I’m a total noob at this but my son is studying Gaming Animation at university and as a casual gamer myself, Witcher 3 being my all-time favourite game, I decided to start exploring Unreal Engine 5 myself.
I have no idea what direction I wish to pursue as of yet but this is it, Day 1 and I’m about to study Unreal Sensei’s Beginner Tutorial.
My X account is the same username, unrealenginedad should anyone wish to follow my progress or give me some tips.
Unreal is huge, so having a clear game dev GOAL now is good (often even essential). So try to pick a specific game idea or genre now if possible and stick with it. Otherwise you may find yourself getting pulled in a 1000 different directions, with 100’s of unfinished game projects that go nowhere. As a former C++ dev, don’t recommend learning game dev C++ (unless the goal is to become an engine programmer). BTW: Recommend Epic-funded ‘Godot’, as its a much simpler much more stable starting point. Here’swhy Good luck!
Best advice?
Dont learn unreal. Learn how things are actually supposed to work. Which means nothing unreal.
Animations in any DCC
Modeling in any DCC
Material shaders with HLSL
Re-work your math and trig in applied examples for game purposes forward vector > point to target, what’s the angle?
Then you should do some “how a scene is built properly” which again means staying away from unreal like if it were the plague.
After that, maybe, you should start looking into the engine you want to know more about. Arguably probably still not a good idea since the 3 tasks above would take a year or so to sink in, and the scene building is also rather complicated.
Yes, you can pick the same stuff up as you try and force the engine to work, but you just learn how to not do things because 90% of what makes the engine work is stuff that will literally see you fired by any developer you work for
Epic’s idea of “proper” is shall we say… epic?
Good luck!