 'out of the box' capable than unity provides?
They differ in details on out of the box functionality, but are very comparable.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
lol I was going to write something similar... If you read the breakdown of a Unreal cinematic project you'll see that in Unity you'd have to go through more hoops to get this level of quality.
For example, Unity doesn't have a built-in SSS \ translucency shader that you can use for human skin. There are plenty of Asset Store options for this, but having the company itself work on that would just feel different, more reassuring perhaps.
A "demo" has always been a way to show off your graphics programming skills. People are still making c64 demos with custom hacks.
Sort of, but I dislike how Unity approaches it. If you look at Unreal demos, most of the time they use only out-of-the-box functionality. They might show some custom stuff like volumetric smoke they used for monsters in Fortnite cinematic, but they a) extremely transparent on it being custom b) show and explain how it was created.
as someone who doesn't program graphics further than drawing on paper or in zbrush, does this differ much from how Unreal shows off their tech demos? do they require as much work as the unity ones or are they more 'out of the box' capable than unity provides?
The thing is Unity offers less sophisticated render features resulting in somewhat worse image, but there is a catch. Unity is easy to learn, to use and to get result. Unreal offers more cool features right out-of-the-box, but you will have to spend quite a bit of time to learn how to operate the engine.
God knows how much I hate those demos from Unity devs. They show what the engine is capable of, but "forget" to mention that you have to have a graphics programmer in order to create something similar. Those demos don't show out-of-the-box features, instead they show custom solutions tailored for particular scene, and average user or a small team cannot achieve the same quality.
Remember their volumetric fog with light shafts and atmospheric scattering? It doesn't work anymore, and when it worked it had to be used with some custom shader you wouldn't want to use anywhere else. What about their realtime area light? Welp, it doesn't work anymore and last time I checked its github page was abandoned. Same goes for a number of other features they used to fake what the engine can do. Hell even terrain they used for Viking Village was not default Unity terrain, but instead a custom mesh. You won't use custom mesh terrain for 99% situations in your games.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
Actually 100% incorrect in this case. You can download the HD path (which will be available via the new package manager soon) and it just works. Unity grew up, who knew! It all works out of the box (I have tried an early version of it).
Your whole complaint is based on experimental stuff they did for adam demo, which has nothing to do with a brand new complete renderering system. Hacks were necessary with the old renderer. This is the new renderer.
Actually 100% incorrect in this case. You can download the HD path (which will be available via the new package manager soon) and it just works. Unity grew up, who knew! It all works out of the box (I have tried an early version of it).
Your whole complaint is based on experimental stuff they did for adam demo, which has nothing to do with a brand new complete renderering system. Hacks were necessary with the old renderer. This is the new renderer.
You seem a little angry but that's OK, I would be too if I didn't read anything or understand anything.
You didn't get whole point of the post, did you? My conclusions are based on ALL their demos, incl. Adam, Blacksmith, Vikings. Every single of them presented custom tailored solutions for these particular scenes, making those demos fake advertisement. I'm pretty sure you will be able to download this new demo and it will "just work", but will also be based on a lot of custom shaders / tool / posteffects making it fake again.
That not fair. Most of Unreal demos actually work and give good performance. All of the Unity demos do not work. Its like Unreal plays by the rules and tries to make an accurate picture of what Unreal can do, but Unity just lies and there demos are never playable.
You're misinformed Unit, about more things than I'm willing to allocate time to try to fix
Instead, I'll just share my own thoughts on this video:
Lovely. Nice work Unity, glad to see you're upping your game. Bringing on Lagarde et al seems to be really paying off, as are a lot of the other aspects of versions 2017/2018. Good job all.
Yeah regardless of the hoops one might need to spring through to reproduce the quality, a damn impressive piece of work! Well done. I enjoyed watching this!
For what its worth all these hoops are getting designed out (already have - as zorro said with the new package system, as well as the new unified post stack etc). There's nothing in this video that you wont be able to do, from the awesome foliage lighting via a special feature in the PLM to the over the top chromatic abberation (lol). This is just great artwork and a great render - and the rendering is exactly what they got the guy who did frostbite to fix - and he has - this is what you get.
This update is actually insanely awesome, it brings us not just complete freedom to build a renderer exactly to our needs without the need for delving into source and branching off and bringing all the complications that brings, but they give you TWO render configs out of the box -- one called HD that is literally forefront AAA technology for the best visuals out there at amazing speed for compute capable systems, but also another one to target systems that can't, called LW which is even faster.
You know, that isn't even to mention the fact that they're also bringing up the slack on editor tools (something artists like a lot about unreal) with things like the shader editor, which works for both renderers and is designed to be able to target something custom too. Never mind the cinematics editor etc.
Or hell, that they didnt settle with enlighten and have embarked on an awesome progressive lightmapper that is tied deeper into unity and is much faster.
Or the amazing material blending that we're getting. Or the SSS character shader that people seem to not be aware of. Etc.
There's leaps and bounds being made across the board. As zorro said, unity is growing up. but you know, it's JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH for the kinds of guys that sit around moaning as if this stuff didn't cost more money than most people see in their lives just 10 years ago. Now its free and they try their best to make it accessible for a 1 man team kind of thing but you know, these guys grab experimental stuff, and WIP stuff, and spit on it because oh god forbid the demo uses stuff that hasn't made it to the main branch yet.
All that stuff from the earlier demos was either from before they decided to get their shit together and open a single office of professionals to deal with it rather than remote randoms, or it was work in progress, the slow hard job of moving from legacy to the future in increments. and yeah you might say 'WELL WHY ISNT IT DONE. WHY CANT I HAVE ALL THE THINGS. FUCK THIS IM GOING TO EPIC COS THEY'VE ALREADY DONE IT" and go ahead, that's up to you but you either don't see the equivalent problems on the unreal side because you're not actually doing anything that warrants anything more than editing a demo templates (glorified modding), or you're just a fanboy that wants to hate on the competing engine.
Some of these comments really show how unaware or inexperienced some people are in gamedev.
Almost every project i have ever worked on has had a TON of stuff created/customized/hacked into the engine to get the end results. Its just a reality of technology.
Sitting there and crying that the in editor terrain system is clunky and holding you back....just make custom mesh based terrain? Assasins creed orgins has all their terrain done via custom geo and that game looks pretty amazing. Good luck getting crisp peaks on your sand dunes with a 1mx1m poly based terrain system.
These demos are products of a team production, ofcourse they sre going to showcase the results of that.
The mindset that some missing feature like SSS or volumetric lighting is holding you back from creating a masterpiece of art is an excuse. Features dont make good art, good artists can make great art with even some basic tools.
Open up any of the unreal engine demos, and crack open most of their materials and its crazy web of techincal nodes 99% of artists have no idea what they are there for.
Artists thinking they need all these technical features to make good art is kinda hilarious. Tools are tools, and focusing on mastering the basics of making good art will get you a lot closer to making scenes like those demos that having an extra tickbox for shiny features.
But yea, there is a big difference in what a team can produce vs a single bedroom artist....but thats just common sense.
That's quite a lazy and superficial point. Of course the artist is more important than tools and features. it doesn't invalidate the criticism addressed at a given piece of software or otherwise.
Looks like there won't be any constructive discussion about the actual tools in the Unity in this thread anyway. You can always make your own solutions for everything sure, especially if you're an AAA studio (or big indie) with people dedicated for it. Harder if you're a freelancer, but why do those 'bedroom artists' even bother, right?:) I'm more than willing to admit that Unity seems very easy to adapt to your needs though.
Anyway, it looks like Unity 2018 is a step in the right direction and they're aware of their shortcomings and willing to iron them out, which is more than welcome from my perspective.
Artists thinking they need all these technical features to make good art is kinda hilarious. Tools are tools, and focusing on mastering the basics of making good art will get you a lot closer to making scenes like those demos that having an extra tickbox for shiny features.
i'm looking at it as someone who would not mind to put an asset on their marketplace. if there are no official shaders i can fall back on to and i'd have to cook up a custom solution of my own, i'm simply not going to bother. without that kind of standardization it's pretty unlikely my asset would fit right into anyone's project and going custom has quite the potential of becoming a support-nightmare.
for my type of work, shaders that are beyond the basics unfortunately make a massive difference. in any case, here's to future improvements of that aspect of unity.
Or the SSS character shader that people seem to not be aware of. Etc.
I'm particularly interested in this one. I know there are already a couple of sneak peeks on Artstation that look pretty impressive. But what makes me really exciting about these upcoming shaders is, that Unity Technologies hired Yibing Jiang for this. Look at her portfolio, that speaks for itself.
Look, I think that doing these showcase projects like Book of the Dead is probably the best way to find out if there's something that could be improved in Unity. So only good things can come out of these projects.
The short looks amazing and I was really impressed while watching it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDsRfbfnC_A
Replies
Can't wait for the demo!
https://unity3d.com/Book-of-the-Dead?utm_content=buffer00730&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
I wonder too, probably a 970 at least
We'll see when they release the interactive demo
I put 40 hours into "The Long Dark" so a bush-wacking/bushcraft simulator sounds good to me.
Sounds to me like how VR players currently move with the teleportation.
https://unity3d.com/book-of-the-dead
i just based my comment on the video. makes it look like a narrow corridor, more or less on-rails with perhaps some wiggle-room. it's a demo anyway.
watching it again i think i would have liked it to have an uplifting last-guardian kind of moment at the end, not some encounter with a treebark-monster. at least they didn't go for duck-walking bearded 'operators', props for that!
Remember their volumetric fog with light shafts and atmospheric scattering? It doesn't work anymore, and when it worked it had to be used with some custom shader you wouldn't want to use anywhere else. What about their realtime area light? Welp, it doesn't work anymore and last time I checked its github page was abandoned. Same goes for a number of other features they used to fake what the engine can do. Hell even terrain they used for Viking Village was not default Unity terrain, but instead a custom mesh. You won't use custom mesh terrain for 99% situations in your games.
This new "book of the dead" looks badass until you start digging deeper and realize they also created custom solutions. Sure they show what new scriptable render pipeline can do, but again they don't tell all the truth about it: you cannot achieve the same quality.
That's well put, my thought are exactly the same.
It just pisses me off ever since the Blacksmith demo, they tease all these great graphics, but
when you download the project files it turns out they have a custom terrain solution with a
custom script for placing vegetation while the default terrain system is kind of useless.
If I remember correctly in some other demo they used an experimental antialiasing method that either wasn't released for a long time after the demo or not released at all.
If it was just that they develop new features for those demos and then integrate them into the editor, then great.
As it is, it's just shameful and misleading what they do.
As far as I'm concerned these demos are worthless, they don't showcase what the engine or the
Unity as a package is capable of.
Unity is a bit more general than Unreal so a lot of the niche features are probably going to be missing. Being fair to Unity, Unreal only really just got proper volumetric lighting in 4.17 late last year...
The fact that you can implement a lot of those shaders so easily in Unity is what makes it better than Unreal in my opinion. The scriptable render pipeline will only make it better in this regard.
I need to have a play with it at some point though
as someone who doesn't program graphics further than drawing on paper or in zbrush, does this differ much from how Unreal shows off their tech demos? do they require as much work as the unity ones or are they more 'out of the box' capable than unity provides?
If you read the breakdown of a Unreal cinematic project you'll see that in Unity you'd have to go through more hoops to get this level of quality.
For example, Unity doesn't have a built-in SSS \ translucency shader that you can use for human skin.
There are plenty of Asset Store options for this, but having the company itself work on that would just feel different, more reassuring perhaps.
The thing is Unity offers less sophisticated render features resulting in somewhat worse image, but there is a catch. Unity is easy to learn, to use and to get result. Unreal offers more cool features right out-of-the-box, but you will have to spend quite a bit of time to learn how to operate the engine.
Actually 100% incorrect in this case. You can download the HD path (which will be available via the new package manager soon) and it just works. Unity grew up, who knew! It all works out of the box (I have tried an early version of it).
Your whole complaint is based on experimental stuff they did for adam demo, which has nothing to do with a brand new complete renderering system. Hacks were necessary with the old renderer. This is the new renderer.
You seem a little angry but that's OK, I would be too if I didn't read anything or understand anything. But if you are good at reading, try https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/01/18/2018-and-graphics/
Instead, I'll just share my own thoughts on this video:
Lovely. Nice work Unity, glad to see you're upping your game. Bringing on Lagarde et al seems to be really paying off, as are a lot of the other aspects of versions 2017/2018. Good job all.
Well done. I enjoyed watching this!
This update is actually insanely awesome, it brings us not just complete freedom to build a renderer exactly to our needs without the need for delving into source and branching off and bringing all the complications that brings, but they give you TWO render configs out of the box -- one called HD that is literally forefront AAA technology for the best visuals out there at amazing speed for compute capable systems, but also another one to target systems that can't, called LW which is even faster.
You know, that isn't even to mention the fact that they're also bringing up the slack on editor tools (something artists like a lot about unreal) with things like the shader editor, which works for both renderers and is designed to be able to target something custom too. Never mind the cinematics editor etc.
Or hell, that they didnt settle with enlighten and have embarked on an awesome progressive lightmapper that is tied deeper into unity and is much faster.
Or the amazing material blending that we're getting. Or the SSS character shader that people seem to not be aware of. Etc.
There's leaps and bounds being made across the board. As zorro said, unity is growing up. but you know, it's JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH for the kinds of guys that sit around moaning as if this stuff didn't cost more money than most people see in their lives just 10 years ago. Now its free and they try their best to make it accessible for a 1 man team kind of thing but you know, these guys grab experimental stuff, and WIP stuff, and spit on it because oh god forbid the demo uses stuff that hasn't made it to the main branch yet.
All that stuff from the earlier demos was either from before they decided to get their shit together and open a single office of professionals to deal with it rather than remote randoms, or it was work in progress, the slow hard job of moving from legacy to the future in increments. and yeah you might say 'WELL WHY ISNT IT DONE. WHY CANT I HAVE ALL THE THINGS. FUCK THIS IM GOING TO EPIC COS THEY'VE ALREADY DONE IT" and go ahead, that's up to you but you either don't see the equivalent problems on the unreal side because you're not actually doing anything that warrants anything more than editing a demo templates (glorified modding), or you're just a fanboy that wants to hate on the competing engine.
Almost every project i have ever worked on has had a TON of stuff created/customized/hacked into the engine to get the end results. Its just a reality of technology.
Sitting there and crying that the in editor terrain system is clunky and holding you back....just make custom mesh based terrain? Assasins creed orgins has all their terrain done via custom geo and that game looks pretty amazing. Good luck getting crisp peaks on your sand dunes with a 1mx1m poly based terrain system.
These demos are products of a team production, ofcourse they sre going to showcase the results of that.
The mindset that some missing feature like SSS or volumetric lighting is holding you back from creating a masterpiece of art is an excuse. Features dont make good art, good artists can make great art with even some basic tools.
Open up any of the unreal engine demos, and crack open most of their materials and its crazy web of techincal nodes 99% of artists have no idea what they are there for.
Artists thinking they need all these technical features to make good art is kinda hilarious. Tools are tools, and focusing on mastering the basics of making good art will get you a lot closer to making scenes like those demos that having an extra tickbox for shiny features.
But yea, there is a big difference in what a team can produce vs a single bedroom artist....but thats just common sense.
That's quite a lazy and superficial point.
Of course the artist is more important than tools and features.
it doesn't invalidate the criticism addressed at a given piece of software or otherwise.
Looks like there won't be any constructive discussion about the actual tools in the Unity in this thread anyway.
You can always make your own solutions for everything sure, especially if you're an AAA studio (or big indie)
with people dedicated for it.
Harder if you're a freelancer, but why do those 'bedroom artists' even bother, right?:)
I'm more than willing to admit that Unity seems very easy to adapt to your needs though.
Anyway, it looks like Unity 2018 is a step in the right direction and they're aware of their shortcomings and
willing to iron them out, which is more than welcome from my perspective.
for my type of work, shaders that are beyond the basics unfortunately make a massive difference.
in any case, here's to future improvements of that aspect of unity.
But what makes me really exciting about these upcoming shaders is, that Unity Technologies hired Yibing Jiang for this. Look at her portfolio, that speaks for itself.
I'm also very excited for the upcoming area lights and the FREE Aura volumetric lighting.
The short looks amazing and I was really impressed while watching it.
This looks wonderful!