Hi there
I have just seen the promo of the new Chrome 4 engine:
Beautiful stuff!!
I just wanted to get peoples perspectives on what makes a game look good - is it the engine or the artist?
Could something like this demo be produced in Unity?
Both. Poor art in a great engine looks poor, great art in a poor engine can still look pretty good if the style is right. WoW is a good example of this, good style makes up for the engine’s capabilities.
Having never played WoW I am surprised the engine is not so great - as the graphics look great! 
I can see your point.
I guess my gut reaction is to put the larger responsibility on the artist as they have an incredible amount of influence on the quality, look and feel of any game. With that in mind the engine does play a part in things too as it might impose restrictions (features/rendering/whatever) that limit what the artist can do. But again I think that the artist is more influential as they can make a bad engine look good through creativity, or make a good engine look bad through lack of skills/quality.
Interestingly this is something that leads back to what I have felt about modern 3D game design - and that is a lot of modern game design “looks” the same - that most 3D engines add render, lighting limitations etc - giving modern 3D games a similar “hue”.
I think that when I saw the Chrome demo that “veil” seemed lifted (except that the water in the stream seemed a little unnatural).
The 3D rendering pipeline is essentially the same. Ultimately, with a Windows game, everything is rendered with DX9 via the GPU (I’m talking in general terms here). Microsoft tells the hardware manufacturers to follow a certain specification, so you essentially get the same thing rendered with different GPU’s.
Don’t confuse “engine” with “art”. Everything you see is the talent of the artists and their ability to model and texture. Whether one engine “looks” better than another is down to the artists utilisation of the models, textures, lighting and shaders. As most engines sit on top of the same 3D pipeline, it’s therefore very difficult to say engine A “looks” better than engine B, unless you are able to put the exact same art into both renderers.
An “engine” however is more than simply a 3D renderer. Often when people refer to the “engine” of a game, they’re referring to the “game engine” which may also include scene culling, physics, audio, editors, asset pipelines and so forth. If engine A and engine B expose the same features of the DX9 pipeline the rendered output will be the same. With a multi-platform console engine the trick is often in getting the same rendering across all platforms with the minimum of changes to the art assets. How engine A vs B is optimised, what API’s they have, tools, support, documentation, etc, etc, is as equally important.
From the Chrome 4 YouTube it doesn’t say if that’s Windows, 360 or PS3. It doesn’t say if the water is procedural or if it’s hand animated. If doesn’t say if the particle effects are trigged by the camera or are timed. It doesn’t even say if it’s real-time, it’s simply implied, though it most likely is. I’m seeing a lot of really nice looking art. Can’t comment on the game engine because we can’t see the code and tools.
The artist, definitely. Even the fastest, most optimized, most advanced and most capable engine in the world cannot make bad art look good.
Great art, on the other hand can quite easily mask the limitations of the underlying engine. For example, more than a few titles that have “the HDR look” run on engines that are not actually capable of rendering in HDR.
Probably. If you have the art team to do it…
While game engine features used to be a big factor in how good a game could look, in the last 5-10 years the rise of commodity engines has meant that most games are going to come out about even on the technical side. While newer rendering technologies have been developed, there hasn’t been a really fundamental shift since the dawn of 3D acceleration in the '90s, and now that the technology there is mature there are few practical limits that the engine places on good how a game looks.
Art direction, on the other hand, was always a big factor, but often limited by what could practically be done in an engine. In recent years though, those limits haven’t been nearly as strict, and 99% of the time there’s a way to faithfully represent any artist’s vision with just about any available engine technology. That means that now the onus is entirely on the art to make a game look good. Just my opinion, though.
For me the biggie isn’t the artist or the engine but the pipeline tools that get the art in the game.
I do some contract work and have worked on a few commercial games in the past. When I pick up a new client first thing I ask is what engine are they using.
If the engine they want to use has a bad art pipeline I won’t take the job. Some engines like previous torque engines had too convoluted and buggy an an art pipeline and missed even basic features like blend modes and more than 1 UV channel. Making the whole process tediously dull, restrictive and no fun at all.
You can spend more time trying to export and get your assets into an engine than you do creating the artwork. At one point this was even a problem with Unity, not that .fbx is a problem but having to buy the engine to produce artwork for it was. Now with the free version and helpful tools like dropbox. That isn’t a problem and working remotely with unity is a lot of fun.
At the end of the day art pipeline is more important than cutting edge rendering features.
There is still one glaring problem with unity though, it loads the coordinates swizzled, so in many applications they need to rotate their meshes 90 degrees before export, or select objects and edit their local pivot to compensate.
Something thats very disappointing in an engine aimed at being user friendly and easy to use.
The engine is more important.
The artist can’t do anything if the engine crashes before the game loads, or if the art pipeline is broken.
Or if the game is running at 4 fps.
I know that most people are assuming a WORKING engine here, but in my experience, that’s a pretty big assumption. Unity is the exception, not the rule