I can immediately say, which platform was used for a game, even which rendering engine, without having seen the logo or entry dialogue.
Typical of OpenGL is amnesia. This is what to me all OpenGL games look like. Unity games show simple forms and rarely any realism. Seems to have it’s cause in lighting and low polygon count.
What is your take on this?
You’re generalising, probably from looking at WIP or Collab threads where many posts are just some simple Unity terrain slapped together for the ‘next big RPG, FPS or MMO’.
There are tons of games out there you would have no clue they were done in Unity. I’ve been using Unity for over 4 years now and am still happily surprised when I find out a certain title was done in Unity.
Unless the Unity GUI is used, there’s NOTHING that identifies a game as having been made with Unity. There’s certainly no such thing as the “Unity Look”.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. I’ve often looked at screenies or videos of projects and asked “Did you make that in Unity?” and the answer is yes. Same deal with Unreal/UDK.
I think that more than anything it comes down to lighting models and/or base shaders. It’s a lot of work to change those things out, so it doesn’t always happen, and it’s rare in indie or low budget titles.
As for the OP, though, the idea that Unity games and OpenGL games each have their own distinctive look shoots the premise in the foot. Unity games commonly are OpenGL games, so the idea that there’s a Unity look and an OpenGL look and that they’re different shows that it’s not the engine, renderer or API that gives the look - it’s what the developer does with them.
Yeah, it’s often pretty easy to identity an Unity game. It’s a sort of flat, bland look. Build-in shaders sounds like a reasonable explanation.
This again. It’s down to the art, not the engine. The comment about OpenGL is absurd
I say we make reflective shaders the default. They make everything look 1000x better.
The default Unity shaders give it away for me most of the time.
Agreed. I am making an OpenGL engine, and it looks nowhere near as nice as Amnesia… Yet 
Everyone using the same set of free terrain textures, character environmental models, and shaders?
I see a lot of assets I own in games when browsing Steam. Realms of Arcana springs to mind. I own the same orcs they used. I even see a lot of the animations I got from Mixamo in games.
I am not saying it is a bad thing. But, if everyone is using Grass(Hill) with 15 x 15 tiling on their terrain, things start looking oddly similar.
My game is using Mixamo animation. I am using lots of body masking to combine animations, but, for my money, they have top quality stuff even right out of the box.
I know nothing of orcs.
Just like UDK stuff has glossy reflections and shine to everything on the entire game seemingly out of the box, wider than usual FOV and some trademark effects, Unity has the opposite out of the box and its just as identifiable.
Funny, there is a game - a WIP - demoed on these forums by primus88 which reminded me of Amnesia in terms of its look and feel, although obviously not the game mechanics. (The scenes he shows also reminds me vaguely of The Seventh Guest.)
Blinding Dark - Tactical FPS Horror Game
Really like the the environment primus88 has generated.
cheers, gryff
I totally disagree about the look of “default shaders” and stuff like that. Are we talking about diffuse shaders? i.e. PLAIN diffuse shading somehow equals Unity?
You might get lucky guessing more often than not that a game is made with Unity, but I think that’s only because of the ever-growing number of developers using Unity.
No.
How about the “lighting models” part of the suggestion, for starters? Sure, take lighting out of the equation and plenty of stuff looks indistinguishable because it is indeed probably equivalent at a mathematical level. But take the lighting model into account and there’s a lot of subtlety that comes into play.
And there’s the post effects shaders to consider, as well.
Pointing at the standard diffuse and saying “of course it looks the same” is a bit dismissive, I think.
Basically this
I cannot comprehend how the default shaders give unity away with any kind of competent application, it makes no sense, and time and time again it seems simply that unity’s the most accessible way to quickly make a shoddy game and it gets blamed for that particular kind of talentless developer
I don’t know. I definitely look at a lot of games (especially indie games) and WONDER if they were done in Unity, but I don’t know that I see any particular signs that they were.
Mind you, I’m not THAT technical on shaders and lighting, so maybe I just don’t have an eye for these things that other people are seeing.
I will say this though, I think it still boils down to this “Unity Look” often being used as an excuse for poor work on a developer’s behalf. It reminds me of these threads asking about when “Unity will be capable of Unreal graphics”, because as soon as that happens I’ll be able to make my smash hit game… i.e. the “it’s the tool’s fault that my game looks crappy” mentality.
I don’t think anyone is saying that diffuse shaders equate to Unity, but that as many games tend to use the default shaders as shipped by Unity, then they are going to end up with the same basic looks because there is quite a limited selection and none have been keeping up to date with advance in graphics in the last 3-5 years. I mean its odd that in the Unity manual is code for an example rim lighting surface shader, yet no rim lighting shader in the editor.
This also doesn’t address the issue that you only have two lighting models (lambert and BlinnPhong) implemented in the shaders and of course everyone ends up with the same shadow mapping technique. Then there are simple things like a scenes ambient value. I wonder how many people bother tweaking that?
Now once you start moving away from the Unity default shaders, by appending or replacing them with newer varieties then things start to look different and less like Unity. Indeed one of Unities greatest strengths is that you can do this quite easily, either yourself or by purchasing them. Not only can you get shaders that use newer graphic techniques, but you can also change the lighting equations, which can make dramatic changes to the appearance of Unity projects.
At this point it starts to get harder to determine what engine a game was built with, but not impossible. I’m not sure what the other tell-tale signs are, some of it may be at a unconscious level and not even directly related to the visuals but other systems, but yeah I still think its possible to see a game sometimes and think it was made in Unity. I guess the most recent example would have been Cricket Ashes 2013, which I had a feeling was made with Unity before discovering that it was.
You do seem to have jumped into this very much on the defensive side of the fence. I don’t think anyone was bagging Unity, the question was just why some aspects of its general look and feel are consistent across games known to use it. It’s a fair enough question, and one that is asked of plenty of high end engines as well (I remember many discussions a few years back about the look of characters in UE3 games, same thing).
noisecrime gave some pretty specific details on the matter, as well.
In any case, you are correct that if someone has a crappy looking game and cites using Unity as the reason then they’re just pulling excuses out of their bums and it’s actually a lack of skill, experience, knowledge, or invested time.