Hair improvements are coming for 2.8 (its there just not.. all released).   Everything else is pretty easy in Blender.  I installed an addon awhile back that makes crazy plants etc for free but doing it manually is also not so hard. 

  As for unreal there is no doubt its a cool software and I used to use nothing but game engines until a couple years ago including things like opensim (well that's not a game engine i guess dunno? use that a lot).   However I had some people I was working with try to convince me as i was making things for the game project how cool unreal was for movies.  So I opened up the packages released and I came to the same conclusion as I had drawn since the newest advanncements.  Unless its a premade game already installed and running with all the assets and stuff (so like your making a movie using some game or other) its actually way more time consuming, harder and less pleasing then some 3D suite.  This didnt used to be the case but over the last couple of years times have changed.  

But its always fun to learn I was simply pointing out that the results in any game engine will always be less then a 3D package and if the issue is quality then that is the solution 

anyhow that's my two cents on the issue.    Didnt used to be this way, but it is now so I have changed with the times  

(edited to remove smiley overload ^^)

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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

    I am very gratefull to reallusion for making a new tutorial Character Creator 3 Tutorial Importing CC3 Characters to Unreal . As i said before i really like character creator 3 and i  prefer the base avatars over any Daz characters. etc.  I own the CC3 pipeline version . I no longer have an expectation to do everything in one piece of software and i enjoy learning new software programs .  This is only my opinion but i dont think there is any software program out there that can beat what CC3 can actually do . And also for ease of use . etc etc . 

Every time someone refers to the amazing visuals of Blender Eevee and Unity, I just laugh and think of this:

That was enough for me to reconsider alternative rendering, the render difference was negligible, In some way I liked IC better.

Animagic said it perfectly' I think you have to be careful not to become paralyzed as you may get into a situation where you don't create anything at all.' Analysis paralysis has taken so much time, creating content is beginning to loosing appeal.

RL filled the creative - 'not overly technical nitch'  If only we could get decent IRAY renders down to less than 60 seconds a frame.. that would be a game changer!





Virtual Media® / VTV® / The Virtual Entertainment Network...
http://VTVLive.com

15 years ago I asked the same question, but for creating games not rendering animations.

After years of learning I now create my own games through coding I have found it much better to render with my own engine using my own framed per second renderer. Easy to code. 

I say this because I was in the same boat as you not satisfied with any body else engines. 

But If I had to choose? 

I would choose unity as its drag and drop and easy to bring in your own models. 




Check out my new Bible Forums

Ok, well after some soul searching before I invested much time into Unreal, I have decided to go with Blender and Eevee, which I'm already comfortable modeling in, the node system etc already makes some sense to me, and my volumetric tests today were good. They fixed some issue recently with dynamic painting and now my oceans are rendering fast and accurately in Eevee too, so even at alpha 2 I can use it for some things I can't do in iClone. I need to figure out importing and adding sss to iClone characters, but otherwise I think I am good to go. Blender makes the most sense in the long run. 

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

 Blender and Eevee,

sounds good.   keep us updated.

 I need to figure out importing

How are tests with FBX, and Alembic, working?    I found Pro formats never could be relied on with a blender pipeline.

I would be more interested in blender if you could buy Quality Pro level assets for it.   But blend swap always strikes me as a yard sale.

I haven't tried Alembic in Eevee yet, it worked fine for me in 2.79 but I never used it much because Cycles is slow. I don't think you can import into Eevee yet, but I do believe you can save a 2.79 project with your assets and open in 2.8, I will have to try that. And Blender can handle any assets pretty much, so importing obj or fbx from, say, Daz, works fine. You need to deal with materials but as long as you are up for that, it isn't hard. Node wrangler and the principled shader make it easy to get pbr workflow going. 

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

Ill have to check the newer FBX plugins, and Alembic.     In the past these could be " gotchas."    I thought it partly
had to do with the Blender Foundation licensing,  VS commercial apps licensing.  Of course some big commercial companies
may not be too thrilled with the Blender approach in general,  and wouldn't necessarily help with formats.   Just a guess.

I saw a tutorial on EEVEE in Blender 2.8 (alpha), and it looks really good. The guy was a master in working with shader nodes, which was very instructive, but would require a lot of learning if that's new to you.



So maybe. Blender is at least a 3D application, which is somewhat familiar terrain.

EDIT: Moved this from the other thread on rendering...

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