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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Not into Gaming Development, but could anyone tell me why All Unreal Rendered Games Graphics look alike? You could literally tell it is Unreal engine if it has those Shiny Rendering Graphics on Metal or Rocks. And they dont look great. There is something about its Light Reflection rendering that i think is "Trademark" of Unreal. And they dont seems to have improved over the many iteration of releases.

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could anyone tell me why All Unreal Rendered Games Graphics look alike

They don't. It can feel like they do because the same libraries, models and shaders are reused a lot between games, but there's a lot of variety if you look hard enough. Comparing the look of RiME to Crackdown 3 to EVE Valkyrie shows there can be a lot of difference.

Have a browser through Unreal Engine's trailer showcase - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlv_N0_O1gYaMTM__mGE...

Unreal games look alike because maybe most people think the default lighting model is really good? I have seen screenshots of some Unreal powered games that look like grease has been smeared everywhere, but others look pretty good.

But then there's the Borderlands games. Those are based on Unreal, but they don't look like any other game out there.

Yes, just to comment on this Unreal Engines lighting is considered really good (and it is imo). The reflections you see in game are actually the responsibility of the creators of the games not the engines.

A newer game that has pretty decent lighting is PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds. Check it out, you might see less of those aggressive reflections.

I go back and forth on the looks PUBG, sometimes its gorgeous, sometimes the buildings don't load.

There will be moments where the landscapes and vistas are almost as impressive as Witcher 3 and then I get shot.

Unreal didn't invent its own shading model. Instead Unreal and a bunch of other game engines now use what is called PBR (work on this started in Pixar before game engines)

I think the possible explanation on why they may look different to you than other PBR engines (say renderman or unity) is that IIRC UE4 has slighly different curves for roughness and other properties. but still I would credit it to what the other comment said about shared assets and people using defaults.

you can see information from disney here: https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_...

and here are the ue4 docs, with some other references at the bottom: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Ma...

Probably the biggest tells of a UE4 game are in screen space reflections for reflective surfaces, and the use of temporal antialiasing (which can cause minor ghosting artifacts, particularly in reflections). These can be found in other game engines too, but the artifacts of UE4's particular implementation are pretty distinctive (to me).

While Unreal 3 games are usually pretty easy to spot, Unreal 4 games that make full use of the engine's customizability are not. The lighting and texturing capabilities received a massive overhaul between the two versions.

If they aren't straying far from the defaults then it should be obvious why they would look the same.

While an experienced Unreal developer knows what to look for, the average gamer most likely couldn't tell if a AAA game was using Unreal Engine 4.

Unreal and Unity ship with their own default PBR shaders and settings. So if the developer doesn't modify them, the lighting can make games look similar. Unreal's lighting reflections is generally considered very good though.

Biggest telltale sign of an unreal game for me is when it streams in new objects/effects a frame too late. If you turn too fast you often see the end a corridor drawn in a frame late and see the skybox in some worst cases. You can even see it in this video [0] which looks gorgeous in stills but as soon as the camera changes there is a single frame where the reflections are not drawn in yet.

Still amazing tech, just something I've noticed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nLGoqqDc0w

If you've played a game or two on an engine, it's usually pretty easy to spot other games that use the same one. Not just an Unreal thing.

To try and give a slightly better answer then others, without complicating too much.

My thought it is because they use the default shaders (and/or the artists do glossy too much). That said..

Most, if not all, modern big engines use "deferred shading" and support normal/bump maps, gloss/reflection maps in addition to "normal" textures (lately every rendering engine that focuses on being realistic is switching to "Physically based rendering", that is very similar to "normal" rendering except that it obeys the "amount of (light) energy out can not be greater then the amount of energy in"(this also means linear light space, instead of logarithmic like we humans perceive)).

All the big rendering engines can, with the same equations in shaders, produce exactly the same result. The same results in regards to the direct "shading".

The other part of how a thing looks is lighting (aka "global illumination"), where the actual engine code is a lot more involved. Since you can't make, like raytracing does, light bounce off of things, you have to cheat (it uses too much processing power). Rendering engines cheat by, for example, plunking "light probes" around (unity had a good post about them, i can't find it now). The slight differences in lighting may not seem like much in a side by side comparison, but our brains use those little lighting clues meaning they(we) are sensitive to them.

There is also how many lights a rendering engine supports (and the distance they can cast light), how it does particles and can they emit light, how it does volumetric.. things (like smoke, maybe water and such), how good it is at reflections (are they precise, do they include dynamic things; note that they probably don't bounce twice), subsurface scattering (notable on skin), and probably more that i forgot.

Note that i simplified plenty. For example lighting and shading are closely related.

PS Reality is not like basic theory. Physically based rendering does give real world results but in reality everything has dust on it, or an oxide layer (aluminium especially), or a sulfide layer (copper likes sulphor). The other imperfection is the minor imperfections in smoothness, what the collective "they" do take into equation (see https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publications/EGSR07-btdf.pdf).

PPS "Physically based rendering".. as if Phong shading is based on something else. (PBR is still no where near reality, for reasons above)

Agree with you. (not sure about most recent version)

The same with ID Tech, Unity, RAGE and CryTech/Dunia games. One can spot them "from 50 feets away", or at least when trying out the controls, the character physic gets rarely changed at all. (I cannot say the same thing for Frostbite 3 and AnvilNext, the are more modern.) And many Unreal and Unity games use the standard shaders included with the dev kit.

(e.g. Titanfall 2 based on Source 2 still feels very like the controls from Quake 1, well it's based on the same engine after all).

I don't know that all look alike (there's a bunch), but Unreal, Unity, etc tend to ship with a lot of premade shaders and materials.

A lot of them are similar but then you have games like Fortnite which looks totally different.

They don't, you are imagining this.

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