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

What are your suggestions to improve this Unity scene ? Tweak shaders roughness ? (materials lakcs light absoprtion). The lightmapping is strange, i don't see lot of GI.

 

There doesn't look like there's too much GI, because I think I overdid it with the contrast.

It needs a few more passes at the material. I think I just went through all them once, but it was just to make sure there weren't any insane values. Most don't have a roughness map (some maps were configured differently).

The GI bake is rough. This was one day of work. Ideally this would be an overnight bake. If we are going for max quality maybe switch to final gather.

And the post effect needs tweaking. Plus I think I was using 5.2? You could add the SSR filter to it now. (btw I think the Unreal version has extra lights all over to make the GI look better, I wasn't using extra lights).

Tweak everything, find the balance, make it look good.

It needs someone to spend more time with it.

 

All post-procesing effects can be switched on/off. Nothing is being forced to the user.

 

We can't compare anything then. Unless it's the exact same scene and exact same assets and exact same lighting.

So all Unity games don't look better or worse than any Unreal game, since you can't compare scenes that doesn't use teh same lightening and mood.

 

Nothing shines through walls as shadows is used to mask light reflection, maybe you are confusing with the flashlight spot (there's a spotlight + a point light that is used to lit stuff close to the character, you can see it at the very beginning of the video). The way we compute spotlight is a bit different than what Unity do, we can actually have one bounce point light on every spotlight as they are computed basically the same way (spotlight then applies a camera space cookie texture)
The way I compute reflective is simple, we add the resulting reflected fragment to the base color so if the area isn't lit then you won't see any reflections at all. It looks to be done through a Fresnel term but is not, you don't really need it using the described way (and it's way cheaper and faster).
But I'm afraid we are getting way off topic, we should probably leave it there and start a new discussion if you want to know more about it.

 

Because comparing a space scene where there is a lower light intensity, less GI can't compare well with a sun light day scene.
Let's get some assets, some walls , one directionnal light and two point lights with same light settings. This is the best way to compare.

UE4 needs less time to have a scene and lightammping , materials look good from start.
This is why i would not battle with Unity to reach high graphics and i would pick up UE4 if high graphics was my game goal.

Your game looks really good for a mobile game, it do as good as some Gameloft ones. About water it looks good for a game, fast enought to run on mobile, interactive water, why would we need to make it looks more realistic when it looks good enought.
Anway this is that annoying and distracting lens dirt on your game that destroys the game visuals overriding the scene graphics

 

Yeah I agree, we don't need the same scene or same lighting, I think it is enough to have the same general setting, e.g. indoors/outdoors and generally similar sorts of materials.

I've been looking at Pamela pics again, I think possibly the main thing missing is great post-effects such as tonemapping. The GI/baking isn't perfect but it's allright:



It would be good to see it with the new post effects that Unity is working on.

I'm not sure what Pollen did differently, but they need a bit more of what Pamela has. I heard they only use realtime GI so not sure what they did for interior lights, maybe that's what.

 

So does anyone think that Unity 5 will attract some decent-size AAA studios? If not why not?

 

What release of Unity was Blizzard using for Hearthstone?

 

That scene, the unreal version, has a bunch of extra lights placed and custom created shaders for that scene. A ton of reflection probes.

It has work put into it. Work that goes beyond the assets. If we want to convert it to Unity and give it a fair shot, it needs the same amount of work. So I don't know about that "looks good from the start" business.

But we're going in circles again.

My general stance is:

If you can't make a good looking game in Unity, the problem is you.

Unreal has more graphical capabilities. But it's not the "magic" that people present it to. The examples people bring up have work behind them. It's not you import a mesh and clap your hand and... magic.

I don't like enlighten, I might even hate it. But at the very least it's usable in Deferred/Linear. <- If you can't make something look good, the onus is on you.

 

I should have clarified, I'm talking about games with 'photorealistic' graphics - whatever that means to you but it sure ain't Hearthstone.

 

I'm avoiding the question (I don't have an answer, really).

But using the same engine as a AAA developer doesn't make you a AAA developer and it doesn't mean it's the best engine you should use.

 

Um yeah we all know that to make photorealistic graphics you need some serious artistic skill. I'm working on it

But there are fundamental differences between the engines. Frankly the more I look at that pic I just posted above of Pamela the more it looks like porridge. Yes maybe it was badly set up, maybe this maybe that, but overall the game looks like someone tried to cram an average archviz render into a game. The lighting looks pretty good in a way but totally fails at gamey graphics:



The same with the courtyard demo. I'm optimistic that a good postprocess setup, especially tonemapping, would go a long way to fixing this, we'll have to see.

 

I think I get what you mean, but I think it's something they wanted? I don't really think it's inherent to Unity, or that it can't be worked around. At least I don't see "that" in the stuff I do, but I get there are pitfalls that the way Unity is setup that you can get to certain "awkward" spots.

But that's more of a thing of having stronger "defaults" than the actual "capabilities" of an engine.

 

I hope so. Here's a quick piccie of a simple Unreal scene, hopefully similar enough for a comparison. I know which one I would put in my game.

 

Annoying lens dirt is a personal opinion. Some people like it and some people dislike it, that's why we offers the choice of disabling them all.

 

I think your game looks great (including water) and is one of the best-looking mobile games I've seen, everyone who isn't looking at this thread with PC-eyes would agree. Sure we all know that the latest gadget can run the whole kit and kaboodle but obviously you need to cater for a wide variety of devices, so I'm pretty impressed. It isn't photorealistic but obviously it wouldn't be considering the platform you were aiming at, as you said yourself it isn't meant to challenge high-end unreal graphics. I think you just posted it where people were expecting next-gen eye-popping photorealistic shots.

 

Look, it's a DX / GL API with a bunch of tools tacked on, it's nothing to do with and / or ever been anything to do with capability. Every engine is capable of being the exact same IF you have the team to be able to do it.

Even then you have to question is it worth the time? If you have shading models, great lighting / shadows / material editors and post at your feet then why bother?

Isn't that what engine is supposed to be though? A tool to save time, if you find said engine is causing a roadblock to get to your finish line then its time to switch.

 

Have to agree with this one, lighting and scene does look very archvizy

 

The whole scene looks too shiny, too much lightening bounce or specularity everywhere.

This leads me to the same conclusion each time i compare Unity graphics with UE4. Unity ligtening is too shiny or too specular, GI bounce is too strong, PBR materials have too much specularity or light reflection, while UE4 materials have a really good light absorption and don't look so "specular or shiny".
I don't know if Unity post effects can counter balance this ?

 

But if you are going for a "look" that isn't the "Unreal look", you'll have to do roughly the same amount of messing around as in Unreal.

Unreal has strong defaults, but those defaults push you towards a certain "style". If you like that, then great.

The only "real" problem that Unity has right now is enlighten.

And while lightmass is better, it has its own set of issues as well (getting GI from emissive materials is almost impossible for example, at least in the version I tried)

 

I see that and I will admit it has a certain coherence that the PAMELA pick doesn't. Not sure if it's the "Engine" that is making the difference, or artistic decisions. (the unreal one is a clean matte environment, PAMELA one is a mess of reflections, makes it look chaotic).

 

They might not look so 'specular or shiny' (Unreal 3 did) but there's definitely something off with Unreal's specularity look, as if it was too blurry and blend in a fake way with the surfaces. And something about the fall-off often ticks me off.

Outside of the famous AAA in-house engines, CryEngine is the only engine with reflections that do not rub me the wrong way. Unity still looks gamey, but Unreal still feels fake and blurry.

As an example, this:

Compared to this:


Though I perceive some amount of chromatic abherration in that Unreal shot.

 

To make good looking photorealistic games, you need two things: Engine graphic features and good technical artists. Unity doesn't give you out of the box tools to make your game look pretty, you have to dig into Unity shaders (including the CG include files) but it gives you lot of flexibility, even the choice to create your own renderer. On the other hand Unreal gives you a vast amount of material profiles that cover any kind/sort of surface and you still have the material editor to create custom materials (based on those profiles). Rendering in Unreal is a bit more unified that's why it's easier to come out with pretty good results quickly.
Still, soon mobile hardware will have enough power to run desktop games, Unreal and CE (even LY) are catching up slowly but I still feel Unity desktop needs to catch up even more.

 

Well we agree about Cryengine but Unreal looks far more gamey than Unity, at least in the shots I posted above. Gameyness is Unity's fundamental problem IMO.

Spot on, Unity needs out of the box solutions that compare to Unreal. Like @ShadowK said you can yank Unity around to look like Unreal if you have source/a lot of technical skill but who wants to do it? I don't. I came to Unity because of ease of use.

And the Asset Store is no excuse. That place should be for art, genre-specific tools and whiz-bang stuff like procedural toolsets, not fundamentals.

 

Most games in Unity uses gamma instead o linear because that's the default on Unity. It leads to overbright lighting at almost any conditions. On the other hand Unreal is by default (on Desktop and Consoles) set to Linear.

 

I agree that it's a bit shiny and I get what you're saying about Unity games often being too shiny. This isn't necessarily a flaw on Unity's part though. Unity is doing what it's supposed to do and if objects look too shiny it's usually because of the art assets and textures themselves, or simply what the artist were going for.
Part of it too I imagine is that when you get a brand new toy like PBR you want to try it out and its easy for artists to go slightly overboard (like when they first discover lens flares or bloom lol) but this isn't necessarily an inherent flaw of Unity.

Although it would help greatly if the standard shader didn't hide the damn sliders when you use a metallic/smoothness texture and instead allowed you to tweak the levels in the shader instead of having to manually adjust the textures. Now that's something that makes me rage.

 

It's a hidden option lot of people won't take note.
This is why i talked about project presets when you create a game. You choose mobile preset or fast PC game Unity keeps foward and gamme, you choose the high end graphics preset, Unity switches to Linear and Deffered.

I think nobody want, Unity users willl tweak graphics and choose effects that give them a good enought game look.
If some user want UE4 look, he will just take UE4.

You have a solution that does not need sliders. I can't imagine a big game with lot of outsourcing models and materials and you should adjust sliders for each ot the 10 000 materials.
If you buy Alloy shaders, you get Alloy shader for Substance painter, So Substance painter materials will look the same in Substance Painter and in Unity using Alloy PBR shaders.
And you don't need to use sliders, you import your metal and roughness textures and that's it, they look the same as you painted them.

Perhaps there is some people that uses too much metallic or specular with Unity, thinking it looks shiny so it looks great. In that case this is a artistic issue, where the PBR materials does not reflect well the real material behaviour with lightening.

Without using Lightmass or Enlighten, when i drop materials in UE4 they absorb the lightening , it's a really good PBR shaders they have. With Unity until you buy Alloy it won't look as good.

 

What do you mean by 'gamey'?
I thought Unity being more 'gamey' meant it is less photorealistic unlike Unreal being able to achieve photorealism with more ease.

 

Unity needs to show how then, with demos/tutorials. The Viking village is the best thing they've come up with by far, and I think it helps a lot, but it all still looks a bit flat compared to other engines.

I don't want to come across as a total naysayer, Unity are going in the right direction, but there's either a lack of high-end graphics capability (within easy reach) or a lack of information on how to use it, or both.

Yeah everyone has a different idea of photorealism. But for me, we're talking about games here not archviz renders or anything. Cryengine is the epitome of 'gamey' graphics, just look at that pic that you just posted. HDR tonemapping, clean, crisp visuals, rich colors, subtle shading, incredibly cohesive and immersive, it almost makes me 'cry' with joy at the sight! it doesn't look like a vanilla photo but who would want it to be?

What can I say, I'm not a technical artist or graphics programmer so I don't know for sure what's wrong, but Unity by comparison looks washed out and the lighting lacks cohesion, at least in the scenes I've seen. The realtime GI in Unity looks great but it takes it from a pastel painting to an average archviz render, totally skipping the sort of stuff we need for a game to look like UDK or UE4. Is it post-process? I hope so, and I'm looking forward to what they come up with in that new package. This thread for me is about finding out what the problems are, getting specific and maybe giving Unity an idea of what we'd like to see graphically.

 

You said that previously, but I have no clue what you mean. Any examples?

 

I'd love to see that one without any kind of light baking or pre-computing. Pretend the environment was assembled procedurally at runtime. How good would a UE4 scene look under these circumstances? I'm really curious.

 

Probably not that great?

 

No you don't, I'm not sure where this is coming from? Diversity of examples show otherwise.

As far as I know, Unity was supposed to be putting in a ray-tracing solution for baked lighting. That'll be interesting.!

 

Unreal look, is whatever zengarden keeps referring to. As I understand it, it's mostly the "look" that lightmass gives it (the strengths and weaknesses it has) plus the way the default post effects are setup by default.

It's the "look", that you get if you get a bunch of assets, throw them in Unreal, throw them in Unity and press bake in both. It's the look a lazy developer will easily get from both. Which somehow has become a pivotal point in the discussion and I'm trying to move away from.

Yes, an experimental (no LOD support and no terrain support, which personally, I can live with ATM) version of that is going to come in 5.5. I'm waiting with bated breath.

 

Looking forward to 5.4 in a couple of weeks...

- DX12 graphics
- Screen-Space Raytraced Reflections
- Texture Arrays
- Tonemapping and Color grading

in 5.5 it says "PowerVR ray tracing lightmap bakes"

 

The SSR and tonemapping stuff are already available. The package is on github. It's in pretty good shape and it works in 5.3 as well, like, right now.

 

True. I downloaded it and played a little bit but haven't spent much time yet. Texture arrays are what I really need. I'm working on modular assets right now and making up optimised texture atlases that don't bleed is killing me.

 

Umm yup, the copy a scene preset look.. It's not exactly difficult to bend UE to look however you want it to end of the day it uses the same tech as any other AAA engine does. It's a PBR GGX shading system same as Unity, so this "look" is utter nonsense.

As for Photon Mapping, it's just a different way of doing things like ray locations and is biased as opposed to path tracing. Meaning desired accuracy can be improved by increasing the amount of photons. There are pro's and cons to all types of lighting, there still isn't a "go to" solution.

http://raytracey.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/which-algorithm-is-best-choice-for-real.html

The amount of difference a lighting solution can have on a scene is crazy! In UE you can remove lightmaps / shadow instances / technology systems to really see what each piece is doing.. Looking forward to stripping it all back and showing everyone!.

 

The sliders are needed for the same reason you can tint the albedo and change normal map intensity. Settings like those mean you can make variations for materials without having to make new textures every time. It's not a feature that will make or break quality of your material, it's a workflow issue.

As far as PBR in Unreal vs Unity/Alloy I think you should listen to @ShadowK :

 

I agree.

Photon mapping is quite different than path tracing. Path tracing is usually a brute force technique, fire enough rays and it eventually looks good. Low amount of rays produce noise. Powevr promises that the implementation will be fast though.

Photon mapping "cheats" quite a bit, but is very faster. It's usually combined with final gather in the prerendered renderers (like KRAY or VRAY etc etc). Low settings results in "splotches" and not well defined GI.

 

Probably faster on bandwidth too not having to sample a texture.

 

Yep, I understand how it works and by basis averages photon mapping doesn't stack with the rendering equation. Again increasing quality by casting a higher amount of photons improves accuracy..

Actually it's not a "final" gather as such, surface radiance is calculated in a second pass which uses the rendering equation to do intersection and stuff!.. It's broken down into direct illumination, specular reflections, soft indirect and caustics.

I believe stuff like soft indirect illumination uses the photon map instead of the rendering equation? But caustics do use RE? Hmm anyway, been a long time since I've had to even think about GI solutions in that much depth.

It's really good at reflections, it's much simpler to "get right" than hybrid path tracing solutions. It's not THE best solution, but in terms of quality it is very impressive (as seen in Unreal).. You look at something like brigade though and that certainly is a step up.

Anyone got more information on this PowerVR stuff? It seemed wholly mobile focused last time I looked.

 

They already have shown how, if Unity users can't be bothered to research or their art skills are not up to snuff and their stuff turns out too shiny, that's not Unity's fault. They've released the PBR calibration scene, they've released the PBR charts showing the exact values you need for different materials, they've released the blacksmith environment demo, and the courtyard demo, and so on. Heck this second blacksmith demo uses wrinklemaps (same tech Mass Effect uses for facial animations). In fact, here's all the blacksmith stuff.

Quite frankly, it's not Unity's job to teach people how to be good artists.

 

Then again Epic's en mass selection of demo's really did help me understand a lot of stuff. Especially how cool the particle system is.. I don't think I could of matched the amount of quality without them..

 

Demos. Tutorials are icing on the cake but demos are absolutely necessary. I didn't learn programming or anything else just by watching a video or reading a book.

I think the blacksmith demo is good, and I said multiple times that it is a really big help, but my complaint was that I don't think it compares to other engines' demos. Is Unity capable of more? Show me.

Anyway, I think Unity do a pretty damn good job with the Learn section and such and the Viking demo filled a gap, before it there was nothing noteworthy in terms of graphics that I could dissect. But Epic continuously produces mind-blowing demos in different scenarios. If Unity is capable of producing something like the Infiltrator demo I wouldn't mind having it.

What it comes down to for me is the capability to produce good gamey visuals like in Unreal without a lot of fiddling around. If someone can show me that Unity is capable of it, I can do the rest myself, although a good scifi demo would be great (I wasn't too impressed with the corridor demo).

 

We were talking about the excessive shininess and whether it was a flaw of Unity or the artists. At least that's what my post you quoted was about. What you're talking about here is a different matter. And in case you didn't notice, those links I posted ARE demos. Those are asset store links. You can take the assets and see how they were built, dissect the shaders, use them for your own project royalty free, and so on. More specifically though, if your materials are looking too shiny you can use the calibration scene and chart to get the textures right.
And if you need demos related to gameplay (which is as separate thing from graphics), there's the angry bots demo, Unity Labs, survival shooter, etc.

Also, if you're not fiddling around in Unreal it's because Epic did the fiddling for you. If you need a game that looks like that then great. If you need something that looks different, you'll be doing a lot of fiddling, certainly if you're making your own photorealistic assets (in either engine). Unity doesn't do as much fiddling for you because they don't have any expectations of what you're trying to make.

 

Yeah I think I responded out of context, sorry.

About the courtyard demo, I don't think it looks all that great. It looks like Pamela, there's something pretty 'real' there but it totally lacks the rich, crisp graphics of something like the Infiltrator demo. It doesn't look like a game to me at all. I feel like I'm looking at a photoshopped photo or something.

As I said, the blacksmith demo is pretty good, I downloaded it recently and had a look around. I'm really happy Unity put that together for us because there's nothing else they've put up that looks like AAA game graphics. What I did say about it is that it simply isn't on the same level as Unreal's demo, and if Unity is capable of that I'd like to see it.

The corridor demo? I didn't like it, looks very bland to me.



Comparison in Unreal:



The rest aren't demos, sure they're helpful but they aren't demos.

 

It sounds like you're going to keep asking for demos, which gently shift in criteria until it's precisely UE4. What is the point of you using Unity? I accept there's some data in this thread to indicate what demos users would like to see from Unity's crack squad demo/learn team, but I don't think copying UE4 is the answer. Using it is, if that's what you precisely want.

I don't think I can get my game's look in UE4 without constant source code modification, because my game has a particular look I want (that I've achieved). I understand it requires source modification to UE4 if you want to tinker with the lighting model. I'm pretty grateful Unity doesn't look like UE4 (all things being equal).

The only weak part of Unity for me is actually the post, and they are living up to my expectations. I check bitbucket a few times a week and enjoy reading the commits. Next up, I'm hoping they'll add some decent motion blur. For while amplify motion is the best by far currently, it is a bit expensive once you get a few objects going.

Oh yeah, Pamela looks awesome. You should try and match that quality, it won't be trivial.

 

You're totally misunderstanding my posts. I don't want Unity to look like Unreal. I want it to look rich and gamey like any of the other AAA engines. I could post Cryengine, Frostbite, whatever pics but it would be less relevant as Unreal is the only real contendor for small-size indie teams - who wants to make a whole game in Cryengine and have Crytek reject it? Besides, Unreal and Unity is what the thread is about.

My art isn't relevant. If I bought substance database - which I'll be doing soon since I'm pretty bad at making materials - I could probably make something pretty similar. But that isn't the point. What I'm talking about is lighting and post-process, probably mostly the latter but I'm not sure.

Did you look at the corridor pic I posted above? It looks washed out, reflections look weird. Look at the pipes, are they shiny paper? What are those flat white reflections on them? You could cut yourself on those jaggies (the new post might take care of that though). If you have a look at the Unreal pic I posted there, or even better the one before that since it is even a simpler scene, it looks gamey, it looks rich, it looks great!

I want to know why this is the case, if this is the best Unity engine can offer? What do I need to do to make it look better? I'm optimistic and I think Unity is making massive progress toward becoming graphically competitive, but we need to show them that this is what we want, that it's important to us - if that's the case of course. Because there's still a ways to go.

With tools like subst designer/painter, world machine, character creation tools, massive libraries of top-notch materials for sale, it's becoming easier and easier to produce high quality art. It'd be a shame to have to become a master graphics programmer just to get to Unreal level graphics. I don't know if that's the case, I want to find out.