The Unity engine is one of the most widely-used game engines out there. It powers a wide array of different titles, spanning all sorts of different scopes, styles and genres. You have simple 2D games to AAA blockbusters all running atop Unity’s vast arsenal of tools.
The main team behind the engine has been creating and publishing various video demos over the last few years which show off the engine’s growing capabilities. The latest of these such demos, titled “Enemies”, shows a female character being beautifully rendered in a room as she monologues and plays a game of chess. The rather quaint scene then becomes rather dramatic towards the end where the background gradually transitions from an empty room to the window of a space station. The change to a zero-gravity environment is further emphasized when everything in the scene begins to vividly float.
All of the different techniques shown off in the trailer are meant to display how far the team has come with the Unity engine’s progress. The lighting and shading effects are superb, along with other great features like dynamic shadows, reflections and various other special effects all getting a solid chance to shine.
Of course, the biggest and most obvious feature of this demo is the way the female character looks. Advancements have been made to better render human skin, and other various realistic features such as “more realistic eyes with caustics on the iris” and “tension tech for blood flow simulation and wrinkle maps”. Even the tech behind the character’s hair was given special attention to ensure it would achieve “highly realistic locks”.
This demo also makes use of ray-traced reflections and also implemented Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech. DLSS thus allowed the demo to “run at 4K with image quality comparable to native resolution.”
As alluded to earlier, not every Unity project will make use of all of these features; simpler titles would use very little, if any at all, of what’s shown off in this demo.
However, by seeing what the engine is capable of, it does generate a lot of curiosity over what developers might come up with in a real game.
