The most Insane AAA Game made in Unity has arrived in Closed Alpha

1. A lot of polygons for grass.
2. Insane texture detail.

That's it. There's nothing else there. you could recreate the scene on DX9 hardware with no advanced tech.

You should be able to replicate it in unity with no issues. I used to experiment with shadows on particles in unity, before I ran into issue with dx/opengl discrepancy.

Spoiler

As long as you pack the scene with enough polygons project a shadow on it, you would replicate the look just fine.

 

I'm starting to suspect normal map interaction for that AAA lighting, mostly grazing angles and cavity.

 

Normal map + occlusion map. Otherwise you're gonna get oblivion glow at the edges everywhere. Aaand of course correct values for smoothness/metalness.

Speaking of which, normal maps must be properly produced too. I recall helping someone with asset store dungeon kit where author of the kit decided that it is an amazing idea to produce all the normalmaps by running albedo/diffuse texture through normalmap filter. Obviously, results looked like garbage.

 

"Seeking the Unicorn": the Quest for Round more AAA lighting in Unity

In all honesty I don't think the lighting in that scene is particularly good, I would go further and say that almost nothing in that scene is even testing light conditions.

Almost all the work is being done by AO. There is some minor specularity on the rocks but very little actual lighting data.

You can get very close to the same results without any lighting.

I think that the "flat" lighting thing is a mixture, one element is that Billy really loves volumetric lighting, so the more volumetric effects at play, the more he is likely to consider the lighting non flat.

In fact, I think that volumetric effects are the difference in somewhere around 80% of the shots that Billy really likes but are not present in any of the scenes that billy says are "flat".

BTW - here are two examples of Unity lighting being not flat:





The lighting here is not flat. What's more, unlike most scenes we've looked at - there is actually a good amount of stuff here. Lots of geometry.

 

I think if you look at this picture - the lighting here is actually not that great.



Look really closely at the tree, specifically the edges and curves. The tree is just wrong. It doesn't quite fit.

If you look at the tree for a second, look away, then look back - it almost looks like the tree was pasted into the shot from somewhere else.

This may not be the fault of the lighting, perhaps it's a matter of texture detail or something, but the tree does not fit into the rest of the scene. Maybe the normals are lower detail than the normals in the rock? Whatever it is, this example is not in the same class as others.

 

If you have AAA project in the makings, just take UE4 to make it, and that's it, why would you wait after Unity ?
Until Enlighten gets replaced by something else, or beeing improved you won't get the top notch results you are waiting for.
It's like people complaining about Unity Terrain, just buy RTP3 plugin and that's it.

The general lighting is good but still not AAA

 

Great, well I'm looking forward to seeing something you've done in Unity that beats it hands down ..

 

He has a point. The scene can be done with unlit shader + ambient occlusion. And it'll look the same, because it is a still.

I think the best idea would be to see things in motion. I remember playing McGee's Alice: Madness Returns, and in motion at that time it looked quite awesome. The thing is, on screenshots results were mediocre at best.

 

Anyone can say it's easy just drop this shader or this effect, but do it and show it looks better

 

Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful scene and the art is fantastic.

But every shot we've gotten here is a beautiful scene with fantastic art. All of it is incredible work.

People spent like a page S***ting on this scene as well:

This is amazing work.

 

@frosted

Yeah I think the point is a lot of these screenshots are above and beyond any AAA game I've ever seen, I'd be happy with half the quality of most of these..

Past a certain point it just becomes obsession, these screenies are great for portfolio's.. When it comes to games it's a different matter.

 

Amazing rendering and execution but overall still lack clear focus in the composition, there is too many thing attract the eyes and don't lead to each other in fluid way. I mean what's the main focus? is it the slightly open door on the right or the elevator on the back? or the reflection on the left?

 

LOL - that's the truth - these screenshots are beyond AAA! Even the Unity ones, like this discussion is absolutely absurd!

 

Just for reference, I mean - look at how S***ty Uncharted 4 is:


Like OMG, that tree is so low poly, the lighting is super flat!


What is this, just amateur hour??


Man, the graphics in Uncharted 4 are just awful... they need SEGI.

 

Composition super uber solid though

 

I find it amazing tbh, taking a single frame and analyzing, yes, but with everything in motion... I find it simply amazing.

 

Most gamers find U4 amazing graphically, small details you point, players don't pay attention because a game is something in movement not a static scene you contemplate during hours.
Your are in total non sense, soon you'll say Naughty Dog are bad at graphics lol

 

I am making a joke - talking about how silly this discussion has gotten

Almost any of the screenshots we have talked about are all better looking than screens from Uncharted and we're nitpicking about minor details still! It's just gotten extremely silly.

 

aah hahaha, true, these discussions also always come to a point where we only argue about our personal tastes too.

 

Indeed lol
You can have the best AAA engine and ligting in your hands, this doesn't mean you'll produce a AAA game or some really good and interesting game.

 

@frosted

• Is there a point to any of your comments? I have tried to be specific with my own as much as possible, but after attempting to mine your sweeping statements for anything that I can reasonably respond to I'm coming up quite short.
  
• Nobody is "S***ting" as you put it, on anybody's work. I specifically said about the scene you refer to that I think it's great work, which I do, but the lighting provided by enlighten is not all that great. It's an Ubisoft artist, you can be pretty sure that it's going to be, all else being equal, great quality.
  
• You seem to have no idea what I'm talking about, yet with each comment you try to blame some non-relevant thing, and round off the discussion with more sweeping statements about my point of view, and refer to me in the third person as if you are trying to avoid actually discussing it in a constructive way.
  
• Those interior Unity scenes you posted are flat;
• Uncharted 4 is not flat, rather it has some of the best lighting I've seen. I don't know why you would expect me to think it looks anything less that great, but then again you seem to have no idea about my point of view.

Spoiler

• I'm out of here, this discussion is becoming beyond useless.

 

Criticism is how we get good at art people, it's been a tradition since the inception of art. I wouldn't be one of you at a deconstruction course, you will had leave shattered lol
I guarantee you that when a game is out, artist of any AAA company have a session where they rip it apart to see what works, what don't and where they could do better and why. My company surely did when assassin's creed 1 was out and doing similar stuff we did!

 

It's not the best ligthing but something we have already seen. About flat, i think you mean lighting and good shaders (normals and physically light reaction), lightprobes math quyality, or lightmapper quality ?

We are not a company producing a game and the engine and shaders, we are simple users.

Anyway what would be great is to have Unity improve to propose almost the same "out of the box graphics" as UE4.I'm not sure this happens, because the solutions have always been in the Asset Store.

About graphics, it's not too bright, not too specular or over lighten, contrast and colors are great, normal mapping is great, i think you will not get such result with Enlighten and default shaders.

 

"We did that at my company" as an example.

It's standard to any art forums that have a minimum of art education, post something, be by a pro or a amateur and composition, anatomy, color, etc ... will be under scrutiny, will be paint over, discuss to death. In fact a lot of AAA stuff was start by simple user in a remote forums that made their ways into AAA stuff because it was pertinent, there is a lot of blog of simple user doing stuff with shader that don't work in a company (like the technology jumpstart by Media Molecule) or even the thing behind SEGI was experimented first by small user. There is no dichotomy, technique is actually cheap, it's just knowledge.

You don't need to be a company to do good lighting.

 

So do it and show us

 

That's why they are often so pointless. Unless someone is discussing or questioning how to achieve a certain look, posting tons of random screenshots is just armchair quarterbacking.

The reality is that in large budget/studio games, the look and feel of game is all about choices. Be it the art/creative direction or technical trade offs for performance and/or flexibility. They have the technical skill and ability set and create as many dials as is practical for the project. It has little to do with shaders or engine or things of that nature. While it may be fun to point at a still image, and say it looks "flat" or doesn't "pop", from the outside with no context, it may very well be the case that team spent months to achieve just that look, because that was the goal. Or that a small reduction in fidelity in some areas allows for resources to be spent in other areas deemed more important to the game overall.

I have spent many hours (days/weeks), making minor tweaks to a variety of aspects because my AD took a screenshot into photoshop, adjusted and provided it back as a visual target.

 

Criticism is important and I agree.

But unless this discussion starts to involve real specifics and use technical terms it leads nowhere.

There are so many layers of effects and processing on all of these images, it's immensely hard to figure out what someone might mean when they're using subjective terms on a "gut feel" level.

For example:



I don't feel that the bike has a proper sense of depth here.

I don't know why, but the Bike looks flat. Am I wrong? Who knows? What the hell does 'flat' mean?

Unless we're dealing with specifics and exploring a specific example in depth, all of these subjective terms lead nowhere.

 

I've enjoyed the discussion and feel like I've learned to appreciate more nuances in lighting. To me the thread had value and I'm hoping that one day I can play around with a more hands on example. It seems I'm starting to grasp what you mean with "flat lighting". I'll keep my eyes open for interesting examples in different engines.
I'll also think about this the next time I look at paintings.

Yes! Learning to see the flaws in everything is an integral part of any artist's journey. Nothing is perfect.

I don't put that much trust in them (or most companies really). The industry didn't even manage to agree on PBR standards and there's so much that can be messed up. Also never underestimate the destructive force of incompetent people in high positions that interfere with artdirection. I've seen and heard plenty of examples from other industries and see no reason to believe companies working on rendering-tech would be entirely safe from that.

I mean, going by the amount of complaints about enlighten in various other threads and situations, it's probably just flawed tech, but I'm more interested in finding a solution to make it work in Unity, than point fingers.

 

lol
Everything is flat, sense of perspective can come from colors pop up or making contrast.
Anyway, you should try VR where there is no need for super shaders and ligting and it doesn't look flat even simple colored polygons.

You can go real time lighting and Alloy, Ubber perhaps.

 

Dude, chill.

We've spent plenty of time trying to figure out "flat" thing. Perhaps some useful info surfaced in the process.

 

Sure it's something we've seen, it'd the state of the art for tech in AAA studios and 'high-end' graphics engines. It's not groundbreaking ...

I have found the problem, because literally every enlighten picture I've seen has 'that look', even when it's running in Unreal. It's a shame that I couldn't seem to communicate it otherwise, but at least there's a more specific marker now.

Well I agree, but it's by no means a scene-wide effect, it's basically just the bike itself, so my guess is that the light on the right is simply overexposing it. But the rest of the scene is very cohesive.

Anyway, I'm done with screenshots. I think I know what the problem is, so as I said before, I just have to choose between enlighten and SEGI because I don't want to have to bake anything more than absolutely necessary.

 

Well, it is flat because the picture is flat. Physically.

Did anyone try to post stereo pairs of images, by the way? That would be interesting to look at.

 

Maybe, but here is an actual photo of a bike.


Do you see how this isn't flat? Compare it to the CryEngine bike, and see how flat the CryEngine bike looks.

Here's another picture of a bike with depth:

Do you see how these bikes pop?


To me, this bike looks flat. It looks like it was photoshopped into the scene later. Something feels off about it.

The material is also strange, it's too plastic. It looks like a barbie toy moped.

_________
[Sarcasm Tag added]

Again, I'm joking although honestly, that third picture does look very 'flat'.

 

Please use sarcasm tags in your posts where appropriate. Otherwise I'm not sure in which way I'm supposed to interpret them.

 

I'm not any expert of graphics, but it's my impression that everybody seems to be using the word 'flat' to mean whole lot of different things.

 

Well I'm glad you enjoy it and find it useful.

My guess is that Enlighten being realtime GI is just not able to beat baked lighting by a long shot, anything realtime has to make huge tradeoffs. VXGI blows it out of the water but is obviously not all that performant - UE apparently decided against integrating it for that reason.

 

I don't think it's very useful to compare a game engine with reality, perhaps you can find a bike rendered in a game engine that looks good to you?

 

Erm...

Isn't "Baked GI" ALSO provided by enlighten? There are several settings, and realtime gi can be toggled off.

Speaking of which, Unreal engine had its own builtin solution called light propagation volumes:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/lates...g/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/
Disabled by default, and requires toggling hidden switches to turn it on.

It is useful when you're using reality as desired quality target. YOu can compare reality with render, tweak the render to make the errors less noticeable.

 

But I believe the discussion here is very specifics, it's all about narrowing down the issues, it's not about good or bad per see, it's about identifying a particular problem.

I relate to this because I had the same problem with black character. I always had a gut feeling that the rendering where wrong, but couldn't formulate it. It might surprising some, but even as a person who identify as black and is surrounded by black person, most of the time I studied how to magnify white skins/hair and worked on white skin, it's only when I had to do black character due to the theme of my game that it start to become apparent something was amiss. And identifying that was part of the process.

In fact it's the same process behind invention behind PBR and co, the consensus is that CG looked "plastic" which is not helpful, it took a lot of observation to realize the problem was energy conservation and have a name for it, and being able to point at some source of problem (ie the shape and intensity of specular, the presence of fresnel on diffuse objects, etc ...).

People get very frustrated when a problem isn't identified, and calling out the process of narrowing the problem as silly, is like people calling out CG as soulless and impossible to convey emotion (until pixar prove it), they are just trying to escape frustration.

And that's oen thing you learn when doing art for long, it's always frustrating and before you understand things, they looks like impossible magic filled with buzzwords (I mean if you are not an artist, try do something and have an artist say to you it lacks flow, and balance, that's vague as F*** and you will have some training to do before it makes a beginning of sense).

 

-Quixel.
-AAA assets.
-Enlighten baking.
-Professional that knows what he is doing. https://80.lv/articles/using-quixel-2-0-with-unity-5/

Still looks flat.

I will describe 'flat' as 'nothing blends'. As if the lighting worked per object rather than trying to mix the whole scene. Everything looks disconnected.

 

Not really sure about that, I haven't used it myself, nor seen anything to reference. Let me know if you have a good example. In any case, that's just my guess, maybe it's not the fact that it's realtime, but something else.

 

Enlighten use very low frequency data, so it might be what I suspected since that corridor image, it's a problem with frequency interaction and light, and why I have been singling out normal and occlusion map (high frequency details). Basically the lighting is going over the hi freq details and might flatten the look.

 

Actually, to be completely honest I'm starting to think we might want to look at actual photography. Many real photos do actually look flat or otherwise wrong.


This picture is extremely strange visually. It was obviously post processed, and the depth is all over the place and nothing looks connected. All the greens are literally on a different plane.

The lighting here is obviously correct since it's real life, so what went wrong? We can't just blame the engine tech here, since the lighting is performed by "The Sun" and "The Sun" is renown for excellent lighting, in fact, everyone else is just trying to copy it.

 

I have opposite impression.

The scene looks like everything was cut out of the same material and is part of the same object made out of wood. Aside from blue fog in distance, no color variation anywhere.

Speaking of which... if the light is cast by torches, it should flicker. Realtime GI can handle flicker just fine.

Also... human eye does automatic white balance. So the scene wouldn't look yellow if you actually viewed it in person. In the video everything looks brown instead which doesn't feel right.

 

As far as I can tell, this is a hdr photo. Which means lighting isn't correct in it.

For example, here's an example:
http://www.joeyblsphotography.com/p...er-of-rocks-along-ocean-avenue-in-newport-ri/

Spoiler

Real life is dull and gray. "Real life" photo as seen by the camera is on the left. Processed tonemapped hdr photo is on the right.

The reason for using HDR photos is that camera has limited range of values compared to human eye, meaning to bring out every color you'd need to reconstruct "true" brightness value using multiple photos, and then, once again, tonemap them onto limited monitor using an equivalent of lowpass filter. That gives everything "dreamy/bloomy" look.

 

That looks pretty fantastic to me. Although I can still sort of see the effect, the lighting works quite well in that setting, probably because with so many light sources it's hard to see the effect of any single one over a long distance.
I also agree with neginfinity that it's way too saturated with the same color and it makes it kind of hard to read the lighting.

Anyway that's probably the best interior scene I've ever seen in Unity/Enlighten.

 

Pointless. You can wreck anything in photoshop.

 

One thing I've noticed in a lot of Unity scenes is that the light sources tend to be cranked into HDR range. The hospital scene above tended to use lighting values in the 1.5+ range. I'm pretty sure Pamela had the values cranked to high hell as well.

I tend to think this is something done on Unity lights very frequently in order to help 'bring out color'. I think that almost all examples tend to use HDR lighting and higher contrast tonemapping (as in, higher exposure values through a naturally high contrast map like ACES).

I wonder if something like this is part of the problem some people feel exist?

 

Actually, you could take one of those "flat" screens and modify it to fix the problem, then demonstrate result. This would also work.

I'd argue this is a correct approach, and it is surprising that brightness values are so low. Actually keeping them in such low range would probably make the scene "grayish" with subdued details.

See table here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight

Then check range of values. For example, bright sunlight vs moon light. 100000+ times brightness difference.

 

@Billy4184

Enlighten is a semi-realtime GI system that works on mobiles, I mean that's pretty impressive by itself.. I've tried LPV a couple of times (in CE and UE) the one in UE was a half baked version donated by Lionhead and I can't really say it was that much better than Enlighten (especially because of light leaking but LPV is quite well known for it) although it is far heavier.

The main issue I've found with Enlighten is there isn't much in the way of light scatter, it seems to just bounce back the colour it's reflecting (nearly as a solid).. I mean try it, texture a terrain with a green grass texture and add a white tree (like the European birch from Speedtree).. Crank the GI influence on the directional and watch how it actually bounces light, it's somewhat odd..

But it is quick / efficient / cheap and if you don't overdo it can have a positive effect on your scene.. It will never look anywhere near as good as a voxel based solution, but it won't ever be as expensive either.

@frosted

Most of it is just washout, the effects of stacking post.. Lighting can make it worse though.. The issue is it's actually hard to balance, so lets say you hit perfect near enough perfect white point and manage to balance out the stack via a lut often you end up with specific portions (like the sky) being too bright (kind of like in Pamela)..

But you can just slap more bloom on it and call it an "artistic choice", I'd do it for no other reason than keeping zengarden happy.

I've never had to colour grade UE4 that much, I have to grade the living crap out of Unity but ultimatley using proper shaders (GGX / Inverse square) goes a long way.. Also to mention UE does things like crush shadows by default.. To get the 100 option level of tweaking you get in UE's post stack use Amplify colour / Photoshop and spend a bit of time..

One thing I seriously dislike about Unity is all the post stacks are screen space only, in UE you can use post stack volumes.. So lets say you walk into a house and you want the interior to be graded differently you easily can do it..