UE4 as video production tool

My current project it’s to produce digital stage set for performing art, basic as animated video and advanced as 3D interactive

Did have three available tools: Cinema 4D R16 Studio, Unreal Engine 4 and HitFilm 2 Ultimate.

My problem is coming from render since traditional rendering is mostly CPU or CPU+GPU based (Furryball is an exception but work only on CUDA and I did have AMD card) so I will be greatly limited with my i5 dual core CPU.

A different solution can be using UE4 for animation and rendering, leaving C4D for modeling and HF2 for effects and compositing.

Question is how limited will I be in term of features vs C4D in term of animation, materials, camera, output.

Second question: animation in UE4 it’s only blueprint (meaning need to deal with code) based or you can also find procedural/key frame animation such as in C4D?

In the UE4 you can find a tool called “matinee” which is used to create cutscenes or movies -> https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Matinee/UserGuide/index.html :slight_smile: But animations have to be done in a 3d program (C4D, blender,…)

e.g this short movie was made with matinee in UDK (UE3):

Interesting, but this make me jump to another basic question: UE appear to be really focused on actors animation, but this will be not the major part of my work since I will animate mostly non-human like elements.
How does UE deal with that?

I don’t know how well C4D supports FBX export, but in programs like 3ds and Maya where FBX support is very good you can export regular object animations (rigid animations) and they import fine to UE4. You can even export camera animations to use in Matinee and use that to construct a video.

Read here a thread of someone able to export FBX from C4D to UE4, so will be definitely possible.
Good UE4 can be part of my workflow solving the render problem.