Unity to UE4 - advice

General Discussion
#1

Has anyone else tried to go from Unity to UE4? Unity took a little while to get used to after using in house tools, but overall acts similar to other packages. In particular the viewport navigation. Going to UE4 feels very awkward, and not in a good way.

Other than the “preserve” advice, has anyone got hint or tips that might make easier to pick up?

#2

Moving new tools is always an exercise in patience and paradigm shifts… I’m actually using 4 different engines across my work week right now, and I go through a very micro version of this just between my days.

My only advice is to acknowledge that you’re going to be frustrated for a little while, and to try to understand the motivation of the engine you’re using, and why it’s powerful. To me, Unity is built around freedom and modularity (with exceptions), but not really run-time efficiency, or even large scale production efficiency. Unreal comes at it from the opposite - an ultimately efficient beast of a pipeline, largely structured and regulated for you so that large productions can hop in smoothly and make huge games, but in many ways at the cost of that freedom to plug and play that Unity provides. Most of their recent (1-3- years) of work has been to build in more and more freedom to allow flexibility

Other than that… it’s just time, and persevence

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#3

Out of interest how do you navigate UE4 viewport? It has a Maya style control, but then falls over when the camera is too far from a object. the pan speed does not adjust base on distance from the object

I guess i just want someone else to have had the same issues, as i don’t understand why this particular issue is still there.

#4

I had the same issues with UE4. You can find a migration tips in UE4 documentation. Some parts of it are misleading, but its still useful.

Unreal forces you to use the common architecture for your project, you have to take advantage of prebuilt GameState, PlayerController etc. My advice would be do not try to translate the experience you had with Unity to Unreal, otherwise you will end up fighting the engine instead of using it.

#5

I actually think the Viewport navigation is really great. You have Maya navigation on the one hand. E.g. framing on objects with ‘F’, the ‘ALT’ rotation around framed objects and the ‘ALT’+‘RMB’ zoom. And on the other hand you can navigate in an ego-shooter (‘WASD’) like fashion, which is super useful. The camera movement speed can be adjusted with mousewheel scrolling.

Imo the viewport navigation is one of the best out there. You’ll be used to it after one week.

#6

Invert your middle mouse button if you’re use to maya controls using alt (EDIT > Editor Preferences > Level Editor [Viewports] > Controls >>> “Invert Middle Mouse Pan”)

Also Epic has a plethora of videos on their engine. You can learn anything with their videos. ANYTHING :grimacing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knI-XUbv2Wg

WASD controls aren’t that bad, combined with F to center on objects.

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#7

I had the same experience when starting game-development with unity and then decided learning UE4.
Here are my thoughts so far:

  1. Unity brings to the table pure editor that really lets the developer the freedom to hack it however he wants. (In my opinion its very good to experience if you want to understand the development dependencies, “code and teamwork wise”)
  2. Unreal gives the “Artistic-person” big push when you more focus on your work then developing your tools to bring your game to a specific level of style.
  3. I started with unity since my university is unity and maya focused.
    After i started working and studying Houdini i thought that UE4 will give my artistic side a boost because so far i find the particle system in UE4 more advanced.
    (This statement is before playing around with Unity5.5 update).
  4. The viewport in UE4 in my opinion is awful. every time i change between softwares i need to train my memory muscles again :sweat_smile:

That said it falls down to your personal taste and pipeline requirements, either you are the coding or visual-scripting dude, or you are the C++ or Java/C# person. Hence both will serve your goal with dignity :muscle: