Eevee vs. Unity/Unreal

I have never used Unity or Unreal, I am curious what advantages does Eevee have over these two game engines?

I understand that Unity/Unreal is for making games but what I am curious about is the quality of renders. Will Eevee be considerably better looking than Unity/Unreal or vice versa or the exact same?

I have seen a few people are making movies in Unity How would these movie’s look if they were done with someone equally talented in Eevee?

What are the Pro’s and Con’s over making a movie in Unity/Unreal compared to Eevee?

My personal 2.8 expectation would be that Eevee is good for pre visualizing how mesh would look in Unreal with textures so i do not have to test every change inside Unreal.

How would these movie’s look if they were done with someone equally talented in Eevee?

Actually, you can’t do such movie with EEVEE. EEVEE and its container, Blender 2.8, are under construction.
Not stable and safe enough to handle such projects.
Few examples :
_Volumetrics were working 2 days ago. They did not work, yesterday They are working, today.
_But actually, render that was working, yesterday, is crashing 2.8, now.

So, if you are stick to a 2.8 build for your project ; you will be limited without fixes and new improvments.
If you follow development and change build everyday, you may encounter these problems and others like older 2.8 blends not supported by newer builds.

We expect that would be possible to create such things with EEVEE when it would be ready.
But when EEVEE will be ready to handle such projects ; these engines will have evolved, too.

Honestly, it is really too soon to play to comparison game.

I would say, that currently Unity and especially Unreal Engine look slightly better (Distance Field Ambient Occlussion, etc.) and have way higher performance, but the workflow using only Blender is better. No asset importing and asset optimization, no switching in programs, etc.

Eevee is under development and neither we, nor the developers know exactly where this is going.
Unreal and Unity must rely on extensive baking tools to achieve scalable realtime scenes. This is not a feasible target for the initial 2.8 release. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to compare them at the moment.

Right now, from a technical standpoint, Eevee is behind UE and Unity. It also has much less manpower behind it. Issues with drivers and OpenGL in general (especially on Mac OS) are going to cause ongoing difficulties. On the upside, with no hard realtime requirement, Eevee (in theory) can get away with less optimization and techniques that are too expensive for game engines.

In practice, 90% of what makes something actually look good is the work of capable artists, not the technology. The workflow with Eevee will be much better, so you’ll have more time to iterate and “nail” that look. Don’t get fooled by tech demos with no real-world budget.

eevee is currently like a hotrod, that is 45% ready.

unity is like a Toyota Corolla. (cheap but holds up well over time)

ue4 is like a Tank, sure it can drive anywhere except drive on normal roads…
(I can’t even barly run unity or ue4 as I only have 2gig of vram and 8gig ram)

I think in the future eevee will stomp them both as far as visuals go,
but for realtime /games in blender we need a system to precompute grids of probes, and mix the probes with realtime cubemaps,
(approximations that accererate the render but reduce the physical realism)

I would say Eevee has a higher potential for high quality rendering because it doesn’t need to be completely realtime. UE4 measures performance wins in milliseconds instead of frames because you generally need at least stable 30 fps (60 fps is preferred when possible). That means there are a lot of cheats to get things that looks pretty good but are also rendered fast.

In Eevee you don’t need 30 fps because it doesn’t need to be played in realtime so you have the ability to crank up the settings. Or, if you need realtime playback, reduce the settings so you get more FPS.

UE4 has been out a long time and things have improved graphically with every release so Eevee has some catching up to do. But the main cons of UE4 is that you are limited to using imported .fbx meshes and animations which means you can’t use modifiers/cached cloth sims and so on.

Sequencer in UE4 which is made for making cinematics has been very rough with tons of minor bugs everywhere so for me it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Especially since the animation systems you made in your game don’t really translate into it, instead you’re better off using one-off animations. I think it would be way more powerful if it was more integrated with the game side of UE4 instead of being a separate cinematic thing which has lots of limitations.

That being said you can still make cool things with it, here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlaOaHvabH0 (featuring some Blender fracture stuff too!) I think the animation blending is a lot easier to do in UE4 than in Blender (NLA) too.

The main pro of Eevee is not that it’s Eevee but that it’s Blender. It’s basically made for animation, you can bake cloth, particle simulations, use modifiers and so on. Corrective smooth modifier, how I miss you. The pipeline is also easier to handle because well you don’t need one, you just use the mesh data/materials in Blender itself.

There are also tons of Blender specific features like absolute shape keys, crazy addons (like AN) and so on. I also think generally the workflow in Blender is better because of the UI and scripting, some things in UE4 can get tedious very quickly, although this could get improved with python scripting in the next release.

Eevee is in early alpha, but so far it looks good, even compared to UE4 IMHO, my understanding is that Eevee will be a fast rendering solution for those who do not need physically correct, although the PBR looks reall good in it.

My favorite game engine for rendering is Cryengine though, more realistic, my hope is that Eevee will look as good, but only time will tell, as for workflow, Eevee is more interesting since it is part of Blender, no need to export and import, then make textures and apply them!

You are right with what you are saying. But you should always(!) measure performance cost/improvements in milliseconds and not in frames. Or in percent of frames. If improve your framerate from 10 fps (100ms/frame) to 20 fps(50ms/frame) you are saving 50 ms. If you improve your framerate from 50 fps(20ms/frame) to 60 fps(16.6ms/frame) you are just saving 3.4 ms. Lets say your optimiziation is scene independent and and does this 50fps to 60fps thing. If you have now a scene that has so many vertices that it renders only at 10 fps and you are now enabling this opimization, you don’t even increase performance by on single frame per second.

I’m very excited for Eevee. I have to say that even at this early stage the ease of workflow aspect should never be underestimated. Having everything in Blender under the same hood is a huge advantage.

The first real time rendering animation project I ever worked on was with Cryengine. It was a few years back now though. At the time getting everything to work and trigger properly in engine was a bit of a struggle for us. We had all had just a few days to cram it into our heads and get up to speed though. And I would suspect things have got better and easier in the years since. But at the time I think we were all wishing we could have done it the traditional way. Pre rendered in layers and composited together.

I just tested a scene i had build for UE4 in Eevee yesterday, but i gave up because the reflection probes didn’t work as planned. Reflections of the ceiling lamps where not visible on the ground below but shifted to the side…

Overall i could get 90% of the look of the original, with the exception of the bloom and reflections, everything looked as good as UE4.

Unity and Unreal have the advantage of their engines having been worked on far longer (Eevee only started seeing serious progress last year).

It’s already pretty impressive for its age, this is helped by the BF having a very skilled coder at the wheel (and now he’s done work on improving 2.8’s draw systems in general).

If you know Blender than you don’t have to sit and learn another app just to be able to render…I have never done any cinematic rendering in either engine but I what I have read here and there is that the pipe line can be a bit tricky to setup and work with so not having not export things could be another feather in Eevee’s cap

Yes, it got a lot easier, and render quality is awesome, I especially love the volumetric clouds and particles system, very powerful, and now they have cinematic tools and compositor in the game engine.

We are currently working on a project with Blender and thought we’d use Cryengine, but with Eevee on the horizon we want to wait and see how it goes, very promising so far, only thing I wish Blender had is a decent terrain generator/toolset, but other than that, Blender rocks, especially with the new fracture addon being part of 2.8!

Yes, I meant that this will be a bit of a culture shock in Blender because earlier there wasn’t anywhere where realtime performance was heavily optimized (in terms of milliseconds) and so with Eevee this will be a first. Well I guess there’s the BGE. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would really like a ms drawing debug view (or just next to the FPS viewer while playing animations in Eevee) as well as a general stats view that show how much all features take to draw.

I sincerely hope for that very reason, EEVEE will end up being able to produce better looking and more physically accurate results. Implement the more computationally expensive techniques… I don’t mind waiting just a bit longer for a great looking render that doesn’t have to go through Cycles.

Just to add, from what I have read Eevee was created to offer realtime previz for games as well as fast renders for movies, so far it does look good but it is only early alpha at the moment, and already it has SSS and volumetrics, which is awesome, here is a 2017 Blender Conference presentation of Eevee, lots of info there.

I don’t see EEVEE and Unity/Unreal in competition. I see them as complementary, supporting one another. Designing game assets in Blender will get a huge, huge boost when you can in essence see how it will look in game engine while you are making it. This and the bevel shader can’t be really overstated on how cool and powerful they are for gamedevs. Now, if there was some way of easily bridging all of this with the Substance toolset… :evilgrin:

I’m thinking of looking into gITF (Unity, Blender and Substance support the 2.0 IIRC) and see how that works. Unfortunately my time has been really limited and I haven’t been able to make actual models recently, but it all seems really promising.

I believe one of the original purposes for Eevee was to provide a viewport display that could do preview far better than 2.79 can (as I recall another article talking about how the engine has blown way past the targets and is now becoming truly powerful, at least to where it kicks BI out of the Blender code).