In A New Dawn, the demo starts not with the main character, but with a sweeping overview of a lush rainforest. Ferns gently sway in the moonlight, vines sprawl across an ancient tree, and budding flowers cast a gentle glow on the surrounding bark. As our character comes into view, we find her swinging on a vine in her new tree home. The tree is rendered to the finest level of detail using DirectX 11 tessellation. At its peak, over four million triangles are used to showcase Dawn's environment.

Another area of dramatic improvement is Dawn's hair. The original Dawn had individual hair strands, but they were few and far between. A mere 1,700 adorned her head and the shader only modeled for specular reflections. The original Dawn also used a rock hard hairspray to ensure her hair never budged a millimeter; all the GPU's horsepower was directed at rendering her character as realistically as possible. New Dawn’s hair is a giant leap forward. Thanks to DirectX 11 tessellation, she has gone from a scant 1,700 strands to 40,000 soft locks of hair. Advanced shading allows her beautiful hair to move out of the jet-black color scheme. While still a brunette, you’ll see her hair gently flowing in the wind, reflecting and transmitting light from the environment.

Because hair is so thin, aliasing is a major problem. Traditional antialiasing doesn't work well here, as a strand is often smaller than a pixel and may not be picked up by any of the four-or-so sample points. To alleviate this problem, A New Dawn has a special hair smoothing shader that inspects each strand and blurs them in the combing direction. The final result looks soft and silky, as if she just jumped out of the shower after an extensive conditioner routine.

Dawn's skin has also received a complete overhaul. Human skin is one of the trickiest materials to simulate. Unlike a concrete object that only absorbs or transmits light, human skin is more akin to a block of jelly; light enters, jiggles around in multiple layers of skin and flesh, and exits in a new direction. The technique used to simulate this complex series of interactions is called sub-surface scattering.

The original Dawn demo used a very simple but effective technique to simulate one aspect of skin shading called rim lighting. It worked by isolating the silhouette of the character and letting light from behind the character bleed through, giving an illusion of translucent skin. This worked well for the silhouette when exposed to strong light, but was less convincing for other portions of the character.