From asset creation and placement to lighting and rendering, this talk explores how Unity's demo team used techniques like photogrammetry and post-processing volumes to accomplish a major feat: Building a realistic forest setting with a high level of detail that supports crucial story beats.

1. Book of the Dead:
Environmental Design, Tools,
and Techniques for Photo-Real
Worldbuilding
Julien Heijmans
Environment Artist, Demo Team

3. Book of the Dead:
Environmental Design, Tools,
and Techniques for Photo-Real
Worldbuilding
Julien Heijmans
Environment Artist, Demo Team

4. What this talk is about:
• Scanned assets, photogrammetry and trees
• Level building
• Lighting and post process
• Optimization

5. Partnership with Quixel Megascans

6. Book of the Dead Assets

7. Partnership with Quixel

8. Partnership with Quixel
● Models from the Quixel Library
● Models made by Quixel for this specific project

9. Partnership with Quixel
Megascans assets are also available on the Asset Store, ready to use

10. Production of photogrammetry
assets by our team

11. Photogrammetry - The process
● Capturing the subject
○ Hardware: A mid range DSLR or mid range camera works just fine, and a tripod.
○ Don’t hesitate to use wide lens (16-35mm), the photogrammetry software handles it well.
○ Best weather conditions: Dry and bright but overcast.

12. Photogrammetry - The process
Taking pictures on location

13. Photogrammetry - The process
Processing the data
● Generate base geometry and textures with Photogrammetry Software (We used RealityCapture)

14. Photogrammetry - The process
Processing the data
● Cleaning, Retopology and UV Unwrapping
● Bake textures onto new geometry
● Delighting the albedo map (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/DeLightingTool)

15. Photogrammetry - The process
Our final cliff in the project

16. Creation of the trees of BotD
Capturing the trees

17. Geometry of the trunk
Made of two parts:
● Unique geometry and texture for the stump
● Tiling textures for the stump

18. Creation of the branches
Creation of the branches texture atlas using Quixel Megascans textures, modeling in 3DsMax

19. Generating the geometry of the tree
Trunk geometry and branches placement done with GrowFX, a plugin for 3dsMax

20. Authoring the asset to support wind
Custom wind solution for procedural vertex shader based wind animation
• 3 levels of hierarchy, assigned on source geometry using vertex color:
• Trunk
• Branches level A
• Branches level B, assigned using vertex color.
• Vertex pivot baked on geometry through Unity C# Script.

22. Wind: Other feature and exploration
• Influence of the sound on the wind intensity
• Flowmap to occlude the wind intensity in cavities and behind large rocks

23. Building the ‘Book of the Dead -
Environment’ scene

24. Shaping up the level
When creating a dense and heavy level: Plan ahead
• Think about how far the player will be able to see
• Build ‘bottleneck’ and corridors to restrict long view distance.

25. Use of occlusion culling

26. Use of Unity legacy terrain system
• We made HDRP Layered shader work for the legacy Unity terrain (quick and dirty)
• Proper integration of the HDRP Layered shader for the Unity legacy terrain coming soon
• All vegetation assets placed through the terrain are setup as trees, for full LOD support
• A large amount of assets are spread over the terrain: Vegetation, rubbles, rocks, detail assets
like small sticks and branches or pine cones.

32. Scattered detail assets
C# tool to scatter many detail assets in the level

33. Lighting

34. Book of the Dead lighting solution
• Baked indirect global illumination with realtime direct lighting
• Gives us some freedom to animate the sunlight
• Lightmaps used for terrain and for some large not too detailed props
• Light probes for the rest of the props (Trees and rocks)

35. Occlusion probes
• Solution originally developed by our team for this project
• API already available since 2018.1, will be properly implemented in HD Render Pipeline

36. Occlusion probes
• Solution originally developed by our team for this project
• API already available since 2018.1, will be properly implemented in HD Render Pipeline

37. Occlusion probes
• Solution originally developed by our team for this project
• API already available since 2018.1, will be properly implemented in HD Render Pipeline

38. Occlusion probes
• Solution originally developed by our team for this project
• API already available since 2018.1, will be properly implemented in HD Render Pipeline

39. PostProcess

40. Custom Atmospheric Scattering
• Created for the BlackSmith demo and ported to the HD Render Pipeline
• Read about it here: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/05/28/atmospheric-scattering-in-the-blacksmith/

41. HD Render Pipeline Transmission
• Uses thickness maps for transmittance

42. Other Post-Process
• Grass Occlusion
• Implementation of Area Volumes, built on the core volume system offered by SRP.
Similar to Post Process Volumes, but able to drive lighting, atmospheric scattering or wind
properties.

43. Optimization
• Use LODs but LOD Crossfade can get really heavy at rendering
• You can use Object Space normals to have better LOD transition
• Use occlusion culling
• Beware of drawcall cost of the shadow maps from the real-time lighting
• Custom implementation of layer culling, allowing shadow culling

44. Visit the
Microsoft & Sony booths
Experience the Book of the Dead: Environment interactive demo for yourself

45. Thank you!
Visit unity3d.com/book-of-the-dead to know more about the creation of this project