I'm a 3D animation student in college and I want to do something a little different from the rest of my classmates in terms of how, in a few years, I'll present my thesis project.

The basic idea is that I'll do all of the animation and modeling in Maya and Zbrush, but instead of using V-ray and getting a linear story, I'll have branching paths where the viewer has different options on what they want the character to do in a certain situation (similar to a QTE in terms of how it works, where it would pause the film and wait for an input).

Anyway, I already know the basic functions of both the CE2 (I assume the CE3 is mostly the same) and the UDK, but I really should pick one and work with it on my own for a while to learn how to use it better (at the time of writing this, I have 1 year to dedicate to learning the engine before I need to start building the assets for it).

I know I'll probably get some biased opinions here, but between the CE3 and UDK, which would be a better choice to go with in this scenario and why?


Oh, and computer speed is not an issue. I have 3 computers available to develop on:

Desktop-
Core i7 (first gen) @3.7GHz
GTX 480
6GB RAM

Laptop-
Core i7-2200QM
GTX 485M
8GB RAM

College desktop-
Dual Core i7 (second gen) @3.0GHz
Quadro 4000 (getting upgrades this summer, don't know what the new one is yet)
32GB RAM

College render farm-
100 of the above desktop in a room, with the sysadmins willing to install the UDK's Swarm to speed up lighting calculations for me if I decide to use that engine

I'll probably be working on either my laptop or the college desktop in most cases.


Thank you all in advance for your feedback.

I personally don't know the UDK really good so I can't really say which is better. I just know that it's possible with the CryEngine and it's also not that hard if you have basic flowgraph-knowledge. It also depends on what scenery you want to use

The CryEngine needs no lightmap building since everything is "real time - all the time". So you won't need your server farm if you want everything to render at a decent speed. If you really want to render a video of it, you can make the engine run at 1-2 FPS, so you may need a render farm to render it fast.

Is there a good tutorial to get that basic flowgraph knowledge? I've never even had to open it yet, let alone actually make something in it.