I’ve just finished teaching a 12 week undergrad University course for Media students where we used UE4 as the software for two 4 week introductory modules on Animation and Interaction Design (we used to use Adobe Flash). In the first 4 weeks of the course we used Photoshop for a module on Graphic Design. Thought I’d share my experience in case it helps someone else set up their course.
I had never used any 3D software much before so there were two months of intense learning on my part before the course began. I don’t think this was a problem as I actually find that I teach better when I have just learned something myself - I am more aware of the difficulties and pitfalls a beginner faces. The one area that you need more experience is knowing how to head off technical issues and we did have a few of those (as you will see below).
The 150 students had mostly come straight from high school. Half were majoring in production and the other half were taking the course as an elective and were majoring in other more writing focused media areas. Only 1 or 2 had previous experience with UE4 and another 2 or 3 had used Unity before. Any prior programming skills were rare.
Those who had experience playing 3D computer games and/or doing 3D modelling had an easier time picking up UE4. Those who hadn’t, and who didn’t follow my advice to practice navigation skills early on, were held back because they couldn’t navigate or position items easily. Some still hadn’t mastered this even by the end of the course. They made OK projects but they were very frustrated. Next year, I will find some kind of simple free 3D game to help these students practice navigation right from week 1.
The students had a 1hr technical class with set video tutorials each week. These were mainly drawn from UE4 official videos and UE4 community videos. I also made some videos myself to cover areas where I either couldn’t find a concise high quality video or where I needed to cover something in a way that was specific to our technical set up. There was also a 1 hr Lecture covering conceptual design issues and a 1.5 hr Studio class where students and tutors could work together on design and creation.
We taught in university computer labs on 2013 model iMacs (OS X v.10) with at first an install of 4.6 and later 4.7 (from GitHub no launcher). This is where the first issues arose.
The iMacs mostly coped well with UE4 but there were crashes when students started taxing the system with more complex things in their projects. Many students did not have laptops or home computers that were high enough specs but they still tried to run UE4 and there were a few corrupted projects. One student said her laptop was fried by it! I got quite good at recovering work from autosaves of maps. Some of these corruption issues were, I think, due to the Apple network account set up and to the server maybe crashing when a project was open.
In our labs the students had 2GB of network space to save their work and this was not enough to cope with the large project files of UE4. Also, our first install method copied apple developer tools to this student space and almost filled it up. So we changed install method and went to version 4.7 in the process. Plus we upped the student server space to 5GB each.
The lab install for some reason always said that projects were created with a different version of engine and prompted students to create a copy every time they opened. If students did this, they again quickly filled up their space. Lesson learnt here is that project file management is a crucial skill to teach early on. After making so many copies, many got confused about which project was their latest version. Also, many didn’t grasp which files and folders were essential for backing up. Next year I’ll do an online quiz about file management.
Because we only had 8 weeks I constrained what the students had to work with by creating a Blueprint First Person template for the students to use (based on Starter Content plus some other bits from free marketplace stuff). We didn’t cover any 3D modelling in other software and didn’t go near skeletons or particle system construction etc. They were encouraged to use Photoshop for 3D Text and textures etc. Their first assignment was a Matinee Animation with sound. They handed in a video screen recording of this. The second assignment was a first person interactive experience. They handed in a video screen recording of an interactive walkthrough and their project folder. The video was a safe-guard in case I couldn’t open their project or it didn’t work properly on my system.
This was a good move as we ended up with 6-8 projects with issues. Most were zip corruption issues - I got them to zip their folder: probably a mistake. The size of the UE4 project folders meant we couldn’t use the assignment submission interface of our usual online learning system (200MB limit). This is something else to consider if you are setting up a course. I didn’t go with packaged projects as when I tested before semester started the unpackaged and packaged projects were almost the same size. This may be different in 4.8. Also, my experience with other software has been that unpackaged projects with issues are easier to deal with because you can often bypass the sections with issues and still mark them ok.
Technical issues aside, the students coped really well and made some fantastic projects. They had no trouble with Blueprints. In fact I would say that they found the Matinee project a bit harder than the interactive one. The end of semester course feedback was very positive with lots of specific comments about UE4 - for example, “UNREAL ENGINE IS MAAAAAAAAAD!”.
So no regrets with the switch at all. In fact wish I’d done it sooner.