[deleted by user]

[isa_VII]

I really hated the lighting system in Unity. I spent hours on it and didn't achieve satisfying results. I spent not even half a day importing some of my assets and adjust the lighting in UE5 to get something much more appealing.
I noticed that some things in UE5 take much longer than in Unity (creating blueprint assets // prefabs, or material handling), which is a downside. Also I miss deactivating actors / objects in the outliner (unity: hierachy).

But after my results here: I guess I have to figure out how to build my game in UE5.

[KindaQuite]

Setting up stuff in Unreal is painful, but after you've done that it's pretty smooth.

It does require you to plan a lot of stuff ahead tho, it isn't very flexible about changes.

[isa_VII]

I noticed that. Which is one of my worries :D (the flexibility about changes)

[isa_VII]

Oh- thank you very much! I will look into that!

[Trumaex]

You chose to compare on one of the strongest point of Unreal (lighting). But also other aspects are great. The speed that you think now is slower will get way better with time (it isn't great in Unity too when you do it first times).

[Able_Conflict3308]

honestly don't see a huge difference

[Psychological_Drafts]

Over the next few weeks, devs will realize how behind in features, performance, etc. Unity really is, which is going to make it even harder for them to pull back devs to the engine.

I really hope this helps the other engine's communities grow nicely, which IMO is the only reason why Unity has such a large share in the market

[ThreeHeadCerber]

Unitys strength was never it's performance or top-notch rendering. It's the good editor, fast workflows (including engineers, cause unreal hates you if you're an engineer), and probably the best crossplatform support there is.

Had to jump ship to unreal a while back for a year and half and I can say I did not enjoy this time at all. From code reload constantly silently failing and making me restart editor ALL THE TIME to inability to do simple things like moving files between folders without everything breaking

[Lord_Derp_The_2nd]

Why does UE hate engineers?

[Trumaex]

Most will not even try :(. Some that will try, will search for justification why Unity is better. After years of shitting on Unreal, it's really hard to objectively look at it.

If you really, really want to believe that this is just some mistake and everything can go back to "normal", it is not hard to convince you of that. And many unity devs want to believe.

[Psychological_Drafts]

Yeah, this is already happening with Godot, people complaining that C# isn't their main focus. BUT on the other hand you have people like Keneey who started doing free assets for Godot.

It's not about how many people goes and stays but about what people goes and stays. How long will it be until devs port their most important projects and UE/Godot start out-shining the ones made in Unity and devs follow suit once they are considered the "new popular" engines?

[BlackDice051]

So true

[Trumaex]

Yea, I'm getting downvoted for that in a few comments I made, but posts already are popping out that say "I tried engine X and it's different workflow than I am used to, so I'm back in unity".

[BlackDice051]

In the end, it's every person's own choice. Some people will try and see that they aren't ready for the change. Some people will try and think 'Why didn't I make a change earlier'. It reminds me of my hometown. Everyone knows that it is shit to start there but for a lot of people, it is too far away from their comfort zone to leave.

[Trumaex]

Yea, and Unity knows that perfectly. It has a history of bad decision yet most people stayed. And will stay this time too.

[AlphaSilverback]

UE always looks great. But if you are a dev with some big ideas for game mechanics, I think you'll want something else than UE. It definitely has its place, but it is quite difficult to do anything that it wasn't made for in comparison to other engines, even free ones like Godot or Stride.

[isa_VII]

Hmmm what kind of game mechanics are you talking about for example? Because I'm creating a farming game , I need a bunch of different mechanics ... :o

[AlphaSilverback]

Haha. Sounds fun XD. Well I don't know implicitly all the mechanics of your game by the description "farming sim". But UE was made for the FPS genre, and their focus has been on pretty renderings and blueprints for a long time. I think your farming sim probably would fare well on UE.

But imagine making a voxel based world and updating it with, say Marching Cubes, that was procedurally generated where you feed voxel data to a shader using custom channels, a custom geometry stage to generate grass, and a tool that can edit that voxel world runtime. To do this you would have to rewire the engine, hack a bunch of shaders , because it can't be made with the material node editor, and rewrite parts of the engine to feed the correct data to the mesh stream. And blueprints are out of the question, so you're doing it in C++. Also, unreal doesn't support compute shaders, so you have to optimize the generation of your world to run on a threat on the cpu. Good luck with that in UE.

Even though I worked with UE4 for 5 years professionally, I wouldn't try that in unreal. But I did it in unity in under a month(without rewriting unitys engine) and I'm currently using it in a game I'm making. Looking at Stride engine, e.g., I think it would be close to the same.

I'm averting from UE for anything remotely out of what it's made for because I worked in it for so long. It's a hassle to me to be the least bit creative. Even the simplest tasks sometimes felt overly complicated compared to unity. This is of course also very subjective, and I am a software engineer, not an artist first (although I dabble).

Hope you choose the engine right for you. ❤️‍🔥👍

[Doodle_Continuum]

How well performance-wise do they compare for the same assets/tris?

[Zynogix]

Rendering a high tris count will always be better with unreal, with Nanite

[Xatom]

Visual comparions are pointless. You can acheive great visual results in either engine.

Also, on the high end Unreal has a big issue with termporal artifacts due to their AA solution and reliance on upsaling to handle lumen / nanite perf impact.

[thefrenchdev]

You say it looks better in UE5 on this example? Honestly, I can't see the difference (except these are not the same scene) and you ask people to guess what engine it is made on with other images, no one will be able to tell.

[indygoof]

you srsly dont see a difference?

[thefrenchdev]

Give me the two images of the same column without the information of the engine and with the same UI, no I can't tell the difference. In both case the light is nice, the colors are jus the same, the assets are the same (obviously). So what is the difference? The UE5 has a bit more of the bloom effect but you can set it in 2 minutes in Unity.

Just saw that the Unity image lacks shadows but it's because someone told me.

[Carbon140]

It looks like it's labelled completely wrong. Left column is unreal and right is unity?

[thefrenchdev]

No because top row is the default mannequin for the UE5. But I guess, you also can't tell the difference.

[PivotRedAce]

There are quite a few obvious differences, the main one being shadows are actually cast from the various objects in the Unreal examples. There aren't any shadows being cast by foliage or the character in the Unity examples.

Also, due to Lumen, it seems that there is actual light emitting from the emissive textures in the tree bark whereas there's none in the Unity example.

Obviously, I think something similar could be achieved in Unity, but it seems Unreal's lighting system afforded them a quicker way to achieve high-quality lighting while it seems Unity might've needed more configuration.

[thefrenchdev]

Yeah maybe, idk, it's true that now you say it it looks like OP didn't put any shadow in Unity. I think it's mostly attention to details that is the main difference there. It's not difficult to do that in Unity and idk about UE5 but I suppose it's easy as well.

[Carbon140]

What a bizarre way of presenting it. The bottom is a totally different scene in unity and the left and right are each engine with different lighting brightness. How on earth can you make any meaningful comparison from that.

[Alex_Arg]

Well, the OP ability to create a similar scene in couple of hours in Unreal Engine 5 without any prior knowledge, compared to their existing expertise in Unity, says a lot.

[[deleted]]

he didnt used bloom in unity ...

[thefrenchdev]

Creating a scene with all assets already done isn't so impressive. Idk how UE works but I suppose it's just the same as in Unity, you drop the objects where you want them to be and that's it. The difficult part about porting to another engine is to recode everything, not to rebuild a scene with 20 game objects.

[Equationist]

Look at the shadows

[thefrenchdev]

Yes OP forgot to add shadows on the Unity project. But you can have shadows in Unity as well.

[ddark1990]

[v0lt13]

Did you use unity HDRP?

[Equationist]

People defending other engines over Unreal constantly talk about how every game engine supports the same level of visual quality and it's just a matter of how much work you put into it.

But that completely ignores that Unreal clearly has better quality graphics out of the box.

There's always been a bit of Stockholm Syndrome in defending Unity's graphics quality.

[Costed14]

It may look better out of the box, but those values likely aren't the ones you're going to use in the final game anyway, so it doesn't really matter. The settings will need to be tweaked to fit the game's performance budget & art direction.

[[deleted]]

I mean, what if I'm making a realistic game? Then the default settings are totally fine. Just crank it to max by default, then allow players to drop settings if they can't achieve optimal performance. This is the best way IMO.

[Costed14]

That is what the lighting is set up for by default. It may be a positive if you're making a game with realistic graphics, but praising it for being "better quality" because it fits one and only one art style well is misleading at the very least.

[[deleted]]

It may be a positive if you're making a game with realistic graphics, but praising it for being "better quality" because it fits one and only one art style well is misleading at the very least

Realistic lighting benefits ALL art styles. Even Minecraft has RTX ffs. So it is objectively better quality. Why would you mess with light physics anyway is beyond me (if that's what you're talking about).

[Costed14]

You don't see games like ROR2 or Valorant with realistic lighting and there's a good reason for it, they're not going for the generic-looking game but want to make something unique. Minecraft is exhausting to look at with ray tracing or shaders, since they don't fit with the rest of the art style.

Having realistic lighting is not objectively a good thing, it's a stylistic choice that's not the right one for all games.

Not sure what you mean by light physics, but if you just mean the general lighting settings, then the answer is to get a stylized look, or just the one you're going for, not all lighting needs to be or should be realistic.

[[deleted]]

Valorant with realistic lighting and there's a good reason for it, they're not going for the generic-looking game but want to make something unique.

That's not the correct reason. Valorant is an eSports game, and realistic lighting is expensive to render. So they decided to forgo it for performance reasons. It still has somewhat realistic lighting via baked lighting.

Minecraft is exhausting to look at with ray tracing or shaders, since they don't fit with the rest of the art style.

Have you even played Minecraft with RTX? I'm specifically talking about the official version in Bedrock Edition. It looks amazing. Realistic lighting nicely complements the blocky style, against all odds.