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

Indeed you can do shiny metal like majority of PBR shaders, but on other materails types like rubber ,plastic, dielectric and other surfaces Unity standard shader at beginning was looking bad with too much specular , far from UE4 ready PBR.

I don't know if Unity will really get here ? How long ?
UE4 is bringing more advanced tech and tools , they have also big games they make bringing new features also, Unity can't catch the same train because they are not targetting the same people and hardware.

Do you remember the terrain survey , there is still no new terrain and tools able to stay on par with UE4 for example.What about cinematic tool , shader editor ? I baught the best on the store but it costed me money and i won't buy RTP3 or many others because it will be too much money until i would have a game that would sell well.
I could list lot more features not out of the box in Unity that makes the difference.All this is are out of the box with UE4, while Unity users will must buy all on the store. This is a choice depending on the user side.

If i would be making some Skyrim like game on a smaller scale targetting realistic like graphics and effects i would be using UE4 without any hesitation because i know i would have zero investment and have all advanced features and tools and small things that makes the difference.
While other users trying to make skyrim would use Unity and would buy many plugins to try to achieve the same result while not paying attention to some UE4 advanced features, they could target a larger hardware range players , they would not pay any royalties if their game get some good success.

If you are not making a Skyrim game but a smaller game , mobile or 2D game than UE4 is no more relevant in many situations.
As you see the choice is really a matter of user preferences, plugins investment , project scale , hardware platforms and choices.

 

That actually looks quite bad, in my opinion.

 

@zenGarden
If somebody needs those features for free and Unity doesn't have them then maybe they probably should switch to Unreal. You really should be using the best tool for the job anyways and if Unreal meets more of your needs it's silly to hold yourself back, especially since both are free. Not much different from switching between 3ds Max and Maya.

 

oh by the way, we now have this awesome post effects from amplify creations.

Amplify Bloom!

 

You misunderstood , i am not making Skyrim , and no realistic game , today only stylized game and mobile game.
But if Unity woud have such amazing terrain and some features of UE4, i would use them and perhaps would try something different or enhance visuals of a stylized simple game.
For example a stylized game on UE4 can look gorgeous (motion blurr , eye adapatation, gorgeous particles etc ... out of the box), UE4 really enhances the game visuals and has some unique features.
But UE4 is not as easy to use, Blueprints are still not optimised and not really intuitive, and i don't want to deal with royalties and it's income reporting today. Still Unity is better on 2D and mobile.

When you will target PC games and high realistic quality, this is when you will have a choice to make to buy Unity plugins or move ot another 3D engine for that project.

I prefer Natural Bloom

 

Well you're entitled to your opinion of course. I've gotten freelance gigs and job offers from that screenshot in the past though so not everyone feels the same way.

 

Well there's an easy way to test that, I always use someone else's assets that I know are good and try them in all engines.. If you noticed, you'll of never seen our artwork before.. It's not that we don't have any, cause we have tons it's a matter of keeping things consistant.

In Unity back in 4.6, we setup our own shaders with GGX. Changed lighting / shadows and made our own GI solution.. Replaced standard post effects and this is how it came out (just a prototype but whatever), someone in the team did something with particle shaders..

Umm there was a little snag though, performance was RUBBISH! Never figured out how to get it running smoothly.. So can Unity look as good as Unreal? Maybe, is it worth the effort? Hell no!.



Literally when we first downloaded Unity, stuck in some asset packs and started building scripts to test functionality this is what it looked like (all Unity stock):



Then of course I went off an a crusade to change all the tech, which turns out wasn't as easy as I thought without access to the core..

See the impact changing tech made?

 

Clarification:
I wasn't talking about geometry or texture job.

I don't like the highlights, especially on cylindrical thing in the middle. It doesn't look right and resembles "polished plastic". THAT is why I said it doesn't look good.

 

I agree, I think it looks like plastic, like something from a modelling kit - great modelling work though.

I'm having trouble at the moment getting my metals to look right on some models too. Even stock metal substance materials I've imported into Unity don't look great, maybe I'm doing something wrong but...

 

IMO Unity looks "Good Enough" we are at that point in graphics today.

Most games really fail to deliver fun and value for money. Infact my favorite game to this day is SSF2 HD Remix. And thats still 2D sprites, no amount of graphics could ever replace the brilliance of that game for, certainly not ugly SF5 and mega butt ugly SF4.

 

Well, unity shaders are responsible for the highlights, that's the reason why I commented on that screen in the first place. Because of the shaders. Not because of the modeling work (no complaints about that one).

Unreal engine in addition to the stuff done by unity apparently does something extra with reflections (probably SSR), and unity by default doesn't seem to be doing that. Basically, in UE4 editor check reflection view.

As usual, there's PROBABLY some sort of sorta-working alternative on the asset store, available for $40 or more.

 

While I basically agree with you, I find that lighting is such a fundamental part of what makes a game enjoyable for me. It just has the potential to make things pop and draw you deep into the atmosphere.

Here's an example of fantastic lighting from Alien Isolation. It is a pretty simple scene, with little color variation and detail, and from what I gather they use fully modelled geometry and tiling textures (so very little hand-painted artistic handiwork). It is likely just models and plain textures. Yet it just pops in a way that nothing I've seen in Unity does. I guarantee you, if you gave me their engine and a few of their materials I could make something similar. If that lighting came with Unity out of the box I would be over the moon.

 

I think Screen Space Reflections are enabled by default in UE4. You can get the cinematic package for Unity and do something similar, but it does take a lot of effort to put together an effects stack that works. Still nothing we can really do to fix Unity's crappy shadows, especially for point or spot lights.

I will say that Unreal's rendering is much less flexible. There's no forward rendering, so if you want to do something custom, say something like Unity's Command Buffers, that's going to be much more difficult in Unreal.

 

^ true but then if it did, Unity would not run on as many low end PC and well money is where low end PCs are. if you think League of Legends, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, WoW, DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2, CS GO. Those games made a fortune largely because it could run on practically majority of low end PC.

For me personally I do like nice lighting, but when I think about Battlefield 4 a game that looks uglier than BF3 because it was rushed for example textures in BF4 is worse than BF3, chopper cockpit for example low end low res compared to BF3 or many ingame textures on buildings, clouds look worse than BF3. All the lighting in BF4 still made it look uglier than BF3 not to mention the nasty blur but then with Sweet FX mod when you removed the Blur BF4 really starts to look truly hideous you can then really see the flaws.

Or think StarWars BF, great graphics, incredible lighting. Total nasty and downright disgusting console type game play where you only play for a few hours then toss it in the trash. I could enjoy CS GO anyday but tell me to play BF4 the only thing I can play it for is graphics and a game designed like that gets boring quick thats my issue.

 

You could do that in UE4 and or CE without too much trouble I guess, them SSR's are beautiful though and lighting is mighty sweet:

UE:





CE:

 

Or mobiles, I suppose. I think ZenGarden pointed out that Unity could have some presets for different platforms, that you can easily switch on and off.

Interesting. Can someone humor a vfx newbie and tell me how they get such good anti-alias in deferred rendering?

 

Just download Unity's new cinematics pack and slap TAA on your main camera..

 

Well I suppose the other issue, can you program in C++? one of the hardest languages to use?

I would imagine making a game in Unity and UE4 is night and day difference when it comes to difficulty

 

Damn! With decent anti-alias, deferred decals and texture arrays my life is about to be so much easier ...

 

Pffff, C++ hard.. A pain in the rear, yeah. Difficult? Not so much, anyway in UE4 all the "pain" is taken out because they built a garbage collector / memory manager into it. So it's about as difficult as C#..

Now what is difficult to understand is the API and that goes for any engine.. Needs good documentation to explain..

 

I SEEEEE

So wait a minute when everyone here was saying that its too difficult to use UE4 because you need to do manual memory managing they were lying?

So you are saying that C++ in UE4 is nowhere near as difficult as C++ in other Engines or programs?

I didn't know this holy crap. Everyone said Unity is better because it uses C# which is significantly easier than C++ so I just assumed this was the case.

 

I am saying that yes, with lack of GC / MEM ALOC to worry about. Far less rope and all that..

Sooo nah, documentation is a little hit and miss though.. Plus there are some concepts you'll need to get used to like header files. It's different sure, but more difficult is subjective..

Here:

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Garbage_Collection_&_Dynamic_Memory_Allocation

P.S you don't need to really understand that, it just proves it exists..

 

Ooh yeah seems its true after all. That really is a spectacular engine.

I would imagine Cry Engine is a whole other ballgame. That might be the hard C++ Engine

 

They were incompetent.

Yes. The engine does decent job of taking care of harder aspects of the langauge.
You can use C++ as if it were a scripting language.

Using C++ as standalone langauge is entirely different thing.

However, when you hit a lacking portion of the documentation, you'll need a skilled programmer that can read engine source code. And UE4 has other things (aside from C++) that make it harder than unity.

Unity is simpler because its object model makes more sense, and because management of assets is simpler.
As for Unity's fascination with C# it reminds me of Unreal's fascination with blueprints. I am still not convinced that using C# in the first place was a good idea.

 

^ interesting what are your thoughts on BluePrints in UE4 vs C# in Unity?

Do you still think BP is a realistic way of building a mobile game?

 

@neginfinity HEY I like BP's, it's a good way to scope out logic and then convert into C++ if it A) becomes a bottleneck or B) Is a feature not in in BP's scope.. But I just generally re-ported it back into BP's anyway..

It's component / object model being simpler is also subjective.. Coming from a long standing C++ background it confused the crap out of me initially.. It's whatever you get used to.

 

Thanks folks I think I will stick to Unity for now till i actually am capable of delivering a complete game and understand programming well.

 

Opinion:

Blueprints are only useful as a gimmic/crutch for people that can't program .

C# is better option than blueprints, but I am not a fan of the the language.

Tried them, they don't work for me. I have been programming for too long, I guess and strongly prefer text without dragging any kind of noodles o the screen. The longer I tried to use blueprints, the more I hated them, pretty much.

I like built-in behavior trees, though. But those are not blueprints.

I also have decent C++ background, the thing is UNity's "Everything is a GameObject, all functionality is a Component" makes more sense than Unreal's "Every visible thing is an AActor, except if they're in hierarchy, then they are components within AActor, except that components can attach actors, except "path following" is also a component even though it is a not a visual thing". I've been scratching my head for quite a while after I found out how AI path movement is performed. Sure, it takes time for unity's architecture to "click", but when it clicks, it is very easy. Unreal seems to have echoes of the past historical decision in it, that results in quirks occasionally.

By the way, have you ever looked into ACharacter's guts? Try that.
Also try creating a mesh from scratch in asset browser from within a C++ plugin. That's fun too.
Or there was that one time where I found out that UFbxFactory doesn't actually use *data parameter (the way abstract class was designed) and instead wants someone to pass a filename via member variable to it.
You also aren't supposed to pass parameters through constructor, which is quite amusing first time you deal with that.

Aside from moments like that, though, Unreal engine code is quite clean, though. Not a Qt level clean, but good. Still, a (programming) newbie will break their neck on that.

 

Is there really any point in using MAYA LT over Blender?

I hear people talk about this whole "intuitive" thingy and that blender lacks it but I am not sure I really follow what they mean by that.

I am guessing Maya LT tool bar is easier to use? the UI itself is just easier? or nicer looking?

 

Shouldn't that be a different thread?

Blender has occasional awkward places which might not be present in maya.

For example, setting up secondary target for a knee/elbow of a an ik-controlled limb in such way that it doesn't break original pose is ... awkward. Splitting smooth-shaded model into pieces into such way that there are no visible seams is difficult. Things like that.

Each modeling package follows different paradigm and different workflow. So it isn't like you can even properly compare them. Just use whatever works best for you.

 

Where do I get this amazing pack?

 

This is a topic that I find fascinating.

But my take is simply this:

If you want to create games for players with high end hardware and that are photorealistic then I suppose UE4 is a competitive choice.

Other than that what difference does it make.

When it comes to stylistic art choices for any realtime engine it is more about the competency of the developers.

If you take away the high end photorealistic graphics which are highly dependent on the level of hardware the end user has then all things are relatively equal.

Your goal has to be to specifically cater to high end user hardware for it to matter and not all gamers have access to high end hardware and those who do may not even care how photorealistic the graphics are.

That is just how I see it.

 

For the record, I think Alien Isolation used Mirror Reflections which are even simpler to use in any engine.

 

I changes what kind of bugs you're going to face and what kind of tools you'll have to deal with them.

 

I have yeah, but you're talking about UE's API specific game framework, not C++ as a game language.. Myself and Tato kinda disagreed on this, I thought th AActor / gameframework was un-necessary he thought otherwise.

I kind of get both sides..

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515

 

xCyborg - uhm, that doesn't have anything to do with a unity cinematic image effect package that contains TAA. Thanks, though?

 

Sorry sorry, wrong link. It's updated now but the TAA is not there yet, it's still in research.

 

Splitting seams in blender is super easy, just mark sharp and add the edge split modifier with angle splitting disabled. Although I do find animating in blender frustrating to say the least.

 

I agree. The bugs from one program to the other are different.

I was only saying that it does not make a difference because the general process is essentially the same.

Attach a material.
Attach a shader.
Attach a texture.

I love the blender cycles engine because it is photorealistic, however, that render engine is made specificallly for images and animation which are not real-time. And although blender has a game engine it is not as developed as Unity3d and rendering photorealistic graphics takes too much time to render in real-time.

I am not completely aware of the real-time render engine that Unity3d uses, but it is my observation that the process is the same but the choices of materials, shaders are more limited because game engines render real-time and need more processing power because they render in real-time.

It is my understanding that UE4 spends more time developing more advanced features with their materials and shaders and how light bounces off of objects and that they still have no standard solution for translucency.

There could be other issues that I am not aware of but that is my understanding of this topic.

But regardless, the more detail oriented the graphics are the more high end the hardware has to be when it comes to rendering in a game engine as opposed to single images and multiple animated images.

And then there is the issue of baking the textures for the sake of easing the burden on the CPU or GPU.

 

I did some more digging and downloaded unreal again. Still slow on my imac, so I figured I would need to shell out lots of cash on a windows build, quad core 8+GB of ram, windows license etc.

Whilst the default materials and lighting and shadows are gorgeous out of the box, the time investment needed to learn unreal doesn't sit well with me.Their baking is far ahead of enlighten, it much quicker as well.

I understand why there is such a fetish with blueprints, scripting by hand will take an inordinate amount of time to learn...

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Tutorials/Components/3/index.html

That page was enough for me to make my decision. So in conclusion, if you're dedicating yourself for making real money and want to invest in learning to code outside of blueprints unreal is probably for you. For the time being, baking inside blender and maybe purchasing a few assets, uber shader looks particularly good... The only thing is since cycles is path tracing it doesn't bode well for interior scenes, even with portals and baking on the gpu, one thing is for sure though, the bake plugin on cg cookie is ridicously useful. Glad I purchase that.

Still wish unity would improve their lighting and shadow anti-aliasing, but with heavy image processing effects you could probably get away with it. Well that's my take. Still holdng my breath on the cinematic package pre alpha.

 

What would you guys say would be a good showcase scene for Unity to push the limit in terms of photorealism? Is there any area where you think we might have not yet seen the engine used to its fullest potential? With "area" I mean things like archviz, nature, sci-fi corridors, large scale terrain, space, etc..

 

There's "Viking Village" scene on the asset store. Check it out. Also assets from Blacksmith demo are available.

Here's the thing though: the viking village doesn't use most of the engine technologies, and, for example, does not even bake lightmaps. Lightmap baking is disabled in the viking village, possibly along with realtime gi.

Photorealism is a wrong target to chase. Regardless of the engine you chose, it boils down to large amount of artistic effort and that's about it.

I remember richard burns rally being quite photorealistic for its time:

And it doesn't even use very awesome technologies. Just a lot of quality texture work, pretty much.

 

Could one say it makes the most of the parts of the engine that are not broken? ^^

Why do you think photorealism is a bad goal? I used that term because of the thread title, what I really mean is Hollywood-movie aesthetic.
I agree that large amounts of artistic effort are needed. Let me phrase my question differently. I'm contemplating making a little non-game showpiece in Unity for my portfolio. Something like a room or a small outside area to walk in and admire the graphics. Something that gives me a good reason to create high quality assets. And ideally something where there is room left to push the boundary of what has been done with Unity.

 

Neither of those look good. Not sure what the point of this post is? The assets themselves just dont look good at all.

If the assets were better quality, they would both look better.

 

Well quite a few of the same assets were used in Witcher 3 (Manufaktura 4K packs), so it's great to have your opinion. But I'll agree to disagree there..

First pic looks absolutley fine to me.

Point was, shaders and lighting can make a major difference.. I was using a third party pack as reference so I can compare like for like..

 

I think this is a good idea, I've been exploring archviz, and for the longest part I was getting frustrated with unity's baking, no matter how big I made the texels per unit it kept coming with black artifacts. I was close to giving then I saw this magic generate uv lightmaps box which is burried away in the menu. And suddenly the artifacts are gone and the bake times and quality are reasonable.

 

my 3D studio max with Mental ray beats both Unity and Unreal.. Games are not suppose to look photorealistic they are suppose to look like games..

 

Photorealism is simply an art style. It has nothing to do with whether it's a game or not. Remember too that at one point in time, and not too long ago either, what we're achieving in modern games took massive supercomputers to do.

 

i disagree, Photo realism is a simulation of reality, art style can be used to produce this simulation, it will still be a simulation. The word "Art" means "to know how to do", if we talk about expression, you can express your art with photo realism simulation, tough it still will be a simulation even you can be very good at it.. If we look at "real" rendringer engines like 3D studio Max or Maya, things are haping on a more calculated way, similar to how the nature do things, then its not the artist who are making it "photo real" but the engine. Game engines (mostly) are not design that way, but have tools and tricks to get it closer to it, like shaders/Texture design/ GPU support etc.

Sorry to say, but real time rendering and frame still rending are never going to be equal. So back to my statement, games are going to be games, and movies are going to be movies. Never use a game engine to produce movies if photo realism is the main focus..

Game engine has to take in to consideration the hardware it is going to run on.
A 3D still render doesn't need hardware render at all and has no limitations.