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

I think this is good - the more stripped down and simplified the example, the easier it is to look at.

I've wasted way, way too much time on this already - but I'll strip the textures from the example I had - dump the scene in drop box, and maybe we can look at it more seriously.

Maybe @ShadowK can set up alternate examples in UT or whatever - since they won't have any texture looking at cross engine examples would be quite fair.

 

Here is what i did recently for a pack, so i only used what Unity provide (i just post 2 screens so it doesn't turn into a show off too much... you can check the artstation for the rest):





Here is the artstation with many more screens:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6DgEw

I put some details on how it's built here:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/stylized-fantasy-village.467805/page-2#post-3069713

The bloom went a bit crazy in some of the shots...
It's not as good as other scenes in this thread but it gives an idea of what can be achieve fairly easily by a random dude like me XD

 

I would set this up - but honestly - waiting for baking is just too time consuming. Area light requires baking, and no, it takes too friggin long

I agree with your other points - but I think ACES and Unity's lighting really don't play well together. ACES produces too high contrast results, and it makes dark areas too dark and light areas too bright - I really think this is part of the problem. Either everything is mega contrast super hyper real or things are too dull and intermediate.

Even though the "no post" hospital scene looked way worse, the lighting was more correct without any post.

 

Looks really nice!

 

This lighting looks really cohesive even if clearly inferior in terms of rendering to Unreal.

 

Does unity allow to rewrite the mip map chain inside a texture? I still has to look how to do it with regular tool too

 

I think it would be very interesting, if it's not too much trouble, if you could render the top scene without textures, so we can really see the lighting data on its own. Then maybe we can be more specific about how to avoid problems and get the best out of it.

 

Also provide a PNG of the same screen

 

I thought you'd appreciate both the work and the article. Not sure if you read that but he mentions Unity being inferior graphically to other engines specifically UE4. Said it would not be possible to have done this out of the box with Unity. $300 worth of stuff from the Asset store were needed.

Still I guess there is the solution. Just accept with Unity you won't get the kind of graphics you want unless you invest $300. Maybe $500 would be even better. But one time cost so not too bad really.

 

Isn't there a performance hit (not to mention increase in system complexity and increased chances for errors due to clashing) when tacking on so many Unity Asset store solutions just to improve the graphics?

Just seems like it would all be cleaner and faster if it was built-in at the C++ level. Maybe not.

 

Well I do, I've seen the article and talked about it in similar threads before, and I think it's a very nicely composed scene (except for the saturated fog).

I can't help but feel like, whether it was the intention or not, the colored fog obscures the fact that the graphics come off a bit blurry (which is a common problem in Unity that may be able to be solved with products like Beautify) and also the lighting provided by Enlighten is not incredibly great. Personally, I would like to play a game that looked a lot more crisp.

Here's what it should have looked similar to in terms of the lighting, IMO, but I doubt that even with all those plugins, it would be possible to achieve the overall lighting quality:

Spoiler

 

I'm not really sure, it seems quite likely. Over time as I've read over some WIP threads about creating custom graphics solutions, I have read things to the effect that the developer is not able to access some information that is buried deep in the source code, and has had to hack it somehow. I'm not at all certain about any specific details though.

My main issue is that it might be very difficult for a developer to maintain a very low-level integration on their own and for a long period of time. Unity can easily keep their own tech in step with whatever related stuff they are doing on the engine.

 

I am not sure it will help a lot because of red coloring everywhere you can't compare with materials on standard outdoor lighting lol

You should give a try at Alloy combined with Scion and Beautify, it should be the best graphics combo possible.

In a AAA team, they have their own shader and lighting Guru working on the rendering part specifically for their unique project.
If Unity should allow the same level of customisation for AAA games, like UE4 it should have the entire rendering part as open source.

 

I wanted to give this one more shot. With a number of changes.


I'm fairly pleased with this, the colors are rich without hyper contrast. The lighting information feels pretty good (not perfect, but pretty damn good). Nothing feels flat.

Maybe I just have a bad eye for lighting, but I think this looks excellent.

Bunch of Changes
One: Added much more color, green on the ground, more blue in the lighting, etc. There's a richer set of colors working here.
Two: I shifted the camera back a bit so the textures didn't look quite so bad and added a detail texture to the wall.
Three: I corrected a number of minor problems (mostly just checking the 'create lightmap uv' import setting).

The bucket in the foreground is excellent. It is not 'flat', the shading at the rear properly blends, and the light hitting the front properly pops. The color is excellent.

I changed the lighting so that none of the object contact points are in shadow. Didn't want to hide defects or problems.

One major hack: I'm using Bloom here with a zero threshold. Since this isn't using any of the fancier color bleeds, I'm using bloom in order to fake better color bounce, the bloom is very subtle, but it does add some blur.

The biggest problem: It's immensely hard to get subtle lighting, even with the bloom hack, the dark areas are too dark and the bright areas are too bright.

The ratio between light and shadow + ACES: this ratio is very very hard to maintain properly with ACES running. Here I'm using a .5 exposure, with the directional and ambient at 1.5 intensity.

Bloom hack and Tonemapping settings:

Lighting settings:


This is all pretty stock. The main deficit I think is a lack of any kind of atmospheric scattering and/or better volumetric effects. I think the colors are quite good though, rich without too much contrast but there are real shadows and a good amount of 'depth'.

Thoughts?​

 

Now I think I am beginning to maybe understand you guys a tiny bit better. Because I can see the fun in messing around doing experiments to try to make a cool looking scene and see how good it can be. Testing store add ons and so forth. I still don't understand it from a game dev perspective because it just seems unnecessary and waste of time IMO. But from a purely having fun and experimenting perspective yeah I can get it.

 

Honestly I really love doing these kinds of experiments. It's the best procrastination possible

Sometimes you even learn something useful.

 

Looks much better, and not bad at all for Unity. Maybe some detail textures on the wood would help to make it look less blurry?

I think you did a great job of tying everything together, to me there's nothing that stands out as being out of whack with the rest.

I still think that the lighting is overall just not anywhere near as good quality as lightmass or something, but that is probably due to Enlighten and the limitations it has to use to be realtime.

 

This looks fantastic to me. Very close to the kind of scenes Billy uses for showing the "good".

I don't know much about all of this modern stuff. But don't the basics still work? Like why can't you use just some ambient lighting to add a bit of subtle light to the scene as a whole. Or is that an old school thing and there is no actual ambient world level lighting anymore?

 

If anyone wants to mess around with it:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ggy1646407eexkr/lighting_test.unitypackage?dl=0

I'm friggin done though

This was made with 5.4.1, I used the legacy post pack since the new stack isn't compatible.

There's nothing particularly fancy happening in that scene other than the bloom hack.

I cranked up the values for the light bounce, because shadows are too dark (especially with tonemapping), but other than that, nothing fancy, nothing custom, no asset store.

 

No, you do it!

(I agree though, the mips are probably a problem)

 

They need to build their own low level stuff so that it runs on every plattform you can deploy to, which must be an absolute nightmare. Asset developers have the luxury of e.g. just supporting windows dx11 and everyone else can fvck off.

That still can be done, even as a gradient that affects top, horizon and bottom with different colors. It has a big impact if you choose to override the skybox ambient light with this.

Make sure to test whether it causes visual "buzzing" during movement. I've stepped into the trap of messing with mipmap settings without testing the look in motion myself in the past. For stills Kaiser looks a lot sharper. You could also sharpen all textures before import.

That was a great talk! Thanks for sharing. Very informative and somewhat sobering.


If the lightbakes of Mirrors Edge 1 took 25 hours per level on a 50 computer renderfarm, then it's plain infeasible for indies to use that kind of approach. None of us can afford to waste so much computing time on light baking. You gotta keep in mind you don't just bake once per level, you bake every time you change something and iterations become a nightmare. I think getting the most out of dynamic lighting without any kind of pre-baking is the way to go for me.

 

I agree with this 100%. It's not remotely worth the bump in quality. That kind of workflow is impractical. Even post release, for patching and fixing, having to spend hours+ to correct a small material or prop placement error is far too much.

 

Absolutely agree. I'm not interested in anything besides GI, and like I've said for me the only two horses in the race are VXGI like SEGI, and enlighten.

OK now I'm stumped, apparently Star Wars Battlefront uses enlighten! Although interestingly, all the links about it on Geomerics website are dead.

So if someone knows how to render a scene of this quality in Unity, using photogrammetry textures/models from Quixel or something, let me know ...

Spoiler

 

You just click the little button next to "Create MMO" ;D

 

The floor looks super flat, the lighting doesn't pop up on floor colors and normal map, this time this is an under lighten scene , but i really prefer it to mosty over bright, bloom and too much specular many people do. The picture looks blurred is it your export format or test resolution ?
Did you use last Unity post effects ?

Yep lol

You forgot Lumberyard and CryEngine SVOGI that is full real time , no baking and looks good enought for most indies.
About Star Wars, even with Enlighten , i think like Mirror Edge they tweaked it a lot for their own needs and the 3D engine is not Unity so they have also full control on the final game look.

 

Hehe not the whole game, just the scene or something similar. The stuff of quixel's website is quite good, and I hear that Battlefront is also using photogrammetry.

In fact in the image that @GarBenjamin posted with the red lighting, many of the assets are also from Quixel. Yet the lighting doesn't come off anywhere near as subtle or nuanced. Maybe Unity and Frostbite are using different integrations?

Anyway, it's made me hopeful that enlighten can do a better job than what I've seen (even in Geomerics own presentations).

 

No way man, I did my part. Download the stupid scene and do it yourself

Correct the floor also, it's too flat (really needs hightmap or tessellation)

 

I was first to talk about the texture by mentioning anisotropy (use mipmap)

Cloud it's surprisingly cheap, I'm broke and that's still enough for me to consider it.

Also people are using segi for editing and visualization and bake after with a proper lightmaping options.

edit:
roughly
AWS: $69/month pay per hour model
Google cloud: $52/month pay per minute model

 

I cheked last Lumberyard demo, and having this quality in real time nothing baked, i think is already very sufficient for most oudoor game projects.

 

Ok... Final... final pass..



I switched up the color grading, and changed a few other things.

This is reducing ACES to .35 exposure. Lighting intensity is also reduced, single directional light at intensity of 1 now.

This is actually good result finally. Ground still sucks because it's just a normal map. Some textures need more detail, blah blah blah, this is very good light.

The color looks better because there are many more colors present, there is a lot of subtlety. There is more spectrum everywhere. Because contrast is not silly, there are more subtle differences between color.

Even though it is not blown out, it is very rich. It's closer to what we see with our eyes on a bright day.

 

Pfff.. Nah, been down that rabbit hole of comparing every engine and every little piece of tech looking back and forwards constantly seeing what actual differences they made. It takes too much time..

What did I tell you about getting the tonemapping right ?.. It's definatley getting there just a bit of bloom / contrast adjustment and it's about on par with just about every well made game out there.

It's not a AAA beating arch viz masterpiece and no amount of tweaking will probably change that, but as we discussed we do games not glass and sofa's..

 

I prefer that new lighting.

 

It's good if it was before night fall, i don't know if it is a post effect setting or the directionnal light making the whole scene having that coloring.

Yep, it looks really good i like it.
Sstill the image is blurry, do you use DOF ?

 

Both of those look way better, the crispness makes a huge difference.

What all are the changes? Just mip?

 

If you add a sharpen filter with Amplify it does the same, all the screenshots I posted used Unity's stock post.. I'm getting lazy..

@Frpmta

You could be onto something, I actually noticed UE looked a bit blurry until I changed them to use the texture group:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?32288-UE4-mipmap-issues

 

Here are the settings for the improved lighting.



The two big differences:
- Directional Specular in the baking (I messed up reverting to directional somewhere and forgot about it - it makes a big difference)
- Crank down ACES to .35, crank up Value to 3 or 4.

I also threw in tiny global fog for just a hint of fake atmospheric scattering. If you use proper scattering/volumetric lighting, it'll look much better.

ACES changes the ratios between bright and dark, but in general, these ratios are actually pretty good. Instead of changing the ratio, all we want to do is brighten the colors, so we increase 'Value' instead, this maintains the ratio between dark and light better while making the colors feel less dull. I reduce the saturation just a bit also to help keep colors blended.

Two major hacks:
- Bloom to fake a little bit more color bleed (this also produces a bit of extra blur)
- Global Fog to fake a little bit of scattering/volumetric.

 

Now you can start your AAA game lol

 

Yes, but... There's no game that uses Enlighten that I actually like its graphics...

 

With both mip map or no mip map, it won't change the final game rendering when the object is in close view and Tone mapper takes care of brightness for you.
I don't think the lighting quality is related to image format, DSS is only about good compression.

When you change a directionnal light values, you can see how the material respond to the lighting and this is different in Unity and UE4 for example.

This is a simple material test made in Substance Painter


Unity reflection probe, real time lighting, linear color space, tone mapping and Alloy


Unreal 4 with the same material exported from Substance Painter, default lighting with Tone mapping , no adjustments, without increasing the contrast, colors are lot more vivid.



UE4 gives you better result without tweaking anything and without recalculate lightmapping after level making.

 

I'll believe it to be a practical solution when I see you using it . There's upload times, setup times, troubleshooting stuff that doesn't work, and even if you get a single bake down to like 10$ (which I really doubt for massive high res bakes), do you really wanna pay that everytime you tweaked a texture or moved an object?

I'd rather speculate that I'll take so long to make a game that at time of release realtime GI on GPUs is feasible x].

 

Linear vs gamma color space.

 

It's already done in CryEngine.
Anyway all time spend analysing wich engine renders better you would had already achieved your game lol

 

Look at the difference in color between the unity shadow and unreal. Unity's shadows are SUPER dark.

The bright spots are BLOWN OUT.

The contrast with stock unity tonemapping is crazy. This is why every unity picture looks so hyper contrast. Even very pro scenes like that old hospital.

 

It's because it's real time lighting, nothing baked, don't pay attention to shadows, the example was to demonstrate the material surface lighting only.

It's the inverse, if you don't increase contrast in Unity tone mapper you loose all coloring, by default the value is too low.
In the example, UE4 has better contrast out of the box even without tone mapping enabled.

Unity without tone mapping , linear color space, Alloy shaders


UE4 without tone mapping



Anyway, what matters more is something that runs good with good visuals instead of trying to get the perfect lighting

 

I really think that contrast and color make a big difference, especially with respect to depth.

Here is an example from above.


This is that scene desaturated. Look at how wrong this is.

The plants cannot be connected to those walls, it is not possible to have something so dark be on top of something so bright. Even a black object will never be as dark as the shrubs.

Brightness is a function of lighting more than anything else, and when you have transitions from one object to the next but you have too much or too little of a change in brightness things look wrong.

The more you shift the ratio of dark and light, the more you create the possibility of impossible combinations like the above.


This is an example of the opposite. Here we have everything so bright, that the differences between elements on the screen is lost. Things look flat because almost everything has equal levels of brightness.



This is very good. The bright and dark areas are clearly separated. The detail is spectacular and the lighting is very well defined. Things are only bright when light is directly hitting them.




If we look at threshold here, this is very good. The areas hit with DIRECT LIGHT are well defined. The areas not hit by direct light are almost entirely excluded.

The difference between bright areas and dark areas depends solely on the amount of light hitting them.



The colors here are completely disconnected from the light.
In this picture light is not creating brightness. Brightness is coming from enhancing specific colors.


This is another example. Brightness here is coming from color or something, not from light.

The orange pants are crazy.

 

Outdoor scenes are a bit trickier, since the lighting is much more even, especially compared to interior scenes.

Few more examples:

This is very solid, with one exception - the tree is not lit the same way as the rest of the scene.

The bright areas on the tree are not coming from the same direction as the brightness from the rocks. The left side of the tree should be brighter. It is either being lit with a different light or ... something.



Witcher 3 is incredibly well done. Even with so much detail on screen, look at the clarity. This is absolute top quality work. Amazing.

All of the brightness here is coming from the lighting, the scene can be entirely understood here - even outdoor - and even with so much detail. You can clearly figure out the direction of the light!



Overwatch is also immensely crisp. Light and dark spaces are clear and distinct. You can completely comprehend this scene, and everything is super crisp.

 

@frosted now this is more like it! Great to see someone using their head and making use of simple image processing to analyze these scenes to better understand what makes them work or not. Great job!

 

You were doing it three pages ago, I just narrowed it down and threw in a rule: brightness should come from light.

So that means that the difference in brightness should reflect the difference in light.

With a lot of the post processing people use, brightness is being disconnected and exaggerated too much. Instead of being a difference in light, brightness is often a difference in color... if that makes sense?



This is the best example, the wall and the shrubs have the exact same amount of light hitting them - but the wall is like 10x brighter than the shrubs.

You will never ever see something like this in real life, nothing will have that much contrast when the lighting is the same.

It looks like someone took a picture of a building and a picture of shrubs and pasted one into the other, since the brightness is so vastly different, they cannot be part of the same environment.

 

It's called physically based materials, more metal and less roughness means lot more light reflection intensity.

I am not sure analysing black and white color filter can used to determine lighting quality.
Anyway if you are able to make a better game using black and white , why not lol

Stop analysing if graphics will work or not, just start your game, Unity can do AAA if you have talent
(the game is full real time, and still looking better than many games using Enlighten)

 

@frosted I truly don't mean any offense here, but the only thing that I really got out of looking at your image examples is that visual mediums (art, photography, games) are completely subjective. The way you chose to process and contrast the images in photoshop is completely subjective. And the interpretation you derive from these things is subjective as well.

Where visual communication is concerned the most important aspect is communicating intent, even moreso than any technique used to visualize. What are you trying to show...? how are you going to construct the image in order to get this across? The absolute worst example (in my opinion) of the images you posted is the Witcher3 image, because it is simply a still capture from a video and being so it does not have the same framing, lighting choices, or visual narrative that other static images are built around.

I think a lot of these types of discussions are completely missing the point unfortunately. You can talk tech all you want but developing knowledge about how to construct an image visually so that it forms a cohesive package is going to do more to inform how you use Unity graphics capabilities, than any of the next 10 advances in engine tech.
</humble opinion>