Unity的演示团队– Unity最出色的视觉效果背后的创造者
With over 3.5-million views, Book of the Dead is hugely popular and many want to know how it was accomplished. Unity evangelist Matt Schell went to Stockholm to meet the Unity Demo team and learn what drives them. This is the kick-off post of a new series covering the demo’s art, characters, lighting, storytelling and much more.
《死亡之书》拥有超过350万的观看次数，非常受欢迎，许多人都想知道它是如何实现的。 Unity传播者Matt Schell前往斯德哥尔摩与Unity Demo团队会面，并了解推动他们发展的因素。 这是涵盖该演示的艺术，角色，灯光，故事讲述等更多内容的新系列的开篇文章。
It’s late winter when I land in Stockholm and the landscape is still blanketed with snow. I’m here to talk to my Unity colleagues about how they accomplished Book of the Dead. As a Unity evangelist, I communicate with our community a lot. Often that’s about helping folks understand the engine technology, what’s coming out, and how to use it. When the teaser for Book of the Dead landed and all sorts of questions about it started pouring in, I decided to visit the Demo team to see what I could learn and share with our community.
是冬末，我降落在斯德哥尔摩，风景仍然被白雪覆盖。 我在这里与我的Unity同事谈论他们如何完成“死者之书” 。 作为Unity的传播者，我与社区进行了很多交流。 通常，这是关于帮助人们了解发动机技术，最新技术以及如何使用它。 当《 死者之书》的预告片登陆时，有关它的各种问题开始涌现，我决定去参观演示团队，看看我能学到什么并与我们的社区分享。
In preparation for my trip, I watched the real-time teaser trailer for the project repeatedly. It’s mysterious and hints obliquely at a larger world. The imagery is haunting and technically impressive. The fact that the demo looks so good has prompted many to wonder if it was only made possible with some highly customized version of Unity, a huge budget or a massive team. I’m curious to get the inside scoop and answer a lot of those questions.
在准备旅行时，我反复观看了该项目的实时预告片。 它是神秘的，并在更大的世界上倾斜地暗示。 图像令人困扰，技术上令人印象深刻。 该演示看起来如此出色的事实促使许多人想知道，是否只有通过高度定制化的Unity版本，庞大的预算或庞大的团队才能使它成为可能。 我很想知道内部消息并回答很多这样的问题。
It’s a team that gets a lot of recognition externally — their work has won awards, including the highly prestigious Webby Award for Adam last year — but they are a distributed team which seldom gathers in the same place, so I pick the one week when they’re all in Stockholm so I can get to spend some time with all of them and see how they work together.
这是一支在外部获得广泛认可的团队-他们的工作获得了奖项，包括去年享有盛誉的亚当·韦比奖(Webby Award)-但他们是一支分散的团队，很少聚集在同一地方，所以我选择一个星期我都在斯德哥尔摩，所以我可以花一些时间与他们在一起，看看他们如何一起工作。
与团队见面 (Meeting the team)
Unity’s Demo team. From top left: Zdravko Pavlov, Georgi Simeonov, Dominykas Kiauleikis, Julien Heijmans, Krasimir Nechevski, Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen, Malte Hildingsson, Plamen ‘Paco’ Tamnev, Robert Cupisz, Silvia Rasheva, Torbjorn Laedre, Veselin Efremov.
Unity的演示团队。 从左上方起：Zdravko Pavlov，Georgi Simeonov，Dominykas Kiauleikis，Julien Heijmans，Krasimir Nechevski，Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen，Malte Hildingsson，Plamen'Paco'Tamnev，Robert Cupisz，Silvia Rasheva，Torbjorn Eff，Veselin Eedre。
When I arrive, I’m introduced immediately to Veselin Efremov, or “Vess,” as everyone calls him. Vess is the creative leader of the Demo team, defining both the visual and narrative vision for their projects. On Book of the Dead, he’s credited with writing, directing and art direction. When we meet, he’s heading into a morning standup meeting with Robert Cupisz, Torbjorn Laedre and Julien Heijmans. They’re doing an environment art review as they prepare to demo at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and are working to get it running on a PS4 Pro.
当我到达时，我立即被大家所认识的Veselin Efremov或“ Vess”介绍。 Vess是演示团队的创意负责人，为他们的项目定义了视觉和叙事视觉。 在 《死者之书》中， 他以写作，导演和艺术指导而著称。 当我们见面时，他将与Robert Cupisz，Torbjorn Laedre和Julien Heijmans参加上午站立会议。 他们准备在旧金山的游戏开发者大会(GDC)上进行演示时，正在对环境艺术进行审查，并正在努力使其在PS4 Pro上运行。
As Julien navigates the environment, Vess looks at the rocks and asks Torbjorn, the technical lead of the project, who’s attending via teleconference, “We need some more rocks. Maybe one or two more 4K textures?” Torbjorn, who is currently optimizing the project, replies, “That’s fine. What are you going to give me in return?”
当朱利安(Julien)在环境中航行时，维斯(Vess)看着岩石，并询问该项目的技术负责人托比约恩(Torbjorn)，他通过电话会议参加了会议，“我们需要更多的岩石。 也许还有一两个两个4K纹理？” 目前正在优化该项目的Torbjorn回答说：“很好。 您要给我什么回报？”
Friendly haggling ensues over texture memory and whether or not more rock textures can in fact be afforded while maintaining performance. We then spend 10 minutes discussing whether the skybox is oriented correctly, and experimenting with it. Observing their process, I am reminded again what an incredible amount of painstaking, detailed work goes into creating a real-time 3D project like Book of the Dead.
随之而来的是讨价还价的讨价还价，以及在保持性能的同时是否可以提供更多的岩石质地。 然后，我们花10分钟讨论天空盒的方向是否正确，并进行实验。 在观察他们的过程时，我再次想起了创建像 《死亡之书》 这样的实时3D项目需要花费大量的艰苦而详尽的工作 。
内部工作室
(An internal studio)
After the meeting, I sit down with Vess and Silvia Rasheva, who is the team’s producer, to learn more about how they work within Unity.
会议结束后，我与Vess和团队的制作人Silvia Rasheva坐下来，以了解有关他们如何在Unity中工作的更多信息。
Vess explains: “There are 12 of us, plus some contractors from time to time. The budgets are more or less the salaries for the team. We basically behave like an internal studio. We get access to information and we communicate a lot with R&D, requesting and contributing bug fixes, but we don’t use the whole Unity machine to do stuff for us.”
维斯解释说：“我们中有12个人，不时有一些承包商。 预算或多或少是团队的薪水。 我们基本上表现得像一个内部工作室。 我们获得了信息，并且与研发部门进行了很多交流，请求并提供了错误修复程序，但是我们并没有使用整个Unity机器为我们做事。”
“The main difference between us and an external studio is that we are trying to use upcoming technology very early in development, which can be difficult because it’s not finished. So we provide a lot of feedback to the various Unity R&D teams as we go.”
“我们与外部工作室之间的主要区别在于，我们试图在开发的早期就使用即将到来的技术，这可能很困难，因为尚未完成。 因此，我们随时随地向各个Unity研发团队提供反馈。”
Silvia adds: “Basing entire productions on features in pre-alpha state, and sticking with them through constant updates until they mature enough to ship, is very taxing on our production process. Sometimes we need to work for months with R&D to overcome certain technical hurdles. This is why half of our team consists of programmers – it’s not such a typical composition of a creative team, but it’s necessary in our context. While our art department is more traditional in how it’s organized – with six artists creating the concept art, character art, the assets and scenes, animations and VFX in the demo – more than half the programmers’ schedule is spent collaborating with R&D.”
西尔维亚(Silvia)补充说：“将整个作品基于前Alpha状态制作，并通过不断的更新来坚持下去，直到它们成熟到可以发布为止，这对我们的制作过程非常重要。 有时，我们需要与R＆D一起工作数月，以克服某些技术障碍。 这就是为什么我们的团队中有一半由程序员组成的原因-这不是创意团队的典型组成，但在我们的情况下是必需的。 尽管我们的艺术部门在组织方式上更为传统-六位艺术家在演示中创建了概念艺术，角色艺术，资产和场景，动画和VFX，但超过一半的程序员的工作时间与研发合作。”
Vess jumps in: “This is one of the downsides of being an internal production team at an engine company – when you make a game, people will put pressure on the Engine team. They’ll say ‘This is not working, fix it now!’ But when you want to be versatile, like Unity, you can’t focus only on solving the problems of one game or studio. We represent the perspective of ‘This is what we’re trying to do, which reflects AAA ambition – games that will want to use complex shaders, a lot of vertices, high-resolution textures, etc.’ – and so R&D needs to find a way to satisfy our request while balancing it against the complexity of simultaneously satisfying the needs of all the different types of projects being created with Unity. But when we raise a flag about a clear-cut issue – ‘Do you know when you do this, the shadows break?’ for example – then R&D will prioritize it, because if it breaks for us, it will break for everyone.”
Vess介入：“这是成为引擎公司内部生产团队的缺点之一–当您制作游戏时，人们会向引擎团队施加压力。 他们会说“这不起作用，请立即解决！” 但是，当您想要像Unity一样用途广泛时，您不能只专注于解决一个游戏或工作室的问题。 我们代表的观点是“这是我们正在尝试做的事情，它反映了AAA的雄心–将要使用复杂的着色器，大量顶点，高分辨率纹理等的游戏。” –因此，R＆D需要找到一种方法来满足我们的要求，同时兼顾其复杂性和同时满足Unity创建的所有不同类型项目需求的复杂性。 但是，当我们举起明显问题的旗帜时，“您知道这样做的时候，阴影就破了吗？” 例如，然后研发将优先考虑它，因为如果它对我们不利，那么它将对所有人不利。”
推动Unity前进 (Pushing Unity forward)
Robert Cupisz explains the occlusion probes
Robert Cupisz解释了咬合探针
“That’s when we receive a lot of collaboration and involvement from the engineering teams, so our production can continue,” Silvia adds. “And they get a solid context to validate the new tech and improve it as much as possible from the early stages. We use the features in a complex, gamelike environment, and we set our quality standards uncompromisingly high, so our productions expose issues that otherwise could go unnoticed for a long time. And of course, there’s always the tech that we sorely need but no one has gotten around to doing yet, so we make our own solution in the project, just as a game studio would. We then hand over our prototype to R&D to help kick off the design of an integrated in-engine solution.”
Silvia补充说：“那是我们在工程团队中获得大量合作和参与的时候，因此我们的生产可以继续进行。” “而且他们从坚实的基础上验证了新技术并从早期开始就尽可能地对其进行了改进。 我们在复杂的，类似游戏的环境中使用这些功能，并且我们将质量标准设定为毫不妥协的高标准，因此我们的作品暴露出了很长一段时间都不会引起注意的问题。 当然，总有我们迫切需要的技术，但是还没有人去做，所以我们像游戏工作室一样在项目中制定自己的解决方案。 然后，我们将原型移交给研发部门，以帮助启动集成发动机内解决方案的设计。”
An example of this collaborative development is the occlusion probes, which Robert Cupisz, the senior graphics programmer on Book of the Dead, created for the demo. In simple terms, occlusion probes work to improve the lighting of the scene by allowing objects to test how much light reaches them from the sky, which allows for more natural-looking, deeper shadows when objects occlude one another. This required deeper access to the light-baking API. At Robert’s request, the Lighting team in R&D exposed this access to C# scripts, and this API was made available with 2018.1 to everyone to use in their own development.
这种合作开发的一个示例是遮挡探针， 《死者之书》 的高级图形程序员Robert Cupisz 为该演示创建了该 探针 。 简而言之，遮挡探针通过允许对象测试从天空射入的光量来改善场景的照明效果，当对象相互遮挡时，遮挡探针可以提供更自然，更深的阴影。 这需要更深入地访问光烘焙API。 应Robert的要求，研发部门的Lighting团队公开了对C＃脚本的访问权限，并且该API自2018.1开始提供给所有人，供其自己的开发使用。
The team maintains a balance between using a non-modified version of Unity (so their achievements are within reach of external studios) and pushing tech boundaries so the engine can satisfy the needs of ever-more ambitious productions. As such, the team carefully manages the project-specific tech they develop on top of Unity, and are pushing hard to ensure that it will be available for everyone by the time 2018.2 is released.
团队在使用未经修改的Unity版本(因此他们的成就可以在外部工作室范围内)与突破技术界限之间保持平衡，从而使引擎可以满足越来越雄心勃勃的作品的需求。 因此，团队认真管理他们在Unity上开发的项目特定技术，并努力确保在2018.2发布之前将其提供给所有人。
Speaking of custom tech, I asked the team how they approached terrain in Book of the Dead, since Unity’s terrain capabilities have gone for a while without an update, and every second comment I’ve seen online seems to be about what custom stuff they did in order to pull it off.
说到自定义技术，我问了团队他们如何接近 《亡灵之书》中 的地形，因为Unity的地形功能已经有一段时间没有更新了，而我在网上看到的每一秒钟评论似乎都与他们做了什么自定义任务有关为了把它拉下来。
I’m surprised to learn that Book of the Dead actually uses the existing Unity terrain without modification, with the addition of one or two custom scattering and placement tools they wrote in C#, as Vess explains: “It was very tempting to do our custom terrain, but we had to consider that in Book of the Dead we deal entirely with a natural environment, so people would pay special attention to terrain, and if we had implemented our own solution here, it would have been misleading. So we made it a hard requirement for ourselves to make this demo with Unity’s default terrain. Torbjorn built some tools that made it easier to work with it, like a scattering tool, and a tool that allows us to paint with groups of vegetation, such as painting five different ferns. I also placed a lot of stuff by hand using the Unity tools. While the terrain system is old, it’s still a complete system and it works. Building small things on top of it can completely change its face. It’s mostly just authoring convenience and shading.”
令我感到惊讶的是， 《死者之书》 实际上使用了现有的Unity地形而无需修改，并添加了他们在C＃中编写的一个或两个自定义的散射和放置工具，正如Vess解释的那样：“做我们的自定义非常诱人地形，但我们必须考虑到 《死者之书》中 我们完全处理自然环境，因此人们会特别注意地形，如果我们在此处实施了自己的解决方案，那将会产生误导。 因此，我们非常需要使用Unity的默认地形进行此演示。 Torbjorn建立了一些使它更易于使用的工具，例如散射工具，以及使我们能够用植物群进行绘画的工具，例如绘画五个不同的蕨类植物。 我还使用Unity工具手动放置了很多东西。 尽管地形系统很旧，但它仍然是一个完整的系统，并且可以正常工作。 在其顶部构建小物件可以完全改变其面貌。 这主要是为了创作方便和阴影。”
I also ask about the grass, since it’s one of my favorite parts of the demo. “Unity’s grass doesn’t support lighting – they’re billboards and you can’t have shaders or a normal map, and we have no control over the material. So we placed the grass as trees. Tiny trees.”
我也询问草皮，因为它是演示中我最喜欢的部分之一。 “ Unity的草不支持照明-它们是广告牌，您不能使用着色器或法线贴图，我们无法控制材质。 所以我们把草当成树。 小树。”
展示Unity的可能 (Showing what’s possible with Unity)
During my two days in Stockholm, a common thread runs through all of my conversations with the team: A desire to show what’s possible in Unity. “That is our goal. We want to show what’s possible. Our target is not a single individual, but for a small team, 10-15 people, maybe with one graphics programmer, it’s totally doable to make something with the visual quality of Book of the Dead,” Vess explains.
在斯德哥尔摩的两天里，我与团队的所有对话都贯穿着一个共同的话题：渴望展示Unity中的可能。 “这是我们的目标。 我们想展示什么是可能的。 我们的目标不是一个人，而是一个10-15人的小团队，也许只有一个图形程序员，就完全可以用《死者之书》的视觉效果制作东西了，” Vess解释说。
Veselin receiving the Webby Award for “Book of the Dead” in 2018
Veselin于2018年获得韦比奖“ 死者之书 ”奖
“Unity is a very powerful tool in the hands of an advanced user. It’s extendable, it’s flexible and things are getting better all the time. Part of our role, and how I decide on what demo we should do next, is looking around and asking: ‘What is nobody doing in Unity?’ Then we try to do that. At the time it might seem impossible or at least very difficult. So while we work on the demos and collaborate with R&D, we help make it possible. Unity evolves incredibly fast and our team tries to run a step or two ahead of it. By the time our demo is done, they have caught up and, in the end, the users get a better product. That’s really what it’s all about.”
“ Unity在高级用户手中是一种非常强大的工具。 它具有可扩展性，灵活性，并且一直在不断改善。 我们角色的一部分，以及我如何决定下一步应该做的演示，环顾四周并问：'在Unity中没人在做什么？' 然后，我们尝试这样做。 在当时，这似乎是不可能的，或者至少是非常困难的。 因此，当我们进行演示并与R＆D合作时，我们将使之成为可能。 Unity的发展非常快，我们的团队力争领先一步。 到我们的演示完成时，他们赶上了，最终，用户获得了更好的产品。 这就是所有内容。”
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Stay tuned for our next posts in the series. Next week Georgi Simeonov covers Concept Art, and the week after Plamen Tamnev will share the Character Art creation process, with lots more to come.
请继续关注本系列的下一篇文章。 下周，Georgi Simeonov将介绍概念艺术，而Plamen Tamnev将在下个星期分享角色艺术的创作过程，还有更多内容。
Meet us at Unite Berlin on June 19 to walk through the Book of the Dead environment on a console yourself, and attend Julien Heijmans’s presentation about Environment art in the demo. See the full schedule here.
6月19日在柏林团结公园与我们会面，亲自在控制台上浏览《死亡之书》环境，并在演示中参加朱利安·海曼斯(Julien Heijmans)关于环境艺术的演讲。 请在此处查看完整时间表 。
More information on Book of the Dead