Unreal Developer's Kit: Now Free

©2009 Epic Games, Inc.

©2009 Epic Games, Inc.

Epic is now offering the Unreal Engine 3 and its complete development framework for free. All the tools you'd need to create an interesting previsualization tool....don't you think? 

Comments

[Albert Cheng]

These are interesting times. There are many real-time options available now to those of us involved with visualization. Game engines have always been accessible to us, but the workflow between the DCC tools that we are familiar with, and the engines themselves have always prevented their practical usage in a previs. Having used the first iteration of this engine (Unreal Engine 1), I can say with all honesty, that it is a huge task to get anything up and running due to the complex nature of what is essentially an engineering toolset. I believe that with each iteration, these tools like Unreal Engine 3, have become more artist friendly, more data driven, and more streamlined in going from idea to visuals. In fact, Unreal Engine already includes a whole camera animation and editing toolset called Matinee, which are use to create real-time cinematics.

Hopefully, the latest incarnation will provide us with some new tools and methods for previs without a herculean engineering effort. Each year, we seem to get one step closer. The great irony is that with newer tools, techniques and rendering horsepower, an ever rising amount of artistic talent and labor is needed to deliver the visual fidelity that has been afforded us.

[Lorin Wood]

The engine (our primary tool at Gearbox for Aliens: Colonial Marines and Borderlands) is somewhat artist-friendly - speaking from the position of a traditional visual artist the application is relatively simple, but still takes a great deal of effort to create assets like any other standard tool currently used by previz artists.

The end results would be great for previz work, but it's still a time-consuming process. I'm hesitant to say that it's a match made in heaven for this industry to outright adopt the tools used in the interactive field. This would be a decision on a per-project basis.

[Daniel Gregoire]

Free for non-commercial use only - not to throw water on it. I too got excited for a moment. :) Maybe good for students but where would that take you?

[Lorin Wood]

Yep. Talked with a co-worker about this offer. Not sure if it would be compatible on project with a hefty NDA attached.

[Albert Cheng]

The game engine companies tend to be pretty flexible when making licensing deals for non-game related projects and encourage uses in various sectors of visualization. They seem to be pretty open to expand their potential client base of course. I'm pretty sure that a project even under a hefty NDA would be possible, if it's for internal previs use for a particular production company.