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Greetings and welcome.
In this video, I'm going to give you a really quick rundown of the user interface in Unreal
Editor.
I'm going to make this as painless as I can.
For starters, what we're looking at is the Project Browser, which is what appears first
when you initially launch the Engine.
I've jumped over to the New Project tab so we can create a brand new blank project.
Of course you don't have to do that if you have a project you wanted to open.
I'll call this one 'UIDemo' just so I know to delete it later.
We'll make sure that Copy Starter Content is active to give us something to look at
and I'll click 'Create'.
That'll take just a second to load up.
Once that comes in we have a very, very simple level and a few things that we can actually
look at in the scene.
I'm going to make this, again, just as quick and painless as I can.
When you first jump into the Editor, probably the first thing that's going to draw your
attention is the Viewport, which is this great big window that dominates the center of your
screen.
This is your view into the 3D world.
We're actually going to talk more about Viewports in a future video, so I'm not going to get
to carried away with them now.
Starting at the top from here, we have the Main Menu bar.
This is pretty much like any menu bar you see in most computer applications.
You have a File menu where you can save what you're working on, you can create new levels,
new projects, etc and so forth.
We have the Edit menu...you know your standards Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste.
Also though, you're going to find your Preferences for the Editor, as well as your project settings
in here.
Definitely worth while at some point to dig through, at least the Editor preferences,
and see the things that you can change around here inside the Editor.
That's something that you'll probably want to do a little later after you've been playing
for a while, but it's good to know that that's there.
Next the Window menu.
Super important because this is where you can show and hide parts of the interface that
are not visible from default.
As you may already know, Unreal Editor is a very deep application.
There's a lot of different facets to it and to keep you from getting overwhelmed, a lot
of this stuff that you can use is actually tucked away here under the Window menu.
Again, we're not going to get to deep into that straight out of the gate.
Then we have the Help menu.
Of particular importance here are links directly to the documentation as well as a link to
some initial tutorials that can really help you out if you're just getting started.
I highly recommend, if you haven't yet, to at least go through the Welcome to the Unreal
Editor and Camera Navigation tutorials as well.
Moving down from there, I'm actually going to jump over here to the Toolbar.
The whole point of the Toolbar is to give you a series of common tasks that you will
normally be performing; so you have some quick and easy once-click access to those.
Some of the more important ones that you'll see are things like the Save button, though
generally I just hit Ctrl-S these days, quick access to the Content Browser if you need
to open one, as well as Simulate and Play, which is something that we will talk about
a little bit later in a future video.
Also, there's an important menu that drops down in here for quick settings which control
various things that you can show and hide inside of your Viewport and in the overall
environment.
Moving to the left from here we have the Modes panel.
This allows us to change the mode that the Editor is currently in.
By default this is in Placement mode.
This allows us to place certain objects into the scene.
Say for instance if we wanted to add a light to this scene, I can switch to the Lights
category, we could grab a Point Light and I'll just drag and drop that rignt into the
scene, it appears on the table and I can lift it up into the air and you can see that working
- you can drag it left and right.
There are other modes as well that we're not going to be able to get into right now.
We have Paint mode, Landscape mode, Foliage mode and Geometry Editing mode - which are
all outside the scope of this video, but they're all different things that you can do within
the Editor.
For now we're going to keep things very simple and just focus on the Placement mode.
Straight down from there we have the Content Browser.
This is a panel that is so vitally important that it's getting its own video just a little
bit later.
The purpose of the Content Browser, however, is to allow you access to any exterior generated
content as well as any special content - like materials or class blueprints that might have
been created.
For example, because I have loaded up the starter content, you see there's a list of
folders here.
I could go under Props and there's a huge list of really cool looking props that I can
just drag and drop in whenever I want.
Here's the material preview mesh.
We can just drag and drop that in.
It's a little big, so let me jump over here to the Details Panel, which I'll talk about
momentarily, and we'll just set the scale to .2 by .2 by .2.
There's a tiny little material preview sphere just for you to look at.
That's the general idea of the Content Browser.
You're going to be doing a lot of dragging and dropping in here; as well as just double-clicking
to access certain types of access.
For example, even this little mesh that we just dragged and dropped into the scene; I
can double-click this and open it up in a special editor.
There are all kinds of Editors within Unreal because you have several assets that require
their own Editors.
Say, for materials they have a Material Editor.
We have a Particle System Editor called Cascade.
We have an Animation Editor called Persona.
It just goes on and on, but I don't want you to get too overwhelmed too quickly; at least
not this quickly.
Let's think of it as just the Content Browser being where you're going to access all of
the assets that you'll be putting into your game.
Jumping across the user interface, we have the Seam Outliner.
This is a hierarchical list of all of the objects that exist in your level at this time.
And you can see there's already several in here that are named.
We have the chair, the floor, the statue.
We can click on any of these and they'll automatically select those objects.
Take a look at the two chairs in my scene.
As I click on the first chair in the list, we get that one selected.
Click on the other one, we get the opposite one selected.
And really that's the big purpose of the Scene Outliner.
It's just a way to see all of the objects in your scene.
It has some other functionality as well.
You can use it to parent objects together.
Just as kind of a preview of what I mean by that, if I grab the second chair here and
I drag it on top of the first, notice how the second chair is now indented underneath
the first - and that means they're parented together.
If I grab the chair at the top and I move it around, both chairs come along for the
ride.
But if I grab just the one underneath, then he can move independently.
That's because he's a child and the one above is a parent.
Down underneath this we have the Details panel.
The Details panel is extremely important and useful.
This is where you're going to control all of the properties for any selected object
in your scenes.
So, for instance, I have the left-most chair selected.
We have it's Transform information - so it's Location, Rotation and Scale.
We have the static mesh that actually makes this up...so this is the Static Mesh component.
We have the material that's been applied to it and we have instant access to these things
as well.
If I wanted to make a change to the material that was applied to any of these meshes, say
the table, I can click on the table, move over here to the Details panel and you'll
see the material that's been applied here in the Materials category.
I can double-click on that and we are now inside the Material Editor looking at all
of the various nodes that make up this material graph.
Go ahead and close that for now.
That is a quick rundown of the UI that is immediately visible as soon as you open the
Editor.
As well as some hints that there's a lot more to the user interface that lies just underneath
the surface.
So in review, we have the Viewport, which kind of takes up the central part of the interface.
We have the Menu bar across the top.
The Toolbar, kind of centered and just underneath the Menu bar.
We have the Modes panel in the upper left corner.
The Content Browser, lower left corner.
Scene Outliner, upper right corner.
Details panel, lower right.
And also keep in mind that all of these parts of the interface are very editable.
So we can put our mouse on the little divider lines in between each one and we can move
these around to make the most of our screen space.
So that is a rundown of those interface options.
That is going to wrap up this video.
Thanks a lot.