When you run Blender, you are greeted by the splash screen. A list of files you have worked on recently will be listed on the left, as well as some quick links to various things, such as the documentation and the website. Click in the space to either side of the splash screen to remove it. Now let's take a look at the default scene.

Blender starts you off with three basic objects in the scene already: a cube, a light, and a camera, as shown in the following screenshot:

Our Blender default setup. We will change this to work better with Unreal 4

Select any one of them by right-clicking on the object. This will highlight it in orange. Try right-clicking on other objects in the scene:

We can rotate our point of view around the center by holding the middle mouse button (MMB). We can slide our view by holding Shift + MMB and zoom it using the mouse wheel or + and - on the number pad. Lastly, the number pad can also be used to view specific angles of your object.

Now let's take a look at the menus:

The Blender interface

All of the preceding options have several functions. We will discuss them briefly here and more as we continue with the project:

A lot of information, huh? Trust me, it gets easier with practice. To make things even easier, let's customize some of our settings.

Without customizing some of your settings, working with Blender can be a bit of a chore, especially if you have any experience with another 3D software. When we started moving around the interface a bit, you may have noticed right away that if you left-click, it moves the little bullseye cursor. This is called the 3D cursor and it is actually used for a lot of things within Blender, such as where to place new 3D shapes. Now, moving this when you left-click is less than ideal and is sometimes easily forgotten as you attempt to select things in your 3D scene, but there is a way to change that.

In the top-left corner of the screen, click on File and select User Preferences. Select the Input tab and look down along the left-hand side until you see the Select With option. You can see that it's currently set to right-click to select objects. Let's change that to Left to bring it more in line with Unreal Engine 4. It stops a lot of confusion later when you are going between the two programs. Be sure to click on the Save User Settings button at the bottom left corner once you have made this change. The second setting that needs to be changed involves scale.

The following screenshot shows the Blender User Preferences window:

Setting the mouse selection to use the LMB

To change this next setting, we are going to take a look at the Properties pane. The window looks something like this:

Along the top of the pane are several small tabs. We are looking for the Scene tab denoted by this icon:

Setting the mouse selection to use the LMB

This pane allows us to change several options pertaining to the scene, such as the scale. Unreal Engine 4 uses centimeters as its default measurement, so we want to match that here. This will make our game assets fit into our levels without the need to scale them in the game engine. Follow these steps:

Now that we have made those changes, save your file by using the File menu or pressing Ctrl + S.

Blender has one more menu we haven't talked about yet. This is a small menu bar along the bottom of the 3D view that looks like the following:

The menu bar at the bottom of the 3d view. We will use this a lot!

It contains the View, Select, Add, and Object menus. It also contains the modes drop-down. We will use many different modes throughout this book, but we will spend most of our time in the Edit mode. This mode allows us to push and pull basic shapes into our new creations. Blender allows us to switch between Object mode (the default mode) and Edit mode fairly easily by pressing Tab. This will only work if you have an object that can be edited selected in the scene. You will notice that many of the menus change when you change modes. We will explore this more when we create our first object in Chapter 3, It's Time to Customize!.

This book is broken into two projects that will have us creating custom game assets in Blender and adding them to levels built in Unreal Engine 4. The first project will be a basic level that I have taught many students to create over my 10 years of teaching experience: two rooms connected by a hallway with some stairs, doors that function, and an elevator. Though the level itself is not complicated, we will walk through the entire design process from idea, to prototype, to the final product. We will then use this same process to design a more complex level later in this book. The levels themselves will be created with a science fiction horror theme in mind. Having a theme will unite the two levels and give us an art style to work with when the time comes to design custom level assets.

So how do you design a level from scratch? Our process will follow a few distinct steps:

Now let's get our project started in Unreal Engine 4.

Before we get started with Unreal, make sure that you have installed the Epic Games Launcher. This is available for free at https://www.UnrealEngine.com/ and can be downloaded by clicking on the Get Unreal button located at the top right-hand corner of the page. You will be asked to create an account and the launcher will ask for this information when you run it.

Next, click on the Library button along the left-hand side of the screen. In the section labeled Engine versions, click on Launch on version 4.9.2 (the latest version as of this writing). If there are no engines visible, select Add Versions and follow the prompts:

The Epic Games Launcher. Clicking Library on the Unreal Engine tab will show what engine version you have, as well as your current projects

Once the engine has loaded, you will be presented with all of the projects you have been working on. For this one, let's start a new project. Click on the New Project tab at the top, as shown in the following screenshot:

The New Projects tab

At this point, Unreal provides you with a few choices. The engine comes with many free starter projects to get you started on a number of different types of projects. For our projects, we will use the First Person starter project. Make sure that the Starter Content button says With Starter Content and give the project a unique name with no spaces. When you are all set, click on Create Project, down in the bottom right. Unreal Engine 4 will load and we will be all set to start our level.

Throughout this chapter, you took a look at the tools you will use to bring our level idea to life. Blender is a freely available open source creation suite that supports the entire asset development process. Created using the Python programming language, Blender is flexible enough to run on almost any machine and is entirely cross-platform; it runs in Windows, Mac, or Linux. Next, you took a look at the design process you will use and how Blender and Unreal Engine 4 plug into it. Lastly, you set up Unreal to begin our first project. As you move to the next chapter, you will build your first level that will play host to your first original game asset. Can you feel the excitement!?