Blueprint Essential Concepts

Onto blueprint essentials today! There are a lot of moving parts that go into knowing how blueprints work and lots of terminology to learn, but we must start somewhere! There are loads of different blueprints to even look at when selecting a blueprint to add to the project. I started with an actor and selected a basic cube. It was easy enough to place it onto the map and then I added a point light on top of that cube as well!

Adding a blueprint itself was easy enough; I began to explore how to access the properties of each blueprint now. I started with a static mesh, choosing a pyramid this time. I explored the details panel a bit for the pyramid and played around with some color and material changes!

After that I added a skeletal mesh to my map, which would be my ‘character.’ This was also easy enough, as there were a few mannequin options I could choose from to use on my project. I chose one at random and began messing around with some of its details as well! I found the animation function and decided to make my mannequin run! Following that I explored how blueprints with multiple components work. Obviously any given blueprint will have a multitude of varying components, so this is something that I will likely continually have to learn, depending on each individual blueprint.

Following that I began to explore the blueprint event graph and construction script. It’s pretty easy to move around the graph, zoom in and out, and select multiple instances within the graphs. A lot of the code looks intimidating or confusing, but I love the organizational functions in the graphs to help with that! Learning about collapsing nodes, functions, and macros is super helpful and definitely looks a lot cleaner in the graph when utilized!