Hey guys, just getting my feet wet with the engine and trying to absorb a lot. Mostly using UE4 from the hobbyist/learning perspective at this point and as I’ve been learning a few questions have popped up that I was hoping some of the more experienced folks wouldn’t mind answering.
I’m about 50 videos deep into the official tutorials on Youtube (and they’re great so far), should I just power through all of them, or should I just dive headlong into the engine and figure it out as I go?
Anyone know if there’s any actual books on UE4 on the horizon? The only one I found that really seemed close came out in March (so I assume it’s pre UE4) and is primarily focused on level creation.
I’m pretty competent with scripting from other games (particularly Arma / SQF). While I definitely see how useful blueprints could be for some folks, as I’m watching the videos, my brain is thinking is how much faster I’d be able to do those same things just typing out script. I assume that means I’d need to dive into the actual C++ code? Or is there some other way to ‘script’ manually without using blueprints?
With your experience in UE4 up to this point, if there was one thing you could tell yourself the day you started using the engine, what would it be?
I personally would just jump right into the engine and when you have problems, search for a video, in the documentation or ask for help in the forum -> but a “must watch” is the 3rd person tutorial series, because you will learn plenty of stuff about animations/anim graph/characters,…
Be more active in the community (because you can learn so much) and directly start developing a game (even when you know that you will fail) That’s what I would have said to me
I am also a hobbyist, & new here (just see my join date) but already starting on a game project to be released.
I think you should do a little bit of both, toggling between getting your hands dirty, & dive into the editor, and going through the tutorials & especially the content examples. I lot of the questions I had are actually found inside them!
The main problem with just diving directly into something as deep as UE4, is that you can missed many major features, or waste time looking for ‘How to do this?’ when the solution can already be found in tutorials or documentation!
Even for software that I am already very proficient I occasionally like to dive online to see how others do things, & I may pick up some tips or things I missed.
The downside of spend too much time following through tutorials, is that you are only following through, & miss the problem tackling aspect of learning, & often you find yourself lose when you started to have to do something on your own.
Thats why I think its best to toggle between learning from Tutorials, & self learning by diving into the editor & play around.
personnaly i’d watch the video’s on the sections that i’m interested in, then jump in and try a few things, there’s also c++ tutorials from the Epic people so you can learn the workflow for that as well, biggest tip i can give is “small steps”
i went in feet first but then i’ve been playing with unreal tech for over 10 years so i’ve learned a lot of the basics which hasn’t changed that much.
as a hobbyist it will take time, so bit by bit learn as you need
Like said, the problem with just doing tutorials is by the time you’ve reached the end you’ve already forgotten 70% of the content most likely (For a long series). What works best for me is going through a tutorial slowly and actually following along. Seems to increase my retention a lot.
Thanks to everyone that’s responded so far, great info! I generally keep the engine open on one screen and the tutorials open on the other and follow along the whole time to help let some of it sink in. I’ll probably start diving in myself shortly, thanks again for all the feedback!
It’s best to setup a project that you want to do and then whenever you need to figure out how to do something then look at the tutorials how. You’ll learn things better in practice rather than just watching a video. However, sometimes you won’t know if an option is available to you so sometimes if you’ve watched a tutorial you might remember later that there’s something that was shown in the tutorial and you can go back to it to make sure to learn how.
