That’s Fair lol.
I used Unity from like 2.0 to 4.x and touched briefly on Unity early in 5.0. Hopefully Unreal has kicked Unity in the *** a bit on things and vice versa.
As a young indie developper, I’ve worked with both engines and I like them both for the different reasons already mentionned here.
And the main point that was made here for me is this:
Our studio only focuses on Unreal 4 and we developped our skills / knowledge on this engine first and foremost. This is getting us somewhere now because we’re able to quickly develop / iterate / showcase art assets.
That’s up to your time and what you do with it / what you already know.
What I like about unity is that you can really make graphics the way you want. If you’re good enough it can be photorealistic, it can be cinematic, cartoony, and so forth… Unreal however always has this cartoony look that is almost impossible to get rid of. This is the only thing I don’t like about the engine. Unreal games are very easy to recognize (compared to good looking unity games that look more neutral, it’s harder to tell on which engine they run on). I wish Unreal would get rid of this distinct stylized look, to something a bit more neutral.
?? What are you talking about?
Actually UE4 rendering is usually way more photorealistic than competitors engines most of the times. Still I have seen some really good photorealistic graphics rendered on Unity5 and CryEngine too. Engine features can help a lot to create more photorealistic environments but anyway a lot of work always relies on 3D modeling, UV baking and texturing with external software packages.
There are plenty of stylized games as well as photorealistic looking games made with every 3D engine. Then some unique engine algorithms implementations can give a better rendering look compared to competitors but none of the major engines on the market is unable to deliver any style game either being cartoonish/stylized or photorealistic look.
I think you meant the other way around.
I’m talking about the pasty/shiny look that makes Unreal games easy to recognize. I’m not saying it cannot be realistic, I think UE4 has the best interior rendering out of all engines out there. I’m talking about outdoors here (forests and such). In-game photorealistic outdoors are very hard to achieve due to the initial look of the engine. Just type “unreal engine 4 forest” on google and you’ll see what I mean. It looks good, but very “pasty” and vibrant. I think this is due to TXAA which makes everything blurry. It looks good indoors, not so much when it comes to foliage. I think sharpening post-processing would help fix this issue.
It’s because developers just use the default shaders / example materials without tweaking them to suit their needs. People have leveled the exact same criticism at every other high-end engine out there.
If you google ‘Unity forest’ you hardly get better results; most of the screenshots are from other engines with Unity users asking how to achieve similar results and those that are in Unity are in my opinion considerably worse.
Personally I think the rendering in Unity 5.X is great and as a whole I do really like the engine, which is in complete contrast to my thoughts on Unity 4.X… I assisted on an MMO and I was creating an openworld RPG, the MMO got transferred over to Unreal because Unity 4.X was a nightmare in terms of physx performance, editor just constantly kept crashing and there was a multitude of issues across many systems that without access to an expensive support contract / source could not be fixed… Not that I’d have the massive team behind me to sort out most of these issues anyway… I can gurantee that MMO would not of been released was it not for Unreal…
Unity 5 is far better in pretty much every way (compared to 4.X) plus you got to love the utterly simplistic scripting system… I’ve used Unity for 4(ish)? Years and I’ve used Unreal since it’s beta and it definatlely has it’s pro’s… I can even understand about the graphics, for some reason I find it far easier to get decent results quickly in Unity than I do in Unreal although I find UE more consistant on the whole… Also to note Unity does scale (in terms of graphics settings) far better… However in the latest versions of Unreal the performance in heavier games has gotten a lot better…
It really just depends on the project, I still would recommend shying away from Unity if the plan is to create something like an openworld RPG… It’s middleware is static (like Umbra), Enlightens GI cache tends to be massive (last prototype had a 15GB GI cache when I’d reduced the quality to the point it wasn’t really helping), from what little you get out the box I found myself “working around” a lot of it… I kept hitting the asset store for pretty basic things like navmesh (due to it being static and heavy), Unreals world composition really does save a lot of time.
On the flip side I made a 3D side scrolling space shmup for a weekend style Jam and Unity made it a breeze… I wouldn’t see the need to use other engines if you’ve got a grounding in Unity for small(ish) projects. I did a side by side test of Unity’s and UE’s lighting (because there was something about Enlighten that irked me originally) opinions were split TBH, I’m sure you’ve seen better but it’s good enough for me and I’d find it hard to keep it up consistantly across an entire game… Looks the exact same for openworld scenes too which is cool.!
TLDR; Whatever works for you…
Unity:
https://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/bakedlightmap-png.233014/
Unreal:
https://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/uetextured-jpg.233018/
Nice images @, I would love to see your Unity work using 2017.1 and the new Progressive Lightmapper. They’ve improved it a lot in the latest Unity version. Anyway from these two screenshots I would say Unreal one looks more real to me. That is just my opinion.
Yeah I agree, I did make some mistakes with DOF but the lighting is the lighting irrelevant… Funny you should mention the progressive lightmapper in Unity, I have tested it out in 5.6 (experimental). One for a more “stylised” version of the test above and the other for a megascans test. One of the major issues I came across with Unity is the lack of a proper skylight with the ability to cast ambient shadows, it makes the transition between indoor and outdoor look slightly odd (reason I did this test)…
https://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/unitynew-jpg.231519/
https://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/megascanshadowlight-jpg.231615/
Edit: I found this too, it was a scalability test in the early days of 5.X… Had this running at 60 FPS on a GTX 470:
The pics look good, in unrela could be amazing, it is a pitty you lost your time in Unity.
Don’t be such a fanboy. It looks very good in my opinion.
Indeed it does. And that is a good reason why Epic Games must step up and up the ante with UE4 which means making it better documentation wise, plugins/assets backward compatibility wise, lower the number of bugs making it more robust, increase the number of assets on the marketplace helping developers as much as possible. Otherwise with Unity getting better they would end up losing large software houses that pay the expensive custom licenses and don’t have their own 3D engine in the works
Oh come , don’t be a fanboy. Unity doesn’t look ugly anymore. I’ve played plenty of amazing looking Unity 5 games that could easily be mistaken for unreal games. If anything, I think Unreal should definitely get rid of this awful TXAA that makes everything blurry (or at least give us more antialiasing options). Sure we can use MSAA (which makes foliage look WAY better), but we have to toggle forward rendreing which in turn disables a lot of good stuff.
Unity only needs such a robust Asset store because the engine is missing so much core functionality. Unity likely leaves said core functionality absent because they make most of their revenue off of the Asset store. It’s funny when you look at the WIP section for Unity and see almost no games. Everyone is making Editor extensions to fill all the holes in the engine…
Now look at UE4 WIP section and you will see a healthy mix of games, environments, and plugins. The marketplace in this case will be dominated by content. Unreal Engine 4 is MADE to MAKE games. Epic uses their own engine to produce quality titles. Many AAA developers choose Unreal over Unity to make actual games.
Unity is an engine designed to lure you in with an “easy workflow” which is only easy because the engine is so sparse of functionality…Once you have invested significant time into the engine, you will be less likely to leave and you will be drawn to the Asset store because so many things are missing. After that you will deal with a bastardized workflow consisting patchworked 3rd party spaghetti coded assets.
I chose UE4 for my first game and I spent around $2000 on the marketplace for assets so far but if I will need to I won’t have any problem using Unity too which is used by many developers for mobile games…
UE4 has more in-engine features that avoid the need to buy plugins (although the documentation is still lacking and buying assets made by others can save a lot of time anyway) but still the asset store is tiny compared to Unity and developers of assets for the marketplace get their products delayed by months due to Epic Games being slow. Like others said Epic Games is no charity so I doubt that they can sustain having the marketplace with a lower revenue for a very long time. If they had as many assets as those for Unity they would be making a lot more money anyway. I am seeing some UE4 marketplace developers publishing their products on CGTrader, Gumroad and other digital content online shops which is just money lost for Epic Games…that is far from a good thing.
Now Epic Games has a deal with Apple for ARKit but still Unity is the most used engine for games on iOS … UE4 is used by a few and that is not a good thing either.
On Wikipedia I see a surely incomplete list of quite many games developed with Unity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games
Underestimate competitors like Unity and CryEngine would be a terrible mistake that Epic Games should absolutely avoid.
How is Unity doing there? Any major new features? Haven’t launched it since 5.1 I think.
I don’t know why people keep saying Unity is more user friendly. I hardly agree. I can open up UE4 with no prior game engine experience and within a reasonable amount of time learn how to use the editor. There’s nothing too it really. The software practically walks you through it. I think people just prefer to write code in C# than incorporate C++ in there tool box.
C++ in unreal isn’t even difficult for the vast majority of things, especially if you did some prototyping up front in Blueprints. IMO, Blueprints are much better for prototyping than even C#. I can keep my C++ code and BP work entirely separate without ever having conflicting naming issues and stuff. It’s super easy to transfer the logic from BP to C++ as well since the BP nodes give direct access to their source code.
The most annoying thing in Unreal C++ I have found so far is that it is exceptionally tedious to rename classes or rearrange their folder structure. This is so bad that I usually just delete and remake them, though I am probably just missing something simple.
It’s doing really great. Look at recent features:
If Google Trends is some indication Unity is outperforming UE4 in popularity by quite some margin: