I use UE4 at work and while it is extremely powerful, it can be shocking how clunky some of the most basic tools are, and how undesigned it feels overall.
For example, the manipulator lacks basic features like effective snapping, and it’s very easy to move objects in the wrong direction because the gizmo axis are difficult to select, and depending on the view angle you can also move objects wildly far into the distance by accident. Camera movement is easy (using basic FPS controls) but each of the main three buttons of the mouse activate camera movement in some way as well as doubling as selection and context menu, so you can sometimes move the camera or select things when you weren’t trying to. Camera movement speed is handled very weirdly (there is a slider for speed, multiplier and holding shift stops the camera moving instead of speeding it up - why not just release the move key?)
A lot of the tools look the same but feel like they were implemented by different people in different years because the behaviour is inconsistent - splines, terrain splines and ramps are an example of this. It can be quite crashy. The view settings seem to get saved or reset at random (especially when changing modes) and
Its internal file management is a binary mess, and the inability to integrate well with git is a real pain. Because everything is binary, changing a texture setting flag on a 4k texture results in the entire file needing to be resaved. Moving or renaming files often creates redirectors, which are by default hidden, and create problems of their own.
Undo is unreliable. It works quickly, but sometimes steps are not saved and don’t get undone, but the thing you did before does get undone.
The material editor is awesome and really powerful, but shader compilation can be very slow and it will often compile tons of shaders after what seems like a trivial material change, meaning you don’t always get very immediate feedback on your material edits like you do with Blender or other programs.
Unreal documentation can be lacking or out of date. This is a common problem with 3d software and game engines, but after using Houdini I realised there isn’t really any excuses when Epic has so much money. They do invest in live training videos etc. but these can’t be edited and go out of date all the time. It’s also hard to search video. SideFX do documentation and learning material extremely well.
Overall though, it’s extremely powerful and useful, but I wish Epic would spend a few months just fixing bugs and improving the UI instead of always adding new features unless those new features are improving and building upon existing features. It’s honestly frustrating to realise how powerful Unreal is but how much time wasting, inconsistent crap exists, that in many cases could probably be fixed by an intern in a few days, saving hundreds of thousands of people lots of time. Sure, we can modify the engine ourselves (we do at work), but that takes a lot of time to compile, and you’ll have to update your patches with each new engine update and take time off what you really want to be doing.
UI I wish Blender had from Unreal:
- Better WASD/FPS camera controls that work with pen tablet input (but without the weird speed controls of Unreal)
- Better search and add node UI in the node editor
That’s probably it. It’s a fairly short list, which is a good thing I suppose
