Chingwa's Guide to Lighting and Post Effects

INTRODUCTION
As a way of introduction this post was inspired by Inquiries found in the "The most insane aaa game..." thread. Specifically posts made by @frosted which can be seen starting around here: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/t...ed-in-closed-alpha.448514/page-8#post-3073918

Using the example scene that was posted, I took a look on my end and completely re-did all the lighting and effects using my own ideas and preferences, and am collecting the process I went through and some other notes on visual design and technique in order to get the (imho) best starting point in Unity.

Also I should say that this is what I consider a starting point, not the end-all-be-all of lighting in Unity. I'm sure others will chime in with their own thoughts and opinions on this matter which I welcome. I decided to post this as a new thread so that it might reach a bigger audience, instead of being buried in a larger thread.

Also, there is a TLDR at the end if you just want to skip to that.

DOWNLOAD AND FOLLOW ALONG
I've posted the example scene in 4 steps, you can download the project and take a look at each example scene here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/share/LightingTestScene.zip

QUALIFICATIONS(???)
I been-a-usin' Unity for a long time and I got strong opinions. Also, I used to be a paid artist before I became a bum. Otherwise I have none. Read at your own risk.

LET'S GET STARTED
There are some basic misconceptions that often arise when talking about this subject and that is that some people are talking on a technology implementation level and others are talking on a visual (or art theory) level. Ultimately though everyone has the same goal, which is a kickass image.

The tools you have in Unity to control color are very powerful, and that comes with a lot of responsibility. It's extremely easy to screw over an image right from the start if you don't begin from the proper baseline, both on the tech side and the visual theory side.

TECH BASELINE
So let's start with a perfect baseline that we can use to build on. I downloaded the example project and opened it in Unity 5.6. I deleted all lightmaps and turned off all bake settings including enlighten... this stuff just get's in the way and "muddy's the water", since you have little control over what it's doing. I converted the one scene light to realtime, set the color to pure white and the intensity to 1. I also set The ambient environment lighting to skybox with an intensity of 1.0 and set the reflection probe to render nothing but the sky (culling mask: none). I set the project to LINEAR color mode in Player Settings, and made sure the camera was on HDR and Deferred, and turned off all fog. Finally I deleted all image effects and Standard Assets from the project and imported Unity's post-processing stack instead. I enabled only the 'Color Grading' section with the Tonemapper set to Neutral, without touching any of the default settings. As an aside, I wrote a little script that force updates the Unity Ambient environment and applied it to the camera, since for some reason it was not updating itself on skybox mode.

The below is the result and is about as basic (yet "proper") result you can get with Unity. As you can see the results are pretty bland, which is to be expected.



ART THEORY
So let's get a couple key RULES out of the way right off the bat...

1) There is no difference between color and lighting. Color IS lighting.
2) Color is RELATIVE. Always.

Now because of these two rules, we can just make up a third rule that isn't exactly always true but might as well be...
3) Color is EVERYTHING.

Since color is so important we want to do everything we can to maintain color info and dynamic range in our scene/image. So let's look at some improvements we can make without immediately jumping to brighten/contrast (which destroys color info) to help this image along.

In general, unless you're looking directly at the sun, the sky will be the brightest and most important element in an outdoor environment, and it will cast it's color onto everything in the scene. You can have a completely believable scene in Unity without even using a directional light at all, as long as the object's are lit properly from the sky. This is why it's imperative to set the ambient source to be 'skybox'. I'm going to make up my own rule here... Ambient light is more important than direct light. Believe it.

Now as we said before, the sky is bright. The sky is in fact so bright that sometimes your eye has a hard time reconciling the sky and other objects at the same time. This is even more of an issue in cameras since they can't capture anywhere near the dynamic range that your eye/brain can understand, and this extends to monitors since they have a limited dynamic range that they can display. This leads to the tendency of adding "Contrast" in an image, which unfortunately usually means darkening the darks and lightening the lights. But since we stated above that color IS light, we can also influence the contrast by changing color instead of destroying the already limited value range in the image.

So let's make some small tweaks here to give ourselves a more visually cohesive image. We can make the sky APPEAR to be brighter by bleeding it into the other colors in the scene a bit. In the PostProcessing stack I turned on Bloom, kept the intensity at 1, lowered the threshold slightly to 0.95, and adjusted the soft knee to 0.75.

Let's also add some antialiasing since nothing screams "fake image" quite like jagged edges do. I turned on the postprocessing antialias setting and set it to 'extreme performance'. Even just a little bit of aliasing goes a long way especially when looking at a static image.

The direct light of the sun is generally extremely bright and extremely white. As the sun get's lower on the horizon the light rays have to pass through more and more layers of atmosphere, and because of that the blue of the sun light starts to get refracted out, which makes the sun light appear warmer and warmer the lower it gets on the horizon. We can simulate this of course by changing the color of the Directional light. But a little goes a long way! Don't get overzealous here. The angle of the sun in this scene has started to lower, but it is still well above the horizon and firmly in an mid-afternoon stage. I set it to an rgb of 255,240,200. I also raised the intensity to 1.25, since again, the sun is brighter than anything else in the scene.

We can add further cohesiveness to the image by adding Ambient Occlusion. We want to be careful though, because this can add a lot of "contrast" (erroneously meaning darker darks) to the image where we don't necessarily want that in the long run. I turned on the AmbientOcclusion in the PostProcessing stack and set the intensity to 1 and the radius to 0.2, kept downsample on and the sample count to medium. And, very important, since we're using Deferred we can apply the occlusion only to shaded areas by checking 'ambient only'.

Just these very small tweaks are giving us a much much nicer image. It's very cohesive, and has sufficient contrast for the image to read visually while still retaining plenty of color info / dynamic range for further tweaking.


ART DIRECTION
It takes a special skill to step away from your work and look at it from a fresh perspective, or a defined perspective. It's easy to be too close to what you do and not want to sacrifice the work that you made, or work harder to improve what you already think is good. This is why everyone hates art directors, and also why they get paid so much.

So let's art-direct the crap out of this image. We got this far, it looks good mostly (you think) and you show the art director your proud baby and this is what happens...

"What is this muddy mess? There's no focus. There's no contrast. Do it over and show it to me again in an hour, I'm going to lunch."

Yep. The art director is never wrong, even when they are wrong. As we've seen "contrast" is a fluid term that means different things in different contexts, but it almost never means "make everything black". So how can we improve on this without destroying the dynamic range of our image? Why, by changing color of course!

The buildings and the ground are very similar and they bleed into each other for sure. This might be a realisitic image in our heads or on paper, but it can definitely be made more interesting with a few key choices.

First I added some darkening variance to the ground, it looked like it already wanted to have wet/dry areas, so I darkened up those spots particularly and added a few puddles for visual interest. The ground and the wood of the buildings were particularly close together and were not distinct from each other despite being made of different materials, so I warmed up and darkened the building materials slightly. I also warmed up the straw in the building's roof... remember how we said color is relative? Adding color is just as good a tool to create contrast as changing value is.

Finally I added some quickly made specular maps where I thought necessary since all the materials were missing them. Remember texture data (like specular) feeds into the lighting/reflection/ambient settings from the rest of the scene and is just as important for lighting cohesiveness as anything else is. It isn't just for metallics.

Some of the above edits were fairly subtle, but it really brings more dynamic effect to the scene, as well as better ground some elements like the barrels, and bucket.


Looking good. Now let's go back in and start tweaking some of the more interesting post effects. Chromatic Aberration and Vignette are very useful for simulating subtle falloff. Subtlety here is always key, I added a aberration at only 0.05 intensity, and added vignette at 0.4 intensity and 0.1 smoothness. I also gave the vignette a tint color, since we want to retain color in our scene. Nothing washes out a scene like using black and white when you could be more nuanced. I used an rgb of 34,6,0.

Next I added ScreenSpaceReflection. This definitely adds visual interest to nearby reflections and breaks up large reflected areas such as the puddles. There are a lot of settings here but I made sure to keep the blur low at 1, and increaded the reflection multiplier to 2. For scenes with large bodies of water you'll really have to experiment with settings here, but these work well for this scene.

To simulate a bit more light in the scene I went back to the bloom and increased the radius from 4 to 4.5, and also increased the intensity of the directional light from 1.25 to 1.4. Now I'm pretty happy with the image as it stands. We have visual interest, good dynamic range, and great contrast while still being able to see everything in the scene.


TLDR
Now you could go on and on like this tweaking effects, changing color grading and etc. forever, but the key points, and perhaps the TLDR is as follows...

1) Color is everything. Use color instead of contrast. Protect the dynamic range of your scene!

2) Start with a proper technical baseline for your project. In most cases this means Linear render path, Deferred Rendering, HDR on your camera with Tonemapping, Skybox as ambient, and a Reflection Probe in your scene to capture it.

3) Practice the art of subtlety. Most settings only need minor tweaking to perform best. (again, protect that dynamic range!)

4) Break rules where you feel they need breaking.

Another point I would like to make, and this may be just a personal preference, but neutral tonemapping is a better starting point than ACES. You will spend more time with filmic tonemapping trying to get good results because it often hides key base tweaks that should be done prior to messing with it. I recommend doing the steps above under neutral tonemapping, and then perhaps switching to ACES at the end and then tweaking it's settings from there.

All that is a lot to read, but I hope it helps some people out there, or gives them new ideas about their own projects. Used carefully, Unity gives you pretty much everything you need at this point to get high quality visuals, you just need to be thoughtful and methodical about it.

Note that all this is stock Unity (apart from the PostProcessing stack, which Unity should "just include" in all future downloads, because it's awesome). Also notice throughout this process I didn't touch the contrast controls once, not did I touch enlighten (turned that junk off first thing!). While I do think there is a place for GI for sure, enlighten is a mess, and it seems Dynamic GI solutions will eclipse it completely soon enough. This particular scene is not likely to benefit from GI much at all anyway.

OK back to real work now.

 

Good read! Nice to see informative posts like this

 

I thought your original image looked very good and definitely the last image with all of your enhancements is great. Certainly a noticeable difference. Be interesting to see what @Billy4184 thinks.

 

@chingwa, dude, this is awesome!

I think this is a really good call. I've been learning more and more about the details of tone mapping, and the difficulties. I really deeply underestimated (and misunderstood) quite a lot about the process.

Getting a scene organized using a neutral tonemap can really help reduce the number of variables while you put things together and make sure all the parts are in proper order.

 

Very interesting read, thanks! I'll probably follow it along in one of my scenes and see how it turns out.

Interesting that you think Enlighten is a mess, can you be more specific?

 

Baking times are restrictive, even prohibitive, on anything other than a relatively small and isolated scene. This right here is a killer in my book. It was sold as a dynamic system and while it technically delivers on that promise it does so at too high a setup cost in fiddling and waiting imho.

Global Illumination is being seen as the latest holy grail in rendering tech, to the detriment of basic visual technique, but I certainly think there are applications for it, and it can add a lot of interesting dynamics to a scene that's for sure. I know of a few Realtime Dynamic GI systems coming close to completion for Unity, SEGI being the most developed, and I can't wait for them to become more feasible in games. The advantages of these far outweigh the current and probably future state of Enlighten.

I did say I had strong opinions.

 

Frankly I'm a little confused about Enlighten. I've been looking at games made with it to see what the best possible quality it can deliver (all else being equal of course).

So, SW:Battlefront, according to Geomerics, uses enlighten for its 'indirect lighting' which could mean a lot of things.
Battlefield Hardline, which also uses enlighten, looks pretty poor IMO as blockbuster games go, and is way behind battlefront in rendering quality despite being released only a year or two apart. In fact I think it could easily have made in Unity by an AAA studio.
So it occurs to me that Battlefield 1, which is at least as good looking as Battlefront - in fact it's probably the best looking game of all time to date - uses the same engine and has a very similar aesthetic and quality despite possibly not using enlighten at all. So I suspect that Battlefront's rendering quality is not all that much due to Enlighten.

Last but not least, Enlighten's own demos are not all that great to me. So I'm going to have to say that I think it's still responsible for most of the ills of Unity's graphics.

Anyway, not to get too sidetracked. Great information in your guide, and I think this sort of thing has been missing from the community. I'm sure many people will improve their games using it.

 

SW:Battlefront and Battlefield 1 look so amazing simply because of the designers expert understanding and implementation of PBR technique. This means a combined focus on high quality tuned texture input data and an unparalleled eye for artistic implementation. Enlighten and GI would be decidedly secondary factors in this formula.

I have strong suspicions that GI is a bit of a red herring. I mean, it can be great and all, but it is far from being the main focus for most lighting situations.

 

Well, just take a look at Battlefield 4 compared to Hardline. Hardline was released two years later and looks way worse - and uses enlighten.

From some of the stuff I've read, I think Enlighten is often used to add a dynamic element to a scene that's otherwise probably baked the traditional way. So I'm not really sure that even games that are supposed to have used it are always using it for anything other than a secondary cosmetic touch. So probably lighting quality (besides correct PBR etc) is still mainly a question of how good the baked lighting is.

Anyway, I'm also very interested in trying out SEGI for future projects, I think that for us indies, getting it performant in a scene would be much easier than it would be for a scene of the complexity that many AAA games have to deal with, so maybe we can use it 'ahead of its time' and do something different.

 

@chingwa

Everyone has there own take on what graphics should look like (unless the goal is pure photorealism), so take this with a pinch of salt.. To me there are a fair few fundamental mistakes, you have washout from incorrect bloom setup but it doesn't pop either.. The lighting looks solid and static (aka, a LUT with a properly graded highlight / shadows and midtones correction was really needed (never underestimate the power of the LUT)..

You never mentioned anything about HDRI lighting, those little pixel lights are fundamental to any good looking scene.

Shaders need work, but that's not your fault.. Also I would recommend a hybrid of 2 texel realtime and the progressive mightmapper.. Getting the skybox influcence and reflections correct is also an important part of the process (especially for outdoor scenes)..

If you really want to know how to get the best out of lighting, I'd highly recommend people read up as much as possible on Koola.! and other arch viz threads.

https://moritzweller.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/dissecting-koolas-ue4-archviz-magic/

 

Both games have a different art style/direction. 'Battlefield 4' aims for realism, while 'Hardline' looks more cartoonic(?)/colorful.
Also, both 'Battlefield 1' and 'SW: Battlefront' uses PBR and Photogrammetry, giving them overall a better graphical look. Those techniques haven't been used in previous titles.

 

Understatement of the century.

I think this is the worst demo I have seen.

 

Regardless of the art direction, I think you'll find that many screenshots show a pretty poor lighting. Even saw a thread about it by gamers where there was a general agreement that it was a step back graphically.

As far as Battlefield 1 and Battlefront are concerned, I think you're overestimating the impact of PBR and photogrammetry on what makes those games stand out. For one thing PBR is everywhere nowadays, and for another, there are great non-PBR games made with advanced rendering tech that put most modern games to shame, such as Crysis 3 for example which is already half a decade old.

Besides, engines like Brigade show that there's still a huge impact that lighting can make on its own, so I don't think we should so quickly dismiss the impact of tech on graphics quality. We don't really know what's in Frostbite but I wager there's a lot of tech going on there besides enlighten.

 

@Billy4184

Crytek did a breakdown with Ryse between PBR and the old diffuse workflow, there wasn't masses of difference between the two. It isn't the secret key to making everything look awesome.. Like everything else it's a small accumulation in the right direction.

But I get the feeling for us, good isn't good enough LOL!..

 

It's look as good as many UE4 scenes, good job.
The only noticeable issue is the default Post Process Bloom, it doesn't look natural and it's over exposed on the scene background.

 

@ShadowK I was waiting for you to come along There's a bunch of stuff I didn't mention. I only barely hinted at PBR and the importance of texture data, and HDRI lighting would be a very good point as you said. But I don't think these things are necessary to get great looking lighting in Unity (though I agree they are important for getting THE BEST POSSIBLE lighting out of Unity).

You can get away with a much simpler out-of-the box setup in Unity as long as you start with the proper baseline setup and practice careful conservation over your color range. I see LUTs as helpful sure, but they are things to do at the very end of a grading pipeline and are often overused for glitzy effect.

The stepped breakdown GIF you posted is a) starting from a poor baseline already as they sky is blown out b) get's no real benefit of the painstaking GI setup (It could have simply used a skybox influenced ambient and a bit of occlusion to the exact same effect) and c) then proceeds to destroy most of the color info in the scene anyway, first with a harsh contrast pass and then an insane LUT.

I have nothing to say about the first video you posted, other than it's damn gorgeous and I want to live there. You can really see the benefit of GI in a scene like this as it moves over the course of the day.

The second video though, I consider oversaturated and unrealistically harshly contrasted. But I suppose this is where we start to get into visual preferences and how different people are looking for different visual stimulus. I gotta say though, the video looks good on the outset but I wouldn't want to play a game that's lit like that.... my eyes would get fatigued.

People have a fetish for harshly contrasted images as it fools the brain into thinking it's seeing a higher dynamic range.

 

How is it over-exposed? If anything I was thinking It's still a bit under-exposed.

 

@zenGarden But yes I think that is a silent point I was trying to make as well. If you labelled the final image with the title "Unity assets in Unreal Engine 4!" a lot of people wouldn't even think twice about it unless they started to look at the details a bit. UE4 gives you this type of starting point by default. But Unity can look just as good with just a few easy to make tweaks.

 

, I should get a tattoo saying OMG GRFX!..

No, LUT's are definatley not just for glitz and glamour whilst they can be used for topping off you should be using them to balance shadows and infllct neutrality for your overall image by doing things like whitepoint selection / calibration. Ask the guy who created scion, that awesome dev knows his post (as he gives you some of the options)..

That baseline you are talking about I originally learned as a basis for lightboxing, I'll put the example I made for another thread below.. There is no blowout there, Koola's example is for internal scenes mainly. I calibrated it to work for both..

HDRI's / properly calibrated IBL is massively important for uniform lighting, it's not hard to grab a HDRI image, create a material and slap it on the skybox (then let it bake).. One of the main reasons is GI colour contribution, it can seriously help balancing out a scene and you need variations to simulate how it'd look in real life.. That's why HDRI's rock.!

Also just to note I agree on the second video, it's cool as an effect but I agree also I wouldn't want it constantly in a game:

But yeah, ultimatley you do it how you think is best.

Lightbox:

 

I'd really like to see this scene (lit like this) in Unity. Not sure if it would be appropriate for this thread but maybe for the other one.

@chingwa regardless of whether or not anyone would spot the difference, I think what you wrote is a very good quick-start guide for setting up lighting in any scene. When there are so many settings that impact eachother it's good to understand where to begin and what order of steps to take.

 

And you are right depending on the author and artistic choices you can also have lot of bloom in UE4 lol


But in your picture, the bloom is like blurring the barell and the shields on floor that looks like loosing details.
While in this UE4 scene, the bloom only shines in some metal parts or barells, and is blurring stuff only around candles lights. Perhaps i am wrong and this scene in some outdoor lighting would have the same bloom effect as in your picture.


Anyway, Unity should propose some post effects profiles system, so we could share our profiles in some easy way and tweak them. And they should propose by default your settings that looks great.

 

If you get that tattoo on your forehead then I promise I'll get "LUT Calibration" tattooed on my ass.

 

Yeah, don't bother to send me the picture I'll just take your word for it ..

I think I'm going into some pretty advanced topics here, there's a 30+ page thread over on the "other" forums about shadow penumbra's and advanced composition.. Sorry if I'm detracting away from the core concepts.

I was heavily invested in how arch viz do lighting, it's not as easy as you'd think and takes a lot of time but the results speak for themselves. Applying to a game is errr, interesting..

 

I think all experience can be applied, whether it's from Archviz, technical graphics research papers, or from painting and traditional color theory. It is all very valuable in very particular ways. But I also think it needs to be tempered a bit when applying to Unity and games in general.

My main goal in this thread was to show that you can setup stock Unity to look good, and you don't necessarily need Asset Store light/post fx add-ons, or to go down the technical wormhole that a lot of folks using Unity would get bewildered with. (Though you do need the PostProcessing stack, that thing is gold and should be mandatory in every project )

 

@zenGarden I'm not fond of the lighting in the UE4 barrel scene example. Everything is too crisp and it looks "computer generated", as well as the ambient being completely black and the lighting value/hue being too bright for the supposed open flame light sources (facepalm).

I do see what you mean about the bloom settings starting to bleed other colors though, and this is a good point and should be tweaked for personal preference. My personal opinion is that I would err on the side of color bleeding for the sake of an overall believable and cohesive image, rather than getting the opposite problem of the crisp image detracting from the effect of implied lighting, which renders the scene too obviously as a conglomeration of different placed objects.

 

No game or screenshot never showed me Unity can do the same graphic touch as UE4, but you demonstrated with some good tweakings it's possible. So many users should not ask anymore "Can Unity do it" lol

Yep the color bleeding is how works Bloom, and i really prefer to bring it to low values, making it subtile.
I seen some projects with too much bloom and if ind it decreases the quality of your game with too much bloom and blurring, this must be some beginner mistake thinking some strong bloom is a great effect.

 

Quite perplexed by this:

I don't want @chingwa to take this as anything personal.. He's done me quite a few solids, I respect his work and I also love his products (they look great). I'm sure he will return the favour after this ..

But I gotta call it how I see it, that screenshot Chingwa posted to me is nothing more than a starting point w/ great general direction and I strongly disagree with @zenGarden.. It looks like an indie game that came out in 2010 with a few fundamental issues, never mind the best of what comes out of Unreal and Unity.

BUT!.. Even an old looking game is difficult and there's many pitfalls, like what jitter settings do you use with TXAA? What does TXAA REALLY mean? So it's great to have these guides about.

Below is Unity's viking village (screenshot by Unity) and besides some very small nit pick's it looks great to me. When we get to a more advanced stage, maybe Chingwa would be kind enough to do a break down something like this?

 

I think the point is to make a simple tutorial that anyone can download and mess with more so than making the most beautiful screenshot possible.

Simple, clear steps into a good, solid result. Maybe not "knock your socks off wow" but definitely solid, balanced, and clean.

 

+1

I wouldn't agree on everything 100% either, but a good chunk of that might turn out to be questions of phrasing or definitions. I wish I would have had such a guide when I started using Unity. Nice one @chingwa!

"Solid" over "socks off" probably is more beneficial for beginners anyway.




I wonder though, have you guys abandoned the other lighting thread already and switched to this? That other thread wasn't even a week old. I get why this guide shouldn't be hidden on page 5 of a huge multipage thread, but is it really any better if we crank out one new thread about AAA lighting each week and fragment the discussion? Personally I think not. It's an ongoing discussion because it will always be relevant and new examples will emerge all the time. I don't see why it shouldn't be one of those 100+ page endless threads like the wip artworks thread. If something noteworthy, like this guide, should come from it, I have no issue at all with it getting its own thread, but why needs the general discussion about related topics always have to shift so wildly from thread to thread?

 

Might be best to keep this thread somewhat on track, instead of being another screenshot dumping ground. I just deleted out my pamela comments to just keep it clean and on topic.

This is a good thread and might really be helpful for people who want to learn some useful tricks.

 

Yes I agree. This thread should stick to being a guide for how to set up graphics in Unity. Deleted my posts as well.

I think the other thread should be for opinions and discussions on general topics in this area, this one is a good simple guide and should not be derailed from that.

 

It's really not 2010, anyway it's your point of view, but myself i am happy with the graphics @chingwa have made, if it was a game i would review it good about graphics.

I really prefer @chingwa settings , your DOF and far camera just make everything blurred and hide issues and your screenshot resolution is too low. You would need to make a screenshot with a closer camera and no DOF.
I just see a picture with good coloring and contrast.
You don't know it , but your are seeking the unicorn lol

 

As long as it makes you happy that's all that matters, it's not my sceenshot buddy (as I already said).. That was made by Unity themselves, that picture in post #19 is mine (lightbox example). Yes I agree the DOF is strong with that Unity one, they needed to change the target range and move forward or backwards quite a bit..

I don't believe some of the issues are anything to do with Chingwa anyway..!

You should use DOF, but sparingly.. Again on my picture (post #19) I used DOF (Bokeh) and there is no excessive blur there. But overall composition looks good on the Unity screenie and that's a very important part of getting a good overall look, removing DOF is easy / good composition isn't..

 

Ok, for lightbox i didn't commented, but i find it is too much GI bounces or too much lighting everywhere like in many Enlighten Archi viz, the lighting is too uniform everywhere.
About DOF is mainly to use in game or for cinematic artistic effect, if you want to showcase 3D art indeed does not hide all details under DOF or Bloom blurring.

I don't see issues but something looking like many UE4 scenes post effects settings. Next step will be Octane or some full real time GI solution, for now Unity can do great for most needs. The bigger part remains producing all the game content not adjusting some post effects.
Anyway, beware of the unicorn lol

 

This is something I need tattoo'd on my ass.

 

Firstly it was modelled on a bright overcast day, it accuratley represented the light balance of my own room at the time (you surely have to understand lighting conditions constantly change? I mean it's fundamentals 101).. Secondly you are about a thousands miles out, it wasn't Enlighten for a start. If you think DOF is for that only, you don't know how to use it efficiently (it's available in many games and is used as a touch up effect)..

This takes a lot of training, Thomas was right it takes 10,000 hours of doing to really get to understand it and if you can't see the fundamental issues plus you're constantly making incorrect assumptions then sorry I can't trust your opinion. But again it doesn't matter in the slightest, It's not going to change anything..

This Unicorn thing is silly, I can get exactly what I need already.. I'll leave at that, we're dragging down a very informative thread at this point.

 

@ShadowK
Why don't you post that breakdown of the scene you were planning on doing, I'd sure like to take a look, and I'm sure others would also.

 

Tons of room for improvement here no doubt, not the least of which would be to start with better texture information and specular maps. I made my own ad-hoc specular textures for some of the materials because they were completely missing, and I only put in minimal effort to do so

The question and pursuit of "The best graphics possible" is an informative and worthwhile exercise. Seeking the Unicorn is a pretty hilarious expression and is sure applicable to all this, but there are definitely gains to be had even if you never catch the thing.

I just want to caution people to not have side-blinders on while on this pursuit, as there are many avenues that are also worthwhile that might fall outside the benefits of pure technical technique.

I am not that fond of the Unity village image in #27 from a composition and visual point of view. The overall lighting looks good to me, and the value range in the scene is controlled well... I'd say better than my tutorial image... However as a whole there is too much light in the scene and not enough contrast between objects.
It's a bit hard to focus because the gate is adding a lot of contrast and saturation to the image, but if you look at the village itself it's all pretty muddy and monotone. The lighting on the buildings are far too close to the ground and don't offer sufficient contrast to my eye. In fact the lighting value on the rock, grass, and the dirt are all surprisingly close to each other. (That glowing glass is actually pretty hilarious, there might be a unicorn hiding in it!)

When you look at in isolation you can see how unbalanced it all is. It's actually throwing off the lighting for the whole scene which is otherwise good:


I don't want to start photoshopping images in this thread as I'd much rather it be contained to improvements that can be made directly in Unity. But just as a way of illustrating the point above I did a quick photoshop edit just to bring down the grass and the dirt, I didn't touch anything else:


This is of course where it's important to make your own creative choices, for the improvement of the scene as a whole. There is such a thing as "perceived" light afterall (back to that whole "Color is relative" thing). It's quite possible that the dirt and grass were perfect in their respective albedo/specular/PBR data range (though I doubt it), But at a certain point there are improvements that can be made outside of normal technical guidelines. That's probably blasphemy when it comes to a tech discussion

As for Depth of Field, I agree it should be used with caution. I'm much more inclined to use color to denote depth in a scene instead of using DOF, but it certainly has it's uses.

 

Personally, I would consider (the first image especially) to actually be "blown out" - the colors end up muddy like you say, but the problem is that it's far too bright (in the technical sense: (r+g+b)/3 is too high).

Even with the treated ground in the second shot, the color on the building ends up being too even and too bright.

It feels muddy because there's not enough contrast as you say, but that's more or less the definition of "blow out" - the color is being compressed into too small of a range at the high end:

- Large differences in color become smaller relatively
- Small differences in color become impossible to differentiate

In histogram form - too much of the color is clustered in too small of a range. <-- blowout.

No? The second image, the ground looks better because you expanded the range of brightness (essentially white balance). But the buildings still don't look good, because of blowout.

 

@chingwa

One of the main issues is you can pull apart anything.. I mean at some point you have to decide it's good enough and drown out the voices:

Below: Inaccurate reflections where shadow contrast hits the back side and the light angle touches it, washout in the front and overexposed / contrasted tonemapping (not mentioning the DOF, not doing it)..



Again over contrast, un-natural light balance and incorrect neutrality in the colour pallet. I mean I can go on but what's the point?



Y'know what, the adam demo looks damn awesome..! Many can only dream of making a game that looks that good, there is no such thing as "technically" flawless in what's essentially a bunch of fakery.. The only time you will get towards truly realistic (or technically accurate) is when you use a heavy realtime pathtracing solution / phsyically based everything..

But there's more to it than just "realism", what about artistic style? One person may really dislike one style and someone else may absolutley love it.. Once you've well and truly learned the fundamentals it is a matter of taste. It doesn't mean you can get away with a half done / lazy approach and call it "artsitic style though".. People (well most people) can tell if it's not done right.

I would honestly love to hear what you think of this though:

 

I'm probably biased because I am completely infatuated with Witcher 3's visuals.

But I would say that Witcher 3 has better treatment of color than any game I've ever seen... by a huge margin.

Spoiler

I marked off a couple things I think are noteworthy.

A: The Roof: even though this is at dusk/dawn under low light conditions, the shadowed roof still has a good amount of detail preserved. The darks aren't too dark.

B: The Reflection off Effects: very few games have such a mature treatment of reflection for effects. Even in this case the reflection of the fire isn't too bright. Even bright effects aren't blinding.

C: Individual branches in area of hyper contrast: even at a distance, and even with bloom, you can still see individual branches clearly. The amount of detail they preserve here is incredible. Even their bloom maintains detail.

These points might seem minor or technical, but A and C are incredibly hard to achieve.

Color is approached entirely differently in Witcher 3 than in most games. They are not using the same techniques as everyone else, they're doing something very very different.

 

Look at that sky it has no color info left! Also needs more cowbell!

But seriously I think as an overall image it's very pleasing, even if being highly contrasted. It is a marketing shot after all and this is what tends to happen for marketing shots, again, because it becomes what people expect in a still image. You can get away with much more compressed range in a still image, but the actual game does not look like this (downgrade!) nor should it really.

I could pick it apart sure... I'll come back to this a bit later

 

This thread is a tutorial, this is the main interest, but indeed anyone is free to spend as much time as they want on the graphics adjustement, or posting picture or having non ending theorical discussions about how should be AAA graphics.

I don't seek AAA graphics or Archi Viz or top notch lighting, it's for real time action game with a decent look. This tutorials is a great base for me and i prefer to spend more time in game creation and content than adjusting post effects.

Yep, i agree.
Thank you for your tutorial, i think it will be helpfull for many other people.

 

I guess my opinion differs a bit, but my thought is that:
- contrast is a very good thing, unless it's at the cost of detail.

You generally want good levels of contrast, brights should be bright, darks dark, colors vivid. What you don't want is too much color compression, where you've pushed the color range into such extremes that smaller differences are entirely lost.

The Viking Village shot compared to the Witcher shot is maybe a bit unfair, but Witcher's shot has contrast that enhances the details, the Viking Village shot has contrast that blurs the details.

The most impressive thing to me about the Witcher shot is that this is a low light shot. If I tried to do a scene under the same kind of lighting condition, it'd be a wreck (I've done tons of low light scenes and people always complain about them).

 

@chingwa
THANK YOU for bringing art direction back in the discussion.

I shut up about art direction because you are doing a much better job than me, and because I only have time to type text and not share fancy image

 

What do you guys reckon about this sort of graphics for a game (prob SVOTI):



Personally, I think graphics have a long way to go in the direction of realism, before they would become in any way ill-suited for games - as long as they have a cinematic touch and are not too noisy.

 

The fun thing is that cinematic is anything but realist, as they cheat all their day long with all sort of visual tricks to make the image better. While in game people TRY to rely on just vanilla physics to achieve the same.

 

That's not a cinematic, that's the actual game (Kingdom Come: Deliverance). All the screenshots look like that.

Anyway, I hope I'm not derailing at all, but I think it would be an interesting thing to discuss this case study, because it draws a somewhat fine line between realism for the sake of beauty, and the utility of the graphics for gameplay.

I don't think it's a coincidence for instance that they don't use a lot of different colors, and seem to keep the lighting relatively subdued, which probably helps to keep the clarity of the scene.

In a game that looks like this, I imagine there would be more difficulty than normal in level design to ensure that the realism does not camouflage important aspects of the gameplay.

 

I was only commenting on the cinematic part not on the game

The thing is I like the pursuit of realism is commendable in itself, but there si a lot of confusion when it start bleeding into "good image™" and that bother me a lot. Especially in game where they are actually to make coexisting 3 lighting reality at the same time:
1. the camera reality, ie emulate how camera perceive light (and why you have chromatic aberration that serves no other purpose)
2. the artistic reality (or cinematic, which part of), which try to always fight the reality to make something more
3. the eye reality, to gave the impression you are immerse in teh scene, whatever that mean.
The thing is that all these reality fight each other tooth and nails as they use different underlying truth.

For example when ShadowK talk about that first adam image about how unbalance and overexposed is was, even though it could be better, it's showing a character that is confused and unbalance and the art direction simply follow that and that's a very common cinematic tropes, it's use for dramatic purpose.

In fact many stuff we take for granted now use to be seen as error (because they expose the camera as an artefact) during the studio era, like lens flare, overexpose light, crushed shadow, (how do you translate "faux jour"?) but where co opted for expressive effect later on. The thing is that a good image is just that, an image that set out to have the expressive impact it must, photo realism is just one of those expressive effect, achieving WILL augment the expressive range, but by itself won't lead to good image, they are orthogonal.

When we stop looking at image in term of composition, texture (not game texture, visual texture), etc ... to only look at how close it is to reality, I think it's a loss. The thing is that all these studio that produce image, do think in all those term and bend realism to achieve them, CG or life movie.

Damn I broke my self impose limit lol, oh well

 

@Billy4184

From a rendering perspective it looks good, some of the texture details look a bit low res and the grass could do with some colour adjustments / SSS (if it's CryEngine / LY).. But yeah, I'd be happy with that setup.