Blacksmith demo?

I don't consider the demo to be false advertising so much as a bit pointless. I decided to largely ignore most of what was shown and instead focus on the République demo. At least with that I knew I would at least get to see it in action myself when the game is available to buy.

The Blacksmith demo feels more like an internal project, one used to prototype and develop engine features, that evolved into a demonstration.

I've lost track of Unreal's demos. They simply release so many.

 

FYI the blacksmith is loosely based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmarinen

 

In development to be released in the 5.1 series I hope.

 

Pretty sure it's not coming in 5.1, but I do have hope for the future, if only if it spits out nice and tight surface shaders. I'd love it if somehow it did optimised post fx too via nodes that made sense (tm).

 

Something like Unreal's?

 

Yeah that would be nice. Director (used in blacksmith demo) is the thing I'm really excited for since I can code shaders anyway.

 

Yes, that demo is said to be an ugly mess that would need a lot of cleanup to be released. And a lot of work to be ported to the current version of the engine. But they did not say no.

Also, we will never see the resources of the current Smaug demo I'm rather sure.

 

It doesn't hurt to pester and encourage Unity or Epic for demos though (speaking from a developer pov) as we all love to learn

 

Or, at least in the case of Epic, having free assets to work with. At the very least for prototyping. Cubes get a bit old.

 

skin and hair, exactly what I would like to put my hands on... and I'm sure many others do... I'm an artist, I don't know nothing about writing shaders... having these would be an amazing improvement in my assets creation... So fed up of this damn transparent cutout which gives ugly to almost decent result, or the transparent one which has some silly Z sorting issues, unless each individual "plane hair" is a separate object...
Come on, those can be given away... Please??

 

If you go to the actual link: http://unity3d.com/pages/the-blacksmith
You'll see that it's not just the director tool. The demo also uses:
- Custom shadows
- Custom color correction
- Custom motion blur
- Custom hair shader
- Custom skin shader (with custom subsurface scattering)
- Custom procedural sky (atmospheric scattering)

And while they don't specifically list it, I'm almost positive that it is also a custom bloom and custom depth of field effect as well, because Unity 5's versions are absolutely horrible looking.

Just because it's "possible" to recreate in Unity by completely tossing out all of Unity's builtin effects doesn't mean it's actually a legitimate "demo" of Unity 5. Technically I could write some code that has Unity shell launch an executable of a game made with the Unreal engine. Is that actually a "demo" of Unity? I don't think so. This demo replaces almost everything visually in Unity; the only thing they really kept was the lighting from Enlighten. Almost every other visual aspect requires throwing out Unity's version of whatever it is and making your own, which is stupid.

 

Exactly, custom shaders are no different than custom art/animation. It's not uncommon to write single use shaders. For example in that demo the "beard/hair" shader may not have practical application beyond that scene or even model. It would be cool if they released it, but folks may have the wrong impression that it can just be tweaked or elements lifted from it create their own games. But as pointed out by others, even if not directly useful, it could at least provide better insight into how that type of stuff is created.

 

We have one. His name is John.

 

That is pretty typically the way things are done though. The shaders and effects that Unity provides are pretty much general purpose and usable examples. (we use none of them for any of our projects.) For performance and specifics, it is always better to write your own, or at least modify the ones that come with it. As they said, no engine code was used. Just shaders and fx.

 

I'd disagree. It might be "the way things are done" for people making a game, but not for someone making a demo of the game engine they're trying to sell you. An engine demo should use the effects that come with the engine. Otherwise, what's the point of the demo?

Also, I don't really want to write my own Motion Blur, Bloom, Shadows, Color Correction, Subsurface Scattering, etc. Part of the reason I bought Pro was to get these image effects and not have to waste time writing them myself. So I'd rather get the version of the effects that are demo-worthy, especially since they're already done and just sitting there, than the old ones.

 

I should maybe be more clear that my mood is not "Omg false advertising, this is the worst thing ever, I've been lied to", it's more "Sigh... why do you guys keep spending huge amounts of dev time fixing/improving your engine effects for 'demos' but then never actually releasing the improved versions?" I mean, they obviously believe that their own shipping image effects are a bit crap, since every single "demo" they've released replaces them with superior versions, and since they've already spent the time to code superior versions, why not just release them?

This would have two big benefits: One - better image effects for everyone, and Two - they don't have to keep explaining why they're technically not misleading people when everyone keeps asking why the version of Unity they downloaded looks worse than the demos.

 

I think the effects that were used for the demo could be too specific to be released "as is". I'm not even sure they were planning to release this demo to public.
For me personally, if they decide to release it - great! If not, not a big deal.
I'm pretty sure that they're working on new Image effects and will release them once they're ready.

 

What specs did it run on? I saw it was XB1/PS4 class but no actual info.

 

A 980GTX is realistic and affordable?

 

Probably more so than a Titan X. But if it runs that quality on PS4 at 60fps and above I would consider that a perfect position to be in given a glance at Killzone Shadowfall speaks volumes.

 

Totally agree. it's should be an 'absolute out of the box' demo.

 

They are obviously using much superior anti-aliasing in that demo, even if you look at Infiltrator in UE4 without temporal AA / with FXAA it's an absolute mess.

BUT! It's obviously a sign of things to come, as long as were not waiting years for it I'm quite looking forward to it. I think Unity will eventually (Hopefully shortly) become a true graphics powerhouse.

When Unity gets to the stage where they attract artists for example demo's, like UE has then everyone will shut up about it.

 

It could just be downsampled.

 

Thanks for the update Peteor..

 

Could someone at Unity please explain the rendering process for making offline videos? This is something my company is very interested in. I've written before about the Butterfly demo for another company but I never received a response. How did you produce rendered frames? What was the process like? Is there any example code?

 

really? can FXAA do that? I never had any AA quality that could match the AA quality in the Blacksmith demo with Unity's AA.

 

I could have sworn I saw SSS on that page but maybe I was hallucinating. Also, I think those DOF and Bloom effects are not the ones that ship with Unity. Unity 5's got a bug/feature right now where Specular highlights are extremely blown out in HDR, so if you turn on Bloom you get gigantic sparkles; any effects that rely on HDR values are unusable with the standard shader. The builtin DOF is also extremely hard to work with, such that I've seen Unity tutorials themselves say to use Tilt Shift to fake DOF instead of the DOF effect itself. I'd be interested to hear how they did the bloom for isntance. Did they just not use HDR? Did the use HDR but wedge in a step to clamp all the broken specular values? (That's what I'm doing currently). Did they rewrite the bloom shader to deal with high values exponentially instead of linearly? Did they get a special build of the standard shader that smooths out concentrated specular highlight pixel values?

 

Er, that demo of Smaug was done by WETA using Unreal, not EPIC.

Why would WETA release their demo/assets?

...

 

So that noobs like us can fail at doing the same thing, in the same engine. A lot of people think "yeah if only I knew how" well you practically do know how. Just you know, don't have millions to spend on art.

 

It's to show off what you can do with the engine, not what you can do with the built-in assets. It's about "the tools we make available help you to make things like this", as opposed to "look at some pre-packaged assets that come with the tools we make available".

Edit: just like the demo says right at the start, a part of what it shows is it's flexibility to allow you to do custom stuff.

 

Yes, but there are ways to cheat. And if you give people the thing to run it themselves they know that you did not cheat (e.g. you can render at 1FPS to 4K and then down-sample it ("good AA") and use after-effects on it).

Can we get the binary to run it on our computers? So we know no cheating involved?

 

I don't care about the art and sound not being available. I care about using different shaders and effects than what ship. Technically, any modern engine can look like anything if you count completely rewriting the shaders or modifying the source code. If I downloaded the original Quake source code but then completely rewrote most of it to do everything through DX11 shaders with my own custom replacement of lighting and shadows, it would be highly questionable to call that an example of what the Quake engine looks like. The Blacksmith Demo's not nearly as guilty of this as the Butterfly demo was, but it's still kind of annoying.

 

Sure, but they're assets just like any other. A significant part of Unity's feature set is allowing you to create and use your own shaders and effects, and they tell you right up front in that video that the flexibility Unity provides by allowing you to do so is specifically a part of what they're showing off.

The issue some people had with Butterfly Effect was that it used experimental features that non-source-licensees couldn't ever do. Taking the video at face value, that's not the case at all here.

 

Well I have to admit an Unreal game sticks out like a saw thumb, you can always tell if a game was made in Unreal 3 whether you liked it or loathed it. So flexibility is cool if you need it, but post can be very complicated (or we'd already have an abundance of upgrades AAA worthy on the asset store and as I and other said it's a great learning experience.

I can make my own shaders sure, but if there's a demo with them you can use and learn from then more people make better games and Unity earns more money.

It's definitely not a bad thing to have.

 

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. "The ability to write your own shaders and effects" is not a particularly thrilling engine feature, and not something anybody needs to see a demo of, since every engine in the last decade lets you do that. I want to see the shaders and effects I'm paying for. That's the whole point of buying a game engine. If I wanted to just write everything myself from scratch, I can do that without shelling out thousands of dollars.

 

Yeah, this.

That's the thing. You're neither writing everything nor doing it from scratch. You're writing a handful of custom things built on top of a whole bunch of existing workflow and functionality. I bet you could write your own shaders, but without the stuff you get with an established engine how long would it take you to be able to use them?

 

Like I said, I'm not throwing things around my house in a rage, I just think it's weird that you guys seemingly know that the Pro effects aren't good enough to use in a demo, so you write better versions of them, but then those just sit there unreleased. Like Bloom has had bugs sitting in the queue unfixed for years. If Torbjorn wrote a better version, why not release it? I mean, really this goes both ways... if the blacksmith demo really only used a bit of shader code that was thrown together in a day or two, then why not share it? Why do the demos always have to be kept under lock and key?

Anyway, I can tell that there isn't much I can say to change any opinions, so I will withdraw from the thread. On the bright side, now that the Image Effects are not Pro-only, there will hopefully be more bug reports and maybe they will get a little love in Unity 6.

 

There will be new image effects soon afaik. That's what Joachim Ante stated in the Unity5 beta forum.

 

Because those shaders might not be suitable for general use? Like they are too specific for that specific project, might not run on older hardware, might use input maps that are composed in a weird way, etc?
You have people on the forum complaining that the standard shader has gloss map in the alpha of spec, as opposed to a separate map. Do you imagine the complaining if they release the shaders that are not suited for release?

 

1. easy access to a lot of off the shelf pbs texture packs, plus texture tools like substance designer and substance painter.

2. still no node based shader editor.

These are the reasons people get upset about shaders but not upset about textures.

 

I agree that a downloadable binary of the Blacksmith Demo would be awesome.

 

There's no cheating involved, that's not even a good reason to request a binary. And never will be. You need a much better reason such as "so we can enjoy and show this demo off" or "see the performance on my hardware" or "check compatibility".

 

I don't mind that the team used shaders other than the default ones. In fact, I love that they are showcasing what Unity is capable of because Unity all too often gets a "looks ugly" reputation because of some of the things produced with it.

I just wish there was a more direct way of learning how to actually do that kind of thing in Unity. Maybe my lack of knowledge is leaving me not knowing the right questions to ask in order to find the right starting points, but after seeing "The Blacksmith", "The Butterfly Effect", and "The Chase", I am always frustrated by knowing that nothing I work on will ever look remotely that good.

 

I hope so too. However, there have been many GDC presentations (from other companies) that said "real-time" that later turned out to be pre-rendered or in other ways post-processed.