How I learned UE4 in ~3 months [And how You can too!] 

I am now 62 years old when I started learning Unreal Engine 5. At first, I found it difficult, but day after day, hour after hour, I find myself learning something new, and this is thanks to God and your efforts in RU-vid tutorials. So everyone who taught me something I thank from the bottom of my heart. To this day, I am still learning new things.

Patience for Unreal shaders to compile, is a real skill.

Charlie's 8 Ps 1.Proof/tests - Experiment after the tuts 2.Passion - You know what it is 3.Patience - Even shitting takes time 4.Purpose - Reason to learn a particular thing 5.Presence - Put your work out there 6.Persistent - Can be even mental. No need to destroy your fingers 7.Prevention - NO BURNOUTS ALLOWED. Work on a different aspect of the project 8.Perseverance - Just sit down and work. U started this for some reason right?

This is nothing but facts. When I started my first game I bought every asset I could because I told myself 3d modeling was too hard, 1 year later and I was selling 3D models on various stores. Just takes a different mindset :)

You are a treasure to the Unreal indie dev community and gave us a great life lesson too!

I am a veterinarian, started learning unreal 8 months ago (as a hobby). I actually have more fun doing so than playing games or working :) While performing other activities I constantly think about ways to enhance the unreal-project hehe. You are right, everyday you learn a bit more!

😶 the cycle of burn out and gaming, It was fucking spot on.

Solid advice on learning any skill...atta boy! Thank you for sharing

thank you for posting this, it's a great pep talk, made me feel better about the days when I lack motivation.

Your best video yet. So glad the community has you.

I've been going at it for 2 years now as a thing I do in my studies, so I didn't expect this video to be for me but there was still a lot to take away and interesting to see how you started

Really great video with really great tips to "fall" forward and learn thinks. I think i can use your guide in every part of my life when i want to learn thinks! Thanks for this!

You have a growth mindset that will take you far. Thank you for the great content!

Really appreciate this , thanks man , I needed this .

You chose the best and transparent motivational words for many.! Just subscribed !

This is amazing advice, well done. I didn't really learn character modelling and texturing until I did a tutorial then completely reworked everything without the support of the tutorial. In 6 months I was at a stage where I could model almost anything and quite quickly.

Thanks bro, that was a really something to keep in mind while going through UE. 🤘😎

Bro you talked about everything thing that can break us, I really appreciate your efforts and your experiment with passion is really useful I didn’t find that in any video

Thank you, this is one of the most important videos I've seen on your channel, really good message, thank you again.

This is first video what I see with you. I mean that it was the best start with your channel. I had this feelings when I started with game development.

Fantastic video! These are just a great set of tips. Also I love the background music. You're clearly a man of culture.

Wonderful breakdown of it all. The Ps themselves make a lot of sense, but the way you said it was extra encouraging - made it feel totally attainable. Well done to you, and thanks for helping us out.

Proof has always been my biggest hurdle, but thankfully I've recognized that and now take notes throughout each tutorial or class I do, and then, as you said, re-do the tutorial on my own the best I can. I also will watch tutorials and anything Unreal related when I'm not working in Unreal just to stay engaged with it. Especially with the new stuff UE5 is doing... games in the next 5-10 years will be unbelievable and learning how to make them yourself is only getting more and more accessible!

Thanks man, I really needed to hear this. I've been through the ringer trying to get back on my feet and re-learning game dev properly ever since dropping out of a game-dev course in uni back in 2013. Since then practically every tool i've used has been either updated into something totally unrecognisable or replaced by something greater, all the while feeling really bummed out as I was struggling to learn multiple fields (2d art, 3D animation/modelling, VFX, Game engines etc) leading to burnout while being outpaced by peers who go on to work in the industry. Your video has definitely re-aligned my perspective about the learning process, personally I feel the parts about purpose, patience and accountability clicked with me the most, though presence still scares the shit out of me, community forums/discords are still very daunting for someone like me trying to improve.

Great video as always very inspirational 👌👌

cheers bro - needed that - subbed

Another amazing video 👍 I know I am guilty of sidestepping the first P and that needs to stop. Thank you for making this! I’m going to link this to every person that ever asks me about learning UE, or even becoming a game dev in general.

bro this is best video i seen about ue4 thank you for this 😙👌

Had a AHHA moment the other day working with animations that i realised i stopped looking for tutorials and simple started seeing what worked. After struggling for months tryna figure out which path to start in. Took a step back and worked on something new and man. It just clicked. Having so much fun now.

Literally was going to ask you how you did all of it today! Amazing vid thank you

Thank you so much for this video. I think I will have to write down some of the things that you said and put them on my wall to stare at every now and then. I get easily discouraged when things don't work out, and I have been running into different issues following tutorials from slightly different engine versions (yours and other people's). Or suddenly the entire project breaking and being unable to open it again (but copying the old files into a new project somehow fixed that so yay). All these things push me back and discourage me from trying, but I think every time I do end up finding a solution, be it on my own or by looking up different ways and trying to combine them, I have been progressing. I'll keep trying and keep learning. I especially need to apply the PROOF part xD PS: The being neuro-atypical part is very relatable. Big same.

thank you sir , very helpful

You gained a new sub just for the OSRS my dude (and the good video)

Amazing, i feel what you say, ty for sharing !

You're a great inspiration!

This is a really special video and I hope more people will have a chance to see it. Thank you for sharing it. If I might be so bold, I would suggest another P - “Pride”. Another positive side effect of your devlogs (and in general what you discuss in “Presence”) is you can look back and see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve learned and the awesome things you’ve created, and I think it’s important for all of us to find opportunities to do this. Those moments in your videos when you’re revelling in some cool new thing you’ve created are a really important part of the process, and they help to balance the frustration and exhaustion that are also part of the process. So be proud of yourself, enjoy what you create, and recognize the progress you’ve made. As accessible as tools like UE may be, this shit is still insanely difficult, and even small wins are a big deal.

7 year music / portrait photographer, now fully transferred over to doing 3D work full time in 2 years, I relate to so much of this, this was beautifully articulated!!

Your videos are awesome i watched few and i think those are to the point

Good vid! What helped for me is to think of a small easy project and break it down into chunks. Character (model, animations, movement), Level (model assets, lighting, skybox), Sound (Character sound effects, ambient sound, music) etc. It helps me to focus on one thing at the time and h ave fun. The biggest problem for me is trying to do everything at once and getting overwhelmed.

A mistake I made while trying to learn UE4 was just watching lots and lots of tutorials without applying gained knowledge. This lead to me forgetting how things worked after a while and not really learning much. When I learned the basics of Javascript, I chose a very direct approach that worked better: I didn't watch / read any tutorials at all but just searched for a solution on the internet whenever I ran into something that I needed for my project and didn't know how to do.

Dude, this was great. I've found your channel pretty inspiring, much appreciated man! As someone who spent a lot of time drawing as a kid, I would always get pissed off when people said I was talented. Like, nah fucker! I worked really hard for this! Haha

Thanks for this educational video! You are awesome, you should be named the UE Guru! :D

Thanks for the TLDR. It helped. I'm watching the full video anyway :D

Hahahaha I think I was getting to close to a burn out when I decided to watch this video and thank goodness I decided to do it, now I feel that I'm not the only one to whom this happens hehe. Thank you for so much! Can't wait to play Prismatica ;)

Having fun is fun, sometimes i suspect that when i'm really tired i just lie to myself that it's still fun and it's fun! I've spent 1 to 1.5 months learning the basics and i had a job afterwards, it's soon a year since i've started and it's still fun ^^

It gets much easier than it seems really fast, and i kinda like that.

Really appreciate the TLDR in the beginning

I'm honestly overwhelmed. I'm a great designer and I am currently doing level design, graphic design, 3D Modeling/Texturing, lighting, marketing, video editing, and more. Going to be learning 2D Animation and possibly 3D and now going to have to dive into Programming as well. It's a lot.

I feel you - being alone with no friends and getting engaged into cats and learning

thank you very much

Great information man! Looking forward to watching the rest of your videos. Just a thought, you should make Amazon affiliate links for your equipment listed in your description. It's not pushy but a potential way to earn some extra money. :)

Tnq so much bro i need something like this on my way

"So what are you doing, open unreal engine and get to fucking work" 😂 Great advice dude! Came across your channel last week and love what you're putting out there bro! Keep up the hard work 👏

awesome tips

I think passion is really powerful in learning new skills. Like once you figure something out its like. Oh what if I make this using a similar method. Its also exciting when you get the stuff working. Its amazing. Currently trying to make lowpoly models that look almost like high poly models.

Wow, this is an incredible video, for me I believe is the most important one, because knowing techniques is one thing, knowing how to learn them is another, and knowing how to learn code for example is what makes a programmer in reality I believe. I'm mostly self taught unreal programmer with little to no real code experience outside of unreal itself, I have now 3 years of unreal experience and I got very far because I always try hard as fuck shit, do the tutorials then I try to understand everything that I did in the tutorial as much as possible, your video shows a better way to go about this and I'm thankful for this incredible useful knowledge. About the passion, I 100% think that if you are doing this and you dont like what you like you will go slower and get stuck way more often and usually that ends up in stagnation or even giving up on yourself, its a real danger to try to keep hammering something that you dont like in this life, as you said even if you were passionate about something then you stopped, switching its alright because you get better at LEARNING itself, and LEARNING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL, you can do literally anything if you can learn it. About patience, my god you are on a roll of extremely good points, patience is also extremely important, patience with yourself, its ok to take long ass time to learn something as long as you actually manage to learn, and that is always true if you do it correctly, learning smart is a thing so as long as you try what you know works best (experiment if you dont, with that you learn that too :) ). Purpose, extremely important as you said too, I feel like I'm just repeating what you said but its just its all so true xD, you need a reason to learn something, because its hard and just because its hard isnt enough for most people to actually do it. Presence, about presence, I learned a lot about what you said from drawing painting and art studies I did on my own, and its incredibly true :D, I try to be very active in Prismatica discord for a lot of reasons, learning and accountability being the major ones, liking you and the others that are in the discord as friends and learn buddies really helped me in a lot of ways with unreal and outside of unreal, besides it makes my time there much more enjoyable and literally makes me happy as a person, that is a HUGE BOOST to everything, happiness literally makes you do everything better I believe. About persistence, I couldnt agree more with you, having a schedule to learn helps but isnt necessary, me for example I focus a lot on keeping a healthy work-free time balance, I always leave a like 4h aprox to play any game everyday at least, I work in unreal projects for my enterprise 6h a day and then if I fancy doing it, I advance personal unreal projects like Sigils or VR Medieval Cartographer and stuff. About thinking and processing unreal stuff even when you are not at the computer, you gotta keep some balance because that is technically working because as you said, you are advancing you are putting the effort, it really helps to do it just dont burn yourself doing it but its a great way to get some really nice gains next time you get on the PC :). About burnout prevention, super helpful tips! I bought a japanese shakuhachi flute to learn it (its an extremely hard and curious instrument, very niche :) ) and I also draw and paint when I want to fully disconnect from unreal to precisely about burnout, taking "just a break" isnt enough, you gotta fully disconnect or you will just put a pause in the burnout bar but you arent draining the burnout, it will still be there unless you properly disconnect. Working in different aspects of the project is a very nice way to learn multiple things at a time, you make progress in your projects too, (btw drawing and digital painting can also be useful for unreal, just look at the plugin LIAD (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ft4a8o2OyOo.html) which perfectly allows to combine those skills with unreal seamlessly to make textures materials flipbooks whatever you need). One last thing on this subject, if for some reason you dont want to do unreal related stuff its ok, as I said in my personal example, there are many ways to marriage unreal projects and probably any skill hobby in the world, you fancy making caligraphy stuff? you can make a text based project with dope ass hand made fonts by your own hand :), you just play lots of videogames? you learn a lot of game design by playing many different games and that way you can create your super designs like my Sigils project (oops shameless self plug), Prismatica (the game I believe is also kinda an example of this, I really dig the influences it has from runescape exanima and other games I really enjoy ♥). With all of this combined as you said perseverance is the last thing to make all click, make the journey easy for you, take more time if you need it, but keep going at it regularly! (At this point I'm talking more to everyone and not just you Charlie oops xD). All this being said, sorry for the long ass coment but I felt I HAD TO SAY ALL THIS, I'm very happy for this video and I'm 100000000000000000000% sharing this in FeatLander, this will genuinely make everyone a better not just unreal developer, but also a better learner ♥. Thanks a lot for the insights and see ya around ^^

Best video in your channel 😊

I'm not even learning Unreal engine and I don't remember how I got here, but DAMN this is great advice. Thank you!

I've been doing game dev as a hobby while working as a career plumber, ever since I started I have wanted to make a game like morrowind... it's a concept/theme i've never been able to shake... Maybe I just bite the bullet and tell myself it's a decade project

Incredible.

playing a game is tottaly legit way of chilling. And if you play a game thats the same genre of game you are making you can even look how others did things you are doing

thanks, what a life advice

J'adore the thumbnail to this video

Have you considered making tutorials for creating game music? I love the music in your videos, it sets such a good mood. Any software more advanced than Bosca Ceoil seems like witchcraft to me.

great video!

great mate!

I thought I was alone. Thanks

Спасибо. Я тоже сталкивался с трудностями, о которых ты говоришь. Это мотивирует

What is that music at 10:10? Sounds amazing. Awesome video by the way! Makes me want to start doing dev log videos of my test project.

Im very familiar with the burnout guilt-frustration cycle and trying to make a game is very fun because it has so many completely different aspects - you can just switch and do something new and interesting. I definitely admit to (to myself) not being talented at maths though. I do think talent is real, it IS the rate at which you learn, but it shouldn't really matter. You just go at your own pace.

After a few months going through unreal engine development work, i felt like i've done anything particular i can prove so i started to think that i'm wasting my time. thank you for saying that "when it comes to learning, it's impossible to waste time".

amazing video.

Hey, thank you so much for your efforts and the valuable information you are offering to the community. I have a question that I'm trying to solve from within UNREAL. I can't blend seamlessly between the different animation tracks in the montage, the same way we can blend two different animation tracks in the sequencer. In my own version of things the animation just abruptly changes to the next one. Is there a way to blend different animation tracks within a montage?

I like the use of Newbie Melody.

“Thinking about what you’re learning and what you’ve done” I do this CONSTANTLY already and I’m only a few weeks in to learning. I found a bug in my code while at work thinking about it one day, lol

Unreal is great for any skillset! Whether you just wanna make awesome scenes or make fun systems in blueprint to creating tools in C++ and everything between! :)

14:40 , this hit me so much. I thought u are some pro and have experience 5-10 yrs. Also, saying about urself about society and happy with cats like saying about me lmao. I hope someday I will be skilled as you, doing likely u imagined for the game. - OneOfUrBiggestFan

thank you very much for making these videos - you are a treasure to the UE4 community

That cool red and blue lighting in your room tho.. :) On a serious note, one thing I've noticed is it's hard to get people to share their knowledge with unreal especially the hard stuff, I've had elite programmers make me feel really stupid for not knowing how to do something. I'm an artist so I've been learning just by breaking shit. takes forever. :(

2:17 that hipster accent was spot on xD Really helpful video btw. Thanks

The cat left when you said we are not learning anything lol

once you learned like a lot of stuffs, when you want to make your own game especially when you're a solo dev. The toughest thing is decision making, hence why people hired CEO to run their business. There are a lot of decisions to make since the beginning and it won't stop soon too, that's why patience is something you must learned fast. Sometimes you'll stuck at crossroad for quite a long time, maybe even a month or months. It's happens all the time especially for creative careers like game developers. I had been here for 7 years now but still not much to show and I'm still lacking in many skills necessary for making a full blown game. Though the fact that it's not as far as I think is true, I'm still far from making great games that I'd been dreaming about. But one lesson for you guys, making small progress is better than making nothing at all. Hell even getting better at breathing is considered a great progress for me.

I agree on everything except ''prevention'' but I guess that's just the difference in mind-sets we have. Motivation isn't real, Discipline is.

I have a question on blueprint vs c++. Is it important to learn c++ do I have to learn it to create a game? Why is it better than blueprints?

I ask myself do I enjoy what am doing, but then I realize I will enjoy it a lot more if I actually know some shit.

Question; did/Do you take paper notes ? When learning something new ?

What would you recommend I learn first

still love ya my boi

Recently started gamedev. Im 28 year old with a son, a dog, a gf, a house and a fulltime job and a part time job. I've had to resort to waking up at 5am so i can get a consistently 2-3 hours every day at learning. Some days when the missus works lateshift i get a total of 4.5-7 hours. But at that point im really maximizing the amout if availble time to devving. I guess i could get 68-83 hours monthly. Thats average 850 hours yearly. While you're at 1500-3000 hours yearly. So im worried if i dont have enough hours to dedicatento even make a worthwhile effort. problem i've noticed is the days i can only do 2 hours then it's like.. just enough to get a bit started on what im doing before i have to shut it off. But so far it goes well, managed to learn blender and substance painter and exporting models to ue5 aswell as doing basic things in ue5. We'll see, my dream is to make my own game. And my thought was to do as you do, begin my dream game without experience and learn along the way. But most experienced devs say you must make many small games and actually finish them but the problem is im not interested in making many small games just for the sake of it..

took me 10 years XD still I am learning how to make my engine and handle servers and stuff.

I need one of these 🐈🐈

3 months? did it in 30 days ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Big fan btw, stumbled on quite a few of your videos, subscribed.

How can I make a game or a level in unreal without needing to be buying anything

god the nostalgia from scape music popping off. stop pls, childhood Emerrrging

Funny story: in a dev group i was in they took away my dev role and then kicked me out. Not kicked like banned, but they forced me to go. They said i should stop trying to learn it or at least learn unity because it is easyer ( it is harder for me) So i kinda was pissed of and left the group. Like directly after i left the group i started to make progress. They still make fun of me and i'm known as the worst game dev there. I'm like a meme you could say. Also the more progress i made the more problems i found. Like i have a very stable game idea, but i have literally no idea how to start with level designing. I mean i can't just use premade models for a whole game. When i tried to make the levels i kinda felt like building lego. (I'm bad at building lego). Another thing that happened once is that i made an ai (dumb me who still needs to learn blueprint) and it seems like i do everything correctly and it still doesnt work. I even send the project to a few people which found no problems. Lol. Also idk why i'm writing a whole book in here. I hope u like reading. Since this text is so big i feel like i need to have some sort of outro yknow? Greetings (that was the outro i guess)

It's been almost 4 months since I got into Unreal Engine, but I feel like I'm still out the door. The engine has too many modules. Not sure which modules to start with. I want to be able to develop games by myself~~

any chance you can do these videos without the background music, or much lower volume? it is very difficult for me to listen to your voice and parse out the music with my processing disabilities

I just wish the information was easier to find. My problem is I understand the basics of what I wish to do in the engine just fine (I create short films not video games). But when it comes time to do something specific that can be done in the video game portion of things no worries, but there's no explanation on how to do it for sequencer, that's when I get frustrated. And even some of the big names on the Unreal Slackers Discord haven't a clue on how to do the things I'm trying to achieve for sequencer. Just wish there were more people who were experts at using Unreal for creating animated films who were active in the community. I see a handful of RU-vidrs, but no where near as many as those learning it for video games.

I feel like learn as you go can easily get away from me. I dont finish learning one thing before i feel like i need to start learning the next thing right away.

6:45 Cute cat spotted in the back