Just for Fun: Guess the Engine

Hi!

I tried my best recreating a scene in 3 different renderers and making lighting as identical as each one allows me to.

• One is Unity 5.5
• One is Unreal Engine 4.13.1
• One is an unbiased path-tracer with 1024 samples and 16 bounces (Blender Cycles 2.77)

Guess which is which

Mystery Renderer #1


Mystery Renderer #2


Mystery Renderer #3


EDIT:

Spoiler: Solution

#1 is Blender Cycles 2.77 - imho it makes the most of the normal maps (the actually deflect photons at different angles), though the overall result isn't as eye-pleasing. No post-processing filters.
#2 is Unreal Engine 4.13.1 - with default post-processing effects including bloom + tonemapping. Only dynamic lighting - no specular highlight on the chandelier. Detail lighting + normal maps are very good, imho.
#3 is Unity 5.5 - Maximum quality, linear color space, deferred renderer, HDR camera + tonemapping filter, no lightmaps. 10 hand-placed light probes. I think normal maps look poorly here, but otherwise it's closest to the raytraced image.

 

mystery 1 = One is an unbiased path-...100% sure ....it seems to have the most accurate lighting overal especially on and around the chain light holder.
mystery 2 = unity 50% sure
mystery 3 = unreal 50% sure

hmmm I like mystery 2 the best.. for overal lighting which ever engine it is, its not as washed out and has darker shadows which fits the room better. Even if the lighting around the light holders is bad.. its just a different kind of bad to mystery3 which is just as bad.

 

Spoiler

#1 blender
#2 unity
#3 unreal

pretty sure on all of those, not 100% on #2 #3 though because I don't use UE4.

May I take this opportunity to say that I'm very disappointed that recently the policy regarding letting us talk about other engines seems to have been changed to "lock every thread talking about another engine". This felt like a very open minded place, free for discussion of all sorts (granted, more free than I expected), and now I often can't understand why threads are locked. E.g. the cryengine bundle thread that recently got necroed, where simply was discussed whether the madison pike assets in the bundle can be used in Unity or not. To me the explanation to take it to the cryengine forum made zero sense since apparently the assets in question weren't even made by crytek, and we were not talking about using them with cry engine. Just my 2 cents. In b4 thread locked...

 

Path-tracer,
Unreal,
Unity


EDIT:
(wait, did you switch them around? I see you edited your post)
(In any case, unity is the one that has light in the shadows and Unreal is the one with totally dark shadows)

 

1. Blender
2. Unity
3. Unreal

 

It's not a very close comparison - render 2 is harshly lit while render 3 is pretty washed out. Not to mention that in a nose-to-the-wall scene like this, the textures have more of an impact than lighting.

I'm going to guess:

Blender
Unreal
Unity

But whichever engine is third, could do a much better job I'm sure.

Edit: that's better!

 

Gotta be honest here, they all look like they're straight from the original quake engine.. I'm actually impressed you managed it. It's not really testing the strengths of each graphics pipeline from end to end here ..

I might do a breakdown as well (at some point)..

 

Funnily enough the least pleasing on the eye imo is the Blender one, you'd think it would look far better than any of the others.

 

I am not sure, but I am guessing:
Blender
Unity
Unreal.
Though, I think you should have added CryEngine to that list.

 

Awww - but true. My original intent was to find out whether there are differences between Unreal and Unity in detail lighting - i.e. how they process normal maps and glossiness/roughness.

@nosyrbllewe I'd add CryEngine, but I have zero experience in it and I'm running Linux here

 

@Cygon4 if I were you I'd either remove the blue reflections from #2 or add it to #3 because it changes the whole feel of it, and the color looks more pleasing by default.

I still think #2 is UE, though they look about the same to me.

 

There are differences. Unity normalmaps are messier and produce lower quality details, and because of that you can get away with normalmap made by running textures through a filter. In unreal 4 engine this will be instantly noticeable. That's based on experience.

Unreal 4 has very noticeable reflecitve surfaces, which produce detailed reflections. On unity scenes, unity engine adds skybox glow to edges of most objects, which doesn't quite work this way in unreal 4. Then again, reflection probes help with that.

The information may be outdated. It's been a while since I made scene transfer between both engines.

-----
With all that in mind, I'd say that #3 is probably unreal and #2 is probably unity. Mostly because getting deep dark shadow is easy in unreal, and in unbaked unity scene without reflection probes skybox light makes everything blue at edges... and we can see blueish ambient in the shadow on screenshot #2.

I'm not 100% sure about it, however.

 

All I get from looking at these images is if this is the difference between these different rendering systems doesn't seem to matter which one is used. I mean sure there are some minor differences but for me anyway just minor things that don't matter one way or the other.

 

I believe he changed the images... (look how render 2 is now the washed out one)

 

All 3 of the renderers used can produce better results than any of the 3 images, so there really isn't much guessing to be done. They all suck.

 

Yes, only minor things like one of them not being real-time.

That being said I just stumbled upon an attempt to make a cycles mimicking real-time renderer for Blender.

http://armory3d.org/

 

Ha ha! You know what I meant!

Those are some nice screenshots. No idea what a "cycles" is. Motorcycles? Bicycles? Probably not.

Back on topic... I have absolutely no idea what any of these are made in. It is very impressive to me though if a person can actually tell just from one of these screenshots where the image came from.

 

Stack Exchange to the rescue.

http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/5821

 

Between the second and third, the choice seems like it's just a matter of knowing what the default settings are. You could probably get either engine to look like both of them if you knew what you were doing.

 

Cycles is a node-based rendering engine for blender that also happens to be able to render results in viewport very quickly due to GPU acceleration support.

It is not realtime, but it typically takes few second to get updated result.

 

The reason why I locked threads like the 'CryEngine Humble Bundle' one or 'X Engine has released version N.N' is because this is ultimately an official forum to talk about the Unity Game Engine (Of course, there are threads on Game Design and Publishing on Steam and such but those are more neutral and relevant and tend to be very civilised) which is hosted and run by Unity Technologies. Other engines/frameworks have their own forums to talk about their own technologies and announcements; which you are more than welcome to sign up to and post in.

However, if a thread is Unity-related/valuable and also involves other technologies (Such as this one and a great number of other threads that have happened over the years; I've probably only locked 5 or 6 other-engine threads in the 3.5 years i've been at Unity Technologies. Inb4 someone makes a tally ) then I won't lock it.

 

Okay, posted the solution

@AcidArrow and @Billy4184 got it right.

Yep, sorry about that, I ninja'd a new image #3 into my post when I noticed I had uploaded an earlier .jpg without tone mapping enabled. But there had already been 5 or 6 answers by then

Blender was a breeze to set up. Render time was 30 minutes on a 16-core Xeon system (so 0.0006 fps). Can't do GPU rendering currently because my Linux distro's cuda toolkit is too old.

Epic's defaults for Unreal Engine are very decent. That slightly colder look is because, lacking dynamic GI, I had to place a SkyLight (ambient light) in the scene so shadows aren't pitch-black. Tuning the SkyLight specifically for the candle's yellow-red wouldn't be something you'd do in a normal level, so I kept the SkyLight as normal white light.

Unity took the most tuning to get an equally contrast-rich image. Lots of tweaking with the light radius, intensity, bounce boost, indirect intensity, shadow strength and so on. Once that's done, of course, Enlighten gives you pretty good GI with no need for ambient light and other silly things.


Overall, this began as a side-by-side test for myself because I had the impression that Unity's detail lighting lacked behind UE4, but after lots of tweaking, I can't really see any big difference anymore. I'm not good enough to do a side-by-side with a complex scene using advanced materials + lighting effects, so I'll leave it at having you all stare at a brick wall

 

A new challenger appears: Guess The Engine!

 

Fooled me nicely with #2 and #3, well done. I voted before you changed the images.

I say Unity because I remember UE4's SSR to be more glossy. Looking great!

The next step should be to take the Unity scene and make it look as good as you can without changing the actual art assets or camera perspective.

 

@Andy-Touch Ah, those arch-viz gurus and their incredibly realistic surfaces

Hm, I don't think either Unity or UE4 could do the soft fall-off + unsharpen from the lamp shade next to the bed.

I'd also rule out Blender Cycles or other path-tracers because that many glossy materials in a closed room would produce at least a hint of fireflies somewhere.

I'd guess a photon mapping raytracer. Blender Yafaray or 3ds Max/Maya Mental Ray perhaps?

 

Try 2 spotlights with cookie textures and without shadow casting, one facing up and one facing down, rather wide angle on both. I'm very certain this isn't Blender, Vray or something like that.

 

Interesting that the answer wasn't obvious at first!

Spoiler

Its Unity 5

 

I could tell it was, because I've seen a few Unity interior renders, including a Unity 4 one that looked similar. Overall they look very good, but one of the things that gives them away is that there is always something funny going on with the ambient occlusion - in some places it seems very harsh and in others pretty much nonexistent.p.s. I hope this is due to the lack of quality SSR at the time these renders were made, which may be fixed now.

What I would really love to see is the Adam demo with a very game-oriented postfx setup - something that gave the scene a rich and atmospheric look at the cost of a little bit of realism, sort of in the vein of the Destiny or Uncharted look. I think it would make the demo carry a lot more weight for game developers in tems of inspiration and being comfortable with Unity's high-end graphics capabilities.

At the moment the best presentations of Unity's graphics, such as the Adam demo and the courtyard scene, look very nice in many respects but just don't show off what (in my opinion) many people would look for in terms of game visuals. I hope this is a relevant observation, considering Unity is primarily used as a game engine and not a movie maker.

 

I wouldn't have guessed but at first sight I prefer the third one, which appears to have been made with Unity 5.5.

Where did you take those assets?

 

I borrowed them from a little known game named Skyrim

 

I had recognised them. Be careful with "borrowing" assets.

 

I'll take it the textures are non PBR then? So the lighting would be in-correct from the start, the whole point in PBR is to unify the engine's lighting based on real world material values.

 

They have diffuse, normals + gloss. Diffuse was not completely cleaned of shadowing, so I did my best in Bitmap2Material for the walls and used the metalness workflow to give the chandelier metallic reflections without having to generate a specular map (and the rocks and woods would have very close to black specular parts anyway so I simply kept them at 0.0 metalness).

It's the same process I have to use for most of my assets purchased outside of Unity's Asset Store (i.e. from TurboSquid) because artists rarely provide PBR maps.

 

Quest3D? Irrlicht? No wait! Torque!

 

At this point someone should popup and say, "No, it is photo of my bedroom!" or something.

 

Compared to typical Arch Viz that image is not very good; the whole thing looks extremely flat, for example the lamp looks like it is painted on to the wall, the bedside table is oddly distorted, and the handles look like decals, Quake II wants its pillows back... very meh for me.

 

We're tech enthusiasts. Nobody would believe our bedrooms are so orderly.

 

Wow that picture is unreal for... unity

 

>,< bah! I didn't get a single one of them right!

 

I got everything right on the first look,
Somehow I feel like I should be worried

Thanks for getting me to walk outside a bit OP!