Hi, I’m a very newbie in this industry and have zero knowledge with it. I’m going to focus on one of the engines above, and it’s hard to make a decision. As you know, it takes a long time to learn the 3D engines. If you grab a wrong one then you’ll waste huge time and have to start over. I’m not going to do modelling from zero as I found it takes tons of time, and it’s not efficient to me. I don’t have so much time to do that. These are what I need:
Modifying the existing assets and arranging them in the scene.
I’ll use it for the music videos, short films/animation (probably a long one later) and typography mostly.
It has to be productive in a short time.
It should work mostly everything just in the engine as I can’t afford to hire someone to take a shot. But I may buy the chroma key green screen.
Better and easier workflow for animation.
And here are my current conditions:
I’m broke, so I can’t afford to buy so many assets or plugins now.
My laptop is kind of old, but it’s a gaming one. 6th gen Skylake 2.4GHz~3.5GHz, 40 GB memory, 2 TB SSD, and GeForce 960m.
I don’t have any co-workers, so I’ll have to do from A to Z by myself for a while.
I learned the basics of Python.
As far as I understand, both Unity and Blender are dependent on 3rd party assets mostly unlike Unreal Engine. If it is true, I probably go with Unreal. UE5 looks all in one solution. Blender also looks all in one, but most useful assets are not free. I’ve been playing with Blender and Unreal for a month, but still have no idea which one I should focus on mainly.
The drawbacks of UE5 I found so far are high spec requirement and big file size. Engine, assets, project files and so on, every file is so big, and my hard drive is running out quickly.
I’m not sure if it’ll be the same in Unity and Blender for the file size problem.
Some people say that Blender is better in animation part, but most of them are old articles and I’m wondering if it’s still the same now. I also heard some people said that they saved lots of time to make animation with Unreal over Blender recently.
I’ll learn another one when I’m not busy, but please don’t say “Learn both” as I don’t have so much time these days.
So, in this case, which one is the best option for me? Still Unreal?
blender is a 3d DCC (digital content creation) app.
Blender can do everything you want to do in one place. That means less time to learn and be productive. But don’t think it will be fast. There is a lot to learn.
For animation and art stuff, if you had to choose unity or unreal, unreal would be my preference (and probably most artist).
But if you just wanna make some animations and render them, you don’t need to learn two HUGE pieces of software at once.
Unreal is generally a pleasure to work with though so ya know, feel free to test it out. But I don’t think anybody is generally making keyframe animations directly in unreal, though in UE5 there is some new animation and rigging tools that look neat.
As beginner though, it’s probably best to stick with older tools and workflows so that you can easily find instruction and troubleshooting help.
I should also mention, the best animation specific software (by a long shot) is maya. It’s not easy to find info about, but maya does have an indie subscription for about $30 a month. Just so you are aware.
Thanks for your feedback. I read an article on Reddit and someone said that he saved tons of time to make an animation with UE5 even though he has years of experience of Blender. What he said is “I was able to make it in 2 hours with Unreal, but it took 2 weeks with Blender”. It turned me on to Unreal actually. Time is most important to everybody and if it is true, there is no reason to hesitate.
I’m aware of that it’ll take lots of time to learn whatever I choose. Eventually, I’ll learn both, but I wanna focus on only one for now.
Maya is a good tool, but as I said, I can’t afford to invest now.
you don’t want a game engine for this, you want a 3D modeling package. Maya is the “standard” but Blender would mostly do. Unreal is for when you need it real-time or interactive.
Is it impossible to modify the assets? As far as I understand, there is modelling option in Unreal.
I’m going to use Meta Human mainly. It also provides the modification tool.
it does have some modeling features but nothing compared to a dedicated 3d modeling program. its good for making some nav mesh geometry or a quick test object. For a real model I would edit the mesh in another program and import it.
Well, I don’t expect dedicated function. What I need is basic one as I’m not gonna do modeling or sculpture deeply. As far as I understand, UE5 also handle the simple modifying. Isn’t it?
Blender and Unreal are above all complementary. It’s very good to have basic knowledge of python. The problem is the age of your hardware, have you considered switching to the desktop?
I’ve considered a lot, of course. But I can’t afford right now as I mentioned. This one of the reason I’m learning Unreal and Python. Once I get decent income, I’ll definitely get a new one.
take the opportunity to learn the basics of SQL, software architecture and the basics of machine learning, even if UE manages it for you, there is no reason not to understand how it works
I have a plan for it actually, but every body has 24 hours. Nobody can eat 100 cakes at once. When I reach a certain level of UE5, I’ll return to learn Python and machine learning.
Thanks for the advice.
I was in the same situation, Blender is Great, but the render time will drive you crazy.
I do not think you laptop will stay up render images with the CPU at 100% for 7h .
Forget your laptop
I will recomend you to buy a HP Z 620, for less than 300 euros you can have a 12 Core , 24 th CPU and 32 GB of Ram.
Hi, thanks for suggestion, but I won’t buy anything until I get regular income.
What about animation part? Do you think handling animation in Unreal is better than Blender?