🎮 Introduction to Unreal Engine 5

• Lesson 1.1 What is Unreal Engine?
• Lesson 1.2 Installation and Setup
• Lesson 1.3 Your First Project
• Lesson 1.4 The Unreal Editor Interface

• Lesson 2.1 Understanding Levels
• Lesson 2.2 Actors and Components
• Lesson 2.3 Blockout Geometry (Modeling Mode & BSP)
• Lesson 2.4 Static Meshes and Assets
• Lesson 2.5 Materials and Lighting

• Lesson 3.1 Material Fundamentals
• Lesson 3.2 Texture Basics
• Lesson 3.3 Building Complex Materials
• Lesson 3.4 Material Instances and Parameters
• Lesson 3.5 Special Material Types

• Lesson 4.1 Lighting Fundamentals
• Lesson 4.2 The Directional Light and Sky
• Lesson 4.3 Interior Lighting
• Lesson 4.4 Lumen Global Illumination
• Lesson 4.5 Post-Process Effects

• Lesson 5.1 Introduction to Blueprints
• Lesson 5.2 Blueprint Communication and Variables
• Lesson 5.3 Blueprint Functions and Macros
• Lesson 5.4 Blueprint Flow Control and Logic
• Lesson 5.5 Working with Actors in Blueprints

• Lesson 6.1 Player Controllers and Pawns
• Lesson 6.2 Enhanced Input System
• Lesson 6.3 Character Movement
• Lesson 6.4 Collision and Physics
• Lesson 6.5 Interactable Objects

• Lesson 7.1 Introduction to UMG
• Lesson 7.2 Creating Widgets
• Lesson 7.3 HUD Elements
• Lesson 7.4 Menus and Navigation
• Lesson 7.5 Data Binding and Events

• Lesson 8.1 Audio Fundamentals
• Lesson 8.2 Playing Sounds
• Lesson 8.3 Ambient Audio

• Lesson 9.1 Niagara Overview
• Lesson 9.2 Creating Particle Effects
• Lesson 9.3 Triggering VFX

• Lesson 10.1 Project Settings
• Lesson 10.2 Optimization
• Lesson 10.3 Building and Distribution

• Lesson 11.1 Introduction to AI-Assisted Workflows
• Lesson 11.2 Setting Up Unreal MCP
• Lesson 11.3 Your First AI-Driven Workflow

Drive the Unreal Editor with natural language through the official Experimental Model Context Protocol plugin. Learn how the agent-to-editor bridge works, set it up, and run your first AI-assisted authoring task.

• Capstone 🕹️ Build the Collect-the-Orbs Mini-Game — level, actors, materials, lighting, a Blueprint pickup, input, a UMG HUD, audio, a Niagara burst, a win condition, and packaging

The finale of the intro course: a small but complete game that puts every module to work at once. Walk a character around a tiled arena, collect three glowing orbs, watch a HUD count them, hear and see each pickup, race a countdown to win (or lose when it runs out), then package it into a runnable build.

• Bonus 🛒 Using Marketplace Assets

Learn to find, purchase, and integrate third-party assets from Fab, Epic's content marketplace (which in 2024 replaced the Unreal Marketplace and folded in Quixel Megascans), and other sources into your projects.

• Lesson 1 🧍 Characters & Animation — Skeletal Mesh, sockets, Anim Blueprints & retargeting
• Lesson 2 🎥 Cinematics with Sequencer — Level Sequences, tracks, cine cameras & shot assembly
• Lesson 3 🎞️ Rendering Output — the Movie Render Queue, anti-aliasing samples & path tracing
• Lesson 4 🦴 Retargeting with the IK Retargeter — IK Rigs, retarget chains & the retarget pose (deep dive)
• Lesson 5 💡 Cinematic Lighting — three-point on a character, key-to-fill ratio, warm/cool & exposure (deep dive)
• Lesson 6 🎛️ Animating with Control Rig — bones, controls & nulls, forward/backward solve, FK vs IK, pose & key in Sequencer (deep dive)
• Lesson 7 🎬 Capstone: Direct and Render a Complete Shot — thread all six lessons into one directed, rendered shot

A step up from the introductory modules into moving characters and finished shots. These lessons teach exactly what the Production Pipeline pages reference as "beyond the intro course," and form the Unreal half of the full Story-to-Screen pipeline.

• Lesson 1 👤 What Is a MetaHuman? — the problem it solves, the shared-rig system, its anatomy & where it fits the pipeline
• Lesson 2 🧩 Mesh to MetaHuman — turn a scan, sculpt, or Daz figure into a rigged MetaHuman by solving an identity from it
• Lesson 3 🎭 Face Performance with MetaHuman Animator — capture a real performance from an iPhone, helmet cam, or video and drive it onto the shared facial rig
• Lesson 4 🏃 Body, Grooms & Retargeting — finish the digital human below the neck: retarget borrowed motion, add mocap, and bind the grooms that read as human
• Lesson 5 🎬 A MetaHuman in a Finished Cinematic Shot — the capstone: stage, perform, frame, light & render the finished digital human, threading the whole cinematic track into one directed shot

A new frontier that builds on the Cinematic Production track: the character itself. Where the intermediate track taught you to move, film, light, and render a character, this track is about the digital human you send down that pipeline and the face performance that brings it to life.

• Lesson 1 🏔️ The Modern Environment Pipeline — the map of the whole track: the three pillars (Nanite, Lumen, PCG), how Landscape, World Partition & Fab fit around them, and how a finished world becomes the stage for a shot
• Lesson 2 🪨 Nanite: Virtualized Geometry — the first pillar in depth: what virtualized micropolygon geometry is, how Nanite streams a mesh as clusters and picks detail per cluster with no LOD chain, using scanned Fab Megascans assets as-is, and where Nanite fits (and where it does not)
• Lesson 3 🔆 Lumen: Real-Time Global Illumination and Reflections — the second pillar in depth: what global illumination is, why lighting used to be baked into lightmaps, how Lumen computes the bounce every frame with no bake so the sun can move, reflections from the same system, and the instant relight loop
• Lesson 4 🌱 PCG: Procedural Generation — the third pillar in depth: describing rules instead of placing objects by hand, the PCG graph of nodes, sampling a surface into points, spawning them as instanced Nanite meshes, and the density, seed, and non-destructive regeneration that populate a landscape
• Lesson 5 🏞️ Assembling a Complete Environment — the capstone: bringing all three pillars together on a Landscape in World Partition, the layered assembly order (block out, place hero geometry, scatter with PCG, light with Lumen), Fab & Megascans as the asset source, what makes a vista read as finished, and how the world becomes the stage the cinematic tracks film on

The second track in the advanced tier, sibling to Digital Humans with MetaHuman: where that track builds the character, this one builds the world it inhabits. Nanite for geometry, Lumen for light, PCG for populating a landscape, then a capstone that assembles a complete environment.

• Phase 2 Character Finalization — Skeletal Mesh, sockets & IK Rig
• Phase 3 Prop Prep — Static Mesh & hand-socket attach
• Phase 4 Animation — the IK Retargeter
• Phase 5 Shot Assembly — place · socket · pose · light
• Phase 6 Cinematography — Sequencer, cameras & lens
• Phase 7 Output — the Movie Render Queue

These sit alongside the Daz and Blender pipeline pages. Steps 5–7 (shot assembly, cinematography, output) are Unreal-only; steps 2–4 finish work handed over from Blender. See the full Story-to-Screen pipeline →