The uncanny valley has been cleared. Lee Perry-Smith along with HDRLabs, Blotchi and Marmoset Co., have collaborated with Alexander Tomchuk, Yura and Unity Technologies to finally make the leap over the uncanny valley and bring near 1 to 1 3D photo-scanning to life in the Unity 3D engine.
DSO Gaming spotted the new video from Lee Perry-Smith, who showcased the video with mono and stereoscopic options for those of you with an Oculus VR Rift.
There is, of course, some blatant nudity present given that the models were scanned in from real people in an au natural state, in which the 3D laser scanner captures the individual from head to toe, and every single millimeter of skin, hair and fiber in between. The detail is quite impeccable if I must say so myself.
This also proves that Unity Technologies is the only engine that seems to be moving forward at an absolutely rapid rate. A lot of this is due to the fact that unlike the Unreal Engine or the CryEngine, Unity's technology is based a lot around community support and evolution, where-as the other two commercial engines are centered squarely around the needs of AAA blockbuster commercial titles and the publishers who make them (with the obvious exception for UDK and CryEngine SDK projects).
Unity is also capable of the highly sought after but practically unusable Global Illumination casting, where the GPU calculates light sources for every single object based on a single light streaming light source. While it seems simple, this feature will not be available in any PS4 or Xbox One game. However, Unity does support voxel cone tracing, which is a replicate of the coveted Global Illumination process.
You can check out the video of the voxel cone tracing below, which offers a nice alternative to the photorealistic path-tracing technology featured in the Brigade Engine. As for those high-poly models... well, at least now you know that you can combine high quality 3D scanned humans with something like iPi Soft and make an AAA quality looking game without an AAA quality budget. If you plan on using yourself as the subject of laser scanning, I suggest you get to work on your six-pack.
