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

I am not sure the shaders lightening maths are exactly line by line of code are the same behind the scene. Or the integration of PBR shading with lights in the engine are exactly the same to produce the final look we have with both engines running a demo.
They are very similar , but not exactly the same.

This is it, we recognize UE4 scene at first look. The overall visual looks better, it is a whole package from PBR, GGX, Lightening, post effects.

I agree, it's easy and out of the box high end graphics with UE4, while you will not reach the same level with Unity battling a lot with plugins and adjustements.

 

This is getting ridiculous because these things are artistically subjective , gritty or clean , new or old etc, I posted a pic of a car where the metal was not super polished and hence not as reflective and then some posted it doesn't look metal enough, like plastic or paper or whatever. So I can change this be be more reflective like as if the car had being freshly polished in real life .. and then others will say there is too much specular? So what is right and what is wrong?

Here is a real photo of some piping, so what is this made of? I would love to hear all the answers , is it plastic , is it metal , paper , jelly maybe?



Here is the car with a more reflective body , so is a super polished car paint the only thing that looks gamey? Or a totally gritty rusted car? .. Surely there is some middle ground along the way and its based on the scene and artistic preference. Who says what you have decided is the best gamey look is how everyone else perceives "the best" ?

This argument is going to keep going in circles because it is opinionated based on personal preference

 

Did you have a look at the two corridor pics I posted? If you can't see any real difference there, beyond some materials settings, well I just don't know what to say..

 

Well then you need to read up on it, it's not Unity who made the equations. Also if you think PBR by itself makes a massive difference you'd be wrong again. CryTek did a showcase showing differences between PBR and standard non PBR shading.. You wondered whether it was enough to care in some instances..

Another example is Modo only recently swapped to PBR workflows, there were tons of realistic renders before PBR became a "thing".. You can affect the look of a scene far heavier with post processing.!

What you're seeing is an accumulation of everything, simple fact of the matter is UE uses a lot of technology Unity doesn't. Sure the core basis is the same, but Unreal trades GPU cycles for quality.

Imagine using full blown real time cascade shadows maps on a mobile etc.? PC's have enough issues.! Watch below, it explains a lot:

 

I did see the pics you posted. The two scenes are vastly different (yes in material settings and lighting and art assets )and as such are a poor example for comparison of internal rendering algorithms/ post effect quality.

 

It sounds like you're trying to hide in generalities. If you have better examples please show them. I seem to be the only one bothering to find high quality examples of both Unreal and Unity for others to shoot down.

If you can't recognize fundamental differences until the scenes are exactly the same, then yeah this is going to go round the merry-go-round.

How about the pic I posted before of Pamela, and the pic following I posted of that simple scene in Unreal? It makes Pamela look like a mess of strange specular reflections.

How about this:



compared to:



or are they an invalid comparison because one is red and the other yellow?

 

Or this:


compared to:

 

I was always referring to PC games, no mobile.

They are not the same, with UE4 it's high end graphics out of the box, no need to buy more plugins , no need to struggle days tweaking shaders or post effects.

This is the same lightening issues as Unity 5 first public release, and this is how you recognize today that a scene is from Unity and not other engines.
Also post effects and lightening in UE4 make the scene and objects blend really well together.

 

There is no doubt that even to me the Unreal screenshots look very good but why do all of the UE examples seem to be of long metallic corridor areas? Are there no examples where both the Unity and UE examples have the same basic scene?

EDIT: Nevermind. Apparently while I was writing this @Billy4184 posted that last comparison.

 

Actually I thought the last comparison was a pretty good one, they both look like junctions in a corridor, both the same general color and layout, only real difference is the outside vs interior lighting. It's hard to find something really similar though since artists have different directions obviously.

EDIT: Heh I didn't see your edit

Hopefully @ShadowK can help us with a good comparison, as well as a more specific breakdown of what the differences amount to in technical terms

 

Please stop comparing different scenes from different artists with different lighting and post...it makes no sense. Untill someone with knowledge of the two engines can provide a scene in both this talk is useless imo. I am actually in the process of creating a test scene mostly to see what results i can achieve in the two engines. Started from scratch so currently im modeling some rock elements to use in the assets. The scene will be inspired by diablo 3: reaper of souls cinematic intro/trailer.

 

Yes that last comparison looks much better. Not being an artist in my eyes it simply looks like the people making these UE scenes are simply better artists or at least more creative. The scenes themselves are simply more interesting or at least more complete.

A good example is the all silver with no color on the Unity scene in that last comparison. If there were some colored lights perhaps a couple red spinny lights on the walls or something like that to project some color onto the scene the environment would look less sterile IMNAO (In My Non Artist Opinion).

Normally I am not crazed about graphics. But it would be interesting to see a comparison of the same exact scene made by the same person in both UE and U5.

Actually though, wasn't there already a case study like that where someone moved from Unity to UE with their FPS game? That may have been from U4 though.

 

So now it has to be even the same artist for a valid comparison? Some of us don't need things to be exactly the same to see fundamental differences in quality. In any case, I applaud you for making a comparison and look forward to the result.

I think that's a common mistake people make about game graphics. The artist can lend a lot of character to the scene but the quality of reflections, shadows and lighting has a lot to do with the engine itself. It makes it hard for me to analyse the Viking demo, there's a lot of detail and character and great artistic work there (which is ultimately the most important thing but not relevant to the thread), but the lighting, shading and post effect (or lack of) let it down a little.

That's why I'm posting ostensibly the best of Unity's work, mainly pics from showcase demos and the best graphics games (like Pamela). Most of the Unreal shots I posted were from random artist's portfolios. If I posted Epic's own work it would be even more obvious - and the only reason I haven't done so is because I can't find good comparison shots.

 

You are kidding right? How can you compare two renderers without comparing the same scene? Just to be clear i do not think that unity has better rendering capabilities from unreal (and how can someone say that when unreal supports stuff like distance field ambient occlusion and Ray Traced Distance Field shadows out of the box and a full tested post effect toolkit), but i do believe that the difference wont be as big in most scenes as most of you people think it is.

 

Of course you can, because the differences are not artistic, and could not be artistic. If we were talking about paintings you could say that the artist was responsible for poor shadows and reflections and things like that, but we're talking about game engines.

 

Ah I see. Well the lighting in the Unity scene looks fantastic to me. It actually looks far more realistic than the UE example IMNAO. It could almost be confused with a b&w photo or frame grabbed from a real world video.

On the other hand, the UE scene looks fantastic for a game set in a futuristic outer space station / ship environment with some kind of new alloy that resists all wear & tear and always has a pristine shine. Or perhaps this ship / station is brand new having been just built. If that is the case then it could be seen as being realistic as well.

I think both are fantastic for game graphics. The Unity example gives me the impression of wearing a helmet that filters out all color or perhaps even looking out through a B&W security camera. For either of those cases it looks eerily realistic. The UE scene is more of the kind of thing I'd expect to see in a cut scene although if it looked like (for a few moments until blood and debris splattered around during combat) in game it would certainly be cool.

 

Isn't the model and texture quality part of a photorealistic rendering?!?!? Ok i think im out of this thread

 

Make an empty scene in Unity and UE4, put a PBR barrel model and some floor PBR texture, don't use Lightmass and no Enlighten, compare the scenes, you won't get the same look.

 

First of all, IMO and what I've said multiple times is that what is lacking in Unity is cinematic, gamey quality, like in the Unreal corridor I posted. Maybe to some people photorealism in games means archviz-style rendering, but to me it is the rich, cinematic visuals of Unreal's demos, or something like Cryengine's Rome. I want that style (post-process?), I want that lighting, I don't want to feel like I'm looking at a random photo.

Now Unity 5 has some sort of realistic lighting to it. If you look at Pamela, there is some kind of realistic lighting in there. The courtyard demo has the same thing. The corridor too. If you squint or zoom out, it looks pretty good, which means that something about the lighting and reflections is going well. Especially anything with realtime GI in Unity looks pretty good, and that's where the courtyard demo looks good.

But it just isn't great for games IMO, it looks like a sort of archviz lighting, not cinematic. That's why I've said that I'm optimistic about the post effects they're making, because to me it looks (in some cases) like the lighting model is sound, but to bring it into a game it needs some good cinematic tools such as good post-process.

Don't be discouraged, we all have opinions here.

Yes it is part of the rendering, but let's be real, the people at Unity didn't learn yesterday how to make good materials. Neither did any of the artists in other pics I posted.

 

Well for starters you'd have to disable Unreal's post effects for it to be a valid comparison.

 

You can do both with and without post effects and using the same HDR skybox.

 

I've had enough arguing the same points. I posted a lot of pics. Why don't some people post some pics showing why they think Unity is better than Unreal graphically, or as good? Or even better, tell us all how to make our games look better?

I don't want to put Unity down, and I'm not. Great engine in a million different ways, really the best overall from my point of view. I just want it to be graphically competitive with Unreal, with a good set of high-end graphics tools out of the box. I think we're getting there slowly.

 

What is the goal of the discussion , only looking at UE4 and Unity screenshots and say what looks the best?
Or some Unity plugins recommendations (Alloy, natural bloom, Ubber,eye adaptation, mption blurr ...) ? Unity best practices and settings for high end graphics ?

 

PBR is just a different way of achieving the same thing as a traditional approach, it was never meant to be some kind of magic gateway to photorealistic rendering.

At the end of the day, all you're doing is simulating the effect of light bouncing off a surface.

The reason PBR got so much hype is because it makes it EASIER to achieve realistic effects. Rather than trying to fudge it with specular maps and the like, you now have a unified set of equations and you just say how reflective, rough, metallic etc you want the surface to be.

Of course the downside is that it is now very hard to create unrealistic surfaces, if you wanted some kind of alien material or something, since you're now constrained by our current understanding of how light interacts with a surface.

Just wanted to clear this up as the hype around PBR has been overblown a bit.

 

Thing is, the blacksmith arguably looks much more realistic than Infiltrator does. It has more natural lighting, and sits more composed in the scene, while Unreal tries to look spectacular (which naturally is unrealistic). So, basically Unity wins the realism contest by miles.

What you guys want is unrealistic amount of GI and unrealistic post (esp. colour grading & SSRR). This is the game-y look billy is craving.

Probably going to lock thread at some point due to it being a dog chasing it's own tail. The same points are repeated over, and over, and it isn't sinking in. Unless the discussion takes a turn and someone comes up with something fresh.

While I agree PBS is touted as being the only best thing ever (it isn't - I use several non-pbr shaders in my project), it does have one useful property that defines it - the lighting behaviour on materials is consistent. For example wood near a volcano at night tends to look still, like wood, even if a flashlight is showing on it. While with a classic approach, your lights would get out of control and require lots of tweaking either to textures or material parameters. This is the single defining reason to use PBS.

The downside of PBS is the horrendous amount of bandwidth burned on it.

 

Um obviously there's more natural lighting in the Blacksmith demo, it's outside? You just compared one instance of utterly different scenes and declared a winner .. not to mention leaving out example pics.

Yeah, I totally agree that nothing is sinking in. If we can all keep it civil and constructive until @ShadowK gives us a decent example and breakdown, maybe we could all learn something. That is, if he wants to risk having this thread locked halfway through his work.

 

OK pick the shot. Any shot. Generally a Unity demo looks more like real life, while UE4 is tailor tweaked to look spectacular and over the top (like a polished marvel film). I won't say game-y because that's senseless. Since mario is a game. Guess what? look around you - real life really looks closer to Unity than UE4.

Slap decent post on and you'll get the same thing (spectacular shinies).

 

I'd rather you did it, so I have more of an idea of what your point of view is. I already posted tons of pics. Tell me, would we all rather have a game that looks like a Marvel film, or a snapshot of our backyard? Post effects are much of what I'm talking about.

 

UE4 is used in archi viz real time, why 3D artists would pick it up if it would not be able to look photo realistic ?

 

All the Unity shots have toned down lighting. Every shot you posted so far that's done in Unity looks more like real life (muted, softer) than UE4 does (metallic, sparkly). Surely you can see it with a casual glance around your room, right now?

That's one of Unity's main clients. Arch Vis.

TLDR: I don't want Unity to change. Maybe I want improvements, but I really, really need it to keep the flexibility it has. My game is NPR, but uses PBS and a mixture of others. I can't really do that in UE4 without a tweak to source because you're stuck with the lighting model there.

 

Obligatory link...

As I said, I don't want that look, not least because real-life lighting doesn't look great with 2k textures and polygon limits. We're making games here, not archviz renders. Besides, Unreal really does have better realistic lighting.

The question is, what to do about it? I'm not bashing Unity, it's been mobile focused for a long time and only recently aimed somewhat at high-end graphics. It's a really, really great engine and probably the reason I started game dev in the first place. I want it to be better, that's all. Trying to shoot down constructive attempts to figure out what is different between its graphics and other engine's graphics won't get us anywhere.

PS I'm all about flexibility, I don't want Unity to change its ability to port easily to different platforms. It would be great to have both a mobile and high-end PC setting, maybe Unreal will get there first since it seems to be aiming more at mobile now.

 

This is a good point actually. If you took a real-life photo of a scene and told people it was taken from a game, I bet a fair number of them would spot signs that "give it away" as being a render.

People look at screenshots with the conscious or sub-conscious intention of finding something off about it, and as a result tend to exaggerate real-life to widen the anticipated gap between art and reality. As a result they end up looking for BUSIER art styles rather than realistic ones. More shininess, more bloom and so on.

As a result, in-game renders end up having to look more "realistic" (whatever that means in the given context) than real life to achieve the same level of acceptance.

People are funny things.

 

Noo, nooo, nooo, nooooo! You think Unity out of the box looks more "realistic" than UE? I'll post the following again as a reminder and you tell me again which looks more "realistic". Remembering a lot of changes have happend to UE since many of these demo's came out.

Yes PBR isn't the night and day difference some make it out to be.. @zenGarden You're missing the point, the issue is things need to be scalable these platforms support more than just PC / Console and secondly PBR GGX is THE same. It doesn't mean the complete graphics pipeline isn't vastly different, but the shaders are the same.. As we all ready discussed, we put way too much focus on shaders.

Especially when were lightmapping stuff / using IBL and stacking post processing changing the overall look of a scene anyway..

 

Unbelievable that some can't accept the obvious, so that we can all stop wasting time arguing. @ShadowK looking forward to seeing your comparison and hearing about what differences and similarities there are.

 

I see the inverse, Unity look too shiny and specular on materials specially metallic ones, while UE4 looks more soften and more light absorption even on metallic materials.

I made materials to test, painted in Substance painter and export as bitmaps.
A cube


A wall


UE4 with post process, no lightmass


Unity same post effects (tone mapping, eye adaptation, reflection probe capture), no Enlighten



The scenes was made from scratch without tweaking effects (only Unity eye adaptation is strange and needed to be toned down, still too strong).
Who looks the best ? aren't they pretty similar with no lightmapping ?

I agree totally, what makes the difference is tone mapping, IBL, Lightmass, UE4 cinematic motion blurr and DOF, UE4 SSAO and ray traced distance shadow fields, TXAA and some other features.

 

Those archiviz shots are pretty useless for gaming and interactions, yeah I mean, as long and nothing moves and you don't touch it, it looks realistic. But that isn't a criteria for 99.9% of games.

Baking does seem to look better in unreal, maybe it's the materials as well.

 

You'd be wrong about that, someone made a silent hill type game with arch viz graphics (Allison road I believe) it started off as one dude then took off and recently they teamed up with Team17 (who made worms). Also as they are "real-time" arch viz demo's why couldn't you use them as a game if the performance is right?

It's perfectly possible but personally I think the closer we get towards realism, the more things look boring. I like a mixture, I'd prefer a surreal look than a bland boring every day look..

 

Yeah, I saw allison road and PT and even visage, but I'm not sure everything is baked and interactive. I believe the doors must be using realtime global illumination otherwise how do you bake the door, when it is closed opened/ inbetween.

The interactions in allison road are clever because when you pick up an object it doesn't interact with the scene, it jumps up and you look around it. I've yet to see a fully interactive game that has unreal paris quality. Unless I'm mistaken.

 

Well, it's a little odd and does require a lot of thought in UE.. Static only lighting in UE is actually only "medium quality", yes you read it right, it's mainly used for mobile games. The best way to go is to mainly use stationary lights, they can't move and you have to be careful with shadowing processes as CSM (real-time cascade shadows) uses 20X the amount of performance compared to static only lighting.

Although you can change colour / brightness and stationary lights with either mixed mode static / combined real-time shadow maps and stationary lights are the highest quality with medium performance (moveable being the heaviest lighting).

You can really crank indirect lighting / lightmass quality and CSM / RT shadow distance properties to look awesome, but as anything there is always a trade off (performance wise) so it takes a lot of messing about to get the balance right. You could theoretically make a proper arch viz style game BUT it's dependant on so many factors. Like lightmap density etc.

Think about it this way, you have 2K LM's spanned over a large scene how much cache would that take up? It could never work for outdoor scenes and dependant on the size of your game could really eat into the size of the end package.

 

Yep you are right on that one, from that view it does make sense. But then again its just a choice of artistic vision in most of screens posted from UE4 that point to that. For example if you take a look on Koolas stuff from UE4, that is what people should really be posting here as correct term of "photorealism" and where UE4 really does win flawlessly and my personal view is by his work is where he pulls out of engine really where what Unity simply couldnt do it out of the box, at least not in same quallity.

 

Those screenshots are also more or less useless for comparison. They look photorealistic yes, but we still can't see what the same assets would look like in Unity, which is more or less where this thread was left at until you and the others volunteered to make an actual 1:1 comparison.

And until we have such a comparison, this thread is literally chasing its tail, reguritating points made earlier. Who's to say that under equivalent conditions with the same assets and composition that the Unity version wouldn't look just as good or maybe actually look better? There's really no point to this thread until we have more comparisons like that.

 

Yeah you still didn't get it did you? I said more realistic, not more beautiful. Real life isn't anywhere like the UE4 shots you posted. Those aren't actually realistic. Those aren't what your eyes would see, but an idealised, stylised version.

I'm kind of on a mission to make people understand that there's realism and there's perceptual realism. People shouting realistic are only half right. The other half is artificial beautification. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm saying that's what it is.

If it was realistic it would look fairly bland and unremarkable. This is why, when you watch The Avengers, you see that every shot is graded like mad, has post, and so on. In real life, you'd see a city skyline and it'd be pretty boring and flat.

Understanding that, and taking a step backward from the world of just maths, helps us all understand what we want from our visuals. None of us want realism. We want something much more.

 

Agreed, kind of sounds like what I've been saying all along. This sort of cinematic tech, built on top of top class lighting, is what I would like Unity to have. I think Unity 5 took a step up with the basic lighting but lacks great cinematic visuals tools. Apart from bedroom horror games (if that) real realism isn't all that attractive.

 

No, I don't believe you "get it".. I've been on a beach at sunset similar to picture 3 (beach sunset) on that list and it does look to me like for like.. A picture below shows the subtle lighting captured between the two. I'm not saying what we want is "realism", but it has the capability.

If you believe some places in the real world look bland and "un-remarkable". Then it's obvious that not enough of it has been seen.!

 

You really aren't reading what I'm writing, but assuming. Read what I've said. It's impossible for you in real life to see that picture you just posted. Thus, we don't want realism, we want more. I did say this, super-clear.

 

Why is it impossible? It is a REAL photo, I've not a clue what you're talking about at this point.

 

Err... I kinda don't see blue haze (from unity screens) over everything in the real life.

Also, I thought it was not about realism, but about ability to quickly get nice visuals you need.

Uh, have you ever met sunrise on a mountain?

 

Because photos aren't actually realistic, they aren't what the eye sees. You know this right? shutter speed, dof, colour enhancement, exposure, lens and so on.

That's equivalent to getting much much more, like say, post FX.

 

Please keep it open until @ShadowK and @neginfinity had time to finish their comparisons. I'd really love to see those.

Until then I encourage everyone to only post if they have an image or video. That might get rid of some repetitive argueing and improve the thread's usefullness. Hands on tipps on how to get better realtime lighting and cinematic look in Unity are still very welcome.

 

I'm done here because it's turned into nit-picking. I'll wait for that time when I can see lensflare, godrays, near and far focus at the same time at the perfect moment in real life with auto exposure, then perhaps what I said would've been horribly wrong.