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So yeah, they just dropped that. Without announcements. For everyone to try. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-is-now-available-in-early-access

Trying something a bit different for me just to mix it up. Enjoying quick modeling this stuff - therapeutic. 💥

i think the easiest way to explain this: You know how some software is more geared towards arch viz, and some towards mograph, and some towards character animations. They each put a different emphasis on various things and tools. Arch viz software probably won't bother too much with developing hair tools, just enough for grass and carpets. Mograph software isn't that concerned with character animation, just enough for a guy pointing/holding a product, maybe some 10 second animations.. Character animation software doesn't really care that much about cloning objects or interactive text objects. But all these things are still pretty close to each other and overlap. Since they all focus on offline rendering. So the interactivity takes priority during creation. Unreal is a game engine, the end product ABSOLUTELY must be interactive that is the highest priority. So they sacrifice interactivity during production. And the tools they develop are largely geared towards creating games, not movies/animations. They are objeviously moving towards making movies, and are being used on projects, but at least with unreal 4, you still feel at every moment who this tool was created for. It's kinda like using a sledge hammer to hammer in nails. It works, and if you line up a whole bunch of nails, you might be able to nail them all in at the same time, but it's still very awkward :)) Or boiling a 10 liter pot of water instead of using an electric kettle. It does boil a lot of water at once, but then it's kinda awkward to pour it into small cups, and it doesn't shut off automatically etc.. it's just lots of small little things which add up during your usage experience.

Well there's still a lot of stuff you simply can't do with realtime engines. Transparencies or translucent materials is one of these things. Subsurface Scattering is still "eh". All the GI and stuff that I showed up there are just approximations. If you made that scene with the small glowing spheres in Octane or Redshift or something similiar you would get "perfect" lighting and shadows. In Unreal it's a blotchy mess. Even with all the modern techniques realtime is still a lot more finicky than just simply chucking a shitty model in a DCC app. You get issues way more quickly. You are not as flexible. Etc. If you haven't, just go ahead and try porting one of your projects. UE supports alembic. Depending on what you were doing in that scene you're going to run into limitations very quickly. It's really cool tech and it has its place but it's simply not a replacement for classic render engines. It's just another tool.

I have been extremely impressed by Nanite and Lumen for quite some time now, ever since their first demo. So given all that this software can do, I have to ask what does this mean for the traditional users of non-game engine DCC tools? I mean if the goal is to create realistically rendered images with physically accurate lighting, why should we be using anything OTHER than Unreal? I mean the darn thing only needs the power of a PS5 or X-Box to run. How many PS5's could you get for an RTX-3090? We pride ourselves on not creating triangles and Nanite is nothing but triangles. Have we been wrong all along thinking in terms of quads, ray optimization, big GPU's and full featured (and expensive) DCC software? Should we just embrace the metalness workflow and only create using game engines? Okay....sarcastic rant mode off. But the point remains valid. Just look at the investment you can make in the traditional DCC approach: Workstation level graphics cards, tons of memory,3rd party rendering software, fast CPU's. You could build a massive workstation, plunk down thousands in hardware and software and still never get the real time performance that Unreal is giving you. So why not just chuck it all and build your entire pipleline around Unreal? Hell, with Unreal all you need is a good modeler (modo), substance painter and a pretty decent gaming computer. Plus now Unreal directly links to Quixel megascans for FREE! That puts C4D's content browser to shame. So what is the advantage to NOT using Unreal for all your creative needs? I ask that as an honest question. Dave

Apart from what we wish for this software we must be realistic and try to see what is MAXON's real goal and what should we be expecting. To do this we also must see what is happening in the other 3d software packages. C4d along with houdini is the main package for motion graphics and an industry standard in broadcast, advertisement, design studios, motion studios etc. MAXON will try to defend this status since it's the main profit branch so it will include more stuff dedicated to motion (scene nodes inluded) and also the reason why its buying red giant etc. Also c4d is know for it's easy approach so the stuff we'll see it's probably gonna be not very technnical. in my opinion MAXON will try to consolidate its presence in this side of the industry in order to keep blender away and to distinguish itself from houdini, since its an easier and more compreensive software. the other commercial software packages are kinda doing the same. in their own game. Autodesk 3ds max is boosting its modelling tools and also developing better material editor in an effort to maintain its status as modelling and render king. However, it relies in two major 3d party softs. Vray and recently tyflow. Without those two max is just and old software with good modellling tools but nothing special. Also autodesk is not introducing nothing new besides these features. max doesn't have a decent take system, nor a decent xref system, nor volume modelling etc. The list goes on. And you have to rely on lots of third party software. Maya is the same, they boost rigging/animation tools since its main business but besides that i dont see much. They dont upgrade their motion graphic tools , or everything else. and its crashes a lot (kinda buggy) Houdini is the main competitor for c4d in my opinion. apart from modelling, sculpting and character animation and rigging it is a stronger software but its hard to learn, and is a lot slower to produce results comparing to c4d in small advertisement projects. However i think they favour the development of vfx tools apart from anything else, since its main profit . Basicaly every company do the same as MAXON. They develop their software according to their commercial needs in order to defend their status in each industries, and if that status is gonne that software is as good as dead. We all want better tools that can do everything and in the end to pay the lowest price as possible. I think its very difficult to do that. Sometimes it's just better to learn a second soft and use it to complement (if needed). For motion graphics / advertisement etc, c4d will be a safe bet and with good tools. For everything else i think it will depend. My guess is that character animation will receive some better tools also. (and i hope) cheers

Beeple uses his $69 Million dollar windfall from selling his crypto-art and purchases MAXON. As the new owner, he launches a new license program that if you create one piece of art every day between each release, then the cost of the next release is free. There is much rejoicing in the C4D community.