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Time Ghost
A Unity Originals real-time cinematic created with Unity 6.
Time Ghost, the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo

Pushing the limits of Unity 6

Time Ghost is the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo developed by the team behind projects like The Blacksmith, Adam, Book of the Dead, The Heretic, and Enemies. Presented at Unite 2024 in Barcelona, it showcases what can be achieved with Unity 6. The demo highlights advancements in visual quality, project complexity, and the practical use of machine learning workflows.

Time Ghost

Graphics in Unity 6

The visual quality and complexity in Time Ghost are made possible by advancements across the board in all graphics features in Unity 6. The demo leverages the latest improvements in HDRP, more sophisticated lighting options with APVs, Scenario Blending and Smoke Lighting, performance gains with GPU Resident Drawer, and powerful artist tools like VFX Graph and Shader Graph.

Time Ghost

Environments at scale with DOTS ECS

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.

Time Ghost

Machine learning for cloth deformation

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.

Time Ghost

VFX Collisions system

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.

Solider from side profile, hair cut short and wavy with eyes staring forward

Improved Hair System

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.

Project Information

Time Ghost, developed with an unmodified Unity 6 engine, was showcased at Unite Barcelona 2024 running on a PC equipped with an Intel Core i9-14900K CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. The project leverages a range of Unity products, features, and services such as:

  • Rendering performance, quality, and scope:
    • HDRP
    • DOTS (Entities Graphics)
    • GPU Resident Drawer
  • Lighting
    • Volumetric Clouds
    • APVs (Adaptive Probe Volumes)
    • Scenario Blending
    • Time of day
  • SpeedTree
  • Sentis
  • VFX Graph
    • Six-way smoke lighting
    • Volumetric fog output
    • Improved collisions
    • Instancing
  • Unity’s Hair System
  • Cinemachine
  • LiveCapture
Unity 6
Get ready for Unity 6

Discover faster rendering, powerful lighting options, end-to-end multiplayer workflows, dynamic AI capabilities, and increased support for mobile web runtimes.

Resources

Delve into the fascinating journey behind the creation of Time Ghost.

Unite 2024
Unite 2024 Barcelona Keynote

Watch the recording of the project launch at the Unite 2024 Barcelona keynote and learn how Time Ghost was created, pushing the limits of our latest technology.

Time Ghost will release
Releases

Time Ghost will release scenes from the project in the Unity Asset Store on October 17, 2024, alongside Unity 6. These scenes will feature environments and a character utilizing cloth deformation.

Time Ghost Credits

Demo Team

Adrian Lazar

Aleksander Karshikoff

Angela Diaz

Christian Kardach

Hugo García Torres

Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen

Mikel Barron Bilbao

Mikko Alaluusua

Petter Flood

Plamen “Paco” Tamnev

Rob Cupisz

Silvia Rasheva

Torbjörn Laedre

Veselin Efremov

Xuan Prada

External vendors

Music Joaquin Garcia

Character design Rael Lyra

Character Grooming Mark Allen, Aaron Conover

Costume production Tanja Gierich

Color grading Mihail Moskov

Creature model Maria Panfilova

Stunt services Svenska Stuntgruppen

Face scan IR-Entertainment

Additional VFX Tuatara, Orson Favrel

Additional animation Take One

Additional technical animation Krasimir Nechevski

Additional design Peter Popken, Andrea Mancarella, Magic Room, Jimmy Gustavsson

Additional audio Pole Position Production, Sebastian Mueller

Additional camera Niklas Nyberg

Additional asset production Patrick Goodwin, Elina Marjomaa, André Castman, Rebecka Näsberg, Simon Picard, Pod8, Tihomir Nyagolov, Daniel Gagiu

Additional studio services Devinsens, Independent Studio, Independent Dekor

Content credits

Sketchfab, Poly Haven, Graswald

Derived work from LiDAR-PNOA-cob2 2015 CC-BY 4.0 scne.es

Special thanks

Carol Carpenter, Natasha Tatarchuk, Sébastien Lagarde

Nikolay Toshev, Julien Fryer, Paul Demeulenaere, Antoine Lelièvre, Ludovic Theobald, Gabriel de la Cruz, Adrien de Tocqueville, Pavlos Mavridis, Sergi Valls Company, Marie Guffroy, Francesco Cifariello Ciardi, Soufiane Khiat, John Parsaie, Steven Shmuely, Alexandre Ribard, Anis Benyoub, Alix Michel, Cyril Jover

Unity Technologies R&D

© 2024 Unity Technologies

Previous demos

Unity Originals are in-house productions created by Unity’s Demo team to push our engine to its limits. These projects highlight major milestones in Unity’s evolution.

Enemies
Enemies
This groundbreaking cinematic teaser features major advances in photorealistic eyes, hair, skin, and more – all rendered in real-time and running in 4K resolution.
The Heretic
The Heretic
The Heretic is a real-time cinematic employing a broad range of Unity’s graphics features, including every aspect of the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
Book of the Dead
Book of the Dead
This interactive short film is rendered in real-time and showcases Unity’s proficiency at powering high-end visuals for game productions.
Adam
Adam
This short film illustrates the real-time graphical quality achievable with the Unity engine in 2016.