Help to improve our Unreal Engine 4 For Unity Developers document

Hello all!
We have the Unreal Engine 4 For Unity Developers page up and I am interested to see that if any of you have any ideas on what we could add or clarify better to help new user’s coming from the unity side of things.

As always, thanks for the help and feedback!
You all rock!

For one thing, triple please, separate the sections in that article to different pages, or expand the contents to list out all of the subsections. I feel like the table of contents needs a redo for Unity developers looking for specific terminologies and concepts at a glance. Two weeks ago, I had a Unity friend working on UE4 who has to hold the scrollbar and move the mouse up and down multiple times just to find 2 concepts mentioned in the article that wasn’t listed in the table of contents.

If you want to attract more Unity Developers, just copy a few good solutions which the Unity developers are accustomed to, not write such pages. Of course, it can be useful but only at beginning. I’m the best example. I have been working with Unity for over 5 years and now I’m trying to use Unreal. I read the page you are talking about and… I got not much for myself. Yes, it good to compare some things in both of engines, but it won’t attract more developers. Ask yourself: “Why does Unity 3D is so popular?”

1/ Because Unity is easy! Its GUI is very intuitive; icons are small, good looking, there’s order everywhere. For a Unity Developer like me, it needs to be the Unity gizmo in the Unreal Viewport that a Unity Developer can click he/she can get Top View, etc. We REALLY need it!!! Please make such a gizmo for navigation.

2/ Unreal Documentation is incomplete and obsolete, not so friendly as that of Unity’s - I know the problem and docs for older versions can be used for newer version, but… Yes, the most important thing! C++ documentation should be always up to date. Always! Unity Developers aren’t accustomed to the Visual Scripting, so the Blueprint System isn’t a solution. We are coders! So do all to have a more friendly (and much more) tuts with C++.

3/ Maybe, you could make a solution for using C# for Unreal, I don’t know. I personally prefer to use C++, but others maybe can see C#.

4/ A lot of us have A LOT OF GBs of Unity Assets. I personally have about 100 GB of Unity Assets, so it would be perfect to us them (not all of course) in Unreal. I don’t know which one exactly, but I’d like to see my Unity animations in Unreal for example. Maybe materials, other sound formats, not only wave. Importing assets into Unity is very easy. Just drag the assets, and all works automatically. In Unreal, I need to select some options during import. If I have many meshes, animations, etc. it can be discouraging.

5/ Skeletal retargeting… Unity detects bones automatically in many cases (if the skeleton has been done well of course). Doing that manually in Unreal is really frustrating. You should make a solution for detecting various skeletons as much as possible. Then, it can be improved manually of course.

In general, copy a few good solutions in Unity. For Unreal users, those things I have written here can be ridiculous but they are important for Unity Developers. It’s the best way to be successful in the market.

Unreal Engine 4 is really awesome and I don’t regret I changed the software. I love it. However, you should do a few changes. I know many Unity users are looking at your software but they are hesitating not seeing those I have written above. Just make their choice easier.

thanks !
Going to put in this request. As the conversion guide grows it very well may need to be split up a bit.

Thanks, , for opening this up to everyone for participation! :cool:

Regarding bringing assets into Unreal Engine, from what I’m reading above, it appears that the feedback is that we could better explain the asset import pipeline into UE4, or even refine features that ease the process rather than converting assets from engine to engine, correct?

Let me know if I’m misunderstanding, I’m just wanting to fully read the feedback to help make better the experience :slight_smile:

As I wrote above:

1/ Improve GUI - it seems too clumsy, too big icons; many people (including me) use laptops, so there should be a function to make the GUI icons much smaller. Unity is the best example.

2/ More C++ tutorials and they should be always updated. I know C++ and have a long coding experience, but starting to write a program in Unreal is a true tragedy. And you are changing all from version to version. Unity doesn’t change the way of programming, only adding API classes.

3/ Think of using C# in Unreal. It’s a very popular language and most Unity users write code in this language.

4/ I know meshes and textures can be easy imported, but what with animations, materials and other Unity stuff? We want to see our assets (bought by money and collected for years) to be easily imported to Unreal.

5/ Improve Skeletal retargeting - we want to use Mixamo-like characters easy; bones detected automatically by Persona

6/ I can add that a good thing in Unity is making prefabs. This is my proposition to make something like Unity prefabs for quick making a complex objects by draging. I know you have a blueprints, but Unity solution is really good and maybe you can do something like that as a alternative.

7/ The most important for me is the Unity Gizmo that I can click and the view is changed - we can switch views quickly among X, Y and Z axis as well as Perspective and Orthographic. This feature is very useful.

8/ More file types supported in Unreal.

In general, please make Unreal more universal and friendly. That’s all.

Hey Frank! :cool:

As mentioned, we’ve got a bit of licensing agreement magic to work through since the UDK and UE4 EULAs differ greatly from eachother. I will let you know as soon as we come to some sort of conclusion regarding these assets :slight_smile:

Chance

Is it really so difficult to make a few good decisions? I see your asking for feedback everywhere. So I, as an experienced Unity Developer, try to provide you with feedback. Now, it’s high time to go into action and change a few things.

Hey Tomza - that reply was in relation to the licensing agreement for using assets from UDK, a previously supported version of the Unreal Engine 3.

Thanks for giving us your input! I was confused at first, as the thread pertains to the documentation we’ve written, however we’re continuously working improve UE based on developer feedback, so it’s certainly something we pay attention to :cool:

In regards to your specific items, here are some things you can check out in the meantime or follow up questions to better understand what you’re looking for in UE :slight_smile:

1/ You can change the size of just about everything inside the editor. Head to Editor Settings -> User Interface -> Use Small Tool Bar Icons, or select View Options at the bottom of file browsers.

2/ Tom Looman is currently working on a series of gameplay examples using C++. Check it out here!

3/ This has been discussed in length in the past, feel free to check out Tim Sweeney’s thoughts on the matter here. We’ve also seen a number of developers writing plugins to allow for other scripting languages to be used with Unreal Engine, so keep an eye out for any advances on that front as well!

4/ Most animations that come across in the .fbx file format should import without problems. What specifically are you looking for. Are you running into issues with them?

5/ We’ve been working fairly closely with Mixamo in regards to exporting their meshes and animations with direct support for Unreal Engine 4. You can find more information on their site, and we had a livestream demonstrating the workflow last December. Check it out!

6/ Blueprints and Blueprintable Components are the way we create saved complex objects with behaviors and components. I’d like to know more specifically what you like about the workflow of prefabs that is missing in Unreal Engine 4 so we can better understand your needs.

7/ Thanks for the suggestion!

8/ Can you let us know which files are most important to you?

Thanks again!

Chance

Thank you for this post and sorry for being off-topic. I just thought I should write feedback for you from a Unity Developer point of view. I’m new in the Unreal world and I still need much to learn. I really like your software and I don’t want to come back to Unity :). Good work!

1/ I know that :). Only Toolbar Icons can be made smaller, but what about for example Modes Icons. In general, there should be a possibility to reduce ALL graphics elements in the Unreal GUI and tabs can be thinner. It makes no sense to make thick bars. The thin bars should contain thin tabs as well as small and visible icons. I think it will be useful for laptop users. The GUI of Unity 3D is a very good example how to design a GUI in elegant and ergonomic way. Using laptops, it’s always fight for more working space.

2/ I will check it out for sure!

3/ Very good! It’s not essential for me because I love the power of C++, but for many Unity users it can be very important.

4/ Sorry, I haven’t tested all yet. Animations are only example, but it’s good to know that I can use all my Unity animations in Unreal. Great! I have a lot of them. I meant the problem of importing Unity Assets to Unreal in general. Many of Unity Developers have a lot of assets and we want to use them in Unreal. I know it’s impossible with the scripts (and other Unity-specific things), but other things can be imported to Unreal.

5/ Great! There are many models with different skeletons and it would be great to import them to Unreal easily.

6/ I am not sure but is it possible to drag an object (actor) from the scene (Viewport) and drop it on the other object in Content Browser to make it a prefab? The Unity-style making prefabs is very good because it is very fast and I think can exists together with your Blueprint System.

7/ Yes, please take it into your consideration. It’s VERY useful! I think it will be appreciated by the users that have never used Unity before too.

8/ Why we can use only .wave for audio format? Even no popular .mp3? Are compressed audio file formats bad? And what movie file formats can be played in Unreal? I can’t find this topic in Google.

That’s all for now :). It’s good you are pay attention to the developers feedback. Keep up the good! These are only my suggestions and thoughts what to change in your software. All to make your software better for us, developers. Anyway, keep improving UE4. I’m waiting for Unreal Engine 4.8 impatiently.

Very interesting topic, I’ll keep updating as I go along as a long term Unity user. For the most part things have been pretty sweet sailing and I’ve found UE4 pretty easy to use BUT! Here’s a couple of things that would be nice:

  1. Tried and tested methodology, when I first started out I followed the terrain (Height Blend / Weight Blend) method. It was riddled with issues, like terrain black when painting etc. I finally figured out the weightmap system was ideal and worked great. Although at the time, nothing was really mentioned… As a Unity user, I was used to using splat maps and that was another “no go” if you wanted a fully functional system in UE4. So a lot of time was wasted figuring out the correct Methodology.

If you want us to do things “Epics” way, then it would be nice if you specify.

  1. Lighting, this is cool https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/Showcases/RealisticRendering/index.html, lightmass is a completely new concept to Unity devs. Whilst the basics are pretty simple (make sure UV’s are in bounds, generate lightmaps for meshes etc.) it’s not always apparent how to get the best out of it (For outdoor / different setups). I find myself just baking and tweaking to get the results I want (a lot of meandering really). I’m sure like me most will figure it out by themselves, but general lighting tutorials to get the wow factor are never a bad thing.

  2. Optimising, in Unity we of course bake like any other engine. But then tweaking performance for terrain / general scenes is quite different, we’d use Umbra to bake occlusion, we’d change different parameters for terrain (Pixel Error, Base Map Distance, Tree Distance, Detail resolution per patch) Unity - Manual: Terrain settings, we’d change the quality settings for other tweaks (Shadow Cascades, Batching, Vsync etc.) Unity - Manual: Quality

Performance is key, so a general how to would be nice.

  1. AI and Navmesh: http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/projects/stealth/enemy-ai for example, we use Navmesh agents and then script around that. Some more in-depth tutorials on transition for these purposes would be nice.

  2. In depth how to’s with GUI’s would be nice also, UMG Scalability settings / Audio levels / Item tree’s etc. I’ve already figured out how to do most of this in code, but still it’d be nice to do via BP’s for beginners.

Thanks Shadow! This is actually well written up and very useful info. I will try to get eyes on this and use some of this for the Unity to UE4 conversion guide update requests.

Thanks , looking forward to it.

I would like to see in that documentation little bit more deeper explanation about the blueprint system. That it is not just about prefabs and it can be used in so many ways (of course you can get this information by checking out the tutorials etc later on).

Another thing, when I moved from Unity to UE, I didn’t understand first how much things are already done inside UE and that there are components like camera shake etc. which you can use right away in your projects. So that you don’t go and make those yourself because you didn’t know what kind of components you can use. I can’t remember exactly what I was doing, but I made some blueprint which worked just fine and found out later that there was a one blueprint component already which did the whole thing so I could have used that time to something else :).

I would give a hint to Unity guys moving to UE: Drop your Unity ways when you start doing your projects with UE or at least check things with fresh eyes when learning to use UE.

One thing what I would like to have in this documentation is something like this http://docs.unity3d.com/uploads/Main/monobehaviour_flowchart.svg

Yes, UE4 is really awesome, but I think Unity 3D has a few things that can be used in Unreal. Maybe, I’m wrong, but a few guys from the Epic Staff accepted a few my ideas. They are my thoughts and suggestions only; what will be done depends on the Epic Staff only.

I know Epic is open to Unity Developers and it’s very good. The Deocumentation is the first important step, then there will be the second - using a real software. A few small things can attract more people to the Epic World. They will see that Unreal isn’t so complex and different than Unity 3D.

In other words, you want diagrams showing the life cycle of a UE4 program, similar to the lifecycle of an Android application.

I agree with Tonza in many subjects.

Recently I move from Unity to Ureal and I am finding really hard the transition, for just simple things like a collision it is hard, even the component (collider) is there it’s not working and there are no any documentation about why it’s not working or how to solve, etc… Even I love Unreal and C++ too and I really want to make good things with it I found myself frustrated many times, I think this is not good if you want to grab Unity users.

I am using a laptop too, I agree with “too big icons” and too many windows.

About file formats… What about blender file? Many modellers love this software mainly because it’s free and it could be so nice to have .blend files support, off course mp3 and aiff audio files too

The code completing for monodevelop it’s great, I can have an “idea” about what i need or looking for and start to type and he will offer me a lot of option, with Visual Studio this not work so nice, I need to dig a lot into documentation to discover the name of some components and some of them not very intuitive, why UBoxComponent and not UBoxCollider?

Off course, I understand you can’t do a “Unity with Unreal framework” because every software it’s different, but you can work a little to reduce the frustration levels, pls :slight_smile:

Exactly. We both have just moved from the Unity world and we have similar feelings. We understand UE4 is different from Unity and no problem with learning interface, navigation, what Actor or blueprint is, etc. The true problem is to write any logic. I have refreshed my C++ knowledge and am trying to use it with UE4. I admit it’s hard to start writing C++ scripts. I have just found the useful links:

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Unity3D_Developer's_Guide_to_Unreal_Engine_4

I read only C++ parts because it is the only thing I need to learn. I can say that it’s a very good introduction. I hope I will read a couple of times and I will understand how to write C++ scripts in UE4. However, even now I can say that it would be great to have more such examples, especially I think it would be useful to take the default C++ files (generated during creating C++ project) and line by line explain all. I know C++ but I was even unable to get the cursor appear at runtime. I got help on this forum. It’s a simple thing but I was unable to do that.

Again, Unity developers are used to coding, so the visual scripting isn’t a solution.

@xpectral Please read:

After a hot discussion, some my propositions were accepted by Epic Team. I hope soon we will see some features to switch on/off not to make difficulties for traditional UE4 users.

Thank you.

I’d highly recommend starting with blueprints first and then converting to code after (if you need to)… There are many reasons to do so, firstly because a lot of the tutorials seem BP orientated, a lot of the component systems are quite similar (Animation BP, AI Behaviour trees) and it’s easier to adapt to the API if you understand the flow in front of you.

Which in turn can make conversion to C++ much easier when you understand it in a more “pseudo format”.

For me the most difficult transition is general things like getting used to a new API, the “Spawn System”, how the UI / particle system works and general terminology. I still today keep looking for “raycast” :).