As an artist I’m on the fence here. I enjoy using Unity and the workflow is great; but when I look at the achieved rendering results between Unity and Unreal Engine 4, it’s night and day. If you look at the Matinee Fight Scene from Unreal, it’s incredible AND it’s running real-time. Granted you need a decent PC to get good frame-rate, but still… If you casually browse their WIP or Released Projects forums you’ll see amazing results, especially when it comes to rendering interiors.
There’s a lot of great visuals in the Unity forums, but when it comes to the photo-realistic/cinemati look, I have not seen anything that comes close. I ask why can’t Unity achieve the same? Physically Based Shaders and Image Based Lighting helps along with cube-map reflections, but what else is going on behind the scenes? Can anyone give me some incite and/or WIPs in the Unity forums that show the same level of rendering quality?
Looking at the video of that scene, I don’t see anything there that Unity can’t do. Making a photorealistic scene like that is like 25% engine, 75% “spending forever and a day on the art assets”. Serious production time and talent went into that demo.
I agree with the time spent on putting that demo together. Like I said, even browsing their WIP threads you’ll see some amazing results. You mentioned that you don’t see anything that Unity can’t do. Do you have any examples or threads that I can check out?
Well you’re certainly right that you don’t see examples like that very often with Unity, and I don’t have any to link to. I don’t really have an explanation for that aside from the fact that it does take a lot of time to put assets like that together, and perhaps Unity devs are more inclined to make games than tech demos that couldn’t realistically become games? (With rare exceptions like the Butterfly Effect, which is not photorealistic but is, IMO, more impressive technologically than the matinee fight - that is to say, there are effects in TBE that I would have thought “nope, that’s not possible in Unity” if I hadn’t been told upfront that it was, while no such effects exist in that fight scene.)
I’m just looking at it from a technical standpoint - like yup, that’s a bumpmap with specular and cubemap reflections, that’s a depth of field image effect, etc. They also made a lot of design decisions to maximize the realism they’re able to achieve - note, for example, that there’s not an inch of human skin visible in the whole clip. It’s also very dark, which can hide imperfections pretty effectively.
The matinee fight scene was just one example. Epic has launched a variety of demos
The matinee fight scene was just one example. Epic has launched a variety of demos; Elemental, Temple, Infiltrator, etc. to name a few that are visually and technically impressive. And from a technical standpoint you can break it down to the basics; but how do those basics come together to have a real-time scene that looks that polished?
Quite often people say that it is possible in Unity, and I believe that to be true with knowledgeable developers and time, but I have yet to see anything to back that statement.
Tech demos are tech demos. Unreal is a studio, their strength is going to be making art assets and showing that off. I think in terms of realism/tech demos, take a look at some of the realistic mobile games that have shipped using Unity. AFAIK, other than a tech demo on mobile, I don’t know of a mobile game made with Unreal that looks as good as Unity games.
I think the ability to make shippable mobile games as complex as some of the Unity titles is impressive tech too. Just coming at it from a different direction, i.e. how much can you push low-end mobile devices to render well in a product. That’s always been the strength in Unity’s tech.
I think people are misunderstanding my question. I’m asking on how to get similar quality renderings as in the Unreal demos and a variety of WIPs in their forums with Unity. As an artist, I want to know how it’s possible to get that cinematic, photo-real feel using Unity and the Asset store.
Because there is a generational gap between the rendering pipeline of UE4 and Unity 4. The post-processing effects and temporal anti-aliasing are better, and it has a really great tools like the material editor. However, UE4 still has some gaps with things like translucency and lots of tools/features that aren’t quite stable or finished.
UE4 would more fairly be compared to Unity 5. The difference is that UE4 puts all their current progress out there for people to play with and Unity 5 is still hidden in a closed beta somewhere.
In any case, in about 5 minutes ShadowK is going to post a few paragraphs about why engine features matter, and then Hippocoder is going to come and close this thread for rehashing the whole UE4 thing.
We’ve been through this one tons of times, these realistic demos are down to lighting (most important thing here) and shaders (materials) RLR, decent shadow algs and post processing. Use LPV with UE4 and it looks crap and runs pretty poor too, use Lightmass and it looks awesome.
Look at V-ray examples with BRDF on nothing more than a sphere with a bit of detail, it looks natural. It’s not about artwork any muppet (which would be me) can put a circle around a sphere and add a pre-made material to it.
Even with Unity 5 I haven’t seen anything that impressive with their updated rending engine. Granted it’s still early, but from what I’ve seen is that they integrated IBL and PBS into their pipeline, which technically you can do already with a couple of Asset Store purchases.
Here are a couple of examples in the U4 forums of artists showcasing their work: Example one Example two
These two examples are very impressive, and I wanted to reach out to the Unity community to see if it’s even possible and if there are any examples.
In theory, you could do that scene using Unity, but Unity would need some 3rd party plugins from the Asset Store to do it. Unity 5 should be able to do a scene like that without any 3rd party plugins, but we cannot compare Unity 5 to UE4 because Unity 5 has not been released and does not have a release date. We might as well debate Unity 6 vs UE5 if we are going to compare unreleased engines.
I concur you are comparing a previous generation engine with a next generation one. Check out the showreel and demos for Unity 5 then at least you will be comparing similar generations of engine.
All I have to go on is what I’ve seen in Unity 5, which so far seems to be integration of IBL and PBS as some of the major highlights. With that said, I’m wondering if anyone has seen anything similar to my examples I posted above or what thxfoo posted?
Yeah they look nice, but they are not even close to being as photo-realistic like you get it out of the box with UE4. The dynamic lighting and reflections of UE4 alone make a huge difference.
