Learning UE4

Hi all,

Recently I got myself a subscription to Unreal 4 with the aim to learn the engine and eventually create a small game by myself using the skills I'd have learnt along the way.

So, in this thread I aim to show what I'm currently learning from tutorials and by myself. I guess I will talk about each tutorial, like what problems I may have had and how I overcame them and hopefully it may be of some use to some of you guys too. Hopefully you guys will join in the discussion too

Anyway I'm trying to learn one new thing in the engine each day. Be that materials or creating a simple pick up. I'm currently working through the tutorials on Epics YouTube channel.

Below are some examples of what I've learnt so far:

Creating a small scene. (Included use of geometry tools, material and prop placement, lighting and some blueprint work to create a moving door.)

Tutorial followed: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…JVrEGiLIploeF3F

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/ZmPwM6Q.png]

This was a pretty straight forward tutorial at the end of the day. If you've used other editors in the past, such as hammer, you'll pick up the geometry tools in no time. Simply drag in a box and set it's dimensions and you have a wall etc.

All of the models you see in the scene come as part of the engine so there's no need to worry about that kind of thing if you want to give this a try. The only downside with UE4 is there's not much content you can use from the get go. Unlike Source which has years worth of props and materials from established games which you can dive right into and create something. But as a whole, I felt the tutorial was worth it to get used to the way a simple scene is created in the engine.

Overall it took about an hour and half to do this tutorial.

Flashlight (Included use of class blueprints)

Tutorial used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPuBZYPEr4k

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/2ot7WoW.png]

This was a nice and quick tutorial which gave me some quick results whilst still teaching me a fair bit which is always nice!

Basically, the tutorial introduced me to attaching a flashlight to a character which can be toggled on and off.

The great thing about UE4 is it's easy to assign a button to your project for use within blueprints (I'm not sure how easy this is in other engines like Source). Simply going to Edit> Project Settings> Input you can create a key which you can use in your blueprints. Alternatively, you can just place an input for any key you wish straight into the blueprint but you can't name it and quickly call that button press in another blueprint without assigning an input in the project settings.

Anyway, didn't really have any problems with this tutorial and as mentioned taught me how to attach something to the character and also ensure it was aligned to the players aim.

Material Instancing (Included creating parameters which designers could edit, material editor)

Tutorials sued: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…DwZNYe_N8IcYWS-

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/Y8GkwZN.png]

This was an interesting tutorial. I'm not a great texture artist by far so it was nice to play about with the material editor with some nice premade textures to see what it is capable of. What I really liked was you could instance a material to create a completely different material with just a few adjustments. These are apparently great to use since the calculations for the material are only done once, and any instances of a material don't need to be calculated again.

The tutorial also taught me how to create properties which designers could use to quickly change the look of a texture. These are created in the material editor and can be accessed in the material viewer by the designers. On the left in the screenshots you can see fields for the base colour of the material, metallic and roughness settings and the textures used for the diffuse and normal.

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/oGbKKUD.png]

These can all be adjusted in real time to allow designers to get their desired material. So if you wanted wood floors with a slightly different colour or a polished look it would literally take a designer about 10 seconds to create without having to go ask an artist or create a brand new material themselves.

I'm not sure if any of you guys are interested in this stuff. But in the engine discussion for the challenge UE4 got a lot of votes. So I'd thought I'd post my experiences so far with the engine to hopefully show people it's not as scary as some of you may think Also, it motivates me to do more work!

Anyway, any questions or comments please feel free to reply to the thread. Would like to hear what you guys think.

My descriptions of each tutorial might not be great. If you guys want to hear anything specific about the process I'm going through whilst learning, let me know and I'll try incorporate them into my posts!

I'll try to update this thread whenever I've learnt something new.

Cheers!

I've not tried to actually look at a trigger and pressing a key to activate but I guess I've done something similar.

Place a trigger around the object you want to "press" like so:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/MNfWNiN.png]

Then within the blueprint (I made a class blueprint for the light), when the player overlaps the volume you enable the input from the player. Then tell the input where the input is coming from (i.e. the player). You can also disable input when the player leaves the volume. Like the script below:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/5R47xis.png]

(After the player enters the volume I've also made some helpful text (a message saying "Press F to toggle light") become visible and it will also hide when the player leave the volume)

Then you basically set a key you wish to use for the "switch" and toggle the visibility on the light like the script below:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/uLxWJZH.png]

(I am toggling the visibility on two lights since the light has a directional light and an omni light for some ambience)

So with that script, whenever I'm inside the volume, I can press F to toggle the light on and off

I hope that helped a bit. If you'd like a professional tutorial not wrote before I'm about to go to bed then check out this video (I'd recommend watching all of them in the playlist):

Any questions just ask and I'll try to help out

Edit: Thanks for the links Paul. Didn't know they had more tutorials on the wiki!

Quote from Algor

I found this which covers a lot of ground;

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/index.html

...

Thanks for the links Algor! I've seen that guy on YouTube before but didn't know he did UE4 stuff!

Quote from Steppenwolf

The landscape system seems to be really fucking hacky. 16 texture inputs limit so realisticaly you get 4 maybe 5 somewhat basic layers out of this for the whole terrain without a lot of trickery/magic. And there doesn't seem to be a way to feed material functions into the landscape layer blend so you have to make your submaterials directly inside the landscape material wtf. So no easy way to switch out sub materials and it's a node mess galore on top of it. I hope Epic releases their landscape demo soon. Want to see what magic they use to get around these limitations.

The landscape demo is on the coming soon part of the store, so it shouldn't be far off! Some of the terrains I've seen in UE4 have been beautiful. Hopefully it's not as hacky when we see how Epic does it!

So today I did a custom projectile tutorial!

Custom Projectile (Included class blueprints, bit of blueprint logic)

Tutorial followed:

This is just a quick tutorial from Epic so you'll probably have to keep pausing the video to keep up with what's going on but it's not too bad. Basically you start out creating a class blueprint for the projectile which consists of a bounding sphere and a model to represent the projectile. You also add a projectile modifier to the blueprint and give it an initial speed and direction of travel. From there you load up your character blueprint (I used the default first person blueprint but deleted the gun and projectile from it) and create the graph to spawn the projectile.

Taking the position of the character along with the direction it is facing you can spawn the projectile from the characters location. After doing a bit of maths to make sure the projectile doesn't spawn inside the character you have yourself a projectile firing from your character!

The script for this looks like this:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/DhljF8k.png]

(I've added a comment to explain what is going on in the graph)

Compile the blueprint and press play and sure enough you have a projectile flying out from in front of you!

However, the tutorial failed to mention collision of the projectile. I went back to the projectile blueprint and selected the bounding sphere and changed it's collision properties to collide with everything. Loaded the game back up and fired my projectile. It collided but then just stayed there, leaving me with this:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/vGxUMgQ.png]

This would not do.

Going back into the projectile blueprint I had a look around to see if there was anything I could turn on to give me some feedback at when it had hit something. I noticed a check box, which when enabled, fired off a hit event.

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/VUYFiuO.png]

(Top check box here)

From here I headed back into my character blueprint where the projectile spawning was handled. Now, I had no idea what I was doing here so I just went in and tried doing stuff. I noticed coming out of the SpawnActor node for the projectile there was a return value pin. With UE4 being context sensitive I tried pulling out a wire from here and searched for "Hit". Sure enough there was an OnActorHit event. I selected it and the blueprint automatically set the "Bind Event" and "Hit_Event" nodes seen below for me.

Out of the event I dragged out another wire and search for destroy. Again, the node I was looking for was waiting for me so I placed it and connected it up. After compiling the script I ran the game again and shot out a projectile and it disappeared upon hitting something. Success

Here's the little bit of script which destroyed my projectiles:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/JzxgnxR.png]

Now I wanted to do some extra things here. Firstly I wanted to add some random rotation to the projectile since they all spawned in the same orientation (As seen in the second screenshot). I couldn't figure it out but I'm pretty sure you could add some random rotation just before you pass on the location the projectile should spawn from.

I also wanted to add some particles to cover up the projectile disappearing but couldn't figure that out either. I have seen other projectile tutorials so will chase this up.

Cheers!