Tutorials

I was hoping to post some book cover sample environments with trees and foliage, but it's not that easy. I've been going through Unreal Engine tutorials this week to try to get up to speed. I've used the BigWorld engine in the past, but it was all set up before I used it. Setting things up in UE has turned out to be a process. It's taking forever to learn things.

I've been using tutorials on YouTube that are made by UE gurus. One of them can't correctly pronounce words like button. He mostly sounds like a native speaker except for that, but it is super annoying. One has a strong Indian accent. His tutorial is over 11 hours long. He has a habit of not saying what he's doing. For example, he'll click/right click something or use some kind of shortcut key without mentioning it. Suddenly, something onscreen will change, leaving me trying to figure out how it was done. If I knew all of those things, I wouldn't need a tutorial. One has an eastern European accent. I like him the best, but it can be difficult to figure out what he's saying for some technical terms. I've watched others for specific things. I wonder where the native English speakers are for these things. Having to stop and figure things out or follow the steps is extremely time consuming.

I'm debating buying a book on Unreal Engine. I looked at them a couple of week ago. They're college textbook prices and thus too expensive. After this week, I might get one anyway. The old books aren't expensive, but Unreal Engine 5.2, which is what I'm using, just came out and has some significant changes not covered in the old books. For instance, procedural generation. If you're heard of or played No Man's Sky, it's made with procedural generation. That's more or less creating a set of rules that lets the engine create an environment(or whatever) rather than creating it all by hand. No Man's Sky has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets, which is 18 quintillion. No one could make that many planets by hand. It's impossible to explore all the worlds in that game. It has 256 universes in it. 😄 Using procedural generation is a powerful tool. It's possible I could make an entire planet using a set of rules and then zoom around to find decent locations for book covers without having to spend hours creating the locations by hand. But is it worth it to learn that? Not just for book covers.

I've been thinking a lot about making a video game as a side hustle and forgetting about Etsy and Adobe and all that. It would be complicated and take a long time, but there's good money in it.

Maybe next week I'll have some screenshots of something.

Have a great weekend.