"Photo-realistic" quality rendering between Unity and Unreal 4

You play pong on 144fps... sweet jebus

 

couple of years ago on 2 high end gpus (easily 1 high end gpu these days). It's not going to be that long, honestly.

 

You would be very much correct that lighting / shadows is one of THE primary contributions to good graphics. But there is much more to it, colour grading plays a huge part too.. Then everything else is touch up's that contribute a certain percentage of the final product (the polish as you will)..

@hippocoder

No chance, the amount of noise that thing creates is pretty indicative of the issues with path tracing solutions. Also on top of that it has to filter down to crappier GPU's, expect at least 5 to 10 years before it's a mainstream proponent..

 

Fair point, give me two titans or more when it becomes affordable. Brigade seems to be pushing their tech via the cloud, which sounds like you use their gpu server farms outside your own machine to play the game, not sure if this will catch on but who knows, maybe this is just octane 3.

 

Accuracy in game engines is considerably less desirable = speed. In any case, a mobile can do a few million rays at acceptable framerates (just an example) with powerVR tracing soon. Do keep up with the news young'un!

If there was ever a place for indies to innovate, it would be doing something super cool like a gpu traced rendered game, I mean - nearly all AAA console games at this point do some form of heavy raytracing. Last gen? it was none.

Even if it's simplistic like tracing for POM in a shader, or for dynamic clouds, it's clear the techniques are not going away - and it's a tremendously exciting thing for me.

 

Yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of other things as well, I guess by lighting I mean visual stuff that is not inherent to the material. I hear a lot of people just say that it all comes down to the artist. But all I have to do is see bare metal in Substance Designer (rendered in real time) and then open it in Unity to see that there is an huge amount of difference that has nothing to do with the art. Of course Substance Designer isn't indicative of any game engine, my point is simply that there is stuff that has nothing to do with the art that can really make a difference in graphics.

 

If were talking about modern 3D games, it's an easy way to spot someone who is new and / or doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.

Although if we're talking 2D art / some older 3D games, then it most likely is the case. If all lighting is pixel drawn or scenes pre-rendered with the addition of small 3D self lit elements then that's just art (mainly)..

When we talk about art as well, it's a muddy subject. Because for e.g. a senior technical "artist", whilst they have the chops to model with the best of them they're primarily coders. They excel in tech / shaders, which shaders are manipulations of core rendering functions in an engine. Amongst their other tasks (particles / environment tech etc.)..

 

Unity looks better here IMO, and it is Unity 4.5:

 

Might need glasses , lol..! Anyway, yeah for Unity 4 that's pretty good..

 

That's pretty damn impressive for pre-Unity 5.

 

While that Unreal video beats everything else, I actually found the Unity 4.5 one more impressive than the Unity 5 one, although it was at a different resolution. Perhaps that isn't the best representation of what Unity 5 is capable of.

 

Do you own work and recreate the same scene in Unity & UE and then you decide. It's not like either one charge you for it.

 

Either way, it shows (for small interior scenes anyway) you can do stuff AAA worthy in both.. Just because UE is more advanced going back to my original point it doesn't mean much.

It comes down to how much work it is for an actual game...

Unity really does need that temporal anti-aliasing badly though ..

 

Yes you can do AAA stuff:

1. Cities Skylines
2. RollerCoaster Tycoon World

 

Umm which of those are cutting edge graphical 3D games? I'm talking Crysis 3 / Fallout 4 / ShadowFall / Witcher etc. etc. Not games you could make in any free engine out there.

Kind of removes the need to compare graphics between engines when they could be done in anything.

 

This week Desert of Kharak came out which at least from the trailers seems really nice and made with Unity. Some first reviews tell a different story though. Will grab it once on sale to check it out nethertheless.

 

Yeah I tend to grab a lot of Unity games as its cool to show support and see what peers are doing.

 

You know, there is an Octane Render 3.0 plugin for Unity -- if you want to see creations made in Unity with Brigade quality (the video shows the plugin for UE4, but the article mentions it for Unity as well).

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...-vfx-in-films-games-and-beyond-300052040.html

 

This post concludes everything that is channeling people from understanding where exactly the difference in lighting/realistic feel of those two engines go apart. UE4 as said in terms of shaders,textures and majority of tonemaping/FXses is going to be the same, but the three points listed above is exactly what is setting it apart and it certainly does contribute to better realistic, but perhaps not just realistic but overall more "warm" lighting and look of UE4 itself. And those itself arent some sidelined features, those are very core features, however Asset store does cover almost all of them, just spread across in different packages (although i did not test any of them, just judging from screens). Shadow artifacts in Unity are probably the largest downside and it really ruins the lighting feel. If one does not belive that, simply make basic scene in Unity and UE4 and compare, with default engine features that are, no need to be theoretical.

 

Hi, but the new cinematic post does a bang up job. Unity nailed the tonemapping and AA is taking great strides (version on bitbucket)

Thanks to using ACES like UE4 does, Unity largely now looks identical (if you want it to). Slap some amplify motion on and there's very little difference. There is still a bit of "guess the values" going on thanks to wholly ambiguous light intensity.

 

I've been playing around with the new Unity tonemapping and AA since it released and I've gotten insanely good results. Unity can hold its own against Unreal if developers know what they're doing.

 

Which unity version is that?

 

Unity 4.5/5.4 beta I think.

 

You can get it on Asset store here. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515
Has early versions of filmic tonemapping, temporal AA, and SSRR. The bitbucket version is probably more up to date but I haven't tried it.

 

Mmmm, nah!. Firstly I was looking into lightmass / VXGI and Enlighten and this is in UE not Unity. If you look at the realistic demo used with Enlighten and the results are mixed to say the least. But like everything else it's a tradeoff, lightmass is static and VXGI requires an epic rig. So whether any of it's useable is up to the dev really..

Then there's still a lot of lighting stuff Unity doesn't have, again shadow tech / DFAO etc. is great and all but again it all has an impact. Unreal has become far more performant but y'know it's not a trail blazer by any means.

There's a ton of stuff including more post, it's still not quite in the same ball park. Again though, it's hard to judge how relevant it is. If you're trying to one up AAA games, go for Unreal still (best of luck with that too).. But Unity can now keep up with some AAA titles, if there's a problem in terms of graphics it's generally the user.

 

I love the new cinematic image effects, but I still find what really sets off a realistic look is the quality of your Materials. Otherwise I find no amount of image effects will help anything unless your Materials are of top notch quality.

And sense Unity is using GGX Lighting now, or at least that's what I've read from various sources. There shouldn't be any excuse of a reason as to why it can't as decent or even better looking than Unreal, so to me quality of Materials outweighs anything else fathomable for good looking graphics (texture wise).

 

It seems, but i still use Alloy shaders because they looks better than Unity standard shader.

I tried a bunch of combination with Unity Image Effects and Scion plugin, it takes lot of time and i can't get the same great visuals as UE4 when you start a new project. UE4 has it's own lightening with shaders and it's own quality post process.
This makes a difference for beginners and total noobs to lightening and post effects and i just hope Unity will bring the Image Effects plugin to a better level.

 

I've always wanted to try Alloy, just can't afford it.

But yeah I've tried UE4, definitely a different ballgame to getting things done, but I did realize quickly the image effects are like already set up to a general ideal solution that is amazing!
Unity's can look just as good, but so much tweaking and settings changes that it would be nice to have a prefabbed Camera already made with General settings for different kinda game types (FPS, TPS, RTS, Etc).

 

I think that's really the gist of it, Unity is capable of a lot but it isn't ready-to-go. When you open up a new scene and drop in a model, it just doesn't look anywhere near as good as in UE, but I know from stuff people have made in Unity that is is capable of pretty great stuff.

edit: maybe because a lot of new users are aiming at performant mobile there's a tendency to set things up to default to something of that kind.

 

Seriously, as I just said and as Hippcoder has said.. The lighting systems / technology (Shadows, DFAO) / cluster of post and shading models (presets pretty much, which work amazingly with their setup) are all different in Unreal. Irrelevant of whoever thinks one looks better than the other. They will never look the same, Enlighten for one will make sure of that..

It's not on par with Unreal, it probably never will be.. Again though, how much it matters in terms of games instead of Arch Viz renders is subjective.

 

If you say so. Personally I'm in the business of making games, not arch viz. For those needs, Unity is more than capable of going head to head with Unreal graphically.

 

I use both engines on a daily basis. I use Unreal Engine for Arch Viz, Animations, and mainly still shots (Using VXGI, HBAO). But I use Unity for my actual Game projects. I also use Unity for Interactive Design and Augmented Reality experiences, Unreal has almost no support when it comes to accessing Mobile hardware and unique devices. One of my mobile games looked worse in Unreal, because I had to turn off most features for it to work, while Unity had Asset Store Plugins that helped achieve those features on mobile.

I've actually taken one of our games pretty far down development in both engines. From my experience, Unreal starts off pretty but as you get going you realize you have to turn down a lot of features to actually get it to run well. In addition if you are not making something that fits their stock game templates, it is hard to do very unique things with unreal. With unity your turning on a lot of features (Buying Plugins) as you go to get the visual quality up. So it's almost a wash for me when making a game. If it's quick Pretty imagery, Unreal gets you there fast. But if you invest in the right Unity assets and setup a stock scene, it can get you to a decent finished image/animation pretty fast too.

Something I never see people talk about is how the engines actually help focus the developers workflow. For me I work faster in Unity then Unreal. Unity doesn't convert files to it's own format, so I feel like I understand what assets are actually being used , where they are, and how they are being read. I feel like I can jump back and forth from my Art programs and completely understand what Unity is reading and doing with my files. I also feel like in Unity I spend more time actually working and not waiting or struggling with the engine to compile and load assets. (In Unreal this is really apparent when using VXGI, it compiles every-time you make a material change). I also find that since unity doesn't look so pretty at first, I concentrate on the Macro "Meat and Potatoes" of actually building my game. Unreal I get caught up in the micro details and waste a lot of time editing the most Minor details right away, like a reflection color or a DOF blur, when I should be focusing on building out the whole scene. (This is more on me then the engines, but I've noticed it a lot lately).

I think you can achieve comparable quality visuals. But if you want to really make a unique game, Unity's Asset Store Developers provide the coolest plugins. Unreal is getting there, but they are far behind.

 

This is nothing new , Unity is better for mobile.

Non sense.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...A-game-of-crafting-exploration-and-friendship!
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?30198-Sugar-Rush-and-Suspended-Cop-WIPs
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58620-Drunk-On-Nectar-A-Nature-Action-Strategy-Game

I don't encounter importing problems with UE4, while i agree compiling shaders is borring , but they have improved it.

Working with Unity is lot more easy and it will work very well on old hardware BUT you must spend too much money to try to get the same tools and features as UE4 offers out of the box.

And the biggest problem with Unity is lightmapping and Enlighten. It is taking too much time to bake, like a simple scene with a floor and some objects, i have to wait 5 minutes while with UE4 and lightmass it is very fast even for a large terrain. Also lightmapping mixed mode in Unity doesn't work, while it works just smooth in UE4.

UE4 far behind ? non sense , have you really used it ?

UE4 has too much stuff for game development that is missing on Unity like better terrain system and foliage, AI perception and visual tool , visual coding and shader editor, cinematic tool , vertex paint tool and i must forget some.
All out of the box without needing to buy plugins.

You have also also advanced features for games like ray traced soft shadows distance fields, sub surface scattering shader nodes, landscape grass renderer, dynamic navigation mesh, SSR on trensluent surfaces, collision generator , soft particles and shadows, particle collision with mesh distance field etc ...

When it comes to making games, UE4 is lot more demanding in hardware i agree, but they deliver pushed features and graphics because THEY MAKE AAA GAMES. They don't rely on some Asset Store or some users plugins.
You can look at Kite demo or Paragon new tools and graphic features for example (they are also bringing game building in VR).

It is a matter of choice for the developper, about the hardware he targets , the features he wants and what engine he prefers to work with.
There is no need to neglect one and talk non sense like you do, each engine has strong points and is good for a specific game. For example CryEngine has great features, it is a faster engine than UE4 and Unity while delivering quality graphics for games.

About Achi Viz, i don't know a lot about, i just know people make Archi Viz in UE4 and they make as good as Unity Archi Viz, they are not far behind

 

Perhaps he worked on 2d project. In that case Unity is likely to be a better choice.

In 3d project unity scene editor alone is unpleasant enough to work with.

Asset store is a nice thing to have, but it doesn't really matter in the long term, because developer is very likely to implement custom assets regardless of the engine.

 

Isn't most of the Arch Viz stuff baked anyway, I was doing some research on unreal and archviz and as far as I can tell it seems the really high quality stuff is baked.

 

Yes, however, both engines produce artifacts and visible seams on scenes that are built out of modules (unity produces worse artifacts), and in case of enlighten baking lightmaps will take eternity. Maximum quality lightmass baking (UE4) takes 4 times less time than default quality unity enlighten baking. Lightmass also less resource-intensive.

UNreal community has subforum dedicated to archwiz which you can check out.

 

Don't be silly, either Unity has X technology or it doesn't. It either uses an equivalent quality setup or it doesn't..

None of this is opinion. You can make better looking games in Unreal as well, if your target market allows for it.

@coldpizzapunk

I think you need to spend more time learning it chief, if you ever believe UE4 is behind Unity there's something wrong. Epic were at the forefront of technology before Unity existed..

It's not hindered rocksteady who use an older inferior version making one of the best looking game series so far. Or the metric ton of other succesful development teams making gorgeous looking games in Unreal 3 and 4.

So if they can do it, I'm kind of thinking it's not the engine that's the problem here.

 

I did try unreal once but my rig wasn't powerful enough to work with so I uninstalled it there after.

My personal experience is the same with enlighten. So I made the switch to baking out all my scene in blender, the bonus is you can use the GPU to speed things up. The second takeaway, was manually uv'unwrapping each object was tedious to work with. To date I've purchase two plugins for blender which are my all time recommendations. retopoflow and bake

https://cgcookiemarkets.com/all-products/baketool/?ref=27

Now I can happily bake full texture atlas.

 

Sorry I think I poorly described what I was talking about. I was purely talking about the Asset Store and the developers making plugins. Unreal has plenty of built in features that Unity doesn't have. But when it comes to things that are more unique cases / out of the box, for instance Augmented Reality, Unique AI systems like RAIN AI, or Android Bluetooth support. (All very unique needs) The Unity asset store has things that Unreal is just starting to get in their asset store. So they are somewhat behind in those cases. I think if you are more of programmer you can likely leverage Unreal to do these things, but for an Arch Viz guy, these unique things are hard to do without utilizing Plugins.

In all fairness, besides Arch Viz, the only full "game-like" thing I've finished and delivered to a client was done in Unreal. (Not photo-realistic but 3D VR) So I guess My point was more towards what zenGarden says. Knowing which tool is right makes you a better developer. And that was really my point. I use Unreal Engine everyday at my dayjob to produce Still Shots and Animations, because it matches the closest to Vray Rendered scenes quickly. I actually don't have the time to bake scenes, so all of my work is Realtime with VXGI, and it still looks very good in my opinion. In unity I have built the same quality, but at a pretty significant investment in plugins and time. But these plugins has opened up a lot more things I can leverage besides just Still Shots and Animations. For ARCH Viz it's selling an idea to a client. So things like Mobile Tablets that let you walk around the space and configure items. While totally doable in Unreal, is made easier with Unity Asset Store.

 

I totally agree with this statement. I was doing Arch Viz work a lot more in Unity 4.6, then I have done in Unity 5 due to the baking times. For my work I need to be able to output changes very rapidly. Unity 5 switch was a nightmare for me and my team. The bake engine is a nightmare where you are dealing with lots of Large Arch Viz spaces with details. But in fairness I use VXGI over Lightmass. So for Unity I am always keeping my eye on things like these:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fully-dynamic-diffuse-global-illumination.314748/
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-bocs-shot-photo-realistic-screen-shots.381382/

As you said, it comes down to being able to understand the tool and utilize it for what you need.

 

Yes, I would hope so. They've had far longer to get it right.

 

My position is that A) Just because Unreal has "better technology" doesn't necessarily mean you'll get better final results since so much of this is up to the developer. It's also up for debate as to whether said technology is actually better given performance is still a critical consideration and not everyone has a GTX 980ti.
B) Unity has enough core tech in place to get most of the way. With the new cinematic effects I linked above, Unity is close enough to Unreal visually. Heck, in real-world situations you probably get better performance to compensate (allowing you to throw on a few more postfx). And for most else, there's the asset store.

You're putting way to much faith in such and such piece of technology as an indicator of whether you can get comparable results and assume that because Unreal has it and Unity doesn't, that automatically puts Unreal ahead.. You're basically nitpicking that Unity doesn't have this or that spec on paper but a game is the sum of its parts.

As an analogy, Mental Ray might have some buzz word that Vray doesn't have or vice versa. Or Mental Ray might be lacking some technology Vray has. But as long as Mental Ray is able to get good enough results at reasonable performance, visually that's the main thing that matters (workflow aside). And the higher up you go, the less and less it matters.

You're also ignoring the fact that the Asset Store has on a regular basis allowed features Unreal didn't have at the time. Thanks to the asset store, Unity 4 had real-time GI months before Unreal ever did. Same goes for other features like physical shaders or megatextures. You might say asset store stuff doesn't count because it's not built in, but that's like saying 3ds Max is inferior to Maya because 3ds Max relies more on plugins (when plugins like Thinking Particles more than make up for it).

Just because you can't make something in Unity comparable to something made in Unreal doesn't mean others can't.

 

UE4 put all efforts mainly on PC and consoles because this is their main target platforms, mobile has never been UE4 priority.

 

No, UE4 lightening ,PBR and effects are not the same look and i just find them better.
I just hope Unity will seriously work on their image effects and bring them to the next level.

If you take a look at any beginner prototypes made with UE4 and Unity , they it always look better in UE4 with their default lightening and post process effects.

No UDK3 has already reflection and some approximate physical shaders, and UE4 was the first to propose PBR before Unity has officialy PBR shaders. Unity first PBR shaders was not good while they was already good in UE4, it took very long time before Unity improved them and switched to GGX.
Still i baught Alloy to get some decent PBR in Unity because they are better, like real time shadows you need to buy a plugin.

Lot of features are made by Epic for their games, that you won't find within Unity or on the asset store (cinematic Dof and motion blurr , ray traced shadow maps, particles and fog with shadows etc ...), these will give your game some advantage if you use and are able to use them.
If some companies like Square Enix choose UE4 for Kingdom Hearts 3 or FF7 for example this is because of all advanced toolset and advanced graphics the engine can deliver out of the box.

 

Firstly, how do you know? Secondly, who said you need a 980TI? Thirdly, go tell that to AAA PC / Console game makers who are using said tech. You think they waste hundreds of thousands in research for a laugh?

On B) Do you know this as fact? Or are we just still throwing made up opinions in the air here?

So ray traced distance shadows, cascade shadow maps, photon mapping, Voxel lighting etc. are all buzz words, there is no technical merit to them yeah? I'll let Nvidia, CryTek and Epic know. Hell why are you using SSR, temporal anti-aliasing etc, PBR. or Enlighten? They're just buzz words, so who cares?

It's good news for Unity, who is developing all of these buzz words. They could save themselves a lot of time.

Did it now, so Lionhead's LPV just popped out of nowhere did it? That was before Enlighten got stuck into Unity. If you find a peformant lighting solution on the asset store, please let me know because I'm yet to find one (I did try a fair few). You're also forgetting some of the asset store stuff is quite hit and miss, got to give kudos to Scion though from Aieth. It's pretty good..

You know that how exactly? Show me something that can match Unreal, just turn back to page one and look at the examples. I've never seen anything match the graphical prowess of Unreal and I'm still yet to..

I've been doing this a fair while, whilst it's getting closer and I expect the gap over the next couple of years to slim further. It's obvious right this moment, you know nothing John Snow ..

But I'm happy to walk you through it if you'd like ?

 

Let's just say that...

Out of the box unreal 4 produces vastly superior results using the same scene and same textures. Default setup without finetuning anything, purchasing anything, or downloading extra anything. Builting scene editor is also superior to unity one. It also comes with AI behaviour trees, Montages, Matinee and lots of other stuff that is not present in unity by default.

The flip side of that is that while unity you can sorta get away with, say, generating normalmap by running normalmap filter over diffuse color, in Unreal engine this kind of stunt will be instantly noticeable. Also, no mecanim.

Either way, I remember writing fairly big (even though it was brief) comparison of both engines.

Both engines have strong points, but getting defensive about unity visuals is a waste of time - it won't improve the engine, and Unreal engine wins in that area.

 

Exactly, not like it stops you making good looking competitive games. There's plenty of proof Unity can, if you're knocking on the door of AAA you've bigger concerns than graphics.

On top of that, I'd take substance over GRFX anyday.. Just played the new StarWars, I usually don't complain about games. Whilst it's pretty, it's devoid of any real content.. I mean seriously it's not far away from getting the FPS demo from Epic and slapping a coat of paint on it..

 

What, did I hit a nerve or something? If so that wasn't my objective so apologies. The tech Unity is upgrading is the tech in that link I posted earlier, which among other things includes cinematic depth of field, filmic tonemapping, SSRR, and temporal AA. They're in an early state and not 100% there yet, but I've gotten good results even then. Between those and Amplify Motion (maybe Uber shader and some others), you're pretty much good to go. And my original post was about these bringing Unity in the same general ballpark as Unreal 4, which you say is not the case.

If I recall correctly (and to be fair I could be wrong), Unreal 4 didn't have real-time GI at launch because they said it was too performance intensive, and they added it back in later. Around this time I recall at least one or two solutions on the Unity asset store. Such as this one (released december 2014)
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/re...ation-for-all-versions-of-unity-w-i-p.206191/
I'm pretty sure there was another but I can't remember the name. Livenda was also working on one around this time and had good results, but it seems they never released it.
Now granted whether these were performant or production ready or not I couldn't say. But then, I was just using it as an example.

We're not talking about Unity beating the top end rendering capabilities of UE4. We're talking about Unity being in the same general ballpark as UE4, remember? Within that context, I know because I've seen others do it, and I've personally done it too. And Unity now has enough of the big features needed in order to get in that ballpark, and the asset store for anything else. If you don't believe that, it's your problem bro.

For example, there's this arch-vis scene here where the only real problem with it compared to Unreal it is the lack of temporal AA (which that package I linked takes care of)

There's the zero gravity space station asset

There's Amplify Texture 2

And then there's me


Believe whatever you want though, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Edit: Oh I see you edited your post to crank up the snark. Well John Snow remind me who was it that said this about real-time Unity 4 stock lighting...
"Nice, like how beast kisses the floor but it's not quite lightmass. Looks better than UE4's LPV solution (I'd hope it does as it's baked). Not sure how we got to a cube off !.."

 

Oh no, not another cube off..

Ok if you think those examples are amazing, I shall leave it with you...

 

I think they're in the general ballpark of UE4 and competitive enough. That Unity can hold its own. If you go back and read my first post that's all I said.