Unreal Engine 4 Beginner Tutorial: Getting started

hey there dev squad in today's video we're going to be building the foundation for our worlds inside of unreal engine [Music] throughout this video we're going to be taking a look at familiarizing ourselves with unreal engine 4 and building our very first scene inside of unreal engine looking at how we can import assets into our scene and manipulate them to build something bigger without further ado let's go ahead and dive into the video okay so assuming that this is the first time you've opened up unreal engine we're going to be showing you how you can set up your very first unreal engine project if you've got an unreal engine project already go to the timestamp in the description and carry on with this video so the very first thing we're going to be doing is creating a brand new project and this is going to be depending on the type of project we've got first things first we have got our games projects we've got our films projects we've got our architecture projects and then we have also got our automotive projects for the sake of this video we are going to be using a games project so i'm going to press next and then what i have access to is a whole bunch of different templates that i can use for the purpose of this video i am going to be using the third person template but this tutorial and world building is going to work in any template in any type of project or application you're going to have unreal engine is simply unreal engine so i'm going to press next and then with this this is where i'm actually going to be defining the project and the application for this so i'm going to be leaving it to a blueprint project because we're not going to be doing any c plus plot i'm going to be leaving it as a blueprint project because we're not going to be doing any c plus coding right now i'm gonna have this as maximum quality i'm going to have ray tracing disabled and then i'm going to set up my desktop because this is the type of project i'm aiming this for and then lastly i'm also going to be including this starter content so we have a couple of different assets that we can work with with these settings i'd really like you to experiment with these look at different options and you are going to be able to do that self-discovery in understanding what each of these are going to do but for now what we're going to do is simply choose a project folder at the bottom here and then we're also going to set a name i'm going to be giving this the name unreal beginner course or of course whatever your project is called put that in there and then press create project give us a couple of seconds and we'll dive into the engine okay so now that we're inside of the unreal engine interface let's go ahead and break this down so the very first thing you're going to see is the viewport and this is in the center of the screen here and this is going to be your view into the world you're going to be able to see all the assets that you're manipulating and absolutely everything that you're creating in here within this you are going to be able to navigate around this by holding down the right mouse button and then panning around with the camera using your mouse you can also move forwards backwards left and right while holding down that right mouse button and you can also use the was and d keys but the best thing to do for this viewport is just dive in and have a little fly around and that is going to be the best way to get the most comfortable with this we have also got some viewport settings in the top left hand corner that we can look into but for now this is not something we're going to look into have a little bit of an experiment with this in your own time but for now that is your very quick intro into the viewport the next thing that we have is our our place actors panel on the left hand side here this is what is going to allow us to place all of our different kinds of actors in our scene whether that be lights or blueprints or geometry or anything like that we're going to be able to find all of this on the left-hand side and don't worry i'm going to be showing you how you can use all of this utilizing all of the user interface as we go through this video and as we go through this course but most importantly with this piece over here you can see we can create things like cubes or planes or actors or lights cinematics geometry and more and creating it can be simpler all you have to do is just simply drag and drop just like that which is perfect but we're going to be going into that in a little bit more detail later on the next thing that we have is our content browser down at the bottom and this is essentially going to allow us to browse our content so with that if i go ahead and click my little button here on the left hand side i can show my sources and i can view all of the different project files for this folder and that could be anything from assets which are your vfx your 3d models your animations and all of that good stuff and viewing these could not be any easier all you have to do is just click on the folders here and then all you're going to do is navigate into these and search for your different items there which is perfect so as you can see here if i go to my content and then i go to my starter content and then i go down to my props you can see i have got all of these different props available to me that we're going to be using in this tutorial video so as you can see here we have got a bush we've got a chair a table a door and all of that good stuff and what i could do is search for particular assets by going to my search props here and then typing in something that i wanted for example if i wanted a chair i could search for chair and now with this i could simply click on this drag and drop it into my scene here just like that nice and simple what we can also do is filter our content browser because we don't always want to see everything we might just want to see the props so we might not want to see the materials so we could go to filters and then we could also turn on our materials and make it only show materials or i can go to my filters here and i can also tell this to only show my static meshes which is our props and you can turn these off and on here just in the bottom left hand corner but that's a quick overview of the content browser moving on from there what we also have is the details panel on the right hand side which is going to give us the details of an object that we've got selected so if i go over to an object in my scene here so i'm just going to fly over select this cube i've got by clicking on it i can then see all of the different settings related to this object so i can see things like location rotation scale the mesh the materials and i can change all of this all within this details panel which is really straightforward and again as we go through this course we are going to be changing things like materials scale physics and all of that good stuff but for now the most important thing you want to know is this is where we're going to be doing all of this in addition to that moving on from the details panel we have also got our world outliner and you can see this in the top right hand corner of our screen so over here in the top right hand corner you can see we have got all of the different actors that are currently in our scene and we've got things in here like atmospheric fog um a player start a character a cube mesh and all of that good stuff and i can scroll up and down this as i need and if i wanted to choose a particular actor i can click on it to select it and then i can also detail i can also change the settings in the details panel but again i can also search for this so i can go in and i could search for something like the floor and as you can see here i can now select my floor a little bit easier so this this world outliner is going to come in real handy as we start building our walls in unreal engine but that's it for our user interface overview let's go ahead and move on to the next bit which you guys are going to be looking forward to which is showing you how you can bring assets into our scenes and then start building our worlds so without further ado let's go ahead and dive in so the very first thing that we're going to be doing is finding some props that we can start putting into our world to create that very foundation and once we created this world we can move on to the other videos in this course at looking at things like lighting and post processing and visual effects but for now let's go ahead and get some props into our scene because we included the starter content as part of this project we can go into our content browser in the bottom left here go to content starter content and then props you can see making sure i've got nothing in my search there i have got access to a whole bunch of pieces of geometry i can use so what i'm going to do is take this chair here and i'm going to drag and drop it into our scene and if i just hold down my right mouse button to move my camera around and then w to zoom in i can now see my chair and what i can do is start manipulating this and then i can add more assets in to start populating the scene but for now let's take this chair and start modifying it so the first thing that we're going to do is looking at how we can move it and to move it we just need to select the chair and you know it's selected because it's going to have this orange outline and then in the world outliner it's going to be highlighted in orange what we can do from there is press our select and translate objects tool by pressing m and then from there i can then move it by pressing one of the gizmos so if i click and drag on my x-axis here which is my red i can then move it backwards and forwards just like that i can also select this and move it on my y axis by dragging the green arrow just like that and just the same i can also do the same thing for the zed by clicking the blue arrow and moving it up and down what i can also do with this if you look at our little axes here i can also move this on two different axes at once by clicking the joining piece between them so i can select this and then i can move it around just like that nice and simple and i can do the same for the other two axes just like that so that is the basics of our movement what we can now move on to is rotating our object so i'm going to select this object i'm going to rotate it and i can do this by pressing the select and rotate objects tool or by pressing e on the keyboard and then i can just grab one of these three axes here and i can rotate this object around on any one of these three objects there or axes rather which is perfect and lastly what we're also going to do for this object is we're going to take this chair and we're going to scale it and this time we can access the scale tool by pressing select and scale objects or by pressing r on our keyboard so if we press that what we can then do is choose one of the axes to scale these on and i can just scale it up or down just like that i'm going to press ctrl z to just you know get rid of my changes there and i can continue to do that on a per axis basis or alternatively what i can also do is go in here i can take this white square in the very middle and i can get this to retain the proportions which is going to stop this item from being stretched so having said that what you should be comfortable with now is placing assets into our scene from our content browser by dragging and dropping them into the viewport but then you should also be able to manipulate them with some basic movement scaling and our rotation as well so nice and simple so now that we've done that let's move on to a little mini challenge to see how well we can do this so what i'm going to do is simply create a nice little setup where we've got two chairs and those are both going to be around a table and on that table there is going to be a little statue so let's go ahead and do that so if we go down to our content browser let's scroll down and what we're going to be looking for here is table round and with this we're going to be placing this into our scene so again we're going to be dragging and dropping this so click drag and drop and place this into our scene if we need to scale this up or down we can and because we don't want to stretch this we are going to be grabbing that white axis there and we're just going to scale it up just like that next we are going to go into our content browser and we're going to grab our chair and we're just going to drag and drop again and what we're going to do is select and rotate these objects and we're just going to rotate it so it faces the table just like that and then i'm just going to move it in just like that so that is a nice simple little setup there and we're going to do the same thing here with the second chair and then what we're going to do is rotate it again so it's facing the table and then we are just going to press the select and translate objects tool just like that once that's done we're now going to move on to the next object which is going to be our little statue which is going to be sitting on the table but again just because we want to make things easier for ourself instead of scrolling down in the content browser i am going to go into my search box here and i'm going to search for my statue and i'm going to turn on my static mesh filter so go to filters choose static mesh and turn this on and i can see i've got my statue here and what i can do is i can drag and drop this into my scene just like that and i can scale this up or down as i need to in addition to this what i can also do is view this asset before i bring it into the scene in what is called the static mesh editor so having said that i'm going to go ahead and open this up i can do this by double clicking on the column to do this i can double click on the asset in the content browser to open this up and in here what we can also see now is with our assets i can now see all of the different settings for this so we can see the asset in the main viewport here and then we can also see the materials in the details on the right hand side and what we could also do is actually change these materials so if you have another material for the statue base here which i can see i could go ahead and just click on the drop down arrow and change this and as you can see it is going to change this and any changes that you make to your objects in the asset viewer or the asset or the static mesh editor rather is going to reflect in the world and you can see my base has now gone orange so that is just one thing that i do want you guys to keep in mind what you can also do is change these on a per asset basis so what we could do is we could change the material here and we could change this on the bottom here but if we drag another one in because i did it on the asset in the scene it is going to be instance so it's not going to apply it to absolutely everything so hopefully that should give you a nice solid understanding of how we can very quickly go in and change some of the different settings for our props so now that we're comfortable with taking our assets from the content browser what i'd like to do is take a minute to introduce you to the snapping settings which is going to make your life a little bit easier when you are manipulating these assets so let's take our chair here i'm going to go ahead and select this and if i move this what you're going to notice is it is going to start snapping and we're not actually going to have full control over the placement for this so what we have to do is actually either turn the snapping off or adjust the value and snapping can be both helpful and it can also be detrimental as well so with this chair if i move it you can see it snaps which is really great if you're working with something like walls or something that needs to be repeated and it can just snap into place but if you're not building something like this what you might want to do is turn off your snapping and we'd have to do this separately for our scale rotation and our movement and we can do this in the top right hand corner of our viewport so what we're going to do is go ahead and select this chair and to stop it from snapping when we move it we are going to deselect this grid icon in the top right here by pressing that and it's going to go gray and now if we go ahead and move this you can see we have got complete control over this object if we turn it back on it is going to start snapping again what we can do with that is turn our snapping up or down by using the drop down option here so if i turn this up to something like 50 you are going to see it is going to snap to a far greater value there which is good if you've got things like walls or fences or floor pieces that need to be repeated we can also adjust the snapping for our rotation by going over to the top right hand corner here and you can see we have got enables or disables snapping objects to a rotation grid if we turn this off it is no longer going to snap when we rotate this object if we turn this back on it is going to snap again and this is really important for rotation because you might want to go to exactly 45 or 90 and the way you're going to do this is by setting this to snap to something like 45 or 90 or 5 so that way you can always get those perfect values so that's object snapping for our rotation and then lastly we can also do the same thing for scaling so if we go ahead and select our scale tool and then go in and then if we move on and try and scale this you can see it is snapping to a quarter snap each time we can turn this up so we can even have this double if we wanted to by setting this to one so it will double in size every time if you want that precision simply just turn that off or on another little tip when it comes to working with the viewport inside of unreal engine is you have your camera speed in the top right hand corner if you've got a small scene like this something like 4 might be good but if it's even smaller than this you might want to turn this down so you have more control over the viewport if you have a scene that's really big you might want to turn this up and you're going to be able to move very quickly as you see there and to change this it's really simple like i just showed you all you got to do is press the camera icon in the top right hand corner there and then just turn this up or down as you so need okay so the last thing that i want to show you in terms of manipulating your assets and viewport settings is our transform mode so what we have is our gizmo when we select an object at the moment it is always going to be facing the same direction so the axes are never going to move and this can be good and it can also be bad because if i need to move something i can only move it backwards forwards left or right what you might want to do is be able to take this object and then rotate it and then be able to move it in the way that it's facing and the way you're going to do this is by changing from world coordinates which is where it always stays in the same direction and change it to the to the local space by pressing that little icon at the top here and we can see it's in local space now because it's got the cube and now the gizmo axes are always going to face the direction of that object so now even if i rotate it and then move it it's always going to focus and follow the direction of that object so that is all of my tips and tricks what i want to see you guys do now is have a little bit of creativity with your scene i want you to go through and create a scene using some of the different props that you've got available to you as part of this starter content and what i want you to do with this is to go ahead and place a picture of this over in our community discord server okay so let's go ahead and start the challenge so what we're going to be doing is first things first creating a brand new level inside of unreal engine so what we're going to do is go over to the top left hand corner here and we're going to go to file and then new level from here we can choose one of the templates for me this is just going to be our default template that you can see here if you want to save the changes to this level that you've got by all means just go ahead and press save selected but that is how we save a level and also how we can open a new one if you want to check the settings in the top left hand corner for this you can so you can either create a new level by pressing file new you can also open a level save the current level or save the current level as something else so have a little play around with those different options there they're going to perform just like any other software package but without further ado let's go ahead and create our very first scene so what we're going to be doing is creating a scene where we have got some glass walls and some pillars and some chairs inside and all of that good stuff so we're going to be using lots of different props and manipulating them in different ways to get the result that we want so first things first what we're going to do in this scene is make our floor a little bit bigger so we're going to select the floor here and then we are going to scale it on both my y-axis and also my x-axis just like that so now i've got myself a little bit more space and notice there i did that individually on each one of the axes what we need to do now is actually start building the room that we're going to be creating and you guys are absolutely welcome to create anything you like with these props or with your own assets if you like i'm still interested in seeing what you're doing so the first thing i'm going to do is scroll down in my content browser under this prop still and i'm going to grab myself a door frame and i'm simply going to drag and drop it into the scene just like that and this is where players or people or the camera even can go into my world or into my room and then going to be taking this door here and i'm going to be placing it in just like that and you can see i can pretty much just drag and drop it into place if i need to and notice that it just went in as it should but what i did have to do is make those adjustments so what i'm going to do is show you a little bit of an easier way of bringing these assets into your scene and making sure they have the correct placement so i'm actually going to select both of these by pressing ctrl left click to select both and then i'm going to delete these and if i select both my door and my content browser by pressing left click and then control left click on the door frame as well we've now got both of these selected and what i can do is drag and drop them into the scene and generally these are going to have the correct placement and for the most part this does the only thing i have to do is select this door and then just move it along the y just like that which is really good another thing you can do with this if you always want to select and move these two assets together from here what i can do is actually group these so i'm going to left-click and control to select both of these and then i can just right-click and press group or ctrl g to group these together if i deselect and select again you can see these are always going to be moved together now which is really nice so we've learned something new there which is great and this is the best way to learn new stuff to just go in and get hands-on so the next thing we're going to do is our is add in our glass walls so i'm going to scroll down i'm going to search for my glass window and then i'm just going to drag and drop it into my scene just like that and with that done what i'm going to do is actually scale this so it's a little bit bigger so notice my pivot point which is where we're going to be transforming from is over in the bottom right hand corner i'm going to drag it out to where i want it to be in terms of width and then if i go over and press my select and scale objects tool button what i can do is make this nice and wide and then i can also make it a little bit taller just like that with that done what we're going to do is pretty much copy and paste this onto the other side so you guessed it ctrl c to copy ctrl v to paste and then what i'm going to do is instead of moving it like this which isn't that great for being able to see what we're doing if i hold down shift and then left click and drag you're going to see my camera is going to move along with that and as you can see there i have now got my glass wall either side of this door and we're learning even more new stuff as we go through and create this what i'm now going to do is take a pillar frame and i'm just going to put this in the corner just like that and then i'm going to do the same thing over there but if you see here these are a little bit too tall at the moment so what i'm going to do is delete one of those and then i'm just going to scale this down to the height that we want which is going to be in line with the door frame and then just go in and copy and paste and move it over just like that and if you feel i'm going too fast just pause the video keep up with me and by the end of this video you will have this wall and this scene coming to life so we now have the front of our room let's go ahead and create the back and the sides now so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to group these two pillars here so select both of these by holding down control g to group them at it sorry control and left click to select both of these and then ctrl g to group them what we're going to do is ctrl c and ctrl v to paste these and as you can see i can now add in my pillars for the other side of the room there what i can then do from here is add in my glass window for both sides so i'm going to drag in one just like that and then i'm just going to rotate it as i need to and as you can see there it is snapping so the rotation worked really good because i don't want it to be angled to 12 degrees or 11 degrees i want this to be exactly 90 so having your snapping enabled like i showed you earlier on is really important with that done i'm just gonna take this into my pillow here and then i'm going to scale it up just like that so it matches the height of the other glass and then i'm just going to scale it on the one axis until it goes into the frame just like that so now we have got our glass walls all the way around on this side let's go ahead and select this and then we are going to control c control v to copy and paste that we're going to move it over to the other side and then we are good to go so as you can see here our room is really starting to take place i'm going to copy and paste this one last time and then i'm going to rotate it and i'm going to be placing it in for the back wall just like this and again i just need to scale this so it fits so hopefully by now you guys are going to start seeing that we can use a whole variety of different assets to really start bringing our scenes to life let's go ahead and move on to the final part of this scene here where i'm just going to be putting a few props into this little room that i've just created so having said that what i'm going to do in here is i'm going to add a table in the corner here rotate or scale this as you like i'm going to put the statue on the table like we did earlier and then i'm also just going to scroll up and take one chair and then face it towards the table my snapping is not agreeing with me there so i'm going to turn that off and i'm going to get that in just like that if you want to put some more assets in here you absolutely can so what i'm going to do is actually take my sm underscore material preview mesh and drag and drop this into the scene here it's currently way too big and i'm going to scale this down and the reason why i've chosen this asset specifically is because i want to show you how you can apply materials to this so if we go over to our starter content and then go to the materials folder we've got a bunch of assets we can use and i can drag and drop pretty much any one of these onto any of these assets so i could go in and select my sandstone rock for example and then i can drag and drop it onto my material sphere here and you can see it's applied but by doing that it is going to go onto whatever you select it and drag and drop it onto so what we want to do is see how we can put it into a material slot in the details panel so i'm going to go to element 0 and i'm going to be replacing the plain material i've got here with some polished marble so select the polish marble in your content browser and then press use selected asset from the content browser and as you can see there that has gone in which is great we could also do the same bit for the material slot to the second material slot that is and we could put something like the lake in there if we wanted to just like that have a little play around with this experiment with some of the pre-made materials and props that we've got that's it for this video make sure you stay tuned for the next videos in this course where we're going to be taking a look at things like materials lighting post processing and more that's it for now though guys so stay awesome keep creating vertus signing out

Channel: DevSquad

Views: 11,571

Keywords: Learn to code, game development, beginner tutorial, how to build games, unreal engine 4, how to make a level, programming, 3d tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, how to build a world in unreal engine

Id: 6E1wsMq2bsM

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021