About Summer of Unreal
The Summer of Unreal is a free, four-week boot camp created in collaboration with Epic Games, where artists learn practical real-time skills from industry experts, higher education partners, and Escape Studios the UK's only Unreal Authorised Training Center.
This is not only our most ambitious free programme to date; it's the largest Unreal Engine training ever attempted.
What you will get:
During this course, you will:
- Receive 20 days of training - most of it in the morning
- Gain insights and listen to talks from European Studios and professionals
- Learn what makes a project successful
- Earn exclusive badges, and Unreal Engine certificates
- Work with artists from across Europe
The demand for Unreal Engine in the creative industry is rapidly growing, so make sure to keep up-to-date with your industry peers by studying with us during the Summer of Unreal course.
Course contents
The weeks are structured into four coherent weeks, each diving into new topics and building upon what you've learned in previous lectures.
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Week 1 of Summer of Unreal:
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This week is about building a foundation of what Unreal is, how it works, and what impact it can have on your workflow. By the end of this week, you will understand the process of asset ingestion with shaders and lighting and will be able to use this to arrange objects in your scenes to create simple sets, ready to let your animation run wild!
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Week 2 of Summer of Unreal:
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This week takes a further look into how to light scenes for different scenarios and how to leverage the power of Unreal for its real-time capabilities creating more complex setups. As well as this, you will also learn how to use Unreal for Animation playback and Cinematography. By the end of this week, you can start building your shots and edits directly in Unreal Engine.
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Week 3 of Summer of Unreal:
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You now have a clear idea of how Unreal works and how to set up your animation shot directly within Unreal. This week improves the visual quality of your animations. By the end of the week, you will have all the tools necessary to create and export your final animations.
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Week 4 of Summer of Unreal:
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We look beyond animation to push your shots further. This week you will take a deeper dive to use advanced functions to increase the possibilities available to you when building animated worlds. You also learn how to utilize the real-time particle system Niagara, as well as look at how Unreal Engine5 will change the real-time world forever.
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Read the full course contents here (PDF).
Daily program
The Summer of Unreal is a complete practical course. We've designed it to allow plenty of personal time outside of instruction periods for other commitments.
The Summer of Unreal course is designed to deliver a workshop every morning Monday to Friday at 10.30 am (CEST), leaving afternoons free to practice or get on with your daily life. You have lots of time to collaborate in your teams.
| When (CEST): |
What: |
| 10.30 am to 1.30 pm: |
class |
| 1.30 pm to 2.30 pm: |
lunch break |
| 2.30 pm to 4.30 pm: |
class |
Much of the practical work will be group work. We intend to mix people with different roles together, so they can collectively support each other and collaborate on creative themes.
Much of the lectures and tuition will be delivered on Zoom. We'll also use Discord throughout the course, which is a forum that can help you organize and collaborate with the rest of the team. We expect groups to be self-organizing and inclusive.
Course materials and system requirements
You will need your PC or Mac and a solid internet connection.
You should check your specs for running Unreal Engine. Find the official system requirements here.
Unreal Engine will work on older systems, but it is recommended that you have a bare minimum of a GTX770 or equivalent.
If in doubt, download Unreal Engine and try it out.
While there may be support on the course for technical software questions, we will be unable to help you with hardware problems.
Mac users should ensure they have the correct XCode version.