illusionLAB (10/19/2018)

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Let's just say, you could export your scene with Alembic characters and get the 'same' result in UE4 and Blender's eevee - both involve similar amounts of manual labour and learning new stuff... so why would you choose the software that by the very nature of it's design will slam you in the face half way through your production?

 A shovel can knock spikes into the ground as well as a hammer, but I wouldn't want to dig a hole with a hammer ;-)

yup here is the thing.   Technology is making it possible to render in real time .. in any 3D package I can think of.    (okay blender it will be a few more months, but right now.. i can open up blender beta 2.8 and render something pre assembled in blender 2.79 or whatever number we are on now.  Its crashy, but it works)

Now we are only one person the time of game engines being an option is past I think.   They are game engines and at this point in time its adding a level of unnecesarry complexity for little to no gain.    If your going to remain with a real time engine using a real time game type skeleton your better off with iclone at this point in time.    (well the curve editor needs some work but i put in a feedback thingy and I think they are working on improving its functionality).   Unreal wont animate any better in fact it uses less bones and has a whole pile of restrictions in it.  Yes they made a thing to make movies with it, but its still a company trying to take a thing made for one purpose and crowbar it to be something else.    Visually you can achieve a lot in iclone any any gains you get in unreal will be handicapped by the fact its still a real time engine with a game skeleton animating.   And looking quickly at the CC3 skeleton used inside iclone now its far superior.   You will get less collapsing of meshes when you move things among other things.

So if you want a render solution that looks better than iclone why not just import it into blender (or whatever) and use a plugin its less complicated and your not stripping bones out of the skeleton to squeeze it into unreal.  Why are you spending time getting it into unreal?:) 

Evee was built upon the unreal engine it is the unreal engine lol (basically) for render why then would i go yet one more step and spend my time putting it into unreal to lower the quality of the animation.    
If your gonna spend time using something as complicated as unreal for movie making better to spend the time on an actual package designed to make movies first.  ?



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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

     No where on the blender site do i read that Evee is based on the Unreal Engine . In fact anything i have researched is that Unreal is still far superior to Evee and its going to be a long time before Evee catches up with the unreal 4 engine which is constantly btw making  huge improvements. Many of us dont appreciate the quality of rendering in Iclone 7 . So using game engines like unreal or unity is a great option for us  and it only takes a little work to learn other tools . and well worth it . Also i agree that blender with Evee will eventually be an option but it has a long long ways to go yet . Film Engine is coming out soon i have read for the cry engine which should also offer another high quality rendering tool for us. 
It's just i think that people who have the standards that find iclone 7 to be acceptible quality for rendering dont get it that , others , dont agree and wouldnt be able to get at the very least the inspiration to create the stories and animate them.  This is only my humble opinion but if the quality is not  high end for the visuals then the story has no interest for me , as if i wanted just great stories i would read books etc . !!
  Dont forget a picture or video is worth a thousand words and crappy visuals  =  crud ! 

You will just have to believe me on that one but yes they based it on unreal's PBR engine.    The info is there to find and I am a blender nerd I read everything LOL.   
They changed the name because of well reasons they dont want to be linked to PBR because in the future the all the rage PBR is not gonna be all the rage it will be some other letters LOL.  
I am also unsure about where you read its not as good as the unreal one.. i have seen nothing but praise for it. 
No matter there are plugins out there that plug into blender to make renders with other letters in the name so your not limited to the unreal thing. 

 Bottom line even if unreals' render engine was slightly better your still dealing with a game system that is gonna place all kinds of restrictions making the animation look worse then anything that can be achieved in blender even if Evee was not as good hands down and bonus it will render at similar speeds.   Plus it has an iray render as well and all that other "old fashioned" slower stuff.  

So the logic in the here and now to use something meant to create video games is lost on me, but then I have used both so I know the limitations of both.  ?   If you want better quality use blender and forget about these game engines they are not necessary these days.   (that's the bottom line) 

This is an old video it works better then this now.   Can do this way easier in blender then in unreal & faster without messing about with their game system to get it into the environment.  






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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

"real time" renderers are built on compromise and clever cheats... but when the time comes to 'up' the quality of your output, the game engine route does not offer a choice of "non-bias" renderers like Blender does - you can swap between eevee and Cycles and not need to convert all your materials - soon you'll be able to choose Octane 4 (free!) or Redshift among others... not to mention the ease of uploading your projects to be rendered by "online render farms".  Honestly, the list of advantages of using a complete 3D suite of software over a game engine is huge.

Fun Fact-
The guy who made Blender was co-founder of the game system Neo Geo in 1988.
That game making experience has led to him becoming a better animation producer.

PS - UE4 has excellent rendering capabilities, it actually renders several frames per second at 1080p, I do not know how it does this, but it can! 
So it actually can beat iClone as far as speed in rendering. 
I am interested to see what capabilities lie in UE4 with alembic.

  well to urbanlamb  and illusionLab  that is very exciting news and information you offer about Blender with Evee  . ! Definitely when the new blender is released i will be willing to put much work into learning it and look forward to this. !  oh yeah and getting octane  4 free to use in blender is an absolute win win situation  ! 

oh this reminded me for anyone interested in blender's game engine.  Its being removed.  It has been broken for a long time... it did get a repair many many years ago but with the invention of things like unity and unreal its been neglected as a usable solution.    They did make some noise about replacing it in the future, but they had a ceremony a few months back removing the code for this engine.  I watched .. there were both tears and cheers.   :)



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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

ternityblue

I'm digging Unreal

I like that tutorial series you posted.  I like the non linear design ,  not sure if Unity has that.

 something to say about actually using a game engine

I'm an Octane User.   That puts me square in line to use Unity.   Sounds like Octane in unity may be free.   would like
to see more tutorials on UE 4 cinema rendering, to compare..

But I'm still wondering about:

1.  License to use PAID ./ FREE models in films / music videos in UE 4,  or Unity.

{  there's talk of these Cinema engines,  but no info for the assets for a film. }

Thank you urbanlamb for adding another point of view, although some may not like it.

Nobody here can dictate what is a valuable contribution to this thread. This is still a public forum after all. I may not do client work, but that doesn't mean I take my filmmaking any less seriously and just fool around.

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I use Blender, I'm very comfortable with it, but it doesn't support the Nvidia works stuff, at least not yet, so I will have to wait till 2.8 is released to even know if it will handle real time rendering some of the stuff I want to do. I know right now the ocean sum is still not very fast, I would love Waveworks in Blender. I would prefer Blender over Unreal etc simply because I could model whatever I needed, change a UV or whatever. So that's my end game hopefully. But that is still maybe six months away at least, and I don't think the bones issue will be that big a deal for me, I will use fbx for distant characters on ships and alembic for any closer animation. But I want a huge mountain, and a tumultuous sea, and that isn't very doable in iClone and may actually be easier to pull off in Unreal than Blender unless I want to make or buy a bunch of plant assets and maybe an addon. And on top of it all, I see value in knowing at least on a high level how to navigate Unreal, I was having a great time with the cameras and rendering last night, it was more intuitive than I found Cryengine, I need to do a bit more focused study instead of late night insomnia haze playing with it, but that is true if I want success with any tool. I think after you get familiar with software, skills and knowledge applies across apps, you get used to using nodes, or how UVs work etc. Anyhow, I saw Reallusion has a new video on Cc3 to Unreal, so that looks interesting. 

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