Unity game engine gets new Enemies demo, features incredibly lifelike character

The race for higher and higher resolution is run by game engines, and Unity is one of the most well-known out there. An impressive new tech demo was shown at GDC, and it contains one of the most lifelike digital humans yet.

The demo, titled Enemies, features actress Louise Ryme (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) as a mysterious chess player with uncanny knowledge and pyrokinesis. While Ryme provides the voice and likeness for the character, the protagonist is still a “digital human,” as Unity calls them in the description. The digital recreation of Ryme is simply stunning — the demo page specifically calls out an “all-new solution” that makes the hair flow so realistically.

This is the second fully digital human Unity demos have featured, the first being the protagonist in The Heretic demo from 2020. Improvements for Enemies include “a better 4D pipeline, [a new] skin attachment system, more realistic eyes, a new skin shader, [and] tension tech for blood flow simulation and wrinkle maps.” That might mean more to a developer than the average gamer, but the result is still a stunning demo of Unity technology. While Ryme’s character is the focus, the setting around the protagonist also shows off the engine’s High Definition Render Pipeline and ray-tracing capabilities in a Dishonored-like clockwork room.

Prior to this demo, Unity was in the news in January of this year. It acquired Ziva Dynamics, whose character faces and models were used for Marvel’s Spider-Man on PlayStation 5 and Hellblade: Senua’s Saga on Xbox Series X/S.