Getting Started

• What is the unreal engine?
  • Epic describes it as a advanced real-time 3D creation tool
    • Definitely for games.
    • and for video production
    • And they are moving into other realms as well.
• But what is Unreal Engine? (Reference)
  • A Integrated Development Environment across coding, art, animation, ...
    • An editor
    • Storage management system
    • Scripting Language
    • C++ support
  • A graphics rendering environment
    • Able to blend models, textures, lighting, and other advanced effects
    • Produces a high quality, possibly even ray traced series of images.
  • A set of "engines"
    • A physics engine that takes care of things like gravity, collisions, ...
    • A partial rendering system
    • A graphics engine
    • An AI engine
  • A part of a development pipeline where teams can build event production pipelines
    • Build models in 3ds Max or some other modeling software
    • Automatically load this and import it into a scene
    • Render the scene with unreal
    • Pipe the output to storage media.
  • And much more.
  • There is too much, we will only scratch the surface.
• Unreal Releases (reference)
  • This engine is constantly changing.
  • Major version (1,2,3...) represent BIG changes in how things work.
  • Minor versions (x.n.m) represent smaller steps forward.
  • This is happening all of the time.
  • Unreal version 5 is not yet here.
  • We need to pick a version and use it. (4.26.0)
• Using Unreal
  • The code is open source, C++
  • Can generate executable for many platforms.
  • There are multiple license options.
    • If you use the Publishing license you pay 5% royalties on anything you sell but only if sales reach $1,000,000.
    • Creators agreement you can use it for free, but you can not charge for anything you produce.
• There is a large marketplace
  • With lots of assets for sale and for free.
  • Advice from Rebecca: Grab the free assets each month.
• Hardware Requirements
  • Look here
• Why Unreal
  • It is a professional engine
  • We can get to the source code if we want.
  • It is free, but widely used.
  • They are very pro-education.
• Why not Unreal
  • It is not the only engine.
  • It is very complex
  • It is constantly changing
  • It