Unreal Engine has many features not covered throughout this introductory guide and it has many resources available to learn from for many different types of users.
Niagara Visual Effects
The Niagara VFX system is the primary tool to create visual effects inside of Unreal Engine. It’s a robust, flexible, high-performance system used to create complex, real-time particle effects and simulations.
Niagara includes the following features:
Visual scripting interface with an emitter-based editor that contains different modules to build out VFX.
Highly customizable to have fine control over particle behavior for simple to complex simulations, such as fire, smoke, rain, explosions, and more.
Data-driven workflows that dynamically respond to gameplay logic, animations, or other external data sources.
GPU and CPU simulations that support massive particle counts and complex particle behaviors that require things to be precise.
Modular and reusable components where you can build out emitters and modules to use across multiple projects or other VFX.
Real-time interaction and previewing within the editor viewport.
Advanced simulation capabilities for fluid simulations.
For more information to get started using Niagara in your projects, see the following topics:
Physics System
Unreal Engine uses its own light-weight physics engine called Chaos Physics. It’s built from the ground up to support the need of real-time physics simulations and the next generation of games.
Chaos physics is built to support these features:
Destruction
Rigid Body Dynamics that support physical animation
Cloth Physics and Machine Learning Cloth Simulation
Hair Physics
Flesh Simulation
Fluid Simulation
And more!
For more information on Unreal Engine’s physics system, see Chaos Physics.
Motion Design
Motion Design is a feature set for motion graphics artists who need a streamlined and creative suite of tools that provide for rapid iteration and scalability. It includes a reworked Outliner, user interface, rigging tools, cloners, customizable 2D / 3D shapes, and an alternative way to create materials using a layer-based workflow called Material Designer.
To learn more about this, see Motion Design.
MetaHuman Creator
The MetaHuman Creator workflow is fully integrated into Unreal Engine. This streamlined workflow enables you to author characters with local editing and seamless access to cloud-powered services like autorigging and texture synthesis.
You can bring realistic facial animation to your MetaHumans with MetaHuman Animator working behind the scenes to process data sent from a capture device. It translates that into accurate facial animation for your MetaHuman. The animation data produced is clean and correct, so that you can easily make artistic adjustments.
For more information on MetaHuman, see the following:
Plugins
Unreal Engine includes a bunch of plugins that enable additional features and content to be used with the engine. The engine is primarily built with plugins that can be enabled and disabled depending on the needs of your project.
The Plugins browser is where you’ll manage these for your project. You can access this window from the main menu under Edit > Plugins.
For additional information about using plugins and this window, see Plugins.
Additional Resources
In addition to Unreal Engine’s documentation, you can explore the following for additional content, such as example assets and projects, community-driven tutorials and forums, learning courses made by the community and Epic staff, and more.
Unreal Live Link for Autodesk Maya
The Unreal Live Link plug-in makes it possible to stream animation data from Maya to Unreal Engine in real-time. Whether you're working between the two tools in a virtual production environment or building your next game, you can now work on character assets in Maya and see previews of your work reflected immediately in Unreal Engine, as you make changes.
To learn more about this and how you can use it with Maya and Unreal Engine, see the Unreal Live Link for Autodesk Maya plugin on the Autodesk App Store.
Fab Marketplace
Fab is a digital marketplace that offers creators a single destination to discover, share, buy and sell high quality, real-time ready game assets. You can explore its content on Fab.com.
Fab is integrated into Unreal Engine as a plugin that is enabled by default. You can download and import content directly into your project from the Fab marketplace.
You can find plenty of Epic-created content, such as sample projects and asset packs, to explore and learn from under the Education & Tutorials section of the Product Types categories in the left-side panel.
To learn more about Fab and its integration in Unreal Engine, see the following topics:
Content Examples Project
The Content Examples project is designed as a showcase of different technology available to you. The project is set up as a collection of levels, with each level teaching a different aspect of the engine through examples. As you move through the level, you will see a series of numbered stands that have its own example asset.
Content examples are designed to be an interactive method of learning. For some of them, you must initiate Play-in-Editor in order to interact with the assets.
Topics covered include
Animation
Audio
Blueprints
Landscapes
Materials
Physics
And more!
When loading up the project, all content topics are broken out into their own levels, which you can find under the Content > Maps folder.
To learn more about this sample project and how you can use it to learn more about the features of Unreal Engine, see Content Examples.
Epic Developer Community
The Epic Developer Community (or EDC) offers announcements, tutorials, showcase projects, forums, and learning materials created by Epic staff and members of the community.
You can access the EDC by visiting Epic Developer Community.