The Future is Real-time | Unreal Engine 5, Blender, & the shifting landscape of motion graphics.

[@JonathanWinbush]

It was a pleasure, thank you again for having me on!

[@speedcreates]

I like your voice, was nice to listen to!

[@JonathanWinbush]

@@speedcreates Thank you, make sure to stop past my channel as well and thanks for listening 😉

[@JonathanWinbush]

@RickTheRedBrick Thanks Rick 💪🏾

[@eclipes5784]

Awesome!!

[@hollidark]

I've learned so much from @winbush over the last year. He's criminally underexposed here on KZbin.

[@JonathanWinbush]

Oh man that means a lot thank you my friend I'm glad to know my tutorials helped you out!

[@m4r_art]

Legitimately the soundtrack and Winbush talking over this video adds a hyperspace vibe to this content! XD

[@ryanleethomas]

On Blender, there's incredible generative and computational design potential, to explore new ways of modeling and rendering/shading in-scene, where Unreal seems fantastic for when you've got your content generally prepared for post-production.

[@Eradifyerao]

Right. Seems like Unreal is what you go to once you have your sculpting, modeling, rigging, and animation is all done... which Begs the question: so now I gotta export everything out, get all the transforms, materials, animations, lighting setup, render passes, and separate scene render passes into another software and hope I will get the same result I know I can get with Eevee?

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

​@@Eradifyerao Problem is that UE 5 can render things like smooth shadows and probably many other things in real-time. EEVEE is a slow to a crawl when it comes to this, they've ditched both VSE and ESM option from 2.8 and forward, which allowed to render a decent looking shadows in real-time and have more control over it in favour of very slow sample based system, which isn't even look great unless you have at least 512 samples and soft-shadows option, which brings render to a 15-20 seconds each frame on decent machine in 720p, which is incredibly slow and of course not real-time, and that begs the question is its even better to just using cycles at this point which has come a long way, you can play with denoise and low sample count and have fantastic shadows. That not even mentioned slow normal maps calculation in EEVEE, which bring's fps to 15 in viewport, unless you have an optimized NRM addon, which is not included in official releases for god know's why reason. No matter how much you optimizing your scene, you can forget about real-time rendering with multiple moving characters unless you want your shadows look like a dud, and that's not even mentioning fog and volumetrics, which are dependent on sample system. I would be happy if they bring back theese options, but dev's are subborn on adding more features rather that optimizing existing one's. For example the excuse for removing GPU subdivision for 3 years, was "optimization" at the cost of severely crippled performance. So UE5 is looks it's blazingly fast by compartion. I don't want to scream about the grass is greener, but real-time rendering alone is what makes me want to learn UE 5, as an avid Blender user.

[@Eradifyerao]

@@saaaaaaaaadasda But you didn't address the export/import process. How's the NLA animation potential in Unreal? Blender is exceptional for animation. I've found Unity to be lacking by comparison. I do think real-rendering is a lot better in a game engine, but I still don't love the idea of having to exporting everything out and rebuilt it in a game engine for a 2d render...

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

@@Eradifyerao Because i didn't touch on theese things, which is a fair point. I just wanted to say that it looks like hastle is worth it, well if we will get some addon to import blend. files directly, just like in Unity. It just boggles me, why people calling eevee a rt renderer, it is a bit misleading, when you need to wait 20-30 seconds per frame if not more to get a decent picture, or faster than Cycles mean's rt now? What blazingly fast speed are people talking about when it comes to eevee. My problem that it has a lot of limitation's of rasterised game engines, but none of the speed.

[@andrewvirtue5048]

6:03 ...You use Blender to make the models, that you would be using for animation in UE? Thats why you would use Blender.

[@RR-om3zx]

Hey, at the start of the video, what is that music called? Thanks!

[@philosophyfrog2653]

Interesting. I never used unreal or any game engine for that matter, I do however have a lot of experience with Maya, C4d and Blender so my questions is how's the transition between these softwares? Are there any similar workflows for animation?

[@Greg.Lacoste]

Great interview

[@JonathanWinbush]

Thank you👊🏾

[@emilienlerochais]

I dug into it few weeks ago thanks to jonathan and i agree there a lot of potential. But for the moment i think it suit well only for some type project (architectural, realistic etc). I'm dreaming having those maxon mograph tools in Unreal ;)

[@KikinProductions]

I was hoping you'd give us a tutorial on how to make a scenery like in the thumbnail haha

[@lowmoon9025]

What are the output options like in Unreal? Can you render a 4k still with AOV passes, alphas etc like in Redshift or Octane?

[@JonathanWinbush]

You can do 4k with passes for sure but the aov passes are limited. You can't do object buffers or mattes yet but Unreal has basically a NLE built in to where you can do all your post processing stuff all within unreal so there's very little reason to really take it to like After Effects or other post programs.

[@DodaGarcia]

I don't know much about UE5, but as a Blender user who recently started using UE4, I feel frustrated at how unintuitive and uncooperative the interface can be compared to the amazing capabilities it has for building and rendering. It can do extraordinarily advanced things, and as someone familiar with programming I got the Blueprints paradigm pretty quickly, but I constantly feel like I'm having to wrestle with the interface to get something done that's sometimes very basic. If that gets improved with UE5, I bet it will be a similar revolution to the one brought about by Blender 2.8 and the software will get a lot more widespread.

[@vadimbanshee]

Dear, Mike from MOBOX Can you tell what a font you use for preview, and other text in your video?) Because it's realy goooooooooooooood font)

[@moboxgraphics]

Gotham

[@vadimbanshee]

@@moboxgraphics many thanks)

[@jascrandom9855]

What they are missing here in the video is that while the Quixel Demo and UE5 demo look astonishing, the "realistic" looking things are all Static Hard Surface Environments, which are the easiest things to make look Photorealistic. If you bend or transform then in any way, it all falls apart. It all still looks CGI anyways.

[@sicfxmusic]

Unreal or game engines are like compositing tools that bring it all together, but the most important thing is bringing in optimized assets such as combined textures, LODs etc which when feeded into Unreal makes it look fast, real and EPIC!! By the way, the other guy is "90%" biased towards Unreal LOL!! Edit: You can't do mograph in Unreal!! C4D-1 Unreal-0 😂😂😂

[@JonathanWinbush]

Yup I've used Cry Engine, Unity and Unreal and so far for me personally I really like Unreal. I have a good friend who swears by Unity so its all about what your most comfortable with at the end of the day these are just tools.

[@toosharpstudios6694]

Frostbite engine, from the battlefield series might be promising too but its not available to public, only company exclusive

[@HentzGG]

6:00 I've been thinking exactly this. The more I get to know UE4, I'm sitting here wondering (aside from personal preference) why people are using Blender opposed to Unreal Engine. Seems UE is really becoming the jack of all trades.

[@andrewvirtue5048]

...You use Blender to make the models, that you would be using for animation in UE? Thats why you would use Blender.

[@codyrw8397]

@@andrewvirtue5048 is blender superior with character modeling?

[@andrewvirtue5048]

@@codyrw8397 considering unreal doesnt even have modeling; yes.

[@codyrw8397]

@@andrewvirtue5048 k

[@DanMDL]

PLEASE! Does anybody know how to do your thing in blender and render in UE?

[@RmaNYouTube]

U-Render for Cinema 4D is actually really underrated, It works crazy fast, even with so much volumetric lights & fogs, ..... but It's not even close to Unreal in the photorealism department!

[@bradstoonz4703]

it focuses on mograph more than photorrealism.

[@jascrandom9855]

Its true that Eevee still has a lot of kinks to work on (The flickering is a problem), it is after all a new engine developed as a Open source project. While UE is decades old and is developed by a Billion dollar company.

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

Then Blender fanboys should just admit that it can't compete with industry giants. Talking as a Blender avid user. Flickering will always be there with current decisions they've made, since soft-shadows using sample system, which is not real-time and probably never will be.

[@renday2636]

*Dude (Raphael Rau) using 8 GPUs where 5 is GTX 1080 TI, and 3 is 980 TI . However, rendering ONLY 1 frame took 2 minutes* *What? OMG **3:27*

[@moboxgraphics]

Yeah that really took the wind out of my sail.

[@JonathanWinbush]

Yup now you can see why I've been trying to utilize unreal for motion graphics. My electric bill is so high every month from all this GPU rendering I have a lot of cards as well that I might be selling off soon.

[@Dazzer1234567]

11:12 YES!! ....... you hit the nail right on the head, this is the biggest issue .......... i've been getting into UE for a couple of months and this is the biggest road-block. With Blender, if you have a problem or need to know something you can google it and you're almost guaranteed to have the answer in a few seconds ........ not so with UE ....... much less info on forums and waaaay fewer youtube tutorials and of lesser quality. And 98% of the UE youtube tuts are aimed at people trying to make video games. Which also makes it harder to learn because the person is trying to explain something with an end goal which is very different from your end goal. I've seen very few tuts aimed at someone who has no interest in video games. Add to that the fact that the UE interface is clunky, ugly & generally pretty poor compared to Blender or Houdini and takes a long time to start up. If you have no knowledge of or interest in developing for games, then the whole UE UI seems bizarre and utterly non-intuitive, especially the viewport. So yeah, coming from Blender, learning UE feels like quite a struggle. However i'm sure that, because of the recent hype about UE for real-time rendering, people will see that there's a market for a new wave of UE tuts aimed at non-game people...........JMH2C

[@JonathanWinbush]

This is the exact reason why I've been doing tutorials in UE. I come from a motion graphics background and yes UE isn't perfect for us but it's getting there I've been enjoying it.

[@Dazzer1234567]

@@JonathanWinbush Great, please keep on making the tuts! ................ here's one i'd really like to see: a generic tut about how to import a camera animation into UE4. I saw you had one about Maya, but i simply couldn't get a Blender FBX camera animation into UE4. I think it's the very power of UE4's realtime render which will draw people to it for longer animations. But people might want to do tricky stuff (like camera animations) in the software they already know and use UE almost like a realtime compositor. If you're not a Blender user, i could supply you with a simple camera animation FBX to test it.

[@JonathanWinbush]

@@Dazzer1234567 Yea I use Cinema 4D which the integration has been really great but if you want to shoot me your Blender FBX I'd be down to check it out shoot me an email at [e-mail] I don't currently know Blender but if you send me a simple scene maybe a camera moving around a cube or something I can see if I can import it correctly

[@kezfx]

14:43 I 'member. Now I Feel old. 🤣

[@JonathanWinbush]

I know right lol

[@sauravjith5783]

Hey Mike, iam surprised to know that you were a mechanical engineer graduate cause iam a mechanical engineer undergrad and honestly I like to pursue motion graphics iam not into this mechanical engineering .. you got any advice for me?

[@moboxgraphics]

What you do in your actual job vs school is totally different. You can go into product management and work with marketing etc. Nothing wrong with working on motion graphics in your spare time until it makes money.

[@sauravjith5783]

@@moboxgraphics thanks for the advice mike, appreciate it.

[@1O1OO11O1O]

3:44 I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant thing to say. First of all you could render the same quality image with blender in "realtime" if you are using eevee and not cycles. The problem is that cycles or octaine is easier for beginners or any ray tracing engine is easier for beginners as it would render more realistically without any trics and techneeks. Realtime is just more complicated to set up. Also, he clearly didn't see the brakedown from the Quixel demo, they used a huge variety of tools to make that demo, not just Unreal, and they had to render out 5k frames and compress it to 4k frames to fix flickers, unreal is not some magic bullet.

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

No you can't, Even if you have a hog of the machine due to EEVEE using sample based system, it's not in real-time. Like even 0.5 seconds per frame it's still not realtime. Yes, you can render from viewport at the cost of ugly shadows that is not usable for final renders. 512 samples and soft-shadows is a must and it's pretty much kills any attempts at real-time rendering. Blender 2.8 have a 2 shadow option's that produced decent looking shadows in real-time, why are they ditched that in favour of much slower implementation i have no idea. They still look much much worse that Cycles and you have less control over it. You can bake static shadows, but you can't do that with dynamic shadows from characters in EEVEE unless im missing something and there's some convoluted and unintuitive way to do it. No matter how much you've optimized your scene in EEVEE, you can't run it in real-time, unless ugly shadows and volumetrics is looking appealing to you. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but i've yet to see a good examples or videos on real-time rendering in Blender. That would mean that dev's are maked a little revolution for 3d artists that want to create fast-smooth animations, without waiting forever to render.

[@1O1OO11O1O]

@@saaaaaaaaadasdaWHAT?! 512 samples?! Are you insane!? Yes devs did that revolution, all my work is in eevee and at most I use 64 samples, most of the time just 16. They implemented a sample based cascade system for accuracy. BTW, since making that comment I actually had some experiance with unreal and it sucks ass, if you want to make a game maybe it's great, but for CG animation not only does it gives the same "unreal" look to all renders, and from what I heard from experienced UE5 users it's almost impossible to get rid of, fancy new GI and LOD implementations are not as straight forward as they make you think, your assets need to be optimized for nanite and lumin to work well with it. You know I do CG professionally and never once did someone complain about my shadows looking ugly lol. Also, Ian Hubert uses Eevee for his VFX work from time to time, I think he uses 32 samples. Yes, it's not true real-time, but you don't need that unless you are running a game, it's all shaded and great looking in the viewport and then 16 - 32 samples render shadows and DOF superior to anything unreal produces rendering 3-10sec per frame. Yes, unreal just like blender 2.8 beta could do soft shadows by projection, but I done AB testing of Unreal v Eevee cascade shadow v cycles ray tracing and unreal not only draws them in the wrong shape it also flickers. Same with DOF in unreal btw, ppl do crazy stuff to reduce these issues.

[@moboxgraphics]

Guys relax. When I talked with Winbush I was very ignorant about 3D. It's no big deal.

[@1O1OO11O1O]

@@moboxgraphics oh you are doing blender content now, cool. It's not a big deal, I'm just an Eevee fan.

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

​@@1O1OO11O1O But they look ugly at 64 and even 256 samples, there's obvious gradience on the edges, because of how sampling system works, you can't even bake soft-shadows themselves. Many not knowledgable people with untrained eye don't see many things, especially when you're work not mean to be realistic. For example i replayed recently Bayonetta 1 and i've put a lot hours in it, but i've noticed only know that during bar scene her hair sleeves going though bar counter multiple times, because of the good cinemathography and pacing i didn't payed attention. My problem is, why are they removing options? I know that 2.8 ESM and VSM shadows are not perfect, but they can be rendered rt and look decent and you had multiple options to tweak them. If they are faked, why we can't have more control over it? Same thing was with removing GPU subdivision for multiple years, for some uncertain benefits at the cost of performance. It just boggles me, why people calling eevee a rt renderer, it is a bit misleading, when you need to wait 20-30 seconds per frame if not more to get a decent picture, or faster than Cycles mean's rt now? What blazingly fast speed are people talking about when it comes to eevee. That's not even talking about how many limitation's eevee has of a rasterised game engine, while not being it. If theese negative's is true about UE5 i'll not defend it, but can we see something looking like Stray in Blender and working in real-time? If not, i don't think it's productive to undermine UE5 achievements, both in terms how much polygons iit could render and doing it with speed. As i've said, you can optimize scene in eevee all you want you can't render it in real-time, with ready to show results, which was my point.

[@warrenhenning8064]

Besides having a tool for artists to create game models and textures in, you still need a DCC like Blender to have a system for doing the optimizations necessary to make games to work on the range of hardware that games currently need to ship to. Realtime rendering is great, but it cannot match full path tracing in all cases. In good games, you won't notice this because of the use of pre-baked data all over the place that was created offline and through creative choices from designers and artists to avoid creating environments where realtime rendering is noticeably unrealistic. You also don't see low-poly models right next to their original high-poly versions for comparison, so you're more likely to accept what is there. Unity's HDRP and Unreal 4/5 are now high quality enough for certain kinds of visualizations, and they can replace a traditional offline rendering engine in those cases, but you still need a spectrum of renderers for different situations.

[@moelleunbelievable]

5x 1080 titan? how is that done? i doubt theres a mainboard that supports 8 gpu slots? 😅 - are the cards setup in a rig like we use to see it for bitcoin mining these days? edit: ne nevermind, its probably built like mining rig

[@shockerson]

Im in a truly (Im pointing in CREATING 3D movies like FROZEN , like Batman , kinda a CINEMATICS movies.) difficult life choice...Im in 3D world from 18 months... im 33 years old. Im Learning ICLONE 7 (Reallusion) and so on from allmost 15 months, and Character Creator 3 (Reallusion) , as far as i know and what i see after allmost 18 months, ICLONE is good for creating MOTION CLIPS i mean Human/objects Movement etc . But other things like visuals (OK Characters are extremly Beatifful) but other Things... Assets are not so good. In Unreal Engine we have quixel tons of amazing Assets , like or Blende we have Destruction system, fluids, softbodies. I rly dont know what to do next AFTER ICLONE 7... ? Im able to create great Motions but what after ? Blender / Unreal engine ? UE has amazing Realtime this is ridicoulus how good is this, and still Evolves.

[@KindTom1]

they didnt talk about EEVEE

[@jascrandom9855]

Or the resent "The Forgotten" Eevee Real Time video. Or the many other videos in which Blender users have achieved the same results.

[@JonathanWinbush]

It's because I'm not a Blender user so I personally can't speak on Eevee I've never used it only saw it from a far

[@KindTom1]

@@JonathanWinbush ,thanks for your honesty and response. and yes it's true, you are very underrated in the cgi community. we appreciate your work.

[@JonathanWinbush]

@@KindTom1 Thank you my man that really means a lot 🙏🏾 I'll get into Blender one day just need to clear some time out to dive into it

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

@@jascrandom9855 It's not realtime, 5 seconds per frame that was said by the author, are you kidding me.

[@mikepindara8478]

Blender does have a built in Real Time engine, Eevee. Which is pretty impressive and comparable from what I've seen.

[@ThePlugTurtle]

That was talked about

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

No it isn't comparable, EEVEE can't render a good shadows, volumetrics without big amount of samples, and that's pretty much kills any attempts of real-time rendering.

[@69grills52]

Why to Use Blender we will talk out genius in this video denying the fact Unreal is still alpha in Mograph and C4D to model lmao You need 3 software in total make one stuffs ? Damn thats too long bro ... I knw Blender Evee is Not Good as Compare to UEbut dont deny the fact Blender can do everything they even has game engine which they removed for conflict in 2.8 so yeah ... Dont compare Game Engine with 3D Software ...You still need 3D models to use in UE .. so yeah instead of being baised accept what real and about c4d we all knw .. but when it comes to mograph nothing cant beat Houdini for sure but learning curves matter and User Experience . Blender still good to use for the artist who find UE complex and its improving and becoming power with every update... thats what progress looks like ... Every Update has major improvement which affecting market race... Nobody cares and value free stuffs but Hell yeah C4D bring it on people comparing 3-4 software with One Indie 3D software Blender .. thats what its all about .. Evolution .. Blender is an evolution and other software copying features ...to cope up competition .. Game Engine is different Complex .. Dont compare two Different stuffs with same logic.

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

So, real-time good shadows, in EEVEE when? Which hardware i should have? Double RTX 3090?

[@69grills52]

@@saaaaaaaaadasda evee has got real realtime shadows it use screenspace reflection .. You can use any RTX cards and SSGI blender build

[@saaaaaaaaadasda]

@@69grills52 And they are not flickering and actually in real-time in viewport with no waiting for actual render? Im talking about soft-shadows specifically, not Global Illumination. It looks grainy in viewport, from videos i've seen and it's even stated that it is not true GI and cheating. Again, where i can see an example of real-time soft shadows in eevee? You know, at least 5 frames per second will be nice. When you move around camera and characters, on Blender 3.3 they are flickering which mean's they are processing using sample count, which means they are not actually working in real-time. And you can't even have a good results with them unless you have a 512 samples or higher, which bring even simple scene render to a 10 second per frame, on GTX 1070 which again doesn't scream real-time to me.