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How to make AAA graphics in Unity/Enlighten

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Billy4184, May 18, 2017.

  1. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    I think it could use more contrast between the light and dark areas, and I'd try the lights halfway between the cold and warm versions.
     
  2. Elzean

    Elzean

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    Those are some i did a while ago, all realtime(no baking).
    I tried to pick the darker ones, usually I play with larger lights to mix colors and very weak brightness. I sometimes simulate some of the bounce with weak point ligths too. Depending on the room i may pick one large light with shadow activated as main source of shadow for the room, means it's not accurate but it's still fine.







    Depending on your material a reflection prob in middle of your room can help. Try to avoid complete pitch black area if possible, it's kind of rare to have something pure black, especially once your eyes adapt to luminosity (talking real life here). But then it depends on the mood/effect you want to achieve :) (mine are kind of cartoony so it's different than you i guess)
     
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  3. Martin_H

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    Actually I would disagree because it's still lit the same grimdark dungeon way as the other scene. You don't invert the mood of a scene by making the colors a few nuances warmer and more saturated, you'd have to light it fundamentally differently for that imho.

    Mentioning your intention here is important, because this is deep in art-direction & opinion territory.

    It's pics like that, that make me question your monitor or monitor color profile. If you like it, I think there is a good chance your monitor is too bright. Imho it is too dark and on many gamer monitors or for people playing in brightly lit rooms, much of the scene will be pure black, which generally should be avoided unless there is a good reason to have it (like horror or stealth games where it has gamedesign implications). If you want realistic lighting, you will rarely find any indoor scene that would have large pure-black areas as long as there is any light source, because light bounces around like crazy and normally every pointlight you place would contribute to GI and light up the whole room. You need to consider where your ambient light is coming from. If there are windows and it's moonlit outside, you could add more cool light to the ambient lighting, possibly with the gradient setup an stronger on the horizon than from top and bottom. If there are no windows, the ambient light would just come from the candles and bounce around in the room, so it would start out warm and be colored by the objects it is reflected from. If you wanna take the artistic freedom to just grade the color into the shadows I think that's perfectly fine.

    Teal and orange might be way overused in movies and not fit your game well, but there's nothing generally wrong with it imho.

    From the 3 you posted I like the first the most by far. I'd add a sharpen effect because it's a bit blurry right now (might be bloom causing it). I'm bad at giving advice on micro color-grading because I always just tweak sliders and compare "do I like this more than before?" till I don't find any more options that I like more than before. I've done it that way for over 10 years and it's one of the very few art aspects where I rely on intuition over knowledge. Also much of it is just plain subjective and colored by people's tastes and viewing conditions (screens and room lighting).

    I agree.


    P.s.: @frosted someone on your greenlight page asked if the project is dead, in case you didn't get a notification for the comment.
     
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  4. TwiiK

    TwiiK

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    @frosted It's hard to comment on dark scenes because they will look so different on each individual's monitor. On the monitor I'm currently working on which is a very old Dell that I don't think has ever been properly calibrated I can't see S***. :p But if I open your images on my reference monitor they don't look that dark at all to be honest, even with 0% backlight which is what I'm usually running. With 100% backlight they are bright as day.

    Anyway, I think the third image by far looks the best and the most natural. The colors in the first one are way too muted for my taste. The second one is very dark even on my reference monitor and it's also too muted for my taste.

    But even the colors look different on my two monitors. On the crappy Dell the last one looks way too reddish, but on the reference monitor it looks good.

    I've made a few different dark games in Unity and I've been thinking about the above every time I worked on them - just how different the games look depending on the time of day, how bright my office is, how bright my monitor is, and of course what monitor it is. Any dark game needs to include an in-game calibration screen in my opinion. A simple brightness slider where you need to see 3 different images is probably sufficient. But it should be shown every time you launch the game or something because the difference between playing at night in a dark room compared to during the day in a bright room is night and day... *cough*, even on the same monitor.

    In a perfect world the game would ship with something like f.lux that always set the brightness correctly based on maybe something like an ambient light sensor attached to your monitor. :p It's just really hard to make a dark game and be sure that everyone sees your game correctly and the same way.
     
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  5. frosted

    frosted

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    Thanks for the heads, I've been kind of negligent. I also haven't put up a new post on indiedb in a long time.

    Last time I went through color calibration the screen I use seemed pretty well calibrated in terms of display I'm using a 100% sRGB profile flat.




    Both of these are pretty good on my screen. There is a very (very) slight difference between black and 5, and a similarly very slight difference between white and 254.

    This isn't a super precise calibration example, and all of our eyes are physically different, but I think the screen is pretty precise (my other screens are not as subtle).

    I wonder if it's better to do work on a display with poor contrast? Just to keep the colors in safer ranges if nothing else. @TwiiK's experience is the same as mine, when I switch to the other screen, the colors end up being much darker.

    f.lux is another example of a problem, since it can have a pretty crazy impact on the color presentation. Sure it makes things feel better to the viewer, but it can still really change how stuff looks.

    For most games, I tend not to use srgb while playing, and switch to a more blue tinted color profile, since that usually helps bring out more contrast and lets me see stuff clearer.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2017
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  6. Martin_H

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    That tool that makes colors warmer towards the evening to help you sleep better? I had to uninstall it because I too often forgot I had it on while doing color-sensitive work.

    That still doesn't say much about how the middle of the spectrum looks and how neutral colors get displayed, but at least your screen seems to be neither extremely too dark or too light.
     
  7. frosted

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    So let's talk about art direction here.

    So I very intentionally kept some pure blacks, the color is shifted a bit toward greyscale in grading. Unity_2017-05-25_22-55-38.png

    The candles on the tables here are much harsher than most candles, with a color closer to a pure white than a warm yellow. White light = harsh light.

    Here are a few words to help describe the mood I want to achieve:
    - Desperate
    - Hard
    - Lonely
    - Determined

    These are definitely not moods that are super common in games, but a great example that comes to mind is "This war of mine" here are some example screens they use:



    Notice how they're using real blacks and very desaturated colors.

    I am trying to use the same kind of feeling, although not as extreme (and not nearly as successful).

    I still need to keep this scene in line with the rest of the game, so trying to achieve this look without going anywhere near as extreme.

    @Elzean, your screens there are absolutely beautiful and very well done, but they're definitely trying to achieve a very different aesthetic. I think you nailed the look you were going for, whereas I don't think I nailed the look I'm going for. But I'm not sure if I should use the same kinds of techniques you used (despite your excellent execution).

    So outside of just "hey this screenshot looks good" - any suggestions on how to improve this shot to achieve the goals and communicate the mood?

    Maybe the real problem is that I'm trying to say too much? Maybe I should just use more natural lighting and let the player make of it what they will.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2017
  8. Martin_H

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    Not the worst choice imho.


    Looks a bit weird to me because whiter flame means hotter flame, you wouldn't have that on a candle. I would experiment with a cool and low intensity spotlight placed offscreen above and shining down, with a soft blended wide cone and low res shadows to fake softer shadows. And then make the candles as warm as they should be, but decrease range and intensity a bit. Don't make the candles your key lights, make them accents. When you need cool light, add cool light with something it could plasibly come from. You could also add some fake volumetric light from above with oldschool tricks like textures on meshes, or with modified height-fog (invert the height influence).
     
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  9. Elzean

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    In "this war of mine" (from those screen, i didnt play it) they seems use contrast and blur to drive player attention. Playable seems to be bright. The desaturate make me feel depress/sad which can go along the mood you search yes. They use black mostly outside playable area, i'm not sure if they tested different ways, but it does also give a very clear reading of each rooms.

    But here lets look at 2 screens from 3d games because it's hard to translate that 2D effect/trick (the strong contrast) into 3d without bothering the gameplay/visibility. Resident evil and outlast:



    Those are not as much desaturated, large part of the mood comes from the lighting condition, the way they are placed and how shadows appear. It is dark but in both cases it's not black. And lit area are very bright, there is a lot of contrast without having too bright or too dark spot.

    I tried to paint a more "dramatic light" on your screen, but it's kind of difficult like that, i prefer just tweak in unity XD
    upload_2017-5-26_21-0-55.png

    It's very dark but the main idea is to change your lighting setup. The light from ground position on the second screen (the one with the body on floor) is pretty good at giving an horror vibe (like when you put light under your face to tell horror stories at campfire)

    I don't know what others source of light you can have in your scenes but you get the idea. Also having props like the spider web and a dead body help to push the mood XD
     
  10. frosted

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    Holy crap.... that's amazing! Just goes to show... good art direction... what a difference... :eek:

    I am literally amazed by the difference. Wow.
     
  11. Elzean

    Elzean

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    About "This war of mine" again, it's a good look for depressing environment. But at this point it is an art style like "Limbo". What i mean is in those case it's more than just getting the mood right as it's a strong artistic choice on the entire look of a game.

    Here is limbo:

     
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  12. Elzean

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    Ha glad you like it XD
     
  13. frosted

    frosted

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    The difference is so big.




    Your edit adds so much to the scene and communicates the feeling so much more effectively.

    I will try to copy this in Unity, but maybe not today - maybe tomorrow. I will share results.

    People mentioned the importance of art direction over and over, but seeing the example like this, with such a big difference... wow. All of the goals I had for the scene, achieved so much better.
     
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  14. Martin_H

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    @frosted: I like @Elzean's overpaint. For completenesses sake I made one myself of what I had in mind too:

    bsg-overpaint-1.jpg
     
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  15. frosted

    frosted

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    This one is also much much better than my version. You took much more color out.

    Instead of using dramatic volume light, you have a bright light shooting down that creates extremely cold grey reflections (tiny blue/steel tint). Your approach is more desaturating.

    Also very effective, it communicates correct mood.

    My original is much, much worse than either of these. Both examples are very good, with slightly different kind of mood communicated.

    @Martin_H's version is colder and more lonely.
    @Elzean's version is more dramatic, mysterious, sad.

    Fascinating seeing the differences.
     
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  16. Adam-Bailey

    Adam-Bailey

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    Love that example @Elzean, it perfectly shows how to do dark lighting well. Dark doesn't mean having the whole screen be dark, but having some bright elements that allows contrast with the dark regions. The strong bright light pouring into a dark space allows the candles to look as dim as they are. People huddled around them trying to eke out the bit of light they can. Great work.
     
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  17. iamthwee

    iamthwee

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    Well admittedly, it's not 'gorgeous' as in vray or lightmass, but it is acceptable I reckon, for unity. light1.jpg light2.jpg

    Simple lightbox, took 3mins to bake on my humble mac mini. Settings in screen grabs.

    Unity 5.2.3f
     
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  18. Deleted User

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    @iamthwee

    In the thread shadows stuff I used Enlighten across the board and got some pretty decent results, yes it looks fine.. I was trying out the progressive lightmapper in a beta version of Unity, for production I'd probably stick to a RC release..
     
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  19. OCASM

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    I should have specified that the image in my previous post is just some random one I found on Google as an example. My bad.

    Having said that, getting results like that are fairly easy on Enlighten and even easier with the PL. I'd make an example but my PC is dead and currently don't have the budget to repair it. You guys can just setup one easily in 3 minutes and run basic tests on it.
     
  20. Deleted User

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    Y'know what? Now I've stepped away for a bit and can look back with a more "rational" view my perspective has somewhat shifted. No matter how many likes I get, I generally dislike every screenshot I post but there is something about this one that just speaks to me.

    I bet in terms of realism I can wipe the floor with it in UE with lightmass, but it has a certain sense of artistic vibe to it whist still retaining a small semblance of reality. In short, if my game looked like this from end to end (of course spending more than 20 minutes on a piece of artwork) I would be very happy.!

    There's more to games than just "realism" and it's so hard to describe, plus there's the uncanny valley effect and the amount of alignment work is ridiculous (so something doesn't stick out). Like W3, it's "technically" not the best outright (in terms of realism) graphics I've seen but the atmosphere sucks you in like looking at a painting.. I think @frosted was really onto something..

    It's also quite hard to understand exactly what you're looking for in terms of visual style..

    @zenGarden is probably correct, I do believe you get blindsided if you're obsessively starting at something for too long and start chasing the unicorn.

    I might do something with it.! :)..

    P.S I got so much more out of this thread than I expected to.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 28, 2017
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  21. frosted

    frosted

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    I learned a ton also.

    You get out what you put in.

    Special thanks to @Elzean and @Martin_H for those paintovers. They really helped give me some perspective. After spending a bunch of time on that scene, seeing two radically different approaches really opened my eyes.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2017
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  22. TwiiK

    TwiiK

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    I can't really bring many personal experiences to this discussion as I haven't spent much time with Enlighten... yet, but based on what I've seen done with it and what I've been able to do with it myself so far I believe it's capable of true photorealism which sort of means you can't do better. It may be very hard to achieve this, but I guess I'll find out. :)

    Lighting isn't such a complex concept if you stick to simple lighting scenarios. I've been rendering scenes using offline renderers like Mental Ray, VRay, Fryrender, Maxwell, Cycles etc. for close to 15 years now and my initial impression of the baked component of Enlighten in Unity is pretty good to be honest. I've only ever used the precomputed GI before. Sure, in unbiased renderers like Fryrender you can just shine a light at a prism and it will automagically refract the light correctly, but if you're just lighting a simple room or object with no complex materials I think Enlighten shows promise so far. And I feel baking is generally pretty quick, especially not as slow as certain people would have me believe, perhaps these people have no experience with rendering in general. I tried the progressive light mapper as well, but it was uncomfortably slow by comparison.

    Hopefully I'll be able to put my money where my mouth is and show you guys something soon because I feel the general trend in a lot of these threads is that someone does something half-assed, either because they've spent a really short time on it or because they are unskilled or lack experience, but then instead of people being critical of the result they just view is as fact, and to make matters worse they compare these half-assed results to the best possible results made with other engines like UE4 rather than to something equally half-assed by someone equally unskilled. I'm not a rabid Unity fanboy by any means, but it does annoy me a bit when someone blames Unity, or any tool, for their own lack of skill or experience. Some Youtube tutorial creators are certainly guilty of this and they have huge fan clubs as well who go around regurgitating these falsities without ever questioning them.

    This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. Not to piss on your effort, it looks good, but what does "acceptable for Unity" mean? There are thousands of examples out there of people creating much better looking scenes in Unity using Enlighten on Google. There are even fairly cheap assets you can buy directly on the Asset Store to learn from like this one:
    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/73674

    I may be overacting here, but overarching statements like these just grind my gears, I guess. :p These results are acceptable for you, not for Unity. Whether or not that's because you don't feel like spending more time on it or because you don't know where to take it further I don't know, but Unity and Enlighten are proven to do better.

    And a 3 minutes bake? A lightmap is something you bake once, surely you can spare a few hours for the final production bake while you prepare dinner or whatnot? Maybe you meant "acceptable for a 3 minute bake on my mac mini by me in Unity" and I just misread it? :)

    So far I feel it's very straight forward to setup "draft values" in Enlighten which look more or less the same as the final values I want to use, but bake in a fraction of the time. However I'm still not sure why the settings are split between the settings asset and the inspector and I haven't learned how these settings fit together yet. Ideally all the settings would be in the asset and you could just create a "draft" asset and a "production" asset.

    You don't even have final gather turned on and your lightmap parameters are "Default". Have you never been curious about what that "Edit"-button next to them means? Just like it will take you years to master an offline renderer like VRay there's no reason you should be able to get perfect results with Enlighten right away either. I'm sure that if I opened Unreal Engine 4 now and tried to bake a scene using Lightmass I would struggle a lot. Just like I'm currently struggling a bit with Enlighten compared to how natural it would be for me to light the same scene in one of the renderers I'm already comfortable with.

    And just so that I don't make this comment without posting anything I quickly tried out some image based lighting using the free Unity Essentials HDRI pack from the Asset Store:


    I think the result is pretty acceptable. I only spent about an hour on it, but I'm working on some more substantial scenes which I'll post when (if) I'm happy with them.
     
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  23. Elzean

    Elzean

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    @TwiiK
    Unity certainly capable of doing good looking scene with efforts, it's still fair to compare to other engine, time is money after all :p
    For what it's worth i also think it is faster to get a good result in UE4 with less effort than in Unity. But as several pointed out the most important part is "art direction" and i'm still amazed at games such as "Journey" that manage such beautiful look.



    If we are talking only about realistic rendering i would agree that someone that knows how to setup Enlighten will have almost identical result as UE4 (there is some video out there comparing it). Because the goal in "Architectural Visualization" is to achieve a very specific look they tend to end up very similar.

    But i wouldn't agree that because unity is capable of realistic looking scene it would mean it can do everything else. It can still be difficult to adjust/tweak settings and create more stylized or cinematic moods.


    I made a small project in UDK some years ago to just learn it. I felt it was actually more powerfull/convenient than Unity is today.
    In the following video there is 2 scenes, the sci fi interior and a "load additive" scene when the door open (cause it could be any world behind the door). It's one of the details that i feel are a bit harder in Unity, having both scene with completly different lighting setup and post process etc, seemed easier to manage in UDK (not that it's impossible in Unity). I was learning there is some mistakes like bloom being too strong etc, but still i'm not sure i would be capable of redoing this in Unity even though i have far more experience in Unity.



    I like Unity but sometimes i do feel a bit frustrated having more trouble to do what i want than i did with an old engine, i still do acceptable things i think but it does feel harder and often need the help of external paid asset that may or may not work with next version of Unity :p (and UE4 is easier to get started than UDK was)

    But again, as shown with "Journey", art direction will always be the most important and many people are capable to do amazing things with very little whatever is the engine they use and i wish to get there one day XD
     
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  24. frosted

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    The problem with bake time in Unity is the "tweek" factor - if you really only needed to do it once, then fine.

    What makes this far worse is that the intensity of baked vs non baked is dramatically different, so any setup using pure realtime light needs to be changed when moving to baked light. This makes the workflow cycle a real pain in the ass. It may be worse in other environments, but one of the main advantages to Unity is the tweekability factor.

    3 minutes is great if its a one time shot right before release, but that doesn't match the actual process (especially in small scale team). 3 minutes each time you make a tiny change is very different.
     
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  25. DominoM

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  26. Deleted User

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    Hmm interesting, true photorealism in what's essentially a rendering pipeline full of approximations.. Which by default doesn't follow proper light falloff and a GI system which uses a radiosity algorithm and if you look at cornell box examples always seems to have excessive colour diffusion (which isn't exactly a new thing to radiosity).

    The obvious advantages of radiosity being real-time speed which again for performance reasons will have further approximations. You have to pick your battles, as it's a game engine Enlighten whilst not the most accurate solution ever is the best real-time solution which is great..! If we could do "true photorealism" right now we'd all be using brigade..

    Then you specify a link to learn off a project that doesn't look in any way photorealistic and then post a screenie of something that the GI system would have little effect on (not really enough to bounce off of).. Yes I've studied Unity arch viz examples (that was also used for SEGI) and it wouldn't of been practicle in a game anyway.

    A lightmap is definatley not what you "bake once", you should be checking often to make sure your materials (shaders) and lighting contribution is correct.. But you're probably best off getting a "feel" for it with low settings than doing full bakes (I just leave Enlighten doing it's thing in the background)..

    Not to waz on your cornflakes, but it's a bit of a fail post all round.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 28, 2017
  27. iamthwee

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    Money just taken. ;)
     
  28. iamthwee

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    Additionally, I'd like to add you need to read the post in context, 3 mins was a comparison to ShadowK's one minute inside unreal. And yes, "it is acceptable for unity" because amongst other things what makes the unreal scenes pop is all their others effects like AA, better screen space reflections, and materials.

    But anyway...
     
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  29. frosted

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  30. neoshaman

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    Brace yourself, I'm going to be that guy again :oops: ... can't ... resist ... Triggered ...

    I'm always afraid of these implicit opposition between art direction associated with game like journey versus realism :eek:
    I don't know if it's conscious, but stylized work don't constitute art direction by itself, and realism is art direction. It made it look like to profane that good art direction is only highly stylized uber moody saturated works ... which makes these discussion go in circle with profane because they don't understand.

    I think part of the discussion, notably with @ShadowK was about how the default setting of both product are different, ie unskilled people get better satisfying result faster in udk, while it need a bit of fiddling and knowledge to find a basic satisfying result in unity of equal quality. Then there was an inquiry to find good example with unity, and basically trying to find what makes the good parameter (while discussion what makes an image good which would allow to find those parameters). So it's just not comparing the best with half ass, especially when many comparison are made by the same person in this thread :p
     
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  31. frosted

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    I imagine that "art direction" can mean almost anything...

    There is certainly a huge range in responsibility from one art director to the next and in different studios and different projects.

    When people say "good art direction" - in general, I think they mean good artistic choices. This can be small things like camera angle for a screenshot, mid-size choices like the composition of a scene or area, or large things like the use of a specific set of styles, shapes or colors throughout a project.

    More realistic work using a more realistic setting will naturally have fewer artistic choices to make. That's not to say there are none or few, but certainly less than more stylized works (all else equal).

    This happens with all art, in film for example, Tim Burton is often viewed as more of an artist or auteur than Stephen Spielberg. Spielberg keeps his work very grounded, whereas Burton tends to heavily stylize his work. That doesn't take away from Spielberg's genius or reduce his creative choices, but it does make them harder to pick out and identify.

    But I donno, after all I am profane :)
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2017
  32. TwiiK

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    I don't understand what you mean here. Realtime vs baked is meant for very different use cases as far as I know, why would you need to switch between them in the same project? If you use baked lighting you'd most likely use area lights as well which don't even have a realtime counterpart.

    And like I said just as with any offline renderer the workflow is to figure out a draft setup which you can use to iterate quickly and then do a final bake using as high settings as you bother waiting for, there are no other factors involved here. In Unity it ends up in a texture and in a 3d application it ends up in an image. Whether you spent 3 minutes or 5 days to render/bake it doesn't change the file size of the image one bit in terms of a rendered image and in terms of Unity it doesn't change the performance of the final game one bit. Hence, why I don't see why anyone would post a 3 minute bake if the goal was to get the best possible result, or at least not if they goal was to show what Unity was capable of, when just bumping up some settings a bit and baking for a bit longer would make it look better and require no real effort.

    I don't see how this is really relevant. Any renderer is full of approximations, some more than others. I don't really know anything about the inner workings of any renderer because I couldn't care less, I just care what I'm able to do with them. If I have to place 10 lights in Unity to approximate a single real world light then that's what I will do. If I have to place light blockers or do funky things with materials or shaders to approximate what I'm trying to recreate then that's also what I will do. This is what everyone does in any software all the time, smoke and mirrors. Sure, in certain renderers, especially unbiased ones, you have to use fewer tricks than you would otherwise to achieve the same result, at least if photorealism is the goal, but it's fun to see what you can squeeze out of the technology you have at hand and I thought that was the goal with this thread.

    To say that the project I linked to does not look photorealistic in any way is ridiculous in my opinion, but to each his own. It's also a project meant for walking around in in VR which obviously means you could turn the dials up a lot more if the goal was a single render.

    There is also VR Unity project somewhere on the web with naked and clothed scanned human models standing in various lighting scenarios that I think looks fairly photorealistic. I remember I found it when I had my Oculus dev kit.

    And as to my image Enlighten is driving the ambient lighting, is it not? I've always viewed everything under the "Lighting" tab as Enlighten, but perhaps I'm wrong. Either way all the lighting in that scene is baked by something in Unity at least.

    I'm not targeting anyone in particular in this thread or in general with what I'm saying, but I was under the impression that the goal here was to try and get the best possible results with Unity and Enlighten, not to try and get the best and most approximate comparisons with UE4, but most of these threads turn into that anyway so I guess it was just a matter of time. For me it doesn't matter one bit what other engines or renderers are capable of. I wouldn't use Unity or UE4 if my goal was to produce photorealistic images, but it's fun to see if you can do that anyway. And that was just my goal, OP wanted to recreate an image from Battlefront which I feel should be no problem at all if you had access to the same assets.

    Here's another image from me:


    I discovered some really well done models I had lying around so these were fun to make. Not sure where I got them from. This one has a directional light because ShadowK doesn't feel like it counts unless you include at least one light in the scene. :p
     
  33. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    @frosted

    Yes but seeing opposed to realism happen to often in these discussion and I had people explode on me because they believed I wanted all their brown shooter to be colored nintendo crap LMAO They couldn't understand when I said that Deus ex had good art direction because its even "browner" (more like gold filter). Game industry have improve a lot in art direction overall these last years, I don't have much complain now lol
     
  34. Deleted User

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    It's extremely relevant, like you said there are approximations in many rendering solutions. They all have their tradeoffs, how quickly you can reach your goals (if you can at all) plays a massive factor.. If a certain solution gets you to point B far quicker than another solution than it's obvious that you go for the solution that gets you there the quickest.

    If you have the time / money then it all becomes irrelevant as you'll design whatever solution you require to get the job done. That doesn't tend to include indie's though..

    Anywho most of this is irrelevant anyway, I want to make games not CG architecture demo's and it's not like either UE or Unity is utter rubbish.

    It sounded like you was directly aiming it at me, I only posted that comparison pic because Billy wanted to see it.. End of the day I'm using an experimental lighting solution in a beta version of Unity. Plus I'd been pratting around with the renderer, I mean recipe for disaster right?

    AFAIK Enlighten does take into account skybox influence, but of course I could be wrong.. Still fundamentals of GI and all, you need something to bounce off.!

    Also I do thoroughly agree, in all fairness we should be posting very WIP stuff from Unity only and learn how to improve upon it.. But usually someone comes in with less than constructive criticism trying to prove their USB dongle is bigger than the rest, then it just decends into a pointless argument. You don't need a fully finished artwork masterpiece to break down as it's clear to see the impact of lighting / composition, this is a thread to learn and share..

    But in my defence I was thoroughly interested where Unity had gotten to as I'm primarily a UE user, but I am starting a sub project in Unity so this thread peaked my interest. Again in terms of a game, I'm happy with what I got out of it.!

    I can really tell, thank goodness for Alloy.!
     
  35. DominoM

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    Realtime GI, the volume light actually seems to decrease the amount of bounce - here's one with the volume light off for comparison.
    SpookeySponza01xVol.png
     
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  36. iamthwee

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    This is probably the best point, regardless of how well your baked image is the 'uncanny valley' effect comes into play, we're making games afterall, stick a third person inside the unreal paris demo and see how much it sticks out like a sore thumb.
     
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  37. Billy4184

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    I think we must all have a very different definition of what photorealism is. @TwiiK the Unity archviz you linked, to me, is exactly an example of Unity struggling to keep up with the pack when it comes to lighting. It's a long way off from many other things I have seen, I encourage you to check out UE4Arch for comparison.

    Also, I know some see photorealism as being unhelpful or detrimental to games - and in a sense I agree, because I think at minimum most games need a much more cinematic, dramatic aesthetic.

    But here's the crucial point, at least the way I see it: a game engine that produces better quality photorealism automatically produces better quality cinematic 'realism' and probably even better quality stylized graphics as well, as long as lighting is still in some way a core component (such as Abzu or something).

    I also think that more realistic lighting is the only rational default in terms of allowing games to have as much potential to take the art direction in any direction they see fit. Some might argue that they don't need photorealism - yet how do you know that realistic lighting would not make your game look better? What makes you think that some arbitrarily modified lighting system (I say arbitrarily but probably it is based on performance on mobile, or some other metric) would make you game look better, even if your game is not meant to be photorealistic in any way?

    Anyway, that's all I have to say, I'm glad to see a good discussion going, and when I have some time off from writing AI code I will post a few more pictures (of my own!).
     
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  38. Elzean

    Elzean

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    Yes Deus Ex as great art direction, and many realistic looking game do(more recently i think Horizon Zero Dawn looks pretty nice). I didn't mean that only stylized game have art direction, i talked about journey because i like it and to explain that those kind of look need a lots of test and tweaking too.
    I agree that there is art direction in any style of visual, and also that some stylized look don't necessarily mean that there is strong/good "art direction" (there is a lot of bad looking stylized games :p)


    About this part, it was from what @TwiiK said:
    So i was just pointing out that stylized look can require as much tweaking as realistic one if not more. And also i did add "cinematic mood" in which case i was thinking about game more like Deus Ex :)

    I guess what i meant is that purely trying to do something realistic with Unity to test stuff out doesn't represent the entire lighting art workflow you need for a good scene and this next step feels harder to do in Unity especially without the help of external packages.
     
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  39. frosted

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    Cell shaded games are a very healthy example of games that do not benefit from more detailed or realistic lighting. In fact, many go to length to simplify lighting considerably. More realistic lighting is like more detail and there are many games that require lower detail levels in order to maintain their aesthetic.

    Think of comic book art. Often times more detailed art can take away far more than it adds.

    We can have more detailed and sophisticated lighting right now, it certainly exists. The questions revolve around performance. In many cases, having more detailed lighting is not actually worth the cost in terms of reduced scene complexity, increased performance cost or reduced draw distance.

    Not to say that there isn't a place for more sophisticated lighting, but for example, I would be far more interested in volumetric effects than GI in most cases.

    I know this is going to sound like crazy blasphamy... but when I look at:


    For me, it's definitely an uncanny valley kind of effect, the more realistic lighting makes my eyes immediately notice all the problems and in most of those shots the contact points on almost every object looks wrong.



    You see it here too, none of the objects connect properly to the ground. Everything looks like its pasted in or the distance looks off. Nothing is connected to the ground properly.

    I'm not saying that voxel based realtime gi isn't awesome, I'm just saying that the problems are there also, and they'll continue ahead.


    Nothings perfect after all...
     
  40. Elzean

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    Still looks a lot better with the effect than without, but i get what you mean overall. Do they need to bake anything or is it like SEGI a bit ? What's interesting is "Performance hit is about 3 fps (about 6%)" and it looks good on trees, bushes too, i'd love having that tech in Unity to be honest XD
     
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  41. Billy4184

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    Yeah I think Kingdom Come is in a difficult spot where it has the opportunity to raise the bar but could easily come off looking noisy/uncanny. So far I really like their aesthetic, and I think they've done a good job of making the scene realistic but somewhat simplified, but anyway I do agree it could do with some SSAO or something in the grass. Some of the vegetation I feel is too noisy a backdrop for a game, and perhaps some better AO could help take care of that.

    @Elzean far as I know it's cryengine's SVOGI which (if this is the correct page) needs no pre-baking and is just plug and play pretty much. Would also love to get my hands on this sort of thing in Unity.
     
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  42. Elzean

    Elzean

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    Wow this would save me so much time and would easily work in procedural generation stuff. We can always dream XD
     
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  43. Roni92pl

    Roni92pl

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    The biggest showstopper for Unity next to lightmapping is IMO foliage rendering, i'm very surprised nobody pointed that out yet. There are still no usable foliage shaders even on the asset store, and I'm not talking about shaders quality only, but also features like lighting, shadowing, billboarding and performance problems. This is where there are the biggest differences between Unity and other, more visual oriented engines. I mean, come on, it's like 90' technology we got now.
     
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  44. iamthwee

    iamthwee

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    Are we all talking about enlighten/ light mapping or materials/post pro effects now?
     
  45. Martin_H

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    Care to elaborate? I don't think I've ever seen an A/B comparison of the same object with alloy and other shaders, that made me think "Ahh, so that's what it's good for.". I am really curious why people like it so much.
     
  46. TwiiK

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    But do you know how and why? Are you able to tell why you think Unity is struggling here? It's not immediately apparent to me, I would have to study each individual image to find what I think looks out of place. I know about all the best UE4 content creators because they appear in these types of threads all the time. :p But you're telling me to check out one particular guy/studio just like people often mention Koola in these discussions. These are brilliant people who create amazing things. Who's to say the person who created the project I linked to is anywhere near their level? Are you sure Unity is the ceiling here or the skill/experience of this particular guy?

    Or perhaps this guy has just found a style he's content with which he sticks to? It certainly conveys what it needs to in my opinion and I doubt any client who wanted a VR house project walkthrough would be unhappy with those results. I just linked that because I think it looks fairly natural and I have one of his other projects and I know he uses a lot of custom Enlighten settings both for rendering speed and quality which is mainly why I linked to it. And he has examples of both precomputed and baked lighting in his projects.

    For me photorealism is about trying to convey a natural and realistic tone with your image. It's not about 1:1 recreating of a photo, although that's what I'm trying to do now just for fun, and I know that's the weight many people put on the term. GTA 5 is a very photorealistic game in my opinion, perhaps more so than almost any other modern game, just like I think the project I linked is photorealistic.

    Imagine taking a photo of real life and then recreating that in CG. Then you scale both of the images down a ton. Are they discernible at this scale? We can scale them up and check again and continue doing this until we find places where the CG version starts to show signs of actually being CG and not a photo. Sometimes these differences are complex light behaviours or similar phenomenon that you're just not able to easily recreate in CG, but more often than not they're just lack of details. You can also blur the images to achieve the same thing.

    Consistent detail is key to achieving an immersive image no matter what style you're going for. If you put very realistic looking characters into a game where you have very artificial animations or interactions with the environment it usually makes the game less immersive rather than more immersive, as is seen in a lot of the more popular Skyrim mods in my opinion.

    If you look at a blurred version or low res version of a screenshot from GTA 5 or the project I linked the colors will look very natural and you will have a hard time telling whether or not the source was real life or cg. With certain mods GTA 5 will be very hard to discern from reality even at high resolutions, or at least for me, I won't speak for the rest of you. :p

    I know UE4 has a ton more tools and features suited for producing high quality graphics, both realistic and stylized and it probably always will because that's what they sell and what they depend on for their own projects. I'm never going to make a graphically intensive game so that doesn't matter to me. I barely do any content production in my own games because it's not what I enjoy about game development, but in terms of this discussion I want to see what I can do with Unity, and so far it's the content production that's taking up most of my time, not the lighting.

    One feature I know UE4 has that Unity hasn't is IES light profile support. I almost exclusively used IES lights when working in 3ds Max and obviously this is a feature that you'd use a lot if you were making photorealistic architectural visualizations. And someone mentioned the light falloff being wrong in Unity, but you can change that to be whatever you want by changing a single shader line in Unity as far as I know. I was certainly experimenting with it in one of my projects related to this thread.

    I don't think anyone disagrees with this. This is exactly what Unity did with Unity 5 and these were their arguments as to why physically based rendering was a good thing for everyone no matter what types of games they wanted to make. Overwatch should be a good example of this.

    If they are actually good they have the worst example images. Programmer art all the way. :p I think the UBER shader thingy looks really nice though. But I won't spend any money on graphical upgrades for Unity unless I suddenly change my entire philosophy about game design, and at that point I may as well consider UE4. And in terms of this thread part of the fun for me is to try and accomplish this with stock Unity. At a fundamental level the rendering capabilities of all engines are very similar and I'm sure technical artists can program whatever graphical feature they want regardless of engine, just look at what people on the Asset Store are doing or what Sonic Ether has done with Minecraft. He has added more advanced graphical features to Minecraft than what you find in UE4.
     
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  47. Martin_H

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    I'd rather that be the case, than them having a bad product with stellar marketing shots. But still, the "what is it good for?" question could be addressed better imho.

    Well actually that's not the case, just a few days ago I talked to one who wasn't able to do a few cool shader things because not enough information is exposed by Unity. He said the workaround would require to roll your own custom lighting system and replace the stock one entirely, which I wouldn't wanna do. I don't know much about Unreal, but at least in the past I remember people complaining about a lack of flexibility in the shader/render pipeline to go for really customized stylized looks. I'm sure there are at least some things that are equally not feasible to do in UE as there are such things in Unity. But that's fine, no engine is perfect.

    It can certainly make for fun challenges. Putting restrictions on artists has a track record of leading to cool and creative things.

    Might be interesting for some people to hear how you'd work around that.
     
  48. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    That's something I often hear. But I believe in statistics. Specifically that if someone is able to produce something of a certain quality in a certain engine, it will sooner or later be done (and given that Unity has many more users than the competition, there should be many more examples). It's a bit like the Fermi paradox actually.

    But anyway, I think it's great you're trying to see what's the best you can get out of Unity, that's what I'm doing as well. And there's always the chance that someone will come along and make some uber lighting system that will make us all happy.

    PS I tried one of the demos of SEGI and it ran quite slow on everything except the lowest settings on my laptop (i7, 8GB ram, GT540M), so unfortunately until I get a better computer it's not an option for me. But it looks cool.
     
  49. frosted

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    lol, yeah - I tried it once on an older laptop and got around 5fps in the demo scene. As nice as the screenshots might look - SEGI is not worth considering for actual release.

    I kind of wish he re-released his old AO plugin, the results were close enough (color bleed) and the performance numbers were actually something you could actually use in game.

    Again, if you look at this comparison:


    The SE AO looks remarkably like GI.
     
  50. Billy4184

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    I saw a game on steam that had used SEGI, not sure how it went down on player's computers. The demo was pretty empty and still ate up my GPU.

    That SSAO looks super, but the lighting overall comes across as solid, but not particularly extraordinary to me.