New user coming from Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine, seeking a place to start

Help
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Hello, I hope this is the right place to ask… :slight_smile:

I am a 3D artist whose work focus on storytelling and rich worldbuilding. I work mainly with Blender and Krita, which are my favorite softwares in part because they’re part of an open-source workflow.

I’ve done mainly short movies. However, I’ve been experimenting for a few years now with game engines as I believe the medium is very interesting to work with. I used Unity and Unreal Engine, and I have to say I’m not a big fan of the philosophy behind these softwares. This led me to Godot, which aligns to my values more.

My questions are mainly about where to start with what I aim to do. Please note I am an artist and not a programmer, I am not afraid to learn and it will probably be necessary, but the “transition” is more about artistic aspects. Every “code” I had to make in Unity and UE were very simple or assets.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Godot, by default, doesn’t have many features and needs plugins to work similarly to other game engines. With no tutorials, I couldn’t find anything on the interface about PBR materials or lighting, for example (though I might have just missed them)

As a bare gameplay base, I’d like to make a first-person 3D platformer. I’d like to use a PBR-based workflow, though I’d have no problem using “old” techniques for features that may not exist (for example, using hand-placed alpha textures to make god rays if volumetric lighting doesn’t exist, or is too noisy like in Unity and UE, or baking some of the light information into the texture directly). Anything that would help compatibility between Blender and Godot is welcome, especially node-based shaders (or node-based anything actually). I am however not interested in anything related to generative AI, even if it means working harder.

The amount of plugins and tutorials is a bit overwhelming, and I believe communities are the beating heart of art and open-source softwares alike. With my profile in mind, where and how would you recommend me to start?

Sorry for inaccuracies or if anything sounds rude, English is not my first language. Thank you

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Godot has plenty of features. You don’t really need any plugins to make a game. Godot’s 3d rendering engine is PBR, and asset pipeline plays nice with Blender.

For start, I’d recommend going through “your first 2D/3D game” tutorials in the official documentation. Although those are not really focused on what you ask here, they’ll give you a decent introduction to engine’s key concepts. Once you go through that, you can start tinkering further and ask more specific questions.

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This will give you an idea of the engine

The shaders aren’t compatible — Godot has its own language.

You can check out Material Maker, which was made in Godot.

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Thank you both for your answers. I spent the day tweaking stuff in the interface and discovering new things, and it seems way more powerful than what I had in mind.

Also, there’s already a node based shader editor (visual shaders) by default, good to know!

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The term node is used in the visual shader editor, to refer to the nodes in the shader graph. I usually don’t see the visual shader referred to as node-based shader, but that is exactly what it is. The reason might be that Godot itself is built around the concepts of nodes. Nodes are what Godot makes Scene trees out (the scenes then in turn can be turned into their own nodes and reused in other scene trees), bare this distinction in mind.

Godot treats GLSL (the code shader) more of a first class citizen than the visual shaders. The docs are all about how to get stuff done with GLSL, unlike Unity, where the visual shaders seem to be really the focus. But Godot’s visual shader can do the same as GLSL. What is a uniform in GLSL is some sort of Input node in the shader graph and varyings have to be passed from one layer of the visual editor the other (unlike Unity I believe)