How new graphics effects can make Unity Engine games look less generic

"Cinematic Image Effects" package adds some punch to the standard "Unity look."


Read the whole story

 

[Deleted member 192806]

SAN FRANCISCO—The rise of engines like Unity has been great for making game development more accessible to the masses. Unity now says the 1.1 million monthly users of Unity Personal Edition outnumber "all the employees at every public game company in the world." That vast popularity has a negative side effect, though: the rise of an identifiably generic "Unity look" among many games made using the engine.

The "Quake" look, or the Unreal look.

 

[Zak]

Why is the little robot flapping its wings?

 

[flerchin]

The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

 

[UserIDAlreadyInUse]

flerchin[/url]":duvlcy2m]The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

Unless you, like me, invested ten years in creating your own game engine only to have it go obsolete with the Unity Personal Edition overnight.

 

[AlizarinCrimson]

That is one of the worst example videos... from the first video most of it looks like hey we added texture maps that aren't white.

The second video at least says what's different. But implies that unity 5.0 did not support tone mapping, SSAO, bloom, DoF, screenspace reflection. Which I'm like 99% positive it does.

So really it sounds more like they're building in those kinds of effects into the core shader functionality instead of letting it be handled by the game makers themselves. None of those effects are things that unity couldn't do before (or god I hope it could), But now I'm going to guess they are built in by default.

 

[gighalen]

Kinda how every web developer on the planet is using vanilla Bootstrap to build their sites?

 

[ZerofaithX263]

AlizarinCrimson[/url]":6uk2hi6z]That is one of the worst example videos... from the first video most of it looks like hey we added texture maps that aren't white.

The second video at least says what's different. But implies that unity 5.0 did not support tone mapping, SSAO, bloom, DoF, screenspace reflection. Which I'm like 99% positive it does.

So really it sounds more like they're building in those kinds of effects into the core shader functionality instead of letting it be handled by the game makers themselves. None of those effects are things that unity couldn't do before (or god I hope it could), But now I'm going to guess they are built in by default.

You're right. It was mentioned in their keynote that these are basically pre made effects that are bundled. You can add more or use these as starters for your own and do whatever you want. In fact, they explicitly said the volumetric fog in the Adam video was _not_ a bundled asset. Unity 5.0 could do it with addons well enough.

 

[Kyle Orland]

AlizarinCrimson[/url]":2gxm29db]That is one of the worst example videos... from the first video most of it looks like hey we added texture maps that aren't white.

The second video at least says what's different. But implies that unity 5.0 did not support tone mapping, SSAO, bloom, DoF, screenspace reflection. Which I'm like 99% positive it does.

So really it sounds more like they're building in those kinds of effects into the core shader functionality instead of letting it be handled by the game makers themselves. None of those effects are things that unity couldn't do before (or god I hope it could), But now I'm going to guess they are built in by default.

This is exactly right (the last bit anyway). And the fact that they are default, rather than requiring a lot of work on the part of the developers, is pretty key to avoiding the wide prevalence of generic, same-y looking games.

 

[harmless]

Ugh. I hate all the blur in the "improved" scenes ...

 

[Digital Dud]

Unity games all look the same because the community just copies and pastes code from samples.

 

[bytegod]

gighalen[/url]":28vhchay]Kinda how every web developer on the planet is using vanilla Bootstrap to build their sites?

Related link : http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/

 

[cwsars]

harmless[/url]":12qrbdei]Ugh. I hate all the blur in the "improved" scenes ...

Check, I'm not a big fan of DoF and Bokeh effects either.

If used carefully, they can be good for cutscenes, and they can also be used for the most distant bits of scenery. But they tend to be over-used just like some of the HDR "walk outside into bright light" effects are.

 

[Tofystedeth]

Kyle Orland[/url]":2il75alg]

AlizarinCrimson[/url]":2il75alg]That is one of the worst example videos... from the first video most of it looks like hey we added texture maps that aren't white.

The second video at least says what's different. But implies that unity 5.0 did not support tone mapping, SSAO, bloom, DoF, screenspace reflection. Which I'm like 99% positive it does.

So really it sounds more like they're building in those kinds of effects into the core shader functionality instead of letting it be handled by the game makers themselves. None of those effects are things that unity couldn't do before (or god I hope it could), But now I'm going to guess they are built in by default.

This is exactly right (the last bit anyway). And the fact that they are default, rather than requiring a lot of work on the part of the developers, is pretty key to avoiding the wide prevalence of generic, same-y looking games.

So just making a new, better Unity Look?

 

[ZerofaithX263]

Tofystedeth[/url]":27ymzigr]

Kyle Orland[/url]":27ymzigr]

AlizarinCrimson[/url]":27ymzigr]That is one of the worst example videos... from the first video most of it looks like hey we added texture maps that aren't white.

The second video at least says what's different. But implies that unity 5.0 did not support tone mapping, SSAO, bloom, DoF, screenspace reflection. Which I'm like 99% positive it does.

So really it sounds more like they're building in those kinds of effects into the core shader functionality instead of letting it be handled by the game makers themselves. None of those effects are things that unity couldn't do before (or god I hope it could), But now I'm going to guess they are built in by default.

This is exactly right (the last bit anyway). And the fact that they are default, rather than requiring a lot of work on the part of the developers, is pretty key to avoiding the wide prevalence of generic, same-y looking games.

So just making a new, better Unity Look?

Probably not too far off... but at least with the effects having some sliders they can kinda tweak them to not look exactly the same. Just quite similar.

 

[Salacyous]

One of the games I play that use the Unity engine is Empyrion: Galactic Survival. They've been in pre-alpha for a while, slowly customising all the default assets, but up until now it's been pretty bland, with all the emphasis being placed on the core elements - building and survival. They recently released their alpha video, which predates the above patch and it looks fantastic. It'll be interesting to see what this patch will mean for the alpha.

Game for reference:
http://empyriononline.com/threads/road- ... date.4664/
http://empyriononline.com/threads/road- ... te-2.5045/

 

[evilTak]

Totally, I hate how Shadowrun: Hong Kong looks exactly like Ori and the Blind Forest.
And how Cuphead looks almost identical to That Dragon, Cancer.
And how Pony Island is practically indistinguishable from Dreamfall: Chapters.
And how Firewatch is basically a clone of TIS-100.
...

 

[tipoo]

Now to make them perform less like Unity. Granted it's often picked up by smaller dev teams with less time for optimization, but many Unity games like Firewatch had several performance issues even on high end hardware that would run AAA games fine.

Firewatch was a great game though. Nice break from AAA gaming despite the Unity of it.

 

[jasonridesabike]

UserIDAlreadyInUse[/url]":2eroorzb]

flerchin[/url]":2eroorzb]The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

Unless you, like me, invested ten years in creating your own game engine only to have it go obsolete with the Unity Personal Edition overnight.

Ya but I bet you're amazing with Unity or any other engine after all that experience.

 

[Infinity4011]

tipoo[/url]":3afn8aq6]Now to make them perform less like Unity. Granted it's often picked up by smaller dev teams with less time for optimization, but many Unity games like Firewatch had several performance issues even on high end hardware that would run AAA games fine.

Firewatch was a great game though. Nice break from AAA gaming despite the Unity of it.

The only game I've played extensively that makes use of Unity engine runs on v4.x, and while I love Kerbal Space Program, the physics engine will bring even the most powerful of PCs to its knees trying to handle the physics of a large space station (which really sucks the fun out of the game, when your mega creation makes your FPS lurch along at 1 fps). My other beef with the game, and this might be the fault of the dev studio, is that the game loads *every* *single* texture in the game into system RAM at game launch, uncompressed, and keeps them there. It also creates additional versions of each texture, as that texture is used on an active object. Every time you launch a rocket or switch to a vessel in orbit, that switch creates a new set of textures that were used to build that object. And then once you hit the game's memory limit (3gb or so) it crashes. Also sucks the fun out of using lots of cool mods to do neat stuff.

But hey, now it has more blur!

 

[UserIDAlreadyInUse]

jasonridesabike[/url]":3tsw6wuu]

UserIDAlreadyInUse[/url]":3tsw6wuu]

flerchin[/url]":3tsw6wuu]The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

Unless you, like me, invested ten years in creating your own game engine only to have it go obsolete with the Unity Personal Edition overnight.

Ya but I bet you're amazing with Unity or any other engine after all that experience.

I wish, but not really. Still a steep learning curve understanding the interface and how they do things, where the gaps are (compared to mine) and what's possible in Unity (compared to mine). Plus, I resisted as long as I could hoping mine could still be relevant, but had to throw in the towel at the end as my code was looking more and more like something only retro gamers would appreciate, you know?

 

[eric123]

i think generic is a term for the most used engine.
this could simply be a step above what they currently have, soon to be the next generic.

 

[apoclypse]

The new demo from EPIC running on Samsung's S7 (called Protostar) looks way better than this and that is running on a mobile device (using Vulkan) so I'm not all that impressed at the moment. Like someone said a lot of that stuff was possible before to an extent and those are techniques that have been available in some form or the other in game engines for quite some time. The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken. On the other side you have Lumberyard (CyrEngine) which has all of that and more.

That's not to say that these features aren't welcomed. They are definitely nice to have in an easy to use manner just not as impressive as Unity is trying to make it out to be.

Anyway if no one has seen it here is the Protostar demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIdNoSB69PI

 

[Deleted member 192806]

UserIDAlreadyInUse[/url]":14lkornh]

jasonridesabike[/url]":14lkornh]

UserIDAlreadyInUse[/url]":14lkornh]

flerchin[/url]":14lkornh]The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

Unless you, like me, invested ten years in creating your own game engine only to have it go obsolete with the Unity Personal Edition overnight.

Ya but I bet you're amazing with Unity or any other engine after all that experience.

I wish, but not really. Still a steep learning curve understanding the interface and how they do things, where the gaps are (compared to mine) and what's possible in Unity (compared to mine). Plus, I resisted as long as I could hoping mine could still be relevant, but had to throw in the towel at the end as my code was looking more and more like something only retro gamers would appreciate, you know?

Croteam is suppose to have released the engine for the first Serious Sam, which even in this day is impressive.

 

[BEIGE]

Nice to see. I use Unreal Engine because of the better rendering engine and that closes the gap a bit. Still more effects and LUT settings in UE4 tho. And I prefer visual scripting to C#

 

[babyinablender]

apoclypse[/url]":1di34ojg]The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure if you mean in the mobile, Vulkan portion, since I don't think that's released yet, but UnrealEngine 4 has global illumination (LightMass) and has had it since 4.0.

 

[Katana314]

evilTak[/url]":6rq71631]Totally, I hate how Shadowrun: Hong Kong looks exactly like Ori and the Blind Forest.
And how Cuphead looks almost identical to That Dragon, Cancer.
And how Pony Island is practically indistinguishable from Dreamfall: Chapters.
And how Firewatch is basically a clone of TIS-100.
...

Hah, I did not realize TIS-100 used Unity. That seemed like the sort of game that a hobbyist would write in C.
To the unaware, it's a Zachtronics game much like his others Spacechem and Infinifactory, but inside a DOS-esque computer.

Not sure I see the complaints though; it's always taken effort to gain a unique visual identity as a game, and no amount of work on the part of Epic or Unity could automatically make Untitled New Project unique.

 

[apoclypse]

babyinablender[/url]":2dwb4ikc]

apoclypse[/url]":2dwb4ikc]The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure if you mean in the mobile, Vulkan portion, since I don't think that's released yet, but UnrealEngine 4 has global illumination (LightMass) and has had it since 4.0.

.

LightMass is not realtime Global Illumination which Enlightenment is. It's only precompute. There is some stuff in the works from Epic but I don't think they think it's ready.

 

[Dustbink]

apoclypse[/url]":24jmhfrn]The new demo from EPIC running on Samsung's S7 (called Protostar) looks way better than this and that is running on a mobile device (using Vulkan) so I'm not all that impressed at the moment. Like someone said a lot of that stuff was possible before to an extent and those are techniques that have been available in some form or the other in game engines for quite some time. The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken. On the other side you have Lumberyard (CyrEngine) which has all of that and more.

That's not to say that these features aren't welcomed. They are definitely nice to have in an easy to use manner just not as impressive as Unity is trying to make it out to be.

Anyway if no one has seen it here is the Protostar demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIdNoSB69PI

If you think what's happening here is they're trying to make the best looking engine possible then you have no idea why anyone uses Unity or what Unity's goal is.

 

[Dustbink]

evilTak[/url]":1lfxa5if]Totally, I hate how Shadowrun: Hong Kong looks exactly like Ori and the Blind Forest.
And how Cuphead looks almost identical to That Dragon, Cancer.
And how Pony Island is practically indistinguishable from Dreamfall: Chapters.
And how Firewatch is basically a clone of TIS-100.
...

Sadly this is being downvoted all to hell. Don't disturb the Ars circlejerk.

 

[James Markon]

They are just playing catch up with Unreal. Some of these things have been in Unreal for at least 5 years. Rendering in Unity has always been kind of crappy. In Unity 5.0 things got a bit better though but it felt "beta".

With Unity you still have to rely on the asset store too much for my taste. You end up spending money on plugins that may or may not be good, may or may not break in the future. Unity is where it is because they supported mobile very early not because it's the best.

I wish they had basic stuff like a shader editor, something like Matinee, behavior trees. The list goes on and on...

It's also hilarious that the volumetric fog effect that makes the "Adam" demo look good is not part of Unity. They say, "hey, it's not part of Unity but you can code it yourself!".

Yes, we can code anything...

 

[GaryFisken]

How about limiting the framerate to 24 fps to give that cinematic look?

PS. I'm joking of course. I think it's insanity that not every movie is shot in at least 48 fps.

 

[normis]

GaryFisken[/url]":3favnc76]How about limiting the framerate to 24 fps to give that cinematic look?

PS. I'm joking of course. I think it's insanity that not every movie is shot in at least 48 fps.

making movies look like home videos? no thanks

 

[BronekK]

apoclypse[/url]":3476in3c]Anyway if no one has seen it here is the Protostar demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIdNoSB69PI

I understand you got downvotes because it's off-topic, still this demo is pretty cool. Unity 5.4 seem to have received depth of field and dynamic reflections, and I am not sure this UE has features which Unity does not have now (probably there are some, but I have difficulty pointing them out). But these are two very different platforms anyway.

 

[snowcone]

I've spent a quite a bit of time poking around in unity and I have to say, like many similar tools, if you use the default assets and an out of the box approach, instead of pushing buttons and fiddling with sliders, it pretty much stands to reason that you'll end up with something that looks "generic".

There are plenty of games built in Unity in which the developers have taken some time to develop their own art style (something Unity actually makes pretty simple to do)

I think my favorite example is the utterly gorgeous Kentucky Route Zero

 

[taliska]

UserIDAlreadyInUse[/url]":3ocygig0]

flerchin[/url]":3ocygig0]The technology that is available, for free, is astounding. It's such an awesome time to be alive.

Unless you, like me, invested ten years in creating your own game engine only to have it go obsolete with the Unity Personal Edition overnight.

Don't worry mate, you're not the only one!

(unlike you however, I'm too stubborn and too stupid to switch...or something... )

 

[PuiuCS]

apoclypse[/url]":31hhj9rw]The new demo from EPIC running on Samsung's S7 (called Protostar) looks way better than this and that is running on a mobile device (using Vulkan) so I'm not all that impressed at the moment. Like someone said a lot of that stuff was possible before to an extent and those are techniques that have been available in some form or the other in game engines for quite some time. The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken. On the other side you have Lumberyard (CyrEngine) which has all of that and more.

That's not to say that these features aren't welcomed. They are definitely nice to have in an easy to use manner just not as impressive as Unity is trying to make it out to be.

Anyway if no one has seen it here is the Protostar demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIdNoSB69PI

you can't really compare the 2 since the tech demo's try to showcase different things.the UE4 one is trying to showcase the latest tech added that uses the Vulkun mobile API. the Unity demo is showing new features added to the engine that will come by default instead of using plugins.

 

[PuiuCS]

apoclypse[/url]":1tcbroet]The new demo from EPIC running on Samsung's S7 (called Protostar) looks way better than this and that is running on a mobile device (using Vulkan) so I'm not all that impressed at the moment. Like someone said a lot of that stuff was possible before to an extent and those are techniques that have been available in some form or the other in game engines for quite some time. The global illumination engine is pretty cool though. Unreal has yet flip the switch on that if I'm not mistaken. On the other side you have Lumberyard (CyrEngine) which has all of that and more.

That's not to say that these features aren't welcomed. They are definitely nice to have in an easy to use manner just not as impressive as Unity is trying to make it out to be.

Anyway if no one has seen it here is the Protostar demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIdNoSB69PI

you can't really compare the 2 since the tech demos try to showcase different things.
the UE4 one is trying to showcase the latest tech added that uses the Vulkun mobile API. the Unity demo is previewing new features added to the engine that will come by default instead of using plugins, something that will make a dev's life much easier.

 

[Aarin]

The unity engine sucks. It is a one of the most inefficiently coded engines I've seen. From my experience even when rendering 2D graphics from a game that looks like it it was from the 90's, it still sends my new Nvidia GTX to full throttle. Any crappy 3D scene and it'll chug even on modern hardware.

Not to mention every unity game I've ever had the displeasure of playing, all turned out to be overhyped and buggy as hell.

 

[davmandave]

I noticed the example video changed a lot about the different scenes, adding assets (robots, extra boxes, new textures) as well as changing the lighting. Unless the Unity engine can dynamically add content, I find that a bit misleading.