Could UE be a quicker easier substitute for 3dsmax animations? Most of my renders have been showing how mechanical things work, some architectural.
Few things looking to simplify & reduce:
1- Rendering times. Waiting for frames.
2- Real time rendering. Getting photo real has been hard to learn.
3- Character Keyframing. Can UE pipeline make it easier to animate characters? I mean possibly by recording actual game play footage? Can a nice animation be done in realtime of character?
Also interested in making interactive scenes with VR. That of course can not be done in a traditional animation package. But my first concern is can UE replace simple animation work that does not require perfect lighting and GI. I guess that is the question.
Another thing is could the HTC Vive be a practical way to create motion capture in UE for making animations. Being that I am not a strong character rigger or character motion animator, looking for cheaper faster alternatives to do projects faster. Advise appreciated.
You could probably create mechanical rigs with blueprints quite ok. Characters not so much. Ideal would be an “Create/Rig/Animate” panel in persona with :
way to create rigs (shouldn’t be too hard to wire up blueprints for this).
way to skin (again can’t see how this would be too hard to wire up)
save/cache the animation.
Or even better, make the whole thing live, so you could make/tweak animations on the fly in sequencer. Then maybe bake it down to an animation file in the end, so the rig doesn’t need to evaluate during gameplay.
Or keep the rig live so you can wire up IK functionality directly into gameplay.
It’s shouldn’t be TOO labour intensive since most of the individual features are already present in one form or another (curve editing, blueprints for rig building, skin data etc.). This would be a massive time saver
compared to animating in an external package and exporting data into the editor, just to notice something is off and re-do the entire process again.
But yeah that would be a nice editor feature for sure
3ds Max has a lot more tools for animation, the only downside is that you have to export to UE4 to use them which slows down the process a bit. Still, for very simple stuff like some cinematic camera animation and platforms/doors it would be just fine to do it in UE4.
Unreal Engine is great for creating realistic lighting and getting feedback instantly (Max takes ages to render stuff out as its not a real-time rendering software).
However, in comparison what is easier to use for rigging, general camera animation and rendering (setup-wise), Max is… by a long shot.
In Unreal, you have to create a Level sequence for every new camera and there are a ton of (useless) options for rendering stuff out where you need it.
In Max, all you press is F10 to get into rendering window, set up your desired destination for saved image sequences or avi file and you’re basically done.
Animating stuff in Max is also dead easy. In Max, all you really need to do is select the object, activate the timeline, and start setting up the keyframes for the object you wish to animate.
The process is longer and more complicated in Unreal as it requires setup of Level sequence and making sure everything works - which of course stops working after you save stuff for some reason - or at least this seems to be the case in Unreal 5.3).
Unreal has a clunkier navigation as well vs Max… so animating the camera is more difficult if you’re doing it with keyframes.
Yes you can apply a path follow in Unreal (or a version of it), but again, Max is just better equipped for that.
If Unreal had Max UI, modelling and animation capabilities it would be a no brainer to use it.
As is, you’re better of using Max to create meshes, rig them or animate them, then export everything into Unreal.
You can also export the camera from Max to Unreal (but this can be a bit clunky sometimes).
