I'd already done a few of Jonathan Winbush's Unreal Engine tutorials, more just to learn something about it as I've still to have any use for it in a client project. However, I know huge potential when I see it, so when School of Motion released their self-guided course, Unreal Engine for 3D artists, I signed up immediately and got it done pretty quickly.
Gotta say, yep, it was pretty good. I learned a lot from it and I've still got a TON of general observations, explorations, questions and things to figure out, like - It won't entirely replace my C4D use and I'll end up taking assorted elements from there into UE5 for rendering and world building. Plants, rock textures and real-world elements look AMAZING due to that new Nanite system.
It's pretty fast and responsive. It also takes up a huge amount of hard drive space. There a ton of menus and settings buried deep in there. It's not always the easiest to figure out what goes where and what should be turned on or off. Creating things like animated materials or avoiding open-backed meshes disappearing isn't as simple as C4D.
Can I bring in a (tracked) 3D camera from AE or C4D into UE5? What's the process for multipass renders to composite further in AE? How do I clone objects - I've recently found out that it's best done via the Foliage brush.
How do I get the physics and dynamics to work? I think I got it sorted out on that 3rd shot with a tentacled Kraken, rendered it, but turned it off somehow (don't ask...) and can't figure out how to get it working again, heheh.
So the answer to that is not a goddamn clue. How do I restore from a crash/autosave?
Why is there so many options to save inside the project which don't seem to save it as I'd expect?
Can I just copy a UE project folder to an external HD and open it on another machine?
Is that how that works?
What's the best way to go about organising project folders & library/marketplace downloads?
On a SSD, or HD, or NVME?
Should that be on the same drive as the project?
Will I use it more than C4D? Maybe, I think? It's obviously faster to render out, but a hell of a lot more convoluted to get to work effectively.
I've literally only scratched the surface with this and there's so much more to investigate and work on. Looking forward to seeing what future projects I can get doing with it! I'm still getting my head around it, but I'm finding the best way to approach it would be to think of it as somewhere to arrange & render your 3D models and make environments, rather than experiment with X-Particles, cloth sims and dynamics.
Project Tags
Companies
Oogie Art
- Arts and Culture