Unreal Engine 4 Beginner Tutorial: Getting Started

hey what's up everybody in today's video I'm gonna show you how you can get started in Unreal Engine 4 if you're a complete beginner the Unreal Engine is a massive program it's designed for massive teams write big these big triple-a studios use the program so you're not expected to learn and become an expert at every single thing in the engine so if you're brand new to game dev you don't have any experience in development or art or anything like that I'm gonna show you how you can get started as a complete beginner that just wants to get into the engine and start making stuff maybe you've been playing games all your life and you've always had this dream of making a game someday but it just seemed like such a daunting task and you're not a programmer you've never programmed anything so how the heck do you get started how do you dive in and just start making games and that's what this video is all about I've been talking to members of my community and we've been discussing things about what they wish they knew when they first opened Unreal Engine for the first time and I got a lot of great feedback so I'm gonna make a video about this stuff and I'm also gonna be giving you my own opinions and what I think you should be working on as a complete beginner so this is the Epic Games launcher here and I'm sure you have this because if you've ever played for Knight or anything like that you have this launcher so on the left side here you have Unreal Engine here so you just select that and you get these tabs up here and you have to go to library and you have to add the engine version that you want to install on your computer as you can see I have four versions installed on my computer plus a few more that are just the C++ source you don't have to worry about that and if you're brand new then you're probably going to launch the latest version which is 4.25 so I'm gonna launch this and this is what you're gonna see the very first time you launch the engine when you launch the Unreal Engine for the very first time this is the window that's gonna pop up up here these are your recent projects and if I click more you can see all the different projects I have installed I have a lot of projects I think I'm using an entire terabyte of space worth of projects but that's because I do a lot of tutorials and courses and things like that but you're not gonna have anything here I'm pretty sure so what you're gonna want is to do games right here so you click games now you're presented with all these different templates the most popular templates are the first person template and the third person template but the thing about these templates is that they're just templates you can always change them around and and make any template into whatever you want to be all right so you have a twin stick shooter template you have this flying template and I don't I thought they had a top-down they do so and then you have this top-down template but like I said you could always take the third person template move the camera to the top of the character and now you have a top-down template so these are just starting points for you if you want to do some sort of first-person game then then just start with the first person template but if you want to do a third person type of game then just go with the third person template and then if you have these other types of games you want to do then by all means just pick the one that sounds best for you I'm gonna do the third person template so you click Next and you're presented with this option here so as a complete beginner just keep your project as a blueprint project you can always convert it to C++ at a later time I'll show you how to do that and then this stuff here just keep this stuff as it is okay and then right here you can select the folder of where you want it to be I put all my projects in its own hard drive so these are all different projects I have and you can name your project here and once you do that you're ready to create your project so just click create project and the project will open up for the first time ever okay here we are first time ever I'm not sure exactly what your UI layout will look like but generally it should look something like this your first time in the editor it's like what the heck is all this stuff you have this character here you have these blocks and stuff placed on the map it's just a very simple level up at the top here you have you know save current modes things like that we're gonna go over some of these things but the first thing you want to do is open up this next to the play button you can click play on selected viewport and it will just jump you in and you can now run around so the templates come with a stock character that you can move and control and jump alright but that's all they give you they don't really give you anything else to work with but it's kind of cool being able to just open up a template and you can now move around so there are other options here that I think are really important to go over number one I like doing a new editor window it just opens up a separate window and if you ever open up like another class or you have like a blueprint open which I know this might all sound confusing it'll launch this separate window on its own anyway so for the level here I like to keep it on just playing in the viewport because playing in the viewport is actually really nice because when you're playing in the viewport what I like to do sometimes and this might be a little bit advanced at this point but when you're playing in the viewport like this you can always press f8 and now I can actually move around and see what's going on in the level and this is very important because down the road when you're making your games you might have certain things going on but you can't see from your character's point of view so you can just press f8 the game will keep running and you can come over here and just see what like your AI is doing or something like that right and then all you would have to do is up here you can just click posess again and you're back in your character or you can press f8 again as well so I think that's really a really cool feature it makes testing really nice so the next thing we have here is this build stuff here I don't want to get too in-depth with all this but generally this is how you would build lighting and do things like that then cinematics this is for creating like cutscenes and things like that but you would want to do a separate tutorial on the sequence editor here blueprints up here this is how it you can open the level blueprint so if you want things that happen in your level you can drive logic that way through the actual level blueprint so this level is called third person example map it's gonna be its own level right so I can go new level here and I can create a default level like this so here we are in a brand new fresh level this is what it looks like and if you click play then you have your character again here and that's because the levels by default are set to run with this third person character every single map you make its gonna be its own level as you can see it says untitled so if I go to save current it's gonna ask me to save the level and what I recommend when you save levels is here in the content folder you want to be at the very top just right click and do new folder call it Maps and then save all your levels in the maps folder so you can call this like you know level 1 or whatever so the other tabs we have up here is you have this marketplace tab and I can make it a whole entire video on just the marketplace but we'll quickly go over it right now so if I click this button nothing's gonna happen alright it's not gonna open the marketplace for some reason so what you actually have to do if you want to get to the marketplace is you have to open up the epic launcher down here just double click it and this will open up and then the tab here you have marketplace so this is where you can buy assets from creators so if you're coming over from unity unity has a massive marketplace and so does Unreal Engine and you're gonna notice some of the same content here that you saw in unity because those creators have made versions for unity and for Unreal Engine so most of these things cost money but there are a lot of free assets you can use as well to get started so that's what you're gonna want to do just ignore the free stuff don't start paying for stuff yet come up here to the top where it says free and you have four things you can do so every month there's free content so every month you're gonna want to make sure you come through and get all of these things make sure you own them all as you can see I scooped them all up so make sure you do that every single month at the very beginning like I think every Tuesday the first Tuesday of the month they launch a new set of free assets so make sure you always grab those and once you have them you have them for life so that's why it's important then you also have this permanently free collection this is where you can get a bunch of free vegetation for example and then just a bunch of free other assets that are good for prototyping as well this medieval dungeon I love prototyping with this because it just gives you a nice set of meshes and things like that in levels to play around with you have a lot of vegetation here you have these these special effects that are good for prototyping as well so the permanently free collection it's really important to get in here and just go through the pages see what they got this ancient treasures is really good animal variety pack you got some weapons here you can use lots of grasses this horror engine is a complete project that you can download and look at and learn from and see what they're doing FPS weapons so like I said you're going to want to spend time in here looking at a bunch of these free assets now you also have the mega scans content so if you didn't know epic bought quick soul and they now own mega scans and so all of the mega scans assets are now free if you use the Unreal Engine you can only use them in the Unreal Engine but yeah they're free now so you can use all these different assets they have like 4k textures and things like that the very high quality but they also can be quite heavy on performance if you're not careful so that's the quick salons then you have the epic games content here these are also good to prototype with they have several projects in here these infinity blade assets are good for prototyping and then it has all these Paragon characters which if you don't know what Paragon is it was a MOBA that epic was making but they shut it down so they could 100% focus on fortnight and they released all the characters and their animations and their special effects to the community for free so it's amazing there's some amazing characters in here these are great for prototyping with as always there's in my opinion there's no reason as a beginner to pay for characters when you can just download these Paragon characters and test with them okay so make sure you do it you can see I've downloaded several over time and I love prototyping with these all of my courses on udemy I use these assets with okay so like I said lots of characters here and still trying to scroll down here still more characters and then epic also has a few scenes that you can download some special effects here and all of these scenes come with assets remember like it's everything you see here so all this lava you'll now have a lava material that you can use in your game Walter Plains you can use water so as a beginner I really recommend that you spend a lot of time going through the marketplace really just understanding what you have or free to play with you I don't want you spending any money as a beginner there's no reason to right now you're really trying to just get comfortable with the engine and learn how it works and navigate the engine alright so let's say you've added a bunch of assets you now own them where exactly do they go where are they now so if you go up here in your library you can now scroll down and you'll have this vault this is where all your assets will be all the assets that you've paid for or the free ones will all be here so as you can see yeah I've spent a lot of money in this engine I have a lot of assets here so what you can do with these assets is for example this water planes right I was showing you that free asset water planes you can add the project and then you would find in the name of your project and you will add it to it this is the name of my project I can add it to the project and then it's going to download it and once inside the project you can now open it up check it out things like that now some assets that you get are going to require you to actually create a project to see them it's kind of annoying but it's just how it is because of the way that the creator has set it up so for example I have this trajectories part one if I want to see this asset and get access to it I have to create a new project just for the asset it's kind of annoying but what you can do is you can still combine all of your assets into one project you'll just have to first create a project and then you'll be able to add it into another project if that makes sense it's kind of confusing but I will show you how to do that because this is also a very important skill so for example let's say I add this military weapons dark witch this is free by the way you can go to add the project doesn't show up here that means the asset hasn't been updated to 4.25 yet or to whatever version you have so you have to click show all projects here then you can come down to your project tutorial testing for me and then here it says select version so these assets haven't been updated since 4.21 so you have to click for point two one and then add to project and it will now add these weapons to my project so once I've added these assets to my project I can come up here to my if you click this content button it's gonna open the content browser for you if you don't have it open but now that I've added those assets I can see them here here's water plane right here and so I have access to a map to look it over and then I added those guns as well those weapons right here so now I have all of these meshes here so I can click the weapons folder here and I have all these different weapons that I can use in my game now let's say you have another project and you don't want to have to download another asset again the way you would do this is if you have like like this asset for example it's 3.1 gigabytes let's say I add it to my project and then I came here and I removed it because I don't want that 3.1 gigabytes sitting on my hard drive so it would suck to have to redownload this and then add it to my new project but if you already have it in another project what you can do is you can come to the project like let's say I want to add these guns to another project I'm making a new project or whatever I can right click the folder here in the content browser I can go to my great to save stuff and then here's all the assets it's gonna migrate so you just click okay it's gonna pop this window up and you find your new project so let's say I want to move it to YouTube survival or whatever I come to my new project and then I go to the content folder right here and then that's it don't do anything else just stay here and then click select folder and it will add it I actually already have this pack in my in this project so this is not the best example but what's important is that you come to the content folder and that's it you don't go deeper than that and then you click select folder and it will migrate all the assets over now I know we've spent all this time talking about the marketplace but I really feel like it's just that important for you as a beginner if you're new understanding what you have available at your fingertips is gonna make your journey into unreal engine just that much easier ok that's why we're starting with the marketplace here another thing that's really important is this on sale tab I like checking this almost every day just to see what stuff is on sale here things that I might be interested in and right now there's 505 assets that are currently on sale another important thing here is to just go to browse and now you're browsing twelve thousand two hundred and three assets so on the right hand side here you can click free you can now see what assets are free that might not be in the free tab here so just another area to go through and look what's currently available and then you have these other buttons here maybe you want to just do tend all our assets I don't know but the point is is just get really comfortable with the marketplace here and once you're comfortable with the marketplace you understand how it works it's gonna make your life a whole lot easier alright now we're back in the engine here and what I want to talk about now are these tabs over here we have details and we have world settings so up here in the world outliner you have a bunch of standard assets that come with each level that you make things like this sphere reflection capture the sky light the sky sphere players start this is the starting location when you click play and you have the light source which is the light in the level if I click this pie I can actually turn the light on and off see this is how you disable actors in the world the floor can disable that atmospheric fog things like that so each object here in the world when you click on it you can notice the details panel changing down here so if I click the light source I get all these different options I can make the light super bright or dark whatever and then let's say you do change it let's say you come up here and you do a bunch of changes and you forgot what it was that originally if you click this yellow arrow it's just gonna reset it to its default setting here you have your rotation settings your location your scale so this right here the arrows here this means that we're in the the location transform setting so we can move objects around like this up and down now moving the light source doesn't do anything but let's say I come up here to place actors this is where I can start placing stuff in the level I can add in a cube like this and just move it up and down left to right if I press E it switches to rotation mode so I can now start rotating objects if I press R it switches to scale mode so now I can start scaling it up and down you can choose which direction you want to scale things on maybe on the z axis or YX things like that so getting comfortable at using you know W to move up and down ER just get used to using those keys because your going to be using them a lot when you're placing actors in the level so now let's say I messed up all this rotation and scale and all that I can just click these yellow buttons and now it's back to zero zero and back to normal so that's how you would do that but you don't have to add actors from this tab here you can always come up to your content browser here you can find for example let's say I want to add this character mesh into my level I can always grab the mesh and holding down the mouse I can just hover over the level and place it in so this is how you would place objects in your level maybe I want this guy over here and just looking guy Ganic so I'm gonna scale him up and now when I play there's just this giant guy chilling in the corner he's not animating or anything like that but that's a lesson for another day so that's just to show you how to place objects in the world what's really important is getting used to the w/e and the are shortcuts because you're gonna be doing a lot of scaling and moving and rotating and things like that alright and this is actually the tools for that up here so you can see I'm in rotation mode if I press W I come into translation mode if I press R I'm now in scaling mode and this little button here it doesn't work for scaling but for movement and rotation this cycles between the world and local so I can click this and you'll see it there are differences when I'm in world mode no matter what object I select the rotations look in the same way I see the rotations the same but if I switch to object mode now the rotation is different so this one when I move it you can see how the rotation is changing or the gizmo rather it's just looking differently I can change it back to world mode and now we're at now we're like this so it's just another thing to keep in mind this button here is force for snapping so I click that I'm now snapping at 10 units per movement you can't really tell from there but if I set to like a hundred or 500 you now see it's starting to snap so again it's useful and it's gonna do that for any object right now so if you want to get some precise rotation or movement or things like that you want to turn off the snapping and I believe rotation is currently snapping so I can always click this to disable it and now I can get some really precise rotation going on and again scaling does it as well I can scale along a snap as you can see but if I turn it off then I can get some really precise scaling okay so that's just a quick little lesson about the about translation rotation scaling now what's also important is up here on the left in the window here you have your lip mode you have your unlit mode which just disables lighting and it will just give you like basically what the texture looks like without lighting data you have wireframe mode detail lighting reflections a bunch of different things that are worth looking at player collision is actually really important because when you're building your level you can see what things on your map actually have collision set up so if I run over here this guy didn't light up but he does have collision enabled because if I click him scroll down here in the details panel and I can see that he has collision enabled here because his presets is called the physics actor so this guy is a physics actor and if I open up the presets here you can see that it says he's blocking everything so no matter what comes in contact with this object it's gonna block everything so collision a very important part I could do an entire lesson on just collision alone an entire tutorial and then let's go back to the lit mode here you can see that he's casting a shadow because the direction of the light is over here but if I turn off cast shadow then he'll stop casting shadow so it's pretty self-explanatory but this also becomes important because you might have objects that are small in your level and you don't want them casting shadows because it's just too small for the player to care about and by disabling shadows it will save on performance so this is very important we'll leave shadows on here because I want to show the light here the sunlight so if I start rotating it you can see the shadow starting to change and the direction of the light is changing so I can go up and down this is really a high noon if I come way down here this is like almost a sunset now the son Hector doesn't update with that you can see the Sun disc is still over there so to fix that what I'm gonna do is come to the world outliner and I believe it's in the sky sphere here if I click refresh material now the Sun has updated okay so this sky sphere is a free actor that comes with the engine if you make I'm gonna save this really quick but if you make a new level let's say I come to empty level here in this place actors tab I can type in sky sphere and you'll get this BP sky sphere this comes with the engine I can actually just drag this into the level and now I have this sky sphere actor in the world but I don't have a sunlight so I would have to add a directional light so once I add a directional light I can come back to the world outliner I can click on the sky sphere and where it says directional light actor I want to select my directional light and now it has refreshed and updated to the current rotation of the directional light so I can rotate it back down like this back to sunset it hasn't updated so I need to click the sky sphere again and then refresh then there you go so again just a quick little tutorial on the sky sphere and the directional light I believe it's important to cover this because in your games when you make levels you might be using these actors all the time if you're doing outdoor scenes if you're doing an indoor scene then this stuff probably won't apply to you but this isn't a lighting tutorial this I'm just trying to go over the basics of the engine and help you understand and get comfortable with all these different settings here you know you have the intensity does it cast shadows or not let's go back to the previous level I can go to recent levels here and then go to level one I'm not gonna save this level here what I can do now with the sunlight actor is I can disable shadows on it completely if I want can obviously disable it here with visible add in light shafts you won't really be able to tell too much maybe a little bit here I don't know if you can see that but it's adding a little bit of an effect here bloom of course self-explanatory so now you really kind of see the effect going on here with bloom that off and then there's some more stuff here that I don't want to get it into detail about alright the next thing to go over is this modes tab up here so this is new with 4.25 if you have four point two four you don't have this anymore instead this is actually its own tab over here if you're using an older version of the engine so this is new to 4.25 and basically you can select what you want to do so let's say we're making an outdoor world we don't want to make an indoor type level right with meshes and stuff on the ground we want a landscape with rolling hills things like that so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna delete this floor and then in the modes panel I'm gonna select landscape and now it's got a landscape for me to select I actually don't have a landscape material and I don't want to make this a landscape you know video but I'm just showing you quickly how to make a landscape you really want to have an outdoor world a landscape again come to the marketplace this month free for the month there is this Dead Hills landscape in this spring landscape you can always add these to your project and you'll have this outdoor landscape with lighting and all that stuff set up okay but really quickly I will make this landscape here so you can click create and actually before I click create let's say you have a height map file maybe you made it in world machine or something like that or you downloaded it I don't know just go to import file you can import a height map file from wherever you might have one and I might have one on my desktop somewhere if I can come to terrains here I have a height map so I'm gonna add it as you can see it's way down here but you'll see it looks weird but once I create it when I click create or import rather it's gonna use this heightmap PNG file and create a terrain looks kind of weird but this is just a terrain and that is how you import height maps into your game so now you have this landscape what I've already noticed is that these actors that come with this level are way too high they're floating in the air if I click play I'm gonna fall for a while so I'm just falling falling falling falling boom now I finally hit the ground and I can run around obviously that's not ideal we're not trying to fly so what we want to do is I want to come back up here and let's say I get lost let's say I'm way over here and I can't find my player start I'm like hey where's my players start where is it I can't find it what I can do is up here in modes I need to go back to select mode and then over in the world outliner I can click on player start and if I press the F key it will take me right to it so this is a very very important shortcut and now I can press W I can move it down or another shortcut is I can press the end key it'll take it all the way to the ground so I press the end key then I press F and now I'm at the player start okay but I don't want to spawn on that hill so I'm gonna press the N key again and now play and now I'm on the floor so those are some very important shortcuts the F key in the N key let's say I want to bring all this stuff down here I can select the cube and then holding down ctrl I can select the mannequin and maybe I want to bring the skylight actor and the sphere reflection the light source I want to bring all this stuff down here so I'm gonna select all of those objects holding down ctrl and then I'll press the N key and they all come down now this little white line you see here what's going on there what is that that is actually the sphere reflection capture so Unreal Engine 4 uses a PBR setup I know that might sound confusing but I know that unity doesn't I think unity uses a gloss setup or something like that not really sure but Unreal Engine uses PBR and you need spear reflection captures to really bring out that color or the lighting rather and I can show you an example of this if I come to this Paragon character here I'm gonna show you a little shortcut here so let's say I'm looking for a character I can't find the mesh there's so many folders it's like oh my gosh where is this character I can't find him what's going on what I can do is I can come to the base folder and up in filters I can just select static mesh or skeletal mesh for example I might turn them all off so I've turned them all off I can click on skeletal mesh and I have the characters here and then I can turn that off by clicking this button here but let's say I want you know particles so now I can click part call system and I have all these special effects that I have access to but let's say I want materials maybe then I have materials and then maybe just level so on and so forth so it's an whoops I don't want that one own compression settings I don't even know where that came from but anyway this is how you would filter through objects and you don't have to go diving into folders trying to find stuff that you know you're just not sure there's all these different folders here how am I supposed to find all these characters right so these filters up here are really important they're gonna make your life a lot easier it's going to be you're going to be finding objects way quicker so I'm showing you why we use reflection captures so I'm just going to grab this guy here and bring them into the level skyy scaled-up let me delete them so we have Greystone right here in the spell reflection capture this is what it looks like if I move them out of it look out look at how drastic his colors change it's really ugly how much it changes so if I play you can see that he's just ugly his colors aren't really working the sword looks really wack and that's because you need these sphere reflection capture actors to get the right color now what you can do is I can grab the sphere here I can actually bump up the sides I can just like bump this up massively if I wanted to all right I can set to like 16,000 and then maybe I can scale it up as well so over here on the scale I'm gonna click this lock because I want it locked when I set X to 5 I also want the Y and the Z to be set to 5 as well but if I don't have the lock then I can set this to 15 and these other ones don't get updated so you want to keep the lock for scaling most of the time now the sphere reflection capture is now massive but it's still only working up to this line here so if I drag this guy out to the line here I believe it's going to stop yeah so you can see that it stopped what I can do now I can go to build build reflection captures and it will rebuild it I actually get the real lighting depending on the direction of the Sun and things like that now I scaled it up massively but the scaling actually didn't update the size of it so I'm just going to set the scale back to its default which is one and it looks like this is the max size I can get for the reflection capture so then what you'll need to do is holding down the Alt key you can now duplicate it and move it around and this is basically how it works so you just have a bunch of reflection captures in your level if you open up any sample levels from the marketplace you'll see a whole bunch of reflection captures everywhere you don't have to worry about performance because it's all handled like at the level creation it's not there not dynamic so you can have as many of these in the level as you want I've added eight reflection captures to the level now because I was duplicating them so now I need to go to build and rebuild okay so he does look super bright but again I think it's because of the direction of the light source here we're basically at sunset if I recall yes so I'm gonna I'm actually going to grab the character over here I'm going to move them back to the light and let's update the direction of the Sun now so bring him up hi now the character doesn't look as crazy but he was gold before because of the direction of the Sun let's just rebuild the reflection captures here you see his color updates another thing that's important is that right now this level is a massive level if I was to build the lighting as I showed earlier you would build lighting here if I was to build lighting on a huge outdoor world like this it would take forever I would need a super beefy computer so when it comes to outdoor worlds like this what you're gonna do with your light source here your Sun you're gonna want it to be movable you don't want to do stationary you want to do moveable and you want to just have a full dynamic lighting setup it's not as pretty as having baked that's having baked lighting but you might be able to get away with keeping it on stationary but if you want to have like a day/night system it has to be movable the Sun has to be able to move and update in real time and so that's what you would do for these big outdoor worlds now if your son is never gonna move if you're playing a game like he'll let loose I believe they do stationary because the Sun doesn't move there is no sunset or anything like that so you can do stationary and then build lighting in certain areas and also if you hover over it it will show what it does okay so that's a little bit about lighting and landscapes and reflection actors things like that so at this point I hope you're not super confused and maybe if I'm lucky you're actually getting sort of comfortable with just moving actors around and doing things like that there's a lot more to this landscape tab here I can sculpt and build hills and do things like that but again I don't want this to be a landscape tutorial I'm just trying to get you comfortable in the engine each one of these tabs right here foliage brush editing mesh painting things like that these these could all be their own separate videos that you could spend 20 minutes on but I just want to quickly go through the engine and get you at least somewhat comfortable able to navigate around because that's what's really important so this content browser this is obviously where you're gonna find everything but let's say you accidentally closed it you can either click this to bring it back up or in the windows panel here or maybe it's not there anymore oh yeah there it is content browser right here you could even have four separate tabs what I like to do since I have a dual monitor setup is I will actually drag this tab off so now it's a separate window and I will put this on my other monitor and I can just drag in assets and stuff like that but most of the time you can just leave it up here and you're fine so the next thing I want to talk about is actually outside of the engine these are things that are really important details that beginners need to know about so if you come to the content browser here if I right click this main folder I can actually browse to it right here I can go to show in Explorer it will take me to this window here I'll just it will just pop up a new Explorer window and I'm now in that main folder what I really want to emphasize here is that you do not I repeat you do not want to be moving folders or assets around or deleting assets from this folder from the Explorer window so for example I would not want to come into mannequin here and then move this to like another folder like that's you do not want to do that that's not how you move assets around you'll break your projects if you do that so do not do it this SK mannequin is right here that's character mannequin mesh if I want to move this guy to another folder I do it from here I do it from inside the project I'll grab the mesh and maybe I want to move it to this rein folder I'll drop it and I can either copy it there or move here okay this is how you move things around you do not want to be moving us at files around this is also the same with deleting you don't want to be deleting you asset files unless the only reason I would ever delete a you asset folder from the Explorer window is if I wanted to delete the whole folder so for example in this project I added that military weapons pack earlier I don't really need it I haven't used it in my game at all it's just sitting here taking up space so I can delete it and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that but this grey stone folder it would be a bad idea to delete it because some of the assets in this folder are currently in this level right this guy is right here if I delete that folder it's gonna create this situation where this level is looking for this character it doesn't know where it is and it's gonna every time you open the engine you might get these errors that pop up saying hey we can't find this character where is it so if you want to delete it the way to do it is number one you would delete it out of the level first and then now you could probably come here and delete it if it's not being used anywhere but the other proper way to delete things is you would browse to the asset that you want to delete so let's say I just want to delete this guy get him off the project you would right click go to delete and then it's gonna bring up this window and it's this is basically a warning it's saying like hey that asset is being used several times in your project are you really sure you want to delete it like if you forced delete it like you might get like bugs and issues and stuff like that so what you want to do is if you're ever gonna delete an asset you want to make sure that you go wherever it's being used and make sure it's no longer being used in that asset so this is a little bit advanced but it's just really important the main lesson here is to not be deleting assets from the content folder in Explorer make sure you're doing your moving and deleting here remember I actually deleted this folder so that's why it looks like this now these things are actually not in the level or not in my project so it just looks a little buggy I'm pretty sure if I close the project and restart it this folder will be gone but again this is an example why you don't want to really delete things in the Explorer because now it's just kind of it's just we got some bugs going on it's just buggy like all these textures really aren't here so it's not showing anything same with the materials here these things are all blank looking so the proper way to delete is by just going to the asset and then right-clicking and deleting it see I can't actually right-click it cuz this folder doesn't exist anymore if I restart the project this folder will probably be gone this is just a quick lesson about deleting and moving assets alright so the next thing I want to talk about are the base classes that make up an Unreal Engine game and I'm actually going to go back to our third-person example map this is the default map that comes when you open up the project for the first time and so what I think is really important is understanding folder structure here so everyone kind of has their own way that they like to organize their assets I like to make a folder called underscore main because it puts it at the top but some people will make a folder called game and then they'll put all their main classes in there for me I like to do main so as an example let's say we want to make our own character right this guy is cool and all but we want our own character so in the content browser here I'm gonna right-click and now I can click create basic asset blueprint class ok so you have level here you have materials you have particles you also have blueprint class so blueprint class is really what's gonna make up the bulk of your game this character right here is a blueprint class if I select him in the world outliner here I can actually click Edit third person character and it will open this character as a blueprint here so again this is a beginners video I'm not gonna go into what all this stuff is going on but but just to give you an idea this is its movement this is how we move with the keyboard right here and this is how we look around with the mouse so so like I said I don't want to get into all of it but this template it comes with this code here so if you want to make your own character you can always just take this code and move it to a new character if you want what I suggest doing though is that if you come to the viewport here you can always replace this little mesh guy here you can come over here to the left side you have all these different components here you can click mesh here and we can actually replace this guy with another character but again I'm not going to get into that because you would also have to create an animation blueprint and do things like that that that could be its own separate video but what's important is just understanding how to create classes so in the main folder here let's say I want to create a blueprint class what you see here is actor pond character and so on these classes that you see here will make up the bulk of your game these are the most used classes in any game so you have things like an actor what exactly is an actor what does that mean well an actor is basically as it says here it's just any object that can be placed in the world so this mesh right here this is considered an actor actor everything in here is an actor even this is an actor this light source is an actor this character is an actor so when I go to make a blueprint class it's kind of like think of this as the top of the hierarchy here it starts with actor then we have pond but as you can see here a pond is an actor so so a pond comes from this actor class and then you have character which comes from pond so it's kind of like it's going down the line here now it's different with player controller but player controller is still considered an actor but the game mode base I don't think that's considered an actor that's different so so what you can do is you can hover over each one and it's going to give you more information about what it does so the game mode base is really important this is something that I want to talk about because if you come to the third person example map the sample map here if you click on world settings this tab it's gonna ask you for a game mode override so you can actually make your own game mode I could come in here go to blueprint class I can click game mode base and now I can type in like GM underscore for game mode right or some people like to do BP underscore for blueprint and you can type in like my game mode now what I can do with this game mode classes I can actually override the level so I can come into the world settings and then I can actually find my BP underscore game mode but a good shortcut that you really want to be using all the time is if you come to the content browser you can select your object here and then you can press this arrow and it will plug it in but if I delete the character let's say I grab this third person character and delete them when I play I'm not a character anymore it's like what happened what am I well let's press f8 and see I'm now this guy right here and this is called a default pawn as you can see here and it's like well why is it spawning a default pawn why isn't it spawning that character anymore well if you look at our game mode override here so I made this new game mode and where it says default pawn class it says default pawn so that's why we actually spawned in as the default pawn so I hit the stop button and how do we fix this like how do we make it so we spawn as that character again well if you remember the name of the character it was called a third person character if I click the drop down here I can look for a third person character which is right here or another way is I can open up this BP game-mode and right here I can set it in the classes here I can set the default pawn class to be third person character I can compile it and save it and then I can actually just put this up here or I can close it and now in the map it now says third person character so when I play I'm now the third person character so any characters that you make in your game you'll plug into the default pawn class and this applies for anything here as well you have your player controller class or game State player state again these are just like the main classes in the game so if I come over here to the content browser and go to blueprint class we have characters I can make my own characters I can make my own player controllers actor components these are really important as well I'll talk about those in a little bit and then scene component I've never actually made a scene component I've never had a use use for this ever and then down here yours might be closed so when you open this window this might be closed but you can actually expand this and every class in the entire engine you'll find down here so for example we have actor it's the same as right here I can click this and they'll make an actor but you can start to expand this and see all the different classes that are in this game it's pretty crazy but we can go down here and find pawn so if I come all the way down I'm scrolling down there's pawn I can click that now there's character and you have more characters from here you can see there's actually a third person character what this means is I can make another class based off of the third person character it's basically a child of that actor and I don't want to get into detail about it but all it means is that anything we set up in the third person character will be used for any classes that we build off of it so just imagine it as like a chain you're just going down the chain you're making classes based off of other classes things like that so kind of confusing but again it's important stuff so here you have actor components same thing is right here it's just that epic puts the important two classes up here that you're gonna be using see common classes so but again you can come down here and make classes like animation notifies state I use that a lot you can make a camera shake damage types you just keep coming down here you can just look at all the different assets that are out there savegame files things like that there's just so many and you can always expand and look so yeah but most of the time you're gonna be making actors and things like that like if you want a swinging door for example you'll start with an actor okay so let's just say we wanted to do a VP underscore door right so if we open this up there's nothing in here it's just an actor right it's an actor blueprint there's nothing in here but you can start to add components you can add meshes to it maybe I want to add like a cube to it so let's say I add a cube to this blueprint I can then hit the compile button and save it and now I can drag this BP door into the level it's gonna show up here in our world outliner and this is now our you know quote door right I don't have a door mesh I believe I don't but maybe you download some sort of free asset like that medieval dungeon that I was showing you in the marketplace I know that probably has some doors so you could add that here in the mesh right here so instead of a cube maybe I want a door or something SM door oh we do have a door so it comes with the door see so now I have a door okay so that's really what it is when you come here and you go to blueprint class if you're trying to make any objects that aren't characters or things like that you'll always do actor and then you start then you start filling in here you start adding in cubes or skeletal meshes static meshes whatever particle systems lights you can even have a light in here let's just say we have a point light right here see it's not that bright but as you can see what's really cool is I can drag this window off come to the map and I can start moving this light and updates in the level see so maybe we wanted to make like a door maybe we had like a wood post that could be like a lantern or something we would add the wood post here for the mesh then we'll add like a light to it and for this light here let me make it big here with light we can like change the color maybe we want to be like orange or something you can see it updating in real-time and then when I compile it it's gonna be orange now and another handy shortcut is let's say you don't want to see all this like these lines and stuff like that just press the G key and it will hide everything and you can now look as if you were playing the game and then you can press G to you know bring everything back okay so again these actor blueprint classes this is what you'll be using to build things and a lot of the templates that you download on the marketplace you'll see that these creators use these blueprints all the time for making things in their level so again this is why I started with the marketplace in this video because it's important to understand how to use it so you can open up free templates and free projects and stuff like that and just see how people are building things and to start getting an idea of how you can flush out your world so another blueprint class here is what's called the player controller I really don't want you to focus too much on that but the player controller can also be used to move characters around and the third person character it doesn't do that it's not using a player controller class it does have one but it's just like a basic simple one and you can see the game mode is actually responsible for the player controller class not the actual character so the game mode is what is driving these classes in the current level that you're on so every level that you make you might have a different game mode maybe you have maybe you have a type of level that's like a capture the flag level so you'll have a you know a capture the flag game mode and then you have another level that's just like a deathmatch and it's just deathmatch game mode and then you have another level that might be like team deathmatch so then you'll have a team deathmatch game mode the game mode is a really important class and you can also do functionality in it I can open up this game mode here I can come to the event graph I wouldn't add any components there's no point of adding a component to the game mode because the game mode you don't like it's not an actor you don't bring it into the world the game mode is just used here for the level but again in the event graph here which I don't want to get into too much but this is where you're gonna be doing all your programming for your actors and your things like that so for example this begin play here any actor or blueprint in your level including this door if I come to the event graph it has a begin play here if I do anything off of this veidt's are adding nodes and functions and things like that when we start to play the game these things will get called right away because it's called begin play so begin play gets fired every time we play the game okay and to show you a quick example of that in the game mode here I'm just gonna do a print string I can type something like the game has started right compile it and save now when I play in the left corner it will say the game has started see so that's what this begin play event does now you can always make your own events but again this isn't a blueprint tutorial that could be it's you know I have a ton of tutorials where I'm making cool things on my channel check those out we're using blueprints and things like that but if you really wanted to make your own event you would type in custom here and then you start to add in your own event like you know make it rain and then do like do something like functionality that's gonna make it rain in your level or something but yeah like I said if you really want to get into Unreal Engine and using the engine and making cool things definitely check out my tutorial series I have this survival game tutorial series I'm doing plus I just have other random tutorials just go through my channel look at the different videos I have and it will give you an idea of how to make things and I think that's really important as a beginner it's really important that you get into this habit of trying to just make things okay I know you might have some like ambitious goal of making some really big project that's just awesome and yadda yadda yadda but it's really important for you to understand the fundamentals understand how these things work up here understand how to navigate around the engine understand the shortcuts we were talking about like I can click this I you know make it disabled I can come over here into the outliner and up here I think I can create a folder yes if I right-click the top I can create a folder and maybe we'll just call this blueprints and then I can drag this door into it and so anything in this folder if I turn off the folder its gonna hide everything this walkway here if I hide this walkway folder all those assets disappear by Hite arena they all disappear so folders are really nice to use as well just structuring out your level design here and minimize things I I do this as well I always put my lighting objects in a lighting folder you can turn them all off at once and yeah you can just drag these things around and move them you can also click and rename okay so that's just a bit about classes and navigating around ok so I think that's about to do it for this tutorial it's pretty long I know but hopefully this video will help ease you into the engine from here what I think is really important is that you now take like some sort of course or tutorial series that's designed for beginners like I said my survival game series tutorial on YouTube it's free you can go through that that'll help you get things set up but again it's it's not super beginner because there are a lot of things that I didn't cover in this video that we'll be doing in there we'll be doing a lot of blueprint programming will be going over things like collision down here setting up collision you know the mesh things in here we'll be creating our own guns things like that and then I have a few courses on udemy as well but again those aren't super beginner I recommend as a complete beginner that you should really just be coming into the engine here just messing around with things adding random actors you know just come up here click light you can add point lights you can add rec lights a skylight you wouldn't add because you only need one of these per level you know add spotlights things like that and maybe making your own blueprint actors and then again going through the marketplace going through some of the templates they have and just seeing how people are building out their projects you don't want to like overload your brain you don't want to be going through these projects that have these really complex characters like there's a lot of these survival templates out there and they just have like hundreds of functions and so much different blueprint code going on if you've never programmed in your life you're gonna be pretty confused trying to understand what's going on and that's where like a really nice beginner in-depth course will help you out and there's plenty of these beginner courses on udemy that you can check out my courses aren't entry-level so I recommend people to have at least three months of experience just messing around in Unreal Engine because I think it's really important to understand what's going on in these blueprints right because you have like the defaults here all sorts of different settings going on here and depending on the class you're gonna have different defaults in the class because its defaults based on the class so characters for example they have a lot of different defaults here as you can see this these defaults here are different than this BP door there some of them are the same like the replication this is for multiplayer but characters also have more defaults it has defaults for the pong classes character camera things like that okay I think that's gonna do it guys thank you so much for watching I hope this helps you get into the Unreal Engine makes you excited to learn about it there's tons of tutorials out there documentation things like that just try to read up and understand and learn as much as you can it's it's it's a journey it's a learning experience I've been working in this engine for five years and I feel like I'm still learning a ton of things I didn't even talk about materials or particles and animation there's just you know artificial intelligence there's just so much stuff going on in this engine so start to learn get out there but take it slow don't force yourself just try to enjoy the process that's the most important thing if you're trying to do too much too soon you're gonna get burned out you're gonna get frustrated so you want to start really simple just find some tutorials where you're making really simple things and go from there okay guys so thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed the video hit that subscribe button because I'm posting tutorials all the time and new videos and helpful videos and gaming content things like that guys so again thanks for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: DevAddict

Views: 662,359

Rating: 4.9530778 out of 5

Keywords: getting started in unreal engine 4, ue4 beginner guide, ue4 beginner tutorial, new to unreal engine 4 guide, new to ue4 tutorial, first time using unreal engine 4, guide to ue4 for beginners, unreal engine 4 newbie tutorial, beginners tutorial ue4, unreal engine 4 guide, unreal engine 4 walkthrough, Devaddict

Id: qeKDRqWtGV0

Length: 64min 9sec (3849 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020