The Pros and Cons of Rendering in Unity

[ #Unity #Rendering #game #RealisticRender #news ]Unity, as we all know, has become a major player in the game industry as it's used by a lot of developers for game creations. Recently (with version 2017.1) it started to lean more towards entertainment with the addition of Cinemachine cameras and Timeline editor. Not many arch-viz people use Unity for scene or animations creation, according to the latest survey made by CGArchitect; as it is used only by 2.9 percent of arch-viz artists and this has raised a lot of questions which are highlighted below.

>> See Also: Unity 2017.1

-The Pros
•It’s fast!
It’s fast and stable – launching Unity takes literally seconds, it’s well written and did not hang regardless of many experiments with importing assets, animating cameras, lights, deleting and re-importing objects, baking with very high settings, etc.
•It can look awesome!
We admit that we haven’t seen many great interior renderings made in Unity, but it does not mean that it is impossible to make one. And when it comes to exteriors… Just look at this Adam demo!

•Importing files is a piece of cake!
Unity accepts FBX files either in ASCII and binary version, it recognizes animations automatically and does not screw them (which was not always the case with competition). It imports assets fast and accurate.

•Plugins!
So many plugins, so little time! Unity comes with great Asset Store that offers not only 3d models or assets like particles but also the whole systems that expand editor’s funcionality.
•Three GI systems!
Unity gives you three GI solutions out of the box, easily switchable and they don’t require restarting engine – you can switch them on the fly. Realtime GI is the simplest and gives the least convincing results, but in many cases it can get the job done.

•Materials compatibility
You can easily export textures from Substance Painter directly to Unity. It also accepts height maps - just drag and drop them to a “height” slot, no need to make Parallax Mapping nodes. Quixel Megascans also support Unity export.


-The Cons
Of course, Unity isn’t perfect, no software is. There are some flaws that need to be addressed.

•Plugins (again)!
Yes, we know we mentioned them in the "Pros" section, they are uber-weapon of Unity, but if you really want to expand your Unity’s abilities, you gonna spend some cash. Many editor extensions cost 30-60$, it’s easy to spend couple hundreds of dollars to gather favourite plugins.

•Originally made for game developers
In many areas you can tell that Unity was made with game developers in mind. This changes (slowly) and looks like the future versions of Unity will be more artist-friendly, but for years Unity was a game engine, which means that some interactions will require coding in C#, not just adjusting sliders or painting.

•Pay for export
If you want to export FBX meshes out of an engine, you need to buy a plugin that costs 100 bucks. And even with this addon you will not be able to export animated cameras.

•No distributed baking (yet!)
You can only bake lightmaps using single machine. There was a solution for network distributed baking in the past, but since then, lightmap system has changed and Unity developers work on native solution for distributed baking.

So, why then should you use Unity3d for your visualizations? Well...because it’s fast, it’s fun, it gives really great results, it is easy to integrate with your 3d software.
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