Book of the Dead
Unity’s award-winning Demo Team, creators of “Adam”, is excited to announce Book of the Dead, a first-person interactive demo showcasing the capabilities of Unity 2018 for powering high-end visuals for game productions.
Watch teaserA powerful new rendering pipeline
Book of the Dead demonstrates what is possible when using Unity 2018’s new Scriptable Render Pipeline, which provides enhanced customizability of Unity’s rendering architecture, putting more control in the hands of the developers.
The project is built on the new High-Definition Render Pipeline template shipping with Unity 2018 and various powerful customizations enabled by the SRP. A preview of the High-Definition Render Pipeline is coming soon to 2018.1 public beta.
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Watch the teaser
Next Level Rendering
At GDC 2018 we showcased Book of the Dead, which was built on Unity’s new HD Render pipeline. HD RP prioritizes stunning, high-fidelity visuals with performant results on modern consoles and PC hardware. In this presentation you’ll how small teams can take advantage of Unity’s newest features to build high-end productions.
Real-world environment assets
All of the natural environment assets in the demo are photogrammetry-scanned real-world objects and textures. The majority of them come from Quixel Megascans, a publicly available library of high-quality scanned assets, which is used widely by high-end game production and film VFX professionals alike.
For creating its own photogrammetry assets, the Demo team used the experimental Delighting Tool developed by Unity Labs in its workflow.
An interactive cinematic experience
Book of the Dead is an interactive demo that combines elements from both film and games. The trailer is representative of the actual gameplay experience.
The environments are built in a way that allows the player to move around and explore. The camera is a continuous first-person camera, and when the player is teleported to a different location, the transition feels like a cinematic cut.
Unlike a traditional first-person game camera, however, here the game camera is designed to have a cinematic handheld feel, with inertia and weight. The height, speed, and shakiness reflect the emotional state of the protagonist and change as the player progresses through the story controlling the character.
Pushing the envelope
Unity’s Demo productions drive advanced use of the Unity engine through autonomous creative projects. The team consists of experienced game professionals led by Creative Director Veselin Efremov, who writes and directs the demos and is responsible for their final look.
Focusing on graphics, the team explores and pushes the limits of what is possible to achieve with the Unity engine. The unique position of an internal team is that it is willing and able to take the risk — and pain — of basing entire productions at the bleeding edge of technological innovation.
See all projects by the team
Demo Team
Written, Directed and Art Directed by
Veselin Efremov
Produced by
Silvia Rasheva
Technical Director
Torbjorn Laedre
Concept Art Director
Georgi Simeonov
Animation Director
Krasimir Nechevski
Sr. Graphics Programmer
Robert Cupisz
Character Art
Plamen ‘Paco’ Tamnev
Environment Art
Veselin Efremov
Zdravko Pavlov
Julien Heijmans
VFX Art
Zdravko Pavlov
Systems Programmer
Malte Hildingsson
Junior Programmer
Dominykas Kiauleikis
Cast
Karen
Louise Ryme
Interviewer
Joshua Lenn
The Bishop
Stephen Rappaport
Screwies
Leonid Yovchev
Additional Art
Sound Design and Music
Aleksander Karshikoff
Additional Environment Art
Tihomir Nyagolov
Tinko Wiezorrek
Scanned Natural Assets
Quixel
Additional Character Art
Alexander Ponomarev
Audio Production
Pole Position
Motion Capture & Additional Animation
Aneta Spasova
Special Thanks: Nikolay Toshev, Mihail Moskov
Music
Requiem in D minor, K.626 (Lacrimosa)
Composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Arranged and Performed by Aleksander Karshikoff
Unity Technologies R&D
Sebastien Lagarde, Tim Cooper, Kuba Cupisz, Jesper Mortensen, Thomas Hourdel, Yibing Jiang, Julien Ignace, Morten Mikkelsen, Ionut Nedelcu, Xiao Ling Yao, Yuanxing Cai, Vlad Andreev, Evgenii Golubev, Uygar Kalem, John Elliott, Tobias Alexander Franke, Kasper Engelstoft, Mikko Strandborg, Felipe Lira, Natalya Tatarchuk
© 2018 Unity Technologies ApS