Recently I’ve downloaded both Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 and I’m new to both of them.
However, I have problem choosing in between them. I am originally a 3D artist working in Blender3D and learning 3ds Max. Is it good in terms of graphics and handling polygons?
Also, I don’t plan to spend much money on assets or plugins. Does Unity have sufficient features for editing or visuals? How does it compare to Unreal Engine?
Also how about multiplayer features? How Unity supports multiplayer other then Unreal?
And, regardless of my research, I can’t find out about animation features of Unity.
I’m asking those because I need more opinions and first-hand experience from people helping me to choose an engine. I appreciate all answers, thanks.
Typically Unity/Unreal comparison threads get locked quickly because they degrade into arguing – but that also means you can do a quick search and find quite a few “discussions” – some quite recent.
I’d suggest you start watching the tutorials and you’ll quickly get a very clear picture of what working in Unity is like.
I’ve always felt the Space Shooter tutorial is probably the easiest to follow for a first-timer.
Absolutely 100% this. Do tutorials for both and see how you get on. I can’t beg you to stick with us but It’d be lovely to have you around if you do decide to pick up Unity!
Well, I asked questions both in Unity and Unreal forums so I can get 2 sided opinions. Well one of my fear is, will I need to buy many addons to make something very good or Unity supports lots of physics, animation and graphical features?
For example Unreal Engine 4 supports jigglebones for tails and stuff
But in Unity I need to purchase Dynamic Bones plugin?
Speaking as newbie myself I would start with Roll A Ball, then Space Shooter.
Space Shooter was made for an earlier version of Unity, and although there is annotations and an upgrade guide, if you do Roll A Ball first ( and understand what you are doing, don’t just copy paste it ), you will be able to work through the changes in Space Shooter without even looking at the update guide.
As a fellow 3D artist and blenderhead you’ll probably find unreal visually more appealing but that will soon wear thin. Unreal is a monster, takes ages to load compared to unity and longer to compile. Eventually you’ll want to start adding gameplay and this soon becomes a nightmare with blueprints whereas c# is a breeze. This is why a lot of indies keep coming back to unity.
Thanks for reply! I also want to ask. How much can I do without purchasing plugins? As a high school student, I don’t have much money to spend on plugins to get additional features on the engine. I thought Unreal was more complete.
It’s actually a trap, yes unreal is more complete, but the time you have to invest to get something out there is colossal.
I’m a student too, I’m not sure what it is you want to do so suggesting plugins could be anything, personally, I’ve never used any asset from the store so I can’t comment.
Hm, what actually makes it a trap? Like if I want to give a character’s tail some dynamic physics I may need to purchase an add-on for that whereas Unreal already has that feature.
I understand the ease of use of Unity. But I am still researching about the limits of Unity without spending much money on it. Thanks again by the way.
You are limited by your skills and knowledge. With experience you don’t need to shop anything for a tail or much anything else either. If you don’t know how to do stuff or want to save time you buy assets.
Don’t forget if unreal comes with a ‘tail’ dynamic, not even sure what that means… you have to understand how to control it to do what you want and that may mean exposing the c++ if the blueprint for it is limited… and good luck with that.
Unity it’s pretty easy to make it do exactly what you want. As an example, first one I saw on youtube. A couple of rigid bodies and a script to detect collision with static objects.
Don’t be fooled, everything in unreal is a trap for a game you want to get to market, unless you have a big team who are specialised in c++, character animations, texturing, lighting etc optimising open worlds.
A smallish non open world game is definitely doable in unity however, with little effort IMO.
The simple answer is, no, you don’t have to buy assets to make a complete game.
My version of the complicated answer is that I’ve found just two assets to be must-haves: Rewired for better interaction with all types of gamepads and other controllers (Unity is rewriting their controller system now but I don’t personally think it’s better) and TextMesh Pro for high-quality fonts (lots of people get by with Unity’s font support but personally I think it’s awful).
But you absolutely do not need to buy assets to get real work done and shipped.
Unreal engine has more feature available out of the box, in case of unity having those features requrie asset store purchase. Animation system superior to that used in unity, but unity has better retargeting mechanism.
Basically, Unreal engine has steeper learning curve, some things are much harder to do than in unity, but it may offer better visual quality out of the box. Unreal also obsess over their visual scripting language called “blueprints”. It also grants source code access.
Unity is closer to being a general purpose graphics framework. Some things are are easier to do, some are harder, in comparison to unreal 4 some features are missing. For example, Unity engine does not have built-in ai solution.
Try both, see which one works better:
You can write everything you need by yourself, without ever buying anything. It’ll still cost development time, however.
One good way to kill an indie project is to attempt switching the engine from Unity to Unreal. Usually a project in question will post few excited updates along the lines of “I can’t believe how amazing everything looks!”, and then silently disappear.
Working without blueprints in Unreal engine requires black belt in C++. If you don’t like Blueprints, you better be prepared for code dives. “Blueprints” are visual programming “language”, and due to its visual nature, it less readable than text. I wish Epic Games stopped obssessing over it.
On other hand, in unity engine you may bump into an unexpected bug 6 months into development, and then you may be in trouble, because there’s no source code access.
Speaking of C+, IIRC Unreal 4 is compiled with exceptions disabled by default, which throws few features a C++ programmer may be used to out of the window.
Overall, I think programmers would be more comfortable with Unity engine, while artists would be more comfortable with Unreal engine.
Unity is definitely a better choice than Unreal, if your project is 2d. Paper2d framework in Unreal engine is not being actively maintained, as far as I’m aware. As far as I know Unity is a better choice if you’re developing for mobiles, that’s despite C# lacking features for effective memory management.
So, in the end you still need to try both and see which works for you.
