The complete short film of The Heretic has finally been released. The near eight minute cinematic was composed, rendered, and captured running in real-time in the Unity 3D game engine.
The highlight of the short film is to give designers an idea of what Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline can be used for when it comes to designing high fidelity projects with multi-directional real-time lighting, dynamic shadows, and physically based rendering for lights, emitters, and effects.
You can get a good look at the seven minute demonstration below, which originally debuted as a teaser during last year’s Game Developers Conference, but is available in full bloom this year.
The story for this particular Unity demo is kind of in the weeds, but it deals with an agent and his robotic sidekick venturing through a portal into another world. They attempt to deliver a package to one of the last of the ancients, but the agent dies in the process and is resurrected in a swirl of frilly white twines that form what loosely looks like an angel of sorts.
The video is used to highlight what Unity is calling their post-processing stack, which helps to create more photorealistic renders, as well as more detail for fantasy-oriented effects.
Over on the Unity 3D website they detail how the Shader Graph master nodes work, enabling artists and animators to add more realism to 3D actors and fabrics, as well as the Visual Effects Graph, which opens up a workflow not unlike the Blueprints for the Unreal Engine 4.
All of the actor effects will be made available as part of a workflow package from The Heretic for designers and artists, which others will be able to use to create their very own characters, cinematics, and games.
I doubt we’ll see many games make use of this technology, but it’s nice to see that it’s currently available for use in a real-time runtime for a current generation game engine.
As mentioned, you can learn more about The Heretic and the latest updates for the Unity 3D game engine by visiting the official website.