Thank you for the Unreal Studio! I really love it, but…
This is not all good news. I would rather have a finished product that we would have to buy than another year in beta. Unreal Studio is targeted to business use, but it would be rather hazardous to actually use it for the real thing if it’s still in beta. I’m working in a company where importing clients’ CAD-models to (Unreal Engine) application will be a key feature in near future. This announcement force us to test other options, because supposed release of the finished version of Unreal Studio is too far away. At least you were straight and said it’s another year, not few months and then another few months.
Currently Unreal Studio (Datasmith) haven’t been able to convert a single large CAD-model from our clients to UE4 without issues (mostly problems with UV-maps, but also other problems), so there is clearly lots of things to do. Those conversions are much harder when you are not the creator of those CAD-models and don’t have access to the original CAD-model or even the CAD-application. Also every client have their own habits of doing things. We have only the CAD-model and nothing else. I have to recommend a workflow for our company to use CAD-models in our future applications, but Unreal Studio is not working good enough for that now and we need to get something out before the September 2019. Unreal Studio is still multiple times faster than doing it manually, but it does only 90% of the job it should do.