When I finished the Zero Gravity scene in Marmoset Toolbag 2 I wanted to test Unity 4.6 visual powers and started to build that same scene there. Pretty soon I realized that it was almost impossible to achieve similar results with that. I tried my best but I ended up with a scene that looked like a generic Unity 4 scene. It was also very heavy to run even though I tried to optimize it as much as possible. This was because I needed to use complex lighting and shaders to mimic the Toolbag 2 version.

I waited for Unity 5 because I knew that it will support PBR and should understand this common language that I used with the Toolbag 2 version. I was very impressed how fast and easy it was to do this same thing with Unity 5. I simply imported the models there and I got good looking results in a few hours. New lighting system worked great with this project when I placed some lighting and reflection probes in the scene. I was very impressed by the realtime GI solution that Unity 5 has.

Textures were the same that I used in Marmoset Toolbag 2 and all I had to do was to add colliders to models and a player controller and I was ready to hit the play button. All of this in under a few days with particle and other extra effects was really impressive compared to the older version of Unity.

Unity 5 supports Spec/Gloss and Metalness/Roughness workflows so you can choose what to use or what will suit you better. Visual quality is something that I´m happy with and even my 6 years old PC can run it smoothly so I would say Unity 5 is a huge step forward.

I don’t think I needed to cut anything but instead I was able to add much more content with Unity 5 like particle effects, objects with zero gravity physics and so on. Unity 5 is a great tool because you can tweak a lot of stuff in the editor and see how different elements affects to the overall performance.

Lighting System in Unity 5