"Photo-realistic" quality rendering between Unity and Unreal 4

As an artist I'm on the fence here. I enjoy using Unity and the workflow is great; but when I look at the achieved rendering results between Unity and Unreal Engine 4, it's night and day. If you look at the Matinee Fight Scene from Unreal, it's incredible AND it's running real-time. Granted you need a decent PC to get good frame-rate, but still... If you casually browse their WIP or Released Projects forums you'll see amazing results, especially when it comes to rendering interiors.

There's a lot of great visuals in the Unity forums, but when it comes to the photo-realistic/cinemati look, I have not seen anything that comes close. I ask why can't Unity achieve the same? Physically Based Shaders and Image Based Lighting helps along with cube-map reflections, but what else is going on behind the scenes? Can anyone give me some incite and/or WIPs in the Unity forums that show the same level of rendering quality?

Thanks!

 

Looking at the video of that scene, I don't see anything there that Unity can't do. Making a photorealistic scene like that is like 25% engine, 75% "spending forever and a day on the art assets". Serious production time and talent went into that demo.

 

I agree with the time spent on putting that demo together. Like I said, even browsing their WIP threads you'll see some amazing results. You mentioned that you don't see anything that Unity can't do. Do you have any examples or threads that I can check out?

 

Well you're certainly right that you don't see examples like that very often with Unity, and I don't have any to link to. I don't really have an explanation for that aside from the fact that it does take a lot of time to put assets like that together, and perhaps Unity devs are more inclined to make games than tech demos that couldn't realistically become games? (With rare exceptions like the Butterfly Effect, which is not photorealistic but is, IMO, more impressive technologically than the matinee fight - that is to say, there are effects in TBE that I would have thought "nope, that's not possible in Unity" if I hadn't been told upfront that it was, while no such effects exist in that fight scene.)

I'm just looking at it from a technical standpoint - like yup, that's a bumpmap with specular and cubemap reflections, that's a depth of field image effect, etc. They also made a lot of design decisions to maximize the realism they're able to achieve - note, for example, that there's not an inch of human skin visible in the whole clip. It's also very dark, which can hide imperfections pretty effectively.

 

The matinee fight scene was just one example. Epic has launched a variety of demos

The matinee fight scene was just one example. Epic has launched a variety of demos; Elemental, Temple, Infiltrator, etc. to name a few that are visually and technically impressive. And from a technical standpoint you can break it down to the basics; but how do those basics come together to have a real-time scene that looks that polished?

Quite often people say that it is possible in Unity, and I believe that to be true with knowledgeable developers and time, but I have yet to see anything to back that statement.

 

Tech demos are tech demos. Unreal is a studio, their strength is going to be making art assets and showing that off. I think in terms of realism/tech demos, take a look at some of the realistic mobile games that have shipped using Unity. AFAIK, other than a tech demo on mobile, I don't know of a mobile game made with Unreal that looks as good as Unity games.

I think the ability to make shippable mobile games as complex as some of the Unity titles is impressive tech too. Just coming at it from a different direction, i.e. how much can you push low-end mobile devices to render well in a product. That's always been the strength in Unity's tech.

 

I think people are misunderstanding my question. I'm asking on how to get similar quality renderings as in the Unreal demos and a variety of WIPs in their forums with Unity. As an artist, I want to know how it's possible to get that cinematic, photo-real feel using Unity and the Asset store.

 

Infinity Blade I, II and III which are kind of iOS-Unreal Engine-Flagships.

 

Because there is a generational gap between the rendering pipeline of UE4 and Unity 4. The post-processing effects and temporal anti-aliasing are better, and it has a really great tools like the material editor. However, UE4 still has some gaps with things like translucency and lots of tools/features that aren't quite stable or finished.

UE4 would more fairly be compared to Unity 5. The difference is that UE4 puts all their current progress out there for people to play with and Unity 5 is still hidden in a closed beta somewhere.

In any case, in about 5 minutes ShadowK is going to post a few paragraphs about why engine features matter, and then Hippocoder is going to come and close this thread for rehashing the whole UE4 thing.

 

We've been through this one tons of times, these realistic demos are down to lighting (most important thing here) and shaders (materials) RLR, decent shadow algs and post processing. Use LPV with UE4 and it looks crap and runs pretty poor too, use Lightmass and it looks awesome.

Look at V-ray examples with BRDF on nothing more than a sphere with a bit of detail, it looks natural. It's not about artwork any muppet (which would be me) can put a circle around a sphere and add a pre-made material to it.

 

Even with Unity 5 I haven't seen anything that impressive with their updated rending engine. Granted it's still early, but from what I've seen is that they integrated IBL and PBS into their pipeline, which technically you can do already with a couple of Asset Store purchases.

Here are a couple of examples in the U4 forums of artists showcasing their work:
Example one
Example two

These two examples are very impressive, and I wanted to reach out to the Unity community to see if it's even possible and if there are any examples.

 

In theory, you could do that scene using Unity, but Unity would need some 3rd party plugins from the Asset Store to do it. Unity 5 should be able to do a scene like that without any 3rd party plugins, but we cannot compare Unity 5 to UE4 because Unity 5 has not been released and does not have a release date. We might as well debate Unity 6 vs UE5 if we are going to compare unreleased engines.

 

Check youtube, it's impressive.
E.g.:

And the following was created by a UE noob at 80fps (at around 3:18):

 

I concur you are comparing a previous generation engine with a next generation one. Check out the showreel and demos for Unity 5 then at least you will be comparing similar generations of engine.

 

Some google searches found some nice items in Unity :

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/rollingant-demo-2013.197148/

I'm sure there's many more that's just some quick samples

 

All I have to go on is what I've seen in Unity 5, which so far seems to be integration of IBL and PBS as some of the major highlights. With that said, I'm wondering if anyone has seen anything similar to my examples I posted above or what thxfoo posted?

 

Yeah they look nice, but they are not even close to being as photo-realistic like you get it out of the box with UE4. The dynamic lighting and reflections of UE4 alone make a huge difference.

 

All I can say is Enlighten is a gorgeous lighting tool if used correctly, it also has the benefit it can be used dynamically in some instances too.

Unless Unity has pressed the wrong button somewhere, watch this space.!

On the UE4 side, it does help they give you a demo of how it all works.

 

I have to admit, I've not seen Enlighten in the asset store. But I agree, no point comparing UE4 to Unity 4 they're not in the same ball park.

 

*cough* http://nvyve.com/our-work/interactive-walkthroughs/ *cough*

 

It's not bad, then I found this below again it's not bad, for Unity and all.

 

But will Unity 5 come close? I've seen a variety of videos, slide-shows, and presentations that has me feeling that it will not.

Even their "uber" shader, now called their "standard shader,' may be lacking when it gets released. In another post I've started, Aras said that the shader will not have subsurface or Pn-Triangle support, and I would have to write my own shader for those features. Skin shading to me is a given, and I'm sure quite a few people would like to use tessellation... and even more since OpenGL now supports it.

I feel that Unity is a base engine, and if you want additional features (which to me are standard based on the competition), you'll either need to buy them in the asset store or write your own. If you would like similar features to Unreal, you would have to buy Skyshop, Shader Forge, Playmaker, ProCore, Shadow Softener, and then some post process assets such as Candela SSRR. And then when new versions of Unity comes out, the developers of those assets have to make sure they work correctly. And then you occasionally have the headache of those separate assets not behaving well together. With Unreal all those are built-in, so they do their own internal testing to make sure everything works correctly out-of-the-box when released.

Another thought is maybe that's where Unity makes money, with their asset store purchases. No need to develop those features internally when they're generating revenue with those. I could be way off, but I figured I would throw my 2-cents in for what it's worth...

 

Look Unity has never been and I don't believe ever will be up to the top tier competition in terms of OMG GRFX and AAA toolsets, there's always too much work to get it up to that level and too many limitations in areas.

But when you're making games having bleeding edge graphics is the least of your concerns. I've spent the last two months day to day with UE4, it's buggy / bloated / time consuming and it's painful. I can do with Unity in 4 hours what I can do with UE4 in a week.

If it's just GRFX you want, go use UE4 or even CryEngine (I still think CE is far better than UE4 for realtime game GRFX). If you want to make a game, deeply evaluate both of them..

 

I spent significant time with Unreal and although they have their share of issues, it's very solid. You do need a decent rig to run it smoothly, but thats to be expected since it's an engine targeted at newer hardware. I personally would rather use Unity since MegaFiers is a huge time-saver, so I'm weighing in on the graphical capabilities.

I would eval Cry, but based on reviews it's very buggy, and there has been some complaints about their licensing too...

 

At the moment, I can't remove trees without UE4 crashing. You paint terrain some weird black marks appear all over the place, skylights get lost in world composition. Lightmass takes forever in preview sometimes four to six hours, so I simply switched it off which takes what makes UE4 look so good out the equation what about translucency / foliage rendering issues. This is only the start, but it's a beta so I don't really care.

Our rigs are 780Ti's / I7 3770K with 32GB of Ram / 1TB EVO SSD, even my laptop has a 780M in SLI (Yes I know AFR issues, so can only use one) with SSD and boat load of RAM.

Question, if it runs fairly poor in these set ups.. What's it going to run like with most of the steam communities machines 5 years in the past? This is what concerns me the most, UE3 was far more performant and not that worse looking TBH.

But back on topic, you will be able to make impressive looking games with Unity 5.0 no doubt, it may / may not be as impressive as UE4 but I couldn't really care. Because Unity is quick / light and it does the job..

TL; DR

I love both Unity and UE4, right tool for the right job and it's preference more than anything. I wouldn't of probably ever touched unreal if it wasn't for the lack of 64-bit editor. They are both capable of exceptional things, you decide what makes your life easier.

 

What's the point of this thread? You want us to persuade you to use Unity and take the responsibility off your shoulders if something goes wrong and you don't like it in the end?

 

ShadowK turned up right on time, but where is Hippo? :/

 

Lol I love you guys, haha!.

 

The rendering pipeline of Unreal Engine 3 is also superior to that of Unity 4.
And you could make an argument for no Unity game looking better than Bioshock 2007, an Unreal 2.5 game. [though that's the work of amazing artists]

Sticking with Unity because I hate the way Unreal handles lighting and how poor it is at dynamic stuff. I would like to use CryEngine but that thing is a (beautiful) mess.

Once Unity gets to the level of CryEngine 2, I will be settled. Just give me that vegetation shader with low level optimized transparency and translucency...

 

I disagree that Unity can't get on to similar levels as UE.

Microstar (Lighting/Particles):

Full Body NOT SAFE FOR WORK(Materials/Textures/Lighting):

The Forest (Actually game example of Unity Photorealism):

 

Problem with The Forest is that its look doesn't justify its performance.
Much more when It takes place in a forest where only the close surroundings are actually rendered. The appeal of forest environments is a constant feeling of density.
Notice how some trees and rocks in the near distance just pop in.
And of course, the big problem in here is that The Forest team is really talented and if those are the performance results they obtain, guess the effort it would take to some of us to achieve that.

But I am not someone interested in photo-realistic graphics. Just performance.

 

As I've been saying the whole thread, that's going to be true of every single photorealistic demo you're going to come across.

 

Well the forest is far from photo-realistic, just one of the better looking Unity games. The rust one isn't what I'd call gorgeous, IR scans is very impressive. (If that's actually what it looks like).

Some of the arch viz stuff ain't bad, where is that video of the UE4 mobile temple made in Unity? That wasn't half bad actually, not quite UE4 but good.

Foliage and terrain does tend to take up a lot of performance, it's knowing how to meet in the middle ground. Like the base pixel error setting can save thousands of draw calls..

 

If we are talking about "the need of talent", sure, but in the art department. This is an engine forum so my compliment to them was in the technical area. What I mean with talent is that they implemented rendering features that are default in other engines.

If it is about "photo-realistic = performance heavy", not really at all and all it takes is a look to some CryEngine demos. Much more when the results of The Forest are surpassed by some PS3/360 game with a much more tight memory budget.

 

The new experimental rust with all the settings turned up looks amazing. BUT it runs like crap. Cant wait to get the Unity 64 bit editor doe.... makin those large scenes more efficient will be a plus. Anyways, Unity 5 and unreal engine 4 are close enough to compare imo. Until then, Unreal will have the better rendering with its pbr and other crap

 

If you want realistic look and gameplay programming, business or other technical details doesn't concern you then I'd suggest using Unreal 4. Physically based shaders, screen space reflections and high quality post processing effects out of the box help quite a bit when you're going for realistic art style.
If you're actually making a smallish game then it might be better to use Unity because its faster iteration times and workflow. Unity would also be a good option if you were going for more stylized art style.

Theoretical Unity 5 vs Unreal 4 comparison doesn't really make sense here IMO. You can't really make anything with an engine version that has not been released yet. Both of them have great potential in the future. If you really want to wait then you'd probably want to look at the Unreal's roadmap and compare it to Unity 5's and decide which features you need more.

But all in all I guess it's easiest for you to just try both and see which one fits you better. Unity has free trial for pro and Unreal is only 20$ to try out.

 

As a new member here (this is my 1st post), I'd like to mention a few things about rendering capabilities of Unity 5 when compared with similar engines like UE4 and Creation in relation to real-life photographs:

In my opinion, Unity 5 is better compared to Bethesda's Creation Engine than Unreal Engine 4 as both (shown below) show very similar rendering capabilities in their respective games whether it be indoor textures, dynamic outdoor scenery, or skins of human characters.

Shown towards the bottom is the 'higher-end' UE4 being one stride closer in photorealistic rendering. It utilizes ray-traced shadows and an ever-maximized performance in polygon rendering techniques (the "leap" to photorealism currently goes to ray-tracing engines like Octane Render 3 & Brigade 3 which use triangles as part of optimization).

Honestly, unless a somebody's life is the universe of virtual realism, no amount of photo, sensory, physical or even quantum realism is going to completely replace "good ol' nature" -- the humanity, natural beauty, and meaning we live for.

1. Unity 5 vs. Bethesda's Creation (respectively):

VS.
​

2a: In-real-life (IRL):

VS.​

2b: Unreal Engine 4 lighting analysis source: http://polycount.com/discussion/149632/forest-lighting-study







Bonus (extra stuff to think about):
--- Euro Truck Simulator 2 powered by Octane 3? Here's what it would look like: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLyhma-kuAw
--- Brigade/Octane Engine capability demos (share same basic coding, by same company):

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y
   
2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXZ33YoKu9w
   
3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aIl4VMyzxo

--- Unreal 4 online manual for Unity developers: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/index.html
--- Unreal 4 manual (expert user-written book): http://www.kitatus.co.uk/master-the-art-of-unreal-engine-4-blueprints-book-3/
--- Article analyzing future of real-time rendering game graphics engines (i.e. ray-tracing): http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/1...tracing-the-next-big-thing-in-gaming-graphics

 

Like it actually matters, rendering technology / lighting / post / particles etc. etc. are all far superior in Unreal and that's not an opinion either.

But if you actually made games, you'd realise quickly how much you have to dial things back for mid range / console platforms loosing most of the benefit. Even AAA games don't look anywhere near as good as some of the renders that come out of UE4 and there's a damn good reason for that (performance if you haven't guessed)..

Even if you have the artistic skill (both technically and modelling wise), you'd never pull off the full strength of the engine in any game worth it's salt.

I'm 100% sure some of the greats of graphics working (or going to work) at Unity could probably beat Unreal, but it's relatively pointless for anything but a showcase.

PAMELA is a good looking game, in fact amazing for an indie. But in terms of games holistically it's nothing graphically special and neither is Fallout 4 for that matter. P.S that screenshot you showed isn't exactly the best, want some true UE4 power?:

 

I think that chasing after photo realism is a waste of time. Photos are static, and games have movement in them. So it is possible to make awesome looking still that will look fake when things start moving. It is possible to do the opposite too - make a game that looks great in motion, but not that impressive on screenshots.

Speaking about Bethesda's creation engine @Results_45 mentioned, if that's the tech used in Fallout 4, then its rendering results look like complete garbage indoors, or when applied to dynamic characters (skin looks very dated). They nailed outdoor look, though, but it is mostly texture detail and not lighting.

That sorta reminds me of richard burns rally. The game looked quite awesome when released, and had pretty much photorealistic environment around the track. The thing is, environment around the track was pretty much unlit. Just pure texture detail and nothing else.

 

I somehow think that ops main intention here was to promote a "Look at unreal's kewl graphics, unity can't do it, unity sux". Forgive if i'm wrong though, but that's just the main vibe i'm getting here

 

Visuals in both UE4 and Unity are just meshes and shaders. The things most people are looking for for "photorealism" or generally good visuals are:

1. great post fx chain, this focuses on excellent tone mapping and antialiasing. Currently Unity doesn't really have either handled the same way.

2. The baked lighting is flat out better from lightmass and UE4 than the results you'll currently get from Unity, mostly because enlighten isn't all that at baking.

3. The realtime lighting is flat out better in UE4. From AES profiles to being able to set up for real world values to generally just having far better shadows, UE4 wins hands down. Unity really do need to address it.

Assuming realtime only, then you should if you're talented with shaders, get ballpark UE4 results in Unity. It's just far from being built in at this point.

But if you look around, choose post wisely, have decent tonemapping you can be pretty similar level of quality for a fixed target platform. If you go for the pc elite with quad gpu setups, then Unity isn't going to keep up. But that's pretty unusable performance wise for most people.

 

Plus all the advanced tech like distance field ambient occlusion for one of MANY. Here's the thing, even if you are a "shader wiz" AAA + graphics aren't that simple (even if the artwork is amazing), or Unity would of just had them out by now working amazingly. Or on the asset store etc. if possible..

It's many months of work.. In UE if you want SSS for ice / or POM for terrain it's a drag and drop node / drop down from the material editor. There's many shading models available to you in-built..

Whilst in Unity you can get away without knowing shaders at all, in Unreal you can't do the same. Although it's far simpler in Unreal to create materials and graphically enhanced components than Unity. If you're learning from GPU gems for example, you can just add custom code nodes and try different shading models too.

So one of the big differences is how easily accessible graphical components are, in short it's easy to make it look good if you're at least an intermediate level developer. Which makes a massive difference..

 

Well, unity had "Blacksmith" demo. I don't like it, because although it looks great (despite atrocious music choice), it is very dishonest. It is 100% result of great artistic job and 0% result of selecting this particular engine.

On other hand it is easier in unity to create raycasting voxel rendering shader and plug it into lightning pipeline. Unless I'm missing something, Unreal 4 works aroudn few predetermined situations (like surface shader), and jamming something extra or working with pure HLSL/GLSL/WhateverSL in there might not be that simple. Haven't done that yet, though.

Of course, nobody cares about writing raytracing voxel renderers and people just make minecraft clones out of polygonal data. Which defeats the point.

 

Don't get what octane has to do with game engines discussion. Unbiased render engine will always beat any game engine still screenshot hands down for quality.

 

Well, it's relevant because it's a smooth 30fps on a modern high end GPU right now. And to look that good on the same GPU without isn't much smoother. In a few years, path traced game engines are a concrete reality. This is where everything is going.

Everything we do today is just an approximation to deal with cheap hardware. That's changing.

There's a tipping point where you want more lights, better shadows, better reflections and so on and you want that at better quality. In the end, it turns out comparable performance since you're doing so much raycasting in shaders you might as well just raycast. The whole move to 4K rendering will hold it off for now. But for how long?

 

Well yeah, kind of.. They did create an atmospheric scattering system and the skin shaders were cool. But it was still Unity and nowhere near on the same playing field as tech showcases from CryEngine, Unreal, Snowdrop and / or Frostbite. First time I saw the Quixel showcases in CE and / or Unreal in realtime was one of the first times I've been truly impressed for a long time, BS wasn't one of those impressive things. Another well it's good "for Unity"..

Not that I'm slating Unity here, because as I said further up playing tech top trumps is great when hardware can run it. I'm not sure many would be happy if Unity said, you want to use our / post / lighting / shading model system? Then you'll need a GTX 980.

I got UE4's Nvidia branch and VXGI whith all the post looks amazing, I mean it is probably the best real time GI I've ever seen bar Pathtracing / Photon. But the I was getting 30FPS on our 980FPS cranked, lol!.

On the HLSL code, no it's not quite copy and paste easy it does take some messing about. But it's pretty cool you can create your own shading nodes and plug into the rest of the material editor system..

 

LOL you guys are hilarious, most of those octane render animations use GPU farms, it will be decades before you can get that and performance in a game on one machine, not to mention the memory limitation is significantly less on a gpu than a cpu, which is why sadly cycles on gpu isn't always an option.

 

30fps is not smooth at all

 

Supposedly 60fps is pretty bad too once you've tried 144.

 

It's pretty obvious that lighting is the main difference. I haven't really used Unreal although I have had a good look through their tech demos and games when I considered learning it. But all I have to do is open Substance Designer and compare the way it renders my models to the way they look in Unity to see that lighting can make a world of difference regardless of the quality of the art.

That said, Unity is unbelievably better looking now compared to before, and that plus the ease of use makes it a killer engine.