I can say with little doubt or exaggeration that one of the reasons I have the employment I enjoy is due to my purchasing “Unreal Tournament” many years ago (around '99).
I had just gotten laid off from the automotive R&D job I had, as they closed the facility. I used the severance check to have a PC built in hopes of maybe teaching myself something new. I saw the game and thought maybe I could play that in my “off time”.
Once I discovered the level editor I was hooked. This in turn inspired me to learn Photoshop and 3D Max and as time progressed many other types of software. The learning of new programs and trying to keep current with the ever evolving technologies is challenging but well worth it, and is something I still endeavor to do. As a result my title is graphics specialist and I actually work mostly with the Unreal Engine, the Adobe suite, and 3D Max designing environments and animations. I am thankful the desire to build something in Unreal led to my learning the other skills as well.
Thanks Epic for all the ways you encourage and empower your community!
The problem is that its, well, “philosophy” is different of many other programs. But it’s not that pain.
I would say, try Solidworks, it’s very very useful, but I suppose that he can’t afford it (about 5k€ for the professional edition). I have it, because of my job and except for “organic” meshes I don’t want use any other modeler. But I do understand that Blender is difficult, I had hard time too.
Anyway.
Solidworks is not a good tool for developing game engine content. If you’re going to learn a new 3D software it’d be better to learn something like 3ds Max/Maya/Blender/etc. since they’re much better equipped for making content for UE4.
I’m also from the past. I built levels entirely made out of bsp because that’s how it was in the first unreal version. All details came from textures. You could only have 200 polygons in view to run the level at an acceptable framerate.
Things have changed. Bsp geometry can only be very simple. To learn how to make a box in blender can’t take you very long. Once you mastered all the shapes you could do in unreal with bsp you can move to more complex geometry that wouldn’t be possible in bsp.
Bsp is still there and it is great to fill a hole quickly. Although you could also use a simple cube for it. I have been told that bsp uses an entirely different render pipeline that is a lot slower. Really - It’s not a big loss not to use bsp. It’s very limited.
If all you want are blocky walls, use the geometry editor mode, which is CSG (aka “bsp”) with both additive and subtractive modelling. You can convert it to FBX models after you’re done too, either for performance or to add details on a modeling program.