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Hey everybody! I just wanted to share this Toothless model I had downloaded from the amazing artist Fulonimation Studios (www.youtube.com/@fulonimations… )! This model and rig were excellent. I ended up going in and updating the shaders, adding micro-details and fancy effects like subsurface scattering, shine, etc. I rendered this with Cycles and used it for a project in which Toothless faced off against Godzilla! That can be seen here in this video; youtu.be/R0T_1P8BfZE

So why does it not look the same in that video as it does here? Simple. Unreal Engine. See, Unreal Engine kind of sucks ass. Now don't get me wrong, you can do some AMAZING things in Unreal. But when it comes to simple things like making good looking normal maps, adding subsurface scattering, messing with specular highlights, it's just 10x more complex then it should be and half the time it doesn't even look good. It just is not beginner or even intermediate friendly. Lumen is great but honestly I can never get shadows to look as good. Unreal just isn't good enough for rendering actual cinematics, so even when I baked out the textures I ended up losing a LOT of detail. It takes so much work to make hair cards look good, to make shadows look good, even to add images/videos transparently on planes. The tech just isn't there yet and they really need to work on it. If I could go back and do it all again I would 150% have rendered this in Blender. I'm not going to make that mistake with my future projects as I halted the progress in Unreal and am going to render it all WITHIN Blender. So this is just a simple What Was, What Could Have Been, and What SHOULD Have Been! 😭😭😭😭 Here's to future projects actually looking amazing!

Description
Hey everybody! I just wanted to share this Toothless model I had downloaded from the amazing artist Fulonimation Studios (www.youtube.com/@fulonimations… )! This model and rig were excellent. I ended up going in and updating the shaders, adding micro-details and fancy effects like subsurface scattering, shine, etc. I rendered this with Cycles and used it for a project in which Toothless faced off against Godzilla! That can be seen here in this video; youtu.be/R0T_1P8BfZE

So why does it not look the same in that video as it does here? Simple. Unreal Engine. See, Unreal Engine kind of sucks ass. Now don't get me wrong, you can do some AMAZING things in Unreal. But when it comes to simple things like making good looking normal maps, adding subsurface scattering, messing with specular highlights, it's just 10x more complex then it should be and half the time it doesn't even look good. It just is not beginner or even intermediate friendly. Lumen is great but honestly I can never get shadows to look as good. Unreal just isn't good enough for rendering actual cinematics, so even when I baked out the textures I ended up losing a LOT of detail. It takes so much work to make hair cards look good, to make shadows look good, even to add images/videos transparently on planes. The tech just isn't there yet and they really need to work on it. If I could go back and do it all again I would 150% have rendered this in Blender. I'm not going to make that mistake with my future projects as I halted the progress in Unreal and am going to render it all WITHIN Blender. So this is just a simple What Was, What Could Have Been, and What SHOULD Have Been! 😭😭😭😭 Here's to future projects actually looking amazing!