I started to explore Unreal Engine 4 for the first time this week and my biggest lesson was learning the interface, how materials work, importing and exporting between Maya and Unreal Engine 4, cameras, lighting, and high resolution screenshots.
I first started to play around with exporting the mannequin from Unreal Engine 4 into Autodesk Maya. After learning about the scale difference between Unreal Engine 4 and Maya, I quickly began to realize the difference between the two programs. Autodesk Maya by default uses metric (centimetres/millimeters) while Unreal Engine uses centimeters. In this screenshot I have a 10 X 10 X 10 cube made in maya vs the mannequin I exported from Unreal Engine.
After seeing the scaling differences, I made the cube more interesting. I changed it's scale to be about the same height as the mannequin which is 182 X 182 X 182. I then did some beveling to the cube and exported it to bring into the Unreal Engine.
Once I brought the cube into unreal engine I opened up the materials editor and started to explore how to create shaders. I was very surprised to see how node based the creation of shaders are in unreal but quickly learned how easy it is to understand it. I personally really like the metalic, fresnel, and emission effects.
I then continued to explore materials and see the power of instancing them to create the same effects but different parameters for different objects. Unreal makes it super easy to apply the different instances with just clicking and dragging out of your Content Browser!
Once I created my instances, I started to manipulate my different colored cubes into my own level creation. I then rebuild the lighting so that everything in my scene was properly lit and added some cameras. Here is the result of my first time in Unreal Engine 4!
