Unity provides glimpse of super-realistic digital humans with "Enemies" demo

Engine maker Unity has spotlighted a new tech demo called "Enemies" that showcases what it describes as "the next step in our digital-human journey."

The demo, which will be featured at the Unity booth at GDC 2022 this week, shows how developers might leverage Unity to create highly realistic digital humans, following in the footsteps of previous demos such as "The Heretic."

Enemies specifically highlights a number of improvements including a better 4D pipeline, more realistic eyes with caustics on the iris, a new skin shader, tension tech for blood flow simulation and wrinkle mapping, and a skin attachment system on the GPU that allows for high-density meshes.

"All High Definition Render Pipeline features have been improved and some new systems were introduced, including Adaptive Probe volumes and Screen Space Global Illumination. Real-time ray traced reflections, ray traced ambient occlusion, and native support for NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling allow the demo to run at 4K with image quality comparable to native resolution," said Unity, detailing some of the tech behind Enemies.

"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."

Anybody who can't make it to GDC can view Enemies using the power of YouTube (as seen below). The demo has been unveiled ahead of the release of an updated Digital Human Package and Hair solution that are slated to launch in Q2 2022.