Unity Cannot Produce Good Graphics....I Think Not

I see this compliant so much and it annoys me. While searching on YouTube concerning unity and graphics I found this.

THIS WAS MADE BY YOUTUBE USER Yaboiicey , not me​

 

Graphics are so yesterday anyways

 

^ +1

Anyways, most people expect graphics to just happen, like CE3 and UDK. They don't realize it takes work.

 

And those people don't realize, either, that the graphics is not so important.
As for me, I DON'T EVEN WANT such graphics in the games (sorry for caps). I mean, nowadays games really suck, everybody wants realistic skin, realistic fur and hair, realistic water, realistic EVERYTHING, but they forget about the game play, the idea and game story. You play such games and get bored in 30 minutes! And compare up-to-date games with the old ones (like The Lost Vikings, etc, there are lots of examples) - they had rather primitive graphics, but what a nice game play and story! Games with a soul!

 

No, but the artist can.

 

(Technical artists play a big role in modern graphics.)

 

That sucks. Get some retro pixels into you son.

 

Eventually pixel art will be too fancy for everyone and it will return to being just text, then pong graphics.

 

i still think gamecube games look just fine

 

I think graphics are as important as you want them to be. Good graphics and good gameplay/storyline are not mutually exclusive, just look at The Last of Us. The problem is that so many games these days focus ONLY on graphics and leave the storyline and gameplay as a side dish, when they should at the VERY LEAST be equal on the plate, if not the main course.

Okay I'm hungry now.

 

For me, graphics boost immersion. They don't have to be photorealistic, just done well...they fit the game. My brain can fill in the gaps, but it definitely doesn't like clunky art.

 

Graphics only support the story world. The visuals either help or hurt the suspension of belief/disbelief. If we didn't believe that a little weird creature could create a star using weird objects that stick together when you roll them, Katamari Damacy wouldn't be as fun. If we didn't believe that Superman could fly, he'd be a weird floating person in the air that we laugh at.

Once upon a time people were terrified after watching the movie, "JAWS", but now it's laughably horrible! The role and quality of graphics have changed, but story world still reigns over graphics.

 

in any event, I do think graphics are a major selling point for any game engine. I think the video just shows the great quality unity can produce with the right models and shaders.

 

I don't think there was ever a doubt unity can produce good graphics...

Theres so much more to games than just good graphics though.

 

You'd be surprised how many people complain and say "OMG Unity Sux Cuz' Iz So Ugly, I think UDK is betta cuz' I can make another generic fps", I just sit and facepalm.

 

Indeed, graphics takes work. If you give me a C compiler and an OpenGL library and a good graphics card, and a lot of money and a team of brilliant artists and programmers, I could give you very great graphics, with a great amount of work.

The idea behind buying a game engine is that SOMEONE ELSE has already done the hard programming work, and you are paying them to use the fruits of their labor. If all Unity provides, graphics wise, is a thin layer around OpenGL (I know I am exaggerating, it does more than that), where to do fancy effects you have to code them all yourself, then yes, indeed, Unity would have poor graphics support. An ideal graphics engine would come pre-stocked with all the fancy graphics algorithms and shaders you need to get amazing things happening. Just drop in some art (yes, the art has to be good), and BOOM, the engine renders fancy soft volumetric shadows, realistic global illumination, subsurface scattering, and everything else under the sun.

I have noticed on these forums that when somebody asks "does Unity do this", the response is always "of course it can, but you have to program it yourself". What's the point of using an engine if you have to do the work yourself? I know, using Unity is easier than working directly with OpenGL, but my point is that it is really strange to say that Unity supports X just because it is possible for a brilliant team of programmers to implement X on TOP of Unity. What people are asking is does Unity support X OUT OF THE BOX.

If somebody asked: what is a better raytracing package, povray or C++, would you answer C++ because C++ allows you more flexibility in the types of raytracers you can create? Of course not, you would answer povray because the work has already been done.

I am not an expert on the various game engines, but if Cryengine comes with more built-in graphics algorithms than Unity, then it is accurate to say that cryengine has superior graphics.

 

Not necessary. You are trying to compare two different things here. Can Unity do the trick? Yes it can. Can Cryengine do the trick? Yes it can. It all depends on what it is you are trying to do. Some might be easy to do in one then the other. I am not going to sit and write a Visual Basic program while I can do it much faster and easier in C++. But can it be done.. Yes it can be done in Visual Basic. It is up to the person doing it.
You stating that you want X Out of the box is like going to the store and buying a cake mix. And thinking that if you open the box.. poof out comes a perfectly cooked cake. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! You have to put the time and energy into it to make it come out perfect. Might not be perfect the first time either. Just because I own 3DS Max doesn't make me a AAA modeler/rigger/texturer. There is no magic button that is there to hit and poof out comes my model perfectly.
Again, the game engine is a tool. Not an end all. The limit is up to you and what you are willing to do.

 

The real question is, can you produce good graphics?

 

This is the kind of attitude that I see all the time on here, and I don't understand it.
This isn't a forum about people's skills. This is a forum about a game engine, a product with pros and cons.
As I said before, give me a C compiler, OpenGL, and a lot of time and money, and yes of course I can produce good graphics, either personally or by paying someone else.

The real question is: is Unity the right product?
If you goal is good graphics, does Unity help you achieve that?
What does Unity provide that helps you get great graphics, that you wouldn't get by using the standard C and OpenGL tools it builds upon?
I am not an expert on Unity, but my impression is that it provides a lot of tools for scripting the interactions between the graphics, the user, and the physics, and it provides enough programabability that you can write your own fancy shaders and multi-pass effects to achieve the same kinds of graphics you could in raw OpenGL. But the question is: does it come pre-built with the latest and greatest fancy algorithms, or do you have to roll your own?

 

Unity has the capabilities of DX11 and such, but it is not just an "out of the box, everything is finished" kind of engine. A lot of work goes into a game, and Unity has taken a lot of the harder work out. Now it's just writing your own shaders (or paying somebody else to do it). Sure, prettier shaders out of the box would be a nice plus, but it's really not necessary. The lack of out of the box shaders does not limit you; all that limits you is your willingness and ability.

 

Kind of ironic, I don't like people with an attitude that the software is to blame for poor quality work.

 

well, the software is to blame sometimes, I believe cryengine 3 and unreal engine 4 looks better in terms of global illumation, ambience and shadows, but reason I use use unity is because I feel the only thing that is wrong with it (in my opinion) it does not look AS good as the triple A ones and it cant use C++ for general scripting (I have a weird disdain for C#) other than that, Unity is near-flawless.

 

They're just as problematic as the ones going around endlessly calling other peoples work (certainly not their own work) poor quality, crap, and such.

 

Prettiness aside that demo doesn't really prove much in terms of graphics capabilities for games ... a single, static, model that causes serious jerkiness when the camera pans.

 

Yeah, the real question is... can Unity compile a whole racing game with those graphics, and not crash the fastest of computers? We'll never know!

 

Well, maybe someday someone will release a AAA title (whatever that is) and put the debate to rest.

 

I agree that it is very awesome that Unity provides access to the underlying DX11 stuff.
It would suck terribly if Unity put limits on what you could do. If I want to write my own fancy shader, I don't want the engine saying "no you must only pick from the shaders we provide".

I also agree that technically it isn't necessary for an engine to provide shaders. But you've started down a slippery slope. Is it necessary for an engine to provide networking? Is it necessary for it to provide support for loading meshes? Is it necessary to support scripting? Where do you draw the line? Is it really enough if all an engine does is get out of your way and let you program as if there was no engine? Not in my opinion. An engine should do things for you so you don't have to. That's why you buy it instead of writing your own. If I want to write my own shaders, I will write my own shaders.

But there are some standard graphics algorithms that have been developed and refined by brilliant researchers and programmers over the years. For example, ambient occlusion, soft shadows, real time variants of photon mapping, subsurface scattering, etc etc etc. Unity may be flexible enough that you can roll your own scripts to pull off all of those. But that results in the game developer needing more time and expertise, just to re-implement something that other people already figured out. If you just want to make a game and don't want to spend all your time reading and implementing SIGGRAPH papers and GPU gems, then you want to pay someone else to implement the graphics code. It makes logical sense that such code is part of or comes with the engine, at least for standard effects that many people will want. Others could be add-ons in the asset store. All else being equal (obviously in reality nothing is equal), an engine that comes with the latest SIGGRAPH papers already implemented is better than engine where you have to write your own. Folks on this forum often come across as saying "Unity is better because you have to code everything yourself". This is where I get concerned.

I'm not saying that Unity is a bad choice, I think that for a huge variety of games, it is a great choice. But Unity is not perfect. If it was perfect, it would come with every effect you could ever want, and you just have to learn how to activate it. My problem is with the people on these forums who are so eager to defend Unity that they think saying "Unity stays out of your way and lets you code your own effects without limitation, the only limitation is your own skill" is going to convert people who were actually asking "does Unity come with a good implementation of X effect out of the box". You are unfairly deflecting the question. This is like the common open source meme: When somebody asks, "I think open source program X should have Y feature", they get a snarky response "sure it does, you just have to code it yourself". You are answering the wrong question. Some people just want to buy something that works, not everybody wants to re-invent the wheel. For those people, Unity might be the wrong choice. If you try to say otherwise, you might fool someone into wasting time with Unity when it doesn't serve their needs. This just makes the community look overzealous and unprofessional.

 

Examples != functionality. Providing lesser amounts of examples does not in any way hinder the ability of the engine, as I said above. Not supporting actual features greatly hinders functionality. There is a line between a feature and an extra. Extras are not integral to performance, like packaged shaders, character controllers, light cookies, or even the example project.

 

But by your logic, you may as well just sit down with visual studio and write your own game in raw DirectX. After all, you have all the functionality that your computer has to offer, every feature of the GPU is exposed. Nothing hinders you from writing anything you want. But everyone on this forum seems to agree that writing your own engine is a waste of time. When comparing game engines, you need to evaluate what features that engine gives to you that visual studio alone does not. I would argue that for everyone to do their own implementation of voxel cone tracing would be a waste of time. It would be better if it was a feature of the engine that you could just turn on. The cone tracing isn't simply an example of what can be done with the engine, it might one day be considered a core piece of functionality that any decent game engine has to provide. Would you say that MIP mapping is just an example of what can be done, and that you don't have to include it, and that you should code it yourself with shaders? Of course not, it is a core feature that all engines support. (I know this is a bad example since its built into the hardware. Shadows might be a better example.) If Unity added the latest and greatest effects, they would be ahead of the curve.

 

All of the extras Unity offers have been created in the Unity engine itself. The features within the engine have not.

 

And this is relevant to a game developer how? When the Unity team wants to expose some functionality to the game developer, that functionality might be hardcoded into the engine C++ source code, or it might be done with scripts, or it might potentially take a combination of both. This is an internal decision that the Unity team has to make. Some things might have to go into the core engine, other things are possible as scripts. Maybe some things are possible as scripts but are more efficient if baked into the engine at a deeper level. All the game developer cares about is what he can do with Unity, and how easy it is to do it. The purpose of a game engine is to save the game developers time. The more things the engine can make easy, whether it be core functionality or extras, the better.

 

You can't expect Unity to just package everything with the engine. Why should they do your work for you? If you want to easily make good shaders, use Strumpy. If you cannot write shaders yourself, buy some from the asset store or hire somebody to make them. There is no necessity in Unity packaging more shaders with the engine. Why don't they just package an entire RPG system or MMO system with the engine as well? That would make the engine more convenient for some people. One of the biggest overlooked differences between the big three engines is that Unity Technologies is a company that makes an engine, not games. Unreal and Cryengine are both from companies that also create games. They have teams specialized in fantastic shaders and graphics, as they have Unreal Tournament and Crysis respectively. What you're asking is for a game engine company to make your game look pretty for you. The ones you should ask for nice shaders and graphics would be a game development team with people who specialize in shaders, not a game engine development company.

 

Thank you for that comment, this clarifies where we really disagree. The issue here isn't whether graphics features are good, but rather what features are part of the engine vs. what features are part of the game. What is a game engine? Here is my point of view: A game engine provides systems that are common to many games. You buy a game engine so you don't have to start building everything from the ground up. The engine involves rendering, physics, networking, and input, for example. Using those tools you can add artwork and gameplay. The artwork and gameplay are the game, the rendering, physics, networking, and input are the engine.

The current discussion is rendering. When you make a game, you want to hire artists. The artwork will be custom for the game. The artwork has to get rendered. The game engine should do that for you, that's the purpose of the rendering portion of the engine: to transform a mesh + textures + lights + shader selection into an image that looks great and renders fast. In the really old days you'd have to write all the rendering code yourself, there was no engine unless you made your own. But why should every game have to have its own implementation of rasterization and lighting and texture mapping? These are common to all games, so build an engine and let the game developers reuse the renderer. The engine should do them for you because you want to focus on the art and gameplay, not the rendering.

Over the years, computers get more powerful and new algorithms are invented. There was a time when wireframe rendering was all there was. Then flat shaded polygons. Then smooth shaded, then texture mapped, then programmable shaders, shadows, global illumination, and whatever else.
At any point in time, you could invent your own rendering algorithms, or read the research papers and code your own implementation. But if you just want to make a game, you want an engine to make life easy. You want to just take the artwork and tell the engine "go render", and it comes back in 1/60th of a second with an image that is as photorealistic (or cartoony, as the case may be), as the current technology allows.

Every year new GPUs come out with new features. Every year new SIGGRAPH papers come out with new rendering techniques to run on those GPUs. My point of view is that the rendering engine should stay current with support for the latest GPU features and the latest SIGGRAPH algorithms for rendering cool things on those GPUs. That way you can always create some art in Maya and toss it in the engine and out comes the best possible looking result. I don't consider rendering to be part of the game, I consider rendering to be part of the engine.

A really good rendering engine like that in Unity goes beyond offering up a selection of good rendering options: it allows you to code your own by writing custom shaders and multipass rendering methods via render-to-texture. This is fine, but it is really a last resort, only to be used when a feature is missing from the engine.

How would YOU decide which rendering functionality is part of the engine, vs. what is up to the game developer to implement?
Personally, if I want to write better rendering code, I'll go work for a game engine company and improve their renderer.
If I want to make a game, I'll use an engine where all the rendering is already done for me, so I can focus on gameplay while letting the artists do their thing.

If I want to write my own renderer AND create my the art and gameplay... I'd have to be a large, well-funded game company that creates their own engine for their own games. But that's not what Unity is about.

 

I too see where you are coming from now. This is mostly just an argument of when rendering should be considered a feature once boiled down a bit. You consider the shaders to be an integral part of the rendering pipeline that Unity should have previously laid out. I tend to think of shaders as a form of customization that build on top of the integral rendering features. I think it is an artist's job to make custom shaders while you think they should be there in the beginning so they can be used by an artist. Graphics-wise, my definition of an engine is just one layer lower than your definition of an engine.

 

Another thing that may be confusing this discussion is that shaders nowadays are so versatile that the term "shader" can mean different things to different people. To me, a shader is a program executed on the GPU, whether as a pixel shader, geometry shader, compute shader, tesselation shader, or whatever. A shader can perform any computation you want, if you know how to parallelize the task. Shaders can sort lists, perform fluid simulations, and solve differential equations. From that point of view, some shaders should be part of the engine, others are part of the game. Just like any other code that plays a role in a complete game+engine, somewhere you have to draw the line, and yes it is somewhat arbitrary.

The original intention of shaders, and hence the word "shader", is derived from the idea of doing the math to assign a color to a pixel. You find the shade for that pixel by consulting stuff like light sources, material properties, and texture maps, then combining them according to a formula of your choosing. I would say that an engine should include basic shaders to do texture mapping, normal mapping, and basic lighting. If you want something exotic, then you can write your own. But if you want something fancy-yet-difficult-yet-standard, like parallax mapping, it wouldn't hurt for that to come with the engine.

On a different but related note, it is interesting to consider what is part of the graphics driver vs. what is part of the application.
A modern GPU does not have fixed-function shading hardware. Even something as basic as flat shading with no texture must be done with a shader.
The shader will just take the dot product of the normal with the light, and output a fixed color with a modulated intensity. But why should the app developer have to reimplement that basic functionality? That shader is inside the driver, even though you can also write it yourself.

 

No kidding, it can take me weeks to design a good looking 3d model in Blender.

 

I just want to know guys, should I make a separate post completely dedicated showing how good unity can look, I really want to get some more exposure out there.

 

This so much. Unity has most of what you need to make a very pretty game right out the box, it's just that you're expected to put things together yourself and provide the assets. I imagine that a lot of those people who complain the most don't make the connection that in Cryengine/UDK they're often using ready-made assets developed by professional artists working with high budgets. It saves time no doubt, but it's not fair to turn around and say Unity has bad graphics when 90% of what makes a game look good is having good assets and art direction.

You know, that actually might not be a bad idea. The "The most awesome Unity titles you've seen" and "Cool images for the Unity3d.com gallery" threads have sort of gotten overrun; a thread dedicated to nothing but the most high-end visuals pulled off in Unity would be kind of cool.

 

I think it's some cruelly if say " Unity Cannot Produce Good Graphics..."
Because we can see the games made with unity and have good graphics , we can't say unity is perfect and every time AAA because other engines some times have better Graphics , in my opinion unity graphic is not 100 and not 0 it's about 40-70 but variable.
My problem with unity graphics is :" why it's should be some time's too hard often time consuming for the medium and semi-professional game developers to produce good and perfect graphics with it? "
From other side problem is really galling because you take your time to invent a wheel (for example) that is invented frequently by many others and many times used but you can't access their wheel and you should consume your golden time to do it again and again and maybe finally can make some thing like other invented wheels.
I think it's a BIG problem for unity beginner and medium users and that really annoy me and some of other people.
unity should think do a work for this issue.

 

I think the issue is that there are more Unity devs than most other engines - it is easy to use and quick. Many of these developers are also independent/beginners and release their games without AAA-like graphics. The sheer number of these indie games vs the number of professional games may create the stereotype that Unity cant produce good graphics.

 

Nuff' said.

 

Can I Repost This In My Unity Showcase, This Is One of The Best I've ever seen unity

 

This is really good looking. Reminds me a bit of the Samaritan tech demo.

 

To be honest this is not impressive at all when you are camparing it with some Unreal Engine scenes, plus, unity is aimed for indies, to get even basic shadows and some effects that cant really compete with UDK's effect you have to play 1500$ while UDK cost 99$ to start making money of .
The only problem in UDK is that is you have to learn all of the already made classes and it is a lot more complicated than unity .
The UDK Ediot is so much richer than unity's, even with the current unity's light's halo you cant do anything more than a circle, not even close to FOG effects in UDK .
Now here comes all who says : you can write your own shader and stuff. now beside the fact that you have to buy the full version to do so and it costs 1500$, This is a F***ing indie engine, why do i have to spend so much time and effort and study time to make some good effects ?! ( which are still not good as UDK's effects ) .

Let's be real, let's say you know UDK and UnrealScript flawlessly and Unity too, which one would you use for your project ?
The only good thing about unity is that it is so easy to start with, I'v used unity alot and now im moving to UDK and it is F***ing hard, I'v thought alot of times to go back to unity just brcause i was too lazy, but i got back on the horse becouse i dont want to limit myself .
If UDK's was as easy as Unity ( You can make your own game from scratch by extending only one main class ( MonoDevelop in Unity's case ) and it was live like unity so you dont have to exit the editor, compile and then enter the editor again), Unity was only useful for Mobile,Web and such kind of games .

 

Your post sounds more like a try to justify your decision to choose UDK

Which is fine. Use whatever you want as long it leads to something cool eventually

 

To be entirely fair, producing performant, high-fidelity graphics in Unity is a bit of a pain, but at the same time, it's something that other engines are specifically designed around in the first place. You can do a lot of really cool stuff with Unity, especially if you're eschewing fidelity for a stylised art direction, largely in thanks to how easy it makes development and how extensible the editor is.

 

I've got to kind of agree with him, if you look at the likes of Star Citizen made in CE3 or some of the Unreal major release titles.. It's not on the same level.

That being said, I'm actually quite sure you could do the likes of mass effect in Unity.. I've just never seen anyone do it yet. Only place Unity falls down is latest (Well quite old now) post effect's / AA and the lack of optimisation choices like dynamic occlusion culling, a 64-bit editor / volumetric water / fog.

Now for a team the size of Unity, I couldn't see the likes of SSDO a 64-Bit editor (Which is already in action) SMAA or CMAA and a bit of volumetric merged fog water to be extremely difficult. You can already stream within Unity from script, which IMO should be an inbuilt function. Global illumination (Baked) is already in Unity Pro, probably a few more cool things like Irradiance volume and LPV. Most of the source code is out for free commercial use on GitHub, so it's not like they have to reinvent the wheel here.

Unity as of now is a jack of all trades and a capable one at that, but there's not denying it's hard work to get Unity to look as impressive as other engines and can take you to extreme places. On the flipside other engines are much more difficult to use, I'd love to have my cake and eat it but I'd rather have a stable straightforward to use system like Unity and sacrifice some eye candy.

I really believe Unity is deceptive, if anyone believes making a high visual fidelity game in any engine is easy then they are mistaken, it's just different problems with different engines. Artwork counts for a large portion, then the last portion is effective post rendering.

I think it's a shame really, there's not masses of work to do for Unity and it could easily throw a crippling blow to competition in the engine sector. Which in turn brings more positive PR to the company when your AAA brand names pick it up.. Studio's would be daft not to pick it up due to plain ease of use..

 

Wigga please!

The only drawback of movie cg quality graphics, is that it's probably heavy on the gpu, so you wouldn't want it for large project... that's what I hear, at least. So people recommend UDK for AAA quality projects, right?

Still, in my experience, stuff made in UDK isn't especially low-end PC friendly...

Hawken, for example (a fast paced game made with UDK technology) is not very playable at 20fps, which is what I get on medium quality, with post processing effects, and such. I must set it to low, to have full fps, which makes it rather unimpressive from a tech point of view (mech art is still awesome). But even then I still get low fps on crowded combat situations.

And Hawken's the work of a full experienced team! I freaking love hawken, I'm waiting for Oculus Rift consumer version to try with that game, I'll need a new rig though.

Unity is, in fact, a perfect solution for small dev teams, even one man teams. Because the whole workflow is easygoing and friendly. Importing, exporting, compiling, extending, anything that ends with 'ing'... you've got it! At least I haven't found anything better in any other engine.

 

*sigh* some people have to turn EVERY thread into Unity vs. some other engine. NO ONE CARES. Go to that forum.

 

Sigh all you like mate, but you need something to compare it to.. Otherwise how would you know if Unity's graphical abilities are any good?

Also people do care, otherwise threads like these wouldn't be made.

End of the day I use Unity, in some area's I wish it had more and in other area's Unity is second to none. Let's not pretend to be blind and whatever helps Unity push forward is a bonus.