Do you like the Unreal Engine look?
interpolator
Sometimes when I'm reading through other forums or news sites, I notice there's a distinct hate for any game that uses the Unreal Engine. The usual complaints I see from people is that any game made with it is "cheap", "generic", has "vaseline", "brown", or is generally "very outdated".
Now I'll admit, I'm a bit biased on this subject. I've been a UE4 subscriber since UE4 first launched. I've also been interested and following Unreal Engine updates ever since Epic first teased the Samaritan demo in 2011.
But bias aside, I never had any hate for games using Unreal. To me, a lot of the complaints stemming from the graphics aren't actually the fault of the engine. A game going for a "brown, gritty, first person shooter look" is totally because of art direction and art directors.
Ironically, what I like about UE4 is that I think it does very colorful games the best. This is very important for me since I want to make games with lots of color, but still feel graphically advance or photorealistic.
Now I'll admit, I'm a bit biased on this subject. I've been a UE4 subscriber since UE4 first launched. I've also been interested and following Unreal Engine updates ever since Epic first teased the Samaritan demo in 2011.
But bias aside, I never had any hate for games using Unreal. To me, a lot of the complaints stemming from the graphics aren't actually the fault of the engine. A game going for a "brown, gritty, first person shooter look" is totally because of art direction and art directors.
Ironically, what I like about UE4 is that I think it does very colorful games the best. This is very important for me since I want to make games with lots of color, but still feel graphically advance or photorealistic.
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For example, when it was announced Kingdom Hearts 3 would use UE4 instead of Square Enix in-house engine, a lot of comments sprung up saying it's going to look very generic.
Hahaha, sums up this thread.
ZB was also becoming the favorite tool to many 'digital Nomads' (lel), and they wanted to show those Normal maps for everything they were worth.
I'm not kidding when I say, many games made in UE3 lacked a Gloss or Specular map (even big studio ones, you know who you are, shame on you) and looked like they were passed in an oil massage parlor or something. I cannot recall how many packages I unpacked to study the game, ONLY to see a Diffuse and Normal map in them, nothing else per asset.
TL;DR: UE3 got it's 'look' because everyone wanted their characters to look like oiled up models, because they had sculpted normal maps, and didn't understand the importance of Spec/Rough maps.
UE4 doesn't have a 'look' because it's going for PBR, which many other engines are also doing, so the homogenization of the material curbs those comments, and because vs. as early as 5-3 years ago, we have much better resource which explain and teach these aspects.
(Jesus, I just realized only recently we started polishing Spec definitions - pun intended).
Can I make it feels like I'm navigating inside Maya ?
Well, there's not much point discussing what the average Kotaku/internet reader is thinking really. Unless you meant, comments made by industry professionals ?
Guilty Gear Xrd is made in Unreal3 by the way
in all seriousness though, UDK(UE3) did make a lot of stuff looks the same, but I think UE4 looks really fresh and clean, which I could not say about UE3.
so Im all in favor for UE4, it looks fantastic!
Is there possibility to change its skin, easily?
Though if you see raytraced distance shadows in a scene it's almost guaranteed its UE4 since to my knowledge its the only engine currently supporting it.
This.
There is no 'Unreal Engine' look, however there is a 'we used all the default shaders' look.
this.
There is definitely a certain look that comes though in the rendering, the way the bloom looks (kinda has a really sharp solid gradient) and the way lights maps come up.
But in the end it comes down to Technical artists to tweak the rendering/shaders and Artists to pick a unique color palette and style and stick with it.
If Unreal has any kind of "look", well that's probably because whoever's using it, isn't using it correctly and is going as default as possible.
Now, that's not to say that Gears of War looked bad, or that there weren't very, very good-looking games on UE3. That's just to say that if a game stayed too close to the defaults and tried to (poorly) imitate the art direction that Epic was taking at the time, it ended up detracting substantially from the experience.
Like a high quality/ performance friendly Real-Time Global Illumination solution. And yesterdays Twitch stream they actually answered my question and said " We got our top man pondering about this subject. "
So fingers crossed and no complaints
This! IMO Poor GI baking solution led artists to mask bad lightmaps with too detailed textures so it would always end with that distinctive flat and noisy "UE3 look".
OHHHHHHH :poly142:
Best thing that came out of this thread.
I wouldn't get too caught up with the tool, the same way I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the paint brushes of a painter. While the tools are extremely important, often times what differentiates the final art/product is how the tool is used (artists/designers/programmers etc...).