So does Unity render in real time please?

Hello everyone
After seeing CG movies like Adam and The Blacksmith, I want to ask can Unity render movies in real time please?
I am a Blender user and I ain't an expert by any means, but know my way around the interface and can do basic modelling, animation and camera stuff and that's the main reason I use it, to put together cinematic sequences, and after seeing the above efforts wondered how hard it is to use Unity, compared to Blender etc and how much faster it is to render movies please?

Any info from users would be awesome, thank you.

 

Unity != Blender

Adam and The Blacksmith are realtime.

 

Thanks for the reply but your reply didn't help much. Do you mean Unity>Blender so you think Unity is better? Also telling me those movies were real time, so Unity can render in that quality real time so no waiting for it to render?

 

I mean Unity and Blender (if you exclude BGE), don't really have a lot in common.

 

Thanks Acid, so interface completely different you mean? So just because I can use Blender, the learning curve for Unity would be different?

And did you mean yes, Unity CAN render high quality visuals in real time?

 

Blender is a low end modeling, animation and rendering tool.

Unity is a game engine.

You're comparing water to a sink.

 

Which is the sink? Thanks for the reply, so the two movies I mentioned were video games? Not CG movies rendered in real time using the Unity engine?
Also I wouldn't call Blender low end, you can achieve some pretty amazing results.

 

The two demos are indeed game cutscenes, played and recorded in real time, not prerendered.

Games are real time. Unity is a game engine.

 

Ok thank you. So what I am asking is, because my main thing is making CG animation, would Unity be a good tool for this please?

 

If you have no reason to render it in real time, no.
If you have no interest in optimizing it to run in real time, no.
Could you? Yes.

 

Are you a politician by any chance? Ok just answer this, by a simple yes or no please? Can I use Unity to make a high quality CG animation in REAL TIME with no render time? YES OR NO?

 

I can't, because you aren't clear and don't actually appear to even understand what you're asking.

For instance "CG animation". What do you mean by this? Do you mean...

• "I want to create rigs of bipedal characters and animate them"
• "I want to create non-bipedal animations"
• "I want to create animations for export to fbx files"
• "I want to animation UI with basic motions"
• "I want to use existing animations to display content in an application"

It matters, because if you want to create animations of characters then there is no reason to use Unity because Unity doesn't even do that. It is a user of animations. You create animations outside of Unity, import them and apply them to a 3d model. Depending on a variety of other factors you may be able to retarget them.

Next "Realtime, with no render time" doesn't make any sense. All rendering has a render time, the term real time is basically to convey that some application is running on some hardware and it will take nth milliseconds to render each frame that is displayed to the user. The difference between render time in something like Blender and Unity is that Blender (and other tools like Max/Maya) use expensive (computationally) methods to create high quality imagery because render time is not a factor. However in a 'real time application' the entire resulting display output must be calculated, updated and rendered 30 - 90 times per second to create a smooth experience so game engines like Unity and Unreal will use computationally cheaper methods to render a frame extremely fast but still look decent.

Blender and similar tools render image output for video and they do it extremely slow. Game Engines render real time live output to a device, not video, and they do it extremely fast.

You must understand that tools like Blender are used to author content like 3d models and animations. Game Engines are *end users* of that content, not authors. They use that outside content to create live, interactive realtime applications. In the case of Blacksmith/Adam demos, these were executable game files run on a computer, rendered somewhere between 30 - 60 fps in real time, then the screen showing them was recorded to video and posted online so that the application did not need to be redistributed to view the 'realtime content'.

If I were to make a lot of assumptions around your vague and confusing questions then I would say "No". It sounds like you have no interest in making applications and are only looking for a tool to make animations. In which case there's no reason to use Unity.

I suggest doing more research to understand these things.

 

Thanks, very helpful.

Anyone else can answer please? All I want to know is can I make a CG animation with Unity please?

 

You can. (Not with Unity alone though, you have to make models and animate your characters somewhere else)

I'm not sure if you should.

 

There have been a number of short films done using Unity, and even a cartoon series. Unreal Engine has actually been used for TV shows in the past, as has even the old Quake 3 engine! Heck, there are some shots in Rogue One that were rendered in real time on set that made it into the finished film, using Unreal Engine 4.

For some uses a real time renderer can make a lot of sense over using something like Cycles, Mental Ray, Octane, etc. etc., but not always. Also most of the time people have used a real time engine because they needed something to actually play back at ~30fps, but don't assume a real time engine will be able to render your content at that framerate automagically, or that the people using it to make short films are getting that kind of framerate. For example, The Gift by MARZA has frames that take multiple seconds to render ... potentially faster than they would using a non-realtime renderer, but not the "30 fps" people always assume. It's also not considering the significant amount of time often required to bake lighting for scenes.

A lot of those "non-realtime" renderers are getting way faster these days. The latest experimental versions of Cycles with a high end GPU will get significantly better quality than Unity is capable of with zero pre-compution time, and Blender's upcoming Eevee will likely match or surpass Unity's quality without requiring the significant effort of moving all of your content from Blender to Unity.



Think of Unity as an external renderer ... one that can't use any of Blender's materials, lighting, or cameras, and only a limited subset of the animation and mesh features and will require significant amounts of content reworking and recreation to use, but still requires you do most of the work in Blender.

 

What a weird thread. The short answer is no, the long answer is as follows.

Unity is a game engine. A game engine consists of the following:

• A system to receive input
• A system to process data
• A system to provide feed back in realtime. (ie a real time renderer).

Its entirely possible to use Unity just as a real time renderer. It would certainly do a decent job of it. Its actually commonly used as such for VR, acrvis, motion capture, live performance ect.

The problem is, a realtime renderer isn't all you need to make a movie. Unity can render stuff. But it can't create stuff to render. You still need to use Blender or equivalent to do that.

Unity is the sink, Blender is the tap, your assets are the water. Unity only serves as a container for assets made in Blender.

The question here is why do you want faster rendering?

If you need faster rendering because you are going to be interacting with the animation in realtime, then Unity is the answer.

If you need faster rendering because you are too impatient to wait for Blender, then the proper answer is to turn the quality settings down in Blender.

 

Additionally, do you want to retain the rendering quality of Blender? I'm not an artist and I'm not competent in Blender but I'm willing to bet that achieving nearly identical quality with Blender would largely eliminate any performance improvement obtained by choosing Unity.

 

Spoiler: Pure speculation

In my hand wavy guess mode, I would say Blender should perform faster then Unity for the same quality output. Blender isn't constantly stepping out of the rendering process to check for input or run physics.

Of course this is very hand wavy. I have no idea what the underlying models are that are used by the two systems. For example its possible Blender has a lighting model that will always perform slower then Unity, regardless of the quality.

 

Weeeell. I see it like this. Unity is geared towards performance. Blender (and all other software like blender) is geared towards quality. To achieve similar quality in Unity, you would have to employ a ton of trickery and spend tons and tons of time preparing and baking etc and then spend little time rendering. While on something like blender, you set the scene, you set displacements for everything, and then you let the renderer do all the math and spend tons of time letting your computer render.

But that's just the rendering.

Unity is a game engine. It doesn't create assets. It doesn't create character animations you can't really rig. You still need Blender or something like it to create a "short cg movie".

That's why the original post is weird and we are refusing to reply with simple yes, no, even though for some reason the op really insists on us doing that.

 

Just to add to the confusion, it is possible to create your assets in Unity. There is the Mesh Maker suite of Unity plug-ins, for example.

It's probably not going to be as good at it as tools actually made for the job, but if you insist on saying things like "All I want to know is can I make a CG animation with Unity please?", the answer is Yes.

I'm still puzzled by this opening statement, though. Adam and The Blacksmith were rendered by Unity in real time. You've basically said "After seeing monkeys make pizza, I want to ask can monkeys make pizza?"

(Of course I guarantee that the modeling, and probably also the animation, for these were done with a standard pipeline, with a professional-level modeling app rather than some Unity plugin.)

 

Thank you guys, the last few replies made a lot of sense. So bottom line is, i still need to use blender or another 3d creation program to make my actual cg movie.
Thank you to the people who replied and helped me with their answers! And i apologise if i came across a little vague as i was unsure exactly what i was trying to ask lol
All is clear now, thank you.