Unity 3D game engine being used for CGI?

MysteriousSoul said:
Just took a screenshot that has good examples of some of the background rendering in the series.



While this scene does look nice at first glance, you can definitely tell it it's rendered real-time cause of some of the artifacts you can see.

You can see that the white text on the road has a material which uses an alpha-cutoff texture to mask the text. It's common to have that issue with Unity, but using just standard alpha-blending is a better solution. I also noticed that on some parts of the bushes, you can clearly see a really small outline on the texture, I don't know why, if it's a part of some shader or whatever.

Also, the characters don't have the best smoothing that you can see on their black outlines. I think this is cause it's using the default MSAA in Unity, which makes things sharp but isn't the best. (TXAA and Temporal AA would be better). Looks like the characters are placed and shown smaller than the native resolution of those characters, and if it was done in After Effects, the lines wouldn't be as sharp and ugly.

Also, the trees have some peculiar properties to them. You can see a lot of aliasing between the very bright sides and dark sides, which would never happen if the trees were painted like that before importing the textures to Unity. So it might be that they have two or more diffuse textures that has it's opacity masked by the direction of the main directional light source or some other method. Personally it looks ugly and has a lot of artifacts.

I think game engines are also far more efficient for rendering CG with a low budget (like 99.9% of anime). Cause most of the lighting, materials and camera effects are really quick to edit, you can see changes as they happen, and are much, MUCH, MUCH, 10x as much easier to learn, and has a better workflow. Hand Shakers is a prime example of piss poor CG that looks like it took the CG artists much more time rendering than fixing most of the issues with the 3D models.

So yeah, very interesting tech being used, but still needs a bit of polishing.

DrBlock42 said:


These backgrounds are all hand drawn ^^

MysteriousSoul said:

A lot of the scenes were hand-drawn, but it would silly for an artist to somehow make pixel-perfect road markings that shift up exactly 1/1080th in scale on paper with naked eyes for perspective. Same goes with the trees and what-not. I broke it down pretty thoroughly, and it if was hand-drawn, then those Unity engineers don't have much to do then since the anisotropic and the characters are done in 3DS MAX.

One of the most important tasks was making [the] giant cube, “Kado” into something wondrous and alien. They decided to base it on a Mandelbox, a fractal object found by Tom Lowe in 2010. When Lowe originally posted the formula, 3D fractal enthusiasts explored through its bizarre shapes and set out to create their own variations. [...]

Yasuhiro Kato was one such enthusiast and set out to reproduce the effect, moving from software to software in order to create the image the director had in mind. Eventually this led to Kado’s exterior being rendered in Maya and the interior being developed in the game engine Unity.

DrBlock42 said:

There is an article up on Crunchyroll about the techniques used for KADO:


The only part of the project they used Unity for was the interior.

These artifacts you pointed out can be found in most anime backgrounds - Because almost all of them are drawn using Photoshop. These are normal digital artifacts caused by perspective tools, etc. These backgrounds are clearly not 3D rendered - What even is this perspective? It's the normal "good enough, but technically wrong"-anime perspective.

And it would simply be silly to composit 2D backgrounds using Unity. No studio in their right mind would ever do this. These backgrounds aren't any different than most anime backgrounds: The consist of some layers - So characters can move through them -, put together with the 2D character art and 3D character art in After Effects.

PS: By no means I want to discredit your Unity experience - As someone who works in an animation studio myself and does a lot of research on the Japanese animation industry, I simply ment to help you.