From the course: Revit and Unreal Engine: Real-Life Architectural Visualizations

The UE interface

From the course: Revit and Unreal Engine: Real-Life Architectural Visualizations

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The UE interface

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- [Narrator] Welcome to the Unreal Engine interface. Now, in this particular course I'm going to be using UE 4.25.0, that's the version I'll be using. Now, obviously that can change depending on the development of Unreal Engine. So always check your version that you're using, you can do that using the epic games launcher, and check that you've got the latest version or the version that you want to use. Now, the Unreal Engine interface does look complex. Don't be afraid. There's no need to be afraid of Unreal Engine. It is a very different interface to an interface you might be used to, like Revit for example. But the whole idea is here is that you're developing real life images, real life video using gaming technology and going into the creative world rather than the architectural world. Now I'm just going to jump through a few little parts of the interface just to show you how it works. Now at the moment, I've got what is called an Unreal Engine project loaded into my Unreal Engine. You can see it on the screen in the drawing editor here. So here's my project here, like so. And every time you develop a new project in Unreal Engine, it's known as a scene, like a scene from a movie. Now what you would normally do in a scene from a movie is place actors. So you noticed we have the place actors tab and you can place things such as basic, which is characters, and so on, spheres, cylinders, cones. You can place lighting, cinematic actors, visual effects, geometry volumes, and all classes of different actors as well. You can also search the classes for different actors that you may need. You'll notice as well, the tab across from there is the world outliner. Now what this does, is it shows you everything in your world at the moment. So if I selected sun sky, you can see there that the arrows appear in the scene. So that's where my sun sky is placed at present. Now if I come into the scene and use my mouse, the mouse movement is very different as well. So if I hold down the left hand mouse button and move around, can you see, I can move left to right, and I can move around my scene, but you'll notice the real life effects I'm getting. Now those aren't UFOs up there, they're actually camera views you'll notice, and they again are actors in the scene. But look at the reflection on the water. Look at the horizon, look at the sky. And as I come around this way, you'll even see the sun shining up there in the sky, giving you the light in the scene. Again, the sun and the sky are an actor in the scene. If I hold down the right hand mouse button, you'll see that I can move in a different way. I'm going up and down and I can tilt forward and back. Good, like that, as if I'm actually moving a camera lens around in the scene. Now the objects in the scene as I said are known as actors. So I can select, let's say part of this shape here like so. Then you'll notice as soon as I select that, it tells me here, in the world outline I know that it's a building. And there's also people there, if I select people, there's people there, and as I come down there's a sphere, and there's also a terrain as well. I'm going to select the building again. And then what I can do is instead of just looking at my world settings which is all the settings in here, I can look at the actual details of that selected actor in my scene. So there's building there and there's all the information I need about that particular actor. Is it beginning to look a bit more recognizable now? So looking a bit more like the project browser, and the properties palette that you use in Revit. So you're beginning to see a kind of synergy between the two, you're just using different terminology and different elements in Unreal Engine as compared to Revit. One of the major benefits of Unreal Engine is that you can bring a Revit model straight in using a thing called Datasmith. Now Datasmith I'll cover later on in the course, I'll show you how it works in conjunction with Revit, and allows you to bring your 3D model into your scene in your Unreal Engine project.

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