Official Unreal Documentation

Free assets for you game

Make sure you check the “Free” section of the marketplace in the Epic Games Launcher.

Other links to mesh’s, textures, sound effects, blueprints etc provided royalty free for your game:

Getting started

  1. Introduction to Unreal Engine Video Tutorial (Goes through the basics – start here)

Creating your first environment

The following resources assume you have a basic understanding of the Unreal Engine GUI and will quick start your landscape creation, importing from Maya along with some starter blueprints. There’s plenty more to learn in Unreal but this should help get you started. Note: Wear your headphones when watching the videos.

Make sure to include the starter project content within your own project and while not strictly necessary I recommend downloading the “Open World Demo Collection” (See below image) on the Unreal Engine Marketplace and adding it to your project. This contains meshes, textures and foliage amongst other free resources you can add to your game.

Landscape Tool

  1. Getting started with Landscaping Video Tutorial (Video by Lecturer Wayne Gallear)

Foliage Tool

  1. Foliage Tool Video Tutorial

Landscape Painting Tool

This tool allows you to paint a mixture of textures onto your landscape rather one solid texture throughout.

Note: The below videos have issues with the screen freezing at times. Ask me in class if unsure about anything, although i don’t think it affects the information being presented.

  1. Creating a landscape material with layers to use with the paint tool video tutorial
  2. Applying and using a landscape material with the paint tool video tutorial

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Geometry Editing Tool

The below tutorial shows you how to use the geometry editing mode to create and edit geometry brush objects in your game world.

  1. Using the Geometry Editing tool video tutorial

Vertex Paint Tool

The below tutorial shows you how to use the paint mode on the static meshes within your game world.

  1. Creating a two tone material and using the Vertex Paint tool

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Blueprints

Moving platforms Video
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Jump Pad Video
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Restart game on collision video
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Importing from Maya to Unreal Engine

How to import your models to Unreal Engine

Maya Export to Unreal Video (With materials & textures)

Export settings for Maya animations to Unreal Engine:

Setting up collision detection on your models and imported mesh’s

The below tutorial shows you the quick way(With a performance cost) and the slightly longer custom way which is less harsh on the players hardware:

  1. Simple, Complex and Custom Mesh Collisions video tutorial

Any convex objects can be used when creating custom collisions, convex objects are any completely closed convex 3D shape. For example, as seen in my video above a box/cube can also be a convex object.

Further reading:

Animations and replacing the default third person Unreal character

The below tutorial replaces the default unreal character but maintains all blueprints and animations which are transferred:

Skeleton Retargeting tutorial video – More information here

The below tutorials shows how to import a Mixamo (or other custom) character with idle, run and in part 2 jump animations, create an animation blueprint and replace the default character:

Part 1 – Introduction to importing custom characters and animations.

Part 2  – Adding a jump animation (Fix for calculate direction update)

Note: When exporting Maya characters to Mixamo use a 2013 .FBX file with embed media. Do not rig characters in Maya, Mixamo will rig them for you.

Cook and build a release candidate

Visual Studio and Unreal Setup, build, cook and package video

Settings for Visual Studio

Additional tutorials and links

To be updated