Why do unity games have the unity look?

You react like a little child, maybe you are young. Keep in mind that there is more to life than what you think.

 

Woah where did that come from?

He and the other 4 were right? What about that makes him a little child?

 

Fair enough I tried to help, you wouldn't listen or even discuss with reason. I don't think you understand the meaning, but best of luck to you in the future.

 

But a Unity game looks identical regardless of platform?

 

The dead giveaway on Kerbal Space Program is the use of the default Detonator explosions.

 

Wrong. I did not ask for help and I wasn't interested in any. That being said, no, you didn't try to help. Lastly, you are the last person on earth I would ask for help. Now realize that you are wrong and don't waste my time with your childish bickering.

 

This looks like an OpenGL-game to me. Bulky primitives with detailed and elaborate textures on it and hardly any shadows.

 

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDE83B6C26F7F4CA2

Im sure these all have the "unity look" also? I get that it's often easy to spot out things that suggest that it might be made in unity like default shaders, asset store packages, crappy post effects(like not having Pro at all); but there is nothing wrong with that.

 

Reminds me of rage, which is in fact opengl which I realized painfully because my 3D - TV didn't work.

 

I completely agree in some respects, I spent months reading CryTek docs on how they did it.. Very complex, very interesting stuff.

There's things like SSDO, Light propagation volume the way they render to HDR etc. The way they do shadows is amazing..

http://www.crytek.com/download/Light_Propagation_Volumes.pdf

Uhh I had another read tonight most of it goes over my head TBH, but I will say it's not just down to the artists.. Lighting and shaders, DOF, BOKEH and all the other post effects make up a larger portion than most believe them to.

Not to say you can't do it in Unity, but you damn well need to know what your doing!.. It's going to be difficult squeezing that last 5 - 10 % and it could take longer than making most of the game.

So it comes back to this, how important is it to go that far? Ease of workflow with Unity is amazing, the extra to make it CryTek realistic for most is unrealistic and not even needed in many cases..

Look at Fallout 3 and diablo 3 and Skyrim, all did well and none of them wowed me like Crysis 3 and Ryse in terms of graphical ability.. But does it matter? Not in my opinion.

 

@Chariots - that was a very good rundown, nice to have some facts in a thread like this.

 

You list the differences. But you don't weigh them. What is the greatest difference and how would you "emulate" another engine like UDK starting with the most obvious change to the least.

 

Whats the point in that? I'd say the most obvious things to me would be make normals that are ridiculously heavy, and the same postprocess chain used constantly everywhere

I'm sticking to a nice simple point, you cant blame your software for incompetent art.

 

You don't go far by saying "well they are just stupid".

 

I go as far as I need to in this case, if your art looks bad in unity, its a problem with your art... i have never done a single thing in Unity where I though 'man unity sucks at graphics', partly because my games look great, naturally, and party because if i'm halfway through modelling and texturing something i dont start blamig unity that its that unity look spoiling things again, i just need to do more work on the item. That 'classic' unreal look is just the same as what you're referring to as the 'classic' unity look cept i think conceptually Unity presents its a place where you make anything you like, from the very start, rather than un-fpsing an fps until it looks like another type of game

The Unity look is as far as i can tell a bunch of children or plain bad artists, or folk out for a quick buck who find unity the easiest to get everything done quickly

Lazy incompetent artists, or art direction.. thats it for me

 

It's not only the look, it's the behavior of many Unity games. You can tell by the physics behavior (i.e. you're playing a racer, and you can tell either by the sluggishness or the odd driving behavior, it's either the built in wheel collider, or UnityCar, or some cheap poorly made "racing AI" plugin, or you're playing a platformer, and the character just gets stuck for no reason, etc), or the GC stutters/pauses, the huge binaries that require long waiting times despite only having 5 levels, loading screens because Unity has no level streaming support.

 

You are cute, I like you.

 

In general, if you had to redo almost everything in a game engine software, you could also dismiss the game engine software altogether and just create your own engine. The very reason people use unity is that most non-fun stuff - like shader creation - is being taken care of.

 

Nothing has to be re-done, only improved. We're not talking an entire engine re-write just to support features that remove performance roadblocks and allow more customizations.

 

You seem to have never created an engine.

 

I got the early release of Wasteland 2 and even it uses the default Unity quality settings screen. Perhaps that will be changed.

 

Unity takes care of itself? Coulda fooled me, its been bloody hard work and its not to its detriment, its a mature games development toolset

The differences in graphics between Unreal 3 and Unity are ridiculously minimal if you stop being a wussy and dive into the stuff that changes the graphics. Want a phong lighting model? Go and make one, want your normals to be cartoonishly intense, go and put that in the shader, want that Unreal style post process? U4 pro is BURSTING with tools to let you get that look. Everything is there to make your game into a gears of war, but as ive said, area lights and GI ARE NOT GOING TO MASKE YOUR GAME BEAUTIFUL. Theyll make it more realistic maybe?

The uncanny valley has not stopped being an issue, as one friend said 'i wish theyd stop making games about humans' - im all for 'pretty' being defined by super lighting and shading tricks but theyre becoming like photoshop-added lens flares in photographs, obscuring the art and deluding a bunch of people into what should look good, and cheapening everything in the process. This obsession with gi and suchlike is a terible indictment of the games industry, its so bloody immature that 'realistic lighting' has overcome plain artistic aptitude as peoples definition of pretty, and that falls nicely into the matching problems that modern games, so many of whch people try to ape, are complete trash, and an insult to the possibilities of the medium. But its ok the americans are shooting the arabs/south americans/chinese with super duper gi power and that makes it alright

 

Do you have any idea what you sound like? Your posts are short troll-like responses with absolute zero value other than to inflame people who are trying to get a discussion going. Therefore it's clear you will not have anything worth saying in the future either. Much less finished games, or any form of actual track record we can judge you by. So the evidence points to you having absolutely nothing of worth to share. So none of us will benefit reading your trite.

You have one chance of turning this round, because everyone needs a second chance, right?

 

ahah! +1

 

It's sport, hippo,i was so glad someone finally liked me i did a little dance

But yes, troll, or too stubborn to backpeddle given enough facts to completey invalidate them entirely

This is a nice community but i'm not so sure theres a lot of room in it for patronising ignorant trolls. Comparing the 'make the graphics more like unreal' to be analogous to 'may as well write a new engine', funny stuff

 

IMHO the Unity look is connected to the materials/shaders used in most games. That's why I am really looking forward to the Shader Forge release. I know we already have the Strumpy shader editor, but it was waaay too outdated/simple when I started using Unity, comming from 3 years of using UDK.

As others have pointed out modifying the lighting models should help as well, but I am not as optimistic that Unity games will get more distinguishable from eachother there. Simply because the new assets that are/will be readily available for Indie seem to still follow a "one size fits it all" approach, so I fear they may just become the new standard look for higher quality Unity games. Which may be a graphical improvement, but it's not really a solution.

 

Well this is another thing! I grew out of the standard shaders quite early on and messed around with all kinds of shaders, you can get any brdf shader you fancy for free if you wanna get some funky shading going on. But like i say I cant think of anything ive done where you'd say 'yeah that was unity' expect for the fact that ideas that have been quite easy to implement in unity would have broken my mind attempting them in an alternative

 

No, just no...

So if you don't want to redo shaders or make a new lightning model you should write your own game engine, that's the most stupid thing I've ever heard.

 

That is not the difference between Unity and UDK, that is exactly how you achieve "the UDK look". Once you do the first 6 of those, you're well on your way there. Conversely, if you avoid these inside UDK, you'll get away from "the look". I've seen people that came from Source engine to UDK, and you wouldn't believe that it wasn't the Source Engine they were using when they've done their portfolio stuff.

There is no black magic running inside in UDK. In fact, compared to CryEngine, (image quality wise) it is almost pedestrian stuff. You can achieve the same look in Unity, or in Torque3D, it doesn't matter, as long as your art assets are up to notch with the shader side.

 

Someone should sticky this thread

Also, since its current and all you need is wordpad and a browser, learn webgl from those absolute ABSOLUTE basics. From there you'll learn a point light is just a point in space that you can do some maths regarding how it relates in position to other information on that space, and how that space is percieved, and all of this is bread and butter what these graphics libraries are, and their fancy effects are derived from. For the millionth time, if your art sucks then you have only yourself to blame if you look at yiur art and it sucks you'll need to try harder, if you want your unity game to be a gears clone , nothing stopping you

Unity really does need some high profile proficient artists just maybe give some better promo on what unity can offer, the dx11 compo was a nice one but why dont they do a 'make us look F***ing fantastic' competition, id be in, im sure otthers would me, and people could shut theie holes! unity will come out of it look no the lesser of its rivals, and then everone can have proper conversations because hearing about how bad at art some devs are on a public forum does get a grind

 

You guys never used the terrain system?

 

The Forest fooled me ,but it's all about the feel creators give to it. The textures, shaders, lighting, mechanics, and other can all be changed to make it look amazingly different ,but most people are content with the nice look of it. It's generally the same for all engines like CryEngine, OpenGL, and UDK.

 

What I wrote - not what you paraphrased - is the most intelligent remark in this whole thread, you don't have the competence to realize this, though.

 

To the pit with this troll, laughable

'Look mom i played with some sliders and now my dragon's more scary' 'son this is not acceptable, go to you room and build a new engine'

 

Please, show me something you've done that tops it.

 

Wow. That proof is indisputable.

I call Troll

 

So you opened a complete pointless thread and now you insult people that don't agree with your view?

On top of that, you have obviously no idea about rendering tech. All your blah is completely bonkers. What does OpenGL has to do with the look of Rage or any other game. It's just a graphics API. The rest is up to the artists and how they use the tech.
It's highly doubtable that you're be able to distinguish engines by the look of their games.

 

A quick sidenote: are you allowed to share those copyrighted pictures here?

 

Nice efforts! Rejigged community shader or? I've got a few answers to the ocean conundrum atm but im hoping my suimono scrawks whitecaps hybrid thing will be a winner. Bizarre how some very snazzy freely available things are becoming available. If you wanna root around and grab perfectly free shaders, theres a youtube tutorial course that i liked that i got oren nayar off, farfarer wrote a free cook-torrence shader, iirc had a go at a well publicised skin shader and implemented DICE's own translucency shader ,no excuses to have your games be generic. That package that got dof looking great on earlier iphone versions (format interchangeable mind) is probs ariund somewhee. There's treasure ttroves of stuff to find every that will not improve your graphics at all without a good artists but doesnt matter bout the artistry! just the shinies

 

You are right, I forgot that any screenshot is copyrighted even those that you have taken on your own computer while playing

 

This is a real time engine rendered logo screen from one of the engines we use, which we use more than one for several things..

Anyone guess?

 

No, this is my own ocean shader. (on the deleted pictures ) - The community ocean is mostly FFT on CPU, so I would not call that a shader.

 

top work then! i think i posted mine earlier in the thred.. or somewhere.. dunno!

Definitely getting an appreciation for how stuff like clouds and water are pulled off

Also since we're starting a copyright war and i just was feeling like showing off some very olf work



That concept and design sure aint mine (Im sure someone will spot it) but there i am stealin a game to make it prettier

Thats much naughtier than what the talented programmer did, ill see you in court!

 

Bout to top your most intelligent remark on this thread. Ready :

You should be permanently banned.

Now that is an intelligent statement

 

Thanks. I know your work, since years I am observing anyone who is working on water. Unity or not. Usually I am one of the first viewers on replies or new videos on youtube. Your combination of other ones work is pretty interesting but I already had you on the radar before you started to merge it with suimono.

 

I'm very much standing on the shoulders of giants with all my water stuff, actually the most impressive personal water achievement was just getting the water bit of stage 3 of my marble madness clone to look a bit like the arcade

Nice to know someone looks anyways i suppose, im starting to get to grips with understanding what im doing. I find your distinction between gpu and cpu there interesting, i guess it would be better to call the whole thing a renderer or a system? scrawks port of the brdf and whitecaps implementations in his thread rely very much on a bit of back and forth

If you dont mind saying, what method of wave generation do you find the most agreeable? I ask because i was very impressed with the gta5 water in=game but got some education as to its low cost, well designed effect so i'm thinking of things that dont use fft as much as do

 

Why did you delete the pics VIC20?

You posted those on a public forum. Do you think that any Youtube gamer, or any game related site like Kotaku get's sued for posting game screenshots or videos of the gameplay? As long as you don't use those commercially, you're fine.

 

1st guess: Cry Engine
2nd guess: Unity

But I might have cheated a little ...

 

I'd appreciate a bunch more looks at your water VIC-20! I'm a strictly not for profit person so you dont need to worry about espionage

I'm right at the start of my project really with a daunting road ahead, so i'd love to get an idea of who is offering what with their water because i get too stuck in - im enjoying the process of the suimono 2 beta atm although i'd only use it in certain settings or situations, pretty much like all of the water things ive come across so far. The community project is amazing given the scary lack of co-ordination and version control behind it. And there's that Livenda product, yours (vic-20) that naval battle game

It's funny how water4 doesnt get a remotest look-in. Observing the gerstner created shapes as you toy with the settings can end up in some nightmarish geometric-looking shapes. Never using a water solution that spooky.

 

Beside performance… I must say at the end it's almost all about the fine tuning and it extremely depends on how you will use it (usual range of the height of the camera, sea states). Often the scale of the whole thing just looks wrong and the speed of the waves is incorrect.

We are starting a thread hijack here - we should stopp this