I recently started learning UE4, I am a complete beginner. I’ve had alot of fun exploring the starter content and using the landscape tools etc. However, recently I had some ideas to build a wood cabin inside of UE4, and after some hours fiddling around I found that UE4 is not really meant as a 3D modelling software. I have some basic forms of the cabin, but my workflow is pretty horrible and it takes alot of time. Some people told me to use a 3D modelling program to make my models, and to import them into UE4, and this seem like a good step. Problem is, there’s alot of software out there and I have been googling the differences, but can’t really decide on what I should pick up. I’m thinking of picking up Blender but I really want your guys’ opinion on this.
What do you guys use for your models? If you were to build a house, what program would you use? Is it worth picking up Maya? (I will soon be a student, then I could get the 3 years free) Or should I just stick to something like Blender?
I personally use blender + gimp because it’s free and you can nearly do everything with it
When you want to work in the game dev industry -> use or maya
I downloaded UE4 because of the amazing environments people make, and how realistic it all looks. I think I am more of a level designer who also wants to put his own models here and there. Right now I don’t know anything about gameplay and only make stuff because it looks good.
For any type of building I’d highly recommend SketchUp Make. It’s free for non-commercial use and will have you designing and building simple corridors, rooms and buildings in minutes. You’ll need to export it as a .dae file and import it into Blender (also free) to join the vertices together because it has this annoying idiosyncrasy of not having the faces joined together so you need to select all of the vertices and join them before you can UV Unwrap the model. It’s a bit of a pain in the bum but the ease of which you can design and model these sort of things so quickly makes this small disadvantage worth bothering with.
If you can manage to use SketchUp Pro through friends or family that are architects the same idiosyncrasy applies to that too, but Pro allows you to export your model as an .fbx file which is handy.
The speed that you can do these things with SketchUp is ridiculous tbh, I’m surprised that more professional developers don’t use it, it’s EXPENSIVE but it will pay for itself in saved time and resources pretty quickly when working on any architecture for games.
Edit: Also forgot to mention that when using SketchUp that if you treat 1m in SketchUp as 1cm in your game youll have the scale right. So if you want to model a cube that’s going to be 3m x 3m x 3m in the Unreal Engine then you need to make it 300m x 300m x 300m in SketchUp.
