Eye candy: Unity’s Pixar-esque new Windup demo

Unity Technologies technical art supervisor – and former Naughty Dog senior shading artist – Yibing Jiang has released a cool new real-time rendering demo based on a scene from upcoming animated short Windup.

The one-minute clip shows a fairly simple set-up: it’s essentially a camera flythrough of a static scene with a young girl sitting in a concrete pipe beneath a tree.

However, it has an attractively Pixar-esque visual style and, once you get close to the lead character, some nice details, particularly on the girl’s hair, clothing and eyes.

Shows off the new advanced materials options due in Unity 2018.1
What’s cooler is when Jiang cuts to the same scene inside the Unity editor, to show adjustments made to the lighting and materials in real time, including adjusting the thread pattern and surface fluff on the sweater.

The demo shows off functionality due to be added to the game engine in the upcoming Unity 2018.1, made possible by the new Shader Graph and High Definition Render Pipeline.

If you check out Unity’s GDC 2018 keynote via the link, you can hear a more detailed explanation of the new materials options available from Unity Technologies director of graphics Natalya Tatarchuk.

Learn more about the real-time materials features shown in Windup from Unity’s GDC 2018 keynote
(The relevant section starts around 00:56:30)