Unity or UDK for environment art?

Bletzkarn

Which program do you think is better for creating environment art portfolio pieces? Currently I am using unity but it just seems like levels designed in UDK seem to look "more awesome" due to lighting controls / shaders. - Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Michael Knubben

I suggest in future you search the forums (and google in general) first. This question has been asked often, and here you'll find all of those previous instances:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site:www.polycount.com+unity+vs+unreal
If you broaden your search outside of Polycount, you'll find even more information on the topic.

huffer

But those searches redirect to page not found!  searching the forums by topic title only works instead

Eric Chadwick

You just have to remove the www from the site: argument. For example
https://www.google.com/search?&q=site:polycount.com+unity+vs+unreal

Joopson

It's a bit nitpicky, maybe, but it's not UDK anymore, it's UE4. (Unless you are using UDK)

Other than that, yes, everybody here is right, it's been discussed a lot. UE4 looks better out of the box, but I've seen some absolutely killer stuff in Unity. And beyond that, I feel like good art can look good in almost any program, within reason, really.

Bletzkarn

MightyPea said:

I suggest in future you search the forums (and google in general) first. This question has been asked often, and here you'll find all of those previous instances:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site:www.polycount.com+unity+vs+unreal
If you broaden your search outside of Polycount, you'll find even more information on the topic.

Sorry for not searching I did google many Unity vs UDK websites most boiled down to "whatever works for you". Also I've been freelancing on a game in unity and I can see that it could be set up to be really good but it doesn't come out-of-the-box beautiful and was just wondering if UDK was easier to manage these sorts of things without buying scripts / plugins.

Deathstick

Well if you end up choosing UDK, you might as well use Unreal Engine 4, which is simply called UE4 and has a lot more visual power over UDK/UE3. Making the jump from UDK to UE4 shouldn't be too difficult since they have a lot of similarities in systems. As others have said, visually out of the box UE4 has a lot of nice rendering features, although you can make Unity games look just as good.

I used to use Unity 4 and the UDK, and while I enjoyed UDK's performance and rendering over Unity 4's, Unity 4 was easier personally for me to try my hand at scripting and had a lot of community support and plugins. I have yet to give Unity 5 a chance, but currently I'm in love with the improvements in Unreal Engine 4, which also added in a new visual programming system called blueprints that is pretty damn powerful and easy to use once you follow a few tutorials. Epic Games also seems to be supporting the community a heck of a lot more than when the UDK came out, with their weekly video blogs, tutorials, updates, and marketplace. There's also the full release of UE4's source code which is something to consider.

Then again, I'm sure the Unity community is still just as strong as it was a couple of years ago, so it really is a matter of personal preference.

Seriously though if you were thinking about using the UDK, I'd choose UE4 over UDK any day of the week. The only reason why I'd see someone wanting to stay with the UDK/Unreal Engine 3 is if they were a studio that had their own customized version of the engine or were in mid-development of a game. Part of the reason why I always enjoyed the UDK and UE4 is due to how their material system is set up as a node based editor, and can be quite powerful in achieving certain visual effects. If I recall Unity 4 didn't have something similar without getting a plugin, although I'm unsure if they added something similar out-of-box to Unity 5.

All in all, I'd try both out since they're both free!

Shrike

You should really know both so make some stuff in each engine id say.
(UE4 will look better, Unity will be easier to do) If its about looks then Cryengine should be taken in consideration as it looks the most realistic, but in the end its 90% about how good your assets and execution are ether way

JedTheKrampus

Yes, Cryengine is really good these days with their synced normal maps and their voxel illumination. It makes you wait the least of all the engines around once you've figured out how to use it.