A post someone made about the awesome game called “Hawken”
I’ve learnt alot from that thread, I’m not planning on jumping ship after what I’ve learnt from it too, but when people say
“it’s all in the art” What does that mean?
The Modelling Program? The Skills of the Artist? if so, what skills? The Textures? and also Optimization, what will you have to be doing to “Optimize” the game’s art work?
Its basically everything you have counted. Its about artists skills, which cover areas of textures, modeling, optimisation and else.
In this expression optimisation plays lowest role, biggest importance is in look.
I have seen that in previous thread you have counted some few “next gen” examples. None of this examples is proven as real next gen game. All of those games can be imitated in Unity for sure. but please dont mix that with Hawken becouse this game is on different engine, art quallity and what not level.
It’s all of the above as been said. People sometimes don’t realize that the artists tools are very important aswell though. Artists are not magicians, they need something to work with. And so the discussion about engines, features and performance gets started
‘Its all in the art’ for game development means the ability of the artist to create ‘good looking’ assets given their tools, game engine/target hardware limitations and desired visual style.
A good artist has the ability to make a good looking game on a technological budget.
I ran across a Half Life 1 mod the other day that exemplifies this: Cry of Fear
The screen below examplifies that the artist was able to make a very good looking game with the severe limitations of the original “gold source engine”, which is the +10year old game engine that powers the original half life. Remember, these are screens from a 10 year old game engine! Some of them look as good as the new COD games.
Before you check out the Cry of Fear screens, take a look at HL in all its glory from 1998:
Check out the mod’s main page as listed above(here it is again:Cry of Fear mod - ModDB if you missed it)
I hope this explains things a little better and with more pictures instead of words.
I will note that even though the game engine is 10 years old, the mod I assume will not run on a system from that era. The textures are far to high res for an old machine to handle.
Artist skill is important, but so are the tools. A master painter will be able to perform much better with using an expensive brush and paints, compared to if he used first grade paint.
I hear “Well it’s artist skill, not engine” a lot here, but have never seen this in practice. Do we have any pictures from unity that match UDK?
I wouldn’t go that far. UDK has a full 64-bit HDR graphics pipeline. Someone on the forums has managed to get scenes to render to a 64 bit buffer to get some HDR effects in Unity, but it’s a pain and performance is probably impacted by not having it in the core engine. Supporting GPU accelerated PhysX can make a difference on machines w/ nVidia hardware. The built in tools like animation tree editor, destruction editor, pathfinding system, etc, etc all mean that in the right hands the UDK can be immensely productive.
Lack of a multi-threaded renderer and MRT support also hurts the performance and capabilities of Unity.
All in all, rendering engine and toolset wise, Unity can’t quite compare to the UDK. Where Unity really excels is in its asset pipeline, ability to expand the editor, component/entity programming paradigm, automatic/in editor compiling and overall ease of use. Which is why I, and many others, use it instead of the UDK.
@niosop
Same reason I use Unity instead of UDK. I gave UDK a several attempts, but I can’t settle for not having an integrated script editor. I fall back to Unity when I get to the part of the tutorial where it says “now close the editor and reopen to compile your script”, that pretty much kills it for me.
Agreed that tools are just as important. However, it falls back to the artists skill to utilize the tools they have available. A first grade painter cannot make something good with expensive brushes and paints while a master painter could make something look good if he has to use first grade paints and brushes. Would it look as good as if he had expensive brushes and paints? No, but the master would still make it look good.
Why does Unity need to match the UDK? Everyone seems so bent on Unity being able to match one of the engines that have been around for a substantially longer amount of time. I would say lets not look for pictures of Unity matching UDK, but pictures of Unity making a visually appealing game. Remember, game art can be just as varied as paintings, anything from Picasso to Michelangelo. I understand that the UDK is ‘pretty’ but really, does visual flare really matter that much? Are Monet’s really that bad compared to Michelangelo’s? I don’t see why everyone is so concerned about flashy graphics. How about games that just look good and play great? Is that so much to ask for? I would rather play a game with “sub-par graphics” that has more gameplay/levels/etc than a game where they spent so much on art the game is only fun to play one run through. Are photo-realistic graphics, HD post processing effects and high-res textures really that necessary to make a visually appealing game? I think not. Can all of those make a pretty game? Yes, but I don’t think they are necessary to make a game look good.
Hers an interesting article about someone else who shares my opinion:
Undeniably, pretty good artwork in these assets. Watch the two videos, “what you can make with these models in Unity”, and “what you can make with these models in UDK”. UDK does not make the assets magically look better. I think that’s what people are referring to when they say “it’s artist’s skill, not engine”.
I don’t think Unity needs to match UDK and it is strange to think that Unity could. Use the tools you have and make the best out of them. A discussion on Unitys capabilities and performance is still interesting though because it helps you make plausable decisions when planning your project. I’m not interested in models and textures, I know how to do that.
Hehe its interesting that I was refering to those examples to show the difference between unity and unreal and how things can look much better in unreal even with the same artist and assets.That shows how differently we look at these things. Understandably it is impossible to come a conscensus in this matter
Finally thats what i have been waiting for. Some comparision of same scenes put in this two different engines.
It is obvious from first look that Unity rendering looks way more outdated that UDKs. Lighting is also more realistic in UDK and a bit more soft.
Unity with Sci-fi environment looks exactly like Doom 3 few years ago, while UDK doesnt feel outdated at all (afterall Mass effect was made with UE3). This is what i was saying all the time, it isnt huge difference but for detailed environment and game like this scene it is huge impact on whole game feeling and look. I would consider playing game in either of engines, but i would defenetly like it much better with UDK rendering.
I’ll admit I’m no videophile, so I don’t notice too big of a difference, but I also think it looks like he didn’t bother at all to set up decent lighting, ambience, or shadows in Unity. It looks he just slapped some point lights in the scene and turned realtime shadows on with default settings. Some tweaking and a post-processing effect or two would slim the gap a bit, IMO.
Yes he could have done more with the unity scene i’m sure. Some more love could push the look further. I admit i’m probably damaged when it comes to graphics from my profession. I’m extremely picky. So things that bothers me many people don’t care at all about.
I honestly hope you’re not judging it by that video. For a start, the unity version isn’t using ANY post effects on the camera or unique shaders on the meshes.
By contrast the unreal version is using the demo FPS scene plus all the effects that are enabled by default in that demo scene including but not limited to: the gun, the FPS controls, the motion blur shaders, and the surface specular shaders.
The unity version has zero camera shaders applied, and zero custom shaders supplied, no gun, and just a path the camera follows. It is using 20% of unity’s potential yet you feel that the videos reflect the engines. Congratulations and I hope that you will in future be open minded.
Perhaps if the effects were enabled beyond a simple spotlight and path for unity we would see some closer comparisons. But don’t let me help you, it is unimportant to me if you learn from this or not.
Basically, disable camera / post effect shaders in UDK, remove the surface shaders and then compare. Or enable those in unity before comparison.
Would it look as good as if he had expensive brushes and paints? No, but the master would still make it look good.