Welcome to another Unreal Tips & Tricks.
In this episode, we'll look at how a keyboard
shortcut-based workflow can save you time and improve
your economy of motion.
While the time and effort savings may seem insignificant,
counted in mere seconds per action
over an entire workday or work week,
those savings can really add up.
Over a multipart series of Tips & Tricks videos,
we'll be looking at many shortcuts that
can be used in the viewport, as well as some basic editor
shortcuts.
And finally, we'll also look at some great material editor
shortcuts, too.
Let's get started.
The first thing we'll want to do is
look at the location in Unreal Engine, where you can customize
your keyboard shortcuts.
For that, we're going to go up to the Edit menu at the top
and select Editor Preferences.
When the Editor Preferences window comes up,
we're going to look under General, Keyboard Shortcuts.
In Keyboard Shortcuts, you'll find
all of the options that can have a keyboard shortcut applied
to them.
And then of course, you'll see the keyboard shortcuts
to the right of those options.
And you can see, if you scroll down, there are quite a few.
Now we're not going to be covering every single keyboard
shortcut today.
There are shortcuts for using Sequencer,
for doing Blueprints, shortcuts for all sorts
of different parts of Unreal Engine.
But we are going to cover some of the most commonly used
in your day to day workflow.
I mentioned that using keyboard shortcuts
can really save on the time and effort needed
to perform an action.
Let's look at a couple of quick examples of exactly how
keyboard shortcuts can do that.
And we're going to look at four different examples here.
So basically, this kind of--
the amount of effort and time you save kind of
depends on where your mouse currently is in the editor
obviously.
But let's just imagine that we're starting with our mouse
cursor down here in the content browser or somewhere over here
on the details panel.
And we want to save the level.
We've just finished doing some work, and we're ready to save.
Now, we can go all the way up here and click on Save Current.
But that's not actually going to save everything.
We may have changed a lot of things-- materials,
Blueprints, the level itself.
And this is not going to save necessarily everything.
If you want to save everything, I like to use Save All.
And for that, we'd have to go all the way up
to the File button at the top left here,
and then scroll down and click Save All.
So clearly, we've got a couple of mouse clicks to perform.
And we had to drag our mouse all the way from the bottom right
to the top left.
So there's a lot of motion there, as well.
Now, the quick way to do that would simply
be to press Control, Shift, S. And that's
going to save everything that you have modified, which
is anything that's going to have a star indicator in the content
browser.
Now remember, we're only talking about a very small savings
here-- fractions of a second, in this case.
But those fractions can add up.
Something else you might do very commonly
is to locate an asset in your content browser
and open it up in the static mesh editor
to make some adjustments to it.
So let's take this chair for example here.
Now in order to find that in the content browser normally,
I'd either go down here and dig through the content browser
until I found it using these folders here.
So I might go to Meshes and then look under Dining,
and then there's the chair.
Or I could type in the search box
here somewhere for the name of the chair.
So I might type chair here.
And that would bring up the chairs
that I have in the project.
Now another option would be to right click the chair
and then select Browse to Asset.
And then from here, to open it in the editor,
I'd need to simply double click that to bring up
the static mesh editor.
So we can see there's a lot of motion
here again, a lot of mouse clicks.
But there are a couple of shortcuts you can use instead.
First of all, if you simply want to locate it in the content
browser, you can simply press Control B. So
if I go back to my content window here
and then I press Control B with the chair selected,
it's going to find it for me.
Now if I want to actually open it,
I still have to double click it to bring up the static mesh
editor.
Let's go back to the content window.
But if I want to go straight into the content's static mesh
editor for this chair, I'd simply press Control E.
And that brings a chair right up in the static mesh editor.
And now I can work with it from here.
So you can see how you save a lot of motion and clicks
there for something that you do on a pretty common basis
when working inside Unreal.
Another good example might be setting bookmarks.
Setting bookmarks in your viewport
is a great way to be able to move from position to position,
a place that you've set that you really like the view.
Now this isn't something that you do very frequently.
But it's good to know the shortcuts.
Normally you'd have to go up to the top left of the viewport
under Viewport Options.
Click on that, go down to Bookmarks,
and then go down to Set Bookmark.
And then click on one of these available bookmark
presets, so 0 through 9.
And then to jump to the bookmark,
you again go back to Bookmarks.
And then you'd click on the Jump to Bookmark.
But instead, let's say we set a bookmark over here.
And then if we want to set that bookmark,
let's set this as bookmark 9.
So we'd hold Control and press 9.
So now if I move my camera somewhere else
and then press 9, that will jump me back to the bookmark.
So setting the bookmark is Control
plus one of the number keys.
And jumping to that bookmark is simply pressing the number key.
All right.
So we've seen some quick examples
of how you can save a lot of motion,
as well as mouse clicks and ultimately time
by learning these keyboard shortcuts.
I'm not going to go through all of the other keyboard
shortcuts in the same manner because I
think these few examples help illustrate the point.
So let's actually just go through some
of the commonly used shortcuts.
And we'll start with viewport shortcuts.
The Unreal Editor viewport uses the intuitive, commonly used
W, A, S, and D keys.
So what you do is you'll hold your right mouse button.
And obviously while you're holding that,
you can rotate your camera around.
And then if you want to go forwards, it's
going to be W. Backwards is A. And then you
can stray to the left with S and to the right with D.
Now these are pretty commonly known.
But there are a few others that we can make use of, as well.
If we want to go down, we can hold
Q. And if we want to go up, we can hold E.
And finally, if you'd like to temporarily change
the field of view, you can use the Z and C keys.
By holding the right mouse button down and then holding Z,
you're going to increase the field of view, zooming out.
And then C will decrease the field of view, zooming in.
Once you let go the right mouse button,
it should snap back into place.
Now, you may have heard of game mode in the viewport.
And this is when Unreal is showing what the scene
or level will look like if it was in game,
what the player would see.
Now currently, we're in game mode.
And what it does is it hides all of the widgets
and things such as reflection capture probes and game related
objects.
But if we need to see those things,
normally, we'd go up to the Viewport Options,
and then we'd select Game View and uncheck that.
However, as you can see, the shortcut for that
is going to be G.
Now take note if you ever press a shortcut key related
to the viewport and nothing happens, make sure you
first right click in the viewport,
and then you should be able to use the shortcut.
In the viewport, we can also use what's called immersive mode.
This is also found in the top left menu here.
And if we press the F11 key, that
will take us into immersive mode.
It essentially makes the viewport
take up the entire screen.
Now you'll notice in immersive mode,
we don't have the basic toolbar at the top here anymore.
So if we wanted to play the level,
we wouldn't be able to do that using the button.
But instead, we have a keyboard shortcut for that.
And that's Alt P. So now you can see,
I'm actually in the sequence that's
played by the game when you run it.
And to get out of the game from here,
we will simply press Escape.
And let's go ahead and return from immersive mode
by toggling it off with F11.
Now let's go over here to our little ice bucket.
And you'll notice that we've got a little particle effect
playing on the ice bucket.
Now this is called real time mode.
That's why we can see the particles displaying.
And sometimes, real time mode is not
something you want turned on because it
can affect your performance.
If you've got a lot of things going on,
you want to be able to turn those off.
Or if you're debugging and you don't
want to see these things in the viewport
while you're debugging, the way you would turn that off
normally is to go up to the top left again,
Viewport Options, and just uncheck Real Time.
However, the keyboard shortcut for that,
as you could probably see there, is Control R.
When you press that, the particles
are no longer animating.
And you can see real time is set to off.
And this is just a great way of being
able to turn off all of the animated things,
anything that's particle-based or anything like that,
physics-based.
All that stuff will be completely shut off.
But if you want to turn it back on, of course,
we'll toggle it with Control R.
In conjunction with debugging and seeing your performance,
if you ever want to see the FPS in the viewport very quickly,
normally you'd use the console.
Now the console is brought up with the tilde key.
And that will allow me to type in a console command.
And from here, I could type Stat FPS.
But let's go ahead and turn that back off.
And obviously, another way would be to use a menu.
But a quicker way is simply to press Control, Shift, H.
And this will bring up the stats.
On the next Unreal Tips & Tricks,
we'll cover some additional viewport related shortcuts
that come in quite handy for debugging and optimizing
your level, as well as shortcuts related
to selecting and manipulating objects in the viewport.
Thanks for watching.
And we'll see you next time