From the course: Unreal Engine 4: Realtime Motion Graphics

Organizing a UE4 project

From the course: Unreal Engine 4: Realtime Motion Graphics

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Organizing a UE4 project

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- [Voiceover] Now we've launched the Unreal Editor and we see our default UI and layout here and in the next movie we're gonna show how we can customize this layout a little bit so we can use our screen real estate a little bit better and have it look more like 3D software that we're more acclimated to, but for now I'm just gonna show you how we can start setting up a new project. So if we go down to our content browser in the lower left here and I click on this little icon, it starts showing our directory structure so I'm gonna click on here where it says Content I'm gonna make a new folder by right-clicking in this pane here and clicking New Folder. So what we're gonna do here is we're gonna make a set of folders for different kinds of assests so we can keep our project organized. This is a style that I've developed for my way of working that is good for me, this isn't the necessary way you have to work in the Unreal Editor, you can develop any file or folder structure you'd like, this is just one way to do it. So my new folder, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna call this one 01_MAPS and make another new folder, I'm gonna call it 02_GEO, make a new folder again, I'm gonna call it 03_TEX and I'm gonna make another new folder and go 04_MAT. So this is for my maps, which is basically my scenes, my geometry, my textures and my materials. You know, in my folder structures I like doing numbers in front of things so I can always keep them organized in an order that I wanna keep them in so the program doesn't do them in alphabetical order, that's just a thing I use for lots of different software in different ways. Okay, so now we've got our Unreal project starting to be set up, got our folders set up, and what we wanna do is I'm just gonna show you basically how to save the scene file, and you can see we just have a grid and these are some default items that are just in the scene by default, but we wanna save this save this, I'm gonna show you how to do that and where to do that. So we go under File, we're gonna go Save As and so you can see that we have a Save Level As and obviously we're using a game engine so it's gonna use terminology that's a bit different than our normal content creation applications that you're probably used to, so again, scene file is a level and the kind of file it is is basically a map. So we're gonna go into our maps folder, and so we're now in Game Maps and we'll just call this Test, right, I'll go 01 again, this is just an empty test for us to test this out. I'll hit Save and so now if I go into my Maps folder in my content browser, you can see our level is now TEST_01, you can see in the upper left corner tab it's now called that and so now we have a scene file that is saved and ready to go. If we wanna look on disk, if I go to my desktop, go into Exercise Files, Unreal Projects, TEST_01, you can see that now we have this TEST_01 and the kind of file is a uproject. If we go into Content, you can see that that maps folder has been saved. If we go in there you can see that TEST_01 umap is now saved. The other folders that we created aren't on disk yet, cause there's no assets in them. Once there's assets in those folders, then those folders start getting actually written to disk. Okay so that's a really basic rundown on how to set up some folders, how to save our first scene file. In the next movie we're gonna start taking a look at how to set up this UI to get working a little bit more efficiently.

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