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

No.
I made UE4 test scene without any Lightmass baking, and PBR materials looks different than Unity ones.



Guess what engine is this scene from ?

 

Any.

 

I find it lot better than Enlighten.

 

Enlighten is a lightmapper.

 

I know, i find better this Unity real time GI plugin by SonicEther than Enlighten lightmap baking.

 

...

 

Anyway, here is a quick scene i put together this morning with some assets i created recently with photogrammetry. It uses unity standard shaders and the unity cinematic effects from the online repository. The water is from the Cyto plugin. The animation is just a sun rotation(didnt have time for a proper day-night cycle). I think it looks quite decent. I really wish though that the standard shader in unity had some additional sliders to help me customize the appearance of the textures (min - max and intensity sliders for metalness-smoothness for example) which is something Uber does and its a huge timesaver than editing the alpha channels of textures in photoshop every 10 seconds to try and get the result you want.

 

That's looking really good! Also thanks for the info on Uber's tweakability. I'm also missing something like this in the Standard shader.
Here is another quick test that I threw together with textures from substance share.


I've tried building a webGL demo with rotating sun, but it doesn't seem to work and I doubt many would want to download 500mb for what should have been a quick youtube video.

http://www.keinebilder.de/unity/DesertGITest1/

Does anybody know what I screwed up? It doesn't even seem to load anything and I don't get any error messages.


Edit: recorded a screencap from a PC build.

http://www.keinebilder.de/temp/DesertGITest1_2016-02-24_14-38-41-95-compressed.avi

 

@moure that video is definitely getting closer. Now we just need to find Unity's tour of paris

 

@moure in the search for a true comparison, I have to say it looks completely wrong. For e.g. the cobbles in the back almost look like a poorly reflected surface there's something odd going on with the shaders there, colour grading is off (it's too bright / saturation is off base), seems to be a real lack of decent AO (if any at all).. Sorry, usually I'm not much of a stickler for this, doesn't really bother me.. But in the spirit of comparison, it ain't going to cut the mustard.

Keep going though, tons of detail / cool stuff going on there it could look awesome.

@Martin_H

Yours is much harder to dissect, from an artwork / setup perspective it looks fine. Actually it looks good, but it still doesn't look physically correct and I'm not talking about the sculpts that were done in the un-real scene.. Do me a favour, can you post a picture when you've increased the bounce intensity under the directional light? I want to see what contribution Enlighten is having on this, also could you post one with GI disabled completely?

Cheers!.

@zenGarden

You really need to know how to use a skylight ...

 

Sure, here they are. I don't use baked GI, only the precomputed realtime GI. Direct light intensity always is 1.5

Without GI:


With precomputed GI, default baking parameters, indirect intensity 1, bounce boost 1, bounce intensity of directional light 2:


Same but with bounce intensity of direct light 4:


With GI (like second image) but without post fx:


Without GI and without post fx:



Post fx used were (in this order):

Global Fog
Anti Aliasing (the new cinematic one)
Bloom (from standard assets)
Lens Aberrations (from the new cinematic effects, but only used the vignette)
Tonemapping Color Grading (the new cinematic one, without eye adaptation or lut)
SSAO Pro (I'm almost sure at some point @Chman will make a good SSAO for Unity's free standard assets too)


I believe I've seen a talk from Crytek once where they showed how they used fotos as a reference during development and then tried to get as close as possible with in-engine graphics. I'm going on the hunt for a good reference photo now. Something like that could potentially save us pointless discussions about what is or is not realistic. At least I hope so ^^.

 

@Martin_H

Does the colour composition of the GI look right to you? Sorry one last test, could you try using an IBL wrap like they do in Unity's scene?

 

I think it's a tiny bit oversaturated, which likely comes from increasing the bounce intensity above 1. It might be possible to get a better result without overexaggerating the bounce intensity.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you want to see the scene without the direct light and only the indirect light from the skybox?

 

It's real time GI and no baking demo in Unity, i find it great. Do you mean it lacks some skykight ?
Still it runs lot faster than UE4 Rayantorrent attempt at real time GI.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fu...lobal-illumination.314748/page-9#post-2525255

I like this one better than others, but i think your tone mapping and bloom lacks something, or it is your material. Can you make the same test on UE4 out of the box ?

You should use a normal map for stone material , it's better to compare with some UE4 screenshots using normal maps.

 

HDR based lighting, just like the Unity demo.. Not a biggie if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll do it when I get around to mine.. Been a busy week, I'll relax and do some over this weekend..

@zenGarden

Every screenshot you've taken in UE has a skylight washing out all the lighting, that's where the massive blue tint is coming from..

 

I had sort of the same problem, I removed the skylight but the sky sphere (+ bloom?) still washed out the textures at a short distance. I set the post-process to low (is that off?) but I could never get the textures to look sharp.

Anyway, I was going to show off a comparison of a nice sci-fi character from the Substance Share site, but I don't know enough about UE (e.g. what exactly happens when I hit 'build lighting' - how do I replicate in Unity?), so I might leave it out for a while.

Looking forward to more eye candy here.

 

Tone Mapping influences a lot the look.

Unity Scion Tone mapping "filmic"



Unity Scion Tone mapping "Reinhard"


UE4 no lightmass baking


UE4 and Lightmass baking

 

You have blue tint in the shadow of the stone model, and tonemapping isn't helping in either case. Shadows are still washed out in the 1st screen despite different contrast. Also, environmental reflection produces edge glow on everything.

You'll either need some reflection probes in the scene, or you'll need to nuke the skylight. Because this doesn't look good.

p.s. frankly, edge glow reminds me of visual effect morrowind spells used to produce...

 

This is why this is difficult in Unity to get good results.There is no complete step by step tutorials on effects and lightening setup and Image Effects is in Beta, that's not easy for the common user and you must by many plugins.
While UE4 has beautifull post effects and shaders out of the box.

 

There is:

The texture quality in that trailer you posted does look a bit more on the Star Wars Battlefront side of things though (Frostbite 3).

Very nice for Unity! The quality looks to me as good as it is in Fallout 4

 

Dat low-poly toilet...

 

PAMELA isn't on the same level as that Paragon trailer, but it has got to be (by far) the graphically best actual game I've seen made in Unity. It really does look spectacular. But it still lacks a little of that solidity/authenticity that you find in some other engines. I really don't know how to describe it, if I had to guess it would be most related to tonemapping, a sort of subtle solidity, or ambience that pops out at you when the lighting everywhere is just right. I see it in those pics someone posted above of the ruins in UE4, you don't have to work hard to imagine that it's a photograph.

To be honest, I'm not all that excited about the Village scene. It looks pretty good, and I'm very, very glad that Unity put that together for us instead of just Space Shooter style examples, but it still has a little of that 'wall painting' look.

Anyway, if we could all get PAMELA looking stuff out of the box in Unity, I would be jumping for joy. Trying to cook up a comparison of UE4 and Unity lately has made me realize just how intricate lighting can get. I feel that a lot of lighting stuff is just too subtle to be done by eyeballing, and that it lends itself very well to a good standard solution - lighting in the real world isn't an artistic composition it is a 'standard' process.

Any AAA game could be made with Unreal's out-of-the-box stack, do any of us really care about tweaking all these bits and pieces? I just want some preset that looks damn good like UE has, so I can get on with my dream of making a one-man AAA game

 

C'mon, where's your spirit of experimentation?
"It is hard because there are no tutorials" is not a very good argument. Lots of gamedev things have no tutorials, and you still need to do them.
----
I mean, there are a lot of weak points in unity, but "I can't tweak ambient light, because there are no tutorials about that" sounds just lazy to me.

 

Don't say what i didn't written, i know how to tweak lightampping parameters or nav mesh, but find tweaking takes times and you never got UE4 look whatever plugin you buy.
If i made high end graphics, i would spend more money on Unity plugins i don' t have (motion blurr, natural bloom, quality eye adaptation etc ... ) , while i can start my game in E4 as it has high end graphics out of the box.

I baked the previous scene test , in Unity after 15 minutes it still had not finished clustering i just gave up, in UE4 in some minutes it was done. Enlighten baking times are too long.
It's a matter of budget and choice of engine that suits your game the best.

I agree this is one of the best looking 3D games , Unity is able of making great graphics and games that can run faster on older hardware, if you are ok with Enlighten long baking times.
Still this game made in UE4 would look different.

 

Were talking about the one's you've done in UNREAL not Unity, be careful with skylights they can wreck the look of a scene and every UNREAL screenshot you've posted so far looks awful because of the lighting.

I'm not trying to be harsh, just offer a bit of advice. I had a lot of issues with skylights / lightmass etc. when I started with UE.. It ain't as easy as people think to make it look good.

 

You find Unity screenshots better perhaps ? I would be glad to see some UE4 screenshot you make that you consider as good ?

 

It's nothing to to with Unity or Unreal, you can make the same mistake in either.. Just be careful with the intensity of a skylight, mess around until it looks natural that's all. The screenshots you posted from UNREAL was whitewash with blue influences from the skylight..

Stripping shadow intensity..Washing out the scene etc.

Look, we're all here to learn.. Find out what makes these engines look good, there's no point getting defensive over it.. I'm sure there will be plenty of criticisms about the stuff I post, which is great!. I'll improve because of it..

Don't care how long someone has been doing something, we can all improve.

 

Dude, chill. No need to take it too personally. I just have hard time agreeing with 'no tutorials" argument, that's all.

IIRC clustering is one of the faster phases. If it isn't finished in 15 minutes, it could've been silently stuck on something (yes, enlighten can do that too) or it is the sign indicating that bake will take 12 hours to complete.

Enabling GiCache helps, but doesn't solve issue completely, because enlighten happily hogs all resources (all cpu cores and quite a bit of ram), given the opportunity, so if you move anything static, it'll start recalculating half of the scene.

 

I find skylight brings a lot and i find it good, perhaps i have it too strong.
What about the previous screenshots ? Skylight is ok .?
https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=76663&d=1454361427
https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=70094&d=1450175052

 

Yeah, looks bang on there.. Very impressive.

 

@zenGarden @ShadowK

Do you think it would make a good gameshow if people had to guess if a picture was real or cgi?

 

Looks good dont see any problems in regard to lighting there. Would be nice to compare this scene perhaps in Unity aswell, only directional light, fxes matching up and see what it gets.

 

could you try to do a like for like in unity?

 

Unfortunatelly theses screenshots are not from me, i don't have these models and textures.
I already made a try with the Lion statue, and i am not skilled enought to get good results about GI.
Perhaps @ShadowK could make some try ?

 

I am sorry but i think the way you try to reach a conclusion in which engine is more photorealistic is wrong. You compare how an image looks to an imaginary "correct" image you have in your head Thats not how you should do any kind of comparison if you want to arrive to any usable result in this thread. If you really care about it you should at least use a real life photograph of a location/space/whatever and see how close you can get to the real life photograph using the game engine. Using an image of some artwork from one engine and think of that as the true photorealistic result because it looks better on your eyes is of no use and proves nothing.

So i have to somehow agree with @Tomnnn here. Pick a good reference real time photograph (that is kind of easy to reproduce) and try to come as close to it as possible in the two engines.

 

That'll never happen, thing is graphics are no use to me unless they can run well in an actual game.. If it can't run @ 60FPS sub 20MS on my M980 all maxed out, it ain't worth even worth looking into.

So I'm looking into the best "approximation" not what's simply the best.. You'd never convince me that Unreal can be beaten as a complete graphical pipeline for renders out of any engine, but that doesn't interest me in the slightest. What I want to know, is performance / vs. graphics.. As a games developer of any standing, that's what matters the most.

Plus whilst art is subjective, lighting isn't really.. It either looks closer to a real life scenario or it doesn't.. It's the art that people get hung up on.

 

I have no idea what you are trying to contradict here!

 

It's simple, if you want to copy a photograph go use Unreal. If you want to make a game it comes down to several matters, time taken to achieve the look and the trade off of performance vs. approximations..

Scalability is a big thing as well, succesfully employing atmosphere at lower settings is key. That's something I've always found Unity to be good at.!

 

Maybe i missed the subject change in the previous pages, but i thought that what people in this thread try to find out is whether unity can produce as photorealistic results as unreal or not. If that is indeed the case what i suggested was to choose a real photograph (and not a scene already made in one or the other engine) and try to reproduce it as close as possible. Of course performance matters. But you can obviously also compare it and use the results, so i really dont understand what point you are trying to make!

 

It might be what some are looking for, but as said I'm not interested in the slightest making Arch Viz examples or art portfolio pieces.. I wanna know how pretty we can make games and what the trade off is..

For publications (screenshots), I'd just render in Modo. It's better than both UE and Unity combined..

Thing is Unreal DOES use different tech, every piece of tech has trade off's.. There's a vast difference between a picture and a performant realistic game. It's going to be interesting.!

 

The better idea would be rely on your eyes. Replicate what you see, not what camera sees.
Camera has no depth perception (which is kinda important), and reacts to light differently compared to human eye.

 

The strange thing is, PAMELA is the only actual game I've seen that uses what Unity is graphically capable of. I've come to the conclusion that either a) Unity's best graphics capabilities are not performant enough for games, b) Unity just doesn't attract serious developers aiming at mid-high graphics or c) bit of both.

If I wasn't a one-man-band, I would probably try to use Unreal for anything pretty, but I need Unity's ease of use if I'm to knock out anything myself.

 

I think we're getting too pedantic here. What we all want to see is something pretty and performant in Unity. At the moment, every single Unity screenshot I've seen (sorry for being unscientific) has a very slight characteristic of a toon-erized wall painting. We all know what Cryengine graphics look like, we know what Unreal graphics look like, now if we can approach any of those I for one will not only be able to tell immediately, but also be very happy

Looking forward to seeing what people come up with. I'm playing around with Unity's corridor demo atm finding out what makes it look good or bad.

 

I'm still a bit torn what comparison would be more interesting in the game context. Baked vs baked, or dynamic vs dynamic. For me personally most game ideas I would be interested in, would involve either lots of destructible stuff or procedural generation or both. So, both because of this necessity, and because many people say that enlighten is impractical in big and complex levels anyway... I'm leaning towards just comparing how well both engines do with these restrictions in mind. It's nice if a baked GI showcase looks great but what good is that to me when my usecase doesn't allow baking at all?

 

Yeah maybe not the best

 

Great point man, art is subjective, lighting is not. +1

 

so any info??? is one unity.. which one.. and why not match the camera ...

 

I think this is Unity.

 

I think it's appropriate thread to also discuss 'the best' realistic shader choice from asset store, as I also aim at rather realistic visuals, and i'm not quite happy with standard shader and was wondering what would be the best 'all round' option from asset store for standard shader replacement. I thinking mainly of Uber shader and Alloy. Would be really nice if someone could post exact same model with different popular pbr shaders. I would do this myself, but can't afford buy solution only for comparison purposes

 

What's makes Unreal Engine rendering really powerfull it's the whole range of lighting models that comes out of the box. It's a true unified physically based rendering system. In Unity (out of the box), you cannot create certain types of materials with the standard shader, like refracted, translucent, skin, scatter, anisotropic are few examples (I can name a lot more). Which forces you to create extra shaders that quite often don't work well with the rest resulting in objects looking off.
In Unreal the default scene also have lighting calibrated to look realistic, nice and smooth, out of the box. That's the reason why it's hard to get things looking good in Unity as fast as in Unreal. Post-processing is also calibrated to make the whole thing look cinematic and/or realistic.
I'm not quite sure if having the same amount of rendering features in Unity will make it slower or faster than Unreal. But to be honest, I seriously don't care that much about making my games ultra-photo realistic, I don't sell Art Room Demos or Architectural presentations, I sell games. I'm more interested in engine optimizations that will let me have for instance a large amount of entities (GameObjects), streaming capabilities, large simulations/worlds without exploding the hardware instead of making flowers and stones looks like real-life.