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.
Project Information
Time Ghost, developed with an unmodified Unity 6 engine, was showcased at Unite Barcelona 2024 running on a PC equipped with an Intel Core i9-14900K CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. The project leverages a range of Unity products, features, and services such as:
- Rendering performance, quality, and scope:
- HDRP
- DOTS (Entities Graphics)
- GPU Resident Drawer
- Lighting
- Volumetric Clouds
- APVs (Adaptive Probe Volumes)
- Scenario Blending
- Time of day
- SpeedTree
- Sentis
- VFX Graph
- Six-way smoke lighting
- Volumetric fog output
- Improved collisions
- Instancing
- Unity’s Hair System
- Cinemachine
- LiveCapture
Discover faster rendering, powerful lighting options, end-to-end multiplayer workflows, dynamic AI capabilities, and increased support for mobile web runtimes.
Resources
Delve into the fascinating journey behind the creation of Time Ghost.
Watch the recording of the project launch at the Unite 2024 Barcelona keynote and learn how Time Ghost was created, pushing the limits of our latest technology.
Time Ghost will release scenes from the project in the Unity Asset Store on October 17, 2024, alongside Unity 6. These scenes will feature environments and a character utilizing cloth deformation.
Time Ghost Credits
Adrian Lazar
Aleksander Karshikoff
Angela Diaz
Christian Kardach
Hugo García Torres
Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen
Mikel Barron Bilbao
Mikko Alaluusua
Petter Flood
Plamen “Paco” Tamnev
Rob Cupisz
Silvia Rasheva
Torbjörn Laedre
Veselin Efremov
Xuan Prada
Music Joaquin Garcia
Character design Rael Lyra
Character Grooming Mark Allen, Aaron Conover
Costume production Tanja Gierich
Color grading Mihail Moskov
Creature model Maria Panfilova
Stunt services Svenska Stuntgruppen
Face scan IR-Entertainment
Additional VFX Tuatara, Orson Favrel
Additional animation Take One
Additional technical animation Krasimir Nechevski
Additional design Peter Popken, Andrea Mancarella, Magic Room, Jimmy Gustavsson
Additional audio Pole Position Production, Sebastian Mueller
Additional camera Niklas Nyberg
Additional asset production Patrick Goodwin, Elina Marjomaa, André Castman, Rebecka Näsberg, Simon Picard, Pod8, Tihomir Nyagolov, Daniel Gagiu
Additional studio services Devinsens, Independent Studio, Independent Dekor
Sketchfab, Poly Haven, Graswald
Derived work from LiDAR-PNOA-cob2 2015 CC-BY 4.0 scne.es
Carol Carpenter, Natasha Tatarchuk, Sébastien Lagarde
Nikolay Toshev, Julien Fryer, Paul Demeulenaere, Antoine Lelièvre, Ludovic Theobald, Gabriel de la Cruz, Adrien de Tocqueville, Pavlos Mavridis, Sergi Valls Company, Marie Guffroy, Francesco Cifariello Ciardi, Soufiane Khiat, John Parsaie, Steven Shmuely, Alexandre Ribard, Anis Benyoub, Alix Michel, Cyril Jover
Unity Technologies R&D
© 2024 Unity Technologies
Previous demos
Unity Originals are in-house productions created by Unity’s Demo team to push our engine to its limits. These projects highlight major milestones in Unity’s evolution.