Im a nuke compositor at one of the bigger vfx houses looking to get into UE. I also have a 3D background, mainly Maya. Having said that, I have no engine knowledge other than some introductory Unreal tutorials I have done. I have been pushing to add UE to our pipeline because Unreal has proven to be capable of doing some incredible things much more efficiently than some of our tools. First thing that comes to mind is Niagara. Nuke particles are terrible and slow and while we have Houdini artists they are many times overkill for simple effects us compositors could put together in Unreal. At this point the heads of department excited about the possibilities as I have been feeding them examples the past few months. Specially now with the latest videos released at GDC (Troll trailer and Quixel’s Rebirth).
I am having a hard time finding a proper learning structure to follow for me and my fellow Nuke artists. The main issue I find is most tutorials, paid and free, are game focused. Should we just buy one of Udemy’s tutorials? Something like: How to Develop Your First Two Games? I think there will be a lot of information that we dont need in tutorials like that one. Because we all have a very demanding job we want to make sure we are spending our time wisely.
Side question. How important is C++ for our use case?
Happy to get any suggestions regarding paid and free training.
Thanks!
You’ll find tons of tutorials on specifics you may be looking for (such as niagra, animations, scenery, etc) without needing to learn actual game development.
This tutorial for example (found by searching ue4 animation tutorial):https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qzd4oU0tkVAExplains how to make animations for a game, but also has a ton of valuable info on how animations work in unreal and how to control them. The engine is build for games afterall so there’s no avoiding that, but with specific searches on topics that interest you you’ll find tons of info. Any game dev info you do learn would still be useful to know your way around unreal and blueprints.
If you’re not sure what to search, feel free to ask the community based on what you need (photorealism, textures, post processes, particles, animation).
C++ is faster and more efficient than blueprints, but blueprints can do nearly everything C++ can. Assuming you’ll need basic scripts to move/ controls animations/camera, etc. You’ll never need to even acknowledge that C++ exists. (Games can be entirely done without ever touching C++ too)
Hope that helps!
Honestly the last couple videos for Niagara are all you really need to get into it.
GDC presentation: Building Effects with Niagara and Blueprint | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine - YouTube
Live training: Niagara: What’s New | Live Training | Inside Unreal - YouTube
I’m currently a senior at University of Idaho and have been trying to learn the ins and outs to UE4 for the past year. I have not read any books on the engine, but any tutorials I looked at have been mostly just to learn use-cases for specific blueprint nodes/functions rather than trying to follow along with the instructions. The official documentation sometimes has really good information, but a lot of the pages are bare so you’ll be trudging into the forums more often then not. Some of the best information comes out of the forums. A solid place to start is the Epic Games youtube channel and also the learning channel here: https://academy.unrealengine.com/
I believe Niagara actually relies more heavily on HLSL than C++.
Thanks for the info. Very helpful links.