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Unreal 5.x Basic Notes

Gameplay Types

Component

A Component is a piece of functionality that can be added to an Actor. Components cannot exist by themselves, however when added to an Actor, the Actor will have access to and can use functionality provided by the Component.

Actor

An Actor is any object that can be placed into a Level, from Static Meshes that create your game’s environment, to sounds, cameras, player characters, and so on. This page will show you how to place these Actors into your Level so you can bring your world to life.

Pawn

The Pawn class is the base class of all Actors that can be controlled by players or AI. A Pawn is the physical representation of a player or AI entity within the world. This not only means that the Pawn determines what the player or AI entity looks like visually, but also how it interacts with the world in terms of collisions and other physical interactions.

Blueprint Class

The Blueprints Visual Scripting system in Unreal Engine is a complete gameplay scripting system based on the concept of using a node-based interface to create gameplay elements from within Unreal Editor. As with many common scripting languages, it is used to define object-oriented (OO) classes or objects in the engine. As you use UE4, you’ll often find that objects defined using Blueprint are colloquially referred to as just “Blueprints.”

This system is extremely flexible and powerful as it provides the ability for designers to use virtually the full range of concepts and tools generally only available to programmers. In addition, Blueprint-specific markup available in Unreal Engine’s C++ implementation enables programmers to create baseline systems that can be extended by designers.

Editor UI

Level Editor

The Level Editor provides the core level creation functionality for Unreal Editor. You will use it to create, view, and modify levels .You will modify a level mainly by placing, transforming, and editing the properties of Actors.

Tab Bar

The Level Editor has a tab along the top with the name of the current level. Tabs from other editor windows may be docked alongside this tab for quick and easy navigation, similar to a web browser.

Toolbar

The Toolbar panel displays a group of commands, providing quick access to commonly used tools and operations.

The Menu Bar in the editor should be familiar to anyone who has used Windows applications previously. It provides access to general tools and commands that are used when working with levels in the editor.

Place Actor / Modes

The Level Editor can be put into different editing modes to enable specialized editing interfaces and workflows for editing particular types of Actors or geometry.

Viewports

The Viewport panel is your window into the worlds you create in Unreal Engine.

Content Browser / Content Drawer

The Content Browser is the primary area of the Unreal Editor for creating, importing, organizing, viewing, and managing content Assets within your Unreal project. You can also use it to manage content folders and perform specific Asset operations, such as:

  • Browse to and interact with all the Assets in your project.
  • Find Assets using a text filter, which you can optionally combine with more advanced filtering.
  • Organize Assets into private, local, or shared collections.
  • Identify Assets that might contain problems.
  • Migrate Assets between content folders or to a different project.

Outliner

The Outliner panel displays all the Actors within the scene in a hierarchical tree view. You can select and modify Actors directly from the Outliner. Use the Info dropdown menu to display an additional column that shows Levels, Layers, or ID Names.

Details

The Details panel contains information, utilities, and functions for the current selection in the viewport. It contains transform edit boxes for moving, rotating, and scaling Actors, displays all of the editable properties for the selected Actors, and provides quick access to additional editing functionality depending on the type of Actor(s) selected in the viewport. For example, selected Actors can be exported to FBX and converted to another compatible type. Selection Details allow you to view the materials used by the selected Actors, if any, and quickly open them for editing.

Mesh Actors

A mesh defines the shape and size of an environment prop or a player character. Unreal Engine uses two types of mesh Actors:

  • Static Mesh Actors, which are used to build levels and environments.
  • Skeletal Mesh Actors, which are typically used for player characters and animated non-player characters (NPCs).

Static Mesh Actor

The Static Mesh Actor is a simple type of Actor that displays a mesh in the Level. Although the name implies that the Actor is static (or unable to move), the “static” refers to the type of mesh used rather than the Actor’s ability to move. A mesh is static if its geometry does not change. Otherwise, the Actor itself can be moved or changed in other ways during play.

Skeletal Mesh Actor

The Skeletal Mesh Actor displays an animated mesh whose geometry can be deformed, typically through the use of control points during animation sequences. These can either be created and exported from external 3D animation applications, or programmed directly in Unreal Engine.

Brush Actors

Brush Actors are a basic type of Actor that displays simple 3D geometry in the scene, such as spheres, cubes, and stairs. These Actors can be changed using the Geometry Editing mode in the Level Editor.

Available brush actors: Box, Cone, Cylinder, Curved Stair, Linear Stair, Spiral Stair, Sphere.

Light Actors

As the name suggests, Light Actors are used to place different types of lights around your Level. Some Light Actors have a limited area of effect around them, while others affect your entire Level.

Directional Light Actor

A Directional Light simulates light that is being emitted from a source that is infinitely far away. This means that all shadows cast by this light will be parallel, making this the ideal choice for simulating sunlight.

Point Light Actor

Point Lights work like real-world light bulbs. A Point Light emits light in all directions from its center, which is a single point in the Level.

Spot Light Actor

Spot Lights work like a stage light or a flashlight. A Spot Light emits light outward in a conical shape from a single point.

Rect Light Actor

Rect Lights emit light into the Level from a rectangular plane with a defined width and height. You can use these to simulate any kind of light sources that have rectangular surface areas, such as windows, televisions, or monitor screens.

Sky Light Actor

The Sky Light captures distant parts of your Level and applies them to the scene as a light source. That means the sky’s appearance and its lighting / reflections will match, whether your sky is coming from the atmosphere, layered clouds on top of a skybox, or from distant mountains.

Camera Actors

Like their real-world counterpart, Camera Actors are used to view your Level and create cinematic sequences. In addition, there are a number of supporting Actors that can be used to simulate real-world camera shots.

Audio and Sound Actors

Audio and Sound Actors are used to add music, voice recordings, and sound effects to your Level.

Ambient Sound Actor

Use an Ambient Sound Actor to play a looping (continuous) sound at a specific location in the Level.

Audio Volume

With the Audio Volume Actor, you can define areas within a Blueprint graph that can be used to process sounds, and use its settings to apply reverb effects, set volumes, define the zones affected, emulate occlusion on a sound, and define the shape of the sound volume.

Gameplay Actors

Gameplay Actors trigger interactive functionality. Despite their name, they have a broad range of uses in all kinds of interactive applications, not just games.

Player Start

A Player Start is an Actor that is placed in the Level to designate where the player character spawns when the player starts the Level.

Trigger Volumes

Triggers are Actors that cause an event to occur when something else in the Level interacts with them, such as the player character or another object. For example, a player can interact with a trigger to switch on a light.

Blocking Volume

As the name suggests, Blocking Volumes are used to prevent the player from passing through. For example, you might use Blocking Volumes so your player doesn’t fall off the edges of your game world.

Kill ZVolume

The Kill ZVolume Actor instantly “kills” (destroys) the player character once they enter or interact with its volume. You can specify the kill condition in the Kill ZVolume Actor’s Details panel.

Pain Causing Volume

A Pain Causing Volume causes damage over time to any player or object that enters it. For example, if a player stands in the fire, you can set up a Pain Causing Volume to deal corresponding damage to their health.

Character and Pawn Actors

Both Pawns and Characters are Actors that represent player and AI-controlled characters.

Pawn

A Pawn is the physical representation of a player or AI entity within the world. The Pawn not only determines what the player or AI entity looks like visually, but also how it interacts with the world in terms of collisions and other physical interactions.

Character

A Character is a specific type of Pawn that is designed for a vertically-oriented player character that can walk, run, jump, fly, and swim through the world. In other words, if your player controls a bipedal avatar (for instance, a human), the avatar will be a Character rather than a Pawn.

Visual Effects Actors

Visual Effects Actors are used to change the look and feel of your Level. These Actors only have a limited area of effect, defined by a finite three-dimensional volume.

Post Process Volume

The Post Process Volume applies one or more visual effects to the objects contained within it. Unreal Engine offers a broad range of effects that can be applied, from bloom and vignettes to global illumination and ray tracing reflections.

Reflection Capture Actors

Reflection Capture Actors are used to capture the contents of the Level for reflection. They capture a static image of the area around them, and map it to a sphere or a box shape, depending on the Actor’s shape. Anything within the volume of a Reflection Capture Actor will have its static image reflected by any reflective surfaces around it.

Planar Reflection Actor

A Planar Reflection Actor captures a 2D mirror image of the scene. It is ideal for creating dynamic mirror reflections and for capturing things that aren’t within the current camera view.

Decal Actor

Decal Actors can be placed over the surface of a mesh to render a Material on top of it, much like a real-world “sticker”. You can use decals to add details and variations to multiple surfaces that use the same texture, like adding water leaks or paint splatters to modular walls.

Worldbuilding Actors

Use Worldbuilding Actors to add realistic details to your Level, such as sky atmosphere, fog, and volumetric clouds.

Sky Atmosphere Actor

The Sky Atmosphere Actor is a physically-based sky and atmosphere-rendering technique. It’s flexible enough to create an Earth-like atmosphere with time-of-day featuring sunrise and sunset, or to create extraterrestrial atmospheres of an exotic nature. It also provides an aerial perspective to which you can simulate transitions from ground to sky to outer space with proper planetary curvature.

Volumetric Cloud Actor

The Volumetric Cloud Actor is a physically-based cloud rendering system that uses a material-driven approach to give artists and designers the freedom to create any type of clouds they need for their projects. The system provides scalable clouds that can adapt to projects using ground views, aerial views, and ground to outer space transitions

Exponential Height Fog Actor

Exponential Height Fog creates more density at lower altitudes within a Level and less density at higher altitudes. The transition is smooth, so you never see a hard cutoff as you increase altitude.

Misc Actors

Text Render Actor

The Text Render Actor provides a simple way to add text to your Level. For a quick usage example, create a new Third Person project. The blue text that reads “THIRD PERSON” across the floor is rendered using a Text Render Actor.

Target Point Actors

Target Point Actors give you a generic point in the world that you can spawn items from. If you are familiar with other 3D applications such as 3Ds Max or Maya, Target Point Actors are very similar to dummy Actors that you find in those programs.

Materials

Materials in Unreal Engine define the surface properties of the objects in your scene. In the broadest sense, you can think of a Material as the “paint” that is applied to a mesh to control its visual appearance.

In a rendering pipeline, shaders are programs that define how each vertex or pixel should be rendered. Shaders in Unreal Engine are written in High Level Shading Language (HLSL). Shader code is then converted to a list of Assembly Language instructions that the GPU hardware can execute. This is how the final pixel colors are output to your display.

Material Editor

Materials are built by combining nodes called Material Expressions in a shader graph and passing the results into the inputs on the Main Material Node.

Material Instance

Material Instances provide a way to quickly create multiple variations, or instances, from a single parent Material.

Effects

Effect, Particle, Cascade

Cascade

Game UI

UMG (Unreal Motion Graphics)

Animation

Skeletal Animation System

Persona , Animation Blueprint

2D

Paper2D

Programming

C++

Blueprint

Physics

Line Trace, Shape Trace

Collision, Physics

Runtime Platforms

Platforms

  • Steam Deck
  • AutoSDK
  • iOS, IPadOS, tvOS
  • Android
  • XR
  • Pixel Streaming
  • MacOS
  • Linux
  • Windows
  • Nintendo Switch
  • Playstation 4, 5
  • Xbox

Mobile, Android, iOS, VR, SteamVR, Google VR, Oculus VR, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, HTML5, Linux, PS4, Switch, Xbox One.