How to Get rid of the "Unreal Look"?

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Hello there!

Can anyone help me with how to make the lighting and the world in general feel less “Unreal”? I don’t have a scene at the moment, but I’ve been curious about this since I started learning the engine. I tried creating post-process materials, but I feel like that’s not the proper way to do it (correct me if I’m wrong). I’m trying to achieve a less photorealistic look, more like an Arcane-style world. I know that Arcane used hand-painted assets, and that’s cool and all, but I’m looking for the world style and lighting, not the textures.

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By not using any of Unreal’s unique rendering features. Megalights, VSM, Lumen, Nanite, DFAO, etc. No other engine has them, so if you use them then your game will inherently look like Unreal because they all have distinct idiosyncrasies people have begun to pick up on.

You should also roll your own sky/atmosphere

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(post deleted by author)

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It’s more than that and you know it. Actually out of everyone you really should know this best?

You can’t achieve a “non unreal" look because the way the rendering pipeline builds the scene by overlaying the different layers - something which is at the very core of the rendering pipeline - is how the engine achieves its final look.

Even building your own usf shading model will not be able to significantly alter the final look/feel you get to the point a user will question if your game is using Unreal or not.

That said, to achieve a modern Arkane like look you probably want to be in forward shading - their games are fairly similar looking to unreal engine builds. That, plus the suggestions above of not using engine built parts should be a good start.

Also, Dishonored is Ue3 probably deferred, while their non original Prey (cuz they stole a title from a long standing IP were P1 is an American Indian and everyone should look it up and play the original) is cry engine.

If you put screenshots side by side you can spot the rendering differences, but overall the feel and look (artistic direction) is very similar regadless of the engine…

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its not that hard to get rid of this look. i personally think unreal looks very clean and always tries to be realistic. to get away from that look turn some knobs that go away from that realism and are more artistic.

i think the easiest method is changing post processing settings. adjust things like the tonemapper, the scene tint/saturation, blow out the exposure etc.

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another great way is to stylize your textures. you can achieve eg. a comic look like the borderlands games. They have their own technique to create these comic like textures and additionally use a post processing effect for the black outlines.

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another way is to adjust the lighting, use a custom sky, a custom fog solution that replaces the heightfog unreal engine delivers which often leads to the same look:

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if you want to avoid the typical unreal engine look try to make as many things custom as possible, dont use megascans like anybody else, dont use marketplace assets like anybody else. you achieve your unique look by doing your own thing.

also things like megalight or vsm are not the “unreal engine look”, they are just technical components of a systems that render something onto your screen, they are not “opinionated”. one system just gives you the ability to draw a lot of polygons, one system just gives you the ability to draw a lot of light. neither of them implies any artistic direction. that is completely up to you. if i were you i would try to look at games details, perhaps extract assets like meshes and textures, if possible display a frame in renderdoc and analyze, ho the lighting changes the way assets look ingame, post processing etc. i would pick 2-3 different games, from racing games to shooters to small cute indie game perhaps and obviously anything you like. change colors, intensities, fake things… especially non unreal engine games that are a bit older, 4years+ did often a lot of tricks to achieve a specific visual impression. look at these games, try to imitate one effect of a game, combine it with the effect of another game. the result will be your own unique look. we all steal things from other games and create new art from it. its fairly common.

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It was not meant to be an exhaustive list, just meant to illustrate that the only way to get rid of it is to avoid the features that probably led them to pick Unreal in the first place.

With regard to deferred/forward, this shouldn’t matter because the lighting contribution is just summed together whether you split it up into a bunch of passes or not. In Unreal there are some shading features that don’t work in Forward and someone could pick up on that. Unreal is also very, very far from the only engine to use deferred shading, Doom the Dark Ages is deferred, as a recent example.

Unreal’s approach to lightmapping is unique (as is every engines) and I suspect that’s the biggest factor in the difference of appearance between Prey and DIshonored, because Dishonored used lightmaps.

If you gave me 3 games that just used standard fully dynamic lighting, shadowmaps, lods, MSAA/FXAA, proper color grading and no GI… I don’t think I could tell you what engine any of them was made in (except Godot, because it applies a dithered blur to its shadowmaps)

If you gave me three tonemapper comparisons between Filmic, GT7, and AgX, unless they were specifically crafted to reproduce the six color problem, I could not tell you which was Filmic.

Meanwhile, give me literally any game with Lumen and I could easily tell you it was a game with Lumen. Every game with metahumans looks like a game with metahumans. Every game with TSR looks like a game with TSR.

All the biggest, most important features are the ones that stick out like a sore thumb.

If we were talking about path traced screenshots, I might agree, but these features all have extreme artifacting, particularly under motion, that just make them very visually distinct. The technical implementation of features leaves its mark on the image, you cannot separate the “technical components” from the picture.

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Why adding path tracing into this conversation, its just a rendering feature like lumen which just enhance the visuals by making the lighting and reflections accurate, nothing more.

You dont even need to compare each tonemapper to see which is which, just get the one you like the most or fits your project better or create one from scratch. Just some edits on post processing can give you nice results, making additional shaders can change the look even more.

“A game with TSR looks like a game with TSR“ or “Metahuman“ just why, if you make the character lets say by hand and not generated or at least, at least modify the generated version you can get away from that look. Obviously TSR is used in unreal, unity and other engines to, all of them have ghosting. Same with lumen, it has artifacts, unity same thing.

Nanaite, VSM, Megalights, Lumen and AO are just rendering features that aims to make the visuals and performance wise better , with or without this features if you dont mess around with post processing, lighting, tonemapper, other shaders you wont get away from “Unreal Look“

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It does not look the same.

You guys seem to think that every realtime rendering technique produces the same results and so it doesn’t matter what you use because they’re all visually equivalent. GI looks like GI, cast shadows look like cast shadows, etc, etc. It’s all just trying to solve the rendering equation so its all the same, right?

But this is simply not true. The approach you use determines what idiosyncrasies it will have and people will pick up on them even if they cannot articulate why.

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I dont really know why you’re even talking about GI when the topic is totally different. “GI looks like GI, shadows looks like shadows, water looks like water” , to be honest it sounds stupid to say that GI is something related to "unreal engine”, its everywhere, this is just how light behaves, and hundreds/thousands of games use it, outside of unreal engine but every engine has its own implementation.

As Apfelbaum said above, none of this features will change the game look. If the game looks good without any of those then you are on the right path, otherwise you need to scratch your head even more.

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Is it for in-game or linear animation purposes?

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GI is not specific to Unreal, Lumen is a specific implementation of GI that is specific to Unreal. Every game implements GI very differently and they all have a very different look to them.

How you implement a feature leaves its mark on the visuals. If you don’t believe this then I would encourage you to ask yourself why Unreal needs 12 different shadow casting methods if they’re all visually equivalent? If a shadow is just a shadow then why are all these different methods needed? Why does Unreal need four different approaches to rendering volumetrics? Why does Lumen need to offer hit lighting for GI when the surface cache exists? Why does Lumen need to offer Hardware Raytracing when they could trace the global distance field?

It’s recently become popular to blame the tonemapper and post processing for the “Unreal Look” and people imagine that fiddling with post process settings and switching to AgX is going to magically fix this. But it won’t, because by the time you’ve reached that point in the rendering, Unreal’s rendering features have left their mark on the image.

Anyway this topic is mostly a waste of time, and I’ve lost interest in it. It’s clear people are not understanding my point, and I am just repeating myself. If you think you know better then just keep on doing what you’re doing, makes no difference to me.

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The one feature no one mentioned that will give the most immidiate “this is unreal" moment to anyone (even your grandma who has never seen it) is probably eye adaptation.

The rest from Akiras at least is pretty spot on. It’s just not all. People are still able to tell what engine is what - just based on looks of the final output and how motion affects it…

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Shading models

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Okay, now I’ve received a lot of ideas, and thank you all — it really means a lot.
But the problem is that I really don’t know much about any of this. I only have a little knowledge about Unreal’s rendering pipeline, and I’ve only used Blender in the past. So I have ‘some’ questions (a lot):

how on earth shoud I use a custom fog solution?

I’ve heard that using forward shading is not really recommended in UE5 because Lumen and Nanite may not work properly with it.

my question here is: what?

Also, some of you asked whether this is for an animation or a game — my goal is to use it in a game.

I already knew that the “Arcane style” might be a bit too ambitious, but I still wanted to try it. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter which game we’re talking about — whether it’s Subnautica, Marvel Rivals, etc. They’ve all managed to change the look of their games in such a way that I didn’t even realize they were made in Unreal until I checked.

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It would be easier to give you actionable advice if you explicitly defined what, in your opinion, are the defining features of the “Unreal look”. Because if there’s anything evident by this thread, it’s that this phrase means very different things to everybody and I don’t think any of us are on the same page as you (or each other for that matter)

When I think of Unreal games that don’t look like Unreal, I mainly think of games like Hi-Fi Rush.