♪♪♪
(Wes Bunn) Hello everyone and
welcome to this introduction to the UE4
Editor video series. In this video,
we are going to take a look at the Editor UI
and give you a quick overview of all the
components that make up the Main Editor window
inside Unreal Engine 4.
So let's get started. The first thing that we are
looking at here is the Unreal Project
Browser, which is launched
anytime that you launch the Editor. This will
be the first thing that you see. This allows you to
create a new project or
use an existing project.
Currently, I am on the New Project tab and as you can see,
we have several different templates that you can
start out with for creating your project.
For us, we are just going to create a
blank one. Make sure that Starter Content
is enabled so that we have something to
look at. We are going to give it a save location
and a name, and then click
Create Project. Now, I already have a project
created to save us some time, so I am going to just
pop that one up instead of creating a
new one. So let me pop that up.
The first thing that you will see when the
editor opens is the Main Editor window.
This is primarily the window you will be looking at when you are working
inside the editor, unless you are working in something like particle effects
or animation where you will be looking at different windows.
But by default, this is the Main Editor window and
the first window that you will see. We are going to go over all the different
components here starting out with the
most visually appealing here in the center of the screen, the viewport.
We are going to go into another video
series that will cover the viewport more extensively,
so I am not going to go into too much detail about all the different bells and
whistles of the viewport, but essentially the viewport is your
level editing window. It allows you to view into your 3D
world. This is where you will be doing most of your level constructing
is inside the viewport here.
Let's jump up to the upper left up here. We
have the Menu bar. We have
several different options here. It is pretty much similar to any
computer application. We have the File option, which allows you to
Open Levels, add New Levels, Save As,
create New Projects, etc. It is pretty standard.
Next we have the Edit button,
which allows you to Cut, Copy, Paste, Duplicate,
as well as some options for the Editor itself. We have some
Editor Preferences which allows you to customize
the look and feel of the Editor, as well as some Project Settings.
When you first get started with the Editor, you probably
won't need to tinker around with these too much.
But as you familiarize yourself with the Editor,
be sure to come and check both of these options out and kind of
experiment with them; especially the Editor Preferences, because then you can get a
more customized look for your Editor.
Next, we have the Window option.
The Window option allows you to toggle
certain aspects of the Editor on and off.
There are a lot of different
components to Unreal Editor and not all of
them are immediately are visible up front.
So for instance if you wanted to check out Statistics
for some reason, you can click that and it will open a separate
Window for your Statistics.
Also if you accidentally close something, say
you have this tab over here, the Modes tab. If you accidentally closed
it and weren't sure how to get it back, you could go to the Window
option and there is Modes. You can click it and it will
create the Modes window again; place it back
in its default location.
Next we have Help, which is pretty straightforward.
It is pretty important though because that has direct links
to Documentation. It will take you to
anything that you want to learn about the Engine.
There is quite an exhaustive list of Documentation
pages, so we are not going to cover all of those. (Laughter) But, just know that
it is there. You can also quickly get to it by pressing F1;
as well as tutorials, In-Editor Tutorials. Again if you are just
getting started with the Editor I highly recommend that you go through these,
especially the Welcome to the Unreal Editor and the Basics
tutorials. These are great because they walk you through,
step by step, various facets of
the Engine. We are not going to go through this together, but if you have
time, I would highly recommend that you check those out.
So that is the Menu bar. We are going to take a look next
at the Toolbar, which is across the top up here.
The Toolbar is basically common tasks; things
that you do quite often. So it is basically
a hotbar. So you have things like Saving, you can jump
to the Content Browser, which we will talk about in a moment;
Settings, Blueprints, as well as the very important
Play. If you click this little drop down here,
there are a bunch of different options for playing too: simulating, playing in different
windows, multiplayer options, etc.
We are not going to cover all those, but we will probably
cover those in a separate video down the road.
But just know that the Toolbar across the top
is your hotbar for commonly used actions. I did want to
mention the Settings button here
because there are some quick settings that allow you to
show and hide things in the Editor, as well as in the overall
environment, as well toggling
some additional settings that are hidden
inside the
Editor Preferences and Project Settings options.
You can look at those at your leisure, and tinker with those
and see what they do, and play with those, but we are not
going to go through those right now. Moving right along, let's
jump over to the Modes tab here.
The Modes tab essentially is a way of
changing the mode that the Editor is in.
By default, we are in Placement mode.
What Placement mode is just allows you to drag and drop
various things into your viewport here. So for example,
say we wanted to add a light to this scene. I could
just drag and drop a light (Point Light) into my scene, and there we have a light.
Now I can move it around and stuff inside my scene.
So anything inside the Modes panel
while you are on Placement mode can be dragged and dropped
into your scene. Another example, there is a
Box Trigger. So now I have a trigger in my level
and I could probably do some script
to toggle and turn on and off this light
when I enter this Trigger Box. So, it is very easy to just drag and drop
things from the Modes panel when you are in Placement mode into your
levels. There are some other Modes that are
also available that we are not going to cover because we are going to try to stick
mostly in Placement mode and get through this as quickly as possible, but I will
run through them really quickly here. We have Paint,
we have Landscape, we have Foliage,
and we have Geometry Editing.
If you are curious about any of these, you can check out the
Documentation for more information on what they do and how to use them,
but that is outside the scope of this video so I just wanted to mention
them. You can take a look at them at your leisure.
Directly below that, we have the
Content Browser. The Content Browser is
pretty important. So important in fact, that we are going to have
a separate video in this series on that as well covering
the different ways that you can use it and access content
from your project. Essentially what the
Content Browser does is it allows you to access
exterior generated content, things that you created
in 3D modeling applications:
props, Static Meshes, things like that, or
textures that you have imported that you have created in any image
editing applications and imported them into your
project. All those can be accessed inside the
Content Browser. So for example, I have
included Starter Content, so I have some stuff in here. Again,
let's go into Props here and I can just
drag and drop things into my scene just as I could in
the Modes panel. So I just dragged another chair into my scene.
You could also do that for
things like Materials. So I have Materials here if I wanted to change
something like the floor, I can change the floor
just by dragging and dropping it into my scene.
It is going to take a second for it to update the
Material, and there you go. That is just done by dragging
and dropping. The other important aspect of the
Content Browser is that it allows you to access
sub-editors. So as we mentioned, this is the
Main Editor window where you will be doing most of your
level editing. Say you wanted to change the
way that this brick Material (M_Brick_Clay_New) looks, you can
double-click on it in the Content Browser and that will open
up the Material Editor used
to create this particular Material. You could change
that as you see fit. Obviously I'm not going to go into detail about
the Material Editor here. (Laughter) You can check out the
In-Editor Tutorials for that, or the
Documentation. Again to access those
sub-editors, just double-click your
assets inside the Content Browser. Another example would be Blueprints;
you could double-click a Blueprint and open up the Blueprint Editor
as well.
Moving on, let's jump up to the upper right up
here. We have the World Outliner
and this is essentially a list of all the
elements that you have in your scene. So for example
we have some chairs, we have some floor, we have a
table, we have this cool little statue thing here;
all of those are listed in the World Outliner here.
I can click on any one of them and jump to them
in my level. So if you have objects that are
way out on the other side of your map, you can find them
in the World Outliner here. Just click on it,
and that will select it. You could also press
F and jump to it as well.
So that is what the World Outliner is for; it just
gives you another way to select the objects in your level. Another
important aspect of the World Outliner is the ability to
parent things. So say for example we have this chair
here and we have this chair here, I could take this
chair and parent it to the other chair.
What that would allow me to do is say I wanted to move this chair up and down in the scene, and
I could. If I pick the parent, I could move
both of them at once. So it is just a way of
organizing your assets in your scene and
manipulating them.
Let's continue. Let's jump down to the Details panel
here right below the World Outliner.
The Details panel controls the properties of any selected
object in your scene. So for example, we have these chairs
selected. If I wanted to
make them physics objects,
I could just click the checkbox here (Simulate Physics). If I were
to Simulate, they now have physics and fall way down
off the world. (Laughter) I didn't expect that to happen, but
the real stuff is the funny stuff. So let's go ahead and stop
and put them back in our scene there. Let's take physics off because I don't want
them falling off our little floor here.
So the Details panel, again, allows
you to change different aspects of your
selected Actors in your level. Let's select this
chair here. You can also access
certain facets of the object that is selected.
So you can see here we have a Static Mesh
there that is being used with this object and the Materials that is applied
to this chair. I could double-click on that and open the
Material that is associated with this object right here
inside the Details panel, as well as other
options as well. You can scroll this list and kind of see what they do.
One other thing I wanted to mention that we
have here in the Details panel are these Add Component
and Blueprint/Add Script buttons. What this
allows you to do is for example, say we have this Trigger Box here.
It is just a Trigger Box right now, but if we click
this Add Component button, you see it brings up a list
of different things we can also add to this Trigger Box.
So say, for example, we wanted to add another light.
We add a Light (PointLight) and now we have a light inside
this Trigger Box. It is essentially
a pre-fab of sorts, but we call them Blueprints
in Unreal Engine 4. Now that we have a trigger
and a light, I could click this Blueprint/Add Script
button so that I can add script to this
Trigger Box and this light. I'm not going to go into too much
detail on Blueprints on what you could do, but essentially
once we've created the Blueprint, I could open it up
and you can see our light and our Trigger Box that we added.
On the Graph, I could say Event Actor
Begin Overlap when I overlap the trigger.
I could drag in the Light (PointLight) and say turn it on
or Set Visibility, and so forth.
It gives you a quick way to
create pre-fabs inside the
Editor really, really quickly.
So that is basically the Main Editor window. We have covered all the components.
Again we have the viewport, which is where you are going to be doing
most of your level editing. We have the
Menu Bar which includes File, Edit,
Window, and Help. We have the
Main Toolbar across the top here, which is your quick
settings, your hotbar buttons for Playing in the Editor:
Simulating, Saving, and quick Settings.
We have the Modes panel, which allows
you to place various objects in your
scene. We have the Content Browser, which is
a directory structure of all the
assets that are included in your project that can be dragged
and dropped into your level, like chairs. Then we have four chairs
around this sweet little table. We have the
World Outliner, which is a hierarchical list
of all the elements in your scene.
You can select individual objects or parent them
together like we did with these chairs. We have the
Details panel, which allows you to set various properties
on the selected object as well as create
Blueprints right there on the fly for any kind of gameplay purposes
or scripted events. That is going to do it for
this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it and
learned something. We hope to see you in the next video.
♪♪♪