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"text": "Hello and welcome to this section. In this section we will go through the Unreal Engine interface. And before we go through the interface, it is very important to know that you don't need to know every single button inside of this engine as a beginner. When I started out I didn't even know 20% of what was in here. And so let's learn the basics and from the basics you can then develop by watching more advanced tutorials. We can start to the top left. here you can see file, inside of file you can create a new level, you can save the current progress you have and you can also create a new project. Inside of the edit you have the editor preferences and here you can edit preferences to the editor to your liking. I haven't been in here too much, I haven't had the need to edit anything but you can try to look around and see what you want to edit. Inside of the project settings this is very important and here you can edit settings to the current project that you're working on. For example you can start by writing the company name, the homepage you have, inside of here you can add a movie like when your game starts up, it starts up with a movie, when you package the game, when you're finished with the game, there are a lot of settings. Inside of the input, this is used for when you're programming the game and so on. So very important settings in here, but you don't really need to go through them right now. So let's close it. Inside of the edit, we also have the plugins. And inside of the plugins, you have a lot of plugins that you can go through. Very important when I start my projects, I go into virtualVR and restart the SteamVR. it doesn't contain any VR. So this is very annoying for the players. So I usually go in and un-tick the VR every time I make a new project. And this is of course, if your project is not a VR game. Inside of window, you can create extra windows. So for example, this is the viewport that I'm looking at. And inside of the window, you can create a new viewport. So now, now you can see I have two viewports and this is very useful if you have two monitors. For example I can throw this one on my second monitor and I can take a look there while I'm working here. So this is very important for opening duplicate windows. So this is for example the details panel. I can open another details panel if I want to use it and now these are the same thing. So you can see if I click on an object the same information will be displayed. So this is the very important thing inside of the window. Inside of the tools we will not go through this, this is not very important right now. It's out of the build, this is not very important right now, we will go through it later and in help you can see the documentation for the Unreal Engine. Below we have the Save button, so we have the Save Current button and we have the Create button and inside of the Create button you can create different items, for example lights and shapes and these are cameras for cinematics, some visual effects item and so on. And we will create some items later in the project. So we have the content and this is opening a new content browser. So if you click control and space this bar will appear and This this will also appear if you click on the content drawer down here So the content will open a new content browser and you can see here This is actually the same just like when we opened duplicate detail panels and We have the blueprints. We will not go through this. This is the programming and we have the blueprints, we will not go through this, this is the programming. And we have the cinematics where you can create cinematics. In the middle we have different tools, we have the editing tool, so this is for selecting items and editing. We have the landscape tool, which will create landscapes. We have the foliage tool, which can paint foliage when we add some foliage items in here. So for example, if we want to paint the grass we have the mesh painting tool this is for when we have meshes so items for example a car or a box and we want to paint something on it we can use this tool we have the fractured tool which is self-explanatory and we have the brush editing tool so we will not go through this right escape to quit the play mode or you can click the stop simulation. And here you can see the different platforms you can package the project to. To the right we have the settings and inside of the, which we can use later. and inside of the settings you can also hide the viewport UI if you want. So these are the buttons up here. You can click hide viewport UI and it disappears and I want them enabled so I'll click this again. Okay so these were the top buttons. I'll go back to the editing mode and to the right we have the details panel. So what the details panel is, it will display information about the items that are inside of your level. So if you click, for example, on this plane, this ground mesh here, it will display all of the different settings that you can edit for this ground plane. And to the top here, you can see what the floor consists of. And down here, you can see the transformation, so the location it is inside of the world. So you can see here if I click and drag to the right and left, you edit the location of the world or of the mesh and you can also rotate it and you can also scale it. Okay, and I'll go back to zero and this one is one. So here you can edit all of the different settings for the items inside of your world. So each time you click on, let me go back in the viewport, I'll explain the movement later. But if you click on different items, you can see you get different settings. And for each item, you can edit different settings. So for example, for the sun, you can edit the intensity of the sun and also the temperature and so on. To the right, we have the world outliner. And inside of the world outliner and inside of the world outliner it tells you what is inside of your game inside of this level you have So inside of the current level we are in we have the atmospheric fog It is very hard to see the fog right now because we don't really have Many items inside of the game. We have the floor mesh. You can see when I click it It also selects it inside of the Viewport the those for now. So these are very different light settings and volumetric light settings. We also have the game mode which is used when you're coding with Blueprint and there are different settings that we will not go through right now but very important to know that it is over here. And at the bottom we have the content drawer so if you click on it or if you click control space it will appear and inside of here you have the different folders so these are the different items you can have in your game so for example if I import a character or if I import for example for the beach we are going to import some assets to build our beach for example some rocks all of these different items will be inside of here inside of the folder and when we have items inside of our folders we can then drag those items inside of our level. So all of your items will be inside here, inside of our folders. And you can view these items inside of here. Currently we have nothing and when you have to search, if your game is very large and you have to find a specific item, it is very useful to search here in this search content. To add items to your game or to your project, you can click on add and you can see here there's a lot of buttons that you can add or a lot of items that you can add to your game. You can also right click here and you can see here the same window opens. So I usually never click here. I usually always right click here. So remember to choose the correct folder and then you can right click inside of this folder and then create whatever you need. And don't worry about it for now, we will create enough items later in this project. So an important thing to know is if you click on the viewport, the content drawer will disappear. So this is just a temporary window that opens and closes. So if you click on the viewport, it disappears. You can make it appear again by clicking here or you can click on Control Space and it appears again and you can see here if you drag an item place it in the world it will disappear and Some people will think it's very annoying that it disappears all the time. They want it to open 24-7 and You can also do this by clicking on the content and clicking on content browser This will open another content browser and you can then click and drag Click on Content Browser in the bottom of the viewport and now it stays here even though I work inside of the viewport it still stays up. You can still view the content drawer by clicking control space and you can see it disappears again. So if you want to remove it again you can always right click and close and it closes and you can just use the content drawer again and for now I think I will keep the content browser ducked and I'll see during the project if I remove it or not. A very cool thing is you can right click the folder and you can set a color for the folder. So this is very cool for organizing your folders. So for example, the assets folder, you can give a color and if you have a programming folder, you can give a color. And if you have a visual effects folder, you can give a color and if you have a visual effects folder you can give another color and this is very cool for organizing your stuff so for this current folder that we have I'm going to clear the color so the last important thing for now is the viewport which is in my opinion the most important thing in the engine and inside of the viewport this is where you visualize your game you can see your game as you build it and in the viewport to the top you have this button and inside of this button you can show the FPS if you're interested in seeing the FPS this is very important for viewing the optimization of your game you don't want to be surprised six months later that your FPS is only for example 50 if you want it to be 200 or whatever and I'm going to click on show FPS again again to make it disappear. So we have the field of view if you want to change the field of view. Right now we are going with the 90 as the default and very important things are the game view and this was f11 so if you click f11 it will minimize it again and you can see the details panels was once again so what I usually do is click f11 to maximize the viewport and I click g now I have a very cool full screen of my game and I can try to visualize what it looks like in the current state so if I click f11 again and I press g so I can see everything again so this was this button and another cool thing I usually use is create a camera. So I use, so create a camera here and camera actor. You can see here it creates the camera where I'm looking at right now. So if I move around, you can see the camera is here. And this is for when I set up a shot, for example, I want to showcase what I've done and I want to take a screenshot of it. So we will get to that later. And inside of the next one, the perspective mode we are currently in, you can change the view mode to top view. Now we are viewing the game from the top, from the bottom, from the left and so on. So I'll go back to perspective mode for now. Inside of here, we have the different view modes. So here is the lit mode. This is the game we are viewing with the lighting. View modes If I click the Unlit, I can still see my game but without any lighting. I'm going to click Ctrl Z and Ctrl Z to make everything appear again. We can also view the game in Wireframe mode to see what it looks like in detail lighting and so on. Very different view modes. We also have the optimization views which we will talk about later. I'll go back to the Lit mode and inside of the show you can also display and hide different items inside of your viewports. To the right we have the select tool so here you can select the different items. We have the move tool which we can then move our different items inside of the viewport. So if you click on an item and click on the pivot points, so you can see here each pivot point will move it in a direction. If you click in the middle, the blue or the white ball here, you can move the item in all directions. And if you want to move it in two different directions, you can click on the squares here. So you can see here we can only move it in the two different directions we have chosen. So this is how you move items. And we have the rotate tool. Here you can rotate the different items. For example, it's better if I rotate the plane. So we can rotate the items. You also have the scale tool. And here you can scale the different items too. And if you click on the white square you can scale it uniformly. If you only want to scale it in the y-axis for example you can drag on the y-axis and you can drag on the x-axis and so on. I'm going to click Ctrl Z to go back and these tools are what you use all of the time and this is why it's very important to know the shortcuts for these tools So click you for the select tool click W for the move tool Click E for the rotate tool and click R for the scale tool So for example, you can click W if you want to move something you can move it You can press E to rotate it You can press R to scale it and you can go back to W to move it and so on. So this is more quicker than going up here and clicking all the time. This will take too much time. So I'm going to click Ctrl Z to go back to my standard place here. The next important thing is the grid snapping tool. So here you can see it when I move the plane it snaps every 10 units inside of the Unreal Engine. and if I edit the number up here to 100 now it snaps every 100 so this is very useful if you want to snap your items and to disable the snapping I can click on this this icon and it becomes white instead of blue and you can see I can now move my items smoothly without any snapping if I want to enable the snapping again I can click on the icon and I can snap again. You can decrease the snapping by changing the number to a lower number and it will not snap as much as it will do if you have higher numbers. Okay, and we have the rotate tool. This is the same thing, the rotate snapping. So now it snaps every 10 degrees. I can reduce the snapping or I can increase the snapping to, for example, every 30 degrees. And if you want to disable the snapping, the rotate snapping, you can click on the icon so it becomes white instead. And I can try to rotate now and it's very smooth. I'm going to click Ctrl Z and I'm going to enable the snapping. This is the scale snapping, so now it's also snapping on our scale. And if I I remove it it will now scale very smoothly. I can enable it and increase the snapping you can see here or decrease it sorry and you can see here it's snapping a lot less than before and if I will increase it it will snap very much. Okay and the last thing here is the camera speed, which is very important too. So if you move the camera back and forth, you can see here this is the speed of the current camera. I'll explain to you the camera movement in a bit. To reduce the speed in which you're moving, you can decrease the camera speed and you can see I'm moving very slowly right now. This is very useful if you want to focus on small objects in your level and if you have a very large level it is very important to increase the camera speed so it doesn't take forever to travel around. The last button we have is the maximize and restore the viewport. You can click here and you can see now you have the perspective view and you also have the other views that we looked at previously. You have the top view, the right view, and the back view. You can also change the views by clicking up here. This is something I usually don't use. Sometimes I use it if I want to place something correctly. For example, I can come inside of the top view and if I have an item that I want to specifically place between these two lines, I can come here and place it precisely instead of being inside of the perspective view. So this is a lot easier. And if you want to go back, you can click on this, this small button. It doesn't matter where we click. So you can maximize this can also maximize this and you can then go back and forth like this. And now I want to maximize my perspective view again. So these are the very basics of the Unreal Engine. I hope it was not confusing and what is very important is just learning the very basic buttons inside of the engine. You don't really have to know everything and through making this project and the next projects in the future you will learn the different buttons and it will become very easy for you. So very important to just focus on the basics for now. Let's go over to the next lesson and I will explain more in detail and how to move around inside of your level.", |
