Unreal Engine 4 for education

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I’ve read an understood the generous licensing model for using UE4 in education, but I had some followup questions I hope someone can answer.

  1. We currently use UDK in our educational labs. If we replace this with UE4 in our labs, will students be able to work on the UE4 created content at home just using UDK? (I suspect the answer is no, and that they will need to purchase a monthly UE4 license for home)

  2. Is UE4 a major departure from UE3 / UDK as far as workflows and features go. I’m concerned that our existing curriculum used for UDK will cease to be applicable if we move to UE4. Our existing curriculum consists of some packt publishing UDK books and various UDK videos.

Thanks in advance!

2

Students would need to subscribe to work with UE4 from home, and they wouldn’t be able to use UDK to create content for UE4. The two versions are not compatible in that way. You can read more about the specifics of educational licensing here:

I’ll try to answer your second question in more detail since it’s more in my wheelhouse. There are similarities in concepts and certain features between UDK and UE4, but workflows have changed quite a bit in many instances.

Trying to follow a curriculum based on UDK material using UE4 would probably be fairly difficult and confusing for the students. We basically ditched the entire library of documentation for UDK and created the UE4 documentation from scratch for these very reasons. In fact, we even had similar problems with people trying to use the Mastering Unreal books - which were written for UT3 - with UDK since the two versions of the editor were so different, and those were the same engine!!

On the bright side, we have been hard at work on that documentation as well as creating video tutorials, and there is a ton of example content available - the Content Example project is especially insightful. So there is a lot of content already available on day 1 to help both users and educators transition to UE4. And there is more documentation and more videos coming soon!

I hope that helps somewhat. If you have more question, please don’t hesitate to ask!

3

Thankyou so much for your prompt answer. That’s awesome service!:cool:

We’ll stick with UDK for this year and I’ll get to work on getting up to speed on UE4 and getting a curriculum ready for it (and keep an eye out for the inevitable and fantastic Unreal Engine 4 ebooks that the pro’s release).

Cheers!