When I began using Unreal Engine in my final term at Think Tank, I had a year of experience building 3D environments in Maya and rendering in V-Ray, but I didn’t have any experience with real-time engines. It was intimidating at first because I wasn’t sure where to start.

Before the start of my mentorship, I decided to try to learn the basics of the engine on my own. I looked up starter tutorials on YouTube, read up on the Unreal Engine documentation, and found some resources from my school’s online portal that helped explain the UI setup. I was unsure about a lot of details, such as which version of Unreal Engine to download and what kind of project template best suited my scene. Luckily, the large availability of up-to-date resources, as well as active 3D art communities helped me with the decision-making process. 

These resources helped introduce me to Unreal, but it wasn’t until I started working with the engine that I started to gain a better understanding of the software. The navigation is similar to other modeling programs, so it was quite easy to pick up. Having the content browser host all the asset meshes, textures, and materials of each project made it easy to keep organized and start building out my scene efficiently. My mentor was also very helpful in guiding me through some technical questions throughout the term.