At GDC 2019, Unity’s award-winning Demo team, the creators of Adam and Book of the Dead, showcased a new short film called The Heretic. The Heretic tech demo was a real-time cinematic running at 30 fps at 1440p on a consumer-class desktop PC.
The Heretic tech demo was achieved with the latest version of Unity’s post-processing features such as motion blur, bloom, depth of field, film grain, color grading, and Panini projection.
The tech demo is lit entirely by real-time lights and uses a probe-based lighting solution. A first iteration of the new system solution was applied in the Megacity demo and is being extended for the full version of The Heretic.
The end result is incredible and Unity promises to release the full short film soon. Not only that but Unity may also allow PC users to download and run it on their PC systems. After all, the team did exactly that with its Adam tech demo so here is hoping that we’ll be able to run The Heretic on our machines.
Enjoy the first tech video for The Heretic and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I am most pleased to see the amount of work Unity has been receiving for so long.
The effects can be replicated on UE4, but it’s not the real point.
regardless of what engine a developer choses, i know i’m going to be impressed.
Unity has come a long way. Not exactly jaw dropping or anything, but Unity certainly can’t be laughed at anymore. That much is for sure.
As soon as the demo started, I could instantly see Real-Time ray tracing was in effect! Boy, this looks gorgeous!
Unity is really showing its potential with these stunning tech demos!
Now if only we could get some developers with the fortitude to make a
game that looks like this. Always too scared about people complaining
they can’t max it out on their systems. I love it when a game forced me
to upgrade my hardware when the visuals are worth it.
I mean… Vermintide uses the Unity engine and looks pretty decent.
Vermintide does not, in fact, use the unity engine. It uses Stingray engine. The engine by autodesk
Rip. I stand corrected.
It’s about making something that will run on normal gaming PCs, even high end ones. There is a reason demos always look so good. It’s because they aren’t real games. They don’t have as much going on as a game does.
Another issues is just the amount of time and detail put into everything. I think it takes them quite a long time to make a sequence like that. It just might not be feasible to spend that much time on every single part of a game.
Great to see such progress from Unity in recent years. Due to the cancer that is Epic Games Store I’m now more keen than ever to see such progress from game engines other than Epic’s UE4.
A week ago I would have laughed at the thought of praising Microsoft and yet thanks to them having woken up to reality by confirming Halo TMCC is coming to Steam (with zero timed exclusivity for Win 10 Store) they’re now all of a sudden the good guys relative to Epic! What a world…
UE4 is still the king as far as that goes, but Unity has started catching up pretty damn fast it seems.
It will only be a matter of time if they keep pushing like this.
Also I just don’t like the look of UE4 games for some reason. They all have a certain look to them that I can’t shake the feeling of.
if the whole world and this industry with it won’t got to shet, i’m really jealous of people who get to play games in 100 or maybe a couple of hundred years from now.
OMG!
Just Amazing !
Yeah, I thought it was insane!!!! So good!
Particle effects and bouncing lighting effects look awesome but the engine that I’m really loving is Frostbite. Say what you will about EA but their in-house engine makes the best looking games and it’s really optimized. Games very rarely come close to engine tech demos like these
This is pretty good, facial animations especially, nothing really super incredible tho.
okay?
Great tech demo but maybe next time the team could make shower scene demo with real time Ray tracing…
CD project got hammered for their downgrade, guess were just gonna have to make our own games and show ’em how its done,right!?
the same reason as always.
This is a demo, not a game. It’s much harder to pull this off in a game, not to mention the absurd amount of time and manpower to build a game with this level of detail. A lot of what you see is just craftsmanship and detail.
They didn’t use fancy raytracing or anything like that.
Getting that kind of detail on one character, okay. For an entire cast of characters that have potentially hours of dialogue ?
>oy vey goy the future is mulatto! your white and want you kids and grand kids , etc to look like you?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!! your wrong! green new deal goyim!
this is gross and the creators should be labeled as race traitors/ a race that doesn’t want white people to exist in the next decade or so… utterly gross… promoting this is white genocide.
do us a favor and hang yourself now.
go f a goat muzzie
you are easily in top 10 dumbest people i’ve ever encountered on the internet.
Very nice indeed.
And all of this tech will end up being in the service of mindless multiplayer shooters so it doesn’t matter.
Forget the Tech Demo, I want to play this ******* game.
The people that made this trailer could probably make a game, same goes for the people that make the Nvidia tech demos and the like. Nvidia could have their own game dev studio with the work that must have gone into pumping their tech demos out. I always wondered why they never do.
They have unlimited Talent but Worldclass Talent is limited.
Amazing. Now this is something that I want to see in a game. Not sure how many of you played “The Journeyman Project” back in the day (it was my first PC game ever that came on a CD, and was one of the first that came in that format)…still waiting to see a game with that kind of story, time travel locations which sure made things quite interesting, and giving that sense that “anything can be possible”.
I mean, we play games and all we do lately is shoot at everything we see with copy and paste cliché stories and such.
It is time to put that creativity to work because “my face is getting tired” of all this garbage we are getting. Sure there are good games and this start of the year proves that (with RE 2 Remake, Metro Exodus, DMC5)…but still most of them based in something that we had before with upgrades either graphically or mechanically.
New IP’s, new ideas, something interesting for a change.
Astonishing!
Here’s the thing about these demos, just download them on the unity store. There’s not as much to them as it appears. They’re very specifically made to show off specific things. There are much, much better unity demos that are much more representative of what unity can do for an actual game rather than a short film. Like the unity made hero shooter thing, for example.
because it’s not us it’s them. There are a lot of stupid and impatient ppl out there that would rather play something for 1h just for the rush/kicks and then go do sth else.
The majority is like that, that’s what sells, that’s what they produce.
Ok the game looks cool and all but what’s with the duckface on the main protagonist?
Honestly, as impressive as the demo was these tech demos do nothing for me. A great way to promote your engine for sure, but it bothers me to think that the average third party AAA games won’t be able to look this good until a couple of years from now. Especially if they’re open world games. There are already some games that are close to this sort of level but are mostly available on the PS4.
I hope its from real game
Dude, I would play this game. They need to make this, perhaps in the veins of an open world like Assassin’s Creed but set in this universe.
Well this looks great, but unfortunately most AAA developers wont use the Unity Engine and instead use their propriety engine, So we will never see any games with this level of visual fidelity, as most Unity engine developers are small indie studios.