Unity vs Unreal engine

Fluffy_hug_of_death

Hi all,
(A little background: I'm trying to do projects to become a games artist, but haven't used Unity before, I'm confident with Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop, Mari, and different renders, but I want to start getting my projects into a game engine and understanding the gaming pipeline etc.)

I downloaded Unity for one of my projects recently, but when looking how to restrict camera movement (so ideally I'd like the camera to be able to move a very limited amount, around maybe 1/4 of my project, not moving on the y axis) all of the answers came up with a lot of code (yikes! I know a tiny amount of basic SQL).

I haven't looked at Unreal as much, but I'm wondering if it would be more appropriate for what I want to do with this project...
There is a small amount of animation, but other than that, I just want the ability to move around my project.

So my questions are:
Would Unreal or Unity be better for this?
Why?
Does the interface in unity allow for users with little to no coding knowledge to still use it?

Thanks all!

Zack Maxwell

If you just want to show off your art in an engine, Unreal is definitely better. It's way easier to set up, has Blueprints for easy programming, and vastly superior default rendering.

Fluffy_hug_of_death

Zack Maxwell said:

If you just want to show off your art in an engine, Unreal is definitely better. It's way easier to set up, has Blueprints for easy programming, and vastly superior default rendering.

Thanks Zack, it sounds much more user friendly. I'll give it a go - thanks

musashidan

No doubt about it, UE4 has the upper hand on Unity in a lot of ways.

Fluffy_hug_of_death

musashidan said:

No doubt about it, UE4 has the upper hand on Unity in a lot of ways.

Hi musahidan,
In general?
or are there circumstances where unity may be better?

sacboi

A good pros & cons comparison between the two engines:

https://www.slant.co/versus/1047/5128/~unity_vs_unreal-engine-4

 

Zack Maxwell

The actual coding side is cleaner and easier to use in Unity, and allows you to easily make custom tools to speed up production.
By comparison, Unreal offers nowhere near the same level of ability to create custom tools (I don't think you can add custom interface elements AT ALL), Blueprints become too convoluted to use on complex tasks effectively, and the C++ coding is a bit slow and messy.
If you expect your game to have a large return (like you're working as part of a relatively large team on a big game), then Unity has an upfront cost instead of royalties.
In practically every other area, I'd say Unreal is better.

sacboi

Yeah I'd agree, for me it's native JavaScript (variant) was the primary reason choosing Unity over UE due to spending time in Web dev back in the day however that said no way I'd class myself today as yet from scratch, anywhere near an intuitive level writing scripts.     

JordanN

Whatever happened to Cryengine? 

Kinda depressing the engine that gave us Crysis and Ryse has fallen out of mainstream opinion. 
Not that there's anything specifically wrong with Unity or Unreal, but competition is always a good thing to help drive innovation and prevent the industry from stagnating. 

McDev

Fluffy_hug_of_death said:

I want to start getting my projects into a game engine and understanding the gaming pipeline etc.)

Related to this, use both, and better a few more like Cryengine (e.g. Lumberyard) and Source Engine. Maybe even go into modding. Because if you want to learn the pipeline then getting to understand how studios create their work is essential, therefore modding can help you to get a wide range of different techniques and setups certain studios use.

You might then focus on one engine where you show of your work but to learn "the gaming" pipeline you should not focus on one engine.

Andreicus

JordanN said:

Whatever happened to Cryengine? 

Kinda depressing the engine that gave us Crysis and Ryse has fallen out of mainstream opinion. 
Not that there's anything specifically wrong with Unity or Unreal, but competition is always a good thing to help drive innovation and prevent the industry from stagnating. 

I think that Crytek falled behind because they almost gone bankruptcy some years ago and they sold the Cryengine 3 license to Amazon to recover themselves.
Anyway, before switching to unreal I used the Cryengine 5 and it crashed every 10 minutes especially with heavy scenes and the import tool sucked, maybe nowadays is better. 

Unreal never failed on me and it is actively developed so it's my main engine. 

Shrike

You can buy visual scripting for unity in varied shapes on the asset store too

For more art heavy projects and first person stuff I would go with unreal, for more gameplay heavy and otherwise unity. Unitys biggest advantage is the asset store, C# and the Windows style editor, which I see as unreals biggest weaknesses, the non conventional editor and forced visual scripting, unreal is a more complete package however and has superior tech, it boils down to choosing between making better game systems or making better art.

kanga

Im in the same boat as you (if I understood correctly). Ive done quite a bit of work in unity but Im not a coder, so I use an engine to showcase my stuff and further my understanding of what is needed to produce functioning assets. In unity you can pretty much adapt code to work with what you want. Unity is artist friendly and even scene navigation is very like a standard 3d app.

What unreal has in its favor is a number of presets that load with your project and make it look far better from the get go. The visual coding system is pretty good to work with, and if you are like me: monkey see, monkey do, monkey adapt works pretty well. Both engines have great communities and they both have enough info available for you to get what you want. If you want an engine to present your stuff then I reckon you cant go far wrong with UE4.

kaspersp

Andreicus said:

JordanN said:

Whatever happened to Cryengine? 

Kinda depressing the engine that gave us Crysis and Ryse has fallen out of mainstream opinion. 
Not that there's anything specifically wrong with Unity or Unreal, but competition is always a good thing to help drive innovation and prevent the industry from stagnating. 

I think that Crytek falled behind because they almost gone bankruptcy some years ago and they sold the Cryengine 3 license to Amazon to recover themselves.
Anyway, before switching to unreal I used the Cryengine 5 and it crashed every 10 minutes especially with heavy scenes and the import tool sucked, maybe nowadays is better. 

Unreal never failed on me and it is actively developed so it's my main engine. 

That's true. Today, what used to be CryEngine is now Amazon's Lumberyard Engine.

Fluffy_hug_of_death

Zack Maxwell said:

The actual coding side is cleaner and easier to use in Unity, and allows you to easily make custom tools to speed up production.
By comparison, Unreal offers nowhere near the same level of ability to create custom tools (I don't think you can add custom interface elements AT ALL), Blueprints become too convoluted to use on complex tasks effectively, and the C++ coding is a bit slow and messy.
If you expect your game to have a large return (like you're working as part of a relatively large team on a big game), then Unity has an upfront cost instead of royalties.
In practically every other area, I'd say Unreal is better.

Thanks Zack,
I'll consider this when going forward, maybe best to first experiment with Unreal, then as @McDev said use some different engines!

McDev said:

Fluffy_hug_of_death said:

I want to start getting my projects into a game engine and understanding the gaming pipeline etc.)

Related to this, use both, and better a few more like Cryengine (e.g. Lumberyard) and Source Engine. Maybe even go into modding. Because if you want to learn the pipeline then getting to understand how studios create their work is essential, therefore modding can help you to get a wide range of different techniques and setups certain studios use.

You might then focus on one engine where you show of your work but to learn "the gaming" pipeline you should not focus on one engine.

Thank you for this! I've not considered this before but it sounds like a really good idea! I will definitely look into this.

musashidan

Also, Godot 3.0 was recently released. Might be one to watch for the future. It's open source, I believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTAeDoRIHaA

melviso

I tested out Lumberyard last year and I found it lacking in a lot of areas. I admire the fact that they are working very hard to make the engine user friendly. I normally check up on the engine to see what features they have added or updated.
I haven't tested Unity at all bc I find UE4 seems to fulfil all my needs currently for archviz.