New and looking for info

Hello, I am new here and I am looking for some information about the Unreal Engine and what we are allowed to do with it.

some friends and I are planning to make some little arcade like games, get in the flow of working together on some projects then work on something a little bit bigger like an RPG.

We are looking into Unreal but I dont fully understand what the rules are for using this program are, other than if we made a profit of 3K it is expected to that we pay 5% to Epic for royalties, if I understand that correctly.

Could anyone dumb it down for me?

If you make money off a game that you’ve made with UE4 then you need to pay 5% royalty if you’ve made more than $3,000 in a quarter. That means during a 3 month period if you make more than $3,000 you pay 5% of your profit beyond that initial $3,000 to Epic.

If you’re just making games with your friends that you aren’t selling, then you don’t have to worry about it at all.

Also make sure to take a look at the FAQ :wink:

https://www.unrealengine/faq

Are any revenue sources royalty-free?

Yes! The following revenue sources are royalty-free:

Ancillary products, including t-shirts, CDs, plushies, action figures and books. The exception is items with embedded data or information, such as QR codes, that affect the operation of the product.
Consulting and work-for-hire services using the engine. This applies to architects using the engine to create visualizations as well as consultants receiving a development fee.
Non-interactive linear media, including movies, animated films and cartoons distributed as video.
Cabinet-based arcade games and amusement park rides.
Truly free games and apps (with no associated revenue).

Our intent at the moment, is just to see how well we can do this together. three of us went to a school to learn 3D animation and game design, one is a computer programer who uses Unity and is looking to dabble into Unreal, another friend is more of an IT tech person, he could build us any computer we would ever need, if we had the money.

the hope with using Unreal, is that we would just make a free demo game of a village or something, let you meet some characters etc.

in short, anything we make for now would be free, look at what we did kind of thing to try and get noticed in the industry, so far our team is 5 members and it could be growing :slight_smile:

are there any programs that we should avoid using with unreal?

an example would be that I use XSI/Softimage (till i learn something better) for making 3D props and one guy uses Maya, would something like that cause any problems?

As long as those tools are abel to export the right file type with all needed information, you can use every program you like.
I pesonally would recommend you blender and gimp -> both are free :slight_smile:

what the UI for them like? Maya and are not a good design for me (too much junk all over the place)

gimp is nearly as photoshop -> in my opinion a good UI
blender -> most people dont like blender because it works with many shortcuts :slight_smile:

do any of them have any limitations? I know that Maya is a good program for rendering higher detail but i have heard 3D is not the best for up close detail. (not sure if thats true)

Blender and Gimp? -> no, they are as good as the “professional” tools + blender is always in development (new features, improvements,…):slight_smile: