As a Unity evangelist I always try to get the solution going with unity first rather than look at other engines. But we need to evaluate for a project at the end of 2014, specifically after the current project. And we usually will plan far ahead.
Looking at Unreal 4, I am impressed by the PBR process and how easy it is for artists to practically make the game themselves either via blueprints or in general with the shader editor. While those two parts can be worked around in Unity, I’d like to discuss PBR and how Unity deals with this.
I’ve a year to familiarise myself and I’m doing this passively before making any decisions so I’d like to hear about what Unity CAN do so I can stick with Unity if possible.
The visuals I’ve seen with PBR look quite astonishing - the materials hold up very well against a wide variety of lighting conditions. What does Unity have that helps us achieve this capability? I saw the tech demo but I’ve not seen any word of it since.
So any discussion or advice (mostly concerning large worlds and PBR) would be really interesting to read.
However nothing native, so if that’s what you absolutely need, I don’t think Unity can help.
The end of 2014 is a long way away when you are talking about technology, any plans you make for a project now are very likely going to have changed by then. But that’s nothing to do with me, I realise.
If you can share, what exactly about your new project requires PBR?
It’s a project which has very strong art direction with a lot of indoors/outdoors being mixed with varying lighting, going from strong lighting to minimal lighting with shafts and things like that, so I felt while it IS possible to avoid PBR, it may be a heck of a lot of less tweaking required to bite the bullet and get some form of robust lighting solution that can handle those extremes.
I probably can get by with IBL, particularly if I can fade between those. I’m still evaluating all the options at this point leading up to it, as we’ll have secured funding by then but won’t have a long time to waste on R&D once funding hits.
All I can say is that there is lots of ups and downs with unity
but there are lots of ups and downs with UDK…
So really all I have to say is to pick a engine that you are most comfortable with…
I was going to choose UDK but it is so difficult to know if your scripts are being used or not…
Unlike UDK unity has a built in scripting tool and is vary easy to use when you learn the language you like…
So if you like UDK better then use it…
Just remember you need a really good computer to run it…
Unlike Unity.
I think unity would be the best engine ever if it was free and the goods can only be done with Pro…
So what im trying to say is that unity can be good to make a Class AAA game but you would have a better chance if you had Pro…
UDK comes with all sorts of free goods just like Unity Pro but also is hard to use…
And also when you build a game with UDK its easier to Hack unlike Unity3d Games…
Nice, looks like some solutions are available. I’m also interested in techniques which do not use PBR but give similar results, if people want to share some findings on that.
Has there been any word on UDK version of Unreal 4? Or it’s equivalent. Well, I suppose it’s too early to ask for that.
I have just dabbled with UDK, nothing more but new workflow of Unreal 4 seems really sweet. A good workflow and quick prototyping has always been one of the selling points of Unity. But competition is good. No doubt they are brewing all kinds of stuff at Unity HQ (and hopefully not just booze) and by this time next year we will have Unity 4.5 with all kinds of great new features. At least there has been good momentum lately, they just have to keep that up.
Well, if you are referring to real time lighting and GI , Unreal dropped the support for physically based lighting in Unreal Engine 4, so all the fancy stuff we saw in the tech demos are hopelessly gone.
And they are back to square one : traditional light baking.
currently the only engine that supports a solid multiplatform solution for physically based rendering is Cryengine 3…which is available for licensing and free for evaluation/non-commercial use.
Well there is already Cryengine 3 , which is far more powerful than Unreal 4 , already has PBR that runs on my 4 year old 16 cuda cores GPU, and was designed to handle large open world/complex environments…and its free to download the full version to play with…it can’t get any better http://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=8
Physically-based rendering
(…) follows the physical behavior of light as closely as possible in an effort to predict what the final appearance of a design will be. This is not an artist’s conception anymore, it is a numerical simulation. The light sources start in the calculation by emitting with a specific distribution, and the simulation computes the reflections between surfaces until the solution converges. The most popular technique for this computation is usually referred to as “radiosity”, or flux transfer, and it does this by dividing all the surfaces into patches that exchange light energy within a closed system. This type of calculation is limited for the most part to simple scenes with diffuse surfaces where the visibility calculation and the solution matrix are manageable (…)
Tech is only part of a PBR pipeline. You still need to standardize the values for your materials (albedo, specular, roughness) and your lights. Although maybe UE4 already has presets for different material and lighting setups. I’d expect at least basic examples.
The Fox Engine presentation talks about how they go about PBR in both tech and asset production (start at 19:30):
Physically based rendering in itself is not hard to implement and it does not take a long time. If you have a firm grip of linear algebra and calculus (and even if you don’t) following a presentation and writing the shader is easy. The problem is that in a physically based context, without IBL all you really have is very advanced specular highlights. While that’s all great, in itself it’s not a gamechanger. I’m nearing completion on the evironment mapping system of Jove (working around Unitys’s limits… my life would’ve been a lot easier had Unity Free had access to rendertextures).
Also working with PBR in photoshop isn’t very intuitive either. Since metals have no diffuse color in PBR and rely solely on specular color it is far easier to predefine materials and then work with those predefined materials to composit them into complex materials. Unreal4 demo’d a node based layering system, I however opted for a more traditional editor UI with layers
Also,this discussion is not about UDK and unity,it’s about UE4 and unity.
I,personally think that UE4 is better because it can actually make AAA games that make millions(Daylight,Outlast,Fable Legends,Project Stealth…)
I just don’t like Unity because it can’t make a beautiful and realistic game,and I need a beautiful and realistic game for it to sell.
