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

Problem is, as Frpmta and I have said repeatedly, it's a per-object thing. You can't fix it in photoshop unless you can segment the objects.

The image frosted posted does not have the same effect, it just looks generally out of whack like someone tweaked the colors or something.

 

It's great for mobile, no doubt, but if you're targeting PC it just looks completely inferior imo. I'd like to see how good its bakes are, but I have no idea where to find any examples.

If you have some great artists you can make it look decent, like Medal of Honor Warfighter:

Spoiler

But it's not going to give any graphical advantage to an indie project.

Anyway, I think for now, for my own PC projects I will try to make SEGI work for me, and see how it all goes.

 

1. I don't see that "per-object" thing in pictures posted. Definitely no "everything is disconnected" effect.
2. You can segment objects in photoshop.

 

All these examples to me have the effect.

Also in the MOH pic I posted above, I find it a bit difficult to look at because to me the distances to the different objects in the scene are not clearly defined by the lighting.

Also, check out this pic, and tell me how it compares to other similar scenes you've seen.

Spoiler

Anyway, I think these pics show that really, it's quite possible for indies to match the quality, but obviously not the quantity, of fairly recent AAA games. However I would like to be able to use the rendering tech of current-gen AAA games, and make whatever compromises I need to art-wise to make my game feasible (which will probably be quite a lot). And obviously, I would not even attempt to match the amount of content.

Frankly, I would quite like to make some kind of narrowed down and pretty experience like Mirrors Edge, maybe for VR.

Spoiler

PS here's an interior enlighten pic, which IMO suffers the same problems as the Abandoned Hospital pic we've referred to earlier. Lighting on different objects does not help pull the image together.

Spoiler

 

I'd say this is a clear example of over saturation...


If we only remove some of the color intensity we get...


Which looks a lot more like we'd expect from real life overcast day having recently rained.

Although I don't think this really is of much use for games, is it?

If people want things to look like photographs maybe just stick with 2D and take photos or videos of everything and use those as the graphics.

For a game something like this would be more interesting...


Now this is more like it! I'd say you probably won't ever see this scene (as far as colors and so forth go) in the real world. Actually kind of looks like it could be a game although one with excellent graphics.

Can you make it down the road before I run over you with the lawnmower? Now there's a game.

 

That's skyrim lighting. Meaning pretty much unlit.

Same. Minimal lighting, almost unlit with SSR.

Now, in THIS screen there's a problem with a light source that has shadow casting disabled but creates reflective light spot on the ground. where it shouldn't be present.

---
Overall...

I don't know, so far it looks like you dislike any picture that has obvious lighting in it and praise those where the effect is pretty much off.

 

Well isn't that interesting, apparently Mirrors edge uses enlighten. Now I'm confused. Maybe I should just make a game, or something.

Not at all.

 

Yes.

 

Again, I don't know much about graphics at all. But from my experience of seeing people arguing how some Skyrim ENB preset is better than others, I'm reassured that there's really no objective standard to measure artistic quality.

Those screenshots which look to me ridiculously over saturated were often praised as 'vivid', or 'cinematic', while others which look pretty realistic to me were criticized as 'dull', or 'lifeless'. So I don't see much point in arguing if a certain piece of graphic representation is 'flat' or 'vivid', because each person defines those terms in different ways, and has very different preferences.

So, I believe that there's only a few cases when we can really have any constructive discussion on such a subject, and that could be when we are evaluating how faithfully a certain graphical representation depicts a real life environment, regardless of its artistic quality.

For instance, in @GarBenjamin's example photographs above, we can discuss quite objectively which of those two photographㄴ can be the more authentic representation of the two, considering the weather and lighting conditions of the day when the original photograph was taken. But that does not mean the more realistic one would look 'better' for everyone, because there would be people who feel unrealistically saturated version looks more 'vivid', or 'stand out'.

I don't believe we can reach an agreement anytime soon, if we keep talking in such subjective terms like 'flat' or 'better'. For, if something looks 'flat', what exactly does it mean? Does it mean it looks desaturated? Having too little contrast? Too homogenous in color palette? Insufficient specular highlights? Limited in dynamics? Dark spots don't look stand out enough due to not using an occulusion map? Incorrect use of material like, for example metallic surface looking like a plastic panel? Not enough texture details? If so, how much is 'enough' really?

A word like 'flat' can really mean whole different things in such a context, so I suppose it'd result in better result if we say something specifc like "I think the texture looks too blurry" or "I think it might look better if we can increase intensity of the indirect lighting" and etc, rather than "Oh it looks flat", or "It doesn't look good", for instance.

 

Well come to think of it, mirrors edge is quite stylized, so I think it helps to cover up some of the rendering tech shortcomings.

Spoiler

But anyway I really like the aesthetic, maybe it's something I should try to use.

I've tried to explain it in more detail a number of times, but it's not possible for me to be precise because even I don't know exactly what it is. All I know is that it's there in Enlighten.

 

Much better example than what I did above. Yes now see this looks great compared to many modern games I have seen and it is starting to look like just maybe this is a game.

I think they didn't go far enough though. This still looks pretty boring...


Compared to this...


The original still looks too something. Sterile. Realistic. I don't know.

 

I also like the artistic style of the screenshot. By the way, it made me curious, how do you think this image looks, compared to the original?


The only thing I changed is saturation and brightness to make it a bit more realistic, so if you also found it to be much lesser in quality, than maybe it's more of a matter with artistic style/preferences than any differences in technical capabilities of each rendering engines?

EDIT: @GarBenjamin Oh, you seem to have beaten me to it

 

No I don't think that changes very much, although I must admit, I was quite taken by the original artistic style.

If you compare it to something somewhat slightly similar, it's just not the same.

Spoiler

 

So I did a few experiments. Just dumped some viking village props in a scene and lit it different ways.

Curious what you guys think. Any of these more or less flat?



I'm doing some kind of unusual stuff in these, so I wouldn't expect it to look much like normal Unity lighting. But who knows, you guys are the experts...

Any of these pass?
Which are better?

 

I'm certainly no expert but since nobody else has commented yet... all I can say is like #3 and #4 better. If I was thinking of them as photographs. #4 gives me the impression of a light early morning fog hanging in the village. I think it looks great for that kind of scenario.

Now if you can really blow up the color intensity on these, maybe scale down to 1/8th the size and then scale back up... you know to give them a pixel art look... then do some posterization and normal color reduction and I think these will do just fine.

 

The last one looks the best, but there is quite a lack of lighting information in the occluded areas, such as the bucket/wood on the lower left, which would otherwise help to make the image 'pop'. All of them also come across a bit hazy/blurry.

I don't really like the second and third ones, it's as if there's some kind of strange tonemapping settings or something, like the gain or gamma being out of whack.

In terms of the core lighting quality, they all look quite similar to me.

 

I prefer 3, but it really depends on what you are trying achieve, in terms of narrative and overall direction.

 

The new one uses Enlighten, yes.

The old one used Beast.

I believe the shot you posted was from the old one, which used Beast.

(also, IMHO, the old one looks better :

I mean it looks a bit dated, but I think it has stronger art direction)

 

Can you compare the amount of "lighting information" on the bucket? Do any have more than others?



There should be more differentiation between the direct and indirect lighting here on the bucket - is this one better?

Is the bucket "flat" what about the barrels in the distance? Which elements are flat?

 

Overall, the lighting in that scene is very muted and uniform, so it's difficult to pick out areas that look wrong due to different lighting conditions. I would say that a lot of the problem is that as soon as an area becomes occluded, it seems to disappear into a sort of dark hazy blob, and much of the lit area is quite blurry.

If I were you, I would try to emulate these sort of lighting conditions/postfx, which would make for a clearer test case.

 

I just spent in the ballpark of four hours lighting a bucket 5 different ways.

There are pretty significant differences in the lighting. I'm not trying to trick you with post effects or tonemapping. These are different lighting techniques.

Can you work with me here?

 

I think you might be right, and maybe I agree. Some of the screens from ME: Catalyst kind of look nice but also missing some kind of information:

Spoiler

I want to like them, but something puts me off a little, the same way as the graphics from PAMELA imo.

 

Look, there's nothing that stands out in the scene to me, that looks as if it doesn't fit. But overall the lighting is very muted and uniform, and it kind of makes the quality of the scene come down to the AO which I think is too heavy. But that last scene you posted is an improvement.

Overall, the scene looks reasonably good, but not great. It's 'flat' in a different kind of way, as if it was simply compressed or something. The textures on the near wall are blurry and make my eyes go weird. It kind of makes it hard to compare it to something else.

Anyway, I do appreciate that you're putting up stuff for discussion, and if you send me the scene I will have a go at it too.

 

This is the same lighting rig as the last shot, just changed the angle of the light.


Final shot - I'll post the scene tomorrow or something.


Same rig same light angle, cranked intensity just a bit to add more differentiation.

 

OK, that's a bit clearer. I think the main issue is that the terrain and the foreground objects don't tie in too well together, and overall there just seems to be not as much ambience or sense of space as there might be (not sure if that's clear, but it's all I've got).

Here's something maybe slightly similar (although much more postfx'd), there's a much, much clearer sense of space and volume.

Spoiler

I'm not at all sure what gives this image more 'three-dimensionality', but that's exactly the term that comes to mind.

In my lighting attempts in Unity, my results have also come through very much like yours. Anyway, I'll have a go at the scene whenever you put it up

 

I need an opening tag as well, or did it cover the whole post?

That certainly a problem, I'd love to hear some alternate suggestions.

Enlighten is baked as well, it just bakes a different kind of information that then can be used for realtime GI. Check out Homefront Revolution. That has the best lighting I've seen so far and it uses realtime GI. When you enter a new level there is a short moment of a few seconds when the voxelization isn't finished yet and the GI is just missing. You'll stare at pure black shadows etc.. When it pops back in, the difference is (no pun intended) night and day. Imho it's a great game too if you like generic sandbox shooters with stealth and poor story. Absolutely love the lighting in that game.

Although nothing is really objective and photographs are always an interpretation of data that colors the result, I think it can be really useful as a point of reference. I've seen a talk on Crysis 1 where they showed how they took reference photos of nature scenes and recreated them in engine. At a glance the lighting looked exactly the same.

Reality looks dull and boring for the most part, has uncomfortably high dynamic range, but amazing drawdistance.

The photo looks like HDR multiexposure, that's far from lifelike. Also you wouldn't believe how much is faked in some photos. Ever seen a "photo" of a car in a print ad? They frankenstein those together from dozens of photos where they rearrange the lights between every shot to get the specific kind of reflection that they want on each specific part of the car. Or they straight up paint all the reflections in over 3D renderings. There's nothing "real" about these photos. Often not even the perspective.

If you "git gud" you can almost paint the images from scratch in Photoshop ^_^. You could cut out every object and tweak them separately. But working on a hands on scene in Unity seems a lot more useful to me too.

Not only is there no objective standard, but also not everyone sees the same thing. Monitors can have pretty bad differences in color representation and also not every person sees color the same way. Iirc if you tend to be "night blind" you have a different distribution of the receptors that see light and those that see color and see colors as more saturated than others would. I have that I think. I have trouble seeing at night and I find many things unpleasantly colorful. E.g. I've always disliked WoW and every game or painting in that "blizzard look". And I never think "this AAA game is too grey/brown", I like that look.
But even more important than that, Skyrim mods are objective proof that some people just have terrible taste .

I think the discussion was useful and constructive, it just shows we are missing some better terminology here.

I haven't played the new one, but the old one was a beautiful game with some of the best baked GI that I remember seeing in a game.

 

Yes, it's true and I think it's one of the main reasons why the old Mirror's Edge still holds up today visually (or at the very least, it does for me).

I actually quite dislike how the new one looks. I was quick to jump to Enlighten being the reason (and maybe it is, in part), but in all fairness, the new Mirror's Edge has day/night cycles and uses precompute GI and is open world. So there's no way to do all that and have any sort of high density GI, Enlighten or no Enlighten.

I mean this is technically much more impressive than the original and it simply wouldn't be possible with a more traditional lightmapper like beast:

I don't really care about how it looks though, but whatever

 

Actually the lighting looks terribad on all of them, but I would choose number 1 as the best looking.. Simply because the shadows are covering most of the lighting issues.

I can cut the the technical bit, but I have posted a breakdown before about lighting in UE (simply because it has many render modes to flag issues).. I shall re-post.

How do I make my game look ****.

Well, I want to work backwards. We talk a lot about how to make a game look good, but never much about why it looks good and what errors people seem to run into. How much impact does an engine have on the look / feel of a game, some are very split on that subject (I'm not) but let's have a look into shall we?
Ok here is the infiltrator demo, pretty ain't it?


Below, I've switched off all post processing..Still don't look that bad right?


Avert your eyes, ewww! Here's picture with all the IES profiles / lighting / shadow information / particles (vfx) switched off. This is literally just the 3D art.



Yeah, doesn't look so good does it? One of THE biggest factors is calibrating your lighting / materials and post correctly. If you don't do that you've no chance, no matter how good your artwork is it'll suck..

Luckily a lot of 3D art packages now include DX / GL based post processing, so at least you're not completely blind going in. So the question, how much impact does an engine have on the look of your game? A lot..

Let's just do one more example, where I've put everything back to the way it should be then stuck in an IBL (Image based lighting) component and not configured it right.


Yeah, I've tried to make it as apparent as possible.. But this is the effect of only one misconfigured light..

Your artwork can be pretty simple and still look better than most "indie" games out there, if you understand the basic principles of how engine graphics technology works.

 

Overblown depth of field effect?

 

Can you elaborate?

I am not doing these to show off, I'm not including anything other than stock lighting and stock post. The point is to be more specific about problems and have the exact same content under different conditions.

What are some of the tell tale signs of terrabad?

 

It actually follows almost all the common elements for creating a feeling of depth in a picture:
https://digital-photography-school.com/depth-dimension-photos/

Leading lines, composition, fore/mid/back, dof, and color to highlight.

Drastically differing color in each section of the screen (green back, orange mid, yellow fore)

But there's very little lighting in that scene, there are very few contact points etc.

 

I honestly think this looks awesome. It's a really cool effect.

 

This is a link to unreal forum that i reallly like so hopefully i don't break too much rules... The point is whatever is explain inside is still valid for Unity (concepts are same):

https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...al-4-Lighting-Academy-or-something-like-that-

Also from this post, here is one of the video (there is more):

It's some interesting talks from someone with lots of experience, so i hope it will help

 

The context and lighting is totally different, on your pictures it's outdoor lighting, while my pictures was indoor, and the artist is not perhaps the top notch skilled about lighting.
Anyway i am happy about UE4 graphics, i don't find them flat or bland, they are good to me.
While for Unity until Enlighten gets replaced by something else i won't expect the same quality.

It has been some dicsussion about Unity graphics not matching with Substance products, but it's Substance team that worked together with Unity to move to GGX.
Our discussion is more like tchit tchat and personnal preferences about top notch graphics, but that won't change anything it's just discussion whatever you claim. Perhaps Octane will become the new lightmapper or something else who knows ?

Anyway, Unity lighting is multi platform and good enought for the majority of indies, and i would prefer Unity to bring some Mmo management system with streaming, region grids etc ... or a new terrain system and vegetation shaders instead of trying trying to race with UE4 or Lumberyard.

 

So I took a look at that last shot in detail, I feel that most of the foreground and background objects tie together well, with the exception on the barrels in the background. Here's the illustration:


(The Green indicate proper relationship between object, light and ground, the Red circle indicates a problem).

Let's put 'artistic' differences aside and simply look at the lighting, is my assessment of the lighting between objects and ground here something you'd agree with?

There's a problem with the barrels on the right not relating correctly to ground, but the other objects tend to blend correctly and interact correctly with light.

At least, that's my impression. Feel free to draw up a counter example if you feel differently.

 

Mirror edge has been mentioned, turns out they talk about the lighting in a GDC.

Also in singling out enlighten, I think we have veer too much in silver bullet territories. Good art direction with good technical knowledge can always compensate deficiency of tools.

I have to rewatch that video too to see if I can refresh what information we can actually get from it ... lots of trade off and compensating weakness of some tools with another for sure !

 

The result is what matters.

 

Some good points!

I think I share your underlying opinion here. I don't understand people showing screenshot after screenshot of games (or at least scenes) made in other engines... presenting these as the kind of look they NEED to be able to make a game.

At least that is how it comes across to me. Because first if it can be "proven" consistently there is a difference between Unity graphics and graphics from another engine (and it seems to be the case to a degree certainly) and a person just has to have their game look like those other engines then it makes sense one should just be using the other engine, right?

Second, I guess I don't understand why they NEED the graphics to look like UE (or whatever) graphics to begin with. I don't understand why a game cannot be made unless it looks better than all other Unity games (again this is the message I am getting for how they are viewing this).

Why are these graphics fine for all of these other popular Unity games and not a few people? It just seems a little extreme to me to have this attitude. "Well I can't use Unity to make a game because my game has to look better (to me) than all of these other Unity games look and I cannot do that in Unity."

That's why I made that post earlier about just doing the best you can and not worrying about it. Not obsessing over things the majority of gamers will never even notice to begin with because (hopefully) they are too immersed in actually playing the game.

OR... just ditch Unity and use UE or CE or whatever.

BUT... I do think this particular thread is better than most because here the focus has been more on identifying the cause and how to "fix it" if possible.

Just saying I still think it is more of an issue of where too much importance is being placed on a certain look (that AAA graphics unicorn). And probably... for a game... it would be better to put this kind of focus and attention to detail on the actual game itself. Remember a game is not really just a collection of cool looking stills / screenshots.

Or another way of viewing it is... other people are making great games with Unity that "suffer" from the same graphics issues. Why didn't it stop them from making their games?

Just something to think about.

 

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023155/Art-Direction-Bootcamp-The-Future
Art Direction Bootcamp: The Future of Lighting

 

To be frank that's not where the discussion is at, it's about a QUALITY (flat vs non flat) that someone need but isn't sure what cause it. And it turns out one engine has this quality as an example to look at. That's some nuance.

 

To be frank if it is simply a technical discussion entirely that is good probably. This one has been interesting at least. Still... why does it matter? Beyond maybe being able to learn how to make the games not look flat (to a couple of people because remember only a couple of people even agree on this flatness thing).

Like I said it is interesting compared to most of the threads that have went this route. I just think the bigger picture is being missed... which is why does it matter so much to begin with.

 

Okay I watch the whole video, they supplement real time indirect lighting (enlighten) with a hierarchical reflection system (occluded skybox, local cubemap, ssr), use real world values adjusted for artistic effect (1000 lux for the sun instead of 100 000 due to interior/exterior overblown transition adjustment). They had quite some problems with night lighting and enlighten, they compensate by adjusting light range and size to mimic effects.

So in the end there is quite a lot of compensating and accepting things, and that's not introducing their need for streaming, avoiding light leaking, or character illumination that have dedicated local light, etc ...

@GarBenjamin
I would argue you need to know your tools and their expressive range to know what to make with it. The link about art direction above also answer that question lol (the concept of OBR).

 

Indeed.

Yep, Unity will make changes and improvments but you must be very patient lol

 

It's cool, just a bit of banter to try and find out what the issue is instead of stewing whilst angrily pointing at the screen.

When you changed the light angle it did help a lot, but nothing looks right about it. From how light is being portrayed / scattered and how it falls off. The GI contribution (colour wise) seems incorrect, the scene is too dull it doesn't like the base lighting has been tonemapped correctly using ACES.. The textures are too low resolution, reflections look inaccurate, it doesn't look "phsyically correct"..

I mean take your pick on that one.. Do me a favour, I want to see what happens when you remove as much of "Unity's standard lighting" out the equation as possible. AFAIK area lights conform to proper square inverse, so replace the directional with one or a couple of those, get a HDR image and use it as the skybox for IBL..

Set the reflection probes to real-time, disable Enlighten.. Post a screenie with / without post, post should be nothing more than AO / Tonemapping (ACES) / Colour grading.

@Zephus

Ha ..!

@GarBenjamin

...

The issue is it shouldn't be that hard, a lot of arch viz stuff is nothing more than substance materials slapped on a mesh plane.. It ain't taxing and it ain't difficult as long as you understand the fundamentals of composition and getting the best out of the lighting / post stack.

 

I think many indies would like some good lighting out of the box in Unity looking as good as this small indie mobile game.

(If i have some time i'll make some small test using Alloy).

 

Maybe this article will help you guys...

Creating a AAA environment in Unity 5

 

Unity already can do that out of the box, but they have good assets / textures. I mean i don't think you need to try to use alloy for this.

 

I don't think so, it's basically the inside of the verandah that I'm talking about.

I found something that I think is useful to use to try to understand good lighting. Here's a completely textureless environment that, IMO, looks obviously mind-blowingly well lit. I think it's Source engine or something, but anyway, the point is that good lighting is regardless of textures. You could have fun walking around in this thing as-is.



I think it also shows how little geometry is required to create a great looking environment.

 

I wish it had not been so saturated, it's kind of hard to appreciate any kind of subtlety in the lighting. But anyway, I don't think this is something that is not quite easily achievable in Unity. And it looks quite good too.

 

So it's shadow and occlusion, and something about falloff