needing some encouragement before i dive on in ...

Hey, welcome to the forums . We’re probably on the same boat we’re both inclined to coding than the graphics side. Everyone has to start somewhere though and it’s always best to start now though in my opinion. :stuck_out_tongue:

You can use blender which is open source for creating 3d assets, however I’m not sure how well it will be for animations in UE4. There are no problems with creating armatures (skeletons) and animating inside blender but importing and exporting might have some problems. From what I’ve read, there seems to be some issues with .fbx files and blender. There might be ways to work around that though but I don’t really know enough to be honest. :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh yeah, I should probably mention to take a look at Gimp (photo-editing) and Inkscape (vector art) for 2d stuff. Both are open-source alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. In case you want to try creating textures and UI designs for your game.