Can any technical expert tell me exactly what is the Beautify asset doing?

Beautify
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/61730

^
This asset basically.

It might sound like a subtle advertisement thread, but no. This is an important matter: in Unreal Engine and CryEngine you seem to get the same texture quality as you do in Unity when using Beautify. So for Unity to require an additional asset to 'fix' its textures blurriness, it makes me wonder: what oversight is currently going under the hood in the engine?

Beautify gives textures that 'extra pop' that gets rid of the blurriness, making even textures you thought of as 'bad quality' suddenly become good. It also makes detail discernible as if low res textures suddenly became high res textures.

So can anyone with expertise in graphics technicalities explain exactly what 'engine feature' is related to textures degradation/blur that is currently unaddressed by the Unity engine?

EDIT: Basically, the question is 'what needs to be addressed at the Unity Engine graphics low level core in order to make the use of Beautify redundant'.

 

Nothing. At a glance the Beautify asset is simply custom shaders.

 

My best guess is the other engines already have a sharpening camera effect enabled by default and unity comes as a clean slate, making no assumptions on how you want the end result to look. Slap such an effect on your camera in Unity (maybe try the sharpening feature of the TAA in the new post stack, or the contrast enhance effect form the standard assets) and be happy with your "magically sharp textures".

 

It's a sharpening post-effect, with some other added features. It's a lot like Prism.

 

Don't think Unreal comes with a sharpening effect enabled by default.
If you want a sharpening effect, you must manually take the Blueprint effect from the Architecture demo and put it into your own project.

I just wonder if the texture degradation I am talking is 'natural' in all game engines (and what causes it) or if it is something that could be addressed in the rendering core. The reason is that I perceive Sharpening effects such as Beautify as a superficial and 'forced' solution to solve a problem that should be addressed from the root.

Or is there any game that would benefit from blurrier looking textures?

 

I have a pixelation filter on my cam, with too crisp textures I get slightly more noisy aliasing in some situations. But that's a super rare niche usecase and I still use several sharpening effects before and after pixelation to achieve the look I want.

I really don't think the Unity rendering pipeline is "broken" as you suggest. Maybe you're comparing Unity apples with UE4 oranges that have different mipmap bias settings or different mipmap filtering (Unity has a crisper type of mimmap filtering that you can activate per texture, iirc it's called "kaiser" or something where the default is "box" filtering), or more anisotropy filtering applied to them? Also consider that there might be performance implications. Ark for example ran like crap on my old gtx660 / gtx670 and still looked terrible at the quality settings. The Forrest looked and performed better on my old cards.

 

To be honest, I'm also a bit curious what purpose is, and why I would want it.

When I'm reading this, I'm thinking
Improves perceptual texture quality - even low resolution textures look better.
.. do you mean unsharpen mask?

 

Are you talking about mip-mapping, compression artefacts, or something else?

 

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@Frpmta, I'm all for addressing weaknesses in a product in order to improve it. But there are constructive ways (bug reports, feature requests, etc) and there are nonconstructive ways (whining on forums, baseless comparisons to other engines, clickbaiting and trolling).

If you're this unhappy with the Unity engine, you're doing yourself a disservice by continuing to use it. And you're doing us a disservice by continuing to post about your unhappiness here. As you're well aware, there are a ton of other options these days, and if Unity is the lost cause you make it out to be, you're better off switching.

If you do actually care about improving Unity, why not stop posting about it? Submit a bug report for specific issues you notice. Request features you'd like to see and vote on ones you support. And learn what you're really talking about so you can understand why things are the way they are, instead of talking about it as if you know better than an entire team of engineers who work on improving the engine for a living.

 

I made this thread because I don't know what is the 'exact' problem, only that it is there, so I want someone with technical knowledge to tell me what is the underlying engine issue causing the image degradation or if it is something natural to all game engines and Beautify is just 'adding something on top of the unprocessed image' rather than fixing it.
But it is this:

^
Left is blurry, right is sharp even when low resolution textures are clearly being used.

Unity vs Unity3d, lol, did you really just put that there?
Half of those are clearly joke threads, the other are legit criticism and rants.
I don't see what's wrong
You should go Google Unity Enlighten blog rants if you really want to know what is hate. There is a great difference between unhappiness and criticism.

And I would never use Unreal Engine or CryEngine unless I wanted a few nice portfolio shots Those things are not production ready. Unless you are an AAA studio, they are toy engines. Unity is the only production ready engine of the big three for indies.

Unity looks ugly to me but becomes a totally different beast when I plug in Beautify.
This thread is the total inverse of 'ungratefulness': many out there call it an engine with 'weak rendering capabilities' but they would change their mind if whatever Beautify does was included at an engine core level.
It is almost unfair. Just look at the ground textures:



That is, assuming that Beautify is 'fixing something' rather than adding something additional on top of the base image meaning that if you want more 'real detail' you need higher resolution textures rather than approaching higher resolution through artificial means like Beautify. Which is the doubt I want to solve in this thread.

 

Don't worry about them. They'll just find something else to complain about while never releasing a game.

 

To be honest I'm pretty sure it's just post filters, sharpen, curves etc, maybe edge masking included.
Which is not a bad thing, but I'm more interested in the performance, or why it is selling better than prism, scion etc.

 

It is not only about color. The grass texture still looks 'blurry low resolution' and the banding in the skybox is much more noticeable in the left. The right side textures are low resolution but still have that 'sharp' feeling that you only normally get with high resolution textures at least in Unity.
Looking at PRISM, it looks to enhance color only, not the textures quality perception like Beautify does.

 

I think you are overthinking it, a compressed 8 bit jpg is a longshot from an uncompressed 32bit rgbag.

 

I am not talking about the image as a whole but the left side compared to the right one. There's less texture resolution in the left than the right.

 

Just checking the Asset Store page and the websites for those assets you mentioned left me with the impression that the developer of Beautify is trying harder. Scion is more expensive, completely lacks preview videos, and the website requires flash to even load. Prism completely lacks any mention on its developer's website.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41369
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50819

By comparison Beautify is the least expensive, has three preview videos in addition to screenshots, and the developer is far more active on these forums (1,000+ posts compared to Scion's having about 800, and Prism's having under 500) despite being a newer member (well over a year) of this community. He has a website with a dedicated page for Beautify.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/61730

 

Don't think it is LODs because even from a close distance there's a huge quality difference.

I would say texture sharpening but PRISM claims to have 'HQ Sharpening' and I don't see a big difference between their comparison images.
So I went and google 'Luma Sharpen' and this useful SweetFX link appeared in the results:
https://delightlylinux.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/sweetfx-lumasharpen/ which seems to be what Beautify does.

But then what is the origin of the 'fuzziness' according to that article? Whatever it is, I think Unity has more of it at a base level than the other engines in the sense Unreal textures look much sharper and less blurry even without a Sharpness image effect.

I have always looked at image effects, outside of AA/AF, as 'stuff people use to make ugly art look better' but I guess it really is a necessity these days. I will look deeper into them. I just don't like to stack things like Beautify on top of the final image because it changes the way in which I approach texture authoring meaning 'I have to take into consideration how Beautify modifies/alters the look when enabled' in order to optimize textures for it rather than have textures look the same in Blender, Marmoset and Unity.

 

I think the main difference is unsharp masking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking



It's not actually "better resolution" - just a kind of contrast enhancement.

I think another part of why Beautify is selling so well is that it calls this stuff magic instead of unsharp masking. I mean, it convinced @Frpmta that beautify was like fixing a core rendering defect in unity...

 

I won't deny that.
But in my defense, none of the other Image Effects packs in the asset store do it.

But do you know exactly the reason why that 'lack of sharpness' is present normally and is not a core rendering defect?

 

look at the image i just posted from the wiki article - the effect adds colors that arent actually in the texture in order to give additional contrast and make the changes pop.

you're looking at the bottom half of the spiral and saying "wow the image on top is so blurry - look at how sharp the image on the bottom is!"

 

Now I get it.

So basically, it is not a rendering defect but the natural looking way of the image, and the Sharpening is actually 'fake' even if it provides a better visual in some cases.

So that means most modern games (say Crysis 3, Uncharted 4, Horizon) use some amount of Sharpening through image effects, right?

 

there's also stuff people mentioned like aniso filtering and mipmapping and stuff. There are different kinds of blurriness that happen at different times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

^^ this is the technique used when viewing something nearing parallel with camera. Like the ground when you're looking ahead - as opposed to looking down directly.

So that setting on textures when you import them will have an effect on how sharp things are from difficult angles and different scales (so at different distances).

 

That's a broad interpretation, but for the examples you provided, I'd assume so.

Since I don't have the budget or skill to chase photo-realistic graphics, I like the way Unity doesn't throw all those post-processing effects on by default. They're there, but you have to seek them out. I would say (generally speaking, of course) that games being made with Unreal or CryEngine are generally aiming for a more realistic aesthetic that benefits from those effects, so that may be why they're configured that way out-of-the-box (if they even are... I've not used those engines so don't know for sure).

 

i think its also worth noting in general, from my experiences -

the absolute highest impact post effects are:

Color Grading
Contrast Enhancement / Sharpening (this has huge impact as we see in this thread)
SSAO (most of all - this is a fix for unnatural looking corners)
Vignette (so much visual impact, maybe higher than SSAO in many cases)

Blurring effects can also be huge - but really depend on the use cases: DoF, Motion Blur, etc. I've seen games use motion blur with depth of field for instance to help make sudden camera movement cause less motion sickness.

Don't underestimate stuff like vignette - I saw my lady playing Mass Effect 3 a few weeks ago and was blown away by how absurdly pronounced the vignette was during one of the end game fights. It covered like a quarter of the screen.

I would have been too embarrassed to crank vignette up that much.

 

I don't know, for me Chromatic Aberration has the highest impact.

Spoiler

It makes me turn off the game.

Spoiler

Unless your name is Bloodborne

 

don't forget bloom -- overcranked bloom is the fastest way to make your game look like a amateur's hot mess.

 

I don't think it has to be image effects. It could be done on textures on import, for instance.

Other things to consider are things like default filtering modes in different engines and how an engine's lighting model works. On the topic of texture filtering, from memory Unity defaults to bilinear with no anisotropic. That produces fine results when you look at something "straight on" (perpendicular to the surface) but degrades rapidly as the angle gets towards parallel. Trilinear with anisotropic filtering even at low levels improves this drastically, and that's something you can do easily in a texture's import settings.

It may sound obvious, but different image compression formats also have different effects on quality. At the end of the pipeline Unity is compressing things into a GPU friendly format, so we have limited options there, though we do still have options. Something that people tend to overlook though is the format of the source image before we put it into Unity. Ideally you should use lossless formats (note that "lossless" is not the same as "uncompressed"), but a lot of people use JPEG textures (partly because that's often how textures are supplied, for some reason). JPEG is a great compression format... for images intended for the human eye. However, the data JPEG discards makes it a far from optimal choice for texture sources, because GPUs do not use the pixels the same way our eyes do. You only want your images to go through one lossy conversion, and for games that should be the one the engine does as it packages your texture for the GPU.

 

Good point. Which reminds me, I would *love* an option in the texture importer to apply a sharpen effect after a texture gets internally downscaled from source resolution to the max resolution set in the importer. That could in some cases greatly affect the perceived sharpness/quality of the texture. I've made comparisons while working on Dota2 Workshop items and auto-downscaled by valves tools vs supplied at correct resolution (downsampled bicubic sharper in Photoshop) with sharpen filter applied afterwards almost looked like double the resolution because the difference was so big.

 

Just want to point out--they were going for a specific aesthetic/mood with the game, which the vignetting enhances. And the end of ME3 uses vignetting for very specific purposes. It isn't at that level during the entire game. So it's not like they just said "Let's put ALL the image effects in!"

Okay, fanboy mode off.