Should I learn Unity or Unreal Engine?

there comes a time in every artist's career where they're faced with an age-old question should i learn unreal engine 4 or unity now it's important to note that these engines are ever changing and always improving so we're just going to take a look at the current state of each engine and see how they've developed over the years we are also going to be more importantly covering which one you should be using as a beginner artist since this video is aimed at beginners i'm not going to go into detail about super advanced concepts such as memory allocation and other advanced programming and scripting concepts it goes over my head i'm just going to be covering the pros and cons for beginner digital artists the discussion for unity or unreal engine for experienced 3d artists and game developers is an entirely different discussion speaking of beginners i've created a beginners course for people who are trying to learn texturing using substance painter it's called the 3d artist coloring book and it contains hours of tutorials and pre-built assets that you can easily access at any time to start learning and mastering substance painter i've also got a really cool section of tutorials in there where i teach you how to make ghibli and other anime inspired textures if you want to check out the course and start mastering substance painter today i'll leave a link in the description for you guys for any beginner artist it's super important that your program has built-in features that you can easily access and implement on your own with little difficulty this is one of the first and most important major distinctions between unity and unreal so which software has more functionality right out of the box in my opinion unreal engine just feels like it's working with you as opposed to against you it has so much available to you right out of the box however using unity i consistently found myself browsing the asset store trying to find the best plugin to fill the need i had for my current project while there's nothing really wrong with this as a beginner i found it pretty frustrating i can honestly say that every time i've wondered if a feature i wanted was in unreal and looked through the documentation to my surprise it was already there from performant terrain editing and world streaming splines vertex color painting node based material graph editing node based code graph editing object painting subsurface scattering foliage shaders blah blah blah blah blah unreal has it all now i know unity has some of these features as well but there are just so many more built-in features in unreal engine when compared to unity now this isn't because unity is a bad engine it's quite the opposite in fact unity said it was a hard choice but their idea for the future of unity is to have a lightweight modular engine that comes bare bones and then has to be extended upon for your personal use cases while this may be liberating for advanced artists and game developers with knowledge in c sharp for a beginner this can be very limiting and frustrating [Music] things are very different from back in the day when you had to spend hours coding your own shaders and functionalities in game engines beginner artists have it pretty easy nowadays though as both unity and unreal engine 4 both have powerful functions that allow you to create shaders and materials without having to write a single line of code let's take a look at both of these functionalities blueprints is the visual scripting system inside unreal engine 4 and is a fast way to start creating shaders and other complex functions instead of having to write code line by line you do everything visually with drag and drop nodes you can set their properties in a ui and drag wires to connect everything together in addition to being a fast prototyping tool blueprints also makes it very easy for non-programmers to dive in and start scripting right away blueprints is a pretty mature feature and has been developed by epic games for quite some time now on the other hand unity didn't have too much in the way of visual scripting built in until sometime last year where the main plugin for visual scripting bolt became a base feature for the engine and is now included in all unity plans the general consensus online seems to be that the vast amount of artists prefer to use blueprints over unity's bolt simply because blueprints provide slightly more flexibility over unity's visual scripting function this is probably simply because blueprints has been around longer and has been developed as a first party software since the start by epic games unity's bolt was a third-party plug-in for unity that has been integrated into the engine so it hasn't received the same quality of development as blueprints has seen however all of this can change in the next few years so who knows where we'll be even two to five years from now now since we're talking about programming it's also worth mentioning given that ue4 is running on c plus plus and unity is running on c sharp a dedicated experienced programmer will usually be able to milk unreal engine for more performance than unity c plus plus versus c sharp is a very complex discussion that goes right over my head so i'll leave it at that feel free to argue in the comments so let's talk about graphics now from my own experience and talking to some industry professionals unreal engine generally has the upper hand when it comes to graphics but with a small caveat when it comes to stylized environments the difference seems to be almost negligible stylized environments are normally quite trim when it comes to performance so any good artist with equal experience in both software should be able to churn out equally impressive scenes using either software it's like i said in the beginning engines are just a tool not an extension of your own capabilities however realism is a slightly different story just like its expansive feature set unreal offers high fidelity visuals straight out of the box whereas unity while it's still able to produce high quality visuals takes a lot more work to get your assets looking close to the same level as unreal for beginner artists this is less than ideal maybe this is the reason that unreal is used more on big games and productions from large studios i'm sure there's a plethora of other reasons for that as well so maybe when you're working with stylized assets and environments it won't make much of a difference but when working with super photorealistic assets and scenes unreal engines high fidelity graphics may give you an edge especially if you're a beginner and don't have the knowledge and skill set to draw out unity's full power of course remember that unreal engine 4's default settings require a relative beast of a gaming pc whereas unity's default settings such as no post-processing in particular are set up to run pretty well on mobile so again not necessarily better just different when you're starting to learn any new software one of the crucial keys to your growth is being able to find resources to answer your questions a beginner is flooded with an overwhelming amount of information when they are learning a new software so being able to find documentation or forums where people can help them sift through all the noise is absolutely invaluable fortunately both unreal engine and unity have strong communities and documentation so there are huge number of forums subreddits and discord communities anyone can join for free to learn and get advice directly from experienced artists in the community if you need assets and other plugins and tools both unreal and unity have great marketplaces where you can find almost everything you need from pre-model assets to various different types of scripts unity however definitely has a much larger marketplace with an overwhelming amount of assets so i will give them the edge here unreal engine has many pre-built functionalities and features for beginner artists that are absolutely invaluable with a very powerful scripting feature and blueprints amazing graphics and a wealth of online resources at your disposal unreal engine is my pick for the best beginner friendly game engine if you have little engine experience unreal engine will get you much further when starting to create game art environments and shaders if you have the knowledge time and ability to take unity and make it your own that's incredible for an artist like me who is quite rusty when it comes to programming it's pretty frustrating i constantly found myself hunting for plugins made by coding wizards to try and make my life easier if we were talking about game development this would be a different story unity is much easier from a programming perspective lightweight and perfectly designed for small teams and having powerful features and extensions for both creating 2d and 3d games [Music] it's important to understand that at the end of the day these two software are really just tools and a good artist will be able to draw out a ton of amazing work using either engine reading the comments in my latest blender versus maya video made me realize just how many people have based their entire self-identity around just a specific software in my opinion this is an extremely toxic mindset because as we've seen over and over again when someone realizes they're not growing as an artist they start clawing and insulting other artists as they excel and grow past them if you make something a part of your personality you're going to start taking it personally it's just human nature so my advice to you as a beginner is don't stress too much about planning your flag of self-identity into a specific software don't care what others think i mean don't care what i think whether you use unity or unreal engine if you focus on the fundamentals and remain open-minded and flexible when it comes to learning new things you will grow exponentially faster than those who refuse to change thank you for listening [Music]

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 901,242

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, blender (software), blender 3d, blender tutorials, blender grass tutorial, blender fluid tutorial, blender animation tutorial, blender 3d animation tutorial, blender fluid physics tutorial, tutorials, tutorial (media genre), blender3d, blender render, beginner tutorial, blender water material, blender guru, modeling tutorial, blender online, blender curves, vfx tutorial, 3d modeling tutorial

Id: OH2sYJw52BQ

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021