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

Most differences between UE4 and Unity 5 graphically can be 'fixed' by making your own custom shaders, obviously it's not easy to do things like change an entire lighting pipeline to get something like better shadow maps, but it is possible. Packages like Uber really help bring Unity up, but we really need proper TAA from Unity, and even then Unity's GI is still a step behind UE4s, and about 10 steps behind CryEngines new SVOGI.

Either way, it's definitely possible to make games with Unity 5 with what consumers would call "AAA Graphics", just requires a bit more legwork.

 

You misunderstand real time GI , and what is called "real time GI" that needs a baking phase (and very long time baking with Enlighten).

Yes, Unity do good if you buy lot of plugins, while UE4 offers better lightening and graphics.


I tried a lot of combination with Unity Image Effects and Scion , but after lot of tries and playing with values, i figured out i could not have the same results.


Also all Unity users are not on the same boat, only the ones that can afford lot of plugins will have a good quality, and many will struggle to find the good plugins and combinations while UE4 brings quality shaders and effects out of the box for everyone.

 

Ugly grass. Trees are just alright. Image effects look like too much, too desaturated and blurred. In order to make a nice-looking game, you need nice assets, such as textures. The grass there just sucks.

 

Sadly I'm looking into unreal, now, my penchant for quality graphics without paying the extra is causing me to consider moving.

 

Based on your infamous "I am gonna make a great game in one week without previous experience!" thread, I wouldn't recommend it.

UE4 is significantly more difficult to learn, and is more demanding to the artistic side.
You'll need to put more effort into making materials, and there's no Mecanim in Unreal engine.
Also, blueprints suck, and C++ is much more complex than C#.

Most likely you'll be better off with unity, unless you've run into unsolvable unity-specific problem.

 

Eh, they have animation blueprints and retargeting which is pretty much the same as what Mecanim does.

I do agree that blueprints suck though. When I tried it, I had the hardest time doing something so simple as spawning a blueprint actor from C++. The API and documentation is awful.

 

Nope. They don't have alternative to mecanim's animation retargeting.

Root motion retargeting is broken as of 4.10. (all root motion is lost in retargeted animation and set to zeroes).
Root motion movement is harder to use than in unity.
Animation retargeting is inferior, requires finetuning and produces inconsistent results.

You'll see models torn in half, bones tilted sideways, and hands doing completely incorrect motions.

If you're using UE4, expect to animate everything yourself. Unreal's retargeting mechanism is almost unusable and cannot be relied upon.

 

Ok I'll stick myself out there, they're pretty much both stock Unity and Unreal, I used SCION in Unity and some atmospheric scattering, Can you tell which is which? If you think they're both rubbish, not fussed.. It's not like I spent much time on either (which is the way it should be) I don't want to be spending months fighting for half decent results:

 

I don't know which is which, but I like the top one better.

 

Ok if you still want to do this, first video (arch viz) not on par at all. Check out Unreal paris, uses HDR IBL which any engine can do and the standard lighting / post / shadows still looks a bit off.

Amplify texture, fine until Unity's native lighting system gets involved then it looks rubbish and it was Unity 4.X. Space ship example, could be much better and not on par, see picture below where I re-graded it / upgraded shaders as a test.

Your example is just HDR based as well, again which any engine can do as long as it uses PBR.. It's telling us absolutley nothing here..

If you'd of chosen for e.g. Pamela, which is an actual game in Unity which looks pretty sweet then yeah we'd start having an interesting discussion.

 

Better lightening and full screen effects on the second picture, UE4 i guess.
On a video you see better the quality about the overall lightening and effects.

I agree Blueprints are not intuitive and over complicated some times, but some individuals are able to make complete PC games using Blueprints only.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...Wonderland-Blueprint-Only-Action-Hack-n-Slash
No, the artistic side is the same with any engine , it only depending on your project style, you can use default shaders, find ones in contributions or buy advanced shaders and tools.
UE4 has many helper tools like Curve tool Blueprint , collision generator, vertex painting and many others, it makes things more easy like making custom shaders has never been so easy with the shader editor.
The artistic side of making great textures and models is not work of the 3D engine.

 

Some people are able to paint pictures by holding brush with their feet. That doesn't mean that everybody should do the same.

It isn't. UE4 shader is more demanding, for whatever reason normalmap errors are instantly noticeable on it. At the same time, it produces better visuals.

 

Hmm interesting, it's one a piece at the moment.. Keep them coming.

 

As opposed to actual games released in UE4? I mean most of the high end demos look nothing like actual games for a good reason, they run like poop and take months to bake.

I think what we are seeing at this point is simply a lack of a good bit of baking in Unity.

 

First screenshot has bad terrain texture.
Second one has badly configured bloom.

Either of those could point at unity engine.

I think that first one could be UE4, because of the signature lensflare and because UE4 bloom doesn't look as bad as the second screen, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

 

UE4 asks a better 3D card, nothing new, but the baking time is lot more faster with Lightmass and the last iteration, just try the 4.11 preview.Drag some objecst on a plane and compare UE4 and Unity baking times to bake a simple lightmap.
Unity is stuck 10 minutes to bake a simple plane with some objects on top of it.

The second picture have a lower resolution , so it is not easy to guess.

 

They're all using substances from the substance database and the second one doesn't have bloom enabled on it.

I think on the first one, the texture parameters was configured to something like 512 whereas the other one is the full 2K..

 

Well errm, I kind of agree with that yeah no doubt UE4 is heavy but it looks fantastic .. There's a list of games here:

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Category:Games

Also found this on my travels, looks mucho niceo..

 

Might be hdr tonemapping then .

 

I'd like to see the same asset in each engine. Do they even have the same image effects enabled? It's kind of hard to compare them due to the total difference in the art style as well. I'm a bit of an artist but no graphics guru, so I can't really diagnose anything, but...

The first one seems to be lacking colors, is this the art itself or some image effect side-effect?

The second one looks like it has too much bloom, you said it didn't have bloom enabled but whatever is causing that is doing too much of it.

The second picture is more artistic and colorful, so I just like it better anyway.

I'll have to go with Unreal being the first, as it has decent anti-alias on those trees, and has an overall crispness to it that I think is hard to get in Unity out of the box. And the second one just reminds me of looking at Terrain Composer screenshots or something. It has that 95% almost-great look that I think is typical of a lot of Unity beauty shots.

 

Like to see this made in Unity, almost looks like a movie...

 

Yep looks lovely, but I wouldn't expect anything less from a hundred million bucks and from epic themselves.

 

Unreal is the first one..

@hippocoder

Good thing is, they take all their experience and tech they gained making the game and put it back in the engine.. Which is cool.

 

Yep but they don't (IMHO) make very good games. Or games I don't particularly enjoy, at least. Seems to be a curse: make an engine, make pretty but (bland) games. id were just as bad

Talking from gamer pov though. From crytek the only game I enjoyed wasn't done by crytek ie far cry 3 doesn't have much left of the original engine.

 

Kind of like CryTEK .. Crysis and / or that roman thingy they did (RyyyyySse?) Ultimatley I do find these comparisons a little silly, it's all about a great all round mixture that makes a good game. Like I said about the new StarWars game, no amount of graphics will ever make up for how little effort was put into it..

Any indie worth his salt could do better.

 

It looks like there is no post process effects in the first picture, did you put a post process volume ?
The scenes and lightening are not the same to make a better comparison, still the second screenshots looks better and like UE4.
Can you post a screenshots of the camera in the inspector and the effects and settings ?

 

Regarding star wars, a lot of people loved the game, it's a decent game but they really didn't have long to make it.

 

No, because it wasn't a graphics test.. It was simply UE4, with a boggo standard post process effect..

I ran statistical analysis on both engines for performance reasons.. The terrain in UE4 was larger and TBH there wasn't much in it..

@hippocoder

Did they, it managed to get a 4.9 on metacritic.. Mainly, the only people giving it good reviews were magazine reviewers...

 

People actually use metacritic? It's entirely broken and easy to manipulate.

 

Maybe that's why they called it Far Cry 3?

 

What post process effects did the Unity shot use?

In any case, you're right of course that a well-rounded game trumps graphics (at least on the day of play if not the day of shopping) but wouldn't it be great if Unity users has access to the out-of-the-box graphics of Unreal?

I'm a hoarder of great-looking screenshots, mainly for artistic inspiration, and I've spent a long time looking for Unity ones with little success. It a) doesn't seem to attract monied developers aiming at PC/PS4 level and b) looking at the average UE screenshot compared to the best Unity screenshot is sort of the same effect as looking at an average photograph vs the most realistic painting. There's just a realness to UE stuff that I don't find in Unity, even if the shot itself is not so well prepared. And since my interest is realistic scifi and not some posterized medieval fantasy game I find it hard to ignore this.

I would switch to UE if it were as easy to pick up and use as Unity. But at this stage it is more important for me to have ease-of-use which is where Unity really shines. For any indie developer an easy workflow and lack of need for fiddling is much more important than anything else.

 

I used SCION and whatever neginfinity says.. It's perfectly serviceable for a moderin(ish) AAA game, especially if you put a bit of time and effort into correcting tonemapping etc.

I agree though, UE4 is more difficult to use.. But ultimatley, it's not about the rendering features even with graphics. The material editor contains a bunch of "preset" shading models, making ICE / shiny metal etc. look awesome couldn't be easier, particles are dreamy but they always were.. I remember particles back in UE3 being quite tasty but not quite UE4 level..

The terrain system can be instantly massive via a tiled openworld editor, it has better definition / tools etc.

On top of that, there's ample amounts of "AAA" examples to work from, it's simple to make things look gorgeous.. It all depends on how much work it is..

Although I bet, with Unity 5.4 I could come pretty close.. Then it becomes a simplicity vs. performance issue..

 

To be honest, I've spent very little time in UE, but I didn't find it intuitive to pick up and use as Unity. I guess I'll have to spend a bit longer and see if it clicks.

I like Unity though, I think it's great what they've made in pretty much every department and I want to see it succeed. I think Unity 5 is definitely a step in the right direction, and they seem to be adding great features all the time. I just started trying out an art workflow involving no normal baking but instead face-weighted-normals and normal decal shaders for detail (a la star citizen), and what do you know, not only have Unity made example normal decal shaders last year but texture arrays are coming as of March this year, so no more fiddling around with texture atlases and mip maps. The only problem is that these decal shaders need deferred rendering and I guess some camera-based anti-alias would have to do.

 

2nd image is unity, cos I saw you putting it in a thread about 5.3 lighting changes comparing 5.2 lighting (the image here) with 5.3 lighting.

Detective work man.

 

Just for comparison sake, here's two we did

Our favorite "hiding behind a toilet in the hospital" screenshot (Unity)



And a VR item for museums (Unreal):



Honestly, I think you can get great results from either engine.

 

That low poly toilet seat doesn't look super comfortable

 

When was the last time you were comfortable on a hospital toilet seat?

 

Good question

 

I did see the Unreal paris demo. And like I already mentioned, the main flaw in the Unity one by comparison is the lack of temporal AA. As to the rest it's mostly down to the artists and art direction, not necessarily the capabilities of the engine. Much like the difference between your nature screenshots above.

As to your spaceship example, it really doesn't look any better just different. Different lighting and color grading, aka different art direction. If anything I could go so far as to say that it doesn't look on par as the Unity one since you're not using as much depth of field, your lighting is different, and so on. I could find other stuff to nitpick, minute differences, but those differences don't mean Unreal isn't as capable do they (which is kind of my general point).

As to my example, there's everything from reflection probes to the new SSRR and filmic tonemapping and temporal AA and other stuff. But that aside, if you think a scene being "just HDR based" makes it lesser well that seems like a sad way to look at things. You could say the same thing about most of the prettiest Unreal screenshots, especially arch vis and nature scenes, doesn't make them any less valid.

But whatever man. We'll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

 

Your main problem is, it's all just opinion based. I spent months buying arch viz examples / shredding them to see what really makes modern graphics tick, not to mention years I've spent messing around with engines. Then refactoring engine components to make them more performant, I can't show our actual game (yet, but won't be too long) but it looks along the lines of that demo reel I posted up at top of the screen..

Because it's a Sci-fi future thingy with mucho shiny, but it runs @ 60FPS on a 470GTX.. To get that "look" I'm having to crank lightmass up and there's a lot of lightmap information, because a lot of it is down to lighting.. That "look" pulling a figure out my rear is 30% Artwork (Materials / Textures / Meshes), 40% lighting and shadow tech, 20% post effects and 10% particles / addons.

If you showed willing to discuss and learn, then we might get somewhere. I might even learn a thing or two as well.. So let me start:

This old how to is the easiest way to understand what I'm talking about:

 

Very well then, virtual handshake.
I've seen that breakdown before, which part of it are you referring to? I'm not really seeing anything there that isn't available in Unity (assuming that crush shadows is another name for ambient occlusion).

By the way your current sci-fi project is in Unreal? I remember you working on a fantasy project some time ago but it seems you're working on a different one now or is that one still in development?

 

Sort of all of it, crush shadows refers to HDR ranges. You have Shadows, Midtones and Highlights in general colour grading which can add "depth".. In all fairness you can download GIMP and do the same, or maybe chromatica in the asset store? (Not sure about that). Colour grading is a big part of it, but of course you can do either in Unity and / or Unreal it's just that Unreal has it built in.

A lot of the other post stuff you can get a pretty good one in SCION (like fringe (or chromatic abberation)..

One of the main differences, Unity uses irradiance lighting where as UE uses Photon Mapping and every type including raytracing has it's up's and downs. Some of the benefits I noticed of UE is the quality is much higher, lightmapping takes less time and the GI cache is much smaller compared to Enlighten. The downsides are there's no option for geometry based computations, so you can't change colours and / or move lights..

LPV is worse than both of them, anything voxel based is decent quality but heavy.. I've not a clue how CryTek have done it (they just addes a Voxel based GI system into CE not long ago and apparently it's blazing).

Along with that the type of shadows, whilst heavier of course look better (Cascade shadow maps and ray traced distance shadows):

https://docs.unrealengine.com/lates...ws/RayTracedDistanceFieldShadowing/index.html

P.S I love the way VXGI looks, it's just amazing but extremely heavy:

As I said before, I tried Enlighten in UE and it looked a bit "odd". Well overtly saturated and un-realistic TBH.. But it's far from bad and it is getting better..

Add in cascade particles:

To me UE4 just looks beautiful, it's almost like magic LOL! (Says me after all the techie talk).. Although it's so hard to get to grips with and there's so many challenges you do sit there thinking whether or not it's worth it.

The other one got dumped, in short we bit off more than we could chew and at the time the game was so large that Unity 4.X wouldn't even load it and Unreal was chugging at around 20FPS with the amount of foliage etc. on a GTX 780. With streaming issues, amount of content this that and the other it started to become a fruitless chore everyone had enough of. It would of got "done" eventually, I'm not sure it would of been a quality release.

So I'd rather it take us a decade and do it right, or don't bother at all. We downsized the scope of the game massively, now it's probably only bigger than Mass Effect 2 ..

 

I don't think it was so much a lack of effort, but more overthinking it. Like a lot of modern FPSs, they add in so much extra "engagement" stuff, and try it make it more palatable to a wider audience (so noobs don't get frustrated by get pwnd all the time). It's gorgeous and all, but really lacks the joy of the originals. The first Battlefronts were great because they were pretty much just Unreal Tournament set in the SW universe. Run around and shoot each other. I miss those types of games.

 

Well color grading is another one of the effects in the Unity cinematic package I mentioned, it's part of the filmic tonemapping complete with shadow/midtone/highlight so along with the other stuff I've mentioned (SSRR, temporal AA, etc.) it basically is included now. Chromatic Aberration has been in Unity since forever too, it's part of the vignetting image effect. Granted it's the purple/green type (I prefer orange/blue) but it's there just the same. One of the main image effects Unity is actually lacking is a good motion blur solution but Amplify Motion comes to the rescue.
But about the gif though, other than the crush shadows there isn't really much to it as far as I can see that isn't in Unity/asset store unless I'm missing something. Unity has Enlighten for the GI like you've mentioned which is different than Unreal's of course but it's GI none the less

Real-time shadows are definitely better in Unreal, no argument there (although it hasn't been a dealbreaker for me so far). For the particles though, there are solutions on the asset store that can give similar results to the elemental video like TC Particles or Popcorn FX.

Hopefully your project doesn't actually end up taking 10 years though! Releasing is a feature too

 

It's pretty clear to me that Unreal has an advantage in out-of-box graphics. A plane with a cube on it just looks better somehow. And there is a lot built-in that comes on by default (maybe too much, as you end up spending a decent amount of time just disabling all the glitz to get performance up). Though a lot can be done with Unity, and I bet you can make a comparable looking game (maybe just with some extra effort).

That said, I think 90% of the look of a game is driven from good art and good art direction. And you can make good art with practically any engine on the market (to varying levels of difficulty). Of course, the choice of engine can help, not arguing that, but I think the focus should be on your artistic skill level, or the skill level of your team, not picking a different engine cause you think your art is going to instantly look better.

 

This is the same for quality bloom , dof , tone maping, eye adaptation, vegetation shaders, terrain RTP 3 , alloy etc .... all quality effects and shaders are only available on the asset store , this is always a matter of beeing able to have the money to buy all plugins you need.
While UE4 has them available out of the box in engine and editor for any user

Unity could propose project templates and options quality like UE4, when you create a project you choose mobile/PC basic quality with no post effects or a PC/Console hight quality project with high quality post effects.

 

Ha, the colour grading wheels look exactly like the one in GIMP .. I did say you could do all of that already though, just export via amplify colour, everything but TAA has been available for ages via the asset store (at various quality's and stability may I add).

"It has GI none the less ", well there's a fair difference between any games lighting technology and Brigade. The sheer impact a GI solution has on your game is unreal (no pun intended). Hippo posted a video on the other page.

Once everyone uses systems like Brigade as a realtime pathtracing solution then any differences in rendering pipelines will be none existent.

I checked out TC and Popcorn, TC particles looks a decade out of date but Popcorn looks ok although at $250.00 it's a bit on the hefty side to say you still get a better looking solution in UE for nothing.

Y'know I could go through all the tech, show what it does. But the ultimate point is an engine rendering and lighting pipeline is made for the type of market they're aiming at. Epic don't seem to care too much about mobile lets face it, they are forever finding ways to not only increase graphics quality for PC / Console but also simplify ways of achieving it. Whereas Unity have to care for many more platforms..

P.S When I mentioned HDR lighting being an unfair comparison because every engine can do it, it's because you drop a single model in with HDR lighting and you're essentially bypassing the GI system, not really using any in-built lighting systems either. So you can't really compare engines on that merit, the arch viz example showed the flaws in a game based lighting solution.

 

Well you said Unreal has the color grading stuff built in, the implication being that Unity does not when in reality it now does. But I suppose its understandable since its a new addition and still being developed so fair enough.

But ignoring that, again taking things back to the gif you posted, which part is it that you can't do in Unity? I don't mean whether this or that technique gives better results, like whether Unreal's GI or chromatic aberration is better than Unity's or stuff like that. I mean which part or pass in that gif Unity simply can't do in any way? This is the part I'm intrigued by because I really do want to know what I'm missing, you're obviously seeing something I'm not and it could potentially help me make my art better.

About the HDR though...uhh I think you may have misinterpreted those screenshots I posted

Those screenshots I posted are stills from a live cutscene animation with actual real-time lights and shadows, multiple moving characters, and the background is actual level geo. It's not simply a single model with HDR lighting + background. It's the real deal. I've been working on this game for several years now...

 

No, nothings "missing" well I could say things like DFAO but it's impact isn't going to change the world as we know it. In fact out of all engines I've ever used, they've never really had anything "missing" even though they might look like a baboons back side.

I was messing around with UDK nearly a decade ago now, which had pretty much what UE4 has.. But there's a distinct increase in graphical ability between the two.

On a side note, well done you.!

 

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if Unity included more of this stuff too and they're gradually getting there (you should definitely try out the package I linked earlier). But at some point in game development you'll have to spend money, whether it's to buy a computer, or the asset store, or hire an artist, or 3ds Max/Maya/Zbrush (Zbrush alone is $800), or paying the Greenlight entrance fee, or even paying Epic royalties after release. At least if you want to make something remotely graphics intensive, something's gotta give.

That being said, a lot of people underestimate what you can do with Unity vanilla...


This is from my own Greeble Kit R2 on the asset store, in the old version of the Unity PBR callibration scene. It was back in the Unity 5 beta or early 5.0, can't remember. It's 100% vanilla Unity (although screenshot is supersampled).

@ShadowK
I agree, I think if a scene in either engine doesn't look good its usually more because of the art direction/assets/lighting is crappy, as opposed to necessarily the engine itself (which I think is why threads like this can often end up going in circles, because it can be hard to know which).
And thanks!