‘Time Ghost’ is latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo

September 20, 2024

Watch the demo here.

Designed to showcase what can be done in Unity 6, Time Ghost is the latest in a series of tech demo’s from the game engine company.

Some info from Unity:

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.

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.

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.

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.

More info at Unity’s site: https://unity.com/demos/time-ghost

Here’s some of the team discussing how they did it.

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