Pushing the limits of Unity 6
Time Ghost is the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo developed by the team behind projects like The Blacksmith, Adam, Book of the Dead, The Heretic, and Enemies. Presented at Unite 2024 in Barcelona, it showcases what can be achieved with Unity 6. The demo highlights advancements in visual quality, project complexity, and the practical use of machine learning workflows.
Graphics in Unity 6
The visual quality and complexity in Time Ghost are made possible by advancements across the board in all graphics features in Unity 6. The demo leverages the latest improvements in HDRP, more sophisticated lighting options with APVs, Scenario Blending and Smoke Lighting, performance gains with GPU Resident Drawer, and powerful artist tools like VFX Graph and Shader Graph.
Environments at scale with DOTS ECS
Leveraging DOTS ECS, we've crafted a vibrant environment with up to 12 million instances of vegetation, including trees and grasses. Using Houdini, we scattered these assets and exported them to Unity as point clouds, converting them into DOTS ECS entities. This approach allows us to handle vast amounts of vegetation, at maximum nearly 8.5 million active pieces but fewer than half a million entities passed to the graphics system. Through Impostor and LOD systems, we achieve high-performance rendering and real-time scene exploration.
Machine learning for cloth deformation
A custom machine learning (ML) model was developed to achieve high-quality deformations in real-time using Unity Sentis. Training the ML model with 2,000 frames of vertex animation reduced the data from 2.5GB to a 47MB model. This allows for stunning deformations in just 0.8 ms per frame, maintaining the visual fidelity of offline computations.
VFX Collisions system
The improved VFX collision system is now more stable, robust, and energy-conserving. It was used to enhance the behavior of debris falling onto the characters. The new collision events allowed for extra interactivity – chunks of debris break apart upon contact, adding to the chaos and organic look.
Improved Hair System
We have upgraded the Hair System, which enables high-density, real-time simulated hair. Since its initial use in Enemies, the system has become both more powerful and more performant in the context of Time Ghost. New features include seamless rendering LOD, automatic LOD generation, volumetric wind, and more – all of which work together to drive high-fidelity simulation and rendering in larger settings.
Learn more
Learn more about this project at:
https://unity.com/demos/time-ghost
Visit Unity Originals website to check out previous work by the Demo Team:
https://unity.com/demos/unity-originals
