Hello,
I’ve recently get into Unreal Engine 4 and I’m excited about it. However as usual I have questions about getting into Unreal. I want to make sure that Unreal is the good path for me.
So.. how well Unreal performs in unique game concepts, is the engine mostly cut for specific game types or it is flexible enough to get creative about mechanics, game designs and concepts?
Also I consider myself a good 3D artist mostly using Blender 3D (But I'm also planning to learn more about 3ds max or Autodesk Maya). Is Unreal Engine 4 good for artists as well?
Also one of my major concerns, which is documentation and community, while coding the game if I want to learn to do something how easy for me to look it up online or ask someone about it? I know Unity has a bigger community and tutorial count but I also wonder will it be a problem for me in future? Or should I change my engine preference?
Hey there, I think unreal is pretty flexible and you can get creative and make any game you want with it. Although at the moment it seems to be more tailored for 3d and lacking a bit in the 2d aspect (but still possible using Paper2D).
If you’re an artist then unreal is probably more friendly in my opinion since you can use blueprints which are very similar to nodes in blender, and you can code using that without having to learn programming. I actually prefer using blueprints even though I’m a programmer; it’s just way more convenient.
As for the documentation and the community, I think the docs are pretty good and the official YouTube channel of Unreal Engine has a ton of material you can go over. The community might not be as big as Unity, but I think having a big community can also be a drawback. In my opinion, having too much content can make it difficult to sort which are good and which are bad. In contrast, you can easily download the content examples in the Epic Launcher that shows you how various features work and other game examples too, so I find it easier to look through those and pick up little bits of knowledge when learning. I don’t remember if they have something like the content examples for Unity. I haven’t touch it for a while now since I like the workflow in Unreal better.
Unity seems to be more intuitive though in my opinion. You want to make an FPS? Drag in a first person controller and viola you have something working, whereas in Unreal you need to:
Create a GameMode blueprint class
Create a PlayerCharacter blueprint class
Setup the input mode in the project settings
Code the movement
Add a player start to the level
Assign your PlayerCharacter in your GameMode
Assign your GameMode in your World Settings.
So to get a basic setup in Unreal takes a lot of steps and that creates a steeper learning curve. It seems to be a trade-off though; as you learn Unreal and become comfortable with it then seems it becomes easier to be more productive though in my opinion.
