I’m a beginner myself with UE4 and Blender. I’ve created a map in CoD4, which was very popular with my friends. In my opinion map designing is primary. He talks about prototyping how is done in Epic. He made a course about game level design as well, but some can be found in youtube.
For my first map in game I don’t need to prototype the map itself since I’m going to use my own one created in CoD4. But after this I’ll follow the guidelines I learned from world of level design.
Anyway, I bought the course from worldofleveldesign:
“Learn UE4 As an Absolute Beginner Without Any Previous Knowledge or Experience of Unreal® Engine 4”
Learn to use UE4 from scratch and begin creating environments, levels and games in just 7 hours…
I did watch many youtube tutorials before, but I liked the way he went through it and explains about prototyping etc.
I’m focused on creating a FPS MP game. Single player with story line is too massive for. I don’t believe that whether FPS or TPS has more or less animations. It depends, how many animations you would like to include. FPS or TPS is basically the only difference how the player sees the world.
I’m not planning to learn C++ programming. I’m mainly focused on blueprints. Last April I started with UE4 and it has been quiet a journey. As well since I had no prior knowledge of Blender, I’m learning two applications.
I may have a different approach in what to learn first. Either way my main focus goes into creating house models in Blender. Importing them in UE4. Creating materials is now what I’m doing. Parallel Occlusion I learned from one course. Displacement is the part I’m currently stuck. Till this point I’ve deleted and redone models a number of times. I’ve had a few very frustrating moments. One some occasions that I would not be able to get my head around it. I’ve had this childhood dream to create a game. In the past only have done attempts. This time with Covid it gives me a chance to do it. If I do get it done, but fail to make some income from it. So be it. More importantly I don’t want in my old age to look back and say, I had great ideas. Never tried hard enough. If you give yourself 2 months time, it isn’t enough. My misses has asked me, when I’m going to be finished? I replied, that if it would be that easy, everybody would do it.
Once, I understood and get all the house models correctly. I’ll move on learning how to place decals, which should be easier. Than the lightening, sky etc. Models and animation last step inlcuding how to create models in blender before creating a game menu. After that the next map.
My approach in learning might not be best practise. I stopped with following tutorials or courses to follow each step and make the same model, landscape or whatever. I go straight into doing my own models, but trying to apply what I’ve learned.
My current course from Udemy: **Creating a realistic Cabin House for Game by Emiel Sleegers **is very good.
About this course
Create Realistic looking environments using Blender, Substance Designer, Painter & UE4.
Though I don’t have Substance Designer and Painter, this course benefited for me very much to understand the workflow from Blender through all the way to UE4. I didnt find any youtube courses that specifically gave the overall workflow.
Planning what kind of FPS, level design, concept and what needs to be learned in chunks to achieve each step on the way is my journey. I’ve already purchased in marketplace sounds, some models, music etc, but this is part of my planning rather than trying to ‘implement’ them straight into UE4.