Nuff’ said. 
Can I Repost This In My Unity Showcase, This Is One of The Best I’ve ever seen unity
This is really good looking. Reminds me a bit of the Samaritan tech demo.
To be honest this is not impressive at all when you are camparing it with some Unreal Engine scenes, plus, unity is aimed for indies, to get even basic shadows and some effects that cant really compete with UDK’s effect you have to play 1500$ while UDK cost 99$ to start making money of .
The only problem in UDK is that is you have to learn all of the already made classes and it is a lot more complicated than unity .
The UDK Ediot is so much richer than unity’s, even with the current unity’s light’s halo you cant do anything more than a circle, not even close to FOG effects in UDK .
Now here comes all who says : you can write your own shader and stuff. now beside the fact that you have to buy the full version to do so and it costs 1500$, This is a fucking indie engine, why do i have to spend so much time and effort and study time to make some good effects ?! ( which are still not good as UDK’s effects ) .
Let’s be real, let’s say you know UDK and UnrealScript flawlessly and Unity too, which one would you use for your project ?
The only good thing about unity is that it is so easy to start with, I’v used unity alot and now im moving to UDK and it is fucking hard, I’v thought alot of times to go back to unity just brcause i was too lazy, but i got back on the horse becouse i dont want to limit myself .
If UDK’s was as easy as Unity ( You can make your own game from scratch by extending only one main class ( MonoDevelop in Unity’s case ) and it was live like unity so you dont have to exit the editor, compile and then enter the editor again), Unity was only useful for Mobile,Web and such kind of games .
Your post sounds more like a try to justify your decision to choose UDK
Which is fine. Use whatever you want as long it leads to something cool eventually 
To be entirely fair, producing performant, high-fidelity graphics in Unity is a bit of a pain, but at the same time, it’s something that other engines are specifically designed around in the first place. You can do a lot of really cool stuff with Unity, especially if you’re eschewing fidelity for a stylised art direction, largely in thanks to how easy it makes development and how extensible the editor is.
I’ve got to kind of agree with him, if you look at the likes of Star Citizen made in CE3 or some of the Unreal major release titles… It’s not on the same level.
That being said, I’m actually quite sure you could do the likes of mass effect in Unity… I’ve just never seen anyone do it yet. Only place Unity falls down is latest (Well quite old now) post effect’s / AA and the lack of optimisation choices like dynamic occlusion culling, a 64-bit editor / volumetric water / fog.
Now for a team the size of Unity, I couldn’t see the likes of SSDO a 64-Bit editor (Which is already in action) SMAA or CMAA and a bit of volumetric merged fog water to be extremely difficult. You can already stream within Unity from script, which IMO should be an inbuilt function. Global illumination (Baked) is already in Unity Pro, probably a few more cool things like Irradiance volume and LPV. Most of the source code is out for free commercial use on GitHub, so it’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel here.
Unity as of now is a jack of all trades and a capable one at that, but there’s not denying it’s hard work to get Unity to look as impressive as other engines and can take you to extreme places. On the flipside other engines are much more difficult to use, I’d love to have my cake and eat it but I’d rather have a stable straightforward to use system like Unity and sacrifice some eye candy.
I really believe Unity is deceptive, if anyone believes making a high visual fidelity game in any engine is easy then they are mistaken, it’s just different problems with different engines. Artwork counts for a large portion, then the last portion is effective post rendering.
I think it’s a shame really, there’s not masses of work to do for Unity and it could easily throw a crippling blow to competition in the engine sector. Which in turn brings more positive PR to the company when your AAA brand names pick it up… Studio’s would be daft not to pick it up due to plain ease of use…
Wigga please!
The only drawback of movie cg quality graphics, is that it’s probably heavy on the gpu, so you wouldn’t want it for large project… that’s what I hear, at least. So people recommend UDK for AAA quality projects, right?
Still, in my experience, stuff made in UDK isn’t especially low-end PC friendly…
Hawken, for example (a fast paced game made with UDK technology) is not very playable at 20fps, which is what I get on medium quality, with post processing effects, and such. I must set it to low, to have full fps, which makes it rather unimpressive from a tech point of view (mech art is still awesome). But even then I still get low fps on crowded combat situations.
And Hawken’s the work of a full experienced team! I freaking love hawken, I’m waiting for Oculus Rift consumer version to try with that game, I’ll need a new rig though.
Unity is, in fact, a perfect solution for small dev teams, even one man teams. Because the whole workflow is easygoing and friendly. Importing, exporting, compiling, extending, anything that ends with ‘ing’… you’ve got it! At least I haven’t found anything better in any other engine.
sigh some people have to turn EVERY thread into Unity vs. some other engine. NO ONE CARES. Go to that forum.
Sigh all you like mate, but you need something to compare it to… Otherwise how would you know if Unity’s graphical abilities are any good?
Also people do care, otherwise threads like these wouldn’t be made.
End of the day I use Unity, in some area’s I wish it had more and in other area’s Unity is second to none. Let’s not pretend to be blind and whatever helps Unity push forward is a bonus.
The games industry should focus less on graphics and more on sound. HD Graphics are nice, but without comparable sound, the immersion that the graphics try to create is broken. Sound engines should be more akin to event based, realtime DAW’s. If that needs hardware, make the hardware.
Im really not sure where this “unity games aren’t pretty” rumor came from. Sure, you need to put a bit of work in (compared to out-of-the-box fidelity that many other engine offer) but the ability is still there. I also think that ‘layering’ of effects is unhealthy. By this I mean using multiple image effects, reflection engines, IBL tools and so on in one project. You might need them but its always better to look into one method of achieving all of the effects you want rather than multiple offering only one each.
None of the videos represent unity or would represent any games dev software particularly well, nothing that impressive
Do graphics matter? Of course they do, so long as they’re at least functional, good, if they look spectacular, super, but you dont like anything in any other medium by just one factor so why suddenly now? The whole ‘interactive stuff’ evolution has been dragged down by these childish notions of of what a media can communicate. How are we still at the point where we’re glad there’s graphics, rather than them being part of a whole work of usually highly collaborative art
The can insert name here do great graphics is an irrelevance, and i think focus should be put more on the opportunities the medium gives us on all sorts of levels, take a few games like say, Journey or Ico and these are just beautifully designed game that happen to be beautiful, thats where you decide what good graphics actually are, and thats interesting to ask people as ‘good’ should not mean ‘realistic’ and wether a realistic or stylised approach uses more tricks or more horsepower is irrelevant
I think personally, id like games to lose robots, cars and guns much more often (Theres irony given my current ambition there), id like people to get over realistic graphics as soon as possible, its incredibly boring, as a friend once said ‘i think they should stop making games with humans in them’ and increasingly I think he’s right, this need to replicate the real world in some horribly contrived narratively abysmal exercise in shader technology. Ive played the last batch of sequels merely to try learn something and there was sadly nothing to learn, in fact they showed still a tendancy for smoke and mirrors tactics that i wouldnt regard as ‘good graphics’ at all
Unity can easily, without argument, deliver as much and more of what has been the visual output of the most critically celebrated games of recent years. It can do more than that, it can blow you away, and give you a ton of ways in which to do that from the very start. If you’re looking for the ‘good graphics’ button in unity, your art is going to be terrible, and it will be your fault. If you approach your visuals with the competency, intelligence, imagination, technical and traditional approach of the finest games you’ll play on any platform, unity can probably do it, and no gi in sight.
The big thing with these arguments is how little understanding of how much it even makes sense to do something as asinine as poking at Unity’s graphics? I would hope these people do not play my games. I know how to make pretty things (much better than im able to make a game that isnt just rubbish to play) but i was trying a concept, not ‘good graphics’. Maybe the kids should go off and play with whatever their favored flavour of the month is regarding making games and try actually make something, and then they can realise they’re not really up to it and theyre making an embarasment of themselves in public and they can go and study to be an accountant or work in macdonalds or something
Umm. With my eyes.
Ha you know what I meant :P…
Getting a decent game done is what’s most important and for that you don’t need stunning environments. But if were talking raw cutting edge graphical power, then Unity isn’t at the forefront of it. Whether people care or not is a different matter, it’s not as if Unity graphics look like Final Fantasy 7… Man that game didn’t age well :)…
Optimisation / asset streaming and 64-Bit editor’s a different matter…
My favourite game to date is Dragon Age origins built in Eclipse engine and that’s originally 2006 tech? Still looks good enough today and the gameplay is excellent.
Unity will probably always be able to be used in a way that evokes an effect another engine might be all about with probably a bunch less efficiency and accuracy but the only people who care in the slghtest are the people making the game afraid of what their peers making other games might think of them. Thats the only reason i can think of this argument to continue while being so fecking dumb. Generally what you can do with a system (lets call it high tech, an integrated gi system) can be approximated with spot effects (lets call that basic, just putting lights there instead) and noone would be able to tell the difference or if they could, care, and it only being in a ridiculously narrow spectrum of the possibilities that people ever scrutinise so much (lets call it fps, motorsport and rpg)
Theres a fellow who works for Pixar (was the lighting lead on the blue umbrella, if youve seen monsters university) who did a great talk on a deviantart chat session about how he created scenes that he was using for videogames. Very weirdly, a few years later, he was hanging out a bunch in my chatroom and i think its simply because of a certain girl who was a reg but hey, i got to quiz him about a bunch of things over a few weeks and he essentially echoed above sentiments. He doesnt care for indirect illumination, does everything with direct lights, in personal pieces i guess, the blue umbrella is probably the most realistic cgi ive ever seen until ive seen gravity so im guessing all sorts of fancy gi things were going on there, the idea is to use whatever it takes to get the intended effect
Pity ‘Uses well judged considered visual motifs to absorb you into a spellbinding story of love and revenge’ doesnt go down with folk as well as ‘DIRECTX11 EXPLOSHUNS!!!’
I agree. I don’t consider myself a graphics snob. In fact, I love the trend of reduced graphics load in exchange for deep game play or creative game play. But there are good games out there with mediocre graphics that I can’t get in to because of the presentation.
I think DA:O is a good example of a game which is both technically compentent and yet as pretty and charming as a worn sock. Which is a pity since concept art for the game looked great. I’m one of those weirdos who liked DA2 more anyway. 8)
Anyhow, I would say graphics are super important but high fidelity isn’t. Thomas Was Alone is one of the best looking Unity games. But high fidelity obviously sells.
True, so many are trying to make good graphics. Try making retro graphics!!! lol
I like the obvious pixel art support on websites and that people still do that stuff but its funny how everyone i know who does pixel art wasnt born when pretty much the only cg art was pixel art