A while ago I made a scene in UDK and was practicing lighting a scene. Lately I’ve been using Unity a lot but I never quite liked the lightmapping. I tried to find out why by re-creating the exact same scene in Unity and seeing how far I could get. My conclusion is that it’s perfectly possible to have similar ( even better ) lighting than UDK in my humble opinion. It’s just that the default settings for a lot of stuff in Unity is not very optimal/pretty. It’s a lot of fun to do these experiments though!
It’s all default materials etc so it can be pushed A LOT more obviously. Not the fairest comparison but I hope someone finds this interesting
You can find the original ( UDK version ) on my website.
The lighting in the UDK scene looks much better. In Unity you mostly get over-bright, oversaturated core areas if lighting meets the surface, which doesn’t look very good.
The interesting thing is, that very first UnrealEd (the one from 1998) had the same lighting as Unity. You might have wondered why the whole game was so dark and even lights themselves seemed dark. One of the reasons probably was, that they tried to avoid this “color-bleeding” by keeping the brightness low. This exact problem with lighting was also described by some well known map creators of Unreal.
If you want to recreate the atmosphere of the original Unreal game, then the default lighting of Unity just leads your way. By trying to avoid this overexposed lighting (which btw. shouldn’t be mixed up with a clean bloom either) you eventually end up with a gloomy lighting like in Unreal. Of course this is not always what we wish…
True, but I don’t think Unity is lacking anything. The trick is to find out what the right settings are and which combination of camera filters to use to get the desired effect. Also, to be fair to Unity, I spent a lot less time in the Unity scene. It’s definately interesting to see if I could get the exact same lighting conditions going.
On a semi-side note, one thing that UDK lacks is easy-to-use area lights. So for my next scene, the Unity one will probably kick unreals ass.
This lighting was done in Unity? If so, maybe you should create a package that can recreate your process and post it on the asset store at a reasonable price. I also, think Unity can best UDK, simple because every game I see made in UNity looks completely different from each other. That cannot be said for UDK. My non gaming friends can spot UE3 graphics.
I agree. I think this is because Unity3d was built from the beginning to be a general all purpose game creation tool. Unity isn’t trying to be a FPS maker and what we think of as great lighting is really only appropriate in that narrow slice of games. For example if you were making angry birds you’d basically want no lighting at all.
In contrast UDK was originally just an FPS game (Unreal 1). One of the goals of that series was to look next-gen, so it does. Then later it become a viable middleware. So as a result, the default settings in that middleware create a pretty polishing looking FPS. Since it does this out of the box, few people tweak those settings. So you can spot it easily.
Amongst the example projects that are available Unity, I’m surprised there isn’t one that makes the engine look truly next-gen. There should be.
I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but I think a lot of people would agree that UDK looks a lot better out-of-the-box than Unity. I don’t think there’s any harm really in admitting that. To me, UDK looks amazing. I would love to have UDK’s default graphics in Unity.
Now, I’ve been working with Unity exclusively for about 2 years now. And Unity is my first and only engine I’ve ever worked with. I looked at UDK for about one day so far. So I havn’t really tried hard to do anything with it. I’ve been able to learn a lot with Unity, and from what I hear, it’s ease of workflow is among the best out there. But if there were a “make Unity’s graphics look like UDK’s” button. I would checkmark it
All this being said, I’m still sticking with Unity, and I have so much time invested in Unity that I refuse to switch to any other engine at this time. Not to mention, I’m fairly certain Unity is the only engine that will allow me to get more done in less time, on an indie budget and crew.
The main reason most work looks better in UDK is because artists get everything for free. So it’s a great tool for Artists to practice with making their scenes.
Unity, on the other hand, requires a Pro purchase for an Artist to push it all the way (render-to-texture vfx).
Funny thing is many Unreal licenses choose to use Beast lighting with their games (such as Injustice Gods Among Us). Unity includes Beast by default. But I believe some of the more advanced features of Beast lighting requires a Pro purchase.
I myself have a Pro license and think Unity can crank out some truly amazing visuals. Is it up to par with Unreal 3? I do think its’ easier to unlock graphics potential in UDK because like I said before- Artists get full access to everything in Unreal + it comes with a Shader Node graph which allows artists to go nuts making crazy complicated shaders
The big boost to Beast in Pro is GI, which you can get from rendering your lightmaps externally but nowhere near the integration (esp what with light probes and all), and the GI really makes Beast viable for strong lighting. Unity isnt as strong out of the box as UDK but as someone mentioned, its not as specialised, and as someone should mention its had a incredible amount of money and time put into it. Unity gives you the tools you need to look like that, if you want to put the time in. A point light is just an arbitrary point in space, how it lights things is how the materials you make for things react to it, so it can be much down to your own initiative, rather than complaining or holding up as example other peoples work where they havent invested their time in that direction.
I love Unity though, its so versatile it makes using udk very odd for me so I just gave up
Part of your problems are your beast settings, lack of pro and of course the materials used with lightmapping. Fix those up and you can get any visual you’d like.
