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The Heretic: Digital Human package out now

May 13, 2020 in Technology | 2 min. read
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When we revealed our short film The Heretic, the question you asked the most was, “Are you going to release this?” We’re happy to tell you that one of the most requested elements of this production - the Digital Human Character and Technology stack - is now available for you to download.

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While working on the realistic digital human in The Heretic, the Demo Team needed to set up a complete data pipeline, from the acquisition of 3D and 4D data through processing and into set up in Unity. We developed some technologies to enable this. While a lot more work remains to be done in the future, we’re sharing what we have today, so that you can look into the current state of our efforts. You’re free to use these tools in your productions and build on top of them as you see fit.

Here’s what’s in the box:

  • Facial animation systems
    • Tools for 4D clip import and processing. When we say 4D, we mean a sequence of meshes captured over time.
    • 4D clip rendering with timeline integration.
    • 4D frame fitting, allowing detail injection from facial rig.
    • Integration of facial rig from Snappers.
    • Pose facial rig directly in Unity.
  • Skin attachment system
    • Drive meshes and transforms in relation to dynamically deforming skin.
    • Used to drive eyebrows, eyelashes, stubble and logical markers.
    • Accelerated by C# Job System and Burst Compiler.
  • Shaders and rendering
    • Full shader graphs for skin/eyes/teeth/hair as seen in The Heretic.
    • Custom pass for cross-material normal buffer blur (tearline).
    • Custom marker-driven occlusion for eyes and teeth.

 

We’re also releasing the character Gawain, a digital character modeled after British actor Jake Fairbrother. This 3D character is available to you for the purpose of learning, research, and similar non-commercial use intended for the advancement and sharing of knowledge in the space of real-time graphics and content creation. 

 

Requirements for the Digital Human package:

  • Unity version: 2019.3.12f1 + 
  • HDRP version: 7.3.1 +
  • Git-LFS 
  • Supported platforms: All platforms supported by HDRP

 

You can download it from the Asset Store or clone it from GitHub: 

 

Use Unity Package Manager to get GitHub packages directly from the Unity Editor. See the documentation for more details.

We’ve also put together an executable version of the sample package (Windows only), which you can also get from GitHub (1.04 GB).

Extra resources

Learn more about the project on The Heretic website. We’re working on further releases, blog posts, presentations, and video breakdowns, and will be adding all the extra resources there.

May 13, 2020 in Technology | 2 min. read

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