Learn Unreal Engine 5 in Under an Hour | Beginner Tutorial

are you ready to get started learning Unreal Engine let's Jump Right In all right so before we can dive in and start learning how to use Unreal Engine we'll need to actually get Unreal Engine installed on our computers but before we can do that you'll need to have an account with epic games the creators of Unreal Engine now if you already have unreal installed you can go ahead and skip to the next video otherwise I'm going to walk you through the three-step process to get up and running step one you'll need to have an epic games account now if you play fortnite rocket League or use the epic game store then you already have an epic games account and you can use this same account for Unreal Engine if not you'll need to create one to get started go to Unreal engine.com in your browser now we're going to go up here and click on this sign in button where you'll be presented with an overwhelming list of options you're going to want to click on the sign in with epic games now if you already have an account you'll enter your login credentials here if you don't you're going to click on the sign up button at the bottom when signing up yes you will need to input your birthday this is a legal requirement because the same account is used for their game store and of course for Online safety in games like fortnite once you've entered your birthday fill out the rest of the information and click continue to create your account step two we need to download and install the launcher once you're signed in you can go up here and click on the download button on this page you'll see the recommended system requirements on the left but really these are the minimum requirements for working with Unreal Engine 5. you'll want to make sure you are running at least these specs that match your operating system on the right you'll see the licensing information the key thing to take away from this section is that Unreal Engine is free to use when they say free they really do mean free I've personally used Unreal Engine on Television Productions feature films and even VR training experiences for multi-billion dollar corporations epic never charged us a penny for any of it now go ahead and scroll down just a little where you will see the download launcher button you'll want to download and install this below that you'll see a provided video on installing the engine if you need a slower step-by-step tutorial once you have the launcher installed open it up and sign in with your epic games account step 3 we need to install the engine with the launcher open it will likely take you to the epic game store section at the start on the left we want to go down here to the Unreal Engine option clicking on this will give you a slightly different interface to get this up and running we'll want to go to the library tab up at the top now mine looks a little different than what a fresh one will because I already have Unreal Engine installed on mine under engine versions you can see several cards with different numbers these represent all the different versions of unreal that I have installed and yes you can have multiple versions of the engine installed at the same time Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 are both managed here and are easily identified by the number at the beginning now to get this installed we're going to click on the plus symbol next to engine versions that's going to add a card with a drop down that allows you to select which version you want to install for this course go ahead and select the highest engine version number available at the time of this recording that was 5.1.0 then click install Unreal Engine is a large program so this is going to take a while to download and install be patient and you'll get this going all right so let's recap in this video we learned about setting up our epic games account installing and using the epic games launcher and how to install unreal from within that launcher now depending upon what project you're working on you might actually need to be using a specific version of Unreal Engine for example a game Studio I am currently working with is using Unreal Engine 5.0 with custom code and the plan to upgrade to 5.1 in the future conversely a television team I was recently working with is still using version 4.27 because it plays nicer with the LED volume wall technology that's being used in Virtual production on things like the Mandalorian or the Batman as another example I'm using 5.1 to teach this course and for all of my personal projects as well now of course I have all of these different versions installed on my computer at the same time so remember if you need more than one version you can have it all right so we've got Unreal Engine installed it's time to unpack what an unreal project actually looks like now you may have already figured out how to create a project on your own but I encourage you to still take the time to watch this video because we're going to dive into some things that you may not have known about in this video we're going to go over the three key elements of an Unreal Engine project so go ahead open up your epic games launcher let's Dive Right In our first step to creating a project is to launch unreal with the launcher open make sure you're in the Unreal Engine category we're going to go to our library Tab and click the launch button for the version of unreal that we want to launch you can also click the launch button up here if you have it set to the version you normally use for this course let's open up the newest version we have installed which at the time of this recording is Unreal Engine version 5.1 now launching unreal for the first time can take a while and there are a couple of spots where it might look like it's hanging or frozen so if it looks like it's stuck on 45 for a few minutes don't worry it's going to do a lot of work in the background to get the workspace ready for you so go ahead and pause this video go make yourself a snack and come back when the project window is opened all right key element number two actually creating the project the project window can be very overwhelming with all the options Available to You Unreal Engine is a Powerful Beast with uses across several different Industries once you know what you're doing and you're creating a project specifically for one of these industries you'll know which option to select for just starting out I recommend going to the games tab where we're going to select the third person template now the reason why I recommend the third person template for just starting out is twofold reason number one it provides a human-sized character that you can easily drop in and use for scale reference in anything that you are doing reason number two you can drop in and play as this character to run around your scene in real time all right so we have our third person template selected now looking at the options over here on the right we can choose between blueprint or C plus plus referring to the main style of code we want to start with keep in mind that this selection is largely arbitrary because regardless of what you select here any project can and likely will use both C plus plus code and blueprint it's typically easier and faster to start with blueprint even if you plan on using C plus plus later in the project now we'll go over what exactly blueprint is in a later video for now we're just going to select that option we'll leave the target platform as desktop and quality preset at maximum for this learning project we'll go ahead and include the starter content which I'll touch on a little bit later for Ray tracing we're going to go ahead and leave that turned off for now the ray tracing option can improve visuals if you have a video card that supports it if your video card has RTX or RX in the name then you can go ahead and use it otherwise Ray tracing won't work on your system this is true for any client users you deploy a packaged project to as well now it does take time for the computer to prepare a project for Ray tracing so for now even if your card does support it we're going to leave it off for this project we want to get into our project and working as fast as possible next we need to determine where we want to save our project the default option in my documents might not always be the best I like to create a folder on my hard drive specifically for my Unreal Engine projects as close to the route as possible this is really helpful for reducing the length of file path names next we're going to pick a name for our project for this one we can just call it my first unreal project now you'll notice I typed this all as one word this is because you can't use spaces in your name alternatively you can use something like underscores in place of spaces or you can use camel casing camel casing is when you capitalize the first letter of each word in the phrase how you name this will largely come down to your personal preferences alright once that's all set go ahead and click create now we let the engine build our project and we wait now that the project is open the first thing we're going to do here is click the little X to close it counterintuitive maybe but we're doing this so we can learn how to open our projects each time we want to work on them this brings us to the third key element the project folder now you'll see here in our library there is a my project section this lists all the projects you've opened with unreal on this specific computer you can open a project from here by double clicking the icon but this list can grow to an overwhelming size pretty fast as you work on more projects so let's look at another way to open our projects up remember how we set a project folder location when we created the project now we want to actually navigate to that folder on our computer using Windows Explorer or finder if you're on a Mac here I am in my project folder location in it you can see a folder with our project's name if we go into that folder we'll see several other folders in a project file now double clicking this file will open our project this will be our main and preferred way of opening projects so it can be helpful to create a shortcut to it if you're on Windows you can right click it go down to syn2 and then desktop create shortcut now we have a shortcut on our desktop that we can double click to open the project moving forward if you're on a Mac you'll do the same thing by right clicking on it and select make Alias to create a shortcut on your desktop now looking back at our folder structure you'll see several different folder let's do a brief rundown config this is where you'll find certain configuration files that pertain to settings and an individual project we won't be editing any of these directly but instead we'll be looking at how to update these settings directly in the editor in a later video now content is where the bulk of your project lives this along with config and the project file itself are the Bare Bones of any Unreal Engine project we'll be looking at how we manage this folder using the editor's content browser in the next video derived data cache is exactly what it sounds like if you're ever working on a professional Unreal Engine project and you hear someone mention the DDC this is what they're referring to no the DDC isn't some government agency we need to worry about this folder is a cache storage for dynamically generated data the contents are constantly changing and this is one of the folders that could would actually be deleted without breaking your project because the data itself will be regenerated the next time you open unreal our next folder in the list intermediate is another one of those folders that can be safely deleted and automatically regenerated think of this folder as your Project's temporary folder for local user data keep in mind that this folder does contain your locally compiled shaders so while you might not include this folder in Source control or when sharing the project folder deleting it does mean that unreal will have to compile shaders again the next time you open it the next folder saved is your local user related content this means any local user settings as well as where things like your screenshots and rendered videos will be saved we'll go into that more in depth later but this is another folder that you generally would not include for things like sharing the project or uploading Source control alright now you should be a little little bit more familiar with Unreal Engine projects congrats on making it through one of the more boring topics but understanding the structure of projects is Essential Knowledge if you're serious about working with Unreal Engine to recap we looked at how to launch Unreal Engine and create a new project using the third person starter template in the games tab we looked at how to open an existing project and create a shortcut to our project file and finally we deconstructed the project folder to see what makes an Unreal Engine project tick foreign so we've got a project to work with and now it's time to get familiar with using the editor Unreal Engine is a powerful piece of technology and that can make it absolutely terrifying when you first load into it I've had hundreds of my students over the years tell me that they wanted to learn Unreal Engine on their own but as soon as they open the editor it was so overwhelming that they immediately just closed it and never came back in this lesson I'm going to teach you how to navigate the interface inside of Unreal Engine by showing you the six major elements you need to understand in order to get started by the end of this video you'll look back in awe how easy it actually is to work with all right right off the bat let's jump into the bread and butter of the editor the viewport this is the three-dimensional stage where you'll be building out your world all of your models characters and everything else will exist within this stage which unreal refers to as a level and we'll dive deeper into what that means in a later video now there are three different options for navigating the camera around the viewport option number one the wasd method this is actually my personal favorite method now if you're familiar with PC gaming you'll feel right at home with this one what we're going to do is hold down the right Mouse button to activate this method and while you're holding down that button press W on your keyboard to move forward press s on your keyboard to move backwards press a to move left and press D to move right while holding down the right Mouse button you can also move your mouse to rotate the camera's look at Direction around using a combination of rotating the camera and using wasd to move you can get around anywhere option number two the unreal method this is the movement scheme that epic developed in its earliest versions from back in the 90s to use this we can hold down the left click on the mouse and move your mouse up to move forward along a completely horizontal plane or move your mouse down to move backwards along that same plane moving your mouse left and right will rotate the camera around holding down both the left and right Mouse button at the same time you can Pan the camera around like this and of course just like with the wasd method holding down just the right Mouse button lets you rotate the camera's look at Direction around keep in mind that using this method the left click will always move along that horizontal axis regardless of where your camera is actually looking at in the vertical axis to move towards your Lookout Direction you'll need to use the wasd method option number three the Maya method if you're used to working with 3D modeling software like Maya this one is going to make a lot of sense to you holding down the alt button on your keyboard or option on a Mac you can use the left Mouse button to orbit around the center of your viewport you can use the right Mouse button to Dolly and and out and you can use the middle Mouse button to pan around now one final thing that all of these different methods have in common is that you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out the scroll wheel can also be used to control the speed of your camera movement by using it while you're actively in the process of moving using the wasd method now I personally use all three of these methods depending upon what I'm doing at any given time I tend to favor the wasd method but there are times when I want to orbit around a specific area or I only want to move along a two-dimensional plane next let's have a look at the second major element the outliner over here to the right of the viewport and on top is the outliner this is a list of all the assets that are currently in your level this includes models lights Blueprints and everything else that make up a level all of these things unreal refers to to as actors so every actor in a scene will show up here if we click on one of these actors in the list you'll see it highlighted in the viewport with an actor selected if you hit F on your keyboard it'll actually move your camera to that actor this is called focusing an actor and if you are unaware this actually works in nearly all 3D software so if you're a modeler or sculptor and didn't know this go give it a try you'll also see that many of these actors in the default scene are organized into folders you can move these into a different folder by dragging and dropping it alternatively you can right click and go down to move to and select an existing folder to move it to new folders can be created in the move to dialog or by clicking this new folder button up here alright next we're going to look at the details panel if we were to click on one of the items from within the viewport or in the eyeliner you can see that the detail details panel gets populated with all kinds of parameters what shows up here is largely dependent on the type of actor that you actually have selected for example with this Cube selected we can see options for things like the mesh the materials and the physics however if we come up here and click on this directional light the details panel now gives us parameters to control things like the intensity the color and the source angle we'll go deeper into what all of these parameters do on a specific actor type when we go over that actor type for now make note that all of the settings that you can change on an actor in a level will be found in this details pin alright the next interface element that we want to look at is the toolbar located directly above the viewport the toolbar contains several items that help you craft your world this includes things like the editing mode unreal actually has several different editing modes that change the way your interface looks and behaves depending upon what mode you're in selection mode is where you'll spend probably 80 to 90 percent of your time but there are other modes that allow you to work with things like Landscapes vertex painting and even 3D modeling within the engine we'll go over each one of these modes in detail in the full course next to the editing mode we have the create button this allows you to add specific kinds of actors into your level your options are organized neatly into folders but once you click on this button you can also just start typing to search what you need the toolbar contains buttons for working with level related blueprints as well as a button for quickly creating sequences which are how you work with cinematics in unreal the toolbar is also where you'll find your play in editor controls which we'll go into that in a later video but for now just know that you can click the play button to drop in and play and then you can hit escape on your keyboard to exit platforms and settings we'll go over later just above the toolbar you'll find the menu bar file edit help this is all pretty standard fare like any other software one thing I do want to point you to is the window option this menu contains all the various panels that Unreal Engine has there are a lot of things in here that we'll go over in dedicated videos in the full course but the important thing to note is that if you ever lose a panel this is where you go to get it back let's say you accidentally close your details panel to get it back you would go to window details details One clicking on this pops it back into place notice that there are four details panels in the list this can be useful if you ever need to have a second floating details panel somewhere also note that you can dock any of these windows anywhere by clicking on the title Tab and dropping it into a spot as they say with any kind of creative Endeavor content is King which is why our final and second most important interface element we're going to look at is the content browser now if you remember deconstructing the project folder in the previous video I mentioned that the content folder was where the bulk of the project actually lives the content browser is how we actually access that content inside of the editor to access the content browser we can go down here to the lower left of the viewport and click on this content drawer button this will expand our content browser as a temporary drawer element clicking outside of it will make it go away you can also use the shortcut key of control space or command space on a Mac to pull it up now I personally like to keep my content browser up at all times when I'm deep into crafting a scene which you can do by going over here and clicking on this dock in layout button so let left you'll see a hierarchy of the folder structure into the right you'll see the contents of the folder that you're currently in since we started with the third person template and the starter content installed you can see all the folders related to those in our content browser digging down into one of these folders such as level prototyping and then into meshes you'll see some familiar looking 3D models these are representative of the models that the starter level in our viewport is made from at this point the Unreal Engine interface should be a lot less intimidating there are a lot more aspects to the interface that we'll cover in the full course but just knowing how to work with these six major elements puts you over 50 percent of the way there to Mastery over the interface all right so you're comfortable with basic navigation around the editor now let's go ahead and take a look at working with content inside of the editor as they say content is King and in the case of unreal without content we just have an empty scene so let's jump into my seven keys for working with Assets in our scene the first key is to have a scene to actually work it with the third person starter template you can see this playground in front of us when we first opened the editor but we'll actually want to create our own level to start working with to do that go up to file new level and you'll get a dialog box with a few options in it ranging from open world to a blank empty level we want to select basic for this exercise this is going to give us a Bare Bones level to work with that already has some lights and a sky in it and with basic selected we'll just go ahead and click create now if you made any changes in the template level then it's going to ask you if you want to save since we don't really want to mess with the starter template level click on don't save alright with our new level open the second key is going to be to add some content so we're going to look at this in two different ways that we can do this first we're going to click on our quick add button in the toolbar that's the little cube with a green plus symbol on it this is going to give us a drop down with a lot of options and you're going to get very familiar with many of these options later in the full course for now let's go down to shapes where we can click and drag a cube into our scene once you drop it in you'll see this widget with some arrows this lets you move the object around but we'll actually dive into that a little deeper in The Next Step first I want to show you the second way of adding content to your scene the content browser remember we can click the little content drawer button in the lower left or we can use the shortcut Ctrl space to bring up our content browser I'm going to go ahead and click on dock and layout since I'm in the content adding mindset right now from here let's drill down into our starter content folder and then into the props folder in here you'll see all sorts of props that can be added to the scene what we're looking for right now is pretty much anything with the word static mesh at the bottom of the thumbnail and at the top of the tooltip this is a 3D object that we can use in the scene just like the cube we added earlier this leads us to our third key which is transforming assets just like the cube our chair has an arrow widget on it that will let us move it around this is called the move widget and it's part of the transform tools if you work with any 3D modeling software then you'll be familiar with the four Tools in this set select move rotate and scale with the corresponding shortcut keys of q w e and r now be sure to check out the cheat sheet below the video to help you remember those hotkeys now let's get back to the move tool which can be activated with W the move tool has three arrows each representing a planar axis in three-dimensional space you can click and drag on any of these arrows to move an actor along its axis or you can click on one of the little squares to move in two axes at once clicking in the very middle of the widget will let you move in all three axes at once but I find that I spend most of my time using the square to move in a two-dimensional planar axis when moving now another cool thing that you can do is if you hold down shift while you're moving an object it'll actually move the camera along with it the next transform tool that we're going to look at is the rotate tool which is activated with the E shortcut also notice that as I change tools the highlighted tool in the viewport toolbar changes as well these also act as buttons If you happen to forget the hotkeys which you won't right the rotate tool also has three axis control that you can rotate around hitting R will activate the scale tool which you can use to manipulate the size of an object the scale tool can be used in an individual axis but this is one where you'll likely be using the center to scale the object uniformly most of the time if you ever need to get granular when lining things up you can access traditional orthographic viewports by going up to the button in the far right corner then you can maximize that with the same Button as an example I'll go over here to the top viewport and maximize it I'll then find my chair and the outliner hit F to focus it use the scroll wheel to zoom in closer right click and drag to move the viewport around and then move my chair to line up with the cube I can then click the button to go back to my 4 up view then maximize my perspective viewport to continue working now one more quick thing to understand about transforming assets is World Space versus local space World Space notated by the globe symbol up here means that no matter what the rotation the object will always be manipulated in relation to the world local space on the other hand which we can toggle to by clicking on this button means the manipulation of the object will be relative to the object itself now as you get more comfortable with moving objects around in the viewport you'll find yourself toggling between world and local space a lot now you've probably noticed that as I've been moving rotating and scaling things that the adjustments are happening in a stair step fashion this is actually because of our fourth key so snapping snapping is the act of applying constraints to a transformation for example we can have something move 10 centimeters at a time or we can have something move 100 centimeters at a time and on that note Unreal Engine uses the metric system where one unreal unit is equal to one centimeter looking up here in the viewport toolbar we'll see the snapping options for move rotate and scale for the icon on the left you can click it to toggle it blue means that snapping is enabled and gray means that it's disabled the number on the right is the value of the snap clicking on this will change to a drop down so that you can change that value now while you can toggle snapping off to get some good free form control remember that snapping is your friend when it comes to building a scene whether you're working on a digital set for a film or an environment for a game snapping is one of your most valuable resources in the industry we call this working on the grid now another cool trick with snapping is that you can hold down the V key on the keyboard to snap to a Vertex on another object this lets us do things like Snap our chair to be centered on this Cube but what if my Cube was rotated and I wanted my chair to be in the same orientation that's where surface snapping comes in by going up here to the surface snapping icon I can turn on Surface snapping with rotate to surface normal turned on if I hold down V I can now snap not only to the Cube's face location but its rotation as well now that actually brings me to the fifth key of working with assets grouping two or more objects can be simultaneously selected by holding down control or command and clicking on them then you can group them by hitting Ctrl and G or command in G on a Mac move them around as one and then you can hit shift NG to ungroup them if you need to now this actually ties into the number six key that I wanted to talk about which is duplication an object can be duplicated in the viewport by holding down alt or option on a Mac and then dragging it out this is useful because it's much quicker than continuously dragging a new copy out from the content browser and it's more accurately controlled than just doing a copy and paste both of which you can do if you wanted to but getting comfortable with the alt drag duplicate is going to be essential if you want to speed up your workflow an example of using these two keys together would be adding a table with chairs around it grouping that up alt dragging out a copy ungrouping it tweaking the chairs a little bit then grouping it back together again doing this you could quickly build out an entire restaurant with subtle variations and chair replacement now our seventh and final key is to make use of the details panel selecting one of our objects if we look over at the details panel on the right take note of the transform section here you'll see the location rotation and scale the object represented in numerical values this can be really useful for getting very granular with the transformation of an object allowing you to get some very exact values for scale take note of the padlock icon which allows you to toggle uniform scale on and off with it off you can scale a specific axis individually and with on everything will scale uniformly just like if you click the center of the scale widget Mobility here for 3D models mostly released if the object is going to be moving or not we'll cover that more in depth later in the full course below that you'll see where you can actually change the static mesh I could for example drag out a copy of this Cube then click on the chair where I will then click on this little folder with a magnifying glass icon to locate the chair in the content browser by the way you can also do this with the shortcut of control plus b and now if I click back on the cube I can click this arrow in a circle icon to assign that chair to this mesh actor notice that the mesh changes but it's white now instead of chrome and yellow like the other one this is because the actor itself is the same as you can see see by the same name of cube in the outliner but we've changed the mesh that it's actually referring to that it's actually referencing the material is still the same basic shape material from before just like with this other Cube now we could actually click on the chair use the find and browser button to locate the material then go back to the cube that is now a chair and assign that material and this is where the details panel lets you update individual parts of an actor you likely won't find yourself doing that exact step when you could just alt drag a copy of the chair itself out but where this does come in really handy is when you want to change the material on something as an example let's navigate to the starter content architecture folder we're going to drag this wall 400 by 400 out into the world and we'll go up here to change our snapping to 500 centimeters then we'll drag out two copies now go into the starter content materials folder where you'll find all kinds material options that you can play around with assigning to these three different walls another quick way to change the material on something is to just drag from the content browser and drop it right on top of the model all right so now that you know how to work with content to lay out a scene let's have a look at one of the most important aspects of 3D digital art lighting Lighting in unreal is an art form in and of itself and there are some powerful tools available to us in the full course we'll be going over an entire module's worth of content on lighting there's just so much to cover when it comes to cinematic lighting but in this video I want to get you quick started with a high level overview so that you can get in and start adding lights to your scene so let's have a look at the five types of Lights in Unreal Engine the first light that we're going to look at is the directional light now the directional light can most easily be thought of as the sunlight of a scene if we create a new basic level we're presented with a starter scene that already has a directional light in it if we rotate our camera around we should be able to actually find the Sun in the sky over here in the outliner under the lighting folder we can find the directional light also note that the sky sphere is an actor that renders our Blue Sky the volumetric clouds render the clouds and this Sky atmosphere is a special actor that ties it all together we'll go over all of that in great detail later on in the full course for now let's just laser focus on this directional light if we select the directional light and rotate it we'll see the lighting in the level change in a time of day fashion we can even see that the sun is now or lower in the sky if we take it a step further we can actually capture a morning golden hour and even a step further than that to capture a sunrise or a sunset any further in the map goes black as it translates over into night time which has some special case considerations that we'll dive into later bringing the sun back up let's take a look at the details panel under the light category let's have a look at this intensity parameter you'll see a value of 6 Lux now Lux is a measurement of luminance per unit area and if you're familiar with the Lux measurement then this can make unreal's lighting a little confusing for you in the real world the sun has a Luxe value ranging from less than 40. all the way up to 120 000 in direct sunlight and this depends on many factors such as time of day or the amount of clouds in the sky pair that with the fact that the sun is 93 million miles away from the earth and the Earth's atmosphere diffuses some of that solar radiation unreal's internal gears are fudging some calculations and doing some magic behind the scenes keeping that in mind you should pretty much ignore the Luxe aspect of the value here and just get comfortable with being creative with the art Direction the default value in a new basic map is six many of us in the game and film Industries have found 20 to be a solid average value for this the important thing here when you're getting started is to just not overthink it too much now next let's have a look at the skylight Skylight is a unique light that serves a very specific purpose if you're familiar with hdri lighting or you're a 3D artist familiar with software that provides default lighting environments such as substance painter or marmoset tool bag this is what the Skylight does in unreal it essentially acts as the hdri lighting environment by default how this works is by capturing what it sees in the sky including the Sun the clouds and the color of the sky itself to create a high dynamic range image to cast light out into the level this is really great for outdoor environments but you can also plug an actual hdri image into the Skylight to use that instead to demonstrate that let's create a new level but this time we're going to select empty level this is going to be a black viewport with nothing in it so let's go ahead and drop a chair in from the start of content then let's go up to our quick add button down to lights and then drop a skylight in notice how the chair is completely black that's because there is no Sky sun or clouds for the Skylight to capture in order to create that hdri environment so instead of trying to capture what's not there let's just Define our own hdri image to do this go over to the details panel with the Skylight selected and we're going to change the source type from captured scene to specified Cube map the starter content provides us with an example HDR IQ map to use so we'll click on the drop down and then we'll select it notice how suddenly our chair is lit double click on the thumbnail to see the image that is actually being translated to these light values the brighter parts of the image are brighter parts of the light just like the darker parts of the image are darker parts of the light and this equates to a giant light with varying values surrounding the level and only 360 degree sphere take note that we can adjust this Source map Cube angle to rotate the image around which gives us some different lighting the intensity scale will adjust how much of that light is actually being contributed with a default value of one you're going to be working with some really small numbers here and then light color will adjust the tent of the hdri image that's produced and of course all lights have an effects world checkbox that lets you toggle them on and off all right next let's start diving into artificial lights first on that list is going to be the point light to start I'm going to grab this floor from the starter content architecture folder and then scale it up to get a bigger area to work with then I'll use the quick add to drag out a point light now a point light is in omnidirectional light that radiates light outwards in a 360 degree sphere think of this like a light bulb which should be easy to do based on the icon that users now the size of the sphere of influence is controlled by the attenuation radius this value tells the light how far it can travel but not how far it will travel that's actually controlled by the intensity of the light through a science called inverse squared Dynamics we'll cover that in depth in the lighting module of the full course but for now just think of the attenuation radius as an option that you can use to clamp how far the light can actually travel with a larger attenuation radius notice that as I change the intensity it also affects the distance that the light travels you'll also see that the value of intensity on the point light has a CD at the end this stands for candles and is the unit of measurement that unreal uses for artificial lights this is a more true to life measurement for you to use now eight candles is equal to roughly 100 lumens if you're more familiar with that unit alternatively you can type intensity into the details panel search box and change the intensity units to Lumen if you're more comfortable actually using them light color does exactly what you would expect it to and lets you change the color of the light you can get as wild as you want here but for more realistic lights you can actually check the use color temperature option and then use the color temperature values to get warmer or cooler lights these are pretty accurate to real world values the next light that we're going to look at is the spotlight now if you work in film or photography this one is going to feel real familiar to you we can grab this from the quick add menu as well and just like the point light intensity color and temperature all work the same the attenuation radius also works the same but because the light is not on the directional it's actually wrap represented by the length of the cone now the width of the cone is controlled by this outer cone angle the inner cone angle gives you an additional cone inside of the larger one that focuses the light a little harsher learning to use both cones together to get good results is an art form that we'll cover in full detail in the full course's cinematic lighting module next let's look at our final artificial light type the rect light short for a rectangle the rect light is a planar light source that simulates light coming from a rectangular surface such as a television screen a computer monitor or even a rectangular light fixture also found in the quick add menu the intensity color and attenuation radius are just like the other lights the key settings for erect light are the size and the barn door for the size you use the source width and Source height to shape the rectangle these units are in centimeters of course and then you can create a barn door effect with the Barn Door settings adjusting the angle we can start to box the light in then we can use the length to make the doors longer now what we can make what looks like a really good soft box shape the Barn Door settings are actually more useful for creating some hard Shadows almost like a light coming through a barn door all right now you're aware of what lights are available to use inside of Unreal Engine like I mentioned cinematic lighting is an art form in and of itself which is why we'll be spending a lot of time covering it in the full course with an entire module of videos dedicated to just that subject by itself computers have been a big part of our lives for decades now we all know how to use control s to save or at least how to go to file save but one of the questions I get all the time is I save my level how come I lost half my work well that's because unreal isn't just one file it's an entire ecosystem but once you understand the three keys to success when you're saving your work you'll never have that problem yourself the first key is to understand levels versus actors let's break it down a level is the scene that you actually see in your viewport you'll also hear this referred to as a map or a set depending upon your industry you'll get used to hearing me call it a scene these I'll refer to the same thing the level itself is like a container for your layout everything inside of the level exists somewhere in the content browser or in the engine code for certain base elements like lights when you hit Ctrl s it's going to save the level and just the level this saves the layout of any actors in it but does not save the actor itself if you made any changes directly to an active such as changing the color of a material or the default material assigned to the mesh let's go ahead and create a new basic level then hit Ctrl s to save it you'll get the save level as dialog right click on the content and select new folder then just name it my stuff with no spaces now we'll set a name for the map I'll call mine saving tutorial and then we'll click save I'll use the quick add button to add a couple of cubes and then hit Ctrl s to save again now each actor in a scene is self-contained well you can move scale rotate and update the details of an actor in a scene the base actor itself in the content browser keeps its defaults and is saved in the content browser remember how we dragged a chair into our scene and then manipulated it if we were to drag the chair in from the content browser again we'll get the original chair we can then manipulate it in a different way if we save the level then both versions of the chair will be saved in that layout but the original chair in the content browser remains unchanged this is because the actor assets are saved independently of the level that they're in to demonstrate let's navigate to the chair in the content browser hit Ctrl D to make a duplicate of the chair so that we're not messing with the original and if you select the thumbnail then hit F2 you can rename it I'll call mine SM underscore tutorial chair now if we double click it it'll open up the static mesh editor in this editor you can see a viewport with a Showcase of the asset in it on the left and a details panel on the right let's go ahead and change the material we can click on this drop down and see a list of all of the materials in the project you can also search for a material I'll type in gold and assign this one notice how the thumbnail in the browser has an asterisk on it this means that the asset has changes and it needs to be saved to save our new chair we'll have to click the save button in the asset editor now if we drag our new chair out into the scene you'll see it has the new gold material on it and the original chair still has the original material on it now if we go into the starter content materials folder let's find another material how about brushed nickel we can drag and drop that onto the slot in the editor notice that it changes in the level however if we go up to this browse button in the asset Editor to find it in the content browser you'll notice it still has the asterisk this means that the asset itself is not saved even though you see it in the editor so even if you save the level if you were to close unreal now without saving the asset then when you came back the chair would be gold again remembering to save in different places can be kind of cumbersome but unreal does provide a solution to make it easier which brings me to the second key using save all if you go to file you'll see several save options including one called save all the hotkey for this is control shift s now if you remember no other shortcut remember this one this will save you more than you know say it out loud with me control shift s Ctrl shift s or save all does exactly what it says it saves everything it saves the level layout you're working in all of the settings inside of it and all the actors that you've updated when you're working on a project in Unreal Engine you'll want to shift your mindset away from the traditional control s to save and get comfortable with control shift s to save all now real quick while we're on the topic I want to bring up something that's new in Unreal Engine 5. the concept of one file per actor now you may hear this phrase thrown around a bit in various conversations but what does it actually mean didn't we just talk about how all actors are their own independent files in the content browser yes we did but one file per actor is actually referring to something completely different this really pertains to working on group projects specifically related to Source control which is something that we'll talk about in full detail later in the full course traditionally only one person on a team could work on a level at a time they would have to check out and lock everyone else out of that level while they were working on it Unreal Engine 5 changed that by introducing the one file per actor system what this means is that each actor that exists in a level has all of its level related information such as location scale and rotation saved in an external file now these external files are more like hidden files with gibberish names that exist only to store that information outside of the level itself you don't need to worry about tracking them or working with them directly all that happens automatically behind the scenes just know that this allows more than one person to work on the same level at the same time which is something that you couldn't do in Unreal Engine 4. all right so we've talked about building scenes with content and I've shown you what it looks like a couple of times to just drop in and play in the editor but let's take a moment to get familiar with using this feature now assuming you created your project with the third person starter template you should be all set up with a default game mode that will let you play here in the template level when you first open unreal you can go up here and click on this green play button to drop in and play an editor the hotkey for that is alt p and then escape to exit once you hit play take note of this message that says click for Mouse control this means that to start playing you need to click once in the viewport to go into game mode you can then hit shift F1 to get your mouse cursor back the message is in the upper left should remind you of this if you forget once you're playing it's standard PC gaming controls wasd to move just like getting around the viewport and edit mode and then spacebar to jump next let's talk about eject and possess when you're playing in editor you could say run your character up here hit shift F1 to get your mouse cursor back then go up here and click on this eject button this will eject you from the player so you can move around the scene just like in edit mode except the game world is still playing click the GamePad icon that it changed to in order to possess the character again this can be really useful if you need to do something like say test out moving an object in the scene just eject move the object and then possess again note that when you exit play mode this change will not be saved so you'll need to repeat the action for real outside of play mode notice that when we hit play we always start from the same position this is controlled by an actor called player start which looks like a flag with a Gamepad icon wherever you place this actor in your scene is where you will start whenever you hit play you can however go up here to the three dots menu and change your player start at location to current camera location this will make it so that when you hit play you'll drop in wherever you happen to currently be in the viewport being able to drop in and play is useful but sometimes you just need to see some action that only works when the game is in play mode but you don't need to actually run around with your character you can do this with the simulate functionality going to the three dots again you can see a list of Options under modes selected viewport is what we have been using and it's the one that you'll be using most of the time many of the others are special cases the bottom option of simulate though can be very useful it'll let you activate the game world without actually playing in it let's unpack a use case bring up the content browser and go to starter content particles folder find the P underscore explosion and drop it into your scene notice how when we dropped it in it exploded once but never again this is because it is a one-time event as you would expect an explosion to be or at least you would hope it would be a one-time event or maybe a No Time Event let's go up to the three dots and change our mode to simulate notice how when you change it it immediately drops you in if you hit Escape you'll see the play icon has changed to let you know that you are set to simulate mode now you can hit play to simulate all you want very useful for tweaking positions of one-time events like explosions all right so you've done some cool stuff and unreal and want to show it off with some screenshots there's actually a really quick way to get these screenshots as long as you know how to grab them and where to find them once you do let's Jump Right In Here in the editor grabbing a screenshot is quick and easy first hit f11 to maximize the viewport this is a toggle so you'll hit f11 to go back again you can also use shift in f11 to toggle full screen hiding your taskbar I recommend doing this because it'll give you the correct aspect ratio if you're on a standard 16x9 screen hit the g key to go into game view which hides all your widgets with your full screen viewport now just hit F9 to take a screenshot you'll see a little pop-up message that you can click on to go directly to your screenshots folder but if you miss it don't worry just go to your project folder in Explorer or finder go into the saved folder and then you'll see a screenshots folder this is where all of your screenshots are saved now what if you have a view that you want to continuously capture as you iterate well the best way to do that is with cameras which we'll go over in depth in the full course but right now I want to introduce you to a little trick to save viewport camera locations these are called bookmarks to create a bookmark you find the view that you want then you hit control plus a number to save it to demonstrate I'm going to hit control plus 1 to save a bookmark here in my scene then I'll go over here and hit control plus 2 to save another bookmark I can now use one and two on my keyboard to quickly jump to each one of these camera angles now if you go up to this hamburger menu in the upper left of the viewport you'll see an item called bookmarks this is where you can go to see and manage what bookmarks you currently have saved as well as you can set bookmarks here too I highly recommend using the hotkeys though alright now you know how to grab screenshots so you could be able to show off your work later in the full course we'll go over cinematic camera settings so you can get the real good shots for now take everything you've learned so far play around to get comfortable working in unreal and take some screenshots to share what you're working on in the next module we'll start diving into working with assets so we can start creating even cooler scenes for you to take screenshots of I'll see you there thank you [Music]

Channel: Digital Alchemy

Views: 8,279

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue5 tutorial, ue5 beginner tutorial, learn unreal engine, gamedev, game design, game development, 1 hour, fortnite, video games, game industry, game career, virtual production, unreal engine 4

Id: Cjk-M2lDb4c

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023