Unreal Engine, like Unity, right now has to be used with Autodesk products like 3DS Max or Maya, or at least that is the case with the large majority of professionals. This is an impediment to using Unreal Engine and thus makes Epic Games sort of dependent on Autodesk.
There is probably no coincidence that the new general manager of Unreal Engine is an ex-Autodesk SVP, Marc Petit, who used to be in charge of Maya, 3DS Max, etc for a decade (https://www.awn.com/news/marc-petit-leaves-autodesk). He definitely sees the value of building up Blender to remove the dependence of Unreal Engine on expensive tools from other vendors.
3D modelling software has had a long history of expensive, esoteric, difficult-to-use applications. Epic, hoping to make money from large numbers of Unreal Engine licenses, would like to see that situation change. Ideally (for them), 3D modelling software would be free and easy to use for everyone, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for those who might make 3D games using UE.
By donating to Blender, Epic hopes to achieve two things:
1. Blender becomes better and easier to use, allowing more developers to enter the market and buy UE licenses.
2. Increased competition puts downward price pressure on commercial 3D packages such as Maya, thus making it more affordable for small-to-medium sized game studios, potentially freeing up budget for more UE licenses.
But yeah - it doesn't seem like this should happen as often as it does.
It's the devil they know. It's not likely malicious or anything conniving, and just something they feel comfortable talking about when making the pitch for their integration.
This is taken directly from the EAC dll:
Linux is ridiculously powerful & versatile as I'm sure we all know...and having that much opportunity to mess with all the net/visual/input subsystems in a way the game can't even see (since it's trapped in WINE) is a major issue cheat wise.
Not ideal but I can totally see why a company might from a practical/commercial point of view just block it outright. Especially given player numbers of WINE players vs upsetting your entire user base due to cheaters.
Contradictory sentiments like these are what lead me to believe this grant is mostly for marketing purposes. (tin-foil hat mode)
However, I don't see the contradiction in Sweeney's statement. One can appreciate the advantages of open tools, libraries and platforms, and still want to publish a proprietary game on top of that technology.
It's kind of like an omnivore chef joining a forum full of vegans to work on improving seasonings for braised veggies. They might not be pleased when they find out that she wants to make a side dish to be served with steak; but that in itself doesn't mean her goal is exploitation or sabotage, rather than mutually beneficial cooperation.
"I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate" - Steve Irwin, when asked about accepting money from "unethical" groups and using it for conservation. https://youtu.be/-1gVkTFam1w?t=753
If it helps a good goal, what does it matter?
I think he's operating with a different understanding of the word "open" than the rest of us.
EGS doesn't have DRM, it is up to each game to implement their own if they want, but the store itself doesn't provide any.
Which is great since most games do not bother :-P (although i'd prefer it if they had a DRM-free stance like GOG, but Epic is too publisher-friendly to allow that).
Right now, this is what I usually do:
- Basic Modeling: Blender
- Sculpting + Details: ZBrush
- Painting: Substance Painter
- Animation: Maya
Last but not least, they should make more effort to improve their keybindings. They've been monkey patching it in 2.8 with the "industry-compatible" keybindings but when you use it a bunch of other things stop working.
I had pretty good success with it, and wrote a Python addon which builds on top to retarget mocap data from the Perception Neuron suit to the UE4 Skeleton.
I tried Blender a decade ago but since I had access to Maya & 3D Studio Max I didn't give it much attempt since the UI seemed more confusing & the material available to learn was lacking.
0) Blender is much more stable than Maya. Also it loads more quickly and is less than 10% the filesize. Although it is quite powerful, Maya is still very bloated with decades of technical debt and legacy baked in. Also blender is OSS which makes me prefer it on principle if I can use it.
1) Blender’s interface has a higher “skill ceiling” — it reminds me of Vim in that most common operations are a few single-key presses away. For example, “rotate the selected object 45 degrees around the x axis” can be executed via R->4->5->X->Enter. Many of these kinds of basic operations require the use of a mouse in Maya or a MEL expression. Of course, this also raises the “skill floor” of blender because you have to remember more key combos. However these days the UI is pretty discoverable (even before Blender 2.8).
2) For basic hard surface UV unwrapping, I like the workflow in blender much better. The interface is the same in 2D as in 3D, and the key combos all carry over, which I really like. Maya has more automatic UV unwrapping options, but I rarely reach for those anyway.
3) 100% of blender’s interface is scriptable. You can literally hover over any button and the corresponding blender python code to execute that button will show in a tooltip. This makes it easy to automate basically anything and has empowered a great community of plugin authors. Maya also has this with MEL, and more recently maya python, but those solutions feel tacked on whereas blender’s UX was built from the ground up to support python.
I should also mention that blender has already went through a major UI refresh, so if you haven’t tried in a while it would be worth trying it out again. I would say that the jump in accessibility from the previous UI refresh is the same jump that we see now. So I’d give blender a second chance if you haven’t already!
Ten years is a really long time though. Google's Go programming language didn't exist ten years ago.
As a slighty OT aside, I really hope blender's UI changes sloooow down. I've been using it for 16 years. 2.8 versus 2.7 is so different, It almost feels like they're making changes for change sake.
I've been trying to use their various 2.8 RC's so I don't have to say I don't know how to use blender anymore when it pops.
They made the following things toggleable at launch, but man these are some muscle memory breaking changes that are now the default.
- Changed selecting objects from right to left click - Space bar no longer opens up the function search. The search is like 50% of my workflow, so this one hit me in the gut until I changed the setting.
Then there's some other things that feel renamed for no discernible reason.
- I can't search for 'remove doubles' anymore. There are certain geometries that I've come to build by snapping to axis, extruding, snapping to vertices, remove doubles. Now it's buried in a menu at mesh->clean up->'merge by distance'. It also makes a GUI element pop with the distance argument, and there's no obvious way to "apply". So weird. - Ambient occlusion in the view appears to have been renamed 'cavity'. - The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling. - The view/selection/snap/etc settings bar has moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Why? - Properties tabs moved to the side from the top. I can see why. - I can't make objects unselectable but visible in the outliner. Why?! - Layers are gone, they're now "collections" but they don't do the same thing at all!
This is the stuff I've hit in a about 2 hours of messing. I'm willing to acclimate to about 90% of these changes. So far it's just the layers / merge doubles thing that really sucks. Eevee is really pretty, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.
Tbh the UI being terrible was one of the main reasons I stayed away from Blender. The fact they changed it makes me have hope I can start using it seriously.
1) Mesh > Clean Up > Merge by Distance
2) F3 operator search. Start typing "mer..." and hit Enter.
3) Ctrl-V to show vertex menu, then Merge Vertices > By Distance
4) The quickest: Alt-M + B (show vertex merge menu, B to select "By Distance")
I scratched my head a bit first too, but frankly "merge vertices by distance" is far more descriptive than "remove doubles".
The UI that pops up is just the operator parameters that used to appear when you hit F6 (eg try adding a Circle, see the parameters that pop up) It's better this is visible to users, rather than hidden behind some secret hotkey. As with previous Blender versions, operators are "applied" by default - you can change the parameters via the UI until you like the result. Once you switch operator, move on, or change mode, the UI will disappear and the operation becomes undoable.
To make objects visible/selectable/renderable etc... open the filter menu on the Outliner (top right, looks like a funnel). This lets you add more toggles to the items.
To move the view/selection/snap settings to the bottom just right click, Header > Flip to Bottom/Top.
Collections replace layers and groups (eg you can instance a Collection), though I haven't completely got my head round them yet. But they look quite powerful.
One more thing on this - hit Shift-Space to show the available tool icons with labels as a context menu.
If you prefer this (I do), you can then hide the icons on the left via View > Toolbar (or equivalently, toggle via the T key).
Remove doubles can be done with Alt-M -> tap 'B'.
The 3D header (and any header in Blender) can be moved to the top or bottom: right-click the header, select "Flip to Top" or "Flip to Bottom".
In the Outliner, you can enable the "toggle selectable" button in the Filters popup. Click on the "Filter" icon, then click on the mouse cursor to enable the button. Now, you can click the cursor next to any object to make it unselectable, and it will remain visible in the outliner.
Collections can do everything Layers could do, and many more things besides.
Just engaging in the time honored tradition of hand wringing.
My first experience with the Epic store was to get Satisfactory. And while it was annoying not being able to have it on steam, it really became a non-issue since everyone I play with uses Discord. Again, I am curious to hear other opinions on this because I really do not see the big deal in my experience.
I'm happy about their revenue share and was excited when they got started - until it became obvious that their tactics didn't align with their PR.
Not knocking the donation per se but it's a bit easier to be a good guy when you're sitting on the world's biggest pile of kid's pocket money.
Several friends have stories along the lines of their children taking not spending any money on their summer holidays because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. It's carefully designed smack for kids and there has to be a certain amount of moral push-back on that.
do you mean Steaming piles of cash? :)
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
It doesn't look like it has many (any?) strings. Aside from being split over three years in Blender's case.
It is worth considering that this is in Epic's best interests as Blender + Unreal Engine is a common platform for startups/indie devs.
Making Blender better may make the games that people develop using Unreal Engine better, which might mean higher license income for Epic. So it is a win for Epic and a win for Blender/the community.
End users get new features they may actually use, massive OSS gets funding. Win-win for all parties.
[0]https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/netherlands-programmer-...
[1] https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/san-francisco-programme...
UE4's own tools (which are based around creating environments from existing models, placing actors, and realtime rendering) are WORLDS ahead of common Autodesk modelling tools eg 3DS Max and Maya (which Epic itself uses). UE4 is easy to pick up, but then you have to learn Maya and it becomes a grind.
There needs to be something as powerful as Maya with a better UX to stop modelling being a blocker for new UE4 users. Being Free As in Beer and Free as in Freedom help too.
Sure there is.
- UE4 needs to move a viewport around 3D space, so does Maya. UE4 uses game controls. Maya you need to hold down something or tweak it to do that.
- UE4 involves creating and manipulating objects in space for BSP. Maya involves creating and manipulating objects in space for modelling.
Maya has a UI that's 20+ years old with minimal changes. UE4 does not.
> They are built to do very different things.
No, they're built to do different but related things. I'm not sure why you would think that modelling and environment creation are very different. For the purposes of gamedev or archvis, they're both tools to support making the environment. And one is a barely maintained cash cow.
This is a 2D animation generated from a 3D environment. Mind blowing ->