Visual Difference between Unity and UE4

I am using both engines. Unity 5 is easier to export to multiple platforms but UE4 is far superior at visual quality. In UE4 in a mater of minutes I can create a material that is super realistic with no effort. In U5 is almost impossible to achieve that.

Use the right tool for the right job !!! Its that simple !

 

It is possible but you must buy the asset to make it possible like Alloy shader framework.
That is Unity major issue problem to not have polished lightening/shaders/shadows/effects out of the box.

 

To OP:
-Umm have you enabled GGX BRDF in unity?
-Use logarithmic Tonemapping from blacksmith
-Use a low value bleach bypass LUT texture in the tonemapping
-Also don't forget aniso filtering

 

Just get scion, turn it on and profit.

It's on sale 50% off today.

 

or . . . that
But no really, personally i like the logarithmic tonemapping in blacksmith
when do unity gonna rolling the new tonemapping anyway :/?

 

You can take that from the blacksmith demo and use it in your project I believe.

 

Nope it is not UE4 quality, i tried many settings , but i didn't get UE4 quality.

I think we will have to wait for Unity to bring the next version of image effects , perhaps including some improved effects from blacksmith demo.

 

Perhaps we can help. I mean I am getting eyeball melting stuff here. I do use color grading too though. Did you play with flare textures, dirt textures?

 

I don't need flare or dirt, it is just graphic layers.
Color grading is not included in Scion also, or do you mean color correction ?
There is no texture in Scion Pack for color correction also.

I will play some more with Scion, but putting on the more important effects
-Bloom
-ToneMapping
-Exposure
-DOF
I don't get so big difference with Unity Image effects.

 

Yeap already did that.
And one thing, i know i shouldn't ask about this since usually it doesn't ended up well, but for the sake of curriousity
Can someone try to bring the challenger scene from unity to UE4 add set it up properly like the current scene with the challenger without helmet model without SSS,SSR,and tonemap?

 

I do not know. The last 6 months I ditched Unity for sure. Customers likes more the output of UE4 as it get more "real life" visual quality. To achieve the same results in Unity it requires from me much more time to achieve that. Also is a complete tool. No need to learn new systems or buy extras.

Now I am working also the mobile projects in UE4 and the visual quality is far better too. I have happy customers now !

I was a Unity fanatic but one more reason that was pissing me off and was another one reason that made me to emphasize more in UE4 was that it is completely free at the beginning and if you publish free projects there is NO LOGO (like unity personal). I am not a weird person but that logo at the beginning in the free version of Unity is annoying me (and many other people too that I have discussed it with them).

I hope Unity to realize that they have to concentrate more on visual quality and on the requests that many of us ask from them to implement in the engine.

For me is too difficult now to consider switching back to unity and use it as my main tool. Maybe in version 6 who knows ?

 

So here’s my take on this subject. This is no doubt a heated topic of discussion these days and having experience of both engines I decided to write about them and the issues that ultimately led me to choose Unity over Epic’s UE4 (so TLDR version; I chose Unity). I emphasize that this is my personal view as a developer that comes from Unity and may not apply to you, however it may help you to decide which engine might be more suitable for your needs.

I think it’s best to I start with some background to give you a grasp of my viewpoint.

The last few years I’ve spent some time developing all kinds of small projects with Unity: Augmented Reality, small industrial simulations, testing Oculus Rift and developing my own little game project. I’d say I have roughly 3-4 years of experience with Unity from versions 3.5 up to 5 (beta) – although it needs to be said that Unity is not my main tool at work. I spend most of my time coding JavaScript/AngularJS for websites and C# for Xamarin projects. From time to time a Unity project comes along and I hop on to work on it. However it’s worth mentioning that C# pretty much my main language these days, which makes working with Unity a pretty pleasant experience. All in all I feel pretty comfortable with Unity and have gotten used to its quirks and workflow.

Then came along UE4. When it came out my buddy went ahead and tried it out since the subscription was dirt cheap, $20 with the possibility to cancel subscription at any time, which was sweet. You could get a AAA game engine dirt cheap – and most importantly, you could get the whole source code for the engine for that measely $20! Haven’t seen a sweeter deal yet! My friend praised it, especially the graphics and the blueprint system. Him being an experienced programmer working with 3D engines before his opinion weighed a lot in my ears. I made a note of it and decided to give it a try when I found the time.

 

I use Unity professionally, and UDK and now UE4 personally, and for me it boils down to how much i'm going to variate from the standard provided stuff. UE4 might look better right out the gate, but it holds your hands and you have to do things it's way. Unity does not hold your hands(as much) but doesn't get in your way as much for doing something custom, specifically with shaders.

Sure you can write completely custom shaders in UE4, but it's easier to do so in Unity, and it's also easier to maintain in Unity. But, UE4 is certainly much more artist friendly as far as setup goes, because it doesn't treat the assets overtly as data(which I feel Unity does, wish in my opinion is a good thing).

 

I think this is the inverse about UT5 and UE4 shaders
I don't know anything about shaders, i could not code Unity shaders, while i could modify inputs of UE4 default shader using the shader editor and make special effects just picking ideas some from examples or trying some nodes on the textures inputs.
UE4 shader editor is very easy to use and understand and there is many people that helped me on some specific shader need.
While Unity don't have a shader editor for people that don't know anything about shaders.

 

I should have clarified. You are correct, but I was talking about the lighting models, shadows, that kind of stuff. What UE4 let's you do is the equivalent to writing a Unity Surface shader, as in you have a set number of input and you are defining that happens to those inputs before they are fed into the rest of the shader.

But UE4 doesn't have the equivalent of a vert/drag shader or any custom shader that's truely custom without a bunch of extra work. Alloy and Skyshop are much easier to create and maintain in Unity, and would probably be more of a pain in the ass than their worth in UE4.

 

I don't knwo but the shader editor comes with many usefull components as the standard shader, sub surface base shader or terrain multi layer shader and some other, from there anyone can really create custom shaders without knowing a lot.

I think you talk about advanced people that knows the fundamentals about vertex language and programming that can make some things faster.
You know UE4 is open source , anyone could create any language or interface or tool that would do what Unity allows

 

"It's like, you give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton, and of course that's not true. And if you give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer, he doesn't become, you know, whoever; he doesn't become us."
Roger Waters (from the film "Pink Floyd at Pompeii" 1972)

 

That's actually a very interesting analogy. I've seen "beginner" musicians blame their beginner instruments... to the point I've believed it myself and then I've watch a master violinist pick up my child's "toy" and I stood in awe as the music rang out. It DID effect the sound they were making... watching/hearing him play my kids violin was VERY much like listening to a master play through an AM radio... but there was no doubt it was in a master's hands, and there was no doubt it was beautiful music.

Unity 5 doesn't quite feel like a master's violin... but it IS FOR SURE more like one than the "toy" that Unity 4 was, LOL. Either way, masters have made very impressive "pieces" from both engines to be sure.

 

I'm just waiting for the implementation of Enlighten to mature. The tech is amazing but it's a bit rough around the edges.

This looks great though.

 

The problem is that is working good with small levels, but it is not the best solution for big outdoor levels specially about the baking times and terrain.

 

But that's a problem with all baking solutions. Lightmass included.

 

You seem not very aware about what is going on in Epic side
They are introducing a new system for large outdoors and the game ARK is also using their own advanced custom system.
Take a look around 40:00

 

OMG, I can't believe the fanboism of some people in defense of Unity's graphics against Unreal's. Let's face it: while Unity is just better in almost all other aspects, Unreal's graphical capabilities are not only better, they are far away better.

It is not just a matter of tunning Unity's shaders. Or have anyone met any graphics made in Unity with the following quality:

Or, what about this showcase using 1million particles from 2 years ago?

I personally use almost only Unity. But one has to give credit where it is due. I would love to see someone getting even close to that in Unity. It would make myself happy for the future of my own projects...

 

At around 40:00 I see TrueSky, which is also available in Unity... So... ??? Also, I'm not sure ARK uses proper GI or some sort of fancy ambient lighting.

Unreal has LPV going for it, but that's not a "baking" solution. All "Baking" solutions like Lightmass are slow with huge environments, I don't see anything wrong with my statement.

 

I am just pointing out that good graphics take effort in unreal as well, and great baked lighting like in the architectural video you posted takes hours, even days. Yes, enlighten is slow, but it's not like in lightmass you just snap your fingers and awesome lighting appears in front of you. And it's also problematic for huge areas, where it's generally recommended you use LPV instead.

And yes that arch vis is amazing. Until you want to move that sunlight. And you either can't or you switch to LPV which in turn will look much worse than this: (skip to 32:21)

 

From an "actually usable in a game" standpoint I find this unity demo much more impressive than the unreal archviz demo where almost nothing is movable or changeble. But in practice unity realtime GI is not usable for me either...

They say it's 30fps, but in the video it definitely does not run at 30fps. And how or why would I use that in a game?
I do agree unreal engine games more often than not look better, though.

 

Yes, UE4 tools , shaders , lightening and terrain/world system , particle system and effects are bad compared to Unity we know

 

Sarcasm. Nice.

You know, I get it. You don't need to defend Unreal. It's the industry standard. It has a ton of games behind it. It looks great and it's a great engine.

What I don't understand is your insistence to bring it up every time we talk about graphics and Unity. It's as if we angered the Unreal gods by daring to put Unity in the same sentence with something resembling good graphics. And if I say how cool enlighten is (when it works), I'll have to be punished for daring to talk about something that is exclusive to Unreal.

You know what. I'm starting to believe you want Unity to look bad, because then it won't be your fault if your game looks bad, it will be because the gods only blessed Unreal with the gift of good looking shaders, "lightening" (sic), particle system and effects.

 

and here we go again. . . i was just hoping a good thread of discussion between unity and other engine, not another "unity sucks ue4 is godlike".
Well i guess this thread gonna be locked in the end.

 

As every other engine out there Unreal and Unity has flaws. I've been using Unity more than Unreal but I'll point out some cons and pros of both engines that I have found during my usage.

Unreal:
+ Cascade (very complete particle system with tons of modules which are impossible to integrate for current Unity), properly lit particles, GPU particles, great collisions and particle events
- Cascade UI (you can't reorder curve points, there are a lot of hidden windows which are not documented, you create particles in separate, blank viewport so it it hard to get things to scale)
+ Shader editor (easy to create PBR materials)
- low-level shaders nodes (some stuff are just not there, for example you don't have direct access to vertex or you can't perform custom space transform)
- writing shaders (it is not as easy as writing surface shaders in Unity, creating pure HLSL shaders is also a pain)
+ editor controls (it is much easier to navigate the scene especially in tight corridors, you can adjust editor FOV, enable editor camera image effects)
+ built-in solutions (almost everything in Unreal is production ready, image effects are being renderer in very specific order in order to get proper rendering queue, there are a lot of implemented state-of-art effects such as DOF, motion blur, tonemapper etc., most of them look better than Unity's)
- FBX import (you can't import FBX with separate sub-objects, there is no model hierarchy. If you want to import a clock made of separate gears you need to import all elements as a separate FBX files and recreate a whole object in-engine)
- FBX pivot imports (Unreal don't respect your FBX model pivots, all models are imported with pivot placed in the world's center)
- scripting effects (documentation is not as clear as Unity docs)
+ transparent objects shading (Unreal renderer is receiving and casting proper transparent shadows)
- no custom lighting modes (you can't put an object into Forward Rendering Path because there is none = no custom per-shader lighting)
- almost everything is HDR (I am especially happy that particles and ribbons are HDR)
- editor UI (it is very clunky, very big, it is really hard to work on one monitor)
+ editor UI (but it has nice colors and layout)
+ cutscene editor (it works and is quite fine)
+ tons of built-in materials (skin, hair, car paint, water, glass)
- documentation (it is not human readable)
- C++ (personal preference, I just don't like working with C++)

Unity:
+ extensible (really easy to hack into renderer)
- extensible (but you can hit the wall very fast)
+ C# (personal preference, I like C# more)
- LDR effects (particles, trial&line renderers are LDR)
+ surface shaders (I prefer writing my shaders instead of connecting the nodes, it gives more possibilities)
- built-in shaders are not universal (a lot of basic shaders are missing such as skin, hair, foliage)
- no refraction for transparent Standard material
+ FBX imports (it imports multi-objects, respects pivots, materials, textures)
+ compile times (so much faster than Unreal)
+ UI (lightweight, smaller)
+ dynamic GI
- particles (fewer modules, no GPU particles, no dynamic parameters, no ribbons, they are not lit)
+ documentation (easy to understand, very complete)
+ Forward Rendering Path (if you don't like what deferred has to offer you can write your own lighting model and render it in Forward Rendering Path)

Overall I prefer working with Unity. I can create more content in shorter periods of time. Unreal feels very clunky and is a pain to work with. It has more to offer but I just can't stand it's workflow.

 

I did a quick test recently and modified the additive particle shader to take a float input and multiply the color with that. The colorpicker stays LDR but the effect on screen seemed to become HDR that way and bloom worked properly. I'm not making any guarantuees here that I'm not overlooking an obvious problem, but if you want HDR particles I suggest to look into this possibility.

Edit: I don't know much about shader and material writing. It might be possible to write a shader that takes an HDR color input and make the material multiply its HDR color with the color data from the particle/linerenderer, but I'm just guessing here.

 

Yup but this way you cannot drive particle color properly. It is a hack rather than robust solution. You can't assign per-particle parameter so you can't set this HDR multiplier over lifetime.

 

Just take a look at beginners games , and you'll see how great they look compared to Unity beginners games, with comparable simple 3D art.

And you are wrong as i have Unity looking great , but it has a price like Alloy shaders + Scion effects and other plugins , at the end this is not cheap and looking great. But Unreal stays a level above , their post process effects are more advanced , their lightening has a superior look and tools are more complex.
Where is vertex painter on Unity ?

Why comparing an engine where the developpers also make AAA games like Gears of War 4 and Fornite and that are always pushing the tools and the graphics ? Unreal 4 goal is to be among the best for desktop and console mainly, they focus mainly on that (it can make games for mobile but it is low priority compared to desktop).

 

I somehow agree with this part, other engine can improve because they also using it to create their own games/demo then include the improvement that they use in their game/demo to the next release of the engine itself, but in unity case most of the tools that they made for the demo are only additional not becoming built in or inaccessible.

 

http://www.gamewatcher.com/games/ukrainian-ninja/screens

That's Unreal. It's not impervious to looking bad. (it's not Unreal's fault of course).

I disagree about the lighting ("look" is pretty subjective). And Shader node editor is not more complex or in-depth than writing your own shaders. It could be more intuitive though. Again, not sure what the point is.

I'll give you that. I remember seeing a vertex painter a gazillion years ago, being developed in ninja camp, but we never saw it make it in engine. And it's pretty basic, it should be there.

 

I agree , that BlackSmith demo just makes me surprised a lot.

Fisrt, the demo parts on the asset store are broken, they don't care about it , and not try to keep it working with Unity versions, perhaps because it is not so official Unity tech ?
Why should we dig it and try to repair (if we have the shader knowledege) ?

From a tech view point , it has some great shaders for wrinckles or character shadows, also a somewhat great tool like grass placement on any surface, or atmosphear scattering , why Unity just don't care and not integrate these as new engine features ? It's like having some advanced valuable tech , showing it and just let it down.

This is so usefull to bring variations and details, it is just suprising in 2015 Unity the most popular not having that for people to make better looking games.

 

Yeap....this is basically.
Also another example is from the chase, it's for mobile, they have skin shader, new lens flare and atmospheric scattering for mobile. but why not publish it or include it as built in??

 

While both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity are excellent game engines, depending on what you want to do, one may be a better option for you, over the other. Whether it’s simply the interface you prefer, or maybe the programming language. Whatever the case may be, let’s break down each game engine and look at their strong areas so you can decide which one will work best for you.

 

It is the same for the "ButterFly Effect" demo , i'm curious to see how the engine is able to run the demo and on what hardware , this is also abandonned features like sub surface scattering or tesselation they used.

 

Scion does a good job bringing UE4 graphics to unity (post fx) and if you take it one step further you can go with Jove.

Anyway just going to say that unity's default lighting is pretty terrible. Please don't use it but of you know how to setup your lighting its pretty easy to make your graphics much better.

 

I got the same game look using Unity image effects as using Scion , take a look :
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/scion-filmic-post-processing.339703/page-9
Scion is not as advanced as UE4 TXAA, DOF, Tone Mapping etc ... But if it pleases you to say it

Eye adaptation is not working good with Scion it seems.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDfzzWgto4

 

Scion has a lot bigger effect it seems in my project then yours.
Most people I see use really poor lighting setups and really wash up their graphics which is the main problem I see with graphics. UE4 default lighting is very goldgold. But I will say that UE4 has a lot better graphics then unity but unity can get similar results given time and knowledge. And let's be honest, its 75% the artist for visuals I could list some UE4 games that look terrible even with their more advanced effects.

 

No offense, but for that to be a a meaningful comparison you'd need to compare an identical scene where the effects are set up by people who can harness 100% of the tools at their disposal. You have shown with your posts that your haven't reached those 100% with scion yet. Like that rant that you deleted later after you found out you had to enable HDR on the camera first .
It's not some black magic that will make crappy looking scenes look like UE4 techdemos. It is a good post processing tool and to get most out of it you need to a) have a suitable scene and lighting first and b) put in some effort in experimenting with all the settings and different lens dirt textures. I can't stress enough how important it is to try and change the lens dirt texture if you don't like the out-of-the-box look scion gives you.

I don't see how the UE4 video relates to that statement.

 

I could present some samples of taking scion off in my scene which make a vast difference which would be difficult to reproduce with unity.

In addition to what Martin said, with the hdr rant. If you're complaining about unity graphics and haven't been using HDR this whole time I think you need to reevaluate your situation.

 

I just get the same look with Unity default shaders and Scion that's it, so what is the problem ?
Also Unity Bloom has a more options as we can control it better for example.

Since i discovered i forgot it with Scion , it has been on all the time now.

Anyway about graphics , it's Unreal 4 some levels above, they made advanced post effects for Kite demo while Scion is not in that level. That's it, if you need the best graphics and effects out of the box today it is Unreal 4.

 

I just want to point out one thing when it comes to the difference between unreal engine and unity engine. A factor that some considered is simply time. Unreal Engine has been around for 17 years while Unity Engine has been around for 10 years. Considering the pace Unity Engine is becoming more powerful it is only a matter of time until it will match Unreal Engine. I also have a feeling that Unity Technologies don´t want to a race to the end in graphic area against Epic. Chances are they will never keep up with Epic in Graphical Power just yet. So even though Unreal Engine looks better it is probably a good strategy not to compete in graphic alone and cover areas where Unreal is weaker. It is very hard to catch up with 7 years against Unreal Engine, so it will always be smarter to be better in other areas while building up the graphic part slowly. Don´t you think so too?

 

It doesn't really work like that tbh, since unity have the same knowledge as unreal, it's just that unity, lets be honest has a higher focus on mobile and indie compared to unreal which has a large amount of AAA games being published with it. Unity could probably easily add in all the graphic stuff in Unity 6, but is it worth the time and effort if most people who use unity don't really need all the shiny stuff

Anyways I found a video where someone butchered the graphics in UE4, don't know how but he managed...

 

I don´t agree with you then. I think time is a major factor when it comes to technology. You can´t catch up with a competitor unless you can match money, manpower and skills. Just because Unity might have the same knowledge does´t mean they can catch up that fast, it takes time and money. And like you said they have priority for that very reason. And my assumption is that Epic Games has bigger team, pocket and head start. In my head that is the logic, right now. Until someone explains otherwise in detail how it actually works that to me is a very simplified logic.