Unity or Unreal for likely arch-vis standard?

[Ernest Burden III]

I have no experience yet at working with either of the 'game' engines, though I am curious and expecting I might want to work with one in the future. But which one?

 

I see ads for 3D generalists that want Unity skills. I see a lot of arch-vis using Unreal, especially by Chen Qingfeng, the former Lightscape master, who posts piles of work on LinkedIn--all Unreal.

 

Which is the likely 'standard' for our industry going forward? If I'm going to invest in one, I'ld like it to be the right one for the field. I realize there are the others like Lumion, but just between the two, which do we think will shake out as the winner for arch-vis?

[Francisco Penaloza]

In my experience, the easiest of all would be Autodesk Stingray or Max interactive. Interaction is very tight with 3D Max, it can read Autodesk and VRay materials.

Quality wise is not there yet but still very good.

 

Unity had a very large community, several of them dedicated to Arch Viz. The learning curve is a little steep but that's the standard for most Game engines. Quality wise is very good. But the strength of Unity is not quality. but customization and integration with other tools.

Several of the 'one click solutions' that you see around are base on Unity FYI.

 

 

Unreal has become the de facto for Arch Viz because of output quality. Learning curve it is steep, preparation of asset it is necessary, and here is where things get fussy. Forn instance if you have a scene in VRay, you just export to Stingray and you are almost ready to go, on Unity and Unreal you'll need to do some prep work.

 

Having said that Unreal is dedicating more and more resources to Arch Viz, I think they realized how big this industry is and how VR-AR are the cutting edge now, they are very focused to provide a more streamed workflow between Arch Viz scenes/Users and Unreal.

 

Where I work I use Stingray just because the easy setup time to do 'quick' presentation, but I also I am digging into Unreal that I think would take whatever I produce into Stingray to the next step.

 

I don't work doing European Lofts so streamed workflow for me it is very important

YMWV

[philippelamoureux]

No one should waste time with stingray when you have this coming to unreal : https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/introducing-datasmith-a-workflow-toolkit-for-unreal-engine

 

seriously, autodesk is clunky!

[notamondayfan]

I've dabbled with both, and my feelings are both are very capable for real time projects.

 

Perhaps I'd say Unreal gives better lighting, materials, etc, and Unity is easier to program and use, but that could just be down to me and my limited knowledge.

 

What I would say is though that you do need to know some kind of programming, or partner with someone who does. There is a limit you can quickly reach (creating walkthroughs for example), but if you want to build in interaction into a product or service, then the headaches start.

 

Luckily there are plenty of programmers out there, and even good courses to learn this if you have the time.

 

I won't be switching still images from Max / Vray any time soon, but can see the advantages for animations and real time projects of course.

[philippelamoureux]

The thing about stingray or even amazon lumberyard is there are no communities...no asset store... no tutorials... Heck, I'm not even sure they have good documentation... For programming you are better off with ue4 because you can use blueprints. In the other engines you need to learn a proper programming language which sucks if it's not your thing!

 

Vray and octane renderer are in development for ue4 right now. That means in the same editor (which is miles ahead of max in term of usability) you can make your hyper real stills, your animations and your playable scene.

[Scott Schroeder]

With Datasmith coming, UE4 is probably going to take the lead. Though the rub with that is that it essentially sledgehammers your scene into unreal and hopes to the render gods that you have invested wisely in your graphics card(s). That being said, Unity can run on just about anything and if you have ever had to develop for a client's hardware, you know that they don't always have $$$$$ hanging around to run your scene.

 

Though I would say we are still about 10 years out from true real time graphics being fully integrated into our workflows. Graphics cards have come a long way, but they still need a lot more before you can get some of the more complicated scenes in there with little optimization.

 

In my mind, the winner will be something like Lumion, Enscape, or Twinmotion. Those are "brainless" apps where all I need to do is click and button and I get my scene into the editor. UE4 will have a big slice of the pie, no doubt. But those "brainless" editors will take the lions share as most places don't have programmers on hand or care to take the time to learn.

[John Dollus]

Unreal.

The workflow is very similar to the old Lightscape ways. You will likely pick it up pretty quickly.

[Francisco Penaloza]

For our industry, I think communities or a large number of developers really make the difference.

Honestly speaking from all the big game engines, Not counting Lumion like, the most Arch Viz friendly is Stingray. The main drawback is as mentioned by others, first, it is own by Autodesk, I am pretty sure they are planning to strip features out and transform it to some cloud service. Second, there is almost not community or third party developers. So yes the future it is very uncertain, but having said that, it is very easy to use and to learn, that's the only reason I can use it now, I need to develop project now, I can't wait for a future new feature from Unreal, I just can't optimize and unwrap a whole Hospital building for a quick presentation in VR inside Unreal as up today. Stingray can do it, so I use that.

 

I also think that the real future for our industry will be something like Enscape, Twinmotion, Lumion like. Wonder now that the partnering of Unreal with Twinmotion if they will concentrate efforts to develop Twinmotion faster and with more features.

 

Unity is very flexible, but I don't think it is easy to program, you can do a lot of things with the default tools, but if you want something custom, I only see C++ in the background, unless I am missing something, I am not that nerd.

 

Unreal has C++ and Blue prints, the last one it is more understandable that the real deal with C++ but as mentioned before there is a large community creating 'most common' functions for us and that is a big plus.

I am open to all option but in my opinion, Unreal is the winner so far.

[Tommy L]

Unreal. Hands down winner.

[khaledbou]

I would go for unreal engine, Epic games are giving huge attention for Archviz, the next version of unreal (4.18) will have an improved lightmass engine, which means lighting will look even better

 

'' Coming in 4.18:

Lightmass skylight solver improvements

* Lightmass uses a filtered cubemap to represent the skylight instead of a 3rd order Spherical Harmonic. Directionality in shadowed areas is improved. Mip level is chosen based on the ray differential for anti-aliasing.

* Multiple skylight and emissive bounces are now supported with a radiosity solver, controlled by NumSkyLightingBounces in Lightmass WorldSettings. More bounces results in longer build times, and the radiosity time is not distributable.

* The mapping surface cache is now rasterized with supersampling, reduces incorrect darkness in corners

* Combined direct lighting, photon irradiance, skylight radiosity and diffuse in the mapping surface cache so final gather rays only have to do one memory fetch, speeds up lighting builds by 7%.

* Added support for Embree packet tracing although no solver algorithms use it yet ''

 

 

+ the new datasmith will be available hopefully it's a game changer.

[michalfranczak]

If I would have to choose between Unreal or Unity I would choose both There are strenghts and weaknesses of both engines, but from my experience:

1. Unreal is a nice package "out of the box" - you have your post-processing tools, volumetric lighting, nice skydome and lighting, node-based material editor, good import of static FBX files and they work hard to make better integration with 3ds max with Datasmith.

It is widely used, has really good forums and many eye-candy visualizations were made with that engine. It's capable in this field and proven. You can also sell your scenes without hassle - it should work at the clients side as on your side in the given Unreal version.

 

Weaknesses: not-so-friendly camera sequencer (but it does not matter unless you make some truly cienamtic-grade stuff), really messed up import of animations, not to great particle system (and hard to edit), no integration with Blender files and non-modularity (most of the things that you find on Unreal Market are assets, plugins are rare and they do not extend Unreal capabilities).

It's closed system. What you install is what you get,l it will not get better unless they make an update.

 

2. Unity: out-of the box is stripped down of many features, luckily there is TON of simple add-ons (many of them free) that can make it look on-par when it comes to graphic quality of Unreal. It has great lighting, realtime GI with Enlighten, new Progressive sampler that works really decent, easy to use sequencer (and four more that you can buy from store), good post-processing stack (in my opinion much more user-friendly than the one in Unreal).

It is easier to learn (subjective matter), it accepts everything you throw at it (FBX, OBJ, Alembic, Substances, blend files, animations), it updates assets automatically - no need to constantly "reimport" things, it is modular - which means that you can have better post-production, camera filters, better antialiasing, reflections, camera tools, etc with just few clicks.

It launches much faster than Unreal and almost none of the operations require restarting the engine. A great knowledge and userbase. And they are going into cinematic / visualizations bussiness also. It has already Octane integration in-engine.

 

Weaknesses: you have to gather some nice plugins to make it shine, luckily Asset Store + forums are doing a good job with that. Not so good: many things will cost you some bucks, but generally they are worth it. No node-based material editor in vanilla version, but you can get one from Asset Store and people say it is comparable to the Unreal material editor - i tested it too short to be an advisor on that matter. Selling scenes is difficult, if you rely on third-party plugins - you cannot include them in your project AFAIK so you cannot transfer the scene to the client with the same quality.

 

I use Unity for my personal projects and we use Unreal in our company - so I can say that both of them make a good work.

Edited September 16, 2017 by michalfranczak

[M V]

Funny how a spam post brought this discussion back to my feed. It is interesting to read this discuss now that 5+ years has past. Those who said Unreal, congrats! Now we can see who had the crystal ball.