Graphical Ability of Unity?

You think Unity can match unreal in the graphic area?

I am asking because I am wanting to make the full switch, Unreal is aggravating the " e ll out of me and the bugs it has are weird and anoyying.

 

Comparison threads tend to be locked as the information has already been discussed to death and can be found with a some digging (assuming you can figure out the correct search key words). I would recommend starting with this recent thread by @ShadowK. I find he's very accurate and fair in his statements regarding the engines.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/thoughts-on-unity-5-0.307525/

 

Well you check the showcase area and see if there is something like that you are doing. Usually the question goes the other way, can You do it?

http://unity3d.com/showcase

 

Yes, but that takes a lot of extra effort and only results in a Hippo intervening.

 

My bad I am on mobile and I have a crap mobile so its hard to search.

I am just so frustrated with unreal

 

Well it's free to download and try Unity with full features

 

Input == Output

 

Well unity 5 is free with all functionality.
Download and give it a try.
That is the only way you'll know if it is going to work for you. We can only say stuff based on our experience. And that experience varies on the milage.

 

I love the controls and ui of unity much more its much easier to use imo, im just wondering about long term. as I am not a designer or animator or modeler I am just a programmer lol which is why I asked about graphic ability

 

Np. Just make sure you have good art stuff then. It's a combo but bad art no matter what you do will suck in any engine.

 

This questions is only relevant if you have one or more AAA artist(s) and a programmer that can push shaders on the graphics card to the breaking limit...

The previous version of Unity was already able to do pretty games and the new version just got better. I can agree that the default shaders in Unity 4 could have been better but all you had to do was to write your own

The real question should be, are you and the engine capable of realizing that game you are dreaming about?

 

If you think Unity can match one of the most important parts of a games look (lighting) and match it's rendering capabilities in general you are a million miles off base. Just look at the speedtree examples, there's not much going on there but it looks a million times better in Unreal.

The real question is at what cost? All this pretty lighting and advanced post etc. comes at a cost and generally it can mean the difference between a showcase and a game.

 

I think Unity can stand on its own.

 

@ShadowK - The importance of lighting depends on the art style that you want to achieve and there is more then one way to achieve light and shadows. Many are not even covered by the default tools but have to be coded from scratch.

Personally, I'd say that the use of shapes, colors and composition is way more important to art then the lighting, then we have animations for moving characters and so on...

 

In 3D, I'd utterly disagree with you!.. I've never bothered with 2D games so I wouldn't know.

Plus the difference between the two all said and done is probably not as far as some would want it to be, although no matter what you do it's a lot of work.

 

I'm not big on the whole "looks" presentation thing but even I gotta say da-aamn that looks fantastic.

 

The biggest factor in good graphics is good art. Sure, effects make it look shiny. But good art is what you need.

 

So when you have speedtree in one engine and speedtree in another and one looks much better than the other, how is that artwork? If people believe it's artwork only, best of luck because you'll need it.

 

I said it was major factor. Didn't rule out differences in presentation, however. Of course, all the best art in the world would suck without being lit properly and so on.

 

Apologies, yeah exactly.

 

Thought id post this game here (Unity 5):

 

As mentioned you need both. No amount of engine tools is going to salvage this artists tree.



So if you have access to top notch artists by all means, select your engine based on its art features. But if you don't you won't see much of a difference.

And that embarrassing screen shot out of the way, I'm back to writing code. I can make code look pretty. Stupid trees.

 

Is that an aluminium tree after you ran over it?

 

As others have said, it's not just the engine that will make your game beautifull, it all comes down to messing around with lighting/fog/art,etc,etc
The images below are all from Unity5, Indoor and Outdoor environments and I believe they look quite good.
The trees are all speedtree models moving around in the wind, etc.

 

I was trying to create some stand ins for a procedural terrain asset I'm creating. The idea was I could build some basic trees of my own as stand ins, that the user can replace with their own. The asset is primarily code, so they don't need to be perfect. But they do need to be good enough to give the user a sense of what's possible.

But yeah you can see the result, aluminium trees will have to do till I complete my code base, then I'll have to commission an artist for the actual asset. My respect level for the artists creating the scenes in this thread has just gone through the roof.

 

really nice, what game is that? My only nitpick is the bloom

Don't forget Cities: Skyline maybe it's not photorealistic, but the performance are impressive. Really curious are any of the Devs can commenting or give some insight about the game.

 

The devs did comment a lot of stuff and even Unity related questions before the release in live streams, reddit, etc

 

Ohh any links about it? kinda curious...

 

This video is playing to strengths, it's far easier to do super shiny indoor scenes than anything else (Due to GI etc.) (GUI work is rather impressive though). There's so many examples of gorgeous looking in-door scenes in Unreal, plus it's simple to do when you keep the geometry sleek and simple.

So I'm far more impressed by stuff like the blacksmith demo, which I know from experience is a hard thing to pull off even though they used terrain meshes as opposed to the terrain system. Which lighting always looks better with that kind of setup.

 

I only found one quickly but it has only some info and rest is generally spread around different sources

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2x4mf9/we_are_colossal_order_the_team_behind_cities/