Using the exercise files - Unreal Engine Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files for this course, you'll find them organized in a structure much like this. So you can see I have a folder here on my desktop, Exercise Files, and once I go into that you'll see the title of the main parent node there, UB4_Intro_Mats. And once we go inside that, this is where the project for this course exists and in here are all the main packaged up directories that you'll have access to. The most important thing to look at in here is this little Unreal icon. This is our actual project file that accesses all the data in these folders here. Now how do we use this in Unreal? Well first of all you're going to need the latest version of Unreal Engine installed. You'll need the latest version of the Epic Games launcher installed as well. I happen to have that here. At the time of creating this course, I built this in version 4.16.2. It's important to note that Unreal is built in a very organic manner so they're always updating and odds are you'll be running a newer version than I built this on here. Everything should run exactly the same as we see throughout this course. So what I'm going to do here is show how to add this project to your Unreal project directory. So they're two ways that we can do this here. I have my project already added in here. What I could do is I could launch Unreal 4.16.2 which is the version that I'm using for this course and then what I want to do is be able to show you how to add this existing project to yours or simply create a base project so that you can follow along. Strongly advise that you have access to these exercise files because we do some very specific things with the materials as we progress. So if you're creating a new project, what you're going to want to do is go to the new project tab and simply define a directory for it, give it a project name, and then you'll Create Project. It's as simple as that. So make sure you define where you have enough space on your hard drive for a project. Give it a project name and by default, the projects come with starter content enabled. I would strongly advise that you leave that in there. We want that available for our project as we progress and I have that in this existing project. So that's how you would create your own project. Let's go back to the Projects tab. As you can see here, I have the project already in my folder. If you don't, you simply click the Browse button, and go to where your exercise files live. Mine live on the desktop here so I just click into that and then what I'm going to want to do is it shows you on the bottom what it's looking for. It's looking for that .uproject file. That's this file here with the blue U icon there. And you would simply click Open and it will add it to your Project directory here as well. And once you get into the project, once you launch into the UB4_Intro_Mats project, this is what you'll see. The project is structured in a way that all of the exercise files you need to have access to are here for you at any time built into the project. So when you open this project, it's going to open to the base first lesson 0101 which we can see on the top tab. Let's take a quick look at the content browser here. This is where I've built a couple of different folder structures for your learning as you progress. So I've actually built a learning folder. If we click on that, you'll see that all of the different folders that exist here are for all of the different lessons. So for example, all the materials that we create as we progress exist for each learning module, for each lesson as we progress as well. You'll see that there's a Maps folder here. This is every single lesson in here as well. So as you click on one of those, it'll launch that specific lesson with a starting point for you to go from. In the course we actually create our own materials directory as well as our own textures directory and you build upon that as you progress. If at some point you get lost, all of the content exists in all of these folders here for materials, and all of the actual maps or levels per learning module exist here as a separate file as well. So for example, we're in 0101 right now. I can simply either go to the File Open Menu to open a level and it's going to take me to the default level there. Or I could even just double click on one here. This is the last file here. I'm just double clicking and opening up. And you can see that it gives a good starting point as to what happens in that final file. So that's an overview of the exercise files, how they're structured for this course, how to build a project, how to add the existing project from the exercise files to your Unreal projects, and how the exercise files are structured for you so that you can learn with this course and be able to have access to all the items as you progress.