I’m not sure what goat is going on about 
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But anyway, the example provided is far from the best I’ve seen come out of CryEngine…
Whatever. :mrgreen:
goat, I’m talking to the op not you. I’ll be sure to quote him next time so you don’t rise in fury and start butting my immovable hippo arse 
I’m getting sick of threads like this. I think people are confused because Unity doesn’t have that many graphically impressive AAA quality examples. Most of the prominent games made in Unity are either indie games that are loved more for their unique gameplay than their AAA visuals or mobile games that look really good for mobile games but don’t look AAA console / pc quality.
But, you must ask yourself when looking at a video like this: does Unity have all of the features that make this look the way it does? For the most part, 99% of the time the answer is yes. The next question is if YOU can make visuals with that level of quality. If not, then you are the only thing preventing that level of quality , not the engine. It might be debatable that it is easier or harder to do X thing in X engine, but it can’t be debated that the “big 3” game engines all share most of the same features at this point.
Once again the “matching it’s performance” part is entirely dependent on how well you can optimize. Unity gives you all the options you’d ever want to optimize visuals, it’s up to you to use them properly. Sure there might be small differences, but at the end of the day a small performance drop or boost should not be the sole determining factor of whether or not you should use an engine. Do you like the engine, is it easy for you to use, etc. are all way better determining factors then “this engine can run 1% faster under the same circumstances as this other engine”.
I think a lot of people think that posts like this are empty air and they need to see examples. That’s fine. Here’s a video of an asset pack that you can download yourself in Unity and see for yourself exactly everything that is done to make this video. I think you will agree that this video looks very similar both in aesthetics and quality to The Last of Us, which was released last year (not that old) and was generally praised very highly for it’s graphics.
Absolutely nothing but camera pans happen in that video and even then it seems that it’s struggling to get out of the 20s when it comes to FPS.
I’m not noticing the performance drops that you are, but even if they do exist you are making a lot of assumptions. You have no idea what the video card is that rendered this video, and recording software vastly increases overhead.
Once again, you can feel free to get this asset pack yourself and run it on your computer. I guarantee you it will run fine assuming you can run modern games.
LOL, well I already know to keep my mouth shut so no excuse. I tend to read unquoted threads chronologically. I’d still like to create a decent looking virtual botany forest in Unity; well maybe I’d better start with a garden.
Have you every attempted this rather than just saying whatever you believe and getting sick of other people mentioning this stuff?
Can I personally make something like this? Yes I can, not only do I have pretty much every Manu4K pack out there I also have a decent sized art department that can improve on these visuals, with access to the likes of the Quixel Megascans / NDO / DDO and a PBR workflow.
Can I make post effects, you’re damn right I can!.
Can I improve on the shaders? Still you’re damn right I can!
Can I build a 64-Bit editor for Unity and introduce level streaming! HELL NO! Simple as that, you don’t have access to low level engine code, YOU cannot create current “Western AAA’s” in Unity 4.0! . Could I make a lighting system as good as Enlighten? NO, not a chance in hell! Could I even match CryTeks implementation of LPV with there 20+ R&D tech engineers? NO! Even to do an integration with middle ware type SVOGI I’d need to plug in.
Can Unity 5.X cycle do all this AAA junk? Why yes, yes it can!
Let’s compare: CryEngine:
You don’t have to look twice to see it’s done with unity (shivering&shaking bushes and trees, all grass bending at same time to same direction, static sky…etc.etc). Assets and art style are good.
That scene looks awesome, but…
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One does not see the details of the assets. E.g. do all assets have detail diffuse and detail normal map in addition to the standard ones? Is the engine able to trigger them without the user noticing?
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Having some fixed blocks or a whole huge level is not the same. And the camera in the video moves in a way that is very nice to the engine.
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From what I have read just having the post processing effects a standard AAA title has nowadays makes Unity too slow even without many assets. And having many active entities seems to kill performance too (I follow a guy who wanted to have 1500 units on screen in a RTS, he gave up using Unity for that).
Looks like Kudzu factory but it was better example of Unity then the 2nd post in this thread.
There were obvious billboarded plants. I wouldn’t have know it was Unity in particular if I hadn’t seen those assets in the asset store though but the one thing I didn’t really, really like was the stiff grass blowing in synchronicity. Unity would have did a better job optimizing then those billboarded plants but you have to allow that Unity or any other game engine isn’t going to give great performance with a game environment setup to try and look like you’re flying on a magic carpet at the height of the Amazon tree line with a focused vision to a depth of infinity.
(1). Yes, I am a game artist and I primarily have used Unity, but I have also used Unreal Engine 3 and 4.
(2). As you point out, all this stuff is coming with Unity 5.
(3). Looking at this video (I have seen it before), from the looks of it none of this stuff couldn’t be done in Unity 5. Unity 4 can still achieve graphics that you find in most games, since most games coming out now are still targeting last gen consoles, and thus don’t have pbr usually and definitely don’t have GI (it’s debatable if GI can even be done effectively on the current consoles). This demo looks better then most games you can actually play. If you want your final game to look better then a tech demo then, well, you have really high standards.
In general I get what you’re saying, I’m really looking forward to Unity 5 as well. But Unity 4 doesn’t prohibit you from making a good looking game. I’d say only 5% of the games that came out within the past 2 years even have these awesome features.
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The trees look fine, they look like they have a light breeze going through them. You can tune Unity’s wind to have a higher frequency in stronger bursts is you want more intense wind.
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This is the only good point in this list.
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You can make a dynamic sky in Unity.
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It doesn’t matter if these particular assets do or not. You can have detail maps in Unity if you want them, and I don’t even know what you mean by the second question. They would mip-map out like any other texture. If you wanted to you could make the LODs have a different shader without the detail maps.
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This is an asset pack. If you wanted to make a game with this pack without the fixed camera, you could, and it would still run fine. If you don’t believe me you can feel free to download it and test it for yourself. I can tell you I’ve bought one of Michael O’s asset packs and I have had none of the issues you seem to be thinking exist. Once again you don’t have to take my word, if you are actually curious about this feel free to run your own tests.
The whole “camera is very nice to the engine statement” is nonsense that is demonstrably false. You’re going to have to elaborate on that.
- Okay, it’s nice that you’ve read that, but there’s nothing stopping you from running these tests yourself. I think you’ll find Unity’s post effects do no under perform within your own projects. And having multiple entities is naturally going to bog down any engine, but there are ways to optimize that as well.
He means you can make your game look better by dividing and conquer the environment, not just the game play, in smaller levels and not to put everything in one level like you want to create the Russian Federation.
I know you see it as your job to defend Unity from every perceived slight, but this is absolutely ridiculous. Unity’s post-processing performance with the included effects is absolutely abhorrent and rolling your own is incredibly time consuming and not something that other engines have to deal with to nearly the same degree. Unity has severe advanced graphics performance issues out of the box and getting it up to speed is a time-consuming and complicated process.
It’s nice that you are passionate about this, but using extreme words doesn’t make it true. Can you demonstrate this with any evidence at all? Your argument seems to imply “it’s well known that Unity’s post effects are bad”, but this just doesn’t hold up. In my experience this is far from true. You are making the assertion, so you have to provide some sort of argument outside of acting indignant.
As for myself seeing “it as your job to defend Unity from every perceived slight,” I do like Unity and as such do find myself defending it, but only against complaints that are false. Unity has many problems that people bring up that I don’t defend because they are legitimate problems.
Add some more intense wind and branches start to disconnect from main branch, that’s why you have to do this kind of shaking and shivering
Can you point me where i can enable dynamic sky i’m bored with this static stuff.
Just add some volumetric clouds and and a small camera on a slow rotation then have your second camera only render that w/ overlay (Layered effect). It’s not that hard to do…
For some reason some artists believe tech isn’t important, even though the modelling apps they use have some of the most advanced lighting and rendering functions on the planet. If that were the case we’d be stuck in the ID 1 era…
How did you find coding all the performance tweaks in Unity?
How many times did the editor bottle it? You generally have to end up scaling back heavily or putting months into your own LOD / OC systems to get the best out of it. Without the bolt ons / tools, it’s not an engine it’s a renderer…
Exactly, but as it stands right now… You can not do in Unity what you can do in CryEngine.
Don’t disagree in some respects, In others I do… What AAA games has included good looking global illumination I wonder? CryEngine and ones with Enlighten someone says? Well I never.!
So I’d double check before you want a healthy debate, not to say that baking isn’t in some instance a lot better anyway. But we should know for a fact that GI methods are perfectly valid.
PBR agree on that and some AAA games look pretty poor, I’ve seen better come out of Unity. But still when we are talking CryEngine here it’s a different matter… There are reasons why you don’t see many games in it though, not related to this thread.
Multiple issues here with Unity 4.0 and it mainly stems around the editor, a big amount of meshes and terrain sent to beast will bowl it over. To do effective OC and LOD, you have to do it yourself. All the post really does need replacing if you need decent performance and a good look, I’m still trying to decide what there AA shader does because it doesn’t seem to get rid of jaggies that well. Too much terrain, or meshes = Unity falling over, select too many large images = Unity falls over. Out of the box you REALLY need to replace all the shaders, or hope to hell someone on the asset store knows what they’re doing. Dynamic shadows suck, best to bake (if you can) and so does dynamic lighting which again Unity 5.0 will sort out and so will the inclusion of a full DR.
In no way is Unity 4.0 a western AAA engine.
When you’re making AAA games (or even A / AA), you’re not aiming for what a game looks like now. You R&D to see what it will look like in three years, we are developers and the latest tech now will be defacto at the time of your release. That being said, I have got our rather large game running on some pretty bad hardware!. I think our big cave scene now runs with 250 draw calls and 6.5ms render / MT time… All out you’re looking at 500 draw calls and 10 ms. There are thousands of meshes in this scene, runs like a dream… Not to say CE still isn’t better at it, because it is!.
I truly believe Unity 5.0 will be a turning point and all this silliness will come to an end.!
Oh another engine zealot thread…
Seriously, who cares if Unity can match CryEngine, or UE4 in look and performance?
99% of all people here are not be able to produce the art content for such games anyways, let a lone a full and polished 3d game. So why bother?
“hello, I’m nipoco and I’m defeatist as all hell.”
It’s not the size of the engine, it’s what you do with it.
– ShadowK (c) 2014