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Unity Originals

Time Ghost

Showcasing the power of Unity

Unity Originals are in-house productions created by Unity’s Demo Team to push our engine to its limits. These projects highlight major milestones in Unity’s evolution.

Productions

Explore our portfolio of Unity Originals: flagship projects created by Unity’s Demo Team.

Time Ghost

Time Ghost

2024 — Time Ghost pushes Unity 6 to new heights, achieving stunning results and demonstrating the power of our strongest-ever engine release.

Enemies

Enemies

2022 — This groundbreaking cinematic teaser features major advances in photorealistic eyes, hair, skin, and more – all rendered in real-time and running in 4K resolution.

The Heretic

The Heretic

2019 — The Heretic is a real-time cinematic employing a broad range of Unity’s graphics features, including every aspect of the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).

Book of the Dead

Book of the Dead

2018 — This interactive short film is rendered in real-time and showcases Unity’s proficiency at powering high-end visuals for game productions.

Adam

Adam

2016 — Adam is an award-winning short film illustrating the real-time graphical quality achievable with beta versions of Unity 5.4.

The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith

2015 — The Blacksmith is a real-time-rendered short film developed to test the capabilities of Unity 5 and showcase the engine’s advanced graphics features.

Packages

Check out a selection of releases published over the years and dive into the details of how our projects come together.

Time Ghost: Environment

This Unity 6 HDRP sample package contains one of the environments created for Time Ghost. Get a closer look at how our team utilized DOTS ECS and additional tooling to carefully manage entity instantiation and resource allocation.

Time Ghost

Time Ghost: Character

This Unity 6 HDRP sample package features the character created for Time Ghost. It showcases the implementation of the Inference Engine, Unity's runtime AI, and highlights its use in deploying ML models for dynamic character behavior at runtime.

Time Ghost

Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6 | URP

Discover Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6, a stylized game environment that showcases the advanced rendering performance, cutting-edge lighting capabilities, and strong mobile optimization of the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

Fantasy Kingdom

Enemies | HDRP

Explore and experiment with the complete Enemies project package, featuring the latest advancements in our digital-human journey.

Enemies still shot

Strand-Based Hair | Experimental Package

Try our ​​integrated solution for authoring, importing, simulating, and rendering strand-based hair in Unity.

Strands on human in editor

The Heretic: Digital Human | HDRP

Try out this package featuring The Heretic’s 3D character, Gawain, and use or modify the tools in your own productions.

HDRP

Book of the Dead: Environment | HDRP

Immerse yourself in an extended version of the environment featured in the Book of the Dead trailer.

Book of the dead still shot

Adam Character Pack: Adam, Guard, Lu | 3D Characters

Download re-rigged versions of the characters Adam, Guard, and Lu from our Adam demo.

HDRP

Adam | Volumetric Lighting

Explore the lighting effects implemented for the Adam demo, including volumetric fog, area lights, and tube lights.

Adam still shot

Viking Village | URP

Download this detailed 3D environment created in Unity 5 and use it as a testing ground to explore using the Universal Render Pipeline in Unity 2020.2 and above.

Viking village still shot

Resources

Explore tutorials, videos, and behind-the-scenes content covering learnings from our production processes and tips to help you achieve similar results.

Making of Time Ghost: Cloth deformation with Unity Inference Engine

Learn how the main character of Time Ghost was created by leveraging Unity Inference Engine, Unity’s runtime AI, to deploy ML models at runtime, and discover how you can apply AI models in your own projects.

Making of Time Ghost: Using DOTS ECS for Complex Environments

Making of Time Ghost: Using DOTS ECS for Complex Environments

Take a walk through the process of creating the environments for Time Ghost using Unity 6. In this video, we break down the workflows and tools we used.

Making of Time Ghost: Using DOTS ECS for Complex Environments

Unite 2024 Barcelona Keynote

Watch the recording of the project launch at the Unite 2024 Barcelona keynote and learn how Time Ghost was created, pushing the limits of our latest technology.

Unite 2024

Time Ghost – How Unity 6 made it possible | Unite 2024

Explore the creation of Time Ghost. In this live session recorded during Unite 2024 in Barcelona, we break down the project and its pipelines into clear, understandable components, highlighting the Unity Engine’s versatile problem-solving capabilities and extendibility.

Time Ghost

Get started with Hair Simulation

Dive into the advanced hair simulation features the Unity Originals team developed for the Enemies demo.

Hair simulation still shot

Inside Unity’s new flagship demo, Enemies | GDC 2022

Take a deep dive into the tech behind Enemies and learn how the Unity Originals team brought its groundbreaking photorealistic character to life.

Enemies demo still shot

Real-time VFX workflows in The Heretic | Unite 2019

Learn about the production process behind key visual effects in The Heretic and how the team employed Unity’s VFX Graph.

The heretic still shot

Making of The Heretic: Digital human character Gawain

Read about the process of creating The Heretic’s protagonist, from concept art to transforming 4D scans of a human actor into a realistic digital performance.

Digital human character Gawain

HDRP lighting features in The Heretic

See how the cinematic world of The Heretic was lit entirely using Unity’s expanded real-time lighting capabilities.

The heretic lighting still shot

The technology behind The Heretic

Explore the biggest challenges encountered during the production of The Heretic, plus key VFX techniques and the process of animating and rendering a digital human.

Screenshot of Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen speaking about the Making of The Heretic

Book of the Dead: Photogrammetry assets, trees, VFX

Take an in-depth look at how the Unity Originals team used photogrammetry techniques to create Book of the Dead’s lifelike trees and a wealth of related visual effects.

Book of the dead still shot

Book of the Dead: Quixel, wind, scene building, and more

Explore the Unity Originals partnership with Quixel and learn how Book of the Dead’s wind system, environmental design, and content optimization processes came together.

Scene building still shot

Book of the Dead: Character and hero assets

Discover the process of turning 2D concepts into Book of the Dead’s richly detailed 3D characters, props, and other assets.

book of the dead still shot

The Making of Adam: Unite 2016

Dive into the production processes for the Adam demo’s graphics, animation, and visual effects.

Presenter talking live

Making a scene that looks like the Adam demo: Unite 2016

Take a step-by-step look at how to set up a project, light a scene, configure shadows, and use cinematic post effects to emulate the Adam demo.

Still from Adam

Working with physically based shading: A practical approach

Try out the downloadable Viking Village package and let this blog post guide you through assembling and illuminating a scene.

Image showing downloadable Viking Village package

Making of The Butterfly Effect

Take a behind-the-scenes look at how Unity collaborated with Passion Pictures and Nvidia to create the short real-time rendered film The Butterfly Effect.

Butterfly effect
team photo

Our team

Focusing primarily on graphics, Unity’s Demo Team is dedicated to exploring and extending what’s possible with Unity, pushing the limits of real-time technology, developing new workflows, and experimenting with innovative approaches. The team creates a portfolio of flagship productions called Unity Originals, as well as various smaller experimental and feature-oriented demos.

The team consists of experienced game professionals led by Creative Director Veselin Efremov, who writes and directs the projects and is responsible for their final look.

Adrian Lazar — Staff Technical Artist

Aleksander Karshikoff — Senior Manager, Content Production

Angela Diaz — Senior Content Producer

Christian Kardach — Staff Technical Animator

Hugo García Torres — Senior Animator

Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen — Staff Software Engineer

Mikel Barron Bilbao — Staff Technical Artist

Mikko Alaluusua — Staff Software Engineer

Petter Flood — 3D Artist

Plamen “Paco” Tamnev — Staff 3D Artist

Rob Cupisz — Staff Software Engineer

Silvia Rasheva — Director, Content Production

Torbjörn Laedre — Principal Software Engineer

Veselin Efremov — Principal Creative Director

Xuan Prada — Senior Manager, Artistry

Other demos

Delve into a selection of other demos and sample projects that Unity’s Demo Team has worked on.

All productions

Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6

2023-2024 — Discover Fantasy Kingdom in Unity 6, a stylized game environment that showcases the advanced rendering performance, cutting-edge lighting capabilities, and strong mobile optimization of the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

Fantasy Kingdom

Neon

2017 — The Neon environment demo uses only Asset Store models and was created with Unity 2017.1, the Post-Processing Stack v1, and Volumetric Lighting packages.

Neon

The Bedroom

2015 — This ArchViz sample leveraged Realtime Global Illumination and provided an early glimpse into screen-space ray traced reflections in Unity.

Bedroom

Viking Village

2014 — This game-ready environment was a testing ground for the lighting workflows in Unity 5, created using Unity’s PBS and Megascans library of scanned textures by Quixel.

Viking Village