Unreal Engine - Wow!

Hey everyone,

I hope you had a great week! 

Mine was very busy because of a Motion Capture Gig that came up on short notice (not 3dx). But I did have time to play around with Unreal Engine 4.26 and I have to say: WOW! 

I really just scratched the surface but I can already tell that I love Unreal :) I am going through some basic tutorials for landscape, foliage painting etc. and I am constantly stumbling over features and how things are handled in Unreal (compared to Unity) that are just amazing. Working with Unreal feels how it´s supposed to be: focusing on content creation without having all those troubles we had so far with Unity. It feels like being freed from chains if you get what I mean :)

I was going through some assets that I already own or that come with Unreal and started painting some foliage in a very simple test scene. And not only does everything look better (antialiasing, in general how light is handled) but the performance is like 3-4 times as good as in Unity! When I paint like 1000 Trees the performance is still so much better than in Unity...It's amazing :)

There are so many things that "just work" without having to struggle with them.  Just to name a few:

• Very well designed Landscape authoring
• Very well designed foliage painting
• Very well made antialiasing
• Wind for foliage
• Volumetric Clouds
• Volumetric light (god rays)
• Day of time changes that look... simply amazing
• Material/Shader editor is so intuitive
• Lens flares! Unity has not managed to get that working for years! It's still not supported out of the box for HDRP.  I love lens flares! Especially for the sun :)
• MINDBLOWING PERFORMANCE!!!

We will not work with UE5 yet because it´s not ready for productions (yet) but already UE4.26 is so good that I never want to go back to Unity.

I am so glad we are making the transition and everyone will benefit. We, because the content creation is with way less headache and you because you can enjoy better graphics. 

We will re-create the Island from EP5 (just way better looking) and then create a test-build for you in the coming weeks where you can just run around and test the performance. I am sure you will love it :)

But we won't recreate EP5/6 in Unreal, that would be way too much work and we want to focus on something new ;)

Alright, that´s it for this week! There are great things ahead and I can't wait to learn more and more about Unreal Engine.

Have a great weekend!

All the best,
PM & Team