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Yes and no. They are different kinds of software. They absolutely started for different target areas. But the last couple of years we have seen, that this two areas begin to merge. Game engines get better quality, and offline 3d is forced to get faster and cheaper. I don't Think that the discussion is: " Can Unreal do everything c4d does?" but more: "Why can't C4D have a easy, good looking wether system in c4d or why cant we have fast dust and fog rendering?") we had the discussion about the maturity of DCC aps and the "need" for subscription. I mean how complicated is it to make a boat drive through water in C4D? Yes Unreal doesn't look perfect, but hey For 90% of the tasks I would be good enough. There is absolutely no reason, why cinema should not and could not contain tools like that.

fields and volumes were introduced in r20, field improvements and field forces in r21... i'd say to most those are quite powerful and useful features...

Why ? I think we can compare Unreal and Cinema 4D, since they can be used for the same purpose. Only the results matter. Unreal is a valid option for many industries beyond gaming. It's used for films, cartoons, architecture visualizations, etc... Working in Unreal is actually not that different than in Cinema 4D. The interface is even quite similar with a content browser, a world manager, a nodal material editor, a details tab (attributes), etc... We can no longer say that game engine are "cheating" because they use pre-calculated data (baked textures, baked illumination and simulation) . Unreal 5 can be used dynamically without any baking at all ! Nanite, its scene optimization system (an automatic LOD system using clusters), even removes the need to use baked low poly assets. You can work directly with heavy geometries, made of billion of polygons. It's not an issue. Sure, game engine use heavy optimization and are limited, but who cares ? Again only the end result matters.

I wish I had learned about Octane sooner. I would have joined up day one if I had known how blazingly fast and beautiful it is compared to the render engines native to Cinema.