I also loaded 5.4 and looked at UE again to see if there are some news
about Apple ARM support. OK, at least we have Lumen (since 5.3 ?)
I loaded a test scene. I think it came in as a Datasmith export and was
migrated a few times through UE versions.
My Twinmotion imports look much better and less lossy though.
But for me UE’s learning curve is linear but vertical.
And those shader calculations, when starting, when opening a file, …
And the need for that annoying Game Launcher
So I tried to find how to edit a Material and was confronted with
that panel with that endless text tree. UE uses non standard terms
and an unusual sorting. I do not see much familiarity.
Similar for Lights.
If there was an option to adapt the UI for my archviz purposes,
by hiding all Game, Animation, … stuff,
I think it would be worth to learn UE.
But as it is I have to stay with Twinmotion.
I actually prefer the way it works in unreal. The material can be set up however you want. You can make a master material similar to what you get in blender with whatever features and functions you need.
But it is true that first you’d need to learn the concept of having a master material and material instances. These things mainly exist for performance reasons so that a reusable material can be compiled only once and only “exposed” parameters can be changed afterwards and possibly at runtime. It also allows for very complex functions to be made into couple of easy to control parameters.
As for lights, there simply have to be controls for rasterizer as well as raytracing and “biased” features like attenuation etc… I actually think that eevee next will have to use some of those concepts as it is also rasterizer, performance is very important if thing need to run at 60fps.
The first AS native Unreal build was only 5.2 if I’m not mistaken. I think they have a while to go before every inch of performance of squeezed from Apple Silicon. It was the same with Metal in Blender
I have been thinking about the same thing. A couple of years ago I put in a serious effort to learn Unreal, and ultimately came out with the realization that, for my needs, Blender with EEVEE made more sense.
Now I’m hoping for EEVEE Next to finally happen, ideally sooner rather than later.
I think the possibilities and quality of UE would be absolutely great.
But I think overall (monster (bloat) software, game loader, …)
it won’t be an App that I would really like to use.
Blenders capabilities and AddOns seems also endless and the way to go.
I also hope for Eevee Next as a suitable realtime solution for my work.
But for me in Blender there is also still so much I need to learn and
get used too.
At least it is easier to get an overview vs UE.
But there are also a lot of things and workflows that aren’t really pleasant
for how my brain works. Mainly the extra abstraction of Node System
or the C4D-like “add Cube anywhere and then relocate and dimension”
vs a CAD-like “draw/create Cube at position in final size”.
At the time, when switching to Modo, it also worked completely different
to everything else I used before. But in that case I immediately had
a feeling this works different but it makes so much more sense
this way …
Something I do not really experience with Blender so far.
I think, despite of the Unreal vs App Store war,
AFAIK Apple just continued Unreal collaboration on Software and API
in a similar way as they lately started for Blender.
So that first AS native support in 5.2 was great of course.
But I think finally Apple RT support
(when missing UE always took as an excuse for support in the past)
should better arrive relatively soon (forced by Apple ?) and allow
Pathtracer and Raytracing.
They already included Vision os in 5.4 preview and I vaguely remember someone mentioning support for pathtracer being worked on. I don’t think epic has anything to gain from not supporting apple hw. I do find it however somewhat odd that vision os is already in and mesh shaders and raytracing not.
Why? I changed everything years ago so that I can switch to any system. Tested all programs. Guess why I no longer use Cinema 4D? Everything works if you want it to!
weirdly i’ve barely touched the 4.0 release let alone 4.1. and i’m usually the person who’s using beta features in productions at my own peril.
i do appreciate some things like the gpu denoising stuff (hooray for apple support there too!), but overall these releases feel like a lot of breaking changes that i’d need to adapt to without any major new feature carrots to entice me to take the plunge.
also blender has gotten more crashy than ever for me in the past year or so. most often when making shader updates (which makes me wonder if its from the metal viewport backend - and i worry whether eevee next will make things even worse). i might wait for 4.2 which will at least be an LTS. hopefully gets bugs patched without having to constantly chase the next version and deal with other parts of a project breaking.
