Perfect video for me! I'm a fledgling indie developer and need to do a lot of concepting now. Allready know how to draw, use unreal and blender, and trying to figure out the best workflow for me atm. Super valuable to have a top concept artist lay out the pros and cons :) Since I'm building my game in Unreal as well, it's an easy choice really, since levels that are created for concepting can be reused for development. About the shader compiling, the reason it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't has to do with caching. It's supposed to compile all shaders when you open a new project, and then cache that data so it's faster from then on. One reason new projects take time to compile is if you select to add starter content on creation. That's 500mb of assets, and adds a lot of stuff for Unreal to compile. An unreal project without starter content is just around 10 mb or so. Viewports: You can set up 4 windows in unreal and set them to thew view you want by using the tiny grid icon button in the top right corner of the viewport. In each window you can then select the view you want, perspective, front, back, etc, and swith between rendered (lit) and other view modes. with the buttons in the top left corner. If you have multiple cameras in your scene, you can set the viewports to the different cameras as well. You can also go to Window > Viewports and add up to 3 more viewports that can be docked wherever you want. These can also be split, so you can have a total of 16 windows, placed and set up however you want :) I think master materials will actually speed up your workflow and become a pro rather than a con once you get used to it :) Once you've built your library of preferred master materials, working with child materials in your scene will probably be quicker than material nodes in blender. The cool thing is that if you decide to add a new feature to your master material, you then instantly have that as a tweakable paramter for all your other materials.
12:41at this point you can find the same master material that the rocks uses and make an instance of it, you'll get the same functionality. You can even collect your favorite master materials from various sample projects and migrate them into whatever you need.
About migrating assets, one thing that helps is to make a project called 'resources' or something and have your favorites in there, then you can migrate them over to your working project as needed.
For modeling unique items you still need other programs like Blender/ Maya and zbrush then use Unreal to to put it all together. You really don't need to to pick one program over the other. Quixel items are nice, but imagine doing something sci fi that they couldn't scan and everyone uses the same scanned items it can become obvious. In my industry you still need multiple programs.
I can feel your struggle... I've been trying to figure out how to optimize my Blender scenes so that they don't interrupt my creative flow. After asking many professionals for advice, I came to the conclusion that Blender's performance is just really lacking in general. I spend most of my time waiting for the program to unfreeze, or finding ways to reduce my texture resolutions, vert count, etc. instead of designing my scenes freely. I might need to give unreal a try. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and I'm looking forward to your tutorial!
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I know what you mean about waiting for Blender to respond all the time. I mean, we'll still have to use it to make a few assets or clean up a few assets, but real-time render speed has got to be the future. I will say though that Unreal is very tricky and unpredictable so you have to factor in the time to learn it plus the time to get used to its quirks.
@@AndyWalsh Oh definitely. I've heard Unreal is quite difficult to get into, but being a game engine it might also open up different ways of presenting concepts. I'll stick to blender for asset creation of course, but for the final assembly Unreal seems like an interesting choice.
@@davidfesl379 well yeah. With AI taking over, I imagine (and it's already being done btw) that the position of concept art will slowly merge into a sort of environment artist + concept artist type role, where we present interactive concepts to the client.
@@AndyWalsh Yes, I've been debating about that too, and given the current disruption in the industry, it seems like the logical evolution from concept art. Shaddy also confirmed my suspicion and at OPB they are going to move away from purely static images and make more of these "vertical slices" of games for their clients - which is cool and I'm really looking forward to bringing my own concepts to life and make them more interactive as well. I still hope there is a place for "handcrafted" images somewhere in the future though.
Perfect video for me! I'm a fledgling indie developer and need to do a lot of concepting now. Allready know how to draw, use unreal and blender, and trying to figure out the best workflow for me atm. Super valuable to have a top concept artist lay out the pros and cons :) Since I'm building my game in Unreal as well, it's an easy choice really, since levels that are created for concepting can be reused for development.
About the shader compiling, the reason it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't has to do with caching. It's supposed to compile all shaders when you open a new project, and then cache that data so it's faster from then on. One reason new projects take time to compile is if you select to add starter content on creation. That's 500mb of assets, and adds a lot of stuff for Unreal to compile. An unreal project without starter content is just around 10 mb or so.
Viewports: You can set up 4 windows in unreal and set them to thew view you want by using the tiny grid icon button in the top right corner of the viewport. In each window you can then select the view you want, perspective, front, back, etc, and swith between rendered (lit) and other view modes. with the buttons in the top left corner. If you have multiple cameras in your scene, you can set the viewports to the different cameras as well.
You can also go to Window > Viewports and add up to 3 more viewports that can be docked wherever you want. These can also be split, so you can have a total of 16 windows, placed and set up however you want :)
I think master materials will actually speed up your workflow and become a pro rather than a con once you get used to it :) Once you've built your library of preferred master materials, working with child materials in your scene will probably be quicker than material nodes in blender. The cool thing is that if you decide to add a new feature to your master material, you then instantly have that as a tweakable paramter for all your other materials.
12:41at this point you can find the same master material that the rocks uses and make an instance of it, you'll get the same functionality. You can even collect your favorite master materials from various sample projects and migrate them into whatever you need.
About migrating assets, one thing that helps is to make a project called 'resources' or something and have your favorites in there, then you can migrate them over to your working project as needed.
For modeling unique items you still need other programs like Blender/ Maya and zbrush then use Unreal to to put it all together. You really don't need to to pick one program over the other. Quixel items are nice, but imagine doing something sci fi that they couldn't scan and everyone uses the same scanned items it can become obvious. In my industry you still need multiple programs.
I can feel your struggle...
I've been trying to figure out how to optimize my Blender scenes so that they don't interrupt my creative flow. After asking many professionals for advice, I came to the conclusion that Blender's performance is just really lacking in general. I spend most of my time waiting for the program to unfreeze, or finding ways to reduce my texture resolutions, vert count, etc. instead of designing my scenes freely.
I might need to give unreal a try.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and I'm looking forward to your tutorial!
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I know what you mean about waiting for Blender to respond all the time. I mean, we'll still have to use it to make a few assets or clean up a few assets, but real-time render speed has got to be the future. I will say though that Unreal is very tricky and unpredictable so you have to factor in the time to learn it plus the time to get used to its quirks.
@@AndyWalsh Oh definitely. I've heard Unreal is quite difficult to get into, but being a game engine it might also open up different ways of presenting concepts. I'll stick to blender for asset creation of course, but for the final assembly Unreal seems like an interesting choice.
@@davidfesl379 well yeah. With AI taking over, I imagine (and it's already being done btw) that the position of concept art will slowly merge into a sort of environment artist + concept artist type role, where we present interactive concepts to the client.
@@AndyWalsh Yes, I've been debating about that too, and given the current disruption in the industry, it seems like the logical evolution from concept art. Shaddy also confirmed my suspicion and at OPB they are going to move away from purely static images and make more of these "vertical slices" of games for their clients - which is cool and I'm really looking forward to bringing my own concepts to life and make them more interactive as well. I still hope there is a place for "handcrafted" images somewhere in the future though.
Your mic sounds horrible mate!!!!
Great video btw
ha, you're so right! I gotta sort something out.
Many thanks!