I am trying to figure out if I should buy the Udacity training course but it doesn’t have any reviews yet. I have already managed to successfully release an app for the daydream platform using UE4. It was a very difficult process, and I was constantly asking for help from the few people who work on mobile VR contribute to this forum and the UE4 answers system. Would this Udacity program be worth the trouble and the $? Would I get anything from it? Has anyone taken it? I have an interest in both mobile and rift vr.
Well, I took and completed the course. I thought I would provide my thoughts on here since no one else has reviewed it yet. It was a good introductory course. The instructor, Joe Radek, gave very clear and easy-to-understand instructions and I really like the project templates he came up with. I would recommend the course especially if you are total newbie when it comes to software programming and just starting out with the UE4 game engine. I personally wish something like this existed before I started my own work on VR using UE4. It was nice to finally encounter a course that lays everything out in one place, and which is easy to understand, and organized, especially after a long period of stumbling around acquiring bits and pieces of educational content here and there. While blueprints is a wonderful tool, there is still a pretty steep learning curve you have to get past.
I think the course might be overpriced for most people who are interested in this sort of thing. That’s my only real complaint. Also, I think the course might be too elementary for people who have been working with UE4 for more than 3 to 6 months. But I did find the discussions about working with VR using UE4 to be useful in and of themselves. I hope more courses like this are created in the future.
Oh, and I would have absolutely no idea this course existed had Epic not linked to it on its website or the Game Engine Launcher (I forget exactly where I saw it first).
I’m glad you decided to give the course a shot and even more glad you enjoyed it! This is good feedback that I’ll pass on to the team.
- Joe “Fr0z3nR” Radak
I really like this course and i hope on continuation.
Thank you)
Okay, now I have something to compare to Joe Radak’s course.
I am in the middle of taking Udacity’s Unity VR Nanodegree course. Right now I am taking Term 3 High Immersion. I just finished the Rube Goldberg project.
Term 3 High Immersion is the most comparable course to Radak’s UE4 course.
I can safely say Joe “Fr0z3nR” Radak’s course for UE4 is much better. The Term 3 High Immersion course for Unity, taught by Sky Nite, is really out of date, especially as it applies to the Rift. For beginners, just starting out, the hurdle for getting a VR game up and running with Udacity’s Unity courses is significantly higher than Joe Radak’s UE4 course. The content just isn’t there. I spent the past 2 to 3 weeks teaching myself how to use the Rift with Unity by watching free YouTube videos, browsing the forums, and reading the documentation despite having paid for Udacity’s Term 3 High Immersion Unity course, which I thought was going to provide me all the information I needed to get things working with the Rift. I was especially disappointed by the lack of content for the Rift.
So my recommendation, if you are on the fence between learning Unity v. UE4, would be to just go with UE4 and take Joe Radak’s course rather than going through all three terms of the Nanodegree course, especially if all you’re interested in is PC/High Immersion. I do not regret taking Terms 1 and 2, because I knew next to nothing about Unity and I learned a lot about working with mobile VR, but if Mobile VR or Unity isn’t something which interests you I’d advise you to just skip the nanodegree course and take Joe Radak’s shorter UE4 course, which is only one term.
I can say Terms 1 and Terms 2 were quite exceptional. But it looks like they dropped the ball with Term 3. Maybe one day Udacity or Sky Nite will update Term 3 High Immersion, but I will not be able to recommend it to anyone until they do. There is also a second Term 3 course specialization called Mobile Perform & 360 Media Specialization, but a student can only take one specialization, and I did not take that specialization so I can offer no opinion on it.