The main problem Unity has as far as noobs like me are considered, is that it doesn’t have “hd graphics” already set up by default, like pretty much every other game engine and that probably makes a lot of noobs choose other, much harder and not really better engines instead. It is probably great if you want to go for a specific graphics style, you can of course manually put DOF and then set it up, manually put anisotropic filtering and set it up, manually this, manually that, but other engines just do that by default.
So, since it’s not really easy for a noob to make their own ambient occlusion, their own DOF and a bunch of other things, is there a addon, preferably free, that automatically sets graphics to a more decent level?
I want to spend time playing around with 3d models that I make mostly and perhaps create assets and stuff like that, I don’t want to have to worry about finding all those graphics elements, so is there a easier way?
You don’t have a very good grasp of the concept of “HD”, do you?
The term HD does not refer to graphical detail, or rendering techniques. It is just a reference to the resolution being used, and the fact that that resolution is not SD. (standard definition) What you are actually thinking of is highly detailed rendering techniques, specifically ones meant to emulate reality. (depth-of-field, antistrophic filtering, normal mapping, etc…)
All of these tools are used to pursue specific visual styles. Most of them aren’t actually needed for any number of other, different visual styles. The choice of the visual style should be up to the developer, not enabled by default by the tool they use. Other engines that do automatically set those features up make mostly incorrect assumptions about what the user wants. Unity takes more of a blank-slate approach, which has its merits. Yes, this means that the developer has to do a little extra work in terms of setting things up. But they also don’t have a faceless influence attempting to railroad them into a specific visual style.
HD means high resolution, and high texture detail, and high polycount in models. High resolution is already there, but providing high quality assets is your job.
Yeees, it’s obvious that I mistook the term HD (resolution) for what I am actually talking about (advanced graphics), since I couldn’t think of a better word and I don’t even live in a english speaking country, so let’s just go with HQ, although that would also be technically incorrect, regardless, that’s not important.
Point is - can I get anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion, DOF and rendering related things like that, automatically with some addon on the asset store or do I have to manually put each of those?
I remember seeing a AAA graphics asset relessed not too long ago that sounds lioe what you are looking for. Don’t think it’s free though but it was made to very quickly tweak settings probably new shader as well to give a closer to AAA look in Unity.
Along side the documentation from @Ostwind (Thank you by the way!) here’s a direct link to the Asset Store page as well as the sub-forum, and here where you can find the Volumetric Lighting to add that extra “umph” to your atmosphere.
A lot of it boils down to the assets you’re using, but those two resources can be used to add an extra level of graphic fidelity that you see in more AAA titles.
To be honest, the unity post processing stuff is a long ways behind what you find in something like Unreal, and you will be disappointed. The unity post processing stack is very low level not noob friendly. Performance leaves something to be desired also.
However, tools like the Amplify suite will give you what you are looking for. Something that pretty much just works out of the box. That and digging into learning a bit about lighting and you will be on your way.
It’s really hard if you are new at this, even if you are good at some other aspect of game development. Because in an engine like Unreal they give you something that looks good that you can look at and see how they did it. Unity doesn’t give you that. You have to figure it out without the benefit of examples.
They have some showcase projects, but they make poor examples for real games. They aren’t put together anything like what you would find in almost any real game made in unity.
It’s quite good and performant these days. In older versions, not so much, but that’s in the past. Anyway, no, Unity shouldn’t just turn on all the possible effects and options by default, since that’s a great way to degrade performance when you don’t actually need everything 99% of the time. It’s not a hardship to just use the stuff you need. Does that require learning a little bit, yes, but really, so what? Not a good idea to design stuff “for noobs” that will annoy you once you have a clue…you’re a noob once but an experienced user forever.
I never liked that argument because too many people hide behind it as an excuse to not do a better job. Unreal does a better job here. If the situation was that you could easily enable a few things and get good settings, it would be different. But that’s not the situation, it takes a lot of knowledge to get from bland to good, much more then in Unreal. And I’m not going to defend that directly.
My defense is you have to evaluate this in the larger context. Yes some areas suck, but it’s made up for in other areas. Some of that is there are good third party assets that solve it. A big one for me is being able to do most everything in a high level language, which has a huge impact on productivity in a lot of cases. I think in the majority of cases Unity turns out to be the more compelling option.
It’s like developers used to working in C++ that try to tell me they can be just as productive in that as C#. And then same people showing off a prototyping framework they created completely outside of Unreal so they could iterate faster on gameplay. True story.
That’s not the argument at all. If you’re designing specifically for noobs and making things difficult for regular users, that’s the opposite of “a better job”. Obviously the software should be made as easy/noob-friendly as possible; I shouldn’t have to say that. But not at the expense of functionality or flexibility. (Unity has occasionally made that mistake, and it’s been predictably annoying. Like moonjump’s example.)
One doesn’t equate to the other. Having reasonable defaults and raising the level of abstraction required to do something are good things. Doing it well doesn’t mean it makes life more difficult for experts.
Pointing out ways it was done poorly is a red herring. I doubt expert Unreal users would want Unreal to adopt the Unity approach in this area. I double most Amplify users would want to switch back to the Unity post processing stack.
Unity is a generic engine, there are a number of areas where they could raise the level of abstraction and provide better defaults. If that wasn’t the case a whole lot of assets on the asset store wouldn’t even exist.
The biggest issue is lack of good defaults. Second is providing optional higher levels of abstraction around a few things.
Good tools provide reasonable defaults and high level abstractions so new users can get something that works well out of the box without having to learn a whole lot. Then over time as they learn more they can use the lower level abstractions, which don’t go away.
Without that approach, you force new users to learn a lot more then they need to, for where they are. Give them something that works reasonably well for the most common cases out of the box without any tweaking. While at the same time still exposing all of the stuff experts need.
Mind you I never made the argument unity should do this. Unity is a generic engine, which in some ways is a strength. I would rather see it stay that way for the most part and use third party tools to improve the experience in specific areas. But that approach means that in a number of areas, you have to use third party tools if you want to get good results without a deeper understanding. And that was really all I was pointing out to the OP in my original post.
The problem with providing good defaults is that they won’t always be good for the scene. Instead of having good defaults it would be better to have good documentation on arriving at good settings. That would be much more valuable.
Perhaps you might be interested in Beautify, it combines a bunch of effects with nice defaults/presets to make your scene pop, works out of the box just by adding a script to your camera and includes some related effects like DoF (which I think are pretty performant). Here’s a raw footage:
The thing is there are always good general defaults to be found. It might be that you have to make a few simple choices to arrive at them, or you might have to choose a template, etc…
I don’t want to drag this off topic. But I have a thing for you should be most critical of what you like the most. To not do so is dangerous. And I’ve seen that play out so many times in the development world. It’s not chance that most evolutions in software come from competition, not from within. And very often come from completely outside the industry even. Too easy for experts to get blinders on for a number of reasons. If you want to find out how to improve user experience, you don’t ask the experts. You usually have to fight the experts:)
