Here’s a stream-of-consciousness backstory for this post.

About a month or two ago, @CakedCrusader and @Mindstrike, and I were playing a good amount of Star Citizen because it was running pretty well. ‘Crusader and I were spending a lot of time completing the ASD Onyx Facilities, and we’d started to run Mindstrike through them as well. Considering how well things were going, I got the idea to record our shenanigans in part for my records, and also because I had finally got it in my head that “a video” didn’t have to mean “one unadulterated stream of minute by minute history”. These runs would be a good place to start learning to edit, so I tried that and looking back, failed miserably. I cut and cut and cut, and while the videos still turned out to be more or less as they happened, what really came out of it was having been forced to look at audio.

I learned that OBS has an input — in beta, currently — that allows for the capture of audio from a specific and running application. This is great because Discord doesn’t have it’s own audio output, meaning I can’t just pipe Discord into OBS in it’s own channel. I could use VB-Audio software, somehow, but that way lies madness, especially since Discord’s new feature — in beta, currently — worked like magic. I split Discord audio from the game audio, and was able to edit out the heavy breathing, coughing, and bag rustling (don’t ask) that was getting caught in the recordings, making the end product a lot more professional while also giving me the opportunity to shed more misconceptions about what a video “must” be.

After all that effort, it seemed like a crime to let the new-found knowledge go to waste, so I started thinking about making videos again on the regular. A big part of getting into a habit, they say, is to do it over and over (aka “make a habit of forming a habit”) so I went looking for games to play that I could record, edit, and post. I thought about Europa Universalis V, but I didn’t and probably won’t ever really understand that game enough in order to play to my or anyone’s satisfaction. Spacebourne II was releasing to it’s 1.0 milestone and I recorded an initial video for that, but I had to admit that the game’s jank wasn’t going to keep my interest long enough to make a series about it.

So to distract myself, I turned to Blender. Actually, I turned to Davinci Resolve first, because I decided to procrastinate by coming up with a new intro animation. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and it had been so long since I really used Resolve Fusion that I couldn’t remember how to string two nodes together let alone make something compelling, so I took the more difficult road and opted to make an animated 3D scene in Blender.

This was a labor of trial and error, mostly error. I subjected ‘Crusader and Mindstrike to daily updates, and they gave pointed and constructive feedback, so their names belong in the credits as well. I am pleased with the outcome of this task, although it had the opposite effect to what I had hoped to accomplish: I might still want to make “Let’s Play” videos, but I’m primarily thinking about creating animations.

Blender does animation well (case in point: Flow) and since I know Blender tolerably well it makes sense to me to use it for my immediate endeavors.

Or does it?

I got an email from Fab telling me of their own early Black Friday sales, so I went to look at what they offered. Fab is basically Epic’s non-game-application, Unreal content marketplace for things like models, “MetaHuman” rigs, and textures. While these are primarily designed to work with Unreal Engine, some of them can be used in Blender, but as I was browsing the listings, I thought: why? Why struggle to fit this round peg in a square hole? Why not bite the bullet and look into learning Unreal Engine?

Earlier today, I was watching videos on Blender’s recently released 5.0 features and I thought back to the time when I first opened Blender, and was punched in the face with inconsolable dread. There was too much there to possibly learn, I remember thinking, needing to learn the basic concepts of 3D modeling in addition to learning the software, and I struggled with all it for quite some time. It wasn’t until a few years ago that something clicked, and what I once thought was insurmountable became…uh…mountable, to carry an unfortunately metaphor to it’s unnecessarily graphic conclusion. I am by no means a Blender expert, but I’m no longer afraid to stick my nose into new systems like geometry nodes or the compositor.

This is why I wonder if now is a good time to look at Unreal Engine again, with the same dedicated focus that I finally gave Blender a few years ago. There’s a lot of material out there for it, and since UE has made the jump from being only a game engine to also doing miraculous things for filmmaking, it’s not entirely academic. I don’t have the bandwidth nor the resources to create entire narrative products, but I have some ideas for a few things that I could technically do in Blender, but which might be better suited to do in UE, considering the latter is designed to do what I think I would need any software used to do.