Working With Unreal on a Mac

I am just getting started with Unreal and trying to determine the best approach to use UE5 on a Mac. As some background, I don’t plan to build and deploy games, but rather using UE5 for archviz and cinematics. What I’ve experienced so far (UE5.0.3, 2020 iMac 3.8 GHz 8 core Intel i7, 32G Ram):

  • Random crashes, a few things that seem to be a bug (but could be my lack of knowledge/experience)
    • Limited access to models in the marketplace (“Supported Platforms” indicates Windows only, so no download is available on the Mac)

So, I’m trying to figure out if I’m getting started on the wrong foot:

  • Is there a large proportion of Mac users or are Unreal devs primarily Windows only?
  • Am I primarily being limited on specs (e.g., I should have at least 64GB RAM)
  • Can models created on Windows be reliably exported/re-imported to Mac? (assuming no Windows-specific plugins have been used). I have tested this with one free model without difficulty, but not sure if it’s a reliable approach going forward for importing large maps with lots of assets, like this example.

Thanks in advance for any input. I’m new here so apologies if these are really basic questions. I haven’t been able to find clear answers for this so far.

Mac is very crashy at the moment ( with 5 ).

You can ignore the platform icons on the marketplace, as long as it’s just meshes and blueprints. Don’t get plugins.

There are definitely a lot of Maccies :slight_smile:

No.

Very much so, yes. I have opened whole chunks of various projects on a Mac, that I developed on Windows. Typically, everything is pretty transferable.

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@ClockworkOcean Thank you so much for the fast and helpful reply!

Am I missing an easy way to download models/assets from the marketplace that are marked Windows only? I get an error that the asset is not compatible (snapshot attached). My workaround was to open up Windows, create a blank project, add the asset from the marketplace on Windows, then copy the Project folder over to the Mac. Fingers are crossed that there may be an easier way or workaround to do this without going via Windows.


I didn’t find anything in the knowledge base that offered an alt solution

Bummer. Didn’t realize it was that bad. But I’d recommend migrating the asset folder, if you can.

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