Unreal Engine vs Unreal Studio Question

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello, nice to meet you!

I’m a 3d artist in-training that currently so excited by Unreal Engine. (discover it through Fortnite)
In my search I also discovered Unreal Studio.
I find that Unreal Engine is for creating games, while Unreal Studio is for architecture and other “3d visual work”.
Lastly, I also find that Unreal Engine also equipped with architecture and “3d visual work” from tutorial video.

That’s the gist of it, and here is my question:

  1. What’s the concrete difference between them.

  2. Why Epic Games separate Unreal Studio from Unreal Engine? Also why by separating them, Epic Games launch Unreal Studio in Beta instead of full release? Also will I get a free update of “released Unreal Studio”, even if it just once?

  3. I also read in Unreal Engine FAQ that “UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products.”
    I also read in EULA about “Royalty”. My question is, does game the only “product” that count? or is there any other “product” that count? In case you are wondering, I plan to write a book and use Unreal Engine to provide the illustration. If it’s not to much trouble, can you link it to me the list of product that count?

Thanks in Advance.

2

Unreal Studio is some additional plugins that help move assets/scenes from 3D programs (like 3ds Max) to UE4 without much work, it’s not a separate program, it’s just an addon for Unreal Engine.

The big advantage is that there’s many architectural visualization artists who have 3ds Max scenes using Vray that would like to use UE4 where they would be able to get nice animations in a shorter amount of time. But it’s a pain to have to export all of the content and remake the materials and lighting, so Unreal Studio/Datasmith is a plugin that Epic made that can do all of that automatically.

As for the royalty agreement, for non interactive media like books/images/videos you do not owe any royalties. So for example you could make a whole movie rendered in UE4 and wouldn’t have to pay to use UE4. So if you want to make a book with it then you wouldn’t owe anything.