I ask because the visual quality looks “good enough” for my plans and I’m sure you can probably boost the settings up quite high at the cost of performance, which if I’m rendering an animation is totally fine, it could take up to 2 minutes per frame and I’d still be fine with that, that’s probably not the case though and I really don’t know if this is feasible or not…
Let’s say i have a scene animated in Blender, how difficult would it be to put those models into Unreal with their animations? I’d probably only do basic materials in Blender and then do the actual serious materials in Unreal, which is supposed to have a good node based material editor with good PBR materials.
Then the real question is, can I do camera animations of everything and RENDER those at high settings?
You can do that, but the Unreal pipeline is a PITA (CryEngine is worse).
The question is what kind of animation do you wanna make?
For huge scenes: everything is recommended to import as separate meshes.
From pipeline aspect Unity is better, but it is harder to get similar quality.
There are several aspects to this workflow and the weakest link is FBX for the animations and character. But once you get that sorted, you can bring some a character and animation in for testing.
Once that is sorted, learn the material workflow. Pretty simple, but different.
You can preview all of this in the level, press play to watch the animation. I usually delete the “Player Start” and view the animation in the view port in real time without having to adjust the player start position. Annoying and you really don’t need it.
Then the next step is to create a Matinee. You have to make a camera track to animate the camera in Matinee. You can learn about this in the docs.
From there you can export the animation to a series of images. Last time I checked it was limitied to .bmp, png, and jpg.
png takes forever to compress the files on export so it is more or less useless. Which leaves bmp or jpeg.
Then of course assemble the frames in a video editor.
Get active on the forums over there for more details.
In this tutorial you can see how to export animations from Blender.
Here you can see how to setup some scenery.
Perhaps you might be able to export all of the scenery from Blender to Unreal at once, though it might not be the best optimal way to do so. I had tried to export a level from Blender to Unity and everything was “static” and unusable. It makes much more sense to import prefabs since they are reusable components and thus doing the prop setup inside that editor.