Good stuff. Wonder if the terrain is “just” a mesh on account of the cliffs?
There’s holes in those terrain objects so they are either voxels or meshes.
Or a shader…and multiple meshes
Or a two headed monkey. Regardless it looks nice enough 
but all these things look nice, but need a million goblin artists locked in dungeons to create.
They mention a few of the models are from Sketchup’s 3D warehouse, and the other things you can mostly buy from dexsoft and the like. But yeah, if you had the engine in your hands, you suddenly discover the time needed for quality content generation!
I was surprised to see such an impressive product come out of nowhere, but apparently it’s from the people behind Quest3D. Not so surprising anymore Looks fantastic, though. I love the sequence flying through the narrow canyon. Lots more over here: http://vimeo.com/user2739859/videos
Wow, that is super nice. Besides the awesome assets, I’m still blown away by the animated clouds and water (with caustics and depth). Jeez I wish Unity had those. Our skyboxes and Pro water look pretty lame in comparison. Sorry UT, this is miles ahead of the U3 Bootcamp Demo IMO. @defmech - yes, apparently Lumion is built from the same tech as the upcoming Quest 3D version. Too bad Quest is such a PITA to use (IMO), otherwise it would definitely be worth a serious look.
That the visual end of Unity is weak and commonly 3-5 years behind current generation is nothing new I fear …
This holds at the time and will hold until the day DX11 and OpenGL 3+ support is added as DX9 just can’t pull such stuff off even if you sit on a monster card (as the antialias with deferred and alike show)
beautiful
I don’t think technically much has changed as you think. Shaders are shaders and artwork is artwork. Unless suddenly the worlds greatest game artists all flock to unity overnight it won’t change in the next 3-5 years. As it stands, unity is easily capable of keeping up with the latest and greatest games out there.
Maybe id engine 5 megatextures aren’t in. Maybe dx11 tesselation isn’t in. But those two aren’t actually game-changing from an art perspective and are really about performance for the visuals you’re getting. It’s not going to suddenly make a crap looking game look any better having those abilities.
Unity is more than capable imho, the onus is on us to deliver content thats good looking.
Its a common mistake for people to point at unity and say “but I saw a game with more lights on my xbox 360 running much smoother but unity is slower on my more powerful desktop” etc
The truth is commercial games are optimized hardcore, they use very few lights, they re-use assets at every corner and shaders are carefully crafted for max performance. Unity really isn’t slow, but what we do with it, we throw the kitchen sink at it then complain its slow?
When looking at the video, use the slider and move the timer to 00:31 seconds, and look at the top of the cliff where it joins the terrain mesh. you will see a definite line where the two objects collide. This is a very simple procedure and was used in Warhammer Online repeatedly. This is actually a very easy solution and Unity will do this easily, what it takes is a really good artist to create the normal map that they used on that mesh and good overlaying.
The thing I am more impressed with is the detail in the trees. The ground foliage leaves a little to be desired, and you can definitely tell the substandard animation used in the “living” models.
Unity Pro will do every bit of what is in this video. What it takes, as this video did. Time, patience and obviously love…
It is Sunday morning, I’m eating my cereals while waking up, watching this video with staring eyes and earplugs. Relaxing, this is perfect for a smooth wakeup.
edit : more seriously, besides the very clean textures, I guess the strength of this video is a very good HDR effect.
The strength of this video is everything. Not only the quality of the assets but the engine build-in features.
Btw, it looks like voxel terrains.
The price is very good, bad thing that you can’t use for night time and, basically, you can only do videos…
They told me that if I want to do something interactive with it I will need to use Quest3D with it…and they told me that probably Quest3D 5.0 will have more or less the same features…so yeah, I’ll wait for Quest3D, even if I don’t like it very much, but the results are impressive!
Edit: Seems that ( very probably ) on the first update the standalone function will be available, so great!!!
So what is the price? I haven’t seen it posted.
I’m still overwhelmed by the quality of the sky and clouds in the demo, sure wish Unity had this.
749€ vat excluded…
If is true that they will add the standalone feature this engin will be mine, since it will require 0 scripting knowledge…a dream!!!
749??? seriously, is actual design of an app/game will work in Quest3D 5.0, then perhaps no more unity pro purchasing/upgrading for me 
Agreed. I’ve accepted this, and just tried to stop wanting/suggesting improvements. There’s still alot of great ‘bang for the buck’ things you can achieve with Unity, so I still have a great deal of faith in the team, just not on the shader/renderer side of things.
This is simply not true. Although I’d never argue against the impact of good art assets, you can’t use that as an automatic defense for technology that doesn’t have demonstrations with good art. There are plenty of technical issues that cause Unity to fall short in this area, and the newer elements are highly questionable. Beast light-mapping integration is great, but the deferred renderer is not. I honestly do not see what about the renderer/shader system besides beast that could be called top-tier, in terms of it’s output or how quickly you can generate content for it.
As far as shaders are shaders, I disagree :), at least in terms of the point I think you’re trying to make. I mean, a screwdriver is a screwdriver, but if you’re, say, hanging drywall in a house, a screwdriver is not acceptable, only a powerful, electric screwdriver would be acceptable to a professional. Unity’s shader system is hard-coded with respect to it’s inputs, making it a hassle to make even the simplest changes. Unity’s material system doesn’t allow for elegant importing of complex materials, yet heavily relies on importing for general construction. These things, and likely a few other smaller things, cause Unity to fall quite short of many other engines in terms of actually developing/importing/tweaking that artwork. So, just because I can technically hang drywall with any screwdriver, doesn’t make all screwdrivers equal to the task.
This is absolutely wrong, IMO. I will say, Unity’s renderer is not slow in some ways, for instance, throwing a good number of dynamic things at it seems fine these days. However, it has little respect for the performance impact of pixel shaders, which is very important. This is typically something deferred shading would ‘fix’ (for lack of a better term), but the way Unity’s is done, especially right now, it’s just slow. For instance, cone lights are drawn with axis aligned bounding boxes, which is a massive waste of time drawing pixels with no visual impact (if you’re doing something crazy like having cone lights at a 45 degree angle). Deferred shading has been well documented and executed for many years, and Unity’s is currently the worst I’ve ever seen for performance, as well as less versatile IMO (although that is highly subjective). Trust me when I say, you do NOT want to defend Unity’s general rendering performance right now.
There’s a lot of things in the Lumion video that I would have liked to see added to Unity. At roughly $1K USD it’s in my price range but, from what I’ve read, its user interactivity is limited to simple walk-throughs. I’m not sure I will be able to find enough uses for that sort of thing to justify buying it. Also according to what I’ve read, Lumion is built based on the same architecture as Quest3D 5. The last time I tried Quest, some 4 or so years ago, it (at least to me) was many times tougher to learn and develop with than Unity. Plus it ain’t exactly cheap. Having said that, I’ll admit that I am considering moving to Quest simply because it appears to be heading in the same direction that interests me, ie. high end PC based 3D sims.
It would seem, to me at least, that Unity’s mistake has been that it is trying to do too many things poorly rather than a few things very well. The competition, in the mean time, is fragmenting into areas of focus and seem to be passing Unity in capabilities, features, and price: For example Shiva3D offers a plethora of handheld device support for under $250, and now Lumion offers stunning architectural / product presentations for roughly $1000. Both are things Unity can do, but not nearly as well nor as cost effectively as their competitors.