Unreal Engine: Creating Widgets for UI

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Course Description

Learn how to create UI menu systems for games like Fortnite, Horizon Forbidden West, Final Fantasy, and Call of Duty!

In this course, you will learn how to use the Unreal Widget Blueprint system to create UI (User Interface) for your games and applications. These are the same user interfaces that you see in popular games such as Fortnite, Madden NFL, Grand Theft Auto, and Final Fantasy! These menus also mimic the menus that I use to create visualization applications at a Fortune 500 company, and are proven techniques! It is vitally important for any Unreal developer to understand the concepts of widget blueprints. By the end of this course, you will have the knowledge and expertise to be able to create menus, on screen HUD’s, and many other kinds of menus that you can use in your own games and applications! You will also have developed a fully functional Survival Game!

This course is a great starting point for users who are unfamiliar with the Unreal Widget Blueprint system. It is targeted at Unreal Engine users who have a basic understanding of Unreal 5. We will not be going over how to download and install the Engine or general navigation of the Editor. However, you will master how to design, program and debug widgets within the Widget Blueprint Editor! NO PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED!

What You Will Learn

  • What are Widgets and why are they important?
  • How to create, display, and remove a widget from the viewport
  • How to create, customize, and utilize the most frequently used UI elements
  • How to add events and program your widgets using the Graph Editor
  • Tips & Tricks for using Unreal Widgets
  • How to create a simple Survival Game with pickups and damage
  • How to make a Game Instance to transfer variables between levels
  • How to create a Save Game to save and load your settings

Requirements/Prerequisites

  • Recommended: Basic computer knowledge
  • Recommended: An understanding of basic navigation for the Unreal Engine
  • Recommended: Unreal Engine 5.1 or higher installed
  • Recommended: Desktop PC with Windows 7 (or later) 64-bit – OR – a Mac with Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
  • Recommended: DirectX 11 compatible video card
  • Recommended: Quad-core Intel or AMD processor
  • Recommended: 8 GB RAM
  • NO programming experience needed!

Intended Audience

  • Students who want to learn how to create UI for games and applications
  • Students interested in learning how the various widgets work in Unreal Engine
  • Students interested in creating a simple Survival Game

Length

3 hours 32 minutes

Curriculum

  1. Introduction
    • Project Primer
    • Making the Most Out of this Course
  2. Creating Widgets
    • What is a Widget?
    • Creating Widgets
  3. Widget Designer Mode
    • Designer Mode Window
    • Widget Types – Input
    • Widget Types – Common
    • Widget Types – Misc
    • Widget Types – Primitive
    • Widget Types – Special Effects
    • Widget Types – Panel
    • Widget Types – Additional Functionality
    • Widget Types – User Created
    • Animations
    • Conclusion
  4. Widget Graph Editor Mode
    • Graph Editor Window
    • Blueprint Panel
    • Debugging
  5. Tips & Tricks
  6. Creating a Survival Game
    • Introduction and Set Up
    • Setting Up The Pawn
    • Setting Up The Start Level
    • Start Level Menu
    • Settings Menu Part I
    • Save Game and Game Instance
    • Settings Menu Part II
    • Animating the Menus
    • Setting Up the HUD
    • Creating the Score HUD
    • Setting Up the End Game Widget
    • Applying Settings to the Main Level
    • Setting Up the Pick Ups
    • Creating Electricity
    • Unreal 5 Streaming Issue
    • One More Thing…
  7. Conclusion

Video Previews

In this project primer, we will walk through why Unreal widgets are important, where they are used, and what the rest of this course will be about.

In this video, you will learn what a widget is and why widgets are important to understand in the Unreal Engine.

In this video, you will learn how to create widgets, and how to display or remove them from the viewport.

In this video you will learn about the different windows in the Widget Designer Mode section of a Widget Blueprint. This includes the viewport, the top menu, the palette panel, the hierarchy panel, the animations panel, and the details panel.

Learn about the various windows in the Widget Graph Editor Mode section of a Widget Blueprint. This includes the event graph, the blueprint panel, the details panel, and the compiler results panel.

In this video, I will introduce the Survival Game that you can create in my full course. We will spend some time going over what we will be doing, and setting up the project.

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