The following game video has been getting a lot of attention for its photorealism. Can’t this pretty much be done in Unity just with dim overcast lighting and either baked GI or manually positioned filler lights to simulate light bounce on the ceiling, walls, etc?
With HDRP and a good tweaked yet simple lighting you can preatty much obtain the same thing. What usually helps Unreal the most those days are the available scan library used in conjunction with nanite and the overall community of users around there, that usually is more oriented in authoring great 3D and texture assets and usually less devoted to talk about elegant scripting solutions to save 3 draw calls.
Another thing that plays well in the video is that it looks a bit like it’s a phone recording a monitor, I’d like to watch the same video in full HD without compressing artefacts. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing demo for sure, but really nothing that I would call “revolution in 3D industry”
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Simulating a low-quality video feed helps a lot in hiding the artifacts that could give it away, but it’s the motion-captured camera movement seals the deal: it looks organic and the fast movement makes it hard to focus enough to break the magic. It’s the same technique used in those popular “Backrooms” videos on YouTube.
There’s a UE4 motorcycle racing game that was making the rounds in social media a while ago which looks very realistic. The viral videos are from the game’s “helmet cam” replay mode, which has the same effect in boosting the impression of realism.
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That motorcycle racing video also had the same cloudy / dim lighting as this new video, which undoubtedly helps increase the illusion of realism because the colors are naturally more muted and therefore there’s less need for good GI or other effects to reduce the gaudiness of computer graphics.
Would HDRP be needed? I thought the thing that makes the video look realistic is the subtle lighting, which is mostly the result of the dim overcast sunlight. I was wondering if the same effect could be achieved even with manually-placed filler lights in place of GI (on the ceiling for example to simulate subtle light bounce).
Well, technically speaking you can achieve that lighting in lot of ways, if I have to use 2022 tools to get to it in 5 minutes, a good lightmapper and wide dynamic range (HDRP is built on that) can take you there in half an hour.
The good looking 3D assets obviously are needed and a base for photorealism, but since we are talking lighting here…
Yep, overcast lighting is one of the less complicated to make look realistic in terms of overall tone and colors. It’s also the easiest to bake AO for.
Extremely dim lighting is even easier. People were excited about the realism of a game called “Beware” a few years ago, due to headlight reflections being elongated as in real life, and also good light diffusion and fog effects; but if you look at the models and textures up close, they’re extremely low-poly, low-resolution models that would look very dated if the game wasn’t so dark and foggy (and if the player wasn’t stuck inside a car without the ability to get right up close to trees and other objects).
What would you recommend for procedural maps that have to be created on the fly and therefore cannot use baked lightmapping?
For procedural meshes in HDRP, Ray-Traced GI (with SSGI fall back) can be a good idea.