Portfolio Question: What program to render real time stills of my work?

gumbosamurai

So, I am working on getting a portfolio together.  I am focusing on environment art for games.  While I already have some props and vehicles completed; there are a few interior and exterior scenes I am putting together.  A total of three to be precise.  I am using Maya,  Zbrush and Photoshop primarily.  As for compiling it all together I am a little at a loss.  While in the past I have rendered out in Mental Ray and also using 3d Max, I figured would be better to bring the work into a realtime setting and get still images for my portfolio that way.  I have some working knowledge of UDK, but even though I'm a little rusty on it, last I remember you couldn't import mods into UDK.  Is this correct or am I mistaken?  I haven't used Marmoset, but not sure if that is just for checking out single models like a character, prop, etc.  Ideally would like to be able to bring everything into a program and fully set up the scene.  While I have done some looking around I figured it would more helpful asking the wealth of knowledge on here.  Hopefully I explained my situation as clearly as possible.  Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Also, as far as texture maps go, using Diffuse, Spec, and Normal (where needed).  Not sure if that would affect any answers.  Thanks ahead of time for any help. 

musashidan

If you have experience in UDK then using UE4 makes perfect sense. 4.13 introduced a nice .hdr preview/showcase function. There are some great Max scripts to make scene transition as straightforward as possible. Google Tom shannon UE4 or Greg's tools.

Not sure what you mean by 'couldn't import mods into UDK'

I would defo recommend checking it out. It's free and should be easy for you to pick up with your previuos UDK experience.

Marmoset TB is great and V3 is about to be released. You can certainly set up full scenes in it and it can take a serious amount of triangles in the viewport.

Eric Chadwick

Agreed.

Also you should be using PBR instead of Diffuse/Spec/Normal. So that would be Albedo/Roughness/Metallic in Unreal.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/

We have some good resources about PBR here on our wiki
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/PBR

gumbosamurai

Thanks guys, that's a big help actually.  I guess with UDK for some reason I wasn't sure if bringing in outside models was possible, but I think it was just the file type I was using at the time.  I may stick with Unreal since I'm familiar with UDK, but definitely going to check Marmoset out as well.  Also, thanks on the PBR info.  I already checked out some of the resources and very helpful and interesting to say the least.  Thanks again for the replies; they were a big help.