hi all unity team,
for the last three month,ı sleep and wake up with unity.
I watched lots of videos about engines(especially unity) like leadworks,chrome,Gamebryo LightSpeed and so on…
All of these engines show their graphics quality,woouuwww their engines are so great!!But when ı came back to unity??is there any demo which show me your graphics??(ın fact there is one,island demo,but you know that island demo is not so great)
Now ı want to ask a question
Unity team CANNOT do it??(Unity CANNOT do it??)
OR
Unity team dont do it??
Very nice video showcasing what’s to come. Even without the 3 release… Unity really is what you are willing to put into it. It’s a pretty open platform that allows expansion in many directions.
Most engines these days are pretty similar in rendering, other than maybe crysis and other deferred rendering engines. If you use shader model 3 shaders it really comes down to the experience and skill and time available to your artists.
Combined with being able to create the shaders you need to create the materials that show your models and lighting to their best effect.
At the moment unity is a little limited for large scenes. It looks like those issues have been realized and addressed in 3.0 with lightmapping, occlusion culling and deferred shading.
You still need to have talented artists to make something look good, the engine can only provide you with the tools and pipeline to get those assets in.
I have touched on this subject many times before and I really don’t know what to think anymore. Either no great artist are trying to use Unity to push its graphical limits or there is indeed a limit in the engine itself that doesn’t allow great artist to achieve the quality one see in many other engines.
I looked at quest3D a couple of years ago which also like Unity tried to make game-making easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. I liked what I saw graphicwise in some of the demos but few seemed to be able to complete any games with it. In unity it seems to be the other way around. Lots of games are being made but few actually looks great.
Interstellar marines is probably the one that comes closest.
And don’t get me wrong now. There are many games made with Unity that has a nice artistic style but so does many flash-games. I’m talking quality 3d-rendered graphics.
I know people will get upset with me and say I’m wrong as they did when I criticized the deferred rendering demo but if people let go of the fact that its Unity and actually compared it with many other engine demos I’m quite sure they will come to the same conclusion.
My experience and gut-feeling what this issue boils down from is the very lacking shader-system which I found extremely limiting. For instacne there is actually no default shader that lets you use a specular map which is oh so very basic. Node-based shader-system and we might see an improvement,
It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or time. That is actually more about the volume of it. Small great looking scenes could be done by one person and been done many times before.
Well, that was a subjective opinion about artistic merits which you were kind of wording as objective fact. There were a few things about that demo which I could criticize, but they wouldn’t be any of the things you mentioned.
“Great art” is an opinion. hakcan says the island demo is not so great, but I’ve seen a couple of posts from people who bought Unity specifically because of that demo. Personally I’m nowhere near good enough to push Unity 2.6 to the limits never mind 3.0, so that aspect is not so important to me.
Well we can’t use that argument all the time. By that reasoning we could say that which one looks best, Crysis or Wolfenstein 3D, all is a matter of taste.
Surely we have to be able to look at these things more objectively?
I was quite sure that you couldn’t use a map do define the amount of specularity but I could be wrong
When it comes to technical features, sure, they either exist in the engine or not and are objective. Talking about the use of hue is not really anything to do with technical aspects though.
The shader doesn’t say “Base (RGB) Gloss (A)” for nothin’.
Db Major isn’t scary, not even if you play it in first inversion and repeat it ad nauseum!!! :roll:
…And as far as graphics go, I assume that we don’t see really visually impressive stuff often, because it takes a boatload of time to make. Even an indie game that takes many people to make, like The Maw, doesn’t really stand out flashiness-wise (though I think it makes up for it in style).
That is true and I get you point but often people can come to an agreement in what is good executed and poor excecuted craftmanship within the artfield even though opinions vary alot what kind of art one likes.
Actually using the word art makes it very subjective. Maybe its easier to explain it like this. If one wants to paint for instance and apple you can quite objectively say if it looks like an apple or not. It is however subjective if you like paintings of apples (you might prefer paintings of oranges).
Ahh i didn’t see that But wouldn’t the gloss(A) actually control the glossiness and not the specularity which are different things. Anyway maybe I want to control both of them with maps
Yes, i could agree that Unity miss few engine features that makes him shine like CryEngine or any other big commercial 3d engine. But a quality result is not just the engine, the engine is provable the 50% of this nice looking result, provably even less. The other part is the quality of your assets. Poor sound, poor music, poor 3d assets, poor textures, poor animations, poor design, etc makes feels how e unpowerful, crappy and bad your engine is. ^^
So is a half-half job engine and asset quality.
To prove my statements. Go to the CryMod forums. And look at the community projects, you will see how crappy Crysis mods look with poor assets.
Cheers, ^^
Yeah I totally agree. Maybe people in Unity focus on completing games more than using it for small flashy demos to build up their portfolio. UDK might work better for that I guess.
Completing a AAA-game bye yourself or a very small team is of course a daunting task that borders on insanity
I won’t argue with you there. That is the whole thing I’m trying to figure out. Poor artists or poor tool what is the reason for the lack of flashy things coming out of unity. Or is it just that people prioritize other stuff?
And just to be clear, I love Unity and rave about it at my work daily and write long papers on why we should start using it to my boss. So don’t you all start to hate me for critizing it. I just want to give my opinions and ask some questions for it to get even better
Interesting discussion. The opinions are probably widely spread about the demo quality of Unity. For example at the Unite 08 the Island demo was enough to blow away Phil Harrison of Atari and let them switch for some stuff over to Unity.
EA produced Tiger Wood with Unity and honestly I like the result very much and from what I’ve seen in the screenies of Need for Speed online (or whatever it was called), I could only see my jaw dropping to the floor seeing what a good team can produce with Unity.
So, I’m just curious if you could give some examples of what you think would be a good demo. (Please don’t get me wrong, no offense intended, I’m just interested to hear your opinion about that point)
Personally and all the devs that I know using Unity, they all target smaller projects like me, not probably the next Need for Speed game. I’m mostly using the webplayer and iphone options of Unity targeting only the casual game market (very casual, stuff that a 1 man army with contractors can produce).
But wouldn’t the gloss(A) actually control the glossiness and not the specularity which are different things. Anyway maybe I want to control both of them with maps