Official LookDev Studio

Hi all, just had a quick run through of the LookDev studio and thought it was a really great start!

Some first thoughts, please forgive me if I'm missing some of the concepts here or doing something wrong -

• There doesnt appear to be a link between say a scene prefab and the model loaded in the LookDev scene?
• How can I acess models/prefabs already loaded into a project? What's the workflow for that?
• I found myself wanting sliders (fine control) for Orbit camera/Turntable
• Wasn't fully clear on the usage for Game mode vs Scene in this case, other than less controls.
• When loading a second character the one in the scene dissapears, I guess I asumed it would just load another.
• When saveing and realoading the chracter is gone? Maybe I'm not using it as its intended?
• PLZ let me get animation onto the character in the futue =D

Thanks for now! Sorry again if some of this is just me being silly and missing something.

 

This looks neat, hope it comes to URP. I already kind of have a setup for this myself XD

 

Fully agree

Anything and everything Unity does, should be cross platform compatible, and auto adapt between platforms.

Not only that, it should work on CURRENT LTS as well as TECH versions, but also future versions.

Not be another Book of the Dead, that's now living only in the graveyard. That doesnt help anybody, except maybe Enterprise customers that has the time, money and manpower to dissect and code something like that themselves. For the rest of us, make things simpler, not harder please.

 

Yeah the logic should be more similar to the logic on the asset store. At minimum a focus on current LTS versions and where it makes sense a support on both main pipelines.

The most satisfying assets have no issue with this logic.

 

Disappointing to see important features (including DLSS and FSR) being silo'd between URP and HDRP :-/

 

This is definitely something that's been lacking in Unity, but its something I would have hoped could be rolled into Unity itself without the need for a separate app.

Adding environment maps and lights is something that Unity is obviously capable of and would be good to have something like this seamlessly integrated into Unity rather than yet another add on. If this is intended to be competitor for Substance Stager id understand it being separate - but from what I can see its not.

 

Just so you know, LookDev is also a Window in Unity.



What we do now is that we have our project and a copy of it with no script for outsourcers to test their assets in. LookDev Studio looks promising for that purpose as it's much easier to setup for people not familiar with the SRPs and the package manager.

 

Sorry guys, but I will be pretty straight in my comment and if you are quite emotionally vulnerable, then you better not read.

"Artists – no matter their expertise – need a place to quickly import, iterate on, and refine their art."
I know in person a lot of artists and animators and nobody and never complained they have a problems with Unity UI. I don't know why you have decided that artists needs your dedicated simplified UI. Are you thinking they are too creative for learn base Unity UI spending max 1-2 hours for that? Moreover almost all of them have pretty good knowledge of Unity UI aswell as UE4 UI which is more complicated that Unity's one.

But what they really wants (you just need to talk them directly instead of inventing the next useless feauture which was born in the greatest minds of product managers) are useful filters in the Project and Hierarchy windows and option "Show only related with selected" for models, prefabs, materials, textures and animations. For example, if you have selected specific prefab in your scene, you must have possibility quickly set filter by that option for showing the meshes, materials, textures and animations (in Project windows) that included in selected prefab without using of context menu Open in context and clicking on specific parts to show its in Project window.

A single feature that is really useful (for me personally) is a quick creating of material of specific type, but you can add this option into Create menu. Instead of Create - Material you can introduce Create - Material - <Material Type> extended menu.

 

Lets say that you run an outsourcing firm and that you have to deal with clients running Unity with built in, Unity with URP, Unity with HDRP, Unreal, Godot and custom engines, then I believe you would welcome that there's a streamlined way of testing different lighting setups and model imports.

You could have Lookdev Studio installed and use it for many projects. It is a much simpler approach to authoring 3D art then setting up artists to version control and project-specific tools and etc.

 

There are no simple approach at all considering different versions of SRPs (HDRP/URP) for Unity 2018.4, 2019.4, 2020.3, 2021.1, 2021.2b. LookDev Studio can't resolve any problems related to SRP versions zoo. And using of Plastic SCM instead of Git made version control as easy as possible even for artists.

And finally it isn't resolving the main problem of workflow with any assets which I pointed - there are no useful filters. When materials and textures count will grow you need to scroll window a few dozen of seconds with your max attention before you find required texture or material. And there are no different if you using LookDev Studio or standard Unity UI.

 

So, as an artist and gamedev, this does not really help my workflow at all. I'm not quite understanding where Unity is getting this design workflow feedback. Same thing with ArtEngine, most people who design their own assets are using Blender on the low end, highend you're using zbrush or cinema4d. I see this is sort of helpful in realigning some textures.

Sorry, I guess you caught me on a bad day, but you sent me the email, so you're going to hear it.

• Build this into polybrush (if you ever get that to work correctly as designed in HDRP). You know what artists would like to do inside of Unity... Paint 4K materials from Artstation on any model inside of Unity. We want to paint rust, dust, moss, dirt, mud, etc on models. Don't shill me ArtEngine, no indiedev is using it.
• Make the Digital Human package actually useable other than the one-off demo that only works in a few select versions of Unity. An even bigger artist tip, how about make it work with character design tools that artists are actually using from the popular character software vendors already out there. The HDRP eye shader is terrible, no one uses it. The HDRP Hair shader? Oh yeah, you don't have an HDRP Hair or HDRP Skin shader... we have to use other shaders by 3rd parties and when you move up in HDRP versions, every shader needs to be updated or replaced. How about that, why don't you start with making HDRP forward compatible like you "promised" you would at Unite 2019.
• There's no HDRP detail shader for terrain that artists want to use. Even worse, there's no tessellated terrain shader for HDRP yet. Psst is 2021... you promised one by 2019 back in 2017. So if we want to paint grass, flowers, etc, we can't because... there's no HDRP detail shader for terrains.
• Guess what no 3d software package easily generates on the fly that Unity HDRP materials require... the integrated mask map. Who's brilliant idea for a PBR material standard at unity decided to make a map mask texture that only gets generated by the HDRP material wizard? You know what would actually be useful that artists need, a "generate mask map" button like you have for "fix normal".
• You know what really irks us the most... the only way to really make use of HDRP from a performant standpoint is to use low poly models with high texture resolutions (4k or better) otherwise what's the point of moving to HDRP. Guess what Unity handles very poorly, multiple material storage and memory handling and it can't handle high poly models as well.
  
  Here's a really big tip, instead of hiring a 20 person team to make a one-off video demo (heretic, Adam, etc) why don't you work with small team indiegame developers to actually see the tools and what our workflow actually is before going down these roads of making these tools no one is asking for.
  
  -Make HDRP performant
  -Make Realtime Global Illumination in HDRP a reality (in an LTR)
  -Make a HDRP Skin & Hair shader that works past 1 version of unity
  -Create a way to use High Poly models like they did for UE5
  -Make HDRP terrains tessellated and with an HDRP detail shader
  -Create GPU indirect instancing with high-z occlusion
  
  -Stop creating one off tools no one needs.
  -Listen to your community of single & small indiegame devs.

 

I'm no artist, so I can't really comment on the usefulness of this stuff.
I'm a solo dev and I won't use this thing, ever, unless I am forced to.

I'm already keeping my assets nice and tidy otherwise I have zero chance to keep myself sane and be able to find the assets I need to operate on. Keeping them tidy and organized inside Unity is basically zero effort.
Say hello to the proper naming convention, to the tags and advanced search capabilities. I don't need a drop down menu, I'm fine with the t:Texture2D search.

I also don't like Unity's tendency lately to move everything into a separate, compact window which disrupts the workflow.
I literally HATE working in UI Builder because it is hard to interact with other parts of Unity while the window is open. Same with this one. Apparently, single monitor users are forgotten and quickly will be left behind.
Also, you're throwing away one of Unity's strong suit: the customizable user interface.

 

Sorry, but you described workflow for skinning of cube or plane or any other 3D primitives. Usually artists creating their FBX models in appropriate software like Maya, ZBrush or Blender with full material mapping, UVs and using internal materials which are were built into FBX as well as textures. All that you need is create the folder MyModelName in your Project window, drag FBX there and select "Use external materials (Legacy)" in the Materials tab of FBX import settings if you need to correct something. Then Materials and Texture folders will be created in MyModelName and there are no reason to find any other correct folder because their location is already correct. About marking textures as normal map. Unity always show tip with "Fix" button if the texture assigned as Normal map wasn't marked as Normal.

I found this feature and I told about I'd like see this feature in context menu of standard Unity UI as submenu of Create - Material - <Type> instead of swithching to LookDev window

I already posted that link in some Discord servers and I have seen only 2 reactions:
1) I need install Unity beta and use HDRP for that? Oh noes!
2) Not interested.
Exactly same as in the comments of guys above.

And I'm want recall you again what exactly the people want. Useful filters and context filter by selected item.
Let imagine I'm artist and want optimize my textures and want to change crunch compression quality to 100% instead of 50% only for normal maps and only in selected folder like there:


Please tell me how I can select all of the textures marked as normal map in specific folder? Despite the fact they have _n suffix if I type _n and run the search for type Textures then it will return me results starting from the root of Asset folders. But if I have filter where I could select "Textures" -"Normal" and checkbox "Search in currrent folder only" I could complete my task in 5 seconds. Instead I must use Ctrl + mouse click on every normal map and finally I will got rage if I misclicked and reset my selection after I already selected ~100 textures.

P.S. I have a strange feeling that Unity team live in different dimension than most of developers including coders and artists. You are making a new tool for nobody, your AssetStoreOriginals team still beleive that most of HDRP users uses Unity 2018 and can't upgrade their assets, demo team releasing absolutely useless VFX Character demo (and others) and seems like that the development of amazing Kinematica package has been stopped. I know Unity haven't a lot of money like Epic, but when you compare what sort of tools Unity and Epic provides for their users you want to cry, switch to UE4 and forget Unity as a bad dream. Sad but true.

 

Is there a reason why it was decided to make it as a separated tool instead of a part of the LookDev option aviable in Unity a few versions ago?
I would love to have something similar but in my own project with all the materials, shaders, textures, assets and prefabs that I already have. No drag and drop, no copy assets from one directory to another. Could also be able to maybe add some animations I already have or maybe apply a timeline and get a screenshot of that.

Not sure if its interesting enough as a separate tool, there are already many other PBR real time visualization tools for artists also in packages like substance that now a day is standard on any pipeline that uses HDRP.

If the idea is to integrate it later in Unity Editor, maybe I will give it a try.

 

Could I teach Unity developer how the search conditions really works? When you searching in the way like you posted in your screenshot you will get in results all of textures that consists "_n" in the whole project, but not in the current folder. Please try to search something in the real project like me

 

Wow Honestly I didn't met that advice in any tutorials that I have ever seen I'm sorry and thank for YOU teached me

P.S. Though the things become much harder if you get asset where normal maps aren't have specific "_n" (or any other) suffix.

 

good day sir

I currently use _N (capital letter) rather than lowercase for all my assets and texture tools
will this be ok ?

DE Environment texture suffix key:
_D = Albedo
_N = Normal
_S = Smoothness
_AO = Ambient Occlusion
_M = Metallic
_R = Roughness
_G = Gloss
_H = Height
_E = Emissive
_T = Translucency
_Mask DE = (R) Ambient Occlusion (G) Roughness /Smoothness (B) Metallic /Gloss (A) Not Used
_Mask TVE = (R) Metallic (G) Ambient Occlusion (B) Translucency/Detail Mask (A) Smoothness
_Mask Unity = (R) Metallic (G) Ambient Occlusion (B) Height (A) Roughness /Smoothness


it would be great in any texture tool we can set different custom import settings such as RGB or sRGB (Linear) based on the suffix

cheers

 

Fantastic to see growing access and support for a newer LookDev approach from 2021 onwards.

Being able to deploy custom templates with this would be great internally and external communications between different artists.

I understand a lot of focus here on asset publishing here too which is a nice addition.

But would we still be able to use this like the traditional LookDev with custom IBL (HDRI) Scriptable objects?
I noticed in Sam's video that there's the current default IBL presets but no custom options there in the drop down.

For us, we have clients that we often build their IBL environment packages based on the sources they provide us.
As this is an important step in LookDev, I understand if it's elsewhere, I just couldn't readily see it.

Would this also mean that the traditional LookDev under Windows will be phased out in favour of this 2021 version moving forward?

Many thanks keep it up.

 

Awesome tool!

There's a cool feature I love in Max, that maybe it can be added too to the HDRI Enviroment for Look Dev:
Its call Ground Plane and its amazing:

Here's how it looks:

 

Thank you for the great reply!

This is a great start moving forward. Thank you for the great input and link back to the feedback form.

 

If you could include concept artists under the demo you're aiming for, including sculpting terrain, quick fog, prefab brushes, paint curves for rivers etc, all that stuff to speed up concept art. I think you'll have something unique here, and a lot of ppl would pick that up for environment concept work.

 

hello sir
just following up
the idea you could explore more is lettings users have a import setting panel and set/save custom import behaviors based on the suffix key ...

this way the artist could have full control about sRGB color texture or not, plus any other filters applied per the suffix

cheers

 

correct we could define a suffix and set import default values based on that suffix
a import manager if you like to call it


example


this would let users define the suffix and what default values would be applied as a artist intended

a Manager window for this could be better as any suffix may have many import filters applied at once

 

@DanielTodorov
this looks like a flat plan
a shader with BiDirectional Parallax would do this even better

cheers

 

Hi,

On a semi-related note, but off topic, some of us are struggling with importing AAA looking character models into Unity HDRP. We're wondering if you can show or detail the workflow on how you imported the character above into Unity. What character design tool did you use, what the workflow pipeline was, etc. It doesn't look like the Digital Human package, but a model from another design tool. A bunch of us indiegame devs are struggling with fidelity of models in Unity from popular character design tools.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/why...-render-aaa-looking-character-models.1168103/

 

Bump

 

One of the key parts of LookDev is to identify problems and balance your characters, motion colours etcetc.
We finished our animation pipeline earlier this year and we're still making small tweaks here and there, specifically with regards to motion.

lighting is very much key part of making a character look good.
Much like a badly lit portrait in the real world it looks flat similar to everyday lighting.

for HDRP at least it's very very easy to emulate real-world lighting situations, including studio work.

Photography and cinematography are amazing places to study how colour, mood and lighting can convey a lot in your scenes and characters and bring out their best.

There is a lot of Uncharted 4 coverages on many of the production processes, and i can't find the exact video but one on lighting drake, goes into a lot of things you should be thinking about and more specifically, not every lighting situation is epic.

This is why photography and cinematic lighting techniques like 3 point lighting, split lighting, Rembrandt to name a few, are often used to showcase the very best of your models.

This is mostly still after or included with LookDev passes mind so you may already have a brilliant character, just focus on studying different lookdev and lighting situations to be able to continue iterating.


and as for a solo dev, it may be good practice to section out what sort of mindset you can utilise the most for the task at hand.

"I'm doing look dev today, should I be coder minded or design orientated?"
it may just help you to study the required content for that focus, as you'll be able to see where potential skill gaps are that you can spend a little more time refining.

Hope that helps or gives food for the thought.

 

Eh... not really no. Our models looks great in the character designer tools but imported into Unity (HDRP), they tend to look not so great. To be honest, we've been down the lighting, shadows, SSS, normals, micro normals, layered texturing, 4K textures, probes, 3 point lighting, shadows, contact shadows, etc. Skin looks harsh/faded, eyes look flat or dead / no tear line/missing gloss, hair looks flat or straw like. The thread I started has more details and examples of what I'm talking about.

Also, I'm not the only artist/dev that has struggled with this, the forums are filled with other developers that can't crack this. Also, let me state that this seems more or less to be something that's Unity HDRP specific, as putting models into Unreal is mostly not a problem.

We're (other unity developers from other projects) are hoping to getting someone's attention at Unity to show or explain with a tutorial the workflow pipeline for importing AAA-looking characters similar to what Unreal can do.

The issue is not:
- Lighting
- Shadows
- Normals
- SSS
- <4K textures
- Layers
- Light probes
- Raytracing

Can we make a good looking AAA style character in HDRP? Sure, yes we can. Can we make it look as good or close to either the Digital Human for Unity or MetaHuman for Unreal... no. It's not "just me", there's a lot of talented developers here in the forums that haven't been able to do it.

If there's magic workflow, great, share it with examples or a tutorial showing the same kind of fidelity or quality as Metahumans in Unreal. What I find though, is that people will just say, "you need better lighting" which is not the case.

 

I can't share our specific workflow from our HDRP screen cap above, but I will check out your other forum post and see if I can give some observational input.

Lighting a character, especially realistic humans doesn't have just one pass, and you're right that meta humans give all the back end, lightings textures, Riggs etc all from the get go, which is why it's so easy ( and similarly with character design tools).

But it's certainly good to vocalise workflow issues you may be having.

We've been collecting a lot of input from teams and indie Devs on their problems and we'd certainly like to help others in workflow departments too, so this may just be written into our series too.

Good luck going forward for sure.

 

This is why I've been asking Unity to do so. I've been able to achieve decent results, but it's not the same as using Unreal.

This post is probably the closest anything that anyone has ever shared in the forums to a pipeline workflow. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-srp-hd-sss.523877/#post-3440944

I've been able to achieve decent results, but it's a lot of work per character to get the lighting, correct levels on the lit shader, etc, which is really tough in the workflow pipeline. However, other than the abandoned Digital Human / Heretic example, Unity hasn't taken any time to address using a AAA-style fully rigged (including face mesh) characters into Unity. They have not really created any tools or processes, rather they've left it up to Asset Store devs or 3rd parties, which have done a decent job, but it's still a far cry from MetaHumans in unreal.

Source tool left / Unity HDRP 10.x right

 

I absolutely hear you there. I know there are a few others working your source pipeline here as well. last i checked it went open source for the setup and a user was doing an amazing job solo.

I do absolutely agree with you that the character pipeline in itself is a long one. it makes sense of course, why a lot of efforts go into them and when it doesn't go well it's jarring.

it is of course part of the dev process but Epic has taken huge steps from their Fortnite earnings to take huge strides
in an extremely short amount of time.

i would still rather put a lot of my pipelines through DCCs and engines at different stages but DCCs, Offline Renders and, Realtime Renderers are beginning to blur.

essentially though, break your source scene up grab the open-source set-up tool

it's GI, AO, MSAA+, 200mm camera ( or whatever FL), 3+ point lighting and IBL, translate that to unity ( should be really straightforward if you're using physically based, set up your probes
and save that bad boy out.

You'll have a really good idea to 1:1 the two and see where things are wrong.
if it is the shader limits or maybe an HDRP asset setting.

it's a little bit of work sure.
but probably not as painstaking as you've been through and it's a really good baseline with where you can go from there.

once the shaders are to your liking, and it seems that you don't have to heavily customise them further, you can start going through the lookdev sections to ensure your model PBR looks great in all your scene environments or your test environments.

I do honestly sympathise, but I think your pipeline is coming together well. If you're able to go back and streamline what was hell and see what can go better, faster easier next time, you'll get even better results.

 

Hi, i tried recently this "tool" and i like it, i think it can be useful. I was playing a little with the character model and modifying the sss settings. Firt time i tried the sss settings from unity and i have to say it is pretty cool (i was looking for something about this recently)
Anyway i just have one problem and is the hair on the character, i can not get shadows from the hair, i play with the AO setting, the lights settings and nothing works, i just can not have shadows from the hair, you can see my problem in the images (maybe is my potato laptop 1050 gtx XD) Also ignore the low Antialiasing
Can anyone help me? thanks...

 

I think that is ok because we need to try the objects in different types of lighting, i think that is the point...
...And yes i'm downloading those files to see and try thanks for that
Is there a way to create Scenes for LookDev Studio? any tutorial?
Thanks.

 

Hello,

I don't really see the point of lookdev to be honest, and here are a few of my points why:
1. Why isn't this kind of functionality added to the prefab scene instead? Turntable, etc
2. Why do we have the same inspector and project view but a bit deterrent and rearranged?
3. Why the camera control is different compared to the default scene navigation behavior? there is no panning, no zooming for instance, or it seems to be bugged maybe
4. There is the texture allocator, why do I need the devlook to use it? It could be a separate tool for any model import
5. Not sure if possible, but can we choose a different folder to import the assets?
6. Why double-clicking a material, creates a new default material? This is not a default unity behavior and things should be kept consistent. Ctrl + D does nothing...
7. Why isn't this pipeline agnostic?

I never saw anybody complaining about importing assets in unity, it is one of the straightforward workflows out there.
What I would do instead is to make the texture allocator pop up on model import (with an option to disable it) and even this is not really needed if the model is properly set beforehand (not sure about normal, mask though).
Add some camera orbit, turntable, etc to the prefab scene view or create a special look dev prefab scene with a few scripts that enabled the functionality. And voila, all pipelines are supported, the default importing workflow is used so no need to learn some new stuff and switch between different views. This is just my personal opinion, so please take it as such

8. Will I ever use it? No.

 

@BOXOPHOBIC
I'm sure if you read the description, most of your questions will be answered.
1 - Read the description (but your idea is not bad)
3 - It seems that you have a bug.

I think this is a tool to make fast previews of objects rendered in unity, in "prototype" phase so you can spect bugs, changes, things not working well, so relax dude.
...And why the navigation is different?
Well... i thing is because they want this to be a stand-alone tool (remember, right now is a prototype)

...And why you want to make fast preview of 3d objects rendered on unity?
Well... clients that have their games on unity and wants to see how it is rendered on unity before downloading the package (and maybe ask for more changes) or maybe your own game that takes a long time to open that complex 3d scene and take too much ram (for for testing the materials)... IDK it looks very useful for me.

 

I really agree with your points, I also suggested similar functionality in another thread for prefab views or asset view in general (Maybe an integration with material viewer). The way this tool is currently created it would require a proper session to sit down and validate our assets.
My post:https://forum.unity.com/threads/broken-asset-and-material-previews.1121962/#post-7216717