Download free assets from Unity’s Book of the Dead demo
Unity Technologies has released the environment assets from its Book of the Dead tech demo for free, including rock, tree and grass models and ground materials, some taken from Quixel’s Megascans library.
The release was announced as part of the firm’s Unite Berlin 2018 developer event, alongside a new tech partnership with Google and upcoming augmented and mixed reality tools.
Download free trees, grass and rock assets: some from Megascans and some created specially
First teased at last year’s conference and released in trailer form in January, Book of the Dead is intended to show off the new Scriptable Render Pipeline in Unity 2018.1.
The plot is fairly enigmatic, but the visuals sure do look pretty, with the camera moving through a detailed forest environment under rapidly shifting light conditions.
The environment assets are a mixture of stock scans from Quixel’s Megascans library, plus others produced by Quixel or Unity’s own demo team for the project.
The free download packages them up inside a readymade Unity project using a custom atmospheric scattering system and a custom vertex shader for procedurally animated wind effects.
The project also includes a readymade player controller and flythrough camera, sound effects and occlusion probes, and is designed to run at 30fps in 1080p resolution on current consoles and mid-range PCs.
Other news from Unite Berlin 2018: new AR tools Project MARS and Facial AR Remote Component
Other announcements from Unite Berlin 2018 include the news that Unity is migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud and partnering with Google to create a suite of new tools for developing ‘connected games’.
The company also previewed the nested prefabs system due in Unity 2018.3, and announced upcoming mixed reality toolset Project MARS and the Facial AR Remote Component, for previewing mocap in AR.
You can find a summary of the announcements on Unity’s blog.
System requirements and availability
The environment assets from Book of the Dead can be downloaded for free from the Unity Asset Store. They’re packaged as a Unity project file, so you’ll need to be running Unity 2018.2b9 or higher.
The project itself is designed to run on Windows (using DirectX 11/12 or Vulkan), macOS 10.13 (using Metal), PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox One S.
Download the free environment art assets from the Book of the Dead demo from the Unity Asset Store (2.4GB download)
Read Unity’s blog post about its photogrammety workflow for creating the assets