I have a unity project which gets more mature.
However any amount of work does not seem to give good quality light and sharp scenes.
I now searched, I feel a bit like the lights were drawn by a little child sometimes.
Even the demonstration scenes and pictures look “flat” the light seems to ignore depth.
This feels like my project with unity can never look “professional” at some point i just wonder if i have to and can accept that.
In the top entry the Unity image on the left looks like you draw some light on a unstructured surface it looks like a Flat image on a Flat background.
The entry in the right looks “deeper” it looks like a real 3d thing.
I am very sad that the Unity staff decided to close the thread i assume its because of the bad publicity it brings to see so directly how much advanced the graphics of ue4 are.
I now wonder if i should rewrite my 10000+ lines of code in the longterm and try to migrate the project away from unity.
My project is more or less c# code which does control the unity interface with the help of some prefabs.
They closed that thread because it is a years old necro thread with outdated content. A lot of stock Unreal’s advantage in its appearance is the by default post processing effects. Since that thread Unity has developed their own post processing solution, which is freely available but something you have to actively add to your project instead of being built into the engine. Also take a look at the new rendering pipeline options being included in the 2018 versions of Unity.
I would not migrate a project between engines if you are already pretty far into the project. A more effective solution would be to finish the current project with the current engine, and then investigate all available engines before starting the next project.
I cant do realistic lighting either.
That doesn’t mean I blame Unity.
Ive seen Unity demos that look great.
Unity is capable of it, Its just probably not “drag and drop” easy.
Keep at it, especially if you have a sizable chunk already done.
Look into shaders though, learn how to program them, I think this is your bottleneck
It has nothing to do with publicity and everything to do with the fact that the thread is seriously out of date. You can very easily find newer threads if you take the time to search a little bit further (and tell Google to stop showing results from a decade ago).
Prepare yourself. You may have to accept an even worse reality. You may discover that even with the ideal game engine your game may still not look “professional”. Realistically the game engine can only assist so much before it falls on your ability to make use of it.
In my brief experience, making your art look good is 1000x easier in Unreal. You create shaders by connecting noodles. Anybody can do it. There is also a ton of important editing you can do in engine, which is much more convenient than unity.
But I wouldn’t switch engines mid-project unless I definitely had strong enough art to warrant the time it would take to redo all of your work. So basically, if you don’t have AAA assets that demand a game engine finely tuned for AAA graphics, it’s probably not worth the time.
I wholeheartedly recommend the OP downloads other engines and does tests etc. There is nothing stopping everyone doing this. Please go ahead and use other engines in addition to Unity.
Nice. I am definitely looking forward to 2018. But, all things considered, Unreal has been doing it longer, and thus I’d expect a higher degree of polish.
I don’t have enough experience/knowledge to know much about the engines beyond using them to display art assets, so the best judgement I can make is by looking at what the majority output of games from each engine are. Unreal definitely takes the cake for AAA graphics blockblusters, while Unity is popular for pretty much everything else. So I guess c# is a simpler/more user friendly language? Or Unity is more developed for the mobile platforms?
Also, there is a package on the asset store called Tropical Forest Pack. It’s got a handful of really nice scanned environment models, but in the included demo scene the author has set up some better lighting and also provides a video demo to show how to do so for your own scene. I don’t have any screenshots ready, but you get some super high quality assets like that with the linear deferred lighting, along with a few PP effects, and it looks pretty damn good. And that’s just a noob (me) poking around.
I think some key things that are easy to do in Unreal but aren’t easy for a noob to find in Unity is volumetric fog, scattering, stuff like that. But it looks like Unity is demo-ing something the same or similar with that video posted above.
Whatever engine you are working in, I think much of what we call “good graphics” is really just a skill in illusion. Like with characters, the more bells and whistles you slap on there, the more detailed it appears. You just give too much shit for the eye to see, and then the eye doesn’t notice mistakes. Check out characters for any modern AAA games. Like, who on earth would run around with so much shit dangling from themselves?
Same thing with environments. The more doodads you squeeze in there, the more atmospheric noise, the more depth of field, it all actually works to kind of cover things up and fade out all the little CG give-aways.
For starters you don’t post any screenshots of your game, which being the cynical bastard that I am makes me wonder.
Unreal specializes in visuals and latest gen rendering approaches. That’s their thing. If you didn’t understand that and make the right decision in that area for your game, that’s on you entirely. What you can do with Unity at any point in time along it’s development cycle is pretty easy to find out.
In the end engines are what they are at a point in time. Complaining that an engine doesn’t do something you need, outside of say bugs, is pointless. It won’t change anything. Complaining about where Unity put’s it’s development focus, that’s a different thing and completely valid IMO. But that has nothing to do with your current game, which has to work within the context of what can the engine do right now.
One last thought is put this in context. The differences between Unreal and Unity lighting is real, but the chances it will have any impact on the success of your game is basically nil. You aren’t competing head to head with multi million dollar productions, and if you think you are, you have bigger problems.
General complaints about graphics and lighting quality are pretty meaningless at this point really. eg if you cant describe specifically what aspects of lighting are lacking using the appropriate terminology, then its hard to have a meaningful discussion about it. And it leads me into the temptation that people not understanding how to get the best out of the tools on offer is a factor. Not that I am entirely blaming the developer for that sort of situation, it can be an indication of poor templates, starting points, documentation, samples etc by the engine provider.
Things are improving in Unity on these fronts anyway, both in terms of what can actually be achieved using the new HD render pipeline, and the scene templates and demo assets like fontainebleau. Not that demo projects that show what is graphically do-able in Unity are anything like a new phenomenon. Sometimes when I see people complaining about the results they’ve gotten with their own projects I wonder if they have studied some of these demo scenes for techniques used and resulting quality.
Elbows i try to describe some actual things i have seen.
i have seen the screenshot from this Video and thats one of the points where i feel thats closest to photorealism unity can get but in my experience it feels not real there are actual mistakes. I dont want to sound harsh towards unity but i wish it could do a bit better in some areas. Alswo i dont want to be harsh towards the demo but i think they are the best there is. Take following examples for “wrongness” from the demo. I did watch them with audio off.
Here i wonder long this image looks flat in some way. Thinking about it the Light does not scatter enough so much light should reflect and illuminate the darker woods more. I cannot really say if the problem is really that or there is something else too but it feels flat a bit.
At 58 look at the back of the trees when the sun is moving they stay exactly the same and it feels when the sun moves the light reflection should reflect on the trees and darker parts of the wood and this reflection should move on the back of the trees and create light patterns on it when the sun moves.
The tree movement seems random in a way and the branches and leaves do not bend.
And some seconds later the light does again not reflect into the wood.
Comparing it with the adam demo in that one i did not see that issues so strong but because it does not feel like putting so much effort in photo realism.
Still Adam has that issues @ 3:40 the gras does not bend.
And in the whole time inside from the start the light does not reflect properly so only the back is illuminated by the light and the front seems to have a constant light.
I think light is one of the biggest issues with graphics unity has.
Is there a way / are there settings to increase reflected diffused light from a surface?
Is there a way / are there settings to increase leaked light from a a surface hitting light to spread more to the surrounding environment to make softer shadows? I tried it with soft shadows and decreased the shadow sharpness but still it does not seem to mix properly with other lights on objects if i have two different lightsources from different angles it seems to get a sharp line between.
Joking side, I think you’ll experience similar problems elsewhere because it’s your lack of experience with the engine, I’m sad to say. Note: this is because I haven’t seen your work and you haven’t apparently asked for any graphics assistance so I could just be saying really silly things
I believe its quite well known that the closer you get towards realism in some areas, the more the brain may notice issues that spoil the illusion. This probably gets most attention when it comes to realistic humans and the ‘uncanny valley’ stuff but it shows up elsewhere too.
Honestly, even though our ability to do more things in a genuine ‘accurate’ way in realtime improves over the years, doesnt mean any less skill is needed to composite everything into the perfect scene. If anything, more skills are required, especially with the art assets and the lighting. And its a time of great change on the Unity front in terms of the scriptable render pipelines and how the HD one evolves over time. Now is a great time to start experimenting with this stuff and some of the assets that are already available for it. There are things missing, but in the meantime you can still learn how to harness what is there already properly and become familiar with how to set these things up and what settings are available. It’s very exciting to me, about as exciting as checking out a completely different engine. Which is certainly something I recommend too, really get into the detail of where other engines are at and what aspects of their approach to graphics yields particular impressive visual results.
Well i have indeed my own battle with (the) light but i did look a bit around to what to expect what i can work towards thats how i came up to look into the demos and pictures that are floating around and illuminated scenes from unity always felt “flat” so i came to wonder why and now i think i know why because the light only comes from one side so to say.
But that essentially sucks it then more like oh if that the best can be maybe i just take only a global illumination and skip any point or other lights…
Just let me ask this way:
If i would want the light to illuminate and spread more into the forest and reflect on the trees so when the sun would move afterwards the backside of the trees would change in light in this one:
