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Check this out! Unity 5 vs Unreal

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Gametyme, Apr 26, 2016.

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  1. Gametyme

    Gametyme

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  2. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    Well that conclusively proves there is no difference.
     
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  3. GarBenjamin

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    Agreed. I see a lot of wood and some dirt & sky regardless of which engine. Don't see anything actually different at all. There might be a missing spec of dust or something but if so I never noticed it.
     
  4. ChrisSch

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    Cool. The first few are pretty hard to decide, I'm mostly leaning towards Unity, but the last picture UE4 takes the win for me. :)
     
  5. Player7

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    There website is like some sort of js infested crap?

    Unity is v5 while Unreal is only at v4.. clearly the higher version number represents a better engine...

    Also if you zoom into the pixels on the Unreal side, they look more unhappy and sad.
     
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  6. BIG-BUG

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    Are these default shaders? Also it seems from the comments that the Unreal scene uses baked lighting while Unity uses realtime...

    And the war goes on ;-)
     
  7. zombiegorilla

    zombiegorilla

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    Site fails on mobile, can't see anything.
     
  8. LaneFox

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    I wasn't even aware people argued about the quality anymore. It's basically been about stuff like workflow and feature preferences for some time now. I recently spend a few days with Unreal, did the tutorials, played in C++, Blueprints, Persona and their whole feature set. My conclusion? I really liked a lot of stuff in Unreal but I also really disliked a lot of stuff. Whats better? I don't know, but I now know what I prefer and why i prefer it.
     
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  9. Soul-Challenger

    Soul-Challenger

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    the monthly engine comparison
     
  10. Gametyme

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    Pretty much.
     
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  11. tatoforever

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    The tests where done with GTX 660, Unity 45-50 FPS (Precomputed realtime GI), Unreal Engine 60 FPS (Baked).
     
  12. angrypenguin

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    Why would you go to that level of effort and then not even put the cameras in the same places?
     
  13. elmar1028

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    Good comparison.

    Looking at those images, to some degree Unity is good at textures while Unreal is good at lighting.
    I am not sure why a piano is very clean in Unity 5, but dirty (more detailed) in Unreal Engine 4.

    Please, adjust images! It hurts to see them at different levels.

    That's a bit concerning. Baked and real-time are entirely different things. Obviously, real-time would cause higher performance loss than baked, so a comparison in terms of FPS is unfair.

    OP you should try making Unity "baked" rather than real-time. Or make Unreal Engine 4 use real-time calculations). That would make results more accurate.
     
  14. tatoforever

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    The biggest difference I see are Unity shadows, they look like 10 years old crap sorry. Even for directional shadows, Unreal engine still way ahead of Unity. Point shadows are total garbage sorry.
     
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  15. tatoforever

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    @elmar1028
    I'm not the one making the tests, just read that on the page comments. To my knowledge it looks like Unity and Unreal uses baked solutions but shadows are real-time on both sides.
     
  16. elmar1028

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    Which is why I said:

     
  17. bart_the_13th

    bart_the_13th

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    But why does Unity ones always have those bleached/foggy look? Is that on purpose or it's something from the post-processing effect? Because I rarely have those look on my (mostly mobile) game...
     
  18. neginfinity

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    Opinion: the article is junk.

    I can name few dozen differences off top of my head. The dude doesn't cover any of them.

    There are also MAJOR differences in lighting system behavior, the dude doesn't cover them either.
     
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  19. elmar1028

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    He is showing off the visual comparisons between Unreal Engine and Unity, which something people wanted to see. Obviously it doesn't cover lots of aspects of both engines, but it's still a great find.

    You can always dig up locked threads to see comparisons ;)
     
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  20. Ryiah

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    Sorry, but it's a very lousy find. If the objects in the scene are not even placed identically what are the chances he tried to do a good job of accurately duplicating the scene between engines? Once I saw that I immediately closed the article. It wasn't worth continuing.
     
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  21. Billy4184

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    Yeah that's a pretty close call, I expect the Unity one is making liberal use of the cinematic effects which is what I think was the main difference. I'd say that now the difference is very far from what I'd call a deal-breaker if I was aiming at a graphically rich game, and since Unity is so easy to work with I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with it.

    I still think that, by a small margin, Unreal takes the cake. Especially images 2 and 4. In number 2 I think the lighting in the Unreal one really pulls everything together and makes it pop, it's very nice to look at. In number 4, I don't like the specular reflections on the piano in the Unity one, they seem too 'painted over' and harsh. The Unreal one, again, the lighting is very cohesive and more subtle. Also in Image 3 the shadows and ambient light in the Unreal one looks better

    But anyway, I think Unity looks great these days, especially because of the new effects, and they are putting in a lot of work it seems to take it to the other engines graphically, so I for one am happy.
     
  22. TylerPerry

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    It's not really conclusive at all. How much work went into each? If they just put the asset into an empty scene in both it probably wouldn't look like.

    No one should be saying that Unity can't look good just look at this stuff, it looks rad!:



    And even better:



    Games like Firewatch and POLLEN look great. The issue with Unity is ease of use, scenes take ages to set up and get good lighting and if you don't know those tools then it's absolutely the worst. Other engines look "ok" by default but Unity just doesn't look as good by default.

    Lighting is really hard to get right in Unity.
     
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  23. Gametyme

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    Not my site. I just posted a link.
     
  24. Rasly233

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    I think Unreal got better visual quality. But i think Unity quality is very good and considering how much easiler and faster working with Unity is, i think Unity wins 2016.
     
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  25. neginfinity

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    His comparison doesn't cover major differences in illumination behavior.

    Namely Emissive materials, mixed mode shadows, translucent surfaces and reflective surfaces. You try to make a scene for both engines, you'll hit those differences hard.

    The article is a complete junk.
     
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  26. jc_lvngstn

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    The unreal images seem to have more contrast, while the unity ones seem to be a little washed out. Also, in the outdoor scenes the light color has more red in it that the Unity one.
    But I wouldn't kick either one to the curb, both are good stuff.

    The piano scene...I would definitely say that the difference between Unity lighting and the unreal stuff is interesting. The unity light seems almost too bright, and yet you see more detail of the piano overall in the unreal scene. I'm not sure why this is, or how you would address that.
     
  27. Billy4184

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    It's still a lot more useful than 100 pages of that Unreal vs Unity thread. I think this sort of visual comparison was what we were all hoping to see. Sure it's very superficial but it's got a direct comparison in a detailed setting with indoor/outdoor scenes, that's probably quite a bit of work to put together and I thought it was great.
     
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  28. Mauri

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    A version number does not necessarily mean anything.
     
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  29. neginfinity

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    That visual comparison is misleading.

    Here's visual comparison for you. Direct scene transfer.


    First go to beginning of the video, then jump to 20th minute.

    ----

    Blog articles like the one in opening post will only create people with unrealistic expectations, in my opinion.
     
  30. Billy4184

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    My internet is really rough at the moment, but I'll watch the whole lot when I get a chance, cheers
     
  31. neginfinity

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    Don't, unless you really enjoy watching progressbars. Just watch beginning of the video, then jump to some point around 20th minute.
     
  32. Rodolfo-Rubens

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  33. ZJP

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    A good engine is a PERFECT compromise. This is EXACTLY what Unity is.
     
  34. Deleted User

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    All it shows is that you can have two semi stylistic scenes look similar in two engines. Which in context doesn't tell you much, I'd wanna know if I could turn Adam into a fully fledged game without it setting a GPU on fire and / or running on lesser hardware fast and still look good?

    I'd also wanna know how difficult graphically it would be to set up something again like the Adam demo / Infiltrator (as a game).

    A game is much more than just a small piece of static geometry, involving many other graphical subsystems (like how good the particle system etc. is). Also a wide range of shader bases, yes I understand shaders are the dev's duty "mainly" but CE and UE always takes most of the sting out of the equation.

    I'd want to know how easy the import pipeline and lighting system is to get along with. Etc. Etc.

    In short it's the hollistic sum and not the small picture.
     
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  35. ToshoDaimos

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    I checked some UT4 docs and I found that they use "static meshes" (which don't animate) and "skeletal meshes" (characters) for everything. I scratched my head and asked them how do they do 3D water animation. They said: "morph targets". That's lame architecture to say the least. You don't event have normal procedural meshes which can be shuffled between RAM and VRAM apparently.
     
  36. Billy4184

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    If only the Viking Village and Adam were actually games, there would be a lot less doubt surrounding what Unity is capable of in terms of what we as game developers want. I really don't see why they would make not one but two movies when very few people here are doing that sort of thing. And the only game projects they make available are pretty much mobile beginner projects.
     
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  37. neginfinity

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    Well. I grabbed blacksmith scene today and wanted to run it through converter. Then I glanced at its shader:
    custom shader.png
    Take a look at bottom right.

    That's a shader for a wooden plank.

    MixyMask or whatever is a custom modification (in this case it is a surface shader, not a major change like in courtyard), but it uses 8 textures (assuming I didn't forget to scroll down). Basically, in addition to detail albedo/normalmap, it has some sort of masked moss texture with its own albedo and normalmap.

    I expect something similar in adam.

    Frankly, I find unity demos somewhat dishonest. They sorta tell you "hey, look at what can be done with our engine". The demo sorta implies that this something that can be done easily and be used in the game. Then you grab the actual demo check it out, and found out that it has some custom solution that is developed from scratch and is beyond skill of ye average gamedev wannabe. So it is more like "Hey, look what our team of artists/engineers could do with the engine they're very familiar with".
     
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  38. neginfinity

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    There is a node in material editor that allows you to deform geometry from within shader.

    In general, you'll be better off reading documentation instead of asking anything on UE4 forums.

    There ARE however, tasks for which unity will be more suitable. Completely custom shader setups are one of those. Both engines have strong and weak points.
     
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  39. Deleted User

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    @neginfinity

    Well the "butterfly" demo certainly was, they were using a 64-bit editor that wasn't available for a long time after. They even used APEX from what I saw http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/355763/physicslab-apex-where-are-the-unity-4-features.html

    If it's missing features you need core access to match, then yeah they're pretty much pointless.

    Although the blacksmith demo was fine, didn't have anything in it that I didn't already have / or make. Doing stuff like shaders is part of the fun, I just wish I had the time to spend weeks if not months perfecting water / river / skin / volumetric stuff and doing lighting approximations. Because personally I find it fun..??

    Although, it takes a lot of time to understand how to do it and there are other engines that come with all this stuff. Which requires nothing more than selecting a checkbox and / or setting up a simple material.

    I agree with what @Billy4184 is saying though, they would be far more impressive / useful as an actual game (Like some of UE's stuff (FPS MP demo, H&S demo). Imagine taking over Adam and going on a rampage? :D
     
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  40. ToshoDaimos

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    I'm making something like Minecraft. I don't need "node in material editor". I need fully procedural, flexible meshes which are supported DIRECTLY by Unity and apparently not supported by UT4.
     
  41. Deleted User

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    Well that's great, you found the engine that works best for you and that's all there is too it. They all have their up's and downs and every project is different.
     
  42. ToshoDaimos

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    UT4 is highly geared towards FPS and TPP action games: shooters, those Batman games etc. Unity has a more flexible architecture and good low-level APIs which can be built upon easily. Working with C# makes you VASTLY more productive than struggling with C++. I have many years of C++ experience and I still prefer C#. In C++ you must be constantly aware of so many subtleties and it's so easy to create nasty bugs.
     
  43. Player7

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    Yeh it is about the workflow, provided tools and performance on the development side.

    On the gamer side its about implemented gameplay/ features, performance and an extent the visuals ..so whole comparison of art assets in both engines is really just showing the subtle differences in lighting/shadows/shader materials.. I mean who cares about that, its one area where you can tweak endlessly to get the desired look without any negative tradeoff other than time involved to get it to where you want. Where as performance and gameplay requiring coding and can often be tradeoffs with some engines and time involved tapping into third party frameworks, assets, knowledge base etc. So I'd have been more interested in a benchmark test average fps..light baking times and total time it took to add all assets and scene/gameplay setup.. It was just a general screenshot comparison which I think Unity won on the overall, glass and reflections on Unreal weren't as clear -little too dark, though background elements and shadows were more were visually clearer in overall scene contrast because they were darker, where as Unity everything was generally brighter including areas that would have looked better with more shadow, maybe little more dusty/bloomy, as someone mentioned the piano keys lost detail because they were so bright white(bit like unity splashscreen now :p) .. if it wasn't for Unreal's windows looking off I'd say it looked better, but it didn't so no kinda subjective though. And the fps performance matters alot as no point in good gfx if the player has to lower it to get better fps, so how well the engine handles tons of physic collisions, lots of animation, particle fx etc.. to me Unreal like Cryengine is definitely an engine to consider if you have team or studio with someone who likes c++, personally I can't stand the language, nor do I like blueprints other than in key areas like material editors etc.. but not gameplay/ logic. Unity is clearly ahead of the competition right now in ease of use with its c# component framework, assets and knowledge base, though finding threads to problems and feature requests 4+year old and wondering wtf such things still don't have such things built in or improved ie in editor or framework functions, is to say the least annoying.

    I know, perhaps you took that post too seriously.. I was joking, besides if anything higher version numbers like chrome are stupid, considering the bug fixing and features are a pathetic joke for a large overvalued company.. aren't they at like version 50 now its just sad that it often causes others in the industry firefox to follow suit with stupid versioning. I guess if you ever make a piece of software its release version should be at whatever the current leading software version is at release time, and be at +10 version ahead of it by the end of the month. Because the psychology of manipulating and hassling people enough times to do what you want generally works well, of course the backlash comes when they realize it wasn't worth it.

    I hope you didn't take my remark about the pixels being more sad either, dare I say Unity pixels are a little slow, but that is a compromise I'm generally fine with as doing similar in other engines would be slower to achieve in some pixel cases.
     
  44. Deleted User

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    Not at all, it's "UE4" by the way. UT is Unreal Tournament :) which is very much geared towards an FPS :)..

    You can make anything you want in Unreal and pretty much never have to touch a line of code if you don't want to.. I do like my C# though (well Unity's version of C#) can't deny that.

    Although again, C++ in Unreal isn't like for like with C++.. All memory management and GC is taken care of for you, it's more akin to a scripting language.

    Not that any of it really matters, use whatever you're comfortable with.
     
  45. ZJP

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    My point of view.
     
  46. neginfinity

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    You don't need them.


    I also think that voxels should be rendered by raycasting, but that's just my opinion.
     
  47. neginfinity

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    That's nonsense. Just because it has ACharacter, it doesn't mean it is geared towards FPS/TPS games.

    Do you really want to start another one of those threads?
    Last unity-vs-ue4 comparison I wrote had 30 entries in the list, and ended up in a draw.

    I'm familiar with both engines. Unreal has way more stuff out of the box which needs to be purchased in unity. And unity is taking its sweet time fixing mixed mode lights in the meantime.

    Speaking of the languages, I prefer C++. Because I know those "subtleties", and find language way more pleasant to work with than C#. Frankly, I would prefer to deal with C++ API instead of C# one.
     
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  48. tatoforever

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    You meant UE4? If so then you are very wrong. UE4 is a general purpose engine, pretty much like Unity, isn't geared toward any genre. You create any type of 2D/3D content with.
     
  49. ChrisSch

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    lol that's exactly what I think every Unity demo. I mean they look absolutely great, and I'm amazed by the potential, but every time I see one I'm like "Yeah, and how many custom solutions and shaders did it need to make it look like that, which an average dev can't do? Can it even run on an average PC?". :D I personally am terrible with shaders, and I don't have time to get into learning that skill set atm, no matter how much I'd like to.
     
  50. ToshoDaimos

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    That looked interesting. I tried to run it on my laptop. I got around 5-10 fps on average. Minecraft is not known for high performance but even on my machine I get close to 60 fps on average.
     
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