Unreal Engine: Introduction to Unreal

Following on from the C++ portion of my course, it’s time to dive into the world of Unreal Engine. This week’s focus was on getting familiar with the engine’s interface and understanding its core concepts.

Here are my notes from watching the content for the first week of Game Programming Foundations.

Getting Started with the Editor

The F key focuses the camera on your selected object – essential for navigating big levels quickly
The Outliner panel shows every object currently loaded in your level
You can replace the default map and set it as your startup map (found in Project Settings → Maps & Modes)
World origin sits at 0,0,0 - good to know when placing objects
Unreal’s units are in centimeters, not meters
Hold Left Alt + drag to duplicate objects in the viewport
Dragging objects onto others in the Outliner assigns parent-child relationships

Setting Up Git LFS

Unreal’s asset files (*.uasset, *.umap) are large binaries that’ll break regular Git repos fast. You need Git LFS:

git lfs install
git lfs track "*.uasset"
git lfs track "*.umap"

This generates a .gitattributes file. Make sure it contains:

*.uasset filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
*.umap filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

Commit this file early – it’s the difference between a 50MB repo and one that balloons to gigabytes.

Assets and Imports

Textures don’t stand alone – they get wrapped into Materials
Import 3D models via FBX export from Blender
When importing textures, pay attention to import method options (e.g. “Do Not Create Material” if you’re building your own)

Common Asset Types

WorldGridMaterial — the default checkerboard material you see in untextured areas
Textures can wrap around objects like a “chocolate Santa Claus wrapper”

Material Editor

Unreal uses PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials. Key values include:

Metallic, Roughness, and Specular control surface appearance
You can pack three greyscale maps into one RGB texture for efficiency:
- Red = Ambient Occlusion
- Green = Roughness
- Blue = Metallic
For Linear Colour textures (HDR data), untick sRGB
Normal maps encode surface direction as RGB vectors – the purple/blue colour shifts represent angle information, not lighting brightness

Material Instances

These let you reuse master materials without recompiling:

Build your base material with texture samples
Convert texture samples to parameters (right-click → Convert)
Right-click the material → Create Material Instance
Instance is a child material you can customise independently (default colour, normal map, occlusion map, etc.)

Blueprints Overview

Unreal’s visual scripting system:

Everything inherits from Object; subclasses inherit parents
Blueprints appear under All Classes when spawning or creating actors
Press End key to drop selected object onto the floor plane
The left panel is the “My Blueprint” header (like a class header file)
Booleans are prefixed with lowercase ‘b’ in code (bIsOn), but Unreal strips this prefix in UI names (“Is On”)

Event Graphs

Where gameplay logic lives:

Group functionality into logical clusters (Physics Graph, Input Graph, etc.)
Nodes like For Loop and Branch form control flow
The graph is split: left side = header/properties, centre = implementation nodes

Notes: These are raw notes from watching Week 1 content for Game Programming Foundations. Expect updates as I build the project out - the GitHub repo linked below tracks progress.

sawnoff-studios/first-project