Unreal Engine 5 for beginners - understand the basics

1. Intro: Hi there!: Hi and welcome to the course and the real engine five for beginners. Understand the basics. I'm really glad to see a here. I want to invite you to this course and this journey will be very interesting. You're going to learn basics of Unreal Engine five If you very, very new and if you don't know anything, that is totally fine. You will learn about projects, levels, acids, actors and different components. We will talk about collisions, physical shapes, different types of collisions, and how you can use it for your game or your projects. We'll also be talking about materials. Interesting part is the blueprints, because with Unreal Engine five, you don't need to know how to write a code. And I'm going to show you how to work with blueprints. We will create several blueprints together, and that's a great start. And religion five is the most powerful tool for building digital worlds that we have ever seen. But without knowing the basics, you can go further. So this course is for you. You didn't use Unreal Engine five before, and you want to understand all the fundamentals. So get ready to start your journey in the endless world with the power of Unreal Engine five. Let's start. 2. Lesson 2 Download and Install: It's done to download and install Unreal Engine and to download it, you need the Epic Games launcher. You find the link attached. You can use this one. But Stop, Stop, Stop. Don't try to close this course and start again. No, no, no. That's not for the games. Just fine. This tab Unreal Engine here, and click here to download Unreal Engine. Once you've downloaded and installed it, you can launch your Unreal Engine right here from the Epic Games launcher or Premium desktop right here. Let's launch it. 3. Lesson 3 Projects: So you have installed, then we'll engine five and you have this beautiful, beautiful icon on your desktop. Let's double-click it and an up. When you launch in Unreal Engine, Unreal Project browser opens automatically. This is place where you can create a new project, open and manage existing projects that I already have my several projects here because I did if you testing before recording this for you guys, but you don't have anything else. It's all just empty here. So don't worry about it. Okay, first let's just look at these categories. We have Games, film, video, architecture, and even product design. And it means that Unreal Engine five and in fact, can work not only for game design, it can work, and it works for production, for architecture, for product design, for manufacturing, and a lot of different things. And that's cool because the basics that you're going to learn in this course are very useful for any task that you may have. And each category has its own templates. For example, for the games we have first-person, third-person, and etc. You also can select blank to create a blank project without anything inside, you can click on different categories and see that every cut category has its own templates. In this course, we're going to use the game team played. Because again, the basic things that you're going to learn here in games, you can use anywhere, anywhere. So we're going to use the third person template, but later you can check the other team place. They're very fun. Actually they like gains prototypes, each of them. So we have select the third person template. We have this little description here, and then the project defaults. This project defaults the settings of your project, very basic settings. And the first one is the blueprint or C plus plus. If you don't know what Blueprint is, that's totally fine. And I'm going to show you later. But in short, it's just a way to program things without actual code writing. I don't expect you to know any programming languages for this course or actually to use Unreal Engine fire up at all. So the target platform is basically a desktop or my while. We're going to use desktop for this one. Then. And then the quality preset is maximum or scalable and it describes itself. So I choose maximum and I'd recommend you doing the same. But if in, anytime you feel like your computer can't work with your project, just come back to the settings and choose scalable because that means that your computer isn't powerful enough to handle the project, okay? Then they start to content. So they started content is useful when you want to start learning and experimenting and straight away without worrying about custom content, you probably don't have any custom content at this point. Later on, you will create your own custom content. But for this course, let's check this box. Then the ray tracing. Ray tracing is a technology and your hardware either supported or not. For this course, we don't need ray tracing, but for your future projects you might need it. I just want you to know that there is a ray tracing chatbox and you can check it if you need it. Then you give your project a name and click Create. Once you click Create, it takes some time for the project to be ready. So let's wait a few minutes and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Lesson 4 Demo Game : Let's see what Unreal Engine has right out of the marks. Curious the third person team play. Find this button here and click. Right. Now we are inside the game, the demo game. You need to click first and then you can move your mouse around. Just take a look around at the character. Look how beautiful it is. Then you can walk using the W, a, S, D buttons or the arrows straight to the left, to the right, and backwards, just like this. And of course we can jump using the space button. Okay, I'm not good at video games. I'm not. Again, here. We also have this boxes that we can contact with this. So this is our project. And of course, because we didn't select the blank project, we selected the third person template. Remember what I said about the maximum quality for your project? If you feel like it's too much for your computer anytime, Let's push escape like this. Then go Edit, Project Settings, target hardware, and then to scalable instead of maximum. Okay, and you might need to restart the project. After that escape, we can click Play again and the player will be on the same position. That's because this prototype game is programmed like this, designed like this. And let me show you what it has. So you can click f 11 to open the full-screen mode, f 11 again to close it. And now I want to show you the following here you have this button. It says detaches from player, controller. What it does. If you click here, you can see that you can move around and your character is not affected. Just move around. If you click again, it attached you to the player and you just moving with your player. Just like this. Now, if use shift plus F1 buttons and click detach. What we can do, we can move around like this. We can select any object with the mouse and see details. For example, the character. And you can see that we have a lot of different things here. Right now. I just want you to know how to move from one mode to the other. So again, stop. We click Play, then detach, and then we can select. So I click escape for now, you actually can see this icon and this means that this is the point where the game starts and it is programmed as well. For example, I can move it around like this. When you click play the games going to start in the other place. Final thing that I'm going to show you here is how we can change our objects. For example, I'm going to click detach and then select the object. Let's take a look at the settings here. Ok, There are a lot of different settings, but for now, I just want you to look at this transform section. And it's not very complicated actually. So we have location, rotation and scale. Location is the point where our character is. And this is three axis, x, y, and z. The rotation is the end goal and the scale is the size of the character. In this case, for example two, you can see that the size of the character changes like this. Let's make it bigger. Oh wow, you are a big, big woman. Okay. Okay. So what do we can do? We can attach and even move around with this big, big, big body that we now have. That's like this and even jump. But when we get this k and play the game again, you can see that nothing has changed. That's because all the changes that you do in this mode will not be applied. And I want you to know that these character is called actor. You can also see the actor here in Unreal Engine five, we call it actors. Actors. You also can see it here we have the camera actor, we have texts, render actor. But for now, I just want you to get used to the language that we use here. Or for example, let's select a cube, this one, and take a look at this buttons here. So what we have is rotation, scale and translate. For example, I can select this cube, make it bigger like this. And if I want to save these changes, I right-click on it and select keeps simulation changes. And now when we click stop simulation, we can see that this cube is still big. And in the next lesson we're going to create a new level and see how the game will look without anything. 5. Lesson 5 Levels: Creating a level. What is a level? A level is all or a part of your game's world. Levels contain everything in player can see and interact with like environments. Usable objects are the characters and so on. In video games, it's common to have multiple levels with transitions between them. For example, once you've read the final boss and a level, you move on to the next one through a door. And this can be a new level. So it doesn't mean that every level that you create a will be the next level for a player. But if the level is a part of your game and level of design is a big and very interesting topic. But what you need to understand now is that you might use different levels to transition between different kinds of environment. Levels are also called maps in Unreal Engine because level file is, you, map file. Level itself is like a container that holds everything else, like light, sound, actors, effects, and so on. This is level. And in theory, this can be a level in a game, or this can be just a very simple game of just one level. And that's it. All. We can do. Some kind of trigger somewhere. And once the player is near this trigger, the next level we'll open to create a new level, go to File, then new level. You also see that you have this open level option here. And if you have or when you will have a lot of levels, you can navigate through them using this open level option here, but for now we just use the new level. Okay, So we have several types. Let's take a look. First is open world. Of course, you know, open world games like No Man's Sky rendered redemption, sky rim. We have there a big, big world to explore. The open world is level with, with sample content that can create a large stream mobile open world. Then we have the empty open world, which is the same thing but without the sample content. Then we have the basic, basic level with a floor plan, lighting, atmosphere, and fog. That's all that it has. Nothing else but this very basic level. And we have the empty level. For this course. Let's look at the basic level, Create. Now you can see this window and what it does. It asks you if you want to save the content, because we did a few changes. You want to save it. Actually, we don't need to save it. So I will click, Don't Save. Right? And here's your new level. You can look around using the mouse. You can hold Alt to move the camera, just like this, and you view just how you want it. And you can zoom in and out. Let's take a look what we have here. So select, just click on this objects to select them. So this is a directional light. This is Sky atmosphere. That's a skylight, and this is Cloud. Wow, Very good. So everything that is on your level, you can find here in this folder, okay? Right now, almost everything that we have is lighting folder. We click here, we can see that we have the lighting and the floor, basically, that's it. If you click this I here, you make the object invisible or visible again. Let's try to turn the light off. Whoop, all dark. It can also open this folder and click like this just to, to get the idea what each element does. Everything that you will add to your level you can find here, okay? Then you have the details for the actor that you select. For example, this floor has Static Mesh Component or it was like the directional light. It has the directional light component. We will get deeper to this components and actors in the next levels. But for now, I just want you to get used to the interface. Next, what we have here is basic settings for the actors. You remember that we did change the scale for the cubes and the sample level. And basically the transform settings are always here. Depending on the type of your actor details, we can change. For example, you can see the light has its own light settings and we can, for example, we can change light color. Let's try. Wow. Wow, looks advocate. It looks epic. Okay, let's go back. Okay, Actually, if you don't know what was the color before, you can just click here rosette and every level has its own world settings. You can move to this tab and take a look at the world settings here. For now. We don't need it, but I just want you to know that you have your world settings here right next to the details. So I told you before that in your game, in your project, you need to program everything. At least we have the character that we can test everything with. But for now, if we go very close to the edge and fall, nothing will happen. Nothing. It's just fallen and fallen and fallen and let's, let's click Escape. And we need to go back to the platform to do it fast. So just click the cinematic viewport and then the default viewport again. The last thing in this lesson is this buttons. I want to show you how you can move, rotate, and scale your objects. If you click here, you can move it like this, like this. So you see we have three axises. And if you didn't know what axes that you're using now, you can take a look at this corner. We have x which is red, Y, which is green, and that which is blue. Okay, Now let's click here and rotate so we can rotate. When we are rotating the light, everything is changing. It's like it's like when the Sun rotates, you see It's like a sunset, right? It's a bright, bright day. That's the sun goes down, sun goes down and goes down, and now it is down. Let's select this again to move the object around. You can not only move on axis, you can actually drag the center of an actor and just move it around like this. Then we have this surface snapping. And what surface NAB and is it the thing that makes actors a line to the floor or another surveys? And next to it you can see these three things as grid snapping, we have the drag grid, rotation grid, and scale grid. When the grid snapping is enabled, an actor will move, rotate, or scale in increments of a specific value. For example, now we have ten and I can slightly move the object just like this. But what happens, really, what happens is here is grid. We don't see it. And I can move it only in ten unit increments. If I put 100, then and do like slowly, slowly like this, you see, I can't move it like this, but I can move it like this. So this step is now one hundred, one hundred, one hundred, one hundred. You also can see this grid right here. If we put 500, now we can move it only to next 500. Like this. So basically ten is fine for the most projects and it is fine for this course. But I just want you to know that you can change it here and you also can click here to disable this function. We held the same thing for rotation and scale. And finally, the chemo speed button in the upper right allows you to change your movement speed in the viewport anytime you feel like you need a break from this course and Unreal Engine fire, you just go file. Save all or save current level, doesn't matter. So we save, save all for this one. If you want, you can create a folder, for example, levels. And now we're going to save it. And then calls happening again. Now when you open it, you can see that you don't see your level, you see this first level. So what do you need to do? You need to click File Open level and select your level. 6. Lesson 6 Assets: In this lesson, we're going to talk about acids. Any piece of content in an Unreal Engine Project is an asset. You can think of assets like building blocks that you use to create your game and application. For example, material is an acid, blueprint is an acid. Sound is an asset. Most of the acids are created outside Unreal Engine and then input to your project. For example, if I need a 3D model of something, I or someone else can create it in a special program, blender or Maya. And you can find a lot of free 3D assets and even more paid ones on web. For example, Sketchfab or turbo squid. For now, let's go here and open the content rower. Since we have selected the starter content, we already have a few assets. Here. We have some audio blueprints, maps, materials, particles. Let's open materials. Material defines the surface properties of an object in your scene. So you can think of a material as the paint that is applied to a match to control its visual appearance. For example, here we have this 3D floor. And if I open the content driver and select a material, for example, this one, you can see that the floor changes to this material. So basically we still have the floor is the same floor but the material is different. Let's put stones. Well, that looks pretty good. If you don't want to click and click, click, click to open the drawer every time. Let's just click here, dog and layout like this. And you can adjust it like this if you need more space. So we have the floor is selected and if we go here to the details and go to the materials, we can see that the material that we have applied is here. And actually if you click here, you can see all the materials that you have available. So instead of going here and select a material, you can just click here and select it from this whole list. Not all materials are good for floor, of course. Now for example, this is just a concrete floor which works very good. But this one, it's not It's not full floor, it's four door. But you need to understand that materials don't have a 3D shape. So basically is just a flat picture on the 3D model. So if you need, if you wanted to be like real dense and bumps, then you need to adjust the model, not the material. The material is just, just to paint. We go to shapes. We have some basic shapes here. We can drag and drop it like this. When you drag and drop an actor, it appears here in this list. And it's called shapes fear. Then let's do the pyramid like this. So these are 3D models, very basic ones. If you selected and go to Materials again, you can select a material for this. Don't forget though, that we have all these 3D models and materials only because they are important to the project because we have checked the starter content. Best practice is to put a letter or two letters sometimes before the name of your acid, just to organize them and to understand what type they are. For example, M means Material. Team is texture as M means static mesh. So for example, let's drag and drop this cheer and another one and rotate it like this. And select and rotate it like this. Maybe. Okay. So now we have two chairs. You can see it here, share and cheered. Two. It says instance because all those actors are instances of this chair. If you do anything with this instance, let's say, for example, we can change the material for it. Like this. That looks strange, but we, we changed something right? Then I'm going to put the other instance. You see that our actions didn't affect the third chair. That's because every chair is its own instance. If we want, for example, to change the material for all chairs here, for example, we have several tiers in our game and then we decide that we want to change material for every chair. Of course, you can click on every chair, go here, change the material, go here and change the material, but it's also time-consuming. Instead, you can just click here, right-click Edit. You'll see this window. Here are a lot of different settings, but for now, I just want you to look here material and I'm going to choose this colorful material. Okay? So I click save and then close and you see that all the chairs are now colorful. And even the chair here. If you have an acid that you want to input to your project, you need to click here input, then find a folder where your object is. Then click or select everything if you want to input everything open. Then for this window you usually just click inputs all. And here's the new assets that you have just inverted. And after you're finished in Britain, your assets, you will notice that they are icons are marked with this star symbol, and that means that the acids are not saved yet. So what you need to do is to click Save. All right, here it shows you the type. We have two static meshes, two materials to textures. And yes, the level is just our level here. And since I didn't save it, and real asks me if I wanted to save the level two. So I want to save the level. Okay? Final thing, if you want to move acids from one folder to another, you can drag and drop. For example, these textures go to textures. You can move here, copy here. Let's do just move and you can see that two items moved. Alright? Okay, Very good. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we will talk about actors. 7. Lesson 7 Actor: In this lesson, we're going to talk about actors. You already know that everything, almost everything here is an actor. You also can see the actor here and that we have 14 actors with one actor selected. If I select a few actors, I can hold Control button and select a few objects. Thus, I select file. For example. An actor is any object that can be placed into a level. If we talk about 3D projects than actors support 3D transformations such as translation, rotation and scaling. And when you create a level, you place actors into l level than move and scale them and add script to make them behave the way you want. For example, this cheers. I think there are too many chairs, so I just select an actor and push Delete button. Just like this. Okay, so now we have big chair and small chair. So with this chair selected, you can see that we have this actor selected here. And the type is static Match actor. And we already know that mesh means a 3D object. What means static? Static here means that it's geometry can be changed because in contrast with static, we have Skeletal Mesh actors, and that means animated mesh geometry can be deformed. For example, when a player is moving. Let's play the game. So this is Skeletal Mesh actor and it can be deformed. Geometry can be deformed. For example, you can see the player is moving and legs bending, arms bending. So geometry of the match is changing. With chair. We don't have such things with its geometry. That's why it's called Static Mesh. Alright? Okay. What do we also have here? We have a lighting. We already know that we have different kinds of light, and here we have directional light. It has type, directional light. Directional light is one type of a view and there are cold light actors, and it's pretty obvious that you need them to add light to your level. We also have other types of light available. For example, if you do right-click anywhere like this, then go to blaze actor and go to Allied. So you can see that we also have the point light and spotlight, wrecked light. All these slides are different types of light. You can use it for different things. For the light actors, we usually can adjust color of the light and temperature of the light right here, light color. You remember, we have already done that and we have temperature. So if I go back to just the white color and adjust the temperature than the lower this number is, the warmer the light is, and we go all the way down to that side, then the light will be very, very cold, okay, And just going to revert it for now. If we click Play again and take a look at this list, we can see that now we have 23 actors. That's because a few of the actors are active only in the play mode. For example, the character, the player start and all the other things. We go to the content rower and open the audio way and then put the audio actor here, for example. And let's go to the particles and add a particle like that. And then play the game. You can hear the sound. And that sound is an actor as well. There are audio and sound actors and there is no need to know all the types. You just need to understand that actors can be different things. Let's just delete these primitives, dislike this, then go to products and select this big rock. That is bag. Okay, now enter play mode. That was, that was loud. I'm going to delete this cell Director for now. Okay. Once again, since we were testing the edema game, you probably think that it would be the same this time. You just run and be blocked by the stone. Like obstacle, right? No. It seems like the stolen is nothing. It doesn't have any physical shape. It doesn't look great. So we're going to fix it and talk about physical shapes in the next lesson. 8. Lesson 8 Collision: Collision. This lesson we're going to talk about collisions, right? Let's fix this mess with the stone. Why it doesn't have any shape. I click Play and then detach, and then select the player. Let's go here to the details. So we have the character and incited. We have the Capsule Component, mesh and camera. So Kimara is camera and we understand that. But take a look here, Capsule Component, Collision. And the mesh. Mesh itself doesn't have physics. If we don't want our objects to just go through each other and we want some real physics than we need collision. In this case, it has the Capsule Component only with shape Component Collision as possible. For example, we have this cheer and this term blocks the movement of the player. And the stone doesn't block the movement. So let's take a look at what the differences are. Select an actor like this and try to edit it. You know, that it means that we added only this instance of the actor. If you want to edit all the instances, you need to find this object here in this drawer and double-click on it. Okay? Alright, so this is the editor, static mash editor. We can see the object, the chair here. And if you go to the Show tab and click simple collision, it will show you the simple collision that it has. This is what the collision looks like. You can see it's not the shape of the actor. It's actually a bit bigger. That means that probably this chair does not designed to be set on it. You also can see that we have all the different things here, such as material. You remember how we changed it? For now, we don't need anything else. I just wanted to show you the collision, how it looks like. So let's just click here to close it. Now let's open this tone. So again, I'm going to find it here in the draw, our double-click on it. And here's the stone. If we click Show and simple collision again, nothing shows. And if we click here collision, you can see that we can remove or delete collision because there is no collision. How to add a collision? We have different types of the collision, sphere, capsule and walks. Let's click sphere first. You can see that it has sphere shape. Let's click capsule. That is capsule. Let's click box. It is box. You can see that new collision does not replace the other collision, but adds to it. And if you need to delete a collision, you just select it like this. Select this leg the collision and delayed. So for example, you want the box collision, it's very simple collision, but you know what NAT box. Let's let's go with the capsule collision. Okay. I think it's it's more it looks more like this tone, okay. Change the collision by moving it like this. If you want, you can make it smaller, you can make it bigger. Well, let's make it very big like this. Then we click, Save and close this. Now let's see what we have. You can see we can go further. We can go through this because the collision is here. You can see, yes, we're still far away from the stone, but the stone that you see as just a match and the collision is what matters. Alright, now let's open it again. And now let's do, let's make this collision very, very small. For example, like this. You can see it's not the, it's not the shape of the stone. Let's say we're very lazy and we don't want to do good collision. Okay. Save closet, play again. Okay. Yeah. You can say we are going through it, but that's through all the stone. Just threw a part of it. I think you already get the idea. Okay. Let's go back and give this boy a nice and good collision instead. Alright, safe. Okay, but let's take another look at this collision things. So we have sphere capsule inbox and they work perfectly for very simple objects. But sometimes you need something more complicated. So that's why we have this collision generator. So ten means at logs with four edges beveled like this, like this. I like this, X, Y, or Z aligned edges. Okay, let's delete those. Then we have 18, That's box with all edges beveled. It's more complex. And then the 26 is the box with all edges and corners beveled. Okay, so I think we can delete the Capsule Component now because this collision looks much better. And of course, the more the number, the more precise is your mesh. But for very, very detailed mesh we have this option, also convex collision. So I'm going to remove this one, go with other convex collision. Here you can see the settings. So what we have the **** count as number of primitives of this, this option lets me move it like this. So this option increases or decreases the number of vertices your collision mesh has. And the last one means number of voxels to use when generating the collision mesh. The higher these values, the more precise your collision mesh will be, but also more complex. So let's apply it. Okay, it's not perfect, it's not perfect. Let's increase it. You can see it, can take some time. So try to play with it. Alright, So for now, I just going to remove this collision and put this one. Alright, so let's save it and play again. Now the stone is just stone for a fact. But with collision applied to your static mesh, you can now simulate physics. For example, I'm going to select this cheer. Go to physics here and click Simulate Physics checkbox. You also can see that if you put this check mark here, it says true and without it false. So you can't go wrong. Alright, let's click Play and try to move it a bit. This is not only because the static measures simulate in physics, but also because of the collision preset. Let's go down to this DTLs and go to the collision. We have Collision Presets here. And it's a drop-down menu. You can open it up. You can see that we have a lot of different presets for collision, then regulates the way Static Mesh reacts to the other objects in the world. And let's say we grabbed this chair and move it on top of this tone. Like this. Just like this. Okay? So now it is simulate, it simulates physics. And if we go to the collision, pretty sad. Instead of physics actor, we choose overlap all. So we chose overlap all. And then we click and then we click Play. Whoop. Did you see? Did you see it? What happens is the cheer overlaps everything else. So basically the chair is falling down and you can see that and real reports, the warnings because of that. Let's take a look what other presets are. So the pond, what is Pon? Pon is this thing, right? So it's the base class of all actors that can be controlled by players. Or a pawn is the physical representation of a player or a Thai entity within the world. Of course, the character is a special point. For example, if we have a game with, let's say, a dog and a cat, when you, as a player control the cat and AI controls the dog. Both of the actors or ponds. But the cat is the character subclass. So for example, if now we go to the stone Collision Presets and choose ignore only pawn. And then play. Camera didn't know what to do. But yeah, the basically it ignores the pond. Alright. And for every and each preset where you can choose it and you can see in this table how it works. Although there are many, many presets, we have just three options. Ignore, overlap, or blog. And you can see here what every option does. You also can take a look at this table which describes each and every type of the preset. Alright, so that was a long lesson, but it is very important. Don't worry, the next one will be a bit easier. 9. Lesson 9 Components: Components. We're back to components, but before that, I didn't mention, but you can move all the windows around just like this if you want. I don't know. If you don't want your Outliner here. I don't know why by or if you accidentally moved the windows, you can just move them back. Or if you close one of them, just don't know how to go back. You click Window and find your window here. For example, the outliner. Just going to move it here next to details. So components. Remember that mesh is just one of the components actors have. There are many. I also need to say that a component is a piece of functionality that can be added to an actor and you remember how the shape component was missing? Yeah, so that's just one of the components. Components can't exist by themselves. They must be attached to an actor. And components are Instance, meaning that each copy of an actor gets its own unique component. For example, if you have a TV in your game and you're showing something unique on the screen, the display and what is showing will be unique for this particular TV. Otherwise, all TVs in your game will be showing the same thing. Just the way we did with the chair. I can give this chair its own unique components. This one. And this actor will not have this. Or you can create a blueprint that will include many, many things inside it. And in this case, when you create instances of this blueprint, that means that each and every instance of this blueprint will be the same. We'll be talking about blueprints in the next lesson. Bye. Now, let's take a look at a few components types. Just want you to know that there are a few types of components. Light components. Yes, there are light actors, but what if you need to add a light to all the actor, like a lamp? Let's go to the Blueprints folder and select this lab. I'm going to put it somewhere here. So this is the ceiling lamp. If it's selected, we can see that it has a few components. For example, the point light is the point light component. In this case, oldest still enlight is a blueprint. And if we need to edit it, we need to go and edited and Blueprint. Then I want to talk about audio components. So if you go to the audio folder here, you can see that we have a few sounds, and each sound has a queue. So sound, It's skull with a sound wave and then sound cue. So the sound component allows you to add sound as a sub object to an actor, provide an a sound source. The sound cue is a physical version of a sound. We can select the lamp. And you can see dropped acid here to add a component. So let's select this sound cue. I just going to drag and drop this component. And now the sound is the component of this vector. Let's click Play and try to hear. I'm not sure if my mike is sensitive enough to record this. I'll try. Yeah. That's the sound. Not very pleasant, but that's just the way it works. So each component type can be very complicated topic and deserves a separate video. But for the purposes of this course, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. You're doing your first steps. You don't need to feel overwhelmed. And four now the understanding that components are attached to actors and each actor has its own unique components is enough. Okay, then the next lesson we're going to talk about blueprints. See you there. 10. Lesson 10 Blueprint: All right, Welcome to the lesson about blueprints. You've heard about them, right? So let's just get into it. Alright, so blueprint is a complete gameplay scripting system. By saying incomplete, I'm in it because this character is actually a blueprint. So let's click here, add it. We have this as a separate window. If you want, you can drag and drop this window right here next to the level window. So let's take a look at right now, you see the Event Graph. You can zoom in and out with your mouse wheel. Use your right mouse button to move around just like this. So we have this three windows here, Event Graph, Construction, Script and viewport. Let's start with the viewport. We can see that kinda similar to the editor, to the mash editor that we used in the previous lessons. This window where you can view and manipulate your blueprints components. So for example, you can select the Capsule Component. You can see that the component is selected here. If you select camera, the camera is selected. Here you can see the details for the components that you selected. Now let's go back to the Event Graph. So again, zoom in and out with your mouse wheel or right-click to move around. The event graph contains a node graph that uses events and function calls to perform actions in response to game play events. A graph as a network of nodes. Every element like this, It's called node. So all of these are different nodes and everything that happens in the Event Graph happens only at runtime. So if you change something in the scene while game is not playing, you won't see any changes. Only when you run the game, you'll see them. With the construction script. You will see the changes because the construction script is executed when the object is initiated in the engine, it doesn't sound very easy, but let's take a look at what we have here. So this blueprint already has a few nodes. Every node is connected somehow. This connections perform some actions in the game, right? For example, if you take a look at this movement, input, gamepad and mouse known graphs, you can see that it starts with the input, move forward. Then this is function and movement input. And then to it, it goes to get forward vector and get control rotation. I don't expect you to understand how it works right now. It's just your first look at this nodes, okay? So this sign, this F, that means function. So we can understand that this three nodes are functions. Then, for example here, jump. So this node graph managers or jumps. So if the jump key is pressed, then jump. If released, stop jumping. Inside this node we held the function. The function jump inside this one, stop jumping. You can see that we have the simulating. If you go back to your level and click stop, then come back to the Event Graph and the text disappeared. Again. Let's play. Go back and you see we have this yellow frame and big yellow word simulated. Let's go back. Click Stop, right? You remember I said that everything that happens in the Event Graph happen only at runtime and you will not see any changes when your game is not being played. So, for example, now, when the game is not, we're not in the plane mode. We don't see the character at all. Only when the game is played on. Then we can see the character and we can see how everything works here. You also can use these buttons here to, for the simulation. And if you accidentally close to your Event Graph, hello, top on it, you go here, event graph. Double-click to open it. And construction script as well. If you need to select a few nodes together, you can just use your left mouse button like this. When you select a few nodes, you can usually just drag them together. But since this is one group of nodes, we can just drag it around like this. Now, let's take a look here. We have the Event Graph Construction Script, and here's variables. Probably you know what variables are. But if not variables or properties that hold a value, there are a lot of different types of variables. For example, let's click plus. To create a new variable, we can give it a name. I'm just gonna give it the test var variable name. And next to the name you can see the type of the variable. You also can see this type here on the Details panel. So as I mentioned, variables have a lot of different types. Let's click here. For example, what Boolean type means. It means yes or no. So there are a lot of types of variables, and in Unreal Engine, each type has its own color. So for example, Boolean is true or false. Float is a float number, meaning something like this with a point. Also have the integer, and it means a whole number, like 123102025 of just whole number, no decimal and other types. For example, we have the string type, a text string. For example, let's do like this. When the play begins, we see a string on the screen. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna add an event right-click and you can see all actions for this blueprint. So I'm going to add event. I'm going to find something that, that is close to begin play. You can do like this, like try to find, okay, Here this event began play, or you can type here again. And it will show you everything that it has. Okay? Event Begin Play here. Now, don't forget to change the type to this string, like this. Next we're going to need to print string. Okay? You guys see this is function print string. So lads connected like this. Okay? If you want to connect two notes together, you can see it's very simple. If you want to disconnect them, Alt and left-click connect. Disconnect. Not all nodes can be connected together. But if they can be connected, you can see this green check mark. Then we need the variable, we're going to drag and drop it to this blueprint like this. And it will always ask you, do you want to get it all you want just sat variable. In this case, I need to set my variable. Here. We can see the text of the string. So let's put something like if you click here, you can see more options for this function like this. Also very good thing that you can hover it like this and read description of a function, prints a string to the log and optionally to the screen its development on this. So it's actually just for you to check if everything works. So it says print to screen and checked print to log, check texts color. Let's change it to red. Okay? Duration. This is how many seconds we will see in the text. So I'm going to put ten. Okay, let's, let's click Compile and then Save. Okay. Now I'll go back to the game. Click play. Here is the string. Ten seconds. It should be here and then after that, just go away. Yeah. All right. Good stuff. And that's how Blueprint works. You see, we started with the event begin play. We've found this event in this endless list of different events. There are a lot of different events here. Then we've found the function that will print the string. And then we set the variable with this function. Just like this, using different variables and functions and events, you're going to create a logic for your game. Instead of writing the code, you'll be creating nodes and connect them together. Just like this, you see, we connected them. And I know it might look scary. But just think about it. This system allows us to program without knowing C plus plus and learning C plus plus is way more difficult to leave me in this course, your goal is to understand how essential elements of Unreal Engine five works. So let's go ahead and talk about node groups in the next lesson. 11. Lesson 11 Blueprint Node Groups: In this lesson, I would like to talk about some elements of blueprints. So first let's talk about events in the last lesson when we have added this event, begin play. What events do is pretty obvious because for this one, for example, it means that all functionality that is after this node will be a response to this event. In this case, when the play starts. And I just want to remind you that we have a lot of pretty sad events here. And you also can add your custom event. For example, let's say you want to set a health for a character in the beginning of the play. So we're going to need the new variable. Let's call it health. Since it's health, we need to choose something that represents a number. We could just float maybe, but that would mean that the number is decimal. So it's like 5.34 health, I think it doesn't look good, so well, health points, it's usually one hundred ninety, five, ninety, etc. So integer it is. Let's add the description. So if you wanted to set the health in the beginning of the play, you need to drag and drop this to your blueprint and set to whatever number, let's say 100. And connected like this. So when you do this and click Play, you don't see any changes, right? That's because, yes, we set the health but we didn't say show me the health. We didn't say print the health Somewhere, right? We don't have any interface elements on the screen right now, because for a game you would have some bars for health, for your weapons. But right now we don't have anything. So yeah, we did set the health but we don't see it. If you want to check that the health was set to this number, what you need is you need to print this information on the screen. So let's add a function. This is the function that you already know. It's print string. But instead of this, we're going to open this up and connect the health to this side. If you see that when you do like this, when you hover over this, when you hover it, you can see it says convert integer to string. That means that it would add this converter here. You can see the different colors because this variable is integer and this variable is string. So we can convert it first. We need to convert it first up. Let's put ten for the duration. Click Compile, Save, and lay. Alright. Here you can see the 100. It's the health points. We ask the system to show us this variable. It did. That's it. So the print string is one of the functions and you will use a lot of different functions when working with Unreal Engine. Basically, a function is a node that is called from another graph. Functions can be public, protected, or private, and you can see the description here on the screen. So the public function, this is default setting. And that means that any object can call this function protected means that the function can only be called by the current blueprint, as well as any blueprints that derive from the current blueprint. And private function means that only the current blueprint can call it. So to create a function, you can either use this list. There are a lot of different functions here. You can take a look. This sign means function. So all this are functions. Or if you need to create your own function, then you go here, Functions, click here, function. New function was created. You can rename it and you can delete it just like this. And the final element that I want to show you is timeline. Timeline nodes provide time-based animation based on events, floats, vectors of colors that can be triggered at keyframes along the timeline there specifically built for simple non cinematic tasks, such as opening doors. We will need timeline nodes for simple time-based animation. And in the next video, I'm going to show you how to use timelines, but we're going to create our own blueprint and create some magic. See you there. 12. Lesson 12 BP p1: Alright, so you made it to this lesson. And in this lesson we're going to create a blueprint, new one. Let's do it. So what are we going to do? Just going to go back to the content rover and create a new folder. I would say here in the content folder, you can click here, add new folder. And I'm going to call it blue print Test. Because we have this blueprints here for the starch content, but I just want our blueprints to be in a separate folder. Double-click to open the folder. Now let's add a blueprint. So Ed, and here we have some basic assets like blueprint level material and younger system. And we need the blueprint class. So we need to pick parent class here. And you can see there are several types and even more here. A lot of them. But for now, I just want you to know that there is the actor class, which is very common class, character class, which has the blueprint for the character. You remember that the character that we have here has this icon for this blueprint. That means that has blueprint has the character class. For this lesson, I'm going to choose the actor class. I'm going to rename it to be p. Remember I told you that it's best practice to rename your items accordingly. So BP for blueprint, M for material, and etc. I'm going to call it a ball because my plan is to create a ball here. Okay? Double-click and drag and drop it here like this. Okay, so now we have the viewport opens and there is nothing, nothing here. That's because our blueprint is just empty. So we need to add something to it. So I'm going to add sphere. Since we have some acids even ported to your project, you'll see this sphere right here. All right, here's this fear. Let's take a look at the details. So this here is static mash. It has material which is basic shape material. So let's click Save, compile, and go back to your scene. And now I can drag and drop this ball to the scene. To put this ball on the floor, we need to move it a bit like this. All right, Let's click Play. Okay? Alright, so we see this sphere on the floor. And as you can see, it already has a collision. So let's go back to the blueprint. And you can see that when you create a new blueprint, there will be these three events drafted for you. But this node, these nodes are disabled and will not be called unless you add a node somewhere. And what I want to do is I want this ball or the sphere to disappear when the character touches it. To do it, first, we need some kind of trigger. So let's add a collision, add collision box collision. Make it a bit bigger like this. Much. Okay? We have this box collision and this box collision is a trigger. So the script that we need is when the character touches the trigger, then the object disappears, right? So let's go back to the Event Graph. And you know what this event actor begins. Overlap works for us just fine. You can check the description event when this actor overlaps and now the actor, for example, a player walking into a trigger. So what do we need? We need to destroy the object when you're just experimenting around. And real engine, which you can do is select this and then just type what you want to do. In this case it's just Troy. We like and we have this Destroy Actor function and we also held the destroy component function, but Of course, if we choose Destroy component function, nothing will happen because the component will be destroyed, but the ball itself, this fear still will be visible. So we need to destroy actor function. And we can see the target, which is self. And that means that this function works for this ball. Alright, so let's save, compile and try it. That's it. Alright, let's do the other thing, very simple again. So this time what I want to do is I want the sphere to change its color or change its material when the character touches it. And again, we're gonna use this event because touch, in this case means overlap two collisions or overlap each other. Right now if we click here to this fear, we can see that it has the basic shape material, but we have a lot of different materials here. We can use some of them. So I'm going to select this node, just click Delete. We're going to find the function. So what we want to change, we want to change the material. That means we want to set new material. We want to set material if you just type material, a lot of different functions. But here, set material. So you see set material walks out or set material sphere. Actually, that's the elements that we have here is the components right here. And if I rename one of them, box and go back. And in typeset material, you can see it says box mine. So this not just as fear or at box, It's the components that we have created. So I'm going to change the material for the sphere because the box is just the collision. It doesn't have material. Okay? Okay, Very good. I'm going to rename the box to just box again. Alright, so let's select a material, for example, this one. And now I just need to connect this with the event just like this. Okay? Save compile. So when the character touches the sphere, it changes its material. Awesome, right? Since we chose the set material for this fear, the node sphere was created automatically, so you don't need to overthink it. The system has created the set material function and the target node, which is the sphere. Now it's time for a bit more complicated script. So I'm going to close this one. You can see this sign, that means that it's not saved. So basically, you can just click Control and S can click Save All. And then it is saved. But we will not use this sphere anymore. Instead, we're going to create a new blueprint. It will be the same class, the vector class, VP. We're going to call it a door, because it will be about door. Okay, again, a drag and drop it here. Alright. So again, the viewport is empty. And what we need to do is to add something here. So what this blueprint for, I want the door to open when the player open set. So we need to add a door here. And you can remember that we have in the folder prompts right here, we have a lot of different things such as this door, this door frame, and the door whom together. Okay. So I'm gonna delete this for now. But that's what I want inside the blueprint. So to end this, we first need to add a mesh. So I'm going to type match and you see we have Skeletal Mesh, Static Mesh. And yeah, this is the mesh that we want to create, the Static Mesh. This is door is actually as just a part of the door. So I'm going to need another part. I'm going to create a static mesh. And it's going to create the door again. But instead of the door, the door frame. First, we need to rename it to door frame. Door. And I can drag and drop it like this. So that now we have the door frame and inside it we have the door. What do we need to do is we need to move this door so that it fits the door frame. Let's do it. Alright, so this is our door with the door frame. So now we need to add a trigger. Remember the way we did with the sphere, we need some kind of collision so that when a player enters the area, we can understand that it's happening. So let's add color. I'm going to use the box collision again. We need to adjust its size. That should be okay. Right now, the box is the part of the door frame. We can just move it like this. And now the box is not a part of the door frame anymore. Okay, So I'm going to compile and save this and go to the Event Graph. For this group, we won't need, we don't need these nodes. Some just going to use my left mouse to do like this. And click Delete. Okay, so first we need an event, right? So let's create an event. So what do we need to do? We need to select the box and create a new event. So you can scroll down and see a lot of events that we have here. In this case, we need this one on component begin overlap. Let's click. It also says box because the box was selected. So this event will be called when something like a character overlaps the box. And the box is this collision box that we did. But we don't want all actors to start these script, right? We just need the character. So in this case, we need this over actor reference and then we need to type cast, cast to third, third person character. This is the BP ThirdPersonCharacter. It's the way the blueprint for the character is called pure Character Blueprint is called the other name. You will see the other name here. And you'll see that this Caz does, it tries to access object as a blueprint class. It may be an instance of it will check if the actor that overlaps is the BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And if yes, then from this point you can see this. It says exec, exec execute this. If no, then cast failed and something happens. So if it has the character, I want the player to push a button, for example, EE button to open the door. So if the character, which should be this character, all the labs, the box, then I want to enable input. So what I want to do is I want to type in enable inputs. You see that it has the player controller. So we need a player controller. Okay, just like this. So if something overlaps the box, then first we check if it's the BP ThirdPersonCharacter. And if yes, then we enable the input for the player controller. But we can just leave it like this. We need to say what will happen if we end the overlap. For example, the character can touch the door, touched the box, then run away a few, a few miles, and then the inputs still will be enabled. And if he pushed the button that we assign, then the door will open. And that's not what we want. So we need to go back to the box and choose on components and overlap. So that's this way we can and all this, and it's pretty the same. So again, we need to check if it's cast. To be happy. Thirdpersoncharacter. It is. Again, we connect it like this. And this time, if yes, then disable, disable, and put this same player controller. Alright, perfect. Let's save and compile. Now it's time to add a key that we will use to open and close the door so we can choose whatever button you want. For example, let's choose the e button, E. Okay? They are all the keys. So this is the E key and you can see that it has pressed, released and the key, I want the character to be able to open and close the door by pressing the E. So if you push, eat, once the door will open, if you push E the second time it will close. That means that we basically have just the two positions, right? One is up and one is closed. And to manage them, we can use the flip flop. Flip flop action. Here you go. Flip-flop is just two alternatives. When you press one, it does the a, and if you press the second time it does the b. So what Open Door means? It means that this door, which is this part of the door frame, is rotated, right? So let's sort of dated like this, 90 degrees C. It can see here that we have rotated it along, along the z axis, 90 degrees. So okay, let's go back to this script here. So I'm going to drag and drop the mesh because I'm going to change its settings and then go back in bed. We mean the rotation. Rotation. We have set related, we have this set related rotation. That's good for cleaning to do that the rotation of the component related to its parents. Okay, that works. So the target will be this door. Then the a is going here and we change the axis to 90 degrees. And then let's just do like this. Select these two nodes. Copy Control, Control C, Control V, and B, like this. And the new rotation will be just 0. Okay? We don't need this door. I think we just can connected like this. Alright. Let's check. Can file safe. Okay. Hold on. We need to put the door on the scene first. So I'm going to our folder blueprint, test for the door right here. In then play the game. I just I have pressed E and the door opens and it lets me go through. Now I'm going to click E again, coast. And from the other side, I think the right way to open the door from is from this from this side. This is the right way to open the door, right? Let's put minus so that it opens not to this side but to the other side. And I also see that we need to move the door bit. You see this? You see the space between the door and the door frame doesn't look good case and go back to the loop print like this. Okay, and then go to the Event Graph and put minus here. Again, save compile. It might not be the case in your case because it depends how you put your door frame to this angle or to the other, but I didn't want to redo this. Oh, I put the other door. Oh, my God. I didn't want that. I didn't want to play again. Open the door. It opens. It closes. I'm pushing E. Right now. I'm pushing E on my keyboard. If you assign the other button, then the other button will work. Okay. 13. Lesson 13 Blueprint: Practice p2: But if you want to go even more further, we can smooth this opening. You see right now, it's very, sorry. It's not natural. It's not natural. We see. And we want to smooth this, right? Right now we have only two positions. One is here when the door is closed and the other one is there when the door is opened. Let's use timeline to do this. So let's go back to the blueprint and now we don't need this. So I'm just going to click, I'm going to push out and click here to disconnect those. I'm going to put this down. So let's add a timeline. So I'm gonna do timeline from this output. Timeline. Timeline. Timeline. Timeline provides time-based animation based on the events. It can really help with. Simple, not cinematic animations and opening doors, words just fine. So I'm going to name it door, Open Door. Okay. We have this inputs and outputs. Let's open the timeline by double-clicking on it. And now we don't see anything here. There is nothing. So we need to add a track right here. Track. We have flaw track Vector, Track, event, and even color. For this purposes, we can use the float track. And Float Track uses values. So right here at 0, and we can set a value, a float value here. Then here we can set the other value and etc, etc, etc. If you want to make this, make the timeline bigger or smaller, you can just zoom in and out with your mouse button like this. And here you can see that the length, which is five seconds. So what it does by eight by adding values here, here, here, and here. You are saying, I want this value to be this number when it's on 0 seconds. Then on 025, I want this value to be this. And then this, and then this animation is moving actually through the timeline. So if you just take your hand and move it a bit, you can see that when you first start the movement you had is in some position. Let's say it's 0 position, then you move it a bit higher. That means that in 2.5th, your hand is on this new position, which is, for example, 1.5. Then you move it a bit higher and it's two. Your hand goes through 0 to two within, let's say 1 second. And to add the value, you need to right-click on it and add key. This value is this. We call it keys. Where you click it. It will add the value. For each value. You can click here. When it is selected, it is blue. You can see the time and the value. So for example here, time is 0.4 almost and the value is 0.35. Here the time will be one. Let's add here almost one. We can set one. And we can set a value like this. You can see it. So I'm going to delete these keys and start from 0. Of course, because for the very beginning, we want the value to be 0. And what the value is, it's actually will be this value, this rotation value. You can see we put 90 here and that's what I want, but I just don't want it to be just two positions. I want it to be smooth. I put the first key here for the time to 0. Value is 0. And then in, then after, after 1 second, I wanted to be, I put 1 second, I wanted to be minus 90. Okay, we don't see it now because the scale is not that big. So you can click here, Zoom To Fit Vertical. Here you go. Okay. But the timeline is five seconds long. I think we can just put 1 second here. Okay, very good. Okay, and then since I want it to be smooth, I want to add a key sound waves here and then move the value bit. Like this. It's not very smooth. Let's click here and try to make it a bit smoother. Let's see something like this. Now when we go back to the Event Graph, to the Event Graph, we see the new track right here. Let's rename it open. Here's the door Movement timeline. So I need this right here. And actually for this one, we don't need the second one. The target will be the same the door. But if right now, I'll try to connect this timeline to this new rotation input. It doesn't let me because it is float and this is rotator. And you can see that it's not competitive. What to do? Good news, we have make rotator. You go. Now. Let me just move it like this. So now it's going to make rotator from this float instead of x. I think I'm gonna connected to the to the rotator. Okay, very good. And I connected it to z because sorry, because you can see that we have changed the z axis and we also saw it here when we open the door. Now we want to update this timeline. We're going to connect this update output right here, is going to update in this and the flip-flop, we have a, we don't have B. So for V, What we want is just the reverse, right? Let's just connected like this. Compile, save. Let's try how small. I do like it. I do like it. Very good. Very smooth rotation. If you don't like the animation that she did, you can always open this timeline and corrected somehow. For example, we can, instead of 1 second, we can put, let's say 2.5th. And in this case, whoop, butt Ugly. And in this case the animation will be faster. So again, compile save, and let's try. You see a bit faster. Yeah, so you did all this. Congratulations. This is a this is for you. This is for you. You did an amazing job really, and I am proud of you. So let's sum everything up and talk about next steps in the last video. 14. What's next?: They didn't say, I'm proud of you and say it again because I really do Unreal Engine five isn't something simple that you can learn in 12 hours. But hopefully this course is give you an understanding of how Unreal Engine tools work. Now you know how to create levels, you know what actors are and that they have components like light, you know, what collision is, and how you can use different shapes of collisions depending on what you need. Do you even know what blueprints are and knowing about variables, functions, and timelines, you are able to create blueprint for yourself, which is awesome. What's next? You ask me next, depending on your goals, you choose your next path. Ask yourself, what do you want to create with Unreal Engine? Because it has so many different tools that it makes it very simple to get burnout and that's not what you want. So let me know what you want to create an AI will decide what to do next based on your comments. I hope you enjoyed the course and I'll see you in the next ones.