I’m in a similar situation, except less ambitious. I am a software developer, so I’m not too worried about the programming side, but the modeling and animation confuses me. And I’m more interested in the learning experience right now than making a perfect game (even though I know there’s lots of great free resources).
Anyway, let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say I want a tower in my game. Then I guess I can make this work in Blender for example. I think it’s referred to as “static mesh” in UE4 but not entirely sure. So far so good I think.
However, what if I also want the cannon on the top of the tower to be able to rotate and to have some recoil and other nice effects when firing. Where is this done? Do I create the animations somewhere else (also Blender?) or is much of this done in UE4 editor itself? In other words, as I’ve never been involved in any part of creating a game, I’m finding it difficult to visualize how everything hangs together.
I’ve started looking at UE4 tutorials on the official youtube channel (great resource btw), but would love some recommendations for good basic tutorials to get the hang of how modeling and animation fits in to the picture.
Edit: for reference just to make it clear what level I’m on, I’ve only spent one day actually working with the UE4 engine so far. Basically just doing some tutorials (and doing some tests based on what I learned) to get the hang of the editor and especially how blueprints works. I have not installed or used Blender yet and my only experience with 3d modeling was a short stint of 3d studio max as a school project some 10+ years ago (crazy how time flies).