Unreal Engine 5 FREE Beginner Tutorial - Getting Started (2024 Update)

are you ready to get started learning on real 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 games 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 unrealengine.com in your browser browser now we're going to go up here and click on this signin 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 want to make sure you 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 doll 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 three 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 dropdown 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 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 and 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 work space 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 recomend the third person template for just starting out is twofold reason number one it provides a humanized 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++ this is 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++ code and blueprint it's typically easier and faster to start with blueprint even if you plan on using C++ later in the project now we'll go over what exactly blueprint is in a later video for now we're just going to 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 your system this is true for any client users you deploy a package 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 root 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 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 all right 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 project 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 rightclick it go down to send two 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 folders let's do a brief rundown config this is where you'll find certain configuration files that pertain to settings in 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 cash storage for dynamically generated data the contents are constantly changing and this is when one of the folders that could actually be deleted without breaking your project because the data itself will be regenerated the next time you open onreal 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 ing 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 The Source control all right next now you should be a 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 all right 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 at 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 WD 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 Buton 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 WD to move you can get around anywhere option number two the unreal method this is the movement scheme that epic developed in its earliest version versions from back in the 9s 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 WD method holding down just the right Mouse button let 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 look at Direction you'll need to use the WD 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 in 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 of moving using the WD 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 WD 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 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 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 were 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 rightclick and go down to move to and select an existing folder to move it to new folders can be created in the move to dialogue or by clicking this new folder button up here all right 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 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 panel all right 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% 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 playin 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 Fair like any other software one thing I do want to point you to is the window option this menu contains all of the various panels that Unreal Engine has there have 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 1 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 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 to the left you'll see a hierarchy of the folder structure and to 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 in 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% 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 in with the third person starter template you can see this playground in front of us when we first open 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 dialogue 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 all right 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 control 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 tool tip 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 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 planer 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 planer 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 a cube I can then click the button to go back to my forup view then Max 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 snapping snapping is the act of applying constraints to a transformation for example we can have something move 10 cm a time or we can have something move move 100 cm at a time and on that note Unreal Engine uses the metric system where one unreal unit is equal to 1 cm 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 X 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 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 control and G or command and G on a Mac move them around as one and then you can hit shift and G 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 placement 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 of 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 relates to 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 ctrl+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 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 400x 400 out into the world and we'll go up here to change our snapping to 500 cm then we'll drag out two copies now go into the starter content materials folder where you'll find all kinds of 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 highlevel 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 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 sunet any further in the map goes black as it translates over into nighttime 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 six Lux now Lux is a major measurement of illuminance 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 lux 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 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 the 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 maret toolbag 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 starter content then let's go up to our quick ad 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 hdri Cube map to use so we'll click on the drop- down and 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 in a 360° 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 10 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 ad to drag out a point light now a point light is an omnidirectional light that r Ates light outwards in a 360° sphere think of this like a light bulb which should be easy to do based on the icon that it uses 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 candalas 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 candalas 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 loom in 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 realis stick 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 ad 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 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 cinematic lighting module next let's look at our final artificial light type the rect light short for rectangle the wed light is a planer 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 ad menu the intensity color and attenuation radius are just like the other lights the key settings for a rect 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 while 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 avilable 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 contrl 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 all 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 contrl s it's going to save 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 actor 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 contrl s to save it you'll get the save level as dialogue 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 ad button to add a couple of cubes and then hit contrl s to save again now each actor in a scene is self-contained while 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 and the content browser hit contrl 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 smore tutorial chair now if we double click it it'll open up the static Mash 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 cont ENT 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 Sav 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 hot key 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 control 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 of 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 contrl s to save and get comfortable with contrl 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 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 out side of the level itself you don't need to worry about tracking them or working with them correctly 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 messages in the upper left should remind you of this if you forget once you're playing it's standard PC gaming controls WD to move just like getting around the viewport in 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 pcore 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 onetime event as you would expect an explosion to be or at least you would hope it would be a onetime event or maybe a notime event now 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 change to let you know that you are set to simulate mode now you can hit play to simulate all your want very useful for tweaking positions of onetime 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 popup message that you can click on to go directly to your screenshots for 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 contrl + one to save a bookmark here in my scene then I'll go over here and hit control+ 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 could set bookmarks here too I highly recommend using the hotkeys though all right 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 all right let's look at how we can get our hands on some really cool free 3D assets that we can use inside of Unreal Engine using a service called quixel Mega scans let's Jump Right In All right so what we're going to do is we're going to go up here to our quick ad button we're going to come down to this quixel bridge and when we click on it it's going to give us the quixel bridge browser here so I'll go ahead and maximize this now before we can actually use anything in here we do need to sign in so you can come up here to the little My Account button we'll click on that click sign in and then just like with the launcher you're going to sign in with your epic games account now it's really important here that you sign in with your epic games account this is going to allow you to use all of the Mega scans assets for free as long as they're used in Unreal Engine any of these other options that you see through here these are all going to come with a monthly fee so just make sure that you're signing in with your epic games account all right now that we're signed in we're greeted with some options for for some collections of assets that might fit within a certain theme uh right now I'm looking at arctic ice and snow contemporary surfaces you know some of these other ones and then if we scroll down we can see some of the Recently Added assets uh in here in mega scans you're going to see your materials you're going to see 3D models plants all sorts of things in here in this lesson we're going to focus on 3D models and materials so first let's look at models we can go over here to the side menu and we're going to click on 3D assets and when we do that it expands down and you can see all kinds of categories that you can drill down into for now we're going to go to props now if I click on this we have even more categories that we can go into so just to start out with we can pick one that we like uh I'll go for how about Farm we'll click on this and then we come in here and we see all kinds of these 3D assets available to us so let's go ahead and click on one of these I'll click this keg here now when we do this it's going to pop up over on the right with the information for this now a few things that I want to point out uh right off the bat we look over here and we see size we can see a little icon of a person and then a shape the shape actually represents the asset itself so this is in relation to the size of the character so everything in this category seems to be pretty small if I were to say go up here to Nature and then we'll go into how about rock and if I were to click on this beach cliff now you'll see that the person is smaller and the shape is bigger so that's in that's the asset in relation to the actual person size itself now next to it you'll see this partial Circle that says open that means that it is an open 3D model meaning that there are sides of it that are not complete uh so in the case of this one it's probably the back of it it's not going to have anything in it and if we go back to props again go back over to farm I'm going to graag my keg here you'll see this one says closed that means that it's an entirely closed 3D asset so right now we'll do this one and if we come down here here we can see this drop down that has a quality on it we have a low quality medium quality and high quality now these are mostly going to pertain to the size of the textures for low quality and medium quality and then high quality is going to be your much larger uh a lot of times larger poly counts you're going to have larger textures and then you have a nanite option as well we'll get into that much later uh but for now for this guy I'm just going to leave it on medium quality because that's going to be something that we can work with fairly easily so next what we want to do is we want to come over here to this download button and if we click on that what it's going to do is it's going to actually download this asset to our library now this doesn't actually put it into the project it just makes it easily available within our library and then when the download finishes you'll get this add button here now this add button button is going to actually add it to the project let me minimize this a little bit I'm going to bring up the content drawer here I'm going to dock it let's uh close all of that and go into our base content folder now if I actually click on this add button now what is going to do is add it to the project now we see that we're in this new folder we see the static mesh here we see a material and we see some textures that are associated with it also if we go back to our content here we'll see we now have this Mega scans folder and we have this Ms presets folder now Ms presets is going to be a folder that Mega scans is going to use to store all of its default Master materials and things like that the actual meas scans folder is where we'll find the assets so we come into here we see 3D assets go into this wooden keg with some gibberish on here that's the ID that's appended to It Go in this and now we have this guy if I move this out of the way for now I can take this and I can drag it into the scene we'll focus on it and now we can see this beautiful 3D asset right here in the scene and what we can do is we can download and add a bunch of these and use them to construct some beautiful scenes No matter what it's for uh this gets used a lot in the game industry uh gets used a lot in film virtual production all of that now the other side that I want to look at here is the materials so what I'm going to do is come up here to Quick ad we're going to come down to shapes I'm going to drag out this Cube we'll bring it up like this now we already know that we can go into our starter content materials we have all kinds of things we can do and you know drag this material on here to get this little brick wall uh but Mega scans actually offers us a lot of really cool materials so let's come back into here this time I'm going to close 3D assets and come into surfaces now surfaces is a term that gets used across a couple of different CG industries that means materials so when we click on it you can see all kinds of stuff in here you can see categories again that you can go into uh let's go to this historical category and I'm going to grab this brick right here Mossy Stone floor uh but it looks close enough to a brick wall uh and then we're going to download this with the medium quality let that do its thing and while this is downloading another thing that I want to point out that makes materials different from the 3D assets is that if we look up here we no longer have the person and the shape to designate size what we have instead is this square with the size of the texal density on this now what this says is 2x 2 m for met which basically means that this particular material is meant to cover a 2X 2 m surface so to get this correct while that's still downloading move this out of the way and I want to look at this guy right here and we want to figure out how big this Cube actually is well quick way to do that right here is knowing that we can come up here to our snapping tools right now it's set to 10 going to change this to 100 which is going to change the size of our grid pattern that you see here and so now each one of these squares is equal to 100 cm which 100 cm is equal to a meter so what that means is that to get a 2X 2 m Cube here we're going to want want to come in and double the size of this cuz currently is a 1 M Cub to do that we will hit this padlock button on scale and then we're just going to set this to two now we have a 2X two M Cub so I'll move this over here like this we're going to bring you up like that move you over here maybe move you that side there we go that works for me so let's come in here and and we're going to since it's finished downloading hit add and then when it does that we'll now see that we have this folder just going to go ahead and drag this out on here there we go now that size is not looking right to me now why is that it feels a little big but just to double check we don't necessarily want to rely on our eyeballs or even rely on this little guy right here you know to to figure that out so what we're going to do is we're going to get some scale reference and just like we mentioned before we can do that with the character that we started the third person template with so to get that let's come down here to the content wait we want to go into car and then we're going to go into mannequins and meshes and then I'm just going to drag Manny out into the scene now if we look at this Manny here and if we were to bring out Quinn as well these are actual character sizes these are real world character sizes and now if we look at this suddenly it doesn't look as off as it did before because this guy is really really small you might be thinking well hey you know that keg is probably closer to you know like a size like that so you always want to make use of your characters here to be able to use the scale references now this right here for what it is it's supposed to be floor tiles so if I bring Manny up on top of this okay well that makes sense yeah that's about right 2x two met for these floor tiles well what if we were to grab some bricks let's see templ Stone tiles 2x two meters we can see that there's definitely more of them than there is in this one so we'll go ahead and hit download on these all right now that is finished we can hit add move this out of the way and we can see if we go into content and back into Mega scans we'll notice that in addition to our 3D assets folder we have a surfaces folder it's where all of our materials are let's grab this Temple Stone tiles and I'll drag this out on here and now that looks looks a little bit more accurate for what I would expect from some Bricks now one other thing that I do want to mention is that whenever we're dealing with all of these Mega scans assets here especially with the surfaces we want to make sure that we're actually dragging the materials onto these assets and not the textures themselves so we'll get into how we work with these textures a little bit later but right now just remember you want to go in here and drag in the materials to drop on these all right so now you know about this really cool free 3D asset library that you can use with Quicks Omega scans that's going to help you get some really good practice in with doing some scene layout using some really high quality assets all right so we've dealt with materials just a little bit already we've used the materials in the starter content and we've even added some materials from Mega scans we know what it's like to to drag and drop a material onto an asset but in this video we want to dive in just a little bit deeper and start to get familiar with the material editor now the material editor gives us a graph to work in where we connect together nodes to perform Shader calculations and then ultimately output those into a collection of parameters which are then compiled down to a material the interface consists of three main areas that we'll be paying attention to the main graph area is where all of the magic happens the detail panel where we edit settings for individual nodes and the viewport where we see the result of the compiled material let's dive in and create a material of our own all right to get started we're going to go up here and we're going to create a new basic level to work in I'm going to go ahead and save this I'm going to put it in the maps folder in my stuff I'm going to call this material demo Next Step we're going to want a mesh to demo our material on so we're going to use a material IAL sphere we can come up here to the quick ad down to shapes and we can add a sphere into our scene like this next let's go down into our my stuff folder where I'm going to create a new folder by right clicking going up to new folder I'm going to call this materials we'll go into this folder and then I'm going to rightclick and I'm going to go up here to the material option under create basic asset when I click on this it's going to create a material down here with the default name of new material I'm going to rename this to M for material underscore my first material just like that next we're going to take this and we're just going to drag and drop it onto this sphere right here now what you'll notice is that right off the bat this particular material has this gray checkerboard pattern and that's basically the default inside of unreal so this means that this material is not actually doing anything so unreal is defaulting to this checkerboard material so let's go ahead and get in and customize this material I'm going to come down here and double click on this to open the material editor I'll go ahead and expand it now in here we have our viewport we have our details panel and we have our graph just like we just looked at now our graph is where we're going to be doing all the work so to get around in here we're going to rightclick and then we can drag this around to move wherever we need to and we can use the scroll wheel to zoom now for these materials we'll need to create nodes that we plug into our output here now there are a lot of nodes that are available to the material editor and you can find all of them by right clicking where you'll find all of these different categories available now there's a lot of stuff in here so this drop down is really useful if you know what c ategory you need to be looking in but if you know exactly what you're looking for you can use the search bar up here so let's say we want to create a basic color node well if you were to type in color you're going to get some options in here that aren't exactly what you're looking for there's some things that you're going to need to remember when working with these materials here so a color to get a color we need to use what's called a vector 3 now if I were to come come up here and type in vector and Vector 3 that's not finding what I'm looking for and that's because the name that Unreal Engine uses for this particular variable type is actually constant 3 Vector so it can get a little confusing with some of those names that's why it's really good to get familiarized with some of the hot keys inside of the material letter so if I were to click on this I'll get get my constant 3 Vector here but another way to grab one of these guys is if you come out here and you hold down three on your keyboard and then left click it'll create one like that I can drag over and select this and hit my delete key to get rid of that one now if I wanted to create a scaler or a constant one which is a 0 to one grayscale value I can also hold down one and click to get that so what's the difference between these two nodes and more importantly how are they actually similar well the vector three up here is actually three of these so if we have three of these like this each one of these pertains to a color channel so red green and blue RGB and you can see that up here on the Node you can see the outputs for r g and B but then you also see this fourth one up here now these three outputs are the individual channels of red green and blue this top one that's white is the combination of them so if you're looking for an actual color then you're going to drag out from this so what we're going to do now is we're just going to left click on this guy and I'm going to drag this out and it's going to give me this chord and I'm going to plug it into the base color here now to actually change the color we can double click on this Swatch right here and it's going to bring up a color wheel so if you're familiar with Photoshop it's very much like working within that so if I were to drag this over here to get kind of a purplish color you'll notice that over here it doesn't change and that's because our value is still at the very bottom here it's black so if I were to start to bring this up we can see how it starts to capture this purple color over here so you can see a combination of all of these things so you've got your color wheel here where you can manipulate the color visually down here you've also got the actual red green and blue values and then over here we have our H saturation and value for now let's commit to this purple color here so I'm going to go ahead and click okay and now if I were to drag this down we'll see that we see it in our viewport here in the material editor but we don't actually see it on our sphere that's in the world and that's because we have to actually compile this material before it shows up in the world to do that we need to come up to our tool bar here and we're going to click on this apply button when we do that it compiles the material and now we see it in the world but if we were to come back in here and say change this to more of an orange color I click okay once again you'll see that the change is not updated in the world so we have to click apply but what if we wanted to see the real time well there's actually a really easy way to do that we're going to come in here to our node I'm going to right click this node and just select this convert to parameter when we do that it's going to have us name it I'm just going to call this color like that we'll hit apply again and then now because this a parameter if I come in here and I start changing this we'll actually see it real time in the world now parameters are something that we'll go into to in detail once we start covering Master materials and material instances but just know that if you ever need to be able to access the changing of one of these values real time you'll have to convert it to a parameter all right I'm going to go back up here and maximize this again and another thing that I wanted to go over is these channels so we can see the rg&b channel here so if I were to drag the red Channel pannel over here and plug it in it's going to turn our material preview over here more of a whitish color now why is that you would probably expect that to be a red color or you would expect this to be a green color or you would expect this one to be a blue color but the reason for that is because these are the individual channels if you double click on this again and you see your channels down here you'll see these broken down into their individual Channel values and that's why this red is a little bit brighter here the green is a darker gray and the blue is actually black now you'll notice when we converted it to a parameter we now have this fourth channel right here this is our Alpha channel so that is going to store another set of data that we don't have available with just this typical RGB and we'll go over that much later in detail all right so now we we have something here let's plug this back in so we have our orange color and we're going to look at some of these other options in here namely the primary one I want to point out is roughness so roughness is part of the physically based rendering pipeline or PBR which we have a whole video covering that coming up but what you should know about roughness is that your zero is going to be a glossy and your one one is going to be more of a mat so if I were to drag this out and plug it in here you'll see how glossy this becomes now if I were to set this value to one now it becomes matte if we were to set this to 0.5 it's going to be right in the middle and this is actually the default value if you were not to plug anything in so if we were to do the same thing as with color and rightclick this and convert it to a parameter I'll call this roughness and then we'll hit apply now we can actually change this roughness Real Time by coming over here and sliding these values to get matte or glossier now something to be aware of is that roughness is one of those values that you only want to exist within the 0 to one anything below zero or over one is going to give you some artifacting that you definitely don't want so something we can do here when we've converted this to a parameter is if we look in the details panel we can see that we have a slider Min and a slider Max zero and one are what we want to put it to but sliding it through here we can still see that it doesn't reflect that then after we hit apply we now have this clamped here so we can't go below zero and we can't go over one I can also click in here and I'm just going to type 0.5 to set that to middle of the ground all right the next one that I want to look at is the metallic value now metallic in PBR typically only comes with with two possible values it either is metallic or it's not metallic now there are instances where you will have a value in between 0o and one usually pertaining to things like rust or if you're trying to do something like a silk or a satin but generally your material is either metal or it's not metal by default the value here is zero so if I were to plug this in with a value of zero nothing's going to change because by default unreal assumes that a material is not metallic but if we were to change this value to one now you can see that we have a metallic sphere here so if I minimize this down and I hit apply now we can see this metallic sphere out in the world all right now if I were to come in here and start playing with our roughness value we can see that we can get a really shiny metallic surface almost mirror likee all the way up to a very matte surface and then everything in between so we could say come in here and I'm going to go about like this there we go and then we're going to take the roughness down a little bit more and and then suddenly we have this nice gold material right here so I'll hit apply to commit to that and there we go now we have our first basic material all right that's the basic intro to the material editor up next we'll look at bringing textures into this all right so in part one we got a brief introduction to the material editor and working with our first two nodes now we can create some basic materials with just these mathematical nodes but to really take advantage of this material editor we need to start to introduce textures all right let's start to enhance this material with some textures I'm going to go ahead and drag out a duplicate of my sphere here so we can compare them going to come down here into the content browser click on my material and then controll D to duplicate it now if you happen to be doing this in Unreal Engine 4 then that's actually contrl w not contr D but in Unreal Engine 5 it is contrl D all right now I'm going to drop this on here and going to go ahead and name this mcore my second material just like that and you can see that we can rename it after we've applied it all right now let's come down here and we're going to double click to open this guy up I'll go ahead and close my first one so I don't get confused now what I want to do is I want to bring a texture into this so for that let's go ahead and go to content starter content and I'm going to go into the textures now there's all kinds of stuff in here what I'm looking for is a particular kind of noise so I'll just go up here to the search bar I'm going to type in noise I can see this pearlin noise right here that's going to work for me so I will drag this in here and now I have a texture in my material editor and so right off the bat let's go ahead and get rid of this guy now if you remember for our roughness this is a single Channel value it is a grayscale value so when we're using a texture like this that we want to plug into one of these single values here we would want to use a particular Channel now what do these channels actually look like in this texture let's go ahead and double click it over here and this is going to open up the texture viewer now in the texture viewer we can single out these individual channels this particular one happens to be a gray scale so all of the channels are the same but if you were to say for example come down here and let's open up this lamp all right now if I expand this if I were to close off the blue and the green channels we can see just the red Channel we can see just the green Channel and we can see just the blue channel here just like that now in these individual channels white is full black is none and with this one you can see the checkerboard pattern behind it that means that it does in fact have an alpha so if I were to turn that off now we can see that throughout this whole thing there's a bunch of red so if I were to turn off green and blue there's all that white there but if I turn on just green we'll see that that becomes black but for now let's go ahead and close this out we're going to work with this and what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug this green channel into our roughness here just like that and now we can see if we look in the viewport here we have these differing roughness values so we have some that are really glossy and some that are not so glossy now if you remember we looked that last time zero is glossy so in this case black is glossy and one or white is matte so with these grayscale values we get a whole range in between with that and of course to demonstrate the difference between metallic and non-metallic if I just come over here and I change this metallic value to zero now it looks a lot different we still have the black areas which are catching some light uh and reflecting quite a bit and we have the matte areas that are not reflecting as much so if I were to hit apply on this and then we come down here and we look out in the world we can see how the Sun is reflecting off of this and if I were to come up to my directional light and I'm going to turn off a world real fast then just come in here and add a point light I start moving this point light around let's turn off snapping and I will turn this down a little bit there we go we can use this point light to see how some of that roughness is affected now when the light shining directly on it here it gets really blown out even in the matte areas but in some of the more diffused areas that is where we can really see where this roughness variation picks up right now I'm going to delete my point light go back to my directional light turns effects world back on there we go and the next thing that I want to do I'm going to bring my material editor back up here and this time I want to plug in a texture to the base color so I'm just going to go down through here and I want to find one we're going to type in Grime here we go I want to get this concrete Grime here I'll just drag this in like that and then if I were to plug this in to base color like that there we go we have this color on here coming from this texture and we also have this roughness from this pearlin noise variation down here so you can see how those being different how they interact and create some very interesting variation now if we wanted to give some depth value to this material we would do that with the normal here so let's go down here and I am going to look at these we'll see these normal Maps there are these uh kind of bluish purplish color ones and I can filter on those by going into search and typing underscore in uh we can come down through these and I think I want uh we have this nice ground gravel here if I were to drag this guy in like that and then what I'm going to do now is drag this over here and then plug this RGB into normal and then now we have some nice little bumpiness to this that you can see so with this we can go ahead and we can hit apply bring this down moved over to my other screen now we can see on our material ball here uh we've got this concrete Grime color going on uh we have some roughness variation and we have some normal map detail to give it some bumpy depth now of course most texture-based materials are built with all of these channels in mind an example that you can actually see with these Mega scan assets all right to do this what we're going to do is we are going to rightclick and go to material again to start fresh mcore my third material just like that and then I will double click this to open it up then we're going to come and actually download a mega scans asset so we'll go up to Quick ad down to quickel Bridge and for this we're going to go into surfaces and let's find something good here I think I'm going to go into historical and I really like this fort stone wall right here uh but for this let's go ahead and we're going to download this and add it to our project then I'll click add and then we'll minimize this can actually close that out and we'll come down here to find our Mega scans folder surfaces here is our fort stone wall now of course Mega scans does create a material for you using its Master material presets but we want to look at how this all fits together so we're we're going to create our own here so right off the bat we're going to drag this D in here where the d stands for diffuse which is also synonymous with the base color so I can plug this RGB in to the base color by dragging off and plugging it in just like that I'll go ahead and drag the normal in and this o DP and then I can drag the RGB from the normal plug it into there then we'll hit apply and this is not that easy to see on a sphere so I can always go down here and change this to a different shape maybe this cube right there there we go that's really good for when you're trying to look at materials that are going on are going to go on something like a wall uh but with this now we can see the color on there we can see the normal map detail but it looks really weird kind of uh you know super glossy and wet maybe not what we're going for but that's where we were talking about with these materials that are made where all of their textures are made together with the final result in mind they will have their roughness and metallic values and stuff like that in there so with this we actually have it in this o DP now the O DP if I were to double click this to look at the image here these individual channels stand for a different parameter in there so if we just single out the red the red channel is the O which stands for occlusion the ambient occlusion the green channel is the r which stands for roughness this is what's going to control our glossiness in there and then with the mega scans assets the B channel is DP which stands for displacement now we're not going to use that in this material here we'll get into that much later uh but this is basically a height map that allows you to displace mesh for now our main thing that we want to look at is the green Channel which is the roughness so if I come back over here I can drag that g out and plug it into roughness and now this looks correct over here now the O which stands for ambient occlusion we do actually have an ambient occlusion output node here so let's go ahead and drag that red and plug it in there now you're not going to see much happening in the actual material itself basically what this ambient occlusion here does is it controls the self shading in the lighting so this is not something that you see directly in the material itself but rather this is something that the lighting environment reads from to add in that little bit of extra depth now if you did for some reason want to enhance the ambient occlusion in the actual material itself you can do that now if we come back over here let's look at this again we can see this red channel uh basically the darker areas are where you can see the shadowing so if we wanted to add that to our base color we could actually do that with a node called multiply so if I were to rightclick in here and type in multiply we'll see multiply here that we can click on to add as a node also the hot key for that is if you hold down M and click you'll get a multiply node so let's go ahead and delete this one and what I'm going to do is I'm going to feed this base color into here and then I am going to multiply it by the ambient occlusion like that and then drag this multiply here to plug into the base color now as you can see we have some of that shadowing actually in the material itself so if you ever need to get a really really pronounced deep ambient occlusion Shadow then you can do it by multiplying your ambient occlusion onto your base color so if I hit apply on here and then we'll take this down what I will do is go back into my stuff materials there's the third material going to go up here and I'm going to actually add a cube this time just like that and we'll drag this onto there now we can see this out in the world how the different lighting affects it and that is how all of these textures work together to create a material all right we have barely scratch the surface on what you can do with materials inside of Unreal Engine but you should be a little bit more familiar with the material editor Shader development with the material editor and unreal is one of the most powerful features this engine has and we'll be covering an almost endless set of topics and recipes on this in the full course now that you're a little more familiar with the materials you'll be well equipped for the next chapter where we're going to be importing custom assets I'll see you there all right so we've explored using 3D assets inside of the engine and even how to obtain some really high quality assets with quickel mega scans layout artist is a very popular job in the industry right now but 3D assets can come from anywhere creating 3D assets is a job in and of itself in the modeling texturing and rendering triangle unreal acts as the renderer now if you're a 3D artist like me then you've probably been wanting to get your own work into the engine maybe you have a friend or a colleague who's a 3D artist or maybe you've downloaded a model from an online Marketplace either way getting art assets into unreal is actually pretty easy let's have a look all right if you've downloaded the file for the jinny Lin trunk and unzipped it you should see two folders inside of that there's going to be model which is going to have the actual models themselves and a textures folder which has the textures for it now I'm going to pop this back over to the side here on my other monitor and what we're going to do inside of unreal is here under my stuff going to create a new folder and I'm just going to call this import demo then go inside of this folder now in this folder there are a couple of different ways that we can import we can actually rightclick in here and go up to import and this is going to give us a browser to navigate to our folder where we unzipped everything we could also go over here to this import button which is going to give us the same thing but I find that the easiest way to import something into unreal is actually to just drag and drop it so if I bring my Explorer window over here or if you're on a Mac you would bring your finder window over and I'm just going to go into this models folder and then drag and drop this right here like that now I'll move this back onto the side and this is our fbx import options here now an fbx file is a type of 3D model uh technically what the fbx file format is it is a container file that can contain models it can contain materials textures uh animations all sorts of things in it that it can contain but for this matter here this particular fbx file the trunks fbx contains two models inside of it now what this is going to do is it's going to import both of those models to Unreal it's going to be just like in our starter content or uh anything that we downloaded from Mega scans but these are custom models so with that in mind let's look at our fbx import options here now there are a few things that we need to be aware of right off the bat up the top we see this mesh category there's an option for skeletal mesh now this is going to pertain to a rigged mesh so like a character or anything that has a rigged skeleton to it in this case we're importing a prop so it is not a rigged mesh it does not have a skeleton so this is going to be unchecked now what's really cool is most of the time you don't have to pay much attention to this right here because unreal will automatically detect if your model has a skeleton or not and we'll automatically check this if it is a skeletal mesh but for this here we don't need it checked next up we'll see this build nanite now nanite is a new function inside of unreal we have a whole video that goes over what that is when to use it when not to use it why to use it all of that now if you're used to working on Unreal Engine 4 then you might be familiar with the LOD system the level of detail or maybe you've heard that from another game engine nanite is Unreal Engine 5's new version of level of detail so we do actually want to build this even if we don't plan on using it because if we want to change something over to use it later if we didn't originally import it with this build manite turn on it is a little bit cumbersome to repport it and and have it rebuilt so let's go ahead and turn this on right here uh this right here generate missing Collision this basically means that unreal is going to automatically create Collision for your meshes now if you're working in film related stuff this is not going to matter too much for you if you're working in game then this is going to be a magic bullet for you unless it's a super complex object where you need to build custom Collision either way if you don't need it it's better to turn it off later so we'll go ahead and leave this turned on a lot of the other options in here you can leave at your default uh one important thing I want to point out is the import uniform scale this right here we do want to leave it at one and if something just seems messed up when you import it it's not the right size then it is best to identify that on the export side rather than the import side so say for example you modeled something in the units of meters instead of having your modeling package set to centimeters it might be tempting to come in here and set this value to 0.1 you want to avoid doing that that especially if you're in a production environment you want to identify those scaling issues on the modeling side before they get to Unreal all right next up we'll leave these guys as default and then down here in material it has the capability of creating a new material for your mesh based on what is in there and then setting that up and importing textures and all of that and now working in production in both the game industry and the film industry I have found that 99 times out of 100 this is not going to do what you want it to and especially if you are working within a pipeline that already exists then your probably dealing with Master materials and stuff like that so really you want to turn this off so what I do here is material import method we'll just click on this and we're going to go down to do not create materials and then also I'm going to turn off import textures because we're going to do that manually especially considering that most of the time your actual PBR textures are not going to be tied to your models and your fbx so we're going to be importing those separately now once you change all of these settings it's going to keep these it's going to save these so the next time you import a model it's going to build nanite it's not going to create materials and it's not going to import textures all right so now we can come down here and we can click on this import button and you'll see that it is now imported two models that's because this fbx file contained two models there was the closed version of this trunk right here if I double click this one there is the open version now these both use the same material the same textures so for here what we're going to do is we're going to come down and right click go up to material just going to name this mcore Jenny lend trunk and then go in here and apply this so remember we can drag and drop this on here or we can with it selected in our content browser we can come up here and click this little arrow right here to assign it now right now it's all black cuz it's got nothing going on go ahead and open this up and then the next thing that I want to do is I'm going to import the textures same thing we're going to come back over here I'm going to go up a level into the textures folder I like to just drag and drop these things in so you can drag and bring them all in at once but there's something very specific that I wanted to show you so if I were to drag this base color in now we see that it's imported we can see it right there if I were to drag this normal map in we can see a little pop up that says texture was imported as normal map we'll hit okay on that that is something really cool that unreal automatically does is if you have a normal map that has your traditional normal map colors in it unreal is able to read that and automatically set it to a normal map in the compression settings now why is that important well that's because the compression settings determine a lot about a texture and we're going to look at that with the Third texture in here which is the occlusion roughness metallic map or the OM if I were just drag this into here like this there we go get this guy out of the way now this right here is one of those instances where we are going to be using individual channels from this so if we look at the red Channel this is our ambient occlusion the green channel is going to be our roughness and then the blue Channel panel is actually going to be our metallic map where we can see the black areas or things that are not metallic like the wood or the leather and the white areas are things that are metallic like the brass now something to keep in mind with these textures is that these textures go through a process called gamma correction now what that means is that in gamma correction it takes the compiled RGB of the image and then it gamma correct it to the srgb color space now if we want to use individual channels of this texture that gamma correction that changing it to the srgb color space is going to mess up those individual Channel values so we can't use them in the way that we want to so whenever we're working with a texture that we plan on using individual channels we need to turn that off now there are a couple of different ways that we can do that over here in the det tailes panel we come down here to texture we see this srgb and a checkbox we can actually uncheck this and it'll turn off that gamma correction now you may not notice a difference when looking at it but that difference is there and it is enough to make a difference in your individual channels but I will turn this back on and the preferred way to do this is to actually change your compression settings so if we go up here under compression we see compression settings and we see by default it is set to default just like if we were to come over here and open the normal map we can see that the compression setting is set to normal map well for this guy what we want to do is we want to set the compression settings to masks and what the masks means is it means that you are intending to use the individual RGB channels and not the combined RGB color so we will change change it to this we'll see that it changes the srgb to off and a couple other things that happen uh but this is going to work for us for now so go ahead and save this and then we can go back into our material and I'm just going to drag each one of these in just like that and then something else that we can do really cool in the material editor is over here in our viewport if we were to come down and select this static mesh down here the open version of this I can actually come up here to the viewport in the material editor and click on this little center block looking icon which is going to tell it to use the mesh that I have selected in the content browser in the preview so now this makes it a little bit easier to work with this material in here all right so with that what I'm going to do now is come over here I'm going to plug in my RGB from the base color going to plug in the RGB for the normal and then we can see over here that we now have these textures on this if I start working with my masks if we remember the O for ambient occlusion we'll drag off of the r o and R to the ambient occlusion and then green is the roughness the R so we'll drag that off and bring it into roughness and now we can see some things going on over here we can see that we've got a little bit of shininess here and there uh but we also have metal and non-metal parts to this which are stored in the metalness map in the blue channel so we'll drag off of this plug it into metallic and now there we go our metallic pieces are metal our non-metallic pieces are not metal and go ahead and hit apply and then if we look down here we can see that both of these since they have the same material and they're using the same texture the same UVs both of them are now all set up and good to go so that is how you import a custom asset you import the models you import the textures you create the material you assign the material and then from there you should be good to go all right now you know how to import custom 3D models and textures if you're a 3D artist yourself you now have the power to render your work inside of unreal this can actually be a replacement renderer for things like marma set tool bag for getting your work up on your portfolio now if you're more attuned to the layout artist route then this can help you when working with other artists on a project all right so Unreal Engine projects are basically package containers full of assets that are wrapped up in a file type called U asset now all of your fbx models and PNG textures that you bring into a project are all converted to this U asset type when when you import them and while you can technically export models and textures back out of the engine there is still a lot of files in your content browser that are Unreal Engine specific in this video I wanted to show you how to migrate these unreal specific U assets between project a to Project B let's get started for this exercise I've provided you with a small pack of custom assets from one of my personal projects that you can use to practice this with now you're also free to practice this process with any Unreal Engine projects you may already have all right let's Jump Right In all right here we are I have two Unreal Engine projects side by side on the left I have my working project that I'm working in and on the right I have a project that has some Assets in it that I want to migrate over to the working project now this is actually really easy to do so what I'm going to do is go in here under my content I'm going to go into this LDA assets folder and go into this prefa and I've got a couple of blueprint prefabs that I've gotten here such as this bpor magic bottle if I drag this out into the world you can see what that is now if I want to get this over into this project it's actually really easy all you have to do is right click on this and you're going to go up here to asset actions then we can come down to migrate and I'm not going to save this map here but once you select migrate it's going to give you your asset report which which is going to show you all of the dependencies that this particular asset has so this blueprint prefab here you can see it right there it has my magic bottle 01 static mesh which has the mcore magic bottle material applied to it which uses these four texture maps in here now when I migrate this one asset it's going to migrate all of this stuff with it and is going to keep its folder structure so what I'm going to do now is I just click okay and then where this takes me is the content folder of the unreal project that I'm currently in so what I need to do now is find the content folder for the project that I want to migrate to so that would be up here in this going to go into this one right here and this is the very important part you cannot skip this you have to do this part right you need to go not only into your project but you need to go into that project's content folder in order to migrate it once you've done that you're in the content folder you hit select folder you'll see that and then now over here in this project you'll see that it's added this LDA allei assets folder which let me go ahead and maximize that and in this we have the pre Fabs folder which has my magic bottle here and of course we have the props folder with the mesh in it uh we have the materials folder with the actual material applied and we have the textures folder that has those textures for that mesh and only that stuff so if we look back over here this folder has a bunch of other stuff in it let me go into the props here uh and you'll see this load up but we have all of these cloth projects the Craton barrels all of this stuff in here and none of that got migrated it was only this magic bottle blueprint prefab that got migrated because that's the only thing that we selected to get migrated now if I wanted to migrate all this stuff all over I could go to this folder go up to content here and I can actually rightclick and go up to migrate and I could migrate everything in this folder over to that project so I'll click okay and it is still in the content folder of my other project cuz that's where I navigated it to it saved that spot but this is my first unreal project over here content folder I can hit select folder it's going to move everything and what we're going to get here we get this little message that says an asset already exists at that location uh referring to to the magic bottle asset that we've already migrated now we could click yes to all and let it overwrite it because we haven't actually changed anything but also we already have it in the project so we don't need to overwrite it so I can hit no to all on this and it'll leave the previous version that we migrated before in there now if I were to go into this props folder we can see all these other meshes that have now been migrated in here along with their materials their textures and all of that so if I were to go into this prefabs folder here I now also have my Lantern which I can bring out which this is just a blueprint prefab that I set up that happens to have the ability to toggle the light on like that or toggle it off and if I were to go up here to my directional light I'm just going to turn off effects world real fast there we go now it's all dark can go back to my Lantern turn toggle that light on and you can see what these are doing so you can see that all of the functionality that was included in the blueprints for these also copied over when we migrated them one last thing I wanted to mention on migrating between projects is that you can go up a version but you can't go down so for example let's say you want to migrate from a 5.0 project into a 5.1 project you can do do that unreal will automatically upgrade your U assets for you however you cannot migrate from a 5.1 project down to a 5.0 project because the U assets will not downgrade all right now you know how to migrate assets between projects this is useful for if you need to move some old work to a new project or you need to migrate something from a Marketplace project or even if you just want to clean out a working project by migrating just the good stuff into a fresh project and then leaving the rest behind it's all a very useful process now one question I get all the time is how come my normal map doesn't look right when I import it into unreal and I don't just get this question from my students either I've actually gotten this question in production from my senior artists that have come to the project from another rendering or game engine and the answer is always the same they're using the wrong normal map format now there are two ways that a normal map can be rendered open G and direct X opengl has been a popular normal map format since the Inception of normal map technology it's very easy to read with your eyes it's the wizzy wig of the two formats really what you see just makes sense cracks grout and other crevices look indented while bumps and protrusions appear to stick out when you look at an openg normal map you immediately know what you're getting this is what your 3D modeling package likely uses and most texturing Suites support it but Unreal Engine uses the other sibling format for rendering normal Maps direct X at first glance a direct X normal map can just look wrong it's not instantly easy to read like openg is it almost comes off as backwards cracks and crevices are actually sticking out while protrusions are indented but alas this is the format that Unreal Engine uses all right now you know what your normal map should look like in order to render correctly but you're still asking the question of what if an asset I'm using has an openg GL normal map well to solve that we need to understand what the difference between the two formats is and that difference is in the y or the up Direction in a normal map the RG and B ma to the X Y and Z in openg G the lighting information in the y or the green channel is coming from One Direction while the lighting information in the y direction of a direct X normal is coming from the inverse Direction so you can literally switch formats by just inverting the green channel in the industry we call this flipping the y or flipping the green now you can permanently alter a normal map by inverting the green channel in Photoshop and resaving it out but you can also do this non-destructively inside of unreal on the config of a texture to change an openg G normal map to direct X inside of unreal just open up the texture go to the details panel and search for flip green to find the flip the green Channel checkbox now unreal will treat your open GL normal as if it were direct X so if your normal Maps just don't look right inside of Unreal Engine check your normal map format and if you have the wrong format now you know how to fix it all right so we know how materials work inside of Unreal Engine and we know how to get around the material editor now we want to explore how efficient unreal's material system can actually be by getting familiarized with the concept of material instancing material instancing has two core components the master material and the material instance let's break it down starting in reverse a material instance is a collection of parameters that you can edit to achieve a specific result we can see an example of this if we open up one of our Mega scans materials that we've downloaded on the right you can see here a list of settings that we can change the values of on the left is a viewport where we can see the results of those Chang now a m Master material is the master that contains all of those parameters that can be edited this is basically just a standard material where the editable nodes are converted to parameters for every Master material you can have an infinite number of material instances all with different settings let's dive in and make our own example we'll start by creating a new folder in materials called instance demo inside of here let's rightclick and create a material we'll call this mmore my first Master where the mm stands for master material double click to open and then we're going to create a color node by holding down three on the keyboard and left clicking we'll plug this color node into the base color pick a color you like and then hit okay now we'll rightclick and select convert to parameter we'll name this new node color next we'll hold down one and click to create a constant right click and convert it to a parameter name it roughness and then plug it into the roughness slot we'll then go over here and set the default value to 0.5 for slider Min and Max we want to set that to 0o and one now we have a basic Master material with two parameters next let's create our first material instance in the content browser we'll rightclick on our Master material and click create material instance we'll name this miore instance1 where MI stands for material instance if we double click to open our new material instance we'll see the two parameters that we created now to edit each of these parameters we have to check the checkbox next to them this activates them and makes them available for edit now we can see that we can slide the roughness value and see it change in real time same with the color if we activate it we can click on the color swatch to open the color wheel or we can change the color take note that the color parameter which is a vector parameter has a drop-down Arrow next to the name this allows you to update the values for the individual channels artistically this makes it easier to achieve a pure red a pure green or a pure blue value but where this is most useful is when you're using a vector parameter to store individual values in a sense your gray packing and Shader math we'll get into that later now I want to direct your attention to the fact that these two parameters are located within different categories based on the type of parameter that they are the roughness is categorized under scaler which refers to a single Channel constant value and the color is categorized under Vector which is a multi-channel value for a friendlier user experience you would generally want to categorize these within custom groups luckily unreal makes that really easy to do let's go back into our Master material select a parameter and then over here in the details panel you'll see an option called group if you check the drop-down the only option we have available is none to create a new group we can actually just click in here and start typing let's create a group called settings and hit enter now if we select our other parameter we'll see that our settings group now exists in the drop-down for us to select hit apply and then we'll check our material instance now you can see that both of our parameters are grouped together nicely under a category called settings all right let's look at adding a metalness option to this material for this we want to plug a constant scalar value into the metalness slot on our material but remember in our PBR Lon we discussed that a surface is typically either metal or not metal meaning it should really usually only be a value of either one or zero let's make that easy for ourselves and our users we're going to do that with a node called the static switch let's come into our Master material and we'll rightclick to bring up the node menu type in static switch and find the static switch parameter now we want to make sure that we select the parameter option so we can edit it in our instance we'll call it is metal with a question mark you'll see that this node is a Boolean value and if else statement where we have a true and a false first let's give this statement some values hold down one and click twice to create two constant scalers now we won't be converting these to parameters because we won't be editing them directly instead we'll use the switch to toggle between them so let's think about this the question is whether or not this surface is metal so if true we want to feed in a value of one for yes because a metallic value of one means that it is in fact metal and if false we want to feed in a value of zero we can then plug this node into our metallic slot note that this default value here that lets us define whether the default value is true or false and in this case we'll leave it as false by default for now make sure to set the category to settings and then we'll hit a apply now check the material instance and we'll see a new parameter we need to check the box to activate it and make it editable but then we'll see that we have a checkbox that we can use to toggle whether something is metal or not all right let's test this process Out Create a new basic level We'll add a few spheres then we can duplicate our material instance a couple of times by hitting control D we'll apply a different instance to each one of the Spheres then we can proceed to go in and change the settings on each instance we should see all of these updates happen in real time in the world this process allows us to have one single Master material with defined controls and then have multiple variations of those settings master materials and their instances are one of my favorite features of unreal it may not seem like much at first with a simple material like this but it can save so much time and most importantly helps maintain consistency especially when you're working on a team now I've personally been on production projects where we' have had complex Master materials that had over 100 different settings but even using this process the simplest of materials can save you so much time over the course of a project all right so we've explored the asset pipelines and the visual aspects of Unreal Engine in this module we're going to dive into some more of the technical aspects of unreal blueprint before we get started we need to answer the question what exactly is blueprint blueprint is an actor type inside of unreal that is one of the engine's most powerful features it allows you to do something as simple as create prefabs all the way up to creating gameplay features with visual scripting let's have a quick look at the blueprint UI as an example of how powerful F blueprint is there are many different types of blueprints that you can create by default you can see this in unreal if you go into your content browser rightclick and go up to the create blueprint button you'll get a little popup with a ton of options but in most cases you're going to be using the first one actor if I open up this new blueprint we'll see the blueprint editor interface it has a similar layout to other editor interfaces that we've looked at before on the far left we have our blue print controls section on the far right we have our details panel and then in the middle we have our stage below the stage you'll see the log section which will show you your errors and your message log as well as give you options for searching and finding references all stuff that we'll dive into deeper later above the stage we have our breadcrumbs and tabs which will become very useful in the next lesson and then above that we have the toolbar diving deeper on the left side our control section is split into two tabs the components tab is the equivalent of our blueprint actors outliner just like the outliner and the level editor this is where you'll find a list of all of the components in your actor below that is the my blueprint section which is the command center for all of the scripting aspects of blueprint back to the middle here the stage area is a very Dynamic area here you can you can see a 3D viewport a blueprint allows you to have pretty much any actor you could have in a level exist inside this selfcontained world we'll talk about that more in just a minute but first I want to look up at the tabs above the staging area you'll see three tabs by default viewport event graph and construction script now you've seen the viewport but if I were to switch over to the event graph you'll see a different UI that is similar to that of the the material editor this is where we do the actual visual scripting part the construction script looks very similar to the event graph and is also an area for visual scripting so what's the difference between the event graph and the construction script well it's all on the names really the event graph is all about events both creating events and reacting to events this is where Dynamic gameplay happens it's important to note that the event graph runs while the game is actually being played so generally to test something happening in the event graph you need to drop in and play the construction script happens on construction of the blueprint actor in the world to understand this you need to really understand when construction happens the construction script is run anytime the blueprint actor is added to a level moved around or a parameter is changed it's also run whenever you first begin playing as well as if it were dynamically spawned into the world the coolest thing thing about the construction script is that since it is run when the actor is first added to or moved within a level it also runs an editor so you don't have to drop in and play to see the effects you'll see how cool this is a few videos from now when we explore creating Dynamic prefabs but on the subject of prefabs let's walk a couple steps back and look at a simple use case scenario for blueprint using a blueprint as a prefab is a fairly simple implementation think about our crates and barrels from before we arranged them in a specific order for a scene but if we wanted to have that particular Arrangement be saved as a prefab that we can just drop into other scenes then we can actually do that really easily with blueprint let's give it a try all right the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and rightclick go up to the blueprint class button and then I'm going to select this first one called actor I'll type in BP underscore prate Barrel then if I were to open this up we'll Now navigate over to find my crate and barrels and I will drag this Barrel here to the components and drop it on this default scene rout and now we can see the Barrel in here so if I were to then click on this and contrl D I can create a duplicate of it now I can drag this dup duplicate around inside of my 3D editor here I can also then click on this default scene route to make it active again and I'm going to drag and drop this crate in here just like that now I can click it inside of here and I can drag this around just like this and position it like that I could then control D to duplicate it again select it from the components over here and now I can move this over here contrl D to duplicate it again going to bring it up here just like that maybe rotate this around some move this Barrel up and we can continue to go through and arrange these in any way that we wanted then when done we'll hit compile going to minimize that down a little I'm going to click on this button here to browse to my original blueprint asset and if I were to drag it out into the scene there we go now we have this blueprint prefab right here that we can treat pretty much as a group and I could alt drag a copy of this out I could drag from here to bring another one in so this allows you to arrange a certain set of models together in a prefab format that you can then drag and drop however you want to blueprint also offers a visual scripting solution inside of unreal that uses a node-based workflow to add functionality to an Unreal Engine project basically it's visual code Unreal Engine is built using the programming language C++ and as a developer you actually have access to this source code you can modify the source code or you can extend it with your own C++ code but this isn't the only way to add functionality and it's primarily useful in more advanced level development projects blueprint actually gives us a visual coding option that is more artist friendly at its base but it also offers a lot more power to those who are familiar with programming fundamentals blueprint uses what is called flow control to guide the order of events the nodes are connected by strings to tell the actor what to do next it's very similar to the material editor and how nodes work there just like in the material editor nodes can have inputs as well as outputs with the addition of an input output slot called execution this execution controls the flow and tells the operation where to go next let's have a look to show how this works I'm going to rightclick go up to blueprint class click on actor here I'm going to call this bpor basic flow just like that I'll open it up and what I'm going to do is over here my components go to this add button I will click on that and I'm going to come down and add a Cube that's going to add a cube into my viewport here going to lift it up just a little bit so it's actually sitting on the floor and then I'm going to come in here click on my default scene route click the add button then come down and click on this sphere it's going to add a sphere component in here which I will then move up here just like this and we can see setting it at 140 here is going to set it like right on top of this Cube now what I want to do is I want to actually move this up 50 cm from this so 140 + 50 is going to be 190 how I'm going to do that is go into my construction script here and I'm going to drag this sphere out here into this and then drag off and I'm going to type in set relative so I can get this set relative location now how this works with the flow is we come out of this execution and we plug into this one so on construction it is going to execute this relative location change onto the sphere and for this Z I want to put 190 because 140 + 50 is 190 I'll hit compile and then if I were to drag this out into the world we can see that this sphere is now floating above it looking back in here at the graph what's happening is this flow is going from this node following this string into this node and doing exactly what we tell it to here on the target which is our sphere now that was a fairly simple example of using the visual scripting aspect of blueprint which is a much deeper subject that we'll start to explore throughout this module for now you should have a little more familiarity with what blueprint actually is you can use it for the the simplest of things like prefabs and you can use it for some very complex gameplay elements or editor utilities is the game engine learning curve holding you back I get it learning Unreal Engine is hard but it doesn't have to be rendering technology has advanced so much in the last 20 years that it's almost been hard to keep up but there's one tool that's been defining the future of 3D for a while now from video games to film and television Unreal Engine has been dominating the entertainment world and is quickly becoming a tool that anyone working in 3D needs to have in their tool B that's why I founded learn digital Alchemy and developed the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class but if you opened up unreal and found yourself completely intimidated no idea where to get started so you go to YouTube and just find yourself even more lost from the endless pile of disorganized videos with the streamlined curriculum of the Unreal Engine Pro masterclass we go on a journey together to help you quickly get comfortable navigating the software like a pro in fact we'll get you up and running an Unreal Engine in just 1 hour for free with the first module of the getting started section of the course in my world using Unreal is just another basic skill that I feel like everyone should have like walking the dog or doing laundry so this first module is completely free no strings attached and I'm not even going to ask you for your email address to get access but let's say you already know the basics have you tried following tutorials online that walk you through step by step to create a result but then when you try to create on your own you find yourself completely lost without the handholding in the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class you'll learn the foundational building blocks that form the basis of everything you do in unreal you'll get comfortable with the how and the why so that when it comes time to do it on your own you'll know EX exactly what steps to put together in what order to reach the result that you want I like to look at it from a perspective of small foundational Lego blocks that are put together in different combinations to reach different results it's like a collection of ingredients put together in different amounts and orders to create different menu items in the nreal engine Pro Master Class we learned the small steps first then we put them together in different ways to accomplish different results then your challenge is to use these same building blocks to accomplish the result that you are after by that point you should have no trouble doing just that but of course if you're still struggling just ask you'll have access to me as well as some of my colleagues and other students both past and present but who am I my name is John wck and I'm an unreal authorized instructor that basically means that epic games the creator of Unreal Engine relies on me and other unreal authorized instructors like myself to help develop education that teaches students the right way to use unreal but even while doing this I still work in the industry and I have for a while I spent some time in the virtual production space leading teams that build digital sets that go up on LED volume walls which is a technology that lets you do in camera what used to have to be done in post- production when filmed against a green screen I've been using Unreal Engine for G games professionally since Unreal Engine 3 and most recently have been at the Forefront pioneering the AAA game industry Ford with Unreal Engine 5 including using some of the most advanced rendering Tech you would never imagine you'd ever see in a mass multiplayer online roleplaying game let's look at some of the top myths about the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class Unreal Engine is just too hard to learn I've been teaching students how to use Unreal Engine for over 10 years now I've discovered some some of the best techniques for learning this powerful software fast but more importantly I've discovered some of the worst ways to learn and how to avoid them with the streamlined curriculum of the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class you'll get that 10 years worth of proven learning techniques that I've used to help so many jump start their careers in both game development and virtual production my methods have even helped students use Unreal Engine to get them jobs at Studios that don't even use unreal I'm already taking a live course in Unreal Engine that's awesome I won't deny that nothing beats live mentorship when it comes to computer Graphics in fact I still teach live classes at various schools myself but the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class is not really in competition with live education it can very much fill a supporting role to help accelerate your learning process why waste valuable class time asking questions about basic unreal usage when you can just refer back to one of the Master Class class lessons that will answer it for you that way you get more value out of the time spent with your Mentor asking the questions that matter more in fact one of the reasons I created the master class in the first place was so that I had something I could point my own live students to when they had a basic unreal question and of course the students that took the extra time to go through the Unreal Engine Pro Master Class actually had an almost unfair advantage over their classmates so sign up today and start becoming an Unreal Engine P I'll see you [Music] there

Channel: Digital Alchemy

Views: 19,257

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, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner, blueprint, materials, material editor, textures, getting started with unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.3 tutorial, learn ue5, unreal engine starter course

Id: 5CTwn547pmU

Length: 145min 39sec (8739 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024