Beautiful Unity Demo ‘Lion’ Runs at 4K@30FPS on PS5 {Hardware}

At SIGGRAPH 2022, Unity unveiled a brand new real-time demo titled Lion, which runs at 4K decision, 30 frames per second on PlayStation 5 {hardware}. It was created with the next artist instruments: Wētā Digital, SpeedTree, Ziva, SyncSketch, and naturally, Unity Editor.

Clearly, probably the most spectacular facet of the Lion demo is the felines’ fur rendering, made with Wētā Digital’s new Wig hair and fur instrument. Unity Technical Artist Sara Hansen defined:

Wig is a unique method of working – it’s truly the quickest grooming instrument that I’ve ever used. A high-quality hero groom – which might take me a number of months in one other grooming package deal – is far quicker to create in Wig. It takes simply a few weeks, and a few grooms go from weeks to create in different instruments to just one or few days in Wig, and at much better high quality ranges and with better artist controllability… Even when you must react to detailed artwork path suggestions notes, like adjusting a particular strand from a reference shot, it’s straightforward to writer in Wig.

That is the instrument, however Unity needed to be up to date to allow the rendering of hundreds of thousands of particular person fur strands, all shifting independently.

One set of enhancements features a new GPU-driven clustered hair simulation that permits hundreds of thousands of hair strands to react dynamically in real-time, a part of the brand new Hair System launched on Unity’s GitHub. This strategy builds on the hair simulation used for the unimaginable Digital Human showcase, Enemies, and expands the tactic to deal with a number of orders of magnitude extra hair strands effectively on GPU.

For hair and fur rendering, the graphics builders at Unity designed a set of enhancements to a GPU tile-based software program rasterization algorithm in HDRP, with important optimization to render a number of million distinctive hair strands. This technique achieved easy visuals with analytic anti-aliasing with compute-sorted order unbiased transparency for hair strands and improved superior physically-based hair lighting fashions for film-quality hair strand rendering. 

Unity mentioned that these hair/fur simulation and rendering enhancements shall be launched to the general public with the 2023.1 Tech Stream.