The rise in popularity of VR in recent years is impossible to ignore, so it’s always useful to have access to an engine that can easily help you produce content for these platforms including the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. There are also tools built in that makes building for virtual or augmented reality a lot easier. This shows the power and flexibility you have with these tools. The somewhat daunting interface of a more complex material included in the starter content. Once you bring in your texture maps made in another program like Substance Painter you can use the hundreds of different material blueprints to customise the end result endlessly to get what you are looking for. The amount of flexibility you have here is incredible. The texturing and materials tools in Unreal are second to none in my opinion. The framework is easy to use for making any objects like a swing that reacts to being pushed. Unreal Engine has a good physics engine built in allowing for soft body physics, particle effects, and more simple things like gravity. As recently as September 2017 they made modifications that allow up to 100 different players to connect and play together in a single game, meaning the possibilities are almost limitless. This multiplayer framework is one of the main selling points today. They spent around a year patching this and it eventually turned into a whole new game ‘Unreal Tournament’ in 1999. When ‘Unreal’ (the game) was released by Epic in 1998 there were issues with its multiplayer systems, which at the time was still pretty cutting edge. The blueprints attached to a hanging light in Unreal’s starter content. This all uses a visual interface so even if you’ve never coded in your life, a few short tutorials can get you well on your way to a working game. The Blueprints feature I mentioned before allows you to put together simple scripts that interact with one another. This, combined with dynamic or baked in shadows and lighting, allows for some incredible photorealistic content that still runs in real-time. It uses the widely adopted PBR workflow for its materials and rendering. Its mix of artistic and development-centric tools allows complete creative flexibility. Unreal Engine hasn’t lasted as long as it has without constantly adding new features to keep it at the front of the pack. With all these resources you can learn the best way to use this engine and find solutions for any issues you may bump into along the way. It was first used for the game ‘Unreal’ with Unreal Engine 2 releasing in 2002, Unreal Engine 3 releasing in 2006, and the current version UE 4 releasing in 2014.ĭue to its long tenure in the game industry it has a huge following and a lot of third-party tutorials and online forums. Unreal Engine has been around in some form since 1998. They instead use a royalty agreement at 5% of all game earnings over $3000 per quarter to make their money. Whether you’re a hobbyist developer or a AAA studio, there is no upfront fee to use Unreal.
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On top of all these features there is a huge amount of documentation to help you learn the system.Ī big benefit to Unreal Engine is that it’s completely free to use. Setting up some of these features can seem daunting at first, but several examples are provided where you can just change the parameters until you create what you’re looking for. It also has powerful material and animation tools for artists which allow you to make complex scenes fast.
I am admittedly hopeless when it comes to coding, but this system allows me to make simple interactivity in my VR scenes such as being able to pick up or throw objects.
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More hobbyist developers can utilise its very powerful blueprints which are basically prefabricated blocks of code you can add to your objects to make interactions. More experienced programmers can use the C++ language to make their own scripts that run in the game engine. This is part of the reason it is so widely used, due to its flexibility to work between these different platforms.
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It allows for development across multiple platforms from PC to consoles such as the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It is used in many modern AAA games like Epic’s own battle royale shooter Fortnite or other hit games like Psyonix’s ‘Rocket League’. Unreal Engine(currently released as Unreal Engine 4) is a popular and widely-used game engine developed by Epic Games. That means if you buy something we get a small commission at no extra cost to you( learn more) Tips 3D Game Design Written by Thomas Denham Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links.