Noob - Next Steps

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Question: Should I stop learning how to get characters migrated from 3dsMax/Maya into Unreal if my focus is on AI, Programming, and character interaction? I feel like I should skip it for now at least, but I don’t want to set myself up for failure down the line for something I don’t see coming.

I have managed to get the female skeletal mesh from the “Female Movement Animset Pro” and the male skeletal mesh from “GR Male Hero 02” working very well with the 1,300 animations I have targeted to the UE4 Template Skeleton. With the assets I have I could get by (especially with world creation) but my concern is when I hit adding the NPCs for interactions down the road.

Background: I’m currently a programmer and DBA (business/corporate/operations stuff). I am mostly interested in programming, AI, and using animation in character interaction within games.

For the past 2 months I have created projects (2-6 times each) following along with all of the video tutorials I could find between the Unreal Engine Learning area and YouTube. First month I worked on learning the engine and building a PC optimized for developing in it. Second month focused on characters and animations. This month I’m working on level design and streaming. December I want to start working on interaction with the world and objects, and then in January I want to begin on my portfolio project that I will be working on for another 2 years bringing it all together.

By 1/2019 I would like to have a portfolio project built in Unreal Engine 4 with my interested areas developed as well as they can be in that short amount of time. I want to primarily focus on concepts supporting my interested areas, secondarily using the engine to apply those concepts in the hopes that I’ll have some sort of marketable skills to get something entry-level.

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It depends, what do you really want to spend your time doing?

I program almost exclusively but I know how the pipelines work and can import assets when needed. AI can really blend the line because it can be very closely wired into the animations. Being able to use the AnimInstance, extending in C++ or Blueprint will serve you well.

As far as actually importing the assets from Maya or Max, that shouldn’t be a problem, making good looking ones is difficult, but if there’s an issue importing them put up your question on AnswerHub and get some help doing it because it has not been a difficulty on any of the projects I’ve been on.

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I started with characters, 3d assets and level design for the first 3 months of my project, then I began learning blueprints, which was pretty hard but personally I think the advantage of doing things this way is you’ll have a very nice play ground full of levels and required assets to do all your programming with, I wouldn’t like to have had to make a new 3d asset every time I wanted to properly test a game play function.

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Thanks for the Feedback.

I do like the blue prints, the feature gives a great visual representation of what is going on and I feel I can move a bit quicker in mocking things up. I’ve been learning both the blue prints and C++ as it relates to the engine and I’m going to try to be proficient in both since I’m interested in both.

I ended up creating my main project and brought in as consolidated/organized as many assets as I could. I think I’ll just start from there and worry about importing additional stuff later on or if it comes to it. There is always the trusty crash test dummy looking dude in a pinch.

Though I think I should probably invest a few months working with custom created animations in the spring.