Hey everyone,
I wanted to share a resource I’ve been working on for a long time, primarily in the hope that it’s genuinely useful to other Unreal users.
After many years working in Unreal across lighting, environments, cinematics, and performance, I’ve often found that the hardest part of improving isn’t learning what buttons to press, but understanding why certain workflows work… and when they don’t. A lot of my knowledge in Unreal comes from production experience, mistakes, and hard-earned lessons that don’t always make it into documentation or tutorials.
With that in mind, I recently released Unreal Engine 5 Best Practices, a book focused on practical, real-world workflows rather than engine theory alone. It covers topics like lighting and visual storytelling, environment construction, cinematic pipelines, and performance considerations, all approached from the perspective of building scenes that actually need to ship, run well, and scale.
This isn’t meant as a “one true way” guide, but more as a framework for thinking about Unreal projects holistically, combining art, design, and technical constraints into repeatable decision-making processes. My hope is that it helps newer users avoid common pitfalls, and gives more experienced devs a way to sanity-check or refine their own workflows.
If you’re interested, I’ve also put together a short announcement trailer that gives a quick overview of the intent and scope of the book:
https://youtu.be/GFp1ca4u654?si=n5S6G2G-SZCVQDuS
And if you are so inclined, you can pick up the book below (based on where you live):
USA - https://a.co/d/5PcyNmu
UK - https://amzn.eu/d/f0cfeiC
Aus - https://amzn.asia/d/cUCWzoj
Appreciate the support and this community as always. Happy to answer questions, discuss approaches, or just talk shop about Unreal in general. I’ve learned a huge amount from this community over the years, but haven’t posted a lot, so this felt like a good way to start give something back.
Cheers,
Tyson