Jumping Ships From Unity to UDK. Need some guidance.
polycounter lvl 5
So as the subject suggests, I am going to start up UDK for the time first time. I have been using Unity 3d for about 2 years, and I have never been satisfied as an artist coming from a fine arts background.
I was wondering A few things:
- All of my UDK tutorials about 2 or 3 years old. Where can I find the best, most current introduction tuts (and of course I'm asking for the community to share their personal experience). Eat 3d, 3d motive, Digital Tutors, UDK Forums?
- Any tips to give a Unity guy?
-edit: Also is it ok to download a Beta to use as your main version?
I'm excited to get into an engine with a more artist friendly approach.
I was wondering A few things:
- All of my UDK tutorials about 2 or 3 years old. Where can I find the best, most current introduction tuts (and of course I'm asking for the community to share their personal experience). Eat 3d, 3d motive, Digital Tutors, UDK Forums?
- Any tips to give a Unity guy?
-edit: Also is it ok to download a Beta to use as your main version?
I'm excited to get into an engine with a more artist friendly approach.
Replies
Most sites like Eat3D and 3D Motive are awesome and I highly recommend either of them. The things I have learned from these sites are numerous but in most cases they are very specific although in depth tutorials. If you're just getting started I would suggest the 3D Buzz videos I linked to before as well as the UDN. Once you are comfortable with the basics, move to Eat3D and 3D motive for more specific features.
artist friendly unless you want to do something really different, then you'll miss the time when a coder could literally change the engine as you need it
but out of the box, definitely unreal3 is the nicest package i ever worked with, from an artist point of view.
Those 3d Buzz Tuts have been insanely helpful. Thanks a million!
http://www.eat3d.com/training_videos
Don't get me wrong, I do love UDK. It creates beautiful graphics, let's me put test levels on an iPad directly from PC without needing a mac.
But be warned, using UDK is like digging a hole to the centre of the earth. At first while you're digging through the top soil (i.e. importing static assets, making shaders) you think "wow, this is going great". Then at some point you hit solid rock (i.e. what do you mean I can't make a skyrim clone with kismet?)
I'm not saying don't use UDK though, I think it's a great choice. Just be aware that there's rock down there.
I have already bought Hourence's first tutorial. Its on!
Yeah well its better than Unity. There you have to go to the farmer's nursery to buy the top soil to even get started.
What? Are you compltely unaware of the enormous user community and enormous amounts of tutorials out there?
Unity was designed in mind for the artist, as well as the programmer. I love UDK too, and in fact I always use it to present my work. However, if it comes down to the decision of whther or not I'd like a game to get done / made, it's Unity all the way.
Please take your fanboy comments somewhere else, or at least provide some info as to why you have such opinions.
I would say take the aggressive demeanor somewhere else. My comment was flippant sure, but obviously a joke. I was only saying that before you can achieve the things UDK can do in Unity, you have to go to said community and implement the scripts yourself. So in this respect I think UDK is more promising. I've used Unity for 2 years as well, and when you have to hunt down a script just to get a spec map working, that is where I am turned off. Not saying I am incapable of doing so, I just don't want to be bothered with it. And you could also argue that all game engines are designed with the artist in mind, but how they support the artist is the issue we are talking about here.
Don't forget the sterile UI, or the lack of standard shaders included, or the huge hits it takes when using transparency, or the bad gameplay UI implementation tools. (These are issues I have personally experienced when working with the programmers in my small studio.)
That being said, Unity was awesome maybe 2 or 3 years ago in that it was free, coummunity driven, and could challenge other engines such as UDK or Crytek. Right now though, I just ask myself why the studio is still using it. We are having issues about licensing the Pro edition for our programmers due to money concerns. Do other engines lock content in their free editions like Unity? (not a rhetorical question. Unity is the only engine I've dealt with recently in a development environment.)
It's the number reason why I choose chipping through rock in UDK over sifting through sand in Unity every time. (So it would be nice if they got them going properly for iOS but I guess you can't have everything you want in life).
It's good for blocking out quickly within UDK for very very basic scale visualisation, but after that, 3D applications all the way.
Static meshes are what are used for basically everything now. You can look at the demo maps in UDK and turn off visibility for static meshes and see how BSP is used, although they're probably more than you'd usually see now days also.