is unreal engine a great alternative to blender?
Since the release of unreal engine 5, update after update, unreal engine has gotten new features that let you do what you would normaly do in dccs like blender and the list keeps growing ontop of all the features it has that blender does not have.
usually when we are comparing blender to other DCC blender always come out favored because of its zero dollar cost price, but unreal engine is also free atleast until you are very very successful and at that point, even when you only use blender its likely you are using paid addons as well, so today we are going to explore the future of blender and unreal engine, and try to answer the question, is unreal engine a great alternative to blender?
I have always wanted to make motion graphics and as a blender user its been a struggle, blender has an extensive list of modifiers for modeling but nothing for motion graphics, of cause you can stack and mix different modifiers until you get something interesting but you are still limited in what you can do compared to applications like cinema 4d, cinema 4d has been unrivaled at motion graphics until now, with the new release of a new motion graphics mode for unreal engine, which puts unreal engine another step ahead of blender.
There have been some move towards polygon modeling in unreal 5 series, though these tools are not comparable to blenders extensive modeling tools. One area where i find unreal engine become a better option for artists is when it comes to rigging, if you are making rigs for games it goes without saying, unreal engines automatic rigging tools are the way to go so now the question becomes, how about rigging for film or animation.
Automatic rigging
if you are studio or making a movie, blender still provides the best options and customization for animation and rigging, but you have to put in quite a lot of work.
i can see unreal engine becoming a great option for individual artists or small teams and studios as there automatic rigging system is the best among any DCCs i have tried, this also guarantees that your rig will work with other tools in unreal engine like animation targeting, where you can easily transfer your animation and rig from one character to another in just a few clicks.
another tool that can be extremely useful to animators is motion matching, most animation is made as a series of animations, like character running, jumping, boxing, walking and more, these are then put together to make a complete story, putting them together is easy the hard part is the transition from one state to the other.
unreal engine has a great solution for that, where it can easily create the missing animation between the different animations to make the whole sequence smooth.
everything unreal can do blender can do and sometimes do even better, the major difference is how many clicks you need to make to get the results, for studios with dedicated skilled animators blender or other DCCs are always going to be a better option since applications like blender give you more control and the animation and modeling tools are usually more mature that unreal engines.
The selling point for unreal engine is that while the quality is not meant for television or film, you can achieve usable results in a matter of minutes without too much setup and sometimes you are able to achieve movie like renders that rival what you get with cycles, or any other offline render engine.
if you are rendering with eevee, hands down unreal engine is going to produce better results thanks, to lumen, nanite and other features that eevee struggles with like reflections and volumetric fog.
i can go on and list hundreds of other reasons why unreal is a great alternative to blender but there also hundreds of other reasons why unreal is unusable without a 3d application like blender.
the point of the video is to show that as an artist you should not be married to any application and always look for tools that can better your craft, and right now unreal engine is really looking sexy.
