Real-time Animated Filmmaking: Unity or Unreal?

In April 2022, I quit my job to become an independent animated filmmaker fulltime. It was a complex, multi-factored decision, but part of it came down to the speed and productivity made possible by real-time graphics engine technology. Traditional pipelines and the slow iterations associated with them are impractical for a single animator (especially an inexperienced one like me) or at least very unsatisfying. Hitting the render button and waiting for hours to see how my shot turned out was not my idea of fun. But being able to get instant feedback inside a real-time engine like Unity or Unreal let me experiment any way I wanted, and immediately learn what worked and what did not. This was a game-changer for me.

A still from a 2 min animated test short I made while learning Unity in 2020 — it took less than 3 days to make

The question of course, was which engine to use? When I started messing around in 2020, the general consensus was that Unity’s learning curve was easier, so I started there. When I began animating fulltime in 2022, I revisited the question and eventually settled on using Unreal 5 for my first project, which is currently ongoing. Both engines are clearly capable of producing stunning, high-end, Triple A (or ‘AAA’) visuals. A lot of the existing content around this debate is focused on the use of these engines for game development — I figured I’d write this from the point-of-view of the growing ranks of animators using the engines for linear animation.

TLDR: I prefer UE5 to Unity 2021.x for linear animation. Future releases of Unity or Unreal Engine may change my mind.

Cinematic showcase of Unity’s HDRP cinematic capabilities made by Unity

Short film made in six weeks by ASC using UE5 Early Access

Two caveats: One, I am an amateur and am learning new things every day — these are the opinions of someone with stories to tell, searching for the fastest and most efficient way to make them real — not a 3D expert. Two, I’m one of those dinosaurs that grew up on 3DSMax and still uses it — if I was a Blender head, it’s possible that Eevee (Blender’s built-in real-time renderer) would be perfectly sufficient for my needs, but I haven’t taken the time to switch to Blender, so I don’t know.

There are a few dimensions on which my experiences with both Unity and Unreal were pretty much identical, so lets get those out of the way first. Both engines have:

• an animation window in which you can manipulate assets
• a camera window through which you can see your shot visualized
• a scene outliner to track your in-scene assets
• a content library into which you can import assets for use
• a timeline structure that allows you to build sequences of linear events
• the ability to cut between various virtual cameras, each with adjustable physical camera parameters and lenses
• a wide range of post-processing effects including color grading, lighting effects, film grain, and more
• the option to render output to a video file or image sequence at various resolutions and in various aspect ratios
• a separate hub that allows for multiple engine versions and asset control
• good integration and workflow options with major 3D software
• good official educational content that helps you along the first few steps of the learning curve
• effectively free pricing plans for linear animation— only usage for interactive products is chargeable, and even that is only beyond a certain revenue level

There are also a couple of aspects that have been less relevant for my purposes. Both engines have:

• basic modeling capabilities (mostly designed for quick block-outs), but I do all my modeling in MAX so I spent no time evaluating these
• powerful node-based scripting languages for deeper functionality (more designed for interactive experiences) — I have barely scratched the surface of these so far

On to the major differences —I’ve broken them down across 7 categories:

1. Product Philosophy

Unity is bare-bones but highly extensible; Unreal works for animation right out of the box

Unity’s product approach seems to be providing a highly extensible bare-bones core product that a user can customize and add to in order to build an environment suited to their particular needs — whether that is a AAA game or a digital twin manufacturing simulator. Unreal gives you an environment designed to make high-end visuals right out of the box and everything about it is focused on that core task. An experienced Unity user will know exactly which plugins to use to set up an HDRP (High Definition Render Pipeline) animation environment just right, but as a noob, I found it quite complicated. The sheer range of options and competing plugins was initially overwhelming. Unreal, on the other hand, had a lot less options to consider but also just worked for animation right away. Winner: Unreal.

2. AAA vs. Scalability

Unreal is less performant on low powered devices, but for pre-rendered linear animation that doesn’t matter

Unreal’s focus on high-end, close-to-photorealistic visuals means that it’s a heavy engine. It really struggles on lower powered machines, like my ‘old’ 2019 MacBook Pro— to the point of being unusable — even on scaled back settings. Nanite, which is UE5’s new system for handling high-poly meshes really improves scalability, but it’s still a beast of an engine. Unity is very scalable and remains comfortably performant on a wide variety of platforms and power levels, which would explain why it is the platform of choice for ~60% of the mobile gaming market. When it comes to making animation though, I don’t really care about scalable performance or platform extensibility — I just want it to be able to quickly and easily make beautiful visuals that I can pre-render, and on a high powered machine, Unreal really shines here. Winner: Unreal.

(Minor caveat: I did swap out my old MacBook Pro for a very heavy Alienware m15 as a travel machine, so the switch to Unreal cost me about $3k there.)

3. Lighting & Photorealism

Unreal’s Lumen lighting system ‘just works’ — turn it on and play till you get the exact right look

My preferred aesthetic is pretty stylized, so all the hoopla around Unreal’s photorealistic Megascans and Metahumans did not particularly excite me. Unity is fully capable of very high-end visuals — especially with newer tools like ArtEngine (Unity’s material authoring engine). The difference for me really came down to Lumen, the UE5 lighting engine — which incorporates a fully dynamic Global Illumination system, reflections, indirect bounces and more right out of the box. After hours spent in Unity with lighting probes and multiple light sources, Lumen just felt like magic. Even for a stylized look, the basics of lighting are a lot easier in Unreal. If you are going for a close-to-photoreal look with human characters, Unreal’s Metahumans definitely wins out over Unity’s current equivalents (see #8 below for more on this). Winner: Unreal.

4. Learning Curve

Unity’s official learning paths are easier in the very beginning

Apart from the ease-of-setup that I described in #1 above, I did initially struggle a little with Unreal as a filmmaking environment. So many of the templates and terminology are designed for games (e.g. scenes being referred to as ‘levels’) that it can feel like you are trying to use the platform for something it wasn’t designed to do. Unity is more seamless in this regard, with more broadly applicable terms throughout the interface. I also found the Unity official learning paths for linear animation easier to follow than the equivalents for Unreal. I ended up giving up on the official Unreal stuff, and switching to really excellent community trainers like William Faucher and David Williams, who make in-depth cinematic-specific tutorial content. Unity also has excellent community content — I found Ben Radcliffe’s VES course in particular very useful. Winner: Unity, for the early stages of learning. After that there’s great content out there for both engines.

5. Marketplaces

Unity’s asset store is way bigger, but sometimes harder to filter the good stuff from the mediocre

The Unity Asset Store is a beast, over 3x the size of the Unreal Marketplace. Both engines have a spectacular range of assets available, from photoreal high-res scans to stylized art of all kinds — meshes, materials, FX, audio, mocap data, software plugins and more. There are armies of really impressive artists making beautiful content for both platforms. The kit-bashing approach that this enables is a huge timesaver and another reason that working in these engines is so satisfying. Unreal includes access to Quixel, a huge library of photoreal environment assets, and overall the Unreal Marketplace (perhaps understandably, given the engine’s strengths) tends to have better photoreal scans and assets. The sheer size of Unity’s Asset Store means a wider range of styles and content is available. I personally found the Unreal Marketplace’s offerings a little more curated, navigable, and on average of higher quality for my purposes — but that is a pretty subjective evaluation. Winner: It depends.

6. Character Animation

Unreal’s in-engine character animation options are more fully-featured

This is a feature level deeper than some of the other dimensions, but I bring it up only because it has been a major area of focus for my filmmaking purposes. Both engines let you import and use animation made in MAX or Maya via FBX files. Both engines have the capability to re-target motion-capture data to your custom meshes and skeletons. Both engines also allow setting up animation rigging on your characters for custom animation or edits in-engine. FBX imports work pretty much the same across both engines. From my experience re-targeting Marketplace / Asset Store / Mixamo mocap animation to custom meshes, Unreal is more fully-featured than Unity. Animation rigging in-engine is built-in for UE5, versus an add-on plugin for Unity, and is a more powerful, comprehensive offering as well. It is harder to get to grips with though, with a lot more options for setup. Winner: Unreal, though I struggled with it.

7. Industry Standard

Unreal seems closer to becoming the industry standard for real-time production of linear animation (image owned by Psyop)

Being the industry standard doesn’t mean a platform is better — it just means more companies use it. But for anyone looking to get a project off the ground, or anyone looking for an industry job, it’s an important consideration. Having said that, in the early days of an emerging industry (very much the case for real-time filmmaking) there is plenty of space for the “industry standard” to shift. Several production houses and studios are experimenting with real-time animation given its obvious advantages, and almost everyone I have spoken to is using Unreal. I’m sure part of this is based on objective capability evaluations, but the fact that Epic has been really smart about courting filmmakers and building high-visibility demonstration projects at scale can’t be hurting. Unity appears to be behind on this front for now. Winner: Unreal.

So that’s my comparison across 7 major dimensions of real difference between the engines, with Unreal coming out on top overall. As a result of this evaluation, I decided to set all my timelines back about 2–3 months by switching engines from Unity to Unreal. I had gotten quite comfortable in Unity by that point, and the difference had to be significant for me to invest the time in starting from scratch. Switching ended up being easier and faster than I expected, and I’m quite pleased with the results I’m getting out of UE5 now.

A still from my current workflow proof-of-concept project built in UE5

It’s also important to note that I’ve been comparing UE5 with Unity 2021.x, meaning that the Unreal offering is arguably one generation ahead of the Unity offering — this is inherently unfair. Unity’s acquisition of WETA Digital (a whole range of in-house modeling, rigging and animation tools) and Ziva Dynamics (a Metahumans competitor) mean that the next generation of the Unity engine could compete pretty closely.

If you’ve gotten this far, I hope this breakdown has been helpful —this is the article I wish had been available to read when I was making my decision between the two engines. Depending on your use case, there are obviously different conclusions you might come to, but for my specific needs, the winner is pretty clear for now.

Let me know what you think in the comments below, and follow me if you’d like to read more content like this. I also post on IG, and document 3D stuff in more detail here, and broader storytelling / life stuff here.