Hi,
apologies if this has been discussed before, but my company (animation studio) is currently investigating engines as a possibly alternative to raytracers for making movies. So far, I've concentrated on UE4, which I've found to be a very impressive tool. We actually delivered a short trailer made in Unreal recently, which shows how easy to use it is!
However, we are running into issues, and I want to understand how many of those are fundamental to Unreal, and whether we might be better off with Unity or CryEngine (or even Source2). I'm guessing that some of these are a consequence of UE4 being a (mainly) deferred renderer, but I don't really know. I'm pretty much a beginner with DirectX, so I'm currently a bit limited in my ability to hack any engine. Our issues include:
antialiasing - generally terrible, and I'm now rendering at enormous resolutions and downsampling.
transparent/translucent materials - having many problems with things like glass and water, due to the need for transparency and specular reflections.
related to both of the above, rendering of hair/fur is terrible.
motion blur and depth of field pretty low quality, although I think these have recently improved.
inability to have a selected light only affect selected meshes - we use this all the time to tweak certain shots.
On the render output side (i.e. Matinee):
no 16-bit or higher outputs.
no ability to render separate layers (e.g. foreground only, background only, effects only etc).
I'm guessing that these two could be addressed relatively easily though.
My question is: is it worth moving to another engine? Or would it be easier to extend Unreal?
Any thoughts gratefully received!