Imported the Infiltrator map and applied a couple of my own materials, added some lightning also ( a couple volumetric from Adam tech demo).
I’m building a FPS game and wanted a rough idea of whether Unity could handle something of the scale of The Infiltrator demo.
NB: Comparing my result after spending the week-end on it and using my personnal simple materials vs complicated multi-layer+Multi-masks materials of the original demo done in 8months by a team of Epic artist and engineer is non-sense.
The Original demo has fully baked GI and rely heavily on really complicated materials. Meanwhile over the week-end i was able to add precomputed realtime GI and several Volumetric lightning thanks to Unity. Just a fair reminder, there’s no realtime GI in Unreal Engine.
Gonna be interesting how the performance compares between the similar setup in Unity and Unreal. Not that I expect parity, that it is really an apples to apples comparison or that it will silence the “Unreal sooo much better Unity sux!” fanboys that seem to hang out quite a lot in these forums.
More to satisfy a more personal curiosity as to how much Unity managed to catch up to Unreal performance in the 5.X cycle.
I was indeed really curious to see how it works out.
So far, it looks like the biggest issue with project of this scale in Unity is the baking/GI Precompute, and i also don’t get as good TAA as i would like (should check how to set this up properly), performance aren’t that far from Unreal Engine. There’s tons of GI baked quite easily on this scene in Unreal Engine. In Unity i’ve to pick carefully otherwise i’m stuck in baking loop hell.
Kind of underlines the main issue left in Unity 5.x… which is lightmap baking and Enlighten. Which works well in some setups, but not so much in others. Large outdoor spaces and terrains being the notable problem children for baking.
Here’s hoping that the 5.6 new baking system will bring good stuff back to Unity when it comes to baking lightmaps. And that Unity will soon after look at Enlighten baking again.
TAA… it never really worked for me in Unreal. Maybe I expected too much from it. Maybe I should have gone with medium to low settings from the start and just expected slightly above FXAA performance from it.
It is what I am getting with Unitys TAA right now. It is better than FXAA alone, it matches 1.3x SSAA, with way better performance (SSAA is expensive even at low settings), but with way more artefacts (blurring of moving foliage, and I have a weird flickering problem with one of my own shaders which uses the stencil buffer I don’t get with SSAA).
SSAA still is the only really good AA algorithm available for deferred rendering in Unity. At a high performance cost. Though I am pretty happy that Unity’s TAA implementation gives you a ton of options to tweak the algorithm. I am already feeling like I am getting better performance with less artefacts from Unitys approach than what I was able to achieve in Unreal with the limited options I got (low, medium, high and epic… the last two blurred moving parts too much. The former two didn’t do much AA IMO). So while I feel TAA is a dead end that will never evolve into a serious contender for the next gen AA that solves the deferred AA woes, I do feel it is at its current stage a worthy option alongside FXAA and more taxing AA approaches like SSAA.
Having said that, what issues are you facing with TAA? I feel the additional tweaking possibilities in Unitys TAA implementation are a godsend, but of course force you to try-and-error for quite some time to get better results out of it than the simpler config approach of Unreal engine for their TAA implementation. What are your settings? Are you using the standalone TAA or the new postprocess stack one?
I think the main problem here would be texture streaming, i don’t think unity have this kind of system at the moment.
Except if i missed it. @Schubkraft is there any texture streaming system in unity?
or @hippocoder since i remember finding your thread about texture streaming
We have no explicit texture streaming but as almost always asset bundles can save your day (mostly).
We assembled an asset bundle dev-Voltron to make them way nicer. Check Unity Engine - Unity Discussions for news regarding that.
Don’t get fooled by comparing 8months of team work of polishing a demo for Unreal Engine vs the work of a single guy over a weekend using simple materials
If you open the demo in Unreal Engine you realize that there is a lots of complicated layered materials that i have nor time nor will to import or replicate in Unity.
Meanwhile all the GI is baked, everything is fully baked, there’s no real-time GI like in the screenshot i put earlier.
One of the fancy window Material as example of the time it would require:
You never used UE4 it seems ? You can also use the default PBR material in Unreal 4 without needing to make custom materials.
The shader editor allows you to make custom materials to simulate materials that behave specifically snow drops on surfaces or water effects and flow, or micro surface details like micro fibers to have some real cloth look. For Unity this is Shader Forge if you want ot make custom materials or try writting them by hand.
Making complex materials can bring a better look to surfaces sometimes, it’s up to you to decide and choose where you should use some.
Anyway if you was using both engines you would know that UE4 proposes more advanced rendering features like distance field shadows , contact shadows, characters materials out of the box to achieve a better look
I was meaning you have too much specular on your screenshots , polygon flat surfaces has all been smoothed and materials are not showing good compared to original demo.
What makes it amazing it’s because of the great level design and great modeling and texturing inside the factory or outside of the city, this demo levels will look good in any 3D engine.
Sure, but isn’t this just some geometry that’s been brought over and had “simple materials” applied? I wouldn’t expect that to look as good or to perform as well.
