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So you want to make your own games in Unreal?!?!
🕑 Added 2024-07-11 20:50:18 +0000 UTC(I'll have the regular Feign progress update post in the next day or two but I was taking a break today and polished this up for people. Hopefully it's helpful!)
Making games has never been this accessible to people and there are so many options for engines out there. I'm going to give a brief outline and overview of getting started in Unreal Engine but keep in mind that maybe another engine will be better suited towards the game that you'd like to make.
Also a quick note: there's no "correct" answer to what software that anyone uses. They're only tools and there are a lot of free options out there that can get the job done just as well.
First things first, the game engine!
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download
Epic has also put together a lot of resources to get people up and running. One such resource is their getting started page.
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/getting-started/games
Game development in Unreal will most likely require a bit of programming (even if it's just connecting existing assets from the marketplace). Your options are doing things in Blueprint or C++ or a combination of the two. Blueprint is powerful enough at this point where it's possible to never touch C++ if you don't want to. But it's also possible to stay in C++ for everything. Whatever works for you.
If you're going to be in C++ there's Visual studio community.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/
Epic has written an installation guide for getting visual studio up and running with Unreal
In Epic's launcher there's an entire section of free content in the engine marketplace. And at the beginning of every month Epic will have a handful of new marketplace items for free that month. I'd recommend just keeping an eye on the free monthly releases and grabbing anything you think might even possibly be useful to you in the future.
They also have official sample game projects to look through and see how they did things.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/sample-game-projects-for-unreal-engine
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/content-examples
The thing with unofficial marketplace content is that it's difficult to gauge the quality of the content and how easy it will be to connect it with your already existing assets. A lot of the time I'll download marketplace assets to a temporary project, fire it up, take a look around, and see what there is I can learn. Then I'll take what I learned and create my own blueprint for my implementation that works with the other already existing systems.
3d + 2d artwork
Modeling + Rigging + Animation
I've heard very good things about Blender. It sounds like it's a solid option for modeling and rigging and some basic sculpting. It's also free!
Autodesk sucks. They buy out their competitors and then suffocate their products. Unfortunately there's so much intertia in games most studios still use either 3dsmax or Maya.
Sculpting
Zbrush is the industry standard for sculpting. Mudbox can also work but isn't as fully featured as Zbrush.
https://www.maxon.net/en/zbrush
https://www.autodesk.com/products/mudbox/overview?term=1-YEAR&tab=subscription
Baking texture maps
Xnormal rocks! Totally free! Easier to use than any other baking programs out there and the output maps are of equal or higher quality.
A lot of other people use Marmoset for their baking needs.
Painting textures
Adobe is another company that sucks but is industry standard.
photoshop + substance painter I'd search for alternatives to this stuff.
Adobe in general has recently started pushing AI garbage really hard so I'd at least avoid the newer versions. But if you can find like an old version of CS6 or something lying around then that works too.
If you want a 3d painting program 3dcoat seems like a decent alternative. https://pilgway.com/
So you have the software that you need to get started... now what?
The good news is that a lot of learning resources out there are free or cheap.
I linked this earlier but Epic's learning content is solid and free
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/getting-started/games
If you need examples and explanations of Blueprint nodes Mathew Wadstein is a hero for this sort of thing!
https://www.youtube.com/@MathewWadsteinTutorials
Polycount!!! There's still a lot of knowledge buried in the forums and on the wiki. But as with any forums there are a lot of dead images and links but if you're willing to dig you can find nearly anything. A lot of people when they were learning and coming up in the games industry have passed through polycount and still post there.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount
VFX most of these are older but they're free and are super high quality for their time.
https://www.youtube.com/@imbuefx/videos
3dmotive at one point was a great go to resource for anything game dev. It seems like they lost momentum unfortunately. But there's still some solid courses on there.
https://www.3dmotive.com/courses/
Simon's site has great info, breakdowns, notes. Solid resource for all sort of game dev tips.
Rigging
For the characters in Feign I primarily use the ARTv1 but there's a newer version that seems to have more features.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/maya-tools
https://www.jeremyernst.com/devblog/category/ARTv2
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Rigging
For animation I try to dig through youtube and find reference videos. Pavel Barnev is one animator I keep going back to to learn from.
https://www.youtube.com/@PavelBarnev/videos
And that should get most people started I hope! Let me know if I missed something or if you have any questions or anything. I think it's really cool that this stuff is so accessible and there are so many resources these days. And I'm super jealous that none of you will have to go through the pain of figuring out UV mapping in Gmax!
Comments
boobsgames
Thank you for sharing the info :)
