A different perspective on Unity development.!

Copying is totally okay, composition is abstract nobody will care if you steal a composition.

Plus visual element can be swap like the house arch became a tree arch, yo can redo the crytech stuff with vegetal, where the statue is replace by a long distance batiment, the opening by huge tree root, the ground where the body lie by a solid rock, the converging line by ropes, etc ....

 

My word, the shadows in this look better than Unity's (lighting's not far off either :S) >>! It's just a very well done scene from top to bottom, from placement / shaders / lighting to interactivity and mood. Square enix are well known for it..

All this makes me want to do is throw everything Unity gives you out the box in the bin and start again, sure I get scenes don't need to be "realistic" or fussy jammed full of stuff like current AAA seem to wanna do to look good. All I'm saying is composition is only one part of the bigger picture, although if you were to screw it up just like a base shader it'd have a dramatic effect on the entire game.

It all has to be done right, but I'll do everything custom anyway.. So hopefully we should be all gurrd.!

 

@neoshaman and @frosted, composition has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Every single high-quality Cryengine shot, from Crysis 3 to Ryse to that Jurassic Park VR thing has this 'rich-color' graphics style. As I said somewhere else, it's like looking at an oil painting vs a watercolor painting, the graphics are just richer and more eye-popping than I've seen anywhere else

It's always possible to win points for beating the drum about artistic skill (since anyone who argues with that looks like a tryhard!) - and in this case I actually hope it is artistic skill and not the engine itself - but it's something to do with the overall graphics picture and not the objects themselves or their arrangement. Whether it's post fx, color correction, shaders, lighting or whatever, it would be great to find out how it was done.

And I still have not seen a Unity screenshot that has anything of this style, even if in my opinion there is a huge amount of artistic skill in it, and it looks like it has been postfx'd to the moon and back.

 

You've seen Pamela right? I've also made Unity look kinda like Unreal, it was a completely custom renderer and shader framework (plus different post etc.).. I've seen others do it too, it's just pretty rare that someone goes to that sort of trouble.

The screens I posted in this thread are straight up stock Unity across the board, but I have to now make it look like the game did in Unreal..

I've never seen stock Unity look like Unreal or CE for that matter. Anyway, less talking more doing..

Next time I post it'll be in the WIP section, with hopefully something decent to show.!

 

Yeah I'm neither talking about engine vs engine, nor am I referring to your own screenshots, I'm simply saying there's an aesthetic to Cyengine graphics that I like (it's not even a realism thing) and I'm wondering if it's possible to emulate it. And Pamela does not have this aesthetic.

Anyway, not to derail, just thought I'd put it out there.

 

Well, now you've successfully convinced me to never touch CryEngine.

 

Okay, I think what you are alluding to is histogram adjustment and visual frequency (shortcut to cut the chase lol). Ie the photographic and cinematographic aesthetics (not only but I'm making a shortcut). This is still composition though, in the previous discussion composition was caricature into object placement for simplicity.

By histogram I mean the control of value and color distribution in an image, you need to think in term of hue, saturation and luminosity, and look at color theory.

Visual frequency is about the distribution of details (high frequency) and general composition (low frequency) to create contrast of texture (mostly using "luminosity").

Spoiler: break down

Visual frequency breakdown example (hifreq on the left , low freq on the right)


In fact, when I was talking about crytek's image I did an image analysis just like that within an image soft I broke the image in hue, saturation and luminosity and did a High pass on the luminosity part!

Look at the color part closely, you the use of the rules of 3, there is a background color (blue, most present), a foreground colors (red) and accent colors (minimalist use to break and add dynamism or focus to the composition with yellow and green). Look at how saturation help the shape to pop within the color blob.

luminosity

color

saturation


If you combine "high freq" and "low freq", the original image is retrieved, if you combine the hue, saturation and luminosity, idem.

It allows you to quickly look at how teh image is composed and how elements are distributed in the image. It's also great to take the luminosity and reduce the number of grayscale color to see how the value are distributed.

In fact the first thing trained artist do when composing an image is to start with a grayscale composition with just a few shade (generally 4).





Deciding the value range and contrast already set a lot of the image goal.

Here is the twist, the exact same basics between the mario galaxy and the crytek image apply. Their quality stem from the same technique despite being in different style.

Anyway, it can be used to quickly diagnostic what's wrong and what to improve, providing one master the basis of composition.

 

@neoshaman great stuff! Looking at your breakdown I think using the saturation to define the shape is possibly the most iconic thing about the style I'm talking about - I was a bit unsure how to explain what I meant because I see both areas of very saturated color as well as areas of very unsaturated color in the Cryengine pics, so I was hesitant to say that it was color per se. Some of their shots are rather unsaturated for the most part but still have that 'thick ink' look:



Thanks for the info!

@neginfinity I don't quite know what to say hehe ... but it's worth noting that all the examples I gave are from Crytek themselves, so it might be mainly their own 'style', or something they really tweak to differentiate themselves. Although it's definitely in other Cryengine games as well, it's not always so pronounced.

 

If you want to do the break down to analyse image, open your photoshop equivalent and have 3 basic layers:
- red 255,000,000
- gray 50%
- your original image

Spoiler: Break down recipe

to extract luminosity:
1. put the image layer above the gray layer
2. set image blending to luminosity

to extract saturation
1. put image layer above red layer
2. set image blending to saturation

to extract color
1. put image layer above gray layer
2. put red layer above image layer
3. set red layer to saturation
4. set image layer to color
- you can fuse back all part by blending them on top of luminosity using the appropriate blending, the original image will be reconstruct perfectly
- you can modify the part to control precisely the reconstruction
- using a curve or level on saturation allow you to control the vivacity of the image (increasing or decreasing the saturation range)!

to extract spatial/visual frequency
1. high pass filter
OR
1. duplicate the image layer
2. invert the color of the duplicate
3. set the duplicate above the image layer with 50% opacity to get a perfect flat 50% gray
4. use gaussian blur on the duplicate
- Note visual frequency tells you how noisy is an image
- the more potent details appear more contrasty
- you can decrease detail potency by blending a bit of gray above the result
- applying the result (modified or not) with the blending incrustation back to the original image will increase contrast and sharpness, modification allow you to modulate precisely the sharpness where you want
- inversing the color of the result and applying it back with incrustation blending will blur the edge, you can modulate with grey potency of blur.
- using high pass and its inverse allow you to separate shape and control texture very precisely

Duplicate accordingly in layer folder OR use "fuse copy" to get the result into a single layer.

 

Don't remember seeing nudity on here, before. Is this legit?

 

It's a swimsuit

 

@ShadowK is completely right in this regard. The profiler adds massive amounts of overhead.

I've been doing a ton of profiling and performance testing. Profiler will drop the framerate very significantly. I've been using a mixture of profiler / unity stats / custom fps counter / fraps.

Unity stats are flat out random numbers. Fraps and 'counting update' will produce numbers almost identical. I drop 15-20 fps with profiler open. I believe that it roughly lines up with the "other" category in the gpu profiling box.

 

"Not Unity or game-related."

 

It's an illustration of value control, ie low range instead of high range like the above image, leading to softer feel, what are you trying to say

 

I don't like realism or modern obsession with high resolution textures.
Grayscale (heck, even monochrome), limited colors, vector art. That's my thing.

So you saying that every screen you saw of CryEngine had their distinct look might mean that the engine is far too gone towards realism in order to be useful (for me).

 

Exactly.

 

Just wanted to repeat that for emphasis.

 

Is it really bothering you that much? If the image were instead showing someone's guts being spilled by a sword, would you have even cared? It's in a discussion about art and art techniques. Traditionally, discussions of that sort have involved images of the (gasp!) human body. Go take a cold shower, maybe.

 

I said I wouldn't post, but I need some advice on this.. I'm a big fan of arch viz and it's becoming sort of a thing in more modern indie games (well it's rare but I've seen it).

I've heard people say the artwork "style" doesn't matter, but I really disagree. It needs to be coherent, so originally the outset of the game is based in an "old world" medieval RPG era and I have two reservations about this. Firstly the setting is pretty much every single RPG game ever made bar a few (like mass effect).. Secondly overall it's a "sci-fi" game so it kind of feels like the two would clash..

Yeah the player's faction lost a war and got dumped on a planet with all the other factions that lost, but it still doesn't mean they wouldn't have the technical skill to make something more than a log cabin. It's also set about 20 years after they get dumped on the planet, plus they scavenge ships for tech / supplies etc.

Most of the art is from the back end of the game, as there's choices we needed to make sure the followup wouldn't come to bite us, so we pretty much worked backwards. How I kick it off is an open debate.!

I'm thinking something a little more "abstract" as in a hybrid of tech and old world / arch viz.. Imagine a wooden house with white walls / maybe a marble floor and some tech about in a modern setting with actual glass.

The issue is it's something "different" and that causes issues, like for example in that screenshot I posted (it's just something I slung together) although someone said. The criticism I'd have is the foliage is from different places and climates..

I said, sure but it's a different planet in a different galaxy so I'm not really sure how that "applies" here. Maybe I'm just overthinking it and as it's a sci-fi game do whatever the hell I want?

 

Was actually having a conversation with my wife about this very thing this week. She's currently working on an RPG, and we were talking about ways to get fresh ideas into it.

I'm currently reading the "Tales of the Dying Earth" collection by Jack Vance. The creators of "Dungeons and Dragons", Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were big fans of Jack Vance, and incorporated a lot of his ideas into their game. When reading the book series it clearly evident where a large number of D&D's inspiration came from.

Anyway...

Read a lot. Watch a lot of movies. Old movies. New movies. Read some more. Listen to epic music. Old music. New music. Drive around and look at the landscape. Sit at a busy place and watch people. Watch the sun set. Read some more. Old books. New books. Let your mind absorb it all. Fill your space with inspiration.

Then... put that into your game. Notice that "play video games" isn't in there. Sure, it's something you should be doing as a developer, but there is danger in looking too deeply and falling in love with certain games. They stick in your mind and put a haze over your creative vision. That way lies stagnancy and boredom. SO many elements of RPGs are based on the original D&D. They laid the groundwork, and it pretty much stuck there. It happens in all mediums.

I remember about twenty years ago (my memory might be fuzzy, so forgive inconsistencies please) reading an interview with Al Jourgensen (Ministry) talking about an album he made, "The Land of Rape and Honey". He said in the interview that he stopped listening to music. For a long time. He just didn't listen to anyone else's music at all. And then he made that album, which was one of the most influential industrial albums ever, and helped solidify a new genre (industrial metal). That always stuck with me.

Don't copy what other games are doing. Make them want to copy you.

 

*waits for someone to point out that I never said it bothered me*
*dies*

I just deleted a paragraph because, well, whatever. Why do I care what you people think? I mean, realistically, what are you even on about? I love sex. I think everyone does. She's a nice looking lady. And while I could suggest that a pair of tits aren't needed to demonstrate how gray scale works, by the same token... who ultimately gives a S***? And then it occurs to me... you do, apparently.

I'm just thinking, if it's not against any rules to post nude pictures of hot women as long as it can technically be related to games in some way, then I have a few ideas for some threads that I think everybody's going to like.

Here's a good one:

Are females in video games too sexualized these days?

And inside the thread it's basically just what you'd expect.

 

@ShadowK, I think the idea of mixing old-world style with scifi is very powerful, it allows people to have all that cool scifi tech while still feeling very powerful on an very basic, individual level ... Star Wars, Dune, the Matrix and a bunch of other stories/games use it, even Halo and Destiny harken to a medieval style. There's a good reason to use it imo.

I think going by that pic you posted, the main thing is that there's nothing strange and imaginative about it, considering it's an alien planet. It looks like somewhere people might easily go on Earth. If I were you, I'd really make the environment something fantastical, something way out of what people might expect. You definitely don't want to look like you simply mixed your average Speedtree forest with sci fi or something like that.

I think Destiny really captures the beauty of non-Earth planets without trying to be too 'realistic'. There's a lot of fantasy and concept art that is really good to stir the imagination. Anyway here's a bunch of images from my inspiration collection that I hope illustrates my point.

 

Don't know, looks like a bunch of well integrated image effects over a lot of tris in the scene. Hardly technically ground breaking. If those CryTek games / "glorified proof of concepts" break anything, its the players computers. There is a good reason Crysis games have been the stress test for Highend PC Hardware for years.


I think you are on to something with your last statement. What you see in CryTek games (which happens to be the MAIN user of the CryEngine AFAIK) is mostly the CryTek style. They seem to have built a lot of expierience with high-res textures, not-so-low-poly game models and tuning image effects for max visual effect.

Something to admire, really. They DO release good looking games, even though it is not to everyones taste. This has not too much to do with their engine, though. Maybe their image effects are better integrated so can be run at higher settings without killing performance than in other engines. Maybe they handle higher polygon counts better by better culling algorithms or whatnot.
Its not magic though, and the high hardware requirements of their games are all the proof you need.

And Crytek is not without fault when it comes to making stupid mistakes (I fondly remember them rendering a tesselated ocean beneath a level with almost no water being visible, or the highly tesselated square block of concrete)... its just that they usually seem to err on the "goodlooking, but kills performance side".


TL;DR: Stop oogling at stills of CryTek games. They are great looking, and we all agree on that (mostly at least). They are created by a big AAA studio which has a lot of expierience in churning out high poly assets with high resolution textures, and gets them to run in a game engine... somehow.
Show me that game running on a midrange PC at acceptable framerates, and STILL having the same visual impact, and then I will be impressed.

Because for all that we know, this could be press beauty shots taken on a high end machine with 2 or more of the most expensive GPUs available at the time, and the biggest CPU that they could fit in there. It could also be a special build with settings enabled that are not in the final game (see how Ubisoft did that with some of their latest games).
For all that I know, it could even not be the running game, but something rendered by an offline renderer... a little bit more out there but not unheard off (like how Wargaming presents new vehicles added to their games with renders taken in the Marmoset toolbag)


I am pretty sure, given a big AAA studio of professionals to churn out the art, good level designers to compose the levels, and a beefy machine you could achieve the same with Unity. Who cares about some FPS less when all you are trying to achieve is taking a still beauty shot!

 

I think the common understanding on this forum is that CryEngine is the most optimised engine regarding real-time lighting. I liked Unity Adam demo. I think some of the stills are mind blowing. The question is if someone would recreate the same demo in CE then, despite the fact that it would take probably a little bit longer to bring the assets to the engine, would it run quicker on the same hardware and would it look even more pleasing to eyes?

Don't get me wrong; I love Unity, and I think that compared to other engines Unity made the biggest leap forward in the last few years. Some time ago UE and CE fans would laugh when someone would mention Unity. Today I can see they've got some respect for Unity, they post Adam demo and say it's awesome.

Like I've said earlier in this thread I would pick an engine based on the project I'm working on. I would ask the question: based on the type of game I want to build - which of the engines performs best, scales well and looks awesome?

 

@gian-reto alig it has nothing to do with high-res textures, since the aesthetic is present on objects at all ranges (the whole picture). As to the rest of your statements, I don't know what to say (mm could be?) except you're possibly right about it being impractical to implement since I don't really see the effect to the same extent in in-game screenshots, but it could just as easily be because it's not to everyone's taste.

Don't be so quick to conclude that something is out of your reach!

 

I would say, in-game art looks awesome too:

 

Yep it's still there, just not as much! I really like the look of it, looks more like the concept art that I collect, which I like better than any game graphics.

Quick tip: If you want to see the world in Cryengine graphics, don't eat carbs

 

You sure? It is standard 3d look, which is the best described as "faceless" "generic" or "uninspiring", imo. Also, everything is brown again.
----
The talk about engines reminds me of "Alice: Madness Returns". It's been a long time since I played it, but I remember the game had an interesting property: It looked great in movement, and looked fairly bad on static screenshots.

 

Well, I never said that the runtime engine of CE wouldn't beat Unity 5.... by what margin, IDK.

All I am saying is:
1) All the guys singing the song of praise on how great CE is * should download it and give it a spin. I did before I totally bought into the hype (and because I was looking for a better engine to migrate to at the time) and came out with the knowledge that the engine clearly is hardly usable for small devs. Or anyone who does not want to invest a lot of time into tools development.
Has nothing to do with the engine not being great for big studios (maybe), or the engine being more optimized than Unity (most probably), or other engines out there (most probably not, given how CryTek games usually fare compared to other games). But it just shows that it is a tool clearly optimized for shine, at the expense of usability.
2) Oogling as stills and praising the engine is like looking at the image of a model and saying how beatiful he/she is. Lets forget that the image is 40% skill of the photographer, 40% skill of the guy touching it up and only 20% the actual look of the model.
Likewise here. We are talking about Assets, Image Effects, Shader Code and Level Design skills before we even get to the engine tech. We are looking at a still, which could as well be an offline render.
I reckon there are some goodlooking CryEngine games that DO run at acceptable framerates on midrange hardware (Yeah forgot about Ryse.... good job getting CryEngine to run on the PS4 hardware, really!)... I know SOME games which do, which happen to be beaten by games built in arguably worse engines in the visual department.

Point in case: Armoured Warfare is built in CryEngine. World of Tanks is built on a heavely modified version of the Bigworld engine (oooold stuff, and never really known for anything besides good netcode).
While AW levels look a little bit better than the average WoT one (as WoT has deferred modernizing their levels for way too long, the new ones though look on par with the AW ones), WoT managed to one-up AW with their new HD tanks models. They look gorgeous! AW tanks are not bad, but meh... after having seen the highpoly glory of the WoT HD tanks, you are just a little bit used to a higher standard.

Now, we are comparing apples and oranges here. Nothing I just talked about has much to do with engine tech (besides the way older engine being able to handle 100k+ tris models on old russian toasters thanks to some customization of the engine), and all with art assets and level design.
Does AW come with some shiny image effects that help the look? Yes! Can it really beat the better art assets in WoT? No, not really. People don't play the game to look at the sunset. They want to see awesome tanks models in action!

All I am saying here, if I am saying anything, is that the old, but customized bigworld engine can beat CryEngine visually by the sheer force of better art assets + more focused usage of resources.


Now, I am also not singing mantras praising Unity myself. I abandoned the engine once in the 3.5 days because it was just lacking, besides the awesome editor and good documentation, back then. I abandoned it again during the early Unity 5 days because the migration was just too rough, and too much stuff was broken.

I looked at other engines in the meantime, and my general takeaway was almost always "Meh, the grass indeed is not greener on the other side".


And if I learned anything from my time with Unity, is that with the help of thirdparty assets, or your own hard work with shaders, image effects or renderers, Unity can get visuals out on par with any engine out there. It might not be too optimized (leading to lost FPS), it might not be the first to invent some new technique (you either have to wait for someone else from the community to do the hardwork, or do that yourself... and most of the time, the community will implement wellknown techniques, not come up with their own)...
But you get all that combined with the advantages Unity DOES have.

Just the other day I found that Volumetric Light system someone from the community developed for Unity, and opensourced it. Its developed after the Killzone algorithm, and it works like a charm. I am thinking about skipping the Adam implementation for it, works so well.
Does it cost FPS? Yes, a lot. But then so does the same technique in CryEngine. Might be better integrated in the engine and not tacked on, and thus save some FPS thanks to that.
But we are not REALLY talking about gettting the looks with the best FPS possible, are we now? Some pages back somebody was starting this discussion saying "Unity can't do that". Well it can. No its not the most optimized engine for it, but it can, you just need to go above and beyond of what you get with the stock engine.



* not necessarily in this thread, I heard this song the loudest by gamers themselves... "when will <game X> switch to CryEngine?" as if a well optimised runtime engine automatically can compensate for bad visual assets, or gameplay programming.

 

Welcome, Brother! Let it all out ...

In all seriousness, I agree with you (from what I've heard, as I've never really tried out Cryengine) - but Unity is about as great a piece of software as there can be in terms of useability, documentation and ease of finding information as well as a number of other things. You won't hear me bashing Unity, far from it - and despite the fact that I think the graphics are a bit less snazzy, if the Adam demo is anything to go by, great stuff is on the way!

In any case, Cryengine graphics have a really nice style and it would be good to know how it's done, maybe it's an engine-specific thing but I really doubt it.

 

Might be a good exercise trying to dissect that (going into the technical details, as to what algorithms might have been employed), and see if there are assets on Unity store that can recreate the look. Because I am pretty sure there are by now.

I would guess its the following image effects above all others:

- Some kind of AO (SSAO most probably, though HBAO is pretty cool, it is a fairly new algorithm)
- Volumetric Lighting
- Good Antialiasing. Given the "Very detailed look" in some of the stills, I would bet some kind of downsampling was used. Having experimented with downsampling (SSAA) in both UE4 and Unity, Downsampling does not only make your aliased edges super smooth, but also adds a lot of "shine" to other parts of the image as everything "looks more detailed"... hard to say why, I guess that mipmapping is choosing a higher mipmap level (which CAN lead to additional artefacts yet again, though the downsampling AA hides most of it)
- Very good fog... might be the volumetric light system kicking in though.
- Obviously the engine supports A LOT of foliage... might be Instancing?

There might be ton of other Images effects contributing, and I haven't even touched on shaders yet, lets concentrate on this points for now

Now lets see what Unity can do:

- Volumetric lights: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/true-volumetric-lights-now-open-source.390818/
Yeah, its kinda new. Still might have some bugs because of that. And yes, its tacked on.
But in my testing, it works like a charm. And its free!
- AO: The standart Unity image effect kinda sucks, Asset store to the rescue:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=relevance/query=ssao
I can vouch for the SSAO Pro and HBAO. SSAO Pro served me well until I found out that somebody has done a HBAO implementation for Unity. Works like a charm. Even has some coold additional features with a self-illum function!
- Good Antialiasing: Yeah, MSAA works for forward SDR rendering. After that, you are at the mercy of FXAA. But after having checked out UE4s TXAA, I don't feel so bad about that anymore. Even the new fad that Epic was drumming up as the killer feature for UE4 does not REALLY work in real game applications. Good for stills though. Breaks down as soon as something moves in the frame, or looks like FXAA if the effect is toned down to not blur everything. Go figure.
There is only one option left besides some improved FXAA algorithms on the asset store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37214
Now I don't think I have to remind you how much of an FPS hit SSAA is. But it works. Everytime. Brute Force.
- Fog: There are so many good fog assets out there, and as most volumetric lighting systems also do fog, I'll not go into that more.
- Instancing and Speedtree support: We already got Speedtrees. Yay! Now we just need speedtree shaders with instancing enabled (hopefully after 5.4), and we are good to go.

Last point is that some asset devs actually started developing "Image effect packs" that cover multiple Image effects in one go. Which is an extremly good decision and might close the gap to engines with better integrated image effects even more.

So either go and see what you get for free and implementing the other image effects yourself, or spend 50-100$ on the asset store to get some image effects that are quite professionally written. I have a lot of expierience with asset store purchases and asset store devs, and the overwhelming majority of these have been positive.


Should you expect to have to pay 100$ (realistically more, there is the terrain system, the water shaders, and other things that need a lot of help) just to bridge the visual gap between Unity and other highend PC game engines?
Well, everyone has to decide that for themselves. I really like having a dedicated dev that I can ask if I have a problem with a specific system instead of having to send a bug report to Unity and HOPE it gets on the roadmap for a release in 4 years (which is kind of understandable given the size of the community, still...). Asset store devs are usually way quicker to fix bugs, and more open to feature requests.
If I need to spend a few quids here and there to support the devs, I will gladly do that. For the support I got from them over the years, it was quite cheap.

 

We all agree that Unity is very capable engine now, no doubt about it. Actually, in the coming months, I will do a lot of R&D regarding if I'm able to get close to Adam demo quality. At the same time, I will do similar work in UE4 and CryEngine V just to learn new things and get to know the workflow differences for myself. I like to be open-minded.

 

No one "really" wants "realism". When people say something is unrealistic, they usually mean "that broke my expectations in an unpleasant way". You do want plausibility and consistency. If you're on an alien planet and all plants look weird and alien, no one will question it, if the plants themselves look plausible enough. When you have a cactus in snowy parts of the planet, people will think "What the hell is that cactus doing in the snow? Everyone knows a cactus belongs in the desert!".

Try the one from the new cinematic image effects. Afaik it is made by the same dev that made SSAO pro. At the moment I'm using both SSAO pro and the new one from the cinematic effects stacked on the same camera. Everything I've seen from @Chman is top notch! Like his free SMAA implementation:

https://github.com/Chman/SMAA/tree/master/SMAA
Try this if you don't like the anti aliasing from the cinematic image effects yet.

I will check out the opensource volumetric lighting next. Thanks for the recommendation!




I may have asked this before, but I still keep thinking about it: why on earth has chromatic aberartion become such a trend? I'm able to see rational arguments to be made for other camera "imperfection" effects like bloom, lense dirt, vignette, grain, DOF or lense flares, even though I don't always like all these effects. I get why someone would like them, or how an artistic intention can be behind them. But with chromatic aberration I have no clue. I can kind of understand it if you put it as an effect on a static black and white painting, to create some color variation and create interest where the image might otherwise be too dull, but that's about it. For every game I play, if I can, I turn it off. If I can't, it annoys me while playing. I just don't get it...

 

Uh, forgot about those... cinematic effects where promised from Unity with 5.4, right? I see there is a "Pre-Release" on the Asset store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515

Gonna try them for sure, always on the hunt for better effects with less FPS impact. Also thanks for the github link to the SMAA implementation.

Really don't know about the chromatic aberation. But then I see most of the camera imperfection based image effects as a little bit questionable, besides Bloom (Until HDR screens hit the mainstream, the only way to really show some glow effect... besides volumetric lighting, which is just kind of "Bloom on steroids" if you ask me).
DoF often gives games a "puppethouse" like appearance, Motion Blur is just aweful in my eyes outside of racing games and such, and lense dirt, vignette and grain might be good to achieve that Special graphical style you are aiming for, or as a special effect, but I am not to fond of it (splashes on the camera during rain scenes, very funny.... remind me again that I am seeing that scene through the glass of a PC monitor screen, good job breaking the immersion guys).

I will take every image effect that makes a scene look "more solid", or "more real", or "more stylish"... trying to make a game look like a movie filmed with an old camera, and without postprocessing the image afterwards is not really what I expect from my games, nor what I would try to achieve when creating a game. Not really "Immersive" at all.

 

Speaking of grass and different planets, I think when people were making Avatar, they hired a scientist who designed evolutionary tree for flora/fauna.

 

Hmm, yeah when I have the budget to hire a flora expert instead of game dev staff then I'll be sure to give it a go.

 

Shhhh....that's much cheaper and better expertise in the subject.

 

I don't know about that....
I think an expert on the subject might save you a lot of time and money on design iterations - by quickly culling something that would be too improbable.

 

Oh, because we were talking about and exchanging links to AA Systems, just in case anyone missed it:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/temporal-anti-aliasing.412482/

Weeee... will not get my hopes until I have tried it (given the disappointment with the Unreal implementation), but gonna try it for sure.

Sorry about the offtopic rambling, and carry on....

 

Well... I may actually be able to contribute something somewhat useful @ShadowK as recently for the first time in many years I have been thinking about graphics again. I mean actually putting some thought into it.

Some of the levels of my 2D game are on an alien world. Doing some research I found:

12 Bizarre Real-Life Plants That Look Like Alien Monsters


Can you believe those things ^^^ are real and on planet Earth?!


And doing more research I found:

Alien Plants More Colorful Than Earth's Flora

Most Alien Looking Place On Earth


More stuff on our own planet ^^^



NASA Predicts Non-Green Plants On Other Planets

Plants Under Alien Suns

Red Suns And Black Trees Shedding A New Light On Alien Planets


I thought all of you real artists did this sort of thing? Researching for references.

Anyway, there is a lot of great stuff in the above articles that may be helpful in crafting your alien world.

 

The No Man's Sky subreddit has had a few threads concerning these sorts of things if you go to look for more. You know practically every single one of these articles concerning freaky plants has entirely different ones from the other articles I've read. There are just so many oddities on the planet.

 

I'll check it out. Thanks! I'm not going to go overboard in any way on visuals. I just want to focus a bit of time to make things look interesting yet not put too much into it to make graphics workload a pain in the ass.

I think one of the most interesting things I found in my research is how many of these odd plants I have seen in videogames over the years. Seriously I have seen that eyeball plant, the huge rooty viney looking mushroom the big heads full of teeth and so on. Clearly many of the artists on AAA games are doing the same kind of thing for references.

 

Yes. They have distinct "plant from earth earth" surface (think surface shader) on them.

Also, there are creatures like mimic octopus on our planet:

 

You know I think I may have found some of the inspiration behind those underground caverns with glowing fungus that you find in some video games like Blackreach in Skyrim. Only these are actually bio-luminescent insect larvae.

The Waitomo Glowworm Caves

 

I'd say there is a very strong chance you are right. Heck that photograph even reminds me of a videogame screenshot. lol

 

Yeah and I plan on doing searches like "alien looking creatures on earth" to drive the enemy character design. Of course they will be represented in low res pixel art but should be interesting. I still don't place nearly the importance on overall graphics quality as far as high resolution and ultra smooth animation and such as you folks do.

The "game" or game experience is still the most important thing to me. I just thought if I want to get a game on Steam and test the waters I should put at least a little effort into presentation. Besides graphics are fun. I just think (for me at least) there is a danger where I'd end up spending all of my time on this and never get any further.

Anyway I don't want to sidetrack the thread I just thought maybe that stuff would be helpful in some way.

 

@ShadowK I don't know if you're dead set on a forest, but deserts are easier in many respects to make look extraterrestrial - not least because the other planets in the solar system don't have trees! And I'm not sure it's warranted to even try to create a whole alien ecosystem, it's probably more effective and easier to focus on things like:

• Having weird/large/multiple suns/planets in the sky;
• Using a strange sky color/fog like a yellow, green or red;
  
• Making a few strange objects that define the feeling of the place, such as a weird tree, a stalactite, or some other 'unnatural' natural formation, such as the floating mountains in Avatar;

And then you just use pretty much normal shrubs and terrain for most of it.

 

Well, if nothing else it allows creative freedom and it doesn't really have to be "out there".. Like if you check out a lot of final fantasy games it's a close representation of Earth with a lot of subtle differences. All in all it just has to look good.!

 

That's actually much easier. Check out insect world. Grab any insect/worm/whatever and have it magnified.

Spoiler

 

Just googling around, here's some environments that definitely suggest a strange planet, without appearing incredibly different or complicated to make - mainly because the focus is on a few clearly unnatural things..