Forum Discussion
Engine for research
What's up folks! I'm a PhD student researching human perception of light and colours (yes I'm aware of the research call :) ). I'm looking to investigate the perception of these aspects when view...
This is a good question. Your work sounds very interesting. Do you mind if I ask which University. What kind of PhD degree exactly will you be getting? Visualization? I work with several people with PhDs in Visualization.
1.) This answer is a question of effort. Let's consider Unity 5 and Unreal 4. Out of the box Unreal produces more realistic looking images than Unity. But Unity is getting better quick. Check out this real-time video from Unity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA
I'm sure you can tweak Unity to be as realistic as Unreal if you are willing to spend the time. Probably in a year or two Unity will be a lot more realistic by default. Unity seems to have the most momentum in funding.
Also my friend said that at SIGGRAPH 2016 that several papers and talks involved Unity and he heard none using Unreal. Unity is apparently more popular with researchers. I am a researcher using Unity. Unity is incredibly easy to use and get results with. My colleague recently implemented a kind of ray-tracer in Unity using shades. With shades using HLSL you have as much power as you want.
You can also make a plugin (DLL) for Unity to use native compiled code. I do that in my project to read simulations data from a commercial fire and explosion simulator my work has created. With a DLL you can optimize even further.
2.) If you want physical based rendering which solves the rendering equation I would write it yourself. That would be an interesting project.
I would like to extend this to use a HMD with head-tracking and maybe position tracking. The Oculus SDK probably shows ways to do this. With Vive look into OpenVR.
Let me know how your project goes. I am very curious to see the results.
1.) This answer is a question of effort. Let's consider Unity 5 and Unreal 4. Out of the box Unreal produces more realistic looking images than Unity. But Unity is getting better quick. Check out this real-time video from Unity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA
I'm sure you can tweak Unity to be as realistic as Unreal if you are willing to spend the time. Probably in a year or two Unity will be a lot more realistic by default. Unity seems to have the most momentum in funding.
Also my friend said that at SIGGRAPH 2016 that several papers and talks involved Unity and he heard none using Unreal. Unity is apparently more popular with researchers. I am a researcher using Unity. Unity is incredibly easy to use and get results with. My colleague recently implemented a kind of ray-tracer in Unity using shades. With shades using HLSL you have as much power as you want.
You can also make a plugin (DLL) for Unity to use native compiled code. I do that in my project to read simulations data from a commercial fire and explosion simulator my work has created. With a DLL you can optimize even further.
2.) If you want physical based rendering which solves the rendering equation I would write it yourself. That would be an interesting project.
I would like to extend this to use a HMD with head-tracking and maybe position tracking. The Oculus SDK probably shows ways to do this. With Vive look into OpenVR.
Let me know how your project goes. I am very curious to see the results.