For those in U5 beta: Is PBR *REALLY* that good?

Or is it only slightly better than default U4 shaders?

 

PBR in general is MILES better than the conventional approach. I'm curious as well though how effectively Unity 5 handles it. From the videos they've shown, they only take kind of a half-way approach to PBR.

 

Yup. I'm loving 2 things about it.

1. The quality looks really nice
2. It's simple with the built in standard shader.

 

With the right artwork and lighting setup, it can look amazing.

But don't expect it to be a magic fix for poor textures and lighting/scene setup.

 

With talented artists, buckets of eye-drool better.
You can get close to the same look with third-party PBS setups in Unity 4, but it runs so much faster in our case with Unity 5.

 

Its twice as good as 4.x and previous solutions and /12 as good as it should be.

 

What's half way about it?

 

Today we've managed to completely destroy UE4's results so it's actually better. But you need to understand a correct linear workflow and have absolutely correct textures to make the most of it.

All Unity needs to do at this point (imho) is keep optimising. Speed is still a major problem.

 

Prove it. And I say that as I sit right in front of Unreal making a shader to handle the PB maps I just pumped out from Substance Painter.

Otherwise, lipservice is not just for lipstick anymore.

 

Have to say, we're getting similar results as hippo.
We got our UE4 subscription months ago, found it was pretty, but it took a lot of work getting things to perform acceptably.
We got our UT5 upgrades much later, but it was much easier to get it both to look realistic and run fast.

Of course, "better" depends on the project and the team more than anything.

 

It will come down to textures and (I assume) how well you can use shaders, but here's what is (potentially) coming. I can't really distinguish this render from a photo, so bravo to the artist.

http://www.marmoset.co/wp-content/uploads/layering01.jpg

 

It's been a while, but I remember it being something along the lines of regular texture maps plus a flat roughness slider, or something like that. They seemed to be focused on keeping it as similar to the current workflow as possible, while still being able to utilize PBR shaders.
I'm also just going by a Unity 5 demo I saw, so they might have changed their approach since.

 

I think some of you are forgetting the true benefit of PBR materials. Predictable results in different lighting environments. My game uses dynamic sky and weather and before I started using Unity 5, materials would look good in particular times of day and rubbish at other times, so I'd tweak them to get something in the middle. Now they look good (to me at least) at all times of the day and I'm not even fully using the pbr assets yet.

 

How about some screenshots or a video?

 

Pics or didn't happen.

 

I would like pics too.

 

You can see how good PBR is without Unity 5 by using Lux or one of the other PBR packages for Unity. Keep in mind though the PBR will look much better with the features of Unity Pro than with the free version. Things like HDR, tone mapping and bloom can really bring out PBR materials. Also keep in mind that the texturing workflow is completely different. With traditional shaders you can get away with your diffuse (color) map being a photograph. Say of a brick wall. With PBR, you really want the albedo (color) map to be just the colors as much as possible. All of the extra shading showing the depths of the bricks and a lot of the higher contrast will need to be minimized or eliminated. There's a pretty good video from Allegorithmic about the workflow for Substance Designer, but it's informative even if you are hand painting the textures here

There's lots of other information out there as well but it takes some getting used to when coming from the old way of doing things.

 

I would like to see some video or pictures of this too please, I have people wanting to jump ship to Unreal because of graphics (without considering much else).
I much prefer the Unity environment/workflow, would be nice to have some visuals to promote Unity 5 as an on par graphics rival. (ArchViz, so visuals matter a lot)

Cheers

 

You won't see anything from @hippocoder's project as it's a top secret, need to know basis. I've probably said too much already and can expect an assassin at my door tonight.

 

We're not ready for the reveal. The reason for this is purely marketing. No leaks until it's time. Unity are preparing a number of demos on closed beta which will among others demonstrate aspects of what you're looking for.

 

If there is nothing to see I'll go back to work on my fusion reactor which I managed to get working today


I haven't found many videos demonstrating unity 5 on YouTube. Has someone a suggestion where I could find more material?

 

Is UT5 under NDA to see more PBR pictures from people using UT5 ? Or it is too earlier to have more UT5 PBR pictures from projects because integration is sitll going on ?

OK.

 

Using beta 16 and the doll scene. The quality is there, I can't imagine how much better one could get in real time rendering. Like everyone has said, the models, textures are important and without proper artistry PBR is not a magic bullet. I think in this case it's just that you can't blame the tech anymore. It's really a matter of the artists involved.

I considered learning UE4, but I really don't see the point now. I am interested in mobile, so that combined with the new render quality, I'm good. Of course it would be awesome if it was free, but that seems unlikely for something this complex.

 

This is a choice from Unity not the complexity that make it free ot not.
And why saying that PBR will be on Free desktop at least for mobile i don't know.

 

I think assuming someone is an idiot because you don't understand something is an awful approach to a conversation.
What I meant by "normal texture maps" is that I recalled it using the typical Diffuse/Normal/Specular setup. No Gloss, Roughness or Metallic maps.
I looked everywhere though, and can no longer find that demo I originally saw. Regardless, the other videos I saw seem to indicate it no longer works that way.

 

It's great. Even the first pre-order beta versions were good enough to make the environmental modelling guy for the project I'm soon to start on buy into PBR and before I knew it he had purchased a copy of Substance Painter and changed his entire approach to texturing.

I wait with much interest to see what 3rd party developers do with additional PBR shaders once Unity 5 is out proper.

And I can't really be judging Unity 5 on the quality of its shaders alone, its the whole package of stuff they've done that improves the visual results when setup correctly that make this experience a pleasure. OK admittedly there are some areas which still cause people displeasure at this stage, often to do with performance or devilish details of GI, Lightmapping and Reflection Probes, but I've been lucky enough not to have issues with that stuff much and to mostly find everything I'm trying to do working out well for me on the first or second try.

 

Why is everyone claiming how cool it is but noone posting any screenshots?

 

In my case because it looks cool when there are decent art assets loaded into it, and I don't have permission to post anything to do with the project they are from.

Plus the relative scarcity of screenshots & videos to date makes the prospect of attempting to show it off somewhat intimidating, too much potential attention.

Also I own a bunch of Asset Store assets that are capable of some very pretty results indeed, but asset authors occasional pleas for people to post examples of what they are doing with the assets tend to fall on deaf ears far more often than you might expect.

 

I am extremely impressed with PBR in UE4. If you are doing PBR work in Unity 5 that completely destroys UE4, then I will be even more impressed. In what way does PBR in Unity 5 completely destroy PBR in UE4?

 

Looks cool to me. I don't have anything to show because I've just done some theory stuff trying to convert legacy to metallic and haven't done very good, but there are several very impressive examples of PBR in 5.x.

Have you seen a *bad* example? I haven't. I suppose if you just plop the same old textures from your legacy stuff on it then yeah, its going to look like crap. The entire Lighting, GI, Reflections, and Standard Shader combo is really nice. Big improvement to both quality and workflow, higher potential than the legacy system.

 

What's wrong with potential attention? Think of it as advertising for your projects.

 

Umm yeah, PBR is PBR...

 

Tell me that that's gonna happen this year :]

 

Well, you're not going to make Crysis if you have crappy art, no, but what PBR can do with minimal art assets is leaps and bounds more beautiful than what you could accomplish before. It won't bring your game's appearance from a 1 to a 10, but it could easily bring it to a 3 or 4.

 

Not necessarily. Performance might differ and the workflow might differ. I have no experience with UE4 on either of those (for all I know U5 might be worse! although my guess is not), but "PBR is PBR" is just not the case.

 

Yes necessarily, the whole point in a PBR shader is physical accuracy. The math is the same across the board, if it looks different in either engine someone has either screwed up the math / lighting or proper calibrated art content. Read the Marmoset guide it's a good explanation. The workflow should achieve the same end results, there's just different ways of getting there, as for performance well that's mainly down to material complexity.

If you haven't tried it in multiple engines, then I'm not sure what angle you're coming from here.

 

Why not proposing the option of Metallic and Roughness as full bitmaps instead of one in RGB and other in alpha only ?
(something more universal and open)
I seen substance had to specially write Unity exporters for that , while UE4 can dal with full bitmaps for spec/rought/metal without needing and alpha trick, but you can aslso do the same as Unity with alpha channel on UE4 if you put the right shader nodes before going to the different channels of the shader.

Why Unity don't propose some conversion tool or in the editor to migrate roughness/metallic imported bitmaps to the alpha channel of a bitmap ? Or propose a shader accepting bitmaps ?
(instead of forcing that personnal standard.)
I'm ok with that way of working, but having to migrate PBR roughness or metallic bitmaps to alphas of a texture, because we would use other 3D software app not supporting Unity specific format ; that will not result in good workflow.

 

Yep, almost same look, but not exactly , it's same for full screen effects that can look a bit different depending on teh algorithm details used.

 

Well not really the "algorithm" if I'm going to start getting pedantic on the subject, because a BSDF is an accumulation of pre-defined primitive BSDF's that are multiplied / added / scalar multiplied, we don't compute illumination. So in effect using all the above to calculate how a surface reflects light.

The only main difference between how Unity and UE4 does it is going to be in regards to Lightmass which is a Photon Mapping technology. Which we use evaluate lighting in reverse..

Again if there is a big enough difference to really notice, something isn't right.! The end of the day, it's supposed to be "physically accurate" in which it either is or isn't..

Not to say post effects etc. won't make a difference in the end.

 

I don't know how to write it's not as visual and clear as if i use successfully substance designer nodes and UE4 visual shader editor that are direct understand (until you go crazy).
Will Unity make some visual shader editor also for non coders or fast visual making ?
(but i agree with code and some help that could be done)

If we would make a custom PBR shader will it be easy ot customize the editor to accept a full bitmaps for roughness and metallic ? As by default on UT5 it's only one bitmap slot using alpha for the second texture.

 

I'd imagine they may eventually, but it looks like Shader Forge provides support for physically-based lighting.

 

In our case its simply far too soon, we don't want attention before the stuff we have done has been polished.

It's also not pure attention on what we are doing, but rather something people will use to judge how good Unity 5 is. Yes there are probably people who would jump at the chance to be a part of that at some point, but evidently not quite yet since there is nothing stopping people posting their Unity 5 output yet very few do.

 

I saw EVE online's using it
Oh god it looks magnificent

 

You mean the Eve game using UE4 ?

 

No, he meant EVE Online.