Enemies expands on the work done for The Heretic, which featured Unity’s first realistic digital human. Improvements include:

• A better 4D pipeline
• Skin Attachment system on the GPU to allow for high-density meshes (e.g., peach fuzz)
• More realistic eyes with caustics on the iris
• A new skin shader
• Tension tech for blood flow simulation and wrinkle maps, eliminating the need for a facial rig for fine details

All High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) features have been improved and some new systems were introduced, including Adaptive Probe volumes and Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI). Real-time ray traced reflections, ray traced ambient occlusion, and native support for NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) allow the demo to run at 4K with image quality comparable to native resolution.

For the protagonist’s highly realistic locks, the Demo team and Unity’s R&D team collaborated on an all-new Hair solution for authoring, importing, simulating, and rendering strand-based hair. It works with any authoring tools that output data in the Alembic format. In Enemies, the team used Maya XGen, and is validating the pipeline with Weta Barbershop.

The Hair Solution is now available as an experimental package on Unity's GitHub. Requires Unity 2020.2.0f1 or later.

The demo was featured in the Unity booth at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on March 23-25 for attendees to check out as a standalone or running in the Unity Editor.

Q3 2022: The Digital Human Package has been updated, available for download now.

Take a deep dive into the tech behind Enemies to learn how the Demo team brought this photorealistic protagonist to life. In this video, Mark Schoennagel walks you through the techniques and technology developed for achieving photorealistic eyes, hair, skin, and more – all rendered in real-time and running in 4K resolution.