AI Filmmaking vs Unreal Engine: Why AI Tools Changed Everything

During the lockdown of 2020 I started to take an interest in ANIMATION development. I don't know why because I've never shown an interest in this field before. The idea was I would make short films and perhaps put them on youtube and or elsewhere. I sought out then spent some time studying the most popular, which seemed to be Blender, Maya and Unreal Engine plus their many versions. What did become apparent about all of these tools is (especially from a filmmaking point of view) none of them could be used without outside help. I can't remember following a youtube tutorial where the tutor didn't use one of the above, let's say Unreal Engine, then halfway through take the project to Blender to do something or other then go back to Unreal Engine. I became increasingly frustrated with this approach. After I finished studying I decided on Unreal Engine purely because Maya, although quite useful, priced themselves out of the market for small independent filmmakers and Blender just didn't have the tools necessary to do what I wanted, with the end results being far inferior to unreal Engine.

Click here to watch the full video. I spent at least 2 hours every evening using Unreal Engine, watching tutorials and putting into practice what I'd learnt but Epic Games, the owners of Unreal Engine (for reasons best known to themselves) have made their tools very user UNFRIENDLY. I'm particularly talking about the metahumans. Things like animating them. Facial animation WOW! It would be easier to move Mount Everest, clothing, even keeping the head in place, have been made difficult.

Why? Even those presenting the tutorials would shy away from answering queries probably because they couldn't solve the problems themselves. I know this to be true from reading 100s of comments in the comments section. Eventually, and after losing litres of sweat, I managed to make a 6 minute film purely in Unreal Engine 5.5. YES I DIDN'T leave it once but then I had one more hurdle to jump. What was that you may ask? Exporting the short film from Unreal Engine onto my desktop as a playable file. There are a dozen steps to make before this could happen. Like I wrote earlier, Unreal Engine insists on making things difficult.

Someone introduced me to filmmaking using AI tools. 'forget about Unreal Engine, Blender and the rest', he said to me. Anyway I put Unreal Engine to one side and watched a few tutorials on ai filmmaking and I've now made a short film using ai tools only. It's taken me maybe a month to do what took me 18 months to do in Unreal Engine. After I finished making the film in ai I simply dragged it onto the desktop it was as simple as that! And it played perfectly in VLC or windows media player.

I think as far as filmmaking goes Unreal engine belongs in the bin. This is my first of what I hope will be many short films.