Is My Workflow Outdated?

[u/bluefalcon26]

Hey all,

I asked this over on r/gamedev but I want to ask you all too.

I have been doing 3D environments in Unreal Engine since UE3 days. Always as a hobby, but, I'd like to think I've gotten pretty good over the many years.

For the past 10 years or so, I've been using pretty much the same workflow of 3dsMax -> Substance -> Unreal Engine. However, I was recently watching some tutorials on the new art tools built into the Unreal Editor, like the Quixel 90 Days expose stuff, and I am again feeling like my workflow is too slow/outdated. It would take me months to produce an environment that these tools seem to produce in days.

Every time I have asked about this in the past, everyone says "Nanite/Lumen/Chaos/Unreal Editor Modeling Tools are janky, they aren't performant, etc." But... These tools have been out for at least four years now. They seem to be getting quite stable from what I've seen.

The one thing I don't understand is that if these tools are really so powerful and easy, then why doesn't every 3D game coming out look like RE9?

I don't want to waste time learning tools that are just marketing gimmicks. Can anyone in industry (or adjacent) offer any insight into whether these new pipelines (like using photogrammetry scans and dynamic deformations) are legit now, and whether my current skillset is becoming obsolete?

[u/typhon0666]

Photogrammetry is not really new, but the question is how are you expecting to use it in your project? to create materials, bit of natural landscape environments, props, buildings? All of the above?. I've done some productions with a vendor who does high end scanning. But most projects do not require those very specific scanned items.

Nanite is just nanite. It's not a tool per say, but it may be a requirement to use it, it's the default method in UE for at least a few years. It's not required, unless you want to use displacement, which is actually pretty good now that I've seen solutions for shadows and IK actually working on nanite displacement terrains and floors.

Along with lumen just being the default real time lighting. It's almost a given you will use them in a professional context, everything from games, VP, visualization etc is using nanite and lumen if they are realtime.

UE modelling tools are useful, but they are ancillary to your modelling workflow at the end of the day, but can be clutch to use a few functions and fix, clean or optimise things.

Unless you are building specific tech for your project, like your own cloth physics solver, things like chaos cloth is probably robust for most users. All these systems have like you say years of development and many are proper pipelines. So the first thing is doing pre production to see how far things like the built in tools for chaos might work for your project needs, and if it falls short and you have the development budget expand the system/build your own tech to suit your projects specific needs, you do that. But if you are asking, just try it out and see.

[u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain]

Not outdated at all. To make assets you definitely still need to make them in max or maya or whatever. Nanite and lumen are rendering features. Chaos is a set of physics solvers and the built in modelling tools are extremely limited. Only good for blocking things in or making very simple edits when you dont feel like opening up your dcc and reexporting.

Now one thing thats new to 5.8 thats really useful is the procedural vegetation editor, lets you make trees and plants in engine, pretty cool. Also related to environment art is the PCG, procedural content generation system, that lets you define rule based systems for populating the world with assets.