oh oh…this is not good news ;( oh well…with this quality I can give it a try:
And I can use another software as a “bridge” between unreal and blender for animation…I guess…
checking the unreal forums, looks like a lot of people wants to create short films with unreal…and looks that is free for movies, 5% if you do a videogame 
I’ve actually heard that it’s the Cryengine that gives the best visuals (even though one might not use it for actual game creation).
There’s even been mention on CGTalk that the crew working on The Maze Runner franchise may have actually ditched Vray for certain scenes as a result. Supposedly, Cryengine scenes can be made to be less dependent on static lighting than an equivalent UE4 scene.
Beer Baron - You are absolutely correct, I should have tempered my genuine enthusiasm for UE4 with a warning about Blender’s FBX when I suggested UE4 to the OP. I have however, personally gotten both animations and models created in Blender into UE4 and working, it does/can work but it is an absolute pain in the ass. My hope is that FBX for Blender will be improved further in the near future.
On the Unreal side of things, there is a lot to like.
(not my work - limited because it’s real-time? yeah maybe, but it’s pretty darned powerful and can be experienced interactively in VR, etc…, I’m pretty confident in recommending it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zjPiGVSnfI -character animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqMbHgBIyY -arch vis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFPOsnC_ETQ -nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67NToSkW2vs -nature w/behind the scenes
Even better, go grab the free example files, edit/play with them in the engine.
If you absolutely insist, I can find the time to record one of my UE4 game demos that includes animation made in Blender.
this is better: unreal 4 EULA:
No royalties would be owed. Under the EULA Section 4(1), no royalties are owed on
Revenue from linear media which is Distributed in a form that does not contain the Licensed Technology (e.g., broadcast or streamed video files, cartoons, or movies)
Strange that you guys have had trouble. I’ve used Blender several times with Unreal 4 with no issues at all. Blender has a decent fbx exporter and I’ve never had trouble getting animation or objects out into Unreal 4 or Frostbite (which I use daily). You’ll need to do your shader work in Unreal but you can do your textures in Blender like normal. You can even use Rigify for animation (the auto biped rig system in Blender). Works great.
Tommy, there are less (but not zero) problems if you create something completely from scratch in Blender, and then send to UE4. There are far more problems, if you import something from UE4, into blender, to customize/add to, and then send it back to UE4 hoping to maintain full compatibility (which is quite important if existing code is calling animations, etc.). Overall there is only 1 thing that cannot be done at all (that is adding removable clothing that is compatible with the UE4 standard mannequin which was originally created in Maya, and is the UE4 design standard that all workshop submissions must adhere to and be compatible with). If you made your own character from scratch in blender, creating removable clothing via Unreals add-body part system should be possible, but this would not be an asset that is compatible with the UE4 workshop/store. The rest, can be done, albiet you must adhere to a strict workflow or you risk running into some currently open/known bugs. The issue with this, is that a strict workflow, makes daily production more tedious and finnicky and sometimes leads to work needing to be re-done (more specifically it means making changes later in the design process, can be way more difficult/tricky than it needs to be). I am confident, that in time, we’ll be at 100% with a nice, open workflow, that makes production a breeze.
looks like Epic is interested in help us:
Unreal Engine 4 Support Twitch Broadcast: Blender and UE4
Cycles is the best choice for Blender. It is fast, user-friendly and it is integrated with blender compositor.
But don’t waste too much money on gpu rendering. An i7 5820k probably is faster and more power-efficient than a Titan X in rendering furry-haired characters or complex scenery (see Caminandes typical scene).
That’s very interesting info. I would like to hear more of that. 5820k has 6@3,3 GHz cores with Hypter-Threading, TDP 140W. I would be amazed and very glad if it could beat Titan X highly parallelized 3072 cuda-cores with TDP 250W, at least in some scenarios.
Is your estimate based on relatively power usage?
But perhaps 5820k should be compared to GTX 970: about same TDP and price. But several cards are more easier to add into one computer than processors. This gets very interesting.
what about blender internal render? Is still an option for animations??
There is also Yafaray which is still alive (or revived). http://yafaray.org/ A new release as of May 10th.
Killer Bean 1 and 2 came from Animation Master (which is still around, amazingly). Killer Bean Forever (full feature movie) was animated in Maya and rendered using finalRender for Maya. Yes, I’ve been around for a few decades! 
I’ll be messing around with different render engines soon to decide which one works best for me for an upcoming short animation I’m working on. Gonna keep an eye on this thread.
Any damn render engine where you can tolerate the render times. Cycles has baking while Yafaray does not. However, Yafaray has an amazing look using just Direct Lighting, AO and caustics if needed. I occasionally use BI where I can feel like I have a Titan X with Cycles.
After spending a week in Cycles it’s amazing to see clean frames rendering out in seconds.
One option to consider gpu wise is you can put in a pair of gtx 970’s for about half of a single titan x and render faster than a single titan x. In fact if you check mike pan’s benchmark thread, you’ll seen there’s barely any difference between 2 970’s and 2 980’s speed wise (maybe a couple seconds). Unless you have gynormous poly counts and texmaps in the scene you can render most scenes in 4 gb.
Thanks guys again, I am saving my money, and I am learning Unreal…
this is the best part:
"There are no royalties for using UE4 in linear/non-interactive productions like movies or TV. "
I just want to make 3d short films/web series, I am not expecting to do a “BLUR” style hyper realistic render and animation any time soon…from here to 2 or 3 years, cycles will be more mature and faster, and TITANs videocards cheaper…
If I can render in realtime this quality with unreal, I will be more than happy:
blender + unreal for render…my setup right now… 
Vray 3 + Vray for Blender:
Pros:
Fast renderer with great results.
Real proxy objects, saved hipoly mesh and in 3dviewport it can be a single cube/more complex mesh. Hipolymesh can be rendered with different materials than it has originally. Real usage is 100 highpoly trees are 100 cubes on 3dviewport.
Round edges, every material can have round edges when render, no need to add geometry (bevel) for every object to look more real.
Rendertime displacement: one single plane (4 vertices) and you can present water waves, bricks, pillow wrinkles etc.
Many texture projection methods: planar, triplanar etc useful for archiz without touching any UV.
You can save Irradiance map and Light cache and next renders are faster.
Cons:
No realtime rendering
Gpu render does not support many materials
Thanks @JuhaW! Vray is one of the powerfull renderers in the industry, + renderman is free to practice too for blender
I will do some test and see
by the way, I got the infamous 3.5GB Ge-force GTX-970
Just for now to some tests/workflow with cycles and play some videogames
and comparing using unreal or renderman…
thanks everybody for your ideas!
Cryengine has a horrible unintuitive interface and workflow. It cannot even compare to the intuitiveness of UE4
