Learn Animating MetaHumans & Explore PCG Tools With February's Free Unreal Engine 5 Courses

This month's free Unreal Engine 5 learning content covers a wide range of topics, from creating stylized, hand-drawn-looking water ripples for your projects to animating MetaHumans with the Game Animation Sample Project.

In the latest Epic tutorial from the staff, you'll learn how to create a simple, easily customizable, and animated material that can be art-directed to fit your aesthetic. Another guide dives into programming C++ and Blueprint classes to integrate a neural network into the render graph pipeline, enabling neural post-processing on the final rendered images. There's also a quick and easy tip available for creating realistic, atmospheric "god rays" using raytraced shadows in the engine.

As for popular community tutorials, David Edwards prepared a beginner-friendly tutorial on Procedural Content Generation (PCG) tools. Learn how to dynamically scatter assets across landscapes, apply advanced filtering techniques for precise placement, and utilize tags and splines to create immersive and optimized environments.

Andrejek Bojan shared an article on MetaHuman customization in Unreal Engine 5, covering materials, textures, geometry, hair, and garments. It highlights workflows like morph target editing, texture painting with Substance 3D Painter, and panel-based garment creation, offering tips on optimizing performance and enhancing realism to help developers create unique, project-specific characters.

Reza Sarkamari's guide covers the key aspects of the Color Grading panel, which centralizes scene color adjustments by managing actors with color grading properties like Post Process Volumes and Color Correction Regions. 

Also, dive into the world of visual effects with Viral Shah's tutorial on creating realistic smoke and fog in Unreal Engine 5, which is suitable for both beginners and experienced developers:

Finally, don't forget about Epic talks and demos. A recorded talk from Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 will teach you how to animate MetaHumans using the Game Animation Sample Project, covering everything from importing and manipulating character animations, switching characters dynamically, creating cinematic camera sequences, and the MetaHuman Mesh-to-MetaHuman workflow. Another talk will detail how Survios built an immersive tech stack for Alien: Rogue Incursion using Unreal Engine 5, focusing on utilizing Chaos Physics, Enhanced Input, and the Gameplay Ability System to enhance VR game development.

Dive in and start learning here. Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.