It would be great if there were versions of Unreal Engine that are listed as separate software and can not be tracked back to gaming easily.
Right now, if we want to convince people that UE4 is a really good software for visualisation of automotive traffic scenes or arch vis or other non-gaming applications, it is a really hard sale to project people or quality people or the management because of the gaming image that comes with UE4. The idea basically dies the moment they google Unreal Engine and see a first person shooter gun aiming at some strange monsters. That is basically a sudden death and us poor engineers and developers, who usually can tell them that the earth has turned into a disk and they eat it and give money to make it a sphere again, have made fools of ourselves.
The BMW people used UE4 recently for early design (great!), but even those articles avoid mentioning UE4 as good as they can and focus on the VR. The gaming world just does not fit well into other businesses image-wise and therefore UE4 separate and renamed versions would be a big plus.
If UE4 did versions like autodesk has Maya and then 3dsmax, that would be great. 3dsmax comes across as ‘serious’ to non-gaming people. You google it, the first tab is architecture. That’s perfect, that’s a serious image. You google Maya, you look at monsters. That’s not good. If you do archvis and say the customer you use Maya and they google it and see a monster or other strange things, that’s a drawback which one might not be really aware of if you spent all your life with gaming.
I was talking to a guy (housing agent) until my mouth had blisters to convince him to use Unreal engine (possibly ith VR) to make showcases of the condos and flats he is going to sell.
I had to constantly repeat that you dont need a player with a gun just to roam within a level.
Non gaming people perceive Unreal engine as: Good for games, everything else must be a foul compromise.
Another guy, from the engineering world, said “those engines” (Unity or and Unreal), are not professional enough, just by looking at the editor UI.
I had suggested to use Unreal Engine to visualize complex simulation data.
Well, he continues to stick with MatLab, because is so much more professional…
Maybe it would already help if there was an option to say “EPIC technology”, instead of “Unreal Technology” and using the square Epic logo, avoiding the term “Unreal” a bit as this is associated with the gaming.
Adding to that, I had also received some remarks in presentations about the Unreal logo. that alone gave a first impression of gaming/entertainment/not serious.
Some people commented that the fancy U in the, as they put it, heavy metal font, is so 90s…
Oh; And showing blueprints to a potential client is also a bad idea. Although BPs are great to improve the expierience by making models and ArchVis scenes interactive, you might get, more often than not, the reply: “Yeah, neat. But we are no script kiddies over here”.
No matter what links you present, they will always do their own “research”…
And then all your good examples are viewed as kind of exceptional edge cases but the standard use case of the engines still within the gaming context…
Unfortunately in the bigger industries something like this is no quick decision. There will be meetings after meetings at various stages and soon something like on the picture will pop up (as cool as it is ). There is no clever hiding of it. It will be an instant knock out, especially if it turns out that this is the major use case of the render engine in question. The bigger problem on the horizon is that you can not explain your Tier 1 car manufacturer customer what he sees on the picture when quality problems pop up and that you have qualified your technology with simulations that are running by a game engine with monsters and strange stuff.
And it is completely unnecessary. For example there is software out there to simulate test drives. The graphics they have is nothing to what Unreal can do. Absolutely nothing. But the one difference why they will be choosen is because they have automotive written all over them and Unreal has things like in the picture all over it.
On the weekend I saw Mark Rein’s BMW post on Twitter. It is not like Epic does not want to.
There we go. McLaren + Unreal Engine. That’s good material.
I really wished there would be more focus on such applications and a version separated from the gaming world. It is an open field.
I doubt a UI skin would take all that much time to make.
it’s funny how perceptions are created, sometimes really quickly, and are impossible to change…I’ve talked with people about Houdini for games and the usual response is “it’s for simulation”…
I think for arch/viz and automotive etc - there just needs to be more content out there for people who don’t really know anything about the tools, but make the decisions, to not concern themselves with these kinds of things and just trust that they can get the content they want.
I figured out today that UE4 is actually blacklisted at work. The editor download was blocked with a black list remark. Disappointing!
McLaren is not so big. That’s not so surprising. But BMW, that’s interesting. Wonder what angle they used to convince their people. Maybe I switch the them. I just want to play at work with UE4 the way I do at home. That’s all really
Honestly sounds more like a problem with middle management in larger companies. There’s a lot of resources out there which demonstrate that Unreal is capable of doing great Archvis.
That’s exactly what it is. Project department, Quality Department and more or less middle management - they all will listen to us developers/engineers what toys we need and in what direction technology moves and then throw money at us so we can get our toys.
Usually we get what we want.
The problem with Unreal Engine is that it is way too much on the monster, chainsaw massacre, killing, etc. violent gaming side. Like Gears of War 4. In this state, with this image tagged to it, it is really difficult to sell to people that are no gamers.
Unity and Cryengine have softer images when you look at their Wikipedia entries or google them. Well, I guess it is either chainsaws and monsters until the end, or surviving the engine battle by adapting to other fields, now that CryEngine 5 and Amazon have joined in.
). There is no clever hiding of it. It will be an instant knock out, especially if it turns out that this is the major use case of the render engine in question. The bigger problem on the horizon is that you can not explain your Tier 1 car manufacturer customer what he sees on the picture when quality problems pop up and that you have qualified your technology with simulations that are running by a game engine with monsters and strange stuff.