I've often heard the "Unity look" criticized, but there is no Unity look. That's just a failure of art direction. I.e. any engine that supports shaders well doesn't have a particular look.
Because Unity and UDK are such time-savers, they're used in a lot of student projects. Often these have very low production values that bias people against these engines.
A good analogy is particle systems. The fundamental technology hasn't changed in 20 years. However the final look is extremely sensitive to iteration and art direction.
Having good artists is much more important than having good tech, much as it pains me to admit it.
yep - the default art assets tend to have a style that people can recognize. But sometimes that's hard to fix since you don't have budget to make new assets. I guess it must be up to the developer's creativity to break the mould - and not many can achieve that.
I've often heard the "Unity look" criticized, but there is no Unity look. That's just a failure of art direction. I.e. any engine that supports shaders well doesn't have a particular look.
Because Unity and UDK are such time-savers, they're used in a lot of student projects. Often these have very low production values that bias people against these engines.
A good analogy is particle systems. The fundamental technology hasn't changed in 20 years. However the final look is extremely sensitive to iteration and art direction.
Having good artists is much more important than having good tech, much as it pains me to admit it.