# Instruction for the courses: ### Introduction to Unreal Engine ### Virtual Worlds for Machine Learning (discontinued) ## New Information There are organisatorial changes coming in 2025. We will provide updates about the courses and communicate accordingly. In the meantime, we will open registration normally. ## General Information The introduction course will take place as an online event on 3 successive Fridays. The link to the streaming platform will be provided to the registrants only. ### Support: Write an e-mail to Dirk Baker, Jonathan Windgassen, or Thomas George: dirk-norbert.baker@ufz.de j.windgassen@fz-juelich.de t.george@fz-juelich.de ### Roadmap and speakers: - Introduction to Unreal Engine - Introduction to Unreal Engine (UE) - Dirk Baker - Programming with UE-Blueprints - Jonathen Windgassen - Programming with C++ in UE - Dirk Baker - Virtual Worlds for Machine Learning - Dirk Baker - **This course is discontinued until further notice** ### Prerequisites: - General programming skills - Dedicated graphics card preferred, integrated graphics only sufficient for low workloads - Installed and running version of Unreal Engine 5.3 ## Course Material - The GitHub project can be found here: https://github.com/dhelmrich/UnrealCourse - Videos will be uploaded and shared after the course has concluded ## Preparation ### We are investigating whether any install is necessary before the June course. To be well prepared, we ask you to install the Unreal Engine 5.3.* and a C++ Development IDE such as Visual Studio 2022 upfront. To do so, please proceed as follows: 1) Create an "Epic Games" account and install the "Epic Games Launcher": http://epicgames.com/store 2) In the "Epic Games Launcher" under the menu item Library install the Unreal Engine in the Version 5.3.*. Attention, you will need about 25GB of free space, so you might want to adjust the installation path. 3) Install the "Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition" and unlock it with a Microsoft account if needed. This version is also for free: http://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads Participants can also choose to install Visual Studio Code, which is free and available for download on multiple OS: https://code.visualstudio.com/ For proper installation and setup, please refer to the following document. The "Unreal Engine Installer" under "Installation Details" can now be omitted. This has already been done in step 1: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/ProductionPipelines/DevelopmentSetup/VisualStudioSetup/index.html. The Unreal Engine offers support for a variety of IDEs, such as Rider, but we encourage participants to follow the default guidelines as closely as possible. If you are encountering any problem, do not hesitate to contact us. However, please understand that daily workloads or the specifics of your problems might impact response time. ## Registration is handled via the conference management system Indico. Link to the registration for the introduction course: https://indico3-jsc.fz-juelich.de/unreal/ ## Troubleshooting ### 1. Start Unreal via the Epic Games launcher for the first time, to install prerequisites This includes DirectX and Redistributables that need to be installed for the runtime environment to work. We do not know whether this is related to any windows errors people are getting, but make sure to also do this. ### 2. If the project still does not load, create a new project There is only the skysphere in the template project, and this can be easily reproducible. You can copy the `.uasset` files over and import them into the new project. This should circumvent some processes that might lead to issues on participants PCs. 1. Create a new Project at a location where you have some disk space (~4GB) 2. Set the Starter Content to activated and the project type to C++ 3. Open the project 4. Under "create", create a new map and choose the blank layout ## Support Information ### Notes Again, if you require assistance, please reach out. The course will cover a number of techniques, as so far, the systems are considered current research. We will additionally touch upon established methods, such as UnrealCV, but not in as much depth. For the Synavis Project, we might add a discussion round at the end if that is feasible with our media equipment.