Armory3D Review

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Review of Armory3D powered by the Slant community.

Armory 3D is a free and open source game development software developed using Haxe and Kha and made to run inside Blender. Armory 3D features a state of the art renderer that supports voxel-based GI, screen space raytracing, temporal antialiasing and the ability to use Cycles Render material nodes. The finished project can be compiled to run on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, HTML5 (WebGL), Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. Armory also supports GPU dual-quaternion skinning, Instanced rendering of skinned meshes, GPU particles and visual scripting.

SpecsUpdate

LicenseMIT

Dev platformsWindows; OSX; Linux;

Desktop targetsWindows; OSX; Linux;

Mobile targetsAndroid; iOS;

Supported languagesHaxe; C; C++; Rust; WebAssembly

Console targetsall supported by kha

Distributed targetsWebGL;

VR targetsWebVR

Language in Blenderpython

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Pros

Pro
Runs inside Blender

Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!

Pro
Node based programming and materials support

Pro
State of the art physically based rendering

Physically based
Cycles material nodes
Voxel-based global illumination
Temporal anti-aliasing
Tessellated displacement
Screen-space raymarching
HDR pipeline

Pro
Free and open source

Pro
Lightweight

Pro
Export to multiple platforms

Export to all platform that Kha supports.

Pro
Easy to use

Pro
A good community

Although the is an obvious lake of community help, it is still there if you look on the Armory forum or there discord your sure to find help for any problem you have.

Pro
A growing community with more tutorials and documentation.

Although Armory has been a little slow in the development, tutorials on YouTube are being released almost daily and the documentation is also being updated regularly.

Pro
No programing experience needed

Cons

Con
Not many developers use it

Armory3d seems to be quite exotic and it should be hard to find developers to help in projects.

Con
Lack of documentation

Con
Still in development

Con
Slow development

Focus from the developer has shifted to another project, so development of this has slowed considerably.

Con
Good looking but a terrible choice for any serious development

Terrible lack of support and lack of a serious delivery strategy. Multiple breaking changes to the master branches (usually the only branch actually) from the core projects as well as the myriad of dependencies it uses make it a nightmare to have something stable to create with. Might be good for prototyping if you stick to the releases, but stay away if you are planning to create something serious.