It seems like unreal engine 4 gives renders that can beat a lot of renders made by 3ds max, maya etc…
And unreal engine 4 makes it in real time. so, i wonder if anyone has tried to do a short movie using ue4 because
the question here is about the workflow.
you need your 3d package program to twick the animations and then you export it to unreal engine 4 and connects it all together.
can you for example make the whole scene and animations of multi characters in a 3d package and then import it to unreal engine 4 as a whole
piece just to render it there ?
and how easy will it be to tweak the animations after everything is already in place ?
Will i have to reimport the whole scene everytime i wanna change something ?
points at Matinee Fight Scene and Elemental Demo
Thanks but those are finished projects, i’m asking about the workflow.
i insterested in this topic.
i am doing something like this with my animations (if i understand right, my english its bad), ins’t movie, but i have lots of animations with two characters interacting and would be nice how do that experience users.
i already do few of this animations, but i don’t know what its the best way, since sometimes ins’t easy and must do a lot of modifications for both characters, take too much time…
First off there’s no way UE4 (as great as it is) can beat a Max render. UE4 can’t even handle the polygon count that an actual animation requires. An average game character might have 100,000 polys, movie characters can have hundreds of millions - mind you we’re just talking the characters here. A movie character can have more polys than an entire scene in a game. Forget about the rest of the scene. It’s actually Apple and Oranges. What you see in the Matinee example is top notch work created by top notch pros using Maya. The assets were created then imported into Unreal and coded to run the animations. Why go through all of that to create an animation when you could just render it from Maya in the first place? You’re adding extra steps for no logical reason and, in the end, it will not compare to something done with a dedicated animation/modeling package. But, unless you intend to use Epic’s assets, you’ll still have to use the animation/modeling package to create your assets anyway.
Game engines use a lot of tricks to get things running in real-time, so the quality isn’t going to be better than using a high quality render from something like Vray or Mental Ray, but in some cases the quality is fine for what you’re doing. I’ve used UE4 already for an animation at work because it’s got enough quality and I needed it rendered fast, but if I had the time then I’d render in Vray because it’s got much better quality.
Probably the biggest issue for rendering in UE4 is the lack of a dynamic global illumination system, that will probably change in the future though. But if you’ve got a case with lots of things being animated then you’ll lose the lighting quality.
Anyways as far as workflow goes, creating your animations in your 3D package and then exporting to UE4 is very easy to setup, however if it’s not right then you’ll have to go back and adjust in your 3D program, you can’t create new animations just from UE4. In UE4 it goes as far as blending animations together (there’s even some systems for targeting parts of an animation for things like feet and hands), but nothing that can create from scratch. Simple stuff like a door being animated can be done in UE4, but other stuff not so much.
For other parts of the workflow, it’s best to export things individually, so send one character at a time. The environment stuff you can export as a single FBX file but make sure to turn off the Combine Meshes option so that it’ll split them out again when you import to UE4–main thing is that each object in the level gets its own lightmap, so if everything is a single static mesh then even at the highest lightmap resolution it won’t look good, so you’d need to break it down into different objects so that it uses more lightmaps.
Other things you don’t really need to be concerned with–some things that you’d normally do to improve performance aren’t as big of a deal if you’re just using things for rendering, if it goes at 20FPS that’s still way faster than rendering in a 3D package even if it’s not fast enough for real-time. So things like instancing where you try to reuse a static mesh isn’t a big deal, so you can export all of your instances together and while that’s not necessarily efficient it won’t be a big deal. You can also use higher resolution lightmaps and more materials, along with turning up other graphical settings.
Thanks for the answers, i guess for best quality i will just use a 3D package, it just that UE4 comes with so many good effects out of the box that this is very tempting…
Depending on your needs it can work quite well, if you check out the archviz threads stuff like that can be done and then you can render animations from it quite well.
The trick to great-looking animations is to have really good artists who really know their tools. Doesn’t matter if it’s Max, UE4, or Blender; talent + skill + knowledge will yield results, lack of them will not.
Yes, there are some terrible Mental Ray or V-Ray or whatever renders, being used in a variety of media (I won’t mention any particular TV ad and nobody will then have to defend how they only had one night to make it happen once all the suits were done negotiating.)
The reason the UE demos look great is that really talented artists who know the tools have worked hard to make it so. Believe me, there are many terrible movies/scenes made in UE4 as well 
I would like to use UE to render backgrounds for green screen scenes with live actors. The quality of UE looks very good but the render time is light years faster than rendering in Vray. One frame from an Archinteriors model rendered in Vray can take 25 Minutes. Where a slightly lower but usable quality can be created almost instantly with UE. Has anyone here used UE for this type of application and where can I found information about how to do this?
Hi there, check my video on you tubehttps://youtube.com/xwKhyDSRiPEI am trying to do the same…
Cheers