Slight followup question. Do you have any recommendations you would give new users of unreal as sort of a best practice to solidify skills and studying?
ScientificGnome
Slight followup question. Do you have any recommendations you would give new users of unreal as sort of a best practice to solidify skills and studying?’
One of my favorite ways to practice is to create smaller games that simulate some of my favorite games or game mechanics. A great example is the breakout clone that our Evangelist Samuel Bass created and documented: Let's Make a Game! - Brick Breakers | Course
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Are you focused on secondary or post secondary education?
Primarily on upper secondary education.
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It really depends on what area of focus the students have. It’s important that it’s clear what they are focused on and are looking for job wise. Quality over quantity! They should only add things they can talk about with confidence.
If they’re interested in film/animation having a short film or a finished scene or environment to show is expected. This can be presented as a group project or an individual project. Students should identify clearly what exactly their part was and what recourses they pulled elsewhere. Providing a breakdown is important.
Showing the process of getting to the finished result is often appreciated. They can also highlight parts that deserve more attention like if a model has a lot of detail, it can be shown separately.
A lot of students create their own websites now-a-days but they can also post their portfolio on ARTSTATION which a lot of recruiters use.
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Artstation is a great place to do sharing as an artist, especially a 3D artist as much of the film and game industry tends be active on there. LinkedIn is a fast track to many recruiters and the general public tend to find a lot of artist through instagram/twitter/tiktok. For game students, an easy place to host their games as a sort of portfolio is itch.io, they can self publish games and host them there and even have a mini landing page for each game, although styling is limited.
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Our Hour of Code: Create Your First 3D Game in Unreal Engine and our Unreal Futures: Careers in Real Time courses are a great starting point:
Unreal Futures: Careers in Advertising
Unreal Futures: Careers in Fashion
Unreal Futures: Careers in Animation
And of course, join our educator discord community to connect with other educators!
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As an educator somewhat new to Unreal Engine, is there a good place to get some general information about Epic Games resources for post secondary schools?
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A great place for Faculty from Post Secondary to get some general information is from our FAQ for Educators page. This covers topics from where to get more information about [MegaGrants] .(Epic MegaGrants | Apply For Funding to Enhance the UE Open Source Community - Unreal Engine) to how a department can become anAcademic Partner.
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How do you go about getting noticed by studios when applying to work there?
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As an educator somewhat new to Unreal Engine, is there a good place to get some general information about Epic Games resources for post secondary schools?
An often overlooked resource for post secondary educators are our Instructor Guides, essentially course-ware for Unreal Engine. While many of these are authored for Unreal Engine 4, some such as the Game Development with Unreal Engine are still relevant and contain PowerPoint Lectures, project files, teachers notes and event tests and quizzes.
Also, be sure to check out the Educator page where you can find links to all these things and more resources as well as news about any events we have coming up:
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Nowadays there are so many ways to get noticed. Places like our EDC, Artstation, YouTube have created a space for developers, artists to show off their work. Even creating a webpage now is just a template. It’s all about creating consistently and showing off your work and sharing your knowledge… Show the world what you are working on, create tutorials for others to learn from. Employers like seeing activity and creativity. If you created a short film be sure to submit them to film festivals.
Doing your homework and knowing what companies are out there and what they are focused on is always wise. Get personal with why you are interested in that specific company. Check out job postings and see what the requirements are so you can customize your portfolio to fit the actual needs. Reach out to recruiters and ask questions!
Create a linked in profile, it’s an amazing place to reach out to industry folks, companies and recruiters.
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As a programmer, what’s the best way to showcase experience as a dev?
great question!!! especially if you work is not “flashy” (backend/optimaztion/task automation tools etc) but still very useful and in demand!!
As a programmer, what’s the best way to showcase experience as a dev?
That’s a great question, and a challenge that most programmers have faced. The real answer is that hiring mangers are looking for a couple of things when they are looking at student work:
- Results - Finished, shipped projects that they can use or see in video. They want to see that your systems work and are elegant.
- Planning and teamwork. Showing your work is key. A strategy for students could be to publish tutorials and other content demonstrating their technical abilities “Behind the scenes” of those projects.
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Probably the best thing to do is have your work on github. This will allow people to easily view your code and give feedback and suggestions on it along with just hosting and version control. If you have visual experiences absolutely share with video or screenshots of the finished result.
If you’re not doing flashy stuff another way to put it out there with unreal specific stuff is to package tools into plugins and put them on the marketplace! not only can you point to that but now other people can benefit from your tools too!
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Thank you everyone for participating in today’s AUA, and a huge thank you to our team for joining us to chat!
This chat is going to be closed but remain up so that all the information is available whenever you need it.
Happy developing, everyone!
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