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My name is Sjoerd de Jong. I am your Unreal evangelist in Europe.
I travel around Europe and talk about Unreal.
I go to conferences. I go to many educational institutions as well.
If you're located in Europe,
I am happy to have a look with you if I can come by at some point,
if there is something we can do.
Like almost everyone else here today, I am a technical artist.
You can see a trend here. That is kind of the
general message we want to convey as well.
I am also going to talk about that here today,
and just how important that really is.
I want to particularly talk about the
master classes that we have been putting together.
These are deep and total dives into the Unreal Engine
and essentially, complex subjects explained in an understandable way.
What that means is the following.
They are posted here.
This is the direct URL: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/video-tutorials
The image that you saw from Chris and Tom with Video Tutorials, that one,
I will go back to the URL in a second.
That is an immediate URL.
That is something we have launched recently.
As part of that, we have the master classes as well.
These master classes take the form of video tutorials.
They are about a couple of hours long.
Mine is about real-time rendering, which I am going to talk about here.
It is about three a half hours long.
That is kind of what we are looking at.
These are the ones we have available.
We have one available on building better pipelines.
It is one thing to learn how to use, for example the Material Editor,
or how to use this feature, and how to use that feature.
It is something entirely different on how you tie all of that together.
How do you combine all of those different tools
into creating an actual pipeline and workflow?
There is one that focuses on that.
We've got one that focuses on advanced techniques for architects
which is part of a wider initiative to building more learning resources for
non-game use of the Unreal engine.
We have one on creating plugins.
Again, part of the pipeline and workflow in a way.
If you are able to build plugins, then you can modify the editor
to better suit your project and way you're working.
Again, very important in mastering Unreal Engine.
Then lastly, we have my own master class on real-time rendering.
The classes on real-time rendering
is about explaining the entire process a single frame goes through.
How do we render a single image?
Everything that is involved, the entire process.
It is not meant for engineers or programmers.
This is meant for artists and designers primarily.
To explain it in a very practical, artist-driven way,
it is about the big picture.
It is about which features exist,
how do they compare,
when to use which feature, what will impact performance and why, etc.
What I'm not doing in class is I'm not explaining how to actually do the things.
I'm explaining what is there and why it is there.
I'm explaining literally the big picture.
For example, we talk about pre-computed visibility.
I am not going to explain click here,
click there, click there, and now you have something.
I'm going to explain this is what exists. This exists and this exists.
This is how this stands in relationship to this feature.
This is how it all impacts performance, and so on and so on.
Then from that information, you can then say, okay
that is cool; I didn't know about pre-computed visibility.
Let me look up some information online,
other resources on how you actually handle and build that.
When I say big picture, I mean big picture.
This is not what we launched. This is not public,
but this is how I started.
When I was building the content, this is how I set it up for myself.
I'm not a programmer. I'm not an engineer.
I'm an artist myself.
I want to visually see exactly what happens.
This is how I set up the content as well.
I build a huge image,
which describes all the steps it
goes through, literally how the image is built up
and which step does it go through as part of the rendering process.
I build up for myself just to get a feel for it.
Then we converted that to the final format of video tutorials.
I'm just going to step through a couple of things it goes through relatively quickly.
It goes through things like Game Draw and Render Thread, and how that works.
Pre-computed visibility.
It looks at draw calls.
We analyze them using RenderDoc.
Exactly what are draw calls. How do they
impact performance. How they impact workflow.
When should you be careful with them.
When should you maybe be less careful with them.
Overshading. GBuffer.
How textures are handled, for example with mipmaps.
Pixel shaders and the general architecture of shaders behind the Material Editor.
Reflections, SSR, reflection captures.
Distance fields. All of the information about lighting and shadowing in general,
including distance fields.
How there are volumetric textures. What does a volumetric texture mean.
Shadows. The GBuffer used to calculate lighting, etc., etc.
I can talk literally for three and a half hours, which is the length of the class,
about everything that is in there.
That is a wide, big view on everything we've got.
I think it is really important
that everyone who's involved
with game development and real-time development
using real-time rendering in general
understands these things.
A lot of people tend to skip out on that especially artists and designers,
for various reasons.
I think one reason is there are not that many resources online.
I think that we explain these very complex subjects in an easily understandable way.
That is probably reason one.
Another reason is kind of our fault.
We made things really pretty, really easy.
That is great. It is one of the strengths of Unreal.
But the downside to that is
that if you're a student or if you are new to
doing these kind of things,
it is very easy to get carried away. It is very easy to do something,
have a pretty picture and think, "I'm done.
I have done a great job; it looks pretty",
which is only a little part of the work you're supposed to do.
Obviously it needs to run,
especially for game development.
For non game usage that it is debatable. It depends on exactly what you are doing.
But especially for games obviously if it does not run,
it does not matter how fun it is, it does not matter
how pretty it is, you can't play it;
which defeats the entire point of making a game.
Perhaps the most important part of this
is to consider what the future looks like.
Because of the work that we are doing with the engine
and because of the work you are doing as educators and a couple of other reasons,
we're getting an ever larger group of people out there who can do something.
The engine is freely available.
We have a lot of learning resources available.
Anyone on the planet can download this.
You can learn it and can master Unreal.
We are getting more educators in the world
to focus on real-time rendering and game development.
The quality of education keeps going up. We get ever more students there.
The group that is there is growing.
We have more and more things on YouTube.
First of all, the rise of YouTube in general in the past 10 years,
things like Steam, there are lots of reasons.
The group of people who can do some kind of modelling,
who can create some sort of programming or scripting,
and the group of people who can make a game is increasing.
In order for you to stand out in the future,
in order for your students and graduates to stand out from that group in the future,
they need to go to the next step. They need to stand out from that group.
They need to be part of the top ten or whatever percent of that group,
and have a deeper understanding of what's going on.
It is no longer going to be sufficient to simply to be able to do something,
to be able to make something.
This is where this really ties in.
We want to make master classes
that really explain how things work because it is important for everyone.
What we've got coming up
is we have a Materials master class recorded.
It has to be edited, and will be live in probably a couple of weeks.
It explains everything to do with Materials.
Later on as this hasn't been started yet,
but we are going to look at a Blueprint master class
that I really want to build over the summer.
We will start looking into that and really explaining
exactly how Blueprint works,
including lots of advanced questions most people don't even know are there.
[Indistinct] This is the URL where the videos are available at.
Cool. Thank you.
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