Firstly hello and thank you in advance for any comments to help out with the below.
I’m moving across from Unity for a project which I am working on. I have a prototype of the game completed in Unity so have a good idea of what I need to achieve in Unreal.
Does anyone have any recommendations as to where to start in learning the engine? I’ve taken a look at the Videos on the youtube channel and notice that some appear to be the intro videos yet are newer than some of the others and it seems some videos have some overlap or have been replaced.
For instance there are so many blueprint series (intro to blueprints, blueprint essentials, blueprint quickshots etc). Can anyone recommend a suitable path through the videos assuming someone new to unreal (however not new to game development?) I was thinking something along the lines of:
Intro to editor
Intro to levels
Intro to materials
Programming (C++/Blueprints) – is the most confusing as there appears to be a lot of overlap in tutorials
learn the UI of the editor (so where everything is)
start a small project
during the project you will get to some points where you have to take a look at tutorials/ask in the forum/…
In my opinion that’s the best way to learn a new engine. (that’s how I did it)
e.g In the project you could start with level design -> take a look at the level design tutorials, bsp tutorials,… but just when you really need a help/hint
For just starting out, I would highly recommend watching the getting started series of videos made by epic, it will walk you through where all the tools are and where to find commonly used items, see the playlist here:
After that, the next series to go through would be to learn Blueprints (or if you are a programmer, head straight for the intro to coding tutorials on Epic’s youtube page), learning blueprints will allow you to start making things happen in your game, and get results quickly. It is a great system and is easy to use. The following are the previously mentioned playlists:
After watching and following along to those video series, you should have a solid foundation from which to begin your own games, and remember to check out the other playlists on Epic’s youtube page that go into making materials, making particles, and much more. Some do overlap, as newer versions of the editor come out, but the information is still valid and is a great starting point.
Thanks for the advice. I’ll certainly be needing to learn things as they arise and I see there are quite comprehensive documentation for .
Thank you. I am a programmer; however I do not mind using blueprints to rapidly prototype. My current project is written in Unity and C#. Is it possible to easily re-factor from blueprints –> c++?
I’ll head for the videos you recommend. I can then branch out into others on the same topic if I feel some questions are unanswered. The forums seem very friendly here!
My plan now is to make a simple Blueprint-only game after watching most of the tutorial videos. I am a programmer as well, and I think that’s the easiest way to get familiar with the interface, how the engine works, and the commonly used API.
I’ve gone through the programming tutorial as well, and I think it will be easier to get into writing my own classes after playing with Blueprints for a while. It seems fairly easy to write things in C++ and make them accessible through Blueprints, and I think generally it is most efficient to work with a mix of the two. You can do all the heavy lifting in C++, and then expose a few useful functions/variables to Blueprint to wire everything together. For example, you generally don’t want to be loading materials and meshes in code when there are much better higher-level tools to do that in the editor.
Of course, that is only my impression of things so far, but I haven’t built anything substantial in the engine yet so I am still learning too. Good luck!
I am the same way, I know C# really well, and am intermediate at C++, however I prefer to use blueprints when possible, and I plan to be switching performance hungry stuff over to code eventually as my project grows. Blueprints are a lot of fun though! I personally see blueprints as a visual & node based C# language (object-oriented, functions/variables/events/classes etc) but instead of typing it out, you connect the nodes to create what you need, and many of the rules in C# carry over to blueprints. Because of that, it is really easy to get started with if you have some background in coding. Also as a side effect of , translating to code is not too difficult, but unfortunately is not an automatic process (yet…? That would be a cool though ), so you will need to write it out again.
In that case I would maybe jump straight to the blueprints playlist, as the one before is much more introductory for beginners, you could get more out of watching the following ones and using the documentation when you hit a snag.
There are also a ton of community tutorials (most have been added to the “Community Tutorials” playlist on the UnrealEngine youtube page) and I highly recommend subscribing to each of those channels as well, there is a wealth of knowledge there that will help you in times of need!
+1 for using Blueprints as a programmer. They are extremely quick when you already have a general sense of how to do the actual task of breaking down a problem into a series of steps in order to solve it.
), so you will need to write it out again.