Hello! I’ve been following Unreal Engine tutorials for a few days(Stephen Ulibarri ). As someone who is a long time Unity user of like 6 years I feel absolutely stumped when trying to do anything myself. I was trying to set up a weapon in the level viewport as an Actor like I would a prefab in Unity. I’ve since learned that this should probably be an actor blueprint and I should set up logic, collision, audio as components within the blueprint.
Part of me wants to pigeonhole my Unity knowledge into unreal but I KNOW I need to just sit and learn the “unreal way”. It definitely seems like there are a dozen ways to do anything in unreal which might be a good thing?
I’m essentially asking for general tips and workflow. I’ve used the search bar for this Reddit and people say that it’s soooo much different than Unity or some people say your workflow should be the same. I don’t want to form bad habits when learning the engine basically. I’m not exactly sure how I should be setting up “prefabs” like if I should always be making blueprints or if Actors would suffice(can’t drag an actor to a folder to be used later?).
Sorry if this post comes off as scatterbrained but that’s how I feel. I’m ready to ditch all I know about Unity and just learn the way to do stuff in Unreal. Please let me know any tips or general “workflow” stuff I need to know. Thanks.
Honestly stop using Unity as a habit for a start, i find the assets lack the necessary features each pipeline requires, finding the right version & pipeline in Unity that works and most versions don’t have all current upto date assets working correctly, now Unreal is not perfect either but one thing is for sure is it renders better then Unity with much less hassle with materials if you’re using products from the marketplace, Unreal renders much quicker than Unity and handles large amounts of high resolution materials & textures better than Unity.
Working with Blueprint is slightly different to the C++ but offers more flexibility once you get used to it as it’s graphical interface becomes easier to use the more experience you have with blueprint, it makes working with each code structure easier & is helpful where you don’t know code it will allow you some options that will be explained in some Youtube if you look up it’s purpose & use, programmers experienced in code should pick up on blueprint fairly easy and should find it more fluid to work with then standard C++.
Everything done in Unity is done so much better in Unreal I can vouch for that as i have bought and tested the same assets bought in both markets each editor offers and i can safely say the assets work in Unreal where they half work in Unity or don’t work at all.
With blueprint you would generally create a BP when adding in a new Skeleton, The Bp allows you to fit items to the skeleton for changing in inventory systems if you’re creating avatars for those purposes or you can move whole characters which blueprints will govern parts of, all blueprint is basically is a graphical representation of the code instead of a notepad or wordpad. Blueprint helps one that’s doesn’t know code fill in the blanks by just dragging a connection to one node to another and choosing from a list of functions any given node might have.
With images for example you might change nodes within the BP for different effects to be applied.
When you’re thinking Prefab in Unity think Blueprint in Unreal. This will mainly come down to how skeletons with convert or require blueprints to make them work correctly.
So a prefab in Unity is like a Skeleton BP you would send over from another editor, UE will grab that FBX file in most cases and convert it to files Unreal can extract & read than you’ll need to either set that skeleton to an Unreal Mannequin for animation and create a Blueprint or create a blueprint for the custom skeleton, all you’ll require documentation and video tutorials for.
As for workflow Unreal you’re not wasting time trying to get simple materials to show up and converting them to whatever pipeline you’re using URP or HDRP or HDRP VR it’s all very confusing in unity and how each version breaks image files that require total manual conversion which take too much time away from real development fixing graphic issues you shouldn’t need to fix.