"Ok, let's begin with a generaloverview of the UDK user interface." "Think of this as the interface at a glance.Now what you see in front of you is what you get when you first launch UDK.You get a little window with the Tip of the" "Day, and of course if you don't wantto wait 'til tomorrow, you can click on the Next Tip button and cycle through these.I highly recommend you take a moment and read through these when you get some time.There are some gems in here that you might" "not otherwise have known.For now though, we'll go ahead and close that; which brings us to the Start Page.Now the Start Page is full of all kinds of cool information about UDK, about its features.There are downloads that you can grab, such" "as demonstration levels, entire games youcan grab from here." "Also, if you want to know anything about licensing,it's all available right here at the" "Start Page.Now, we'll come back to this window, and some of the tabs associated with it, towardthe end of this video." "For now though, let's go ahead andclose this out, and this will give us the" "UDK main interface.Now, if you are completely new to working with any kind of a 3D environment application,perhaps such as Autodesk 3DS Max or Maya, then this might seem a little overwhelmingat first." "But don't worry, once you get into it, you'll findthat UDK is very intuitive, very easy to use." "So what I'd like to do here is justkind of walk you through the key areas of the interface, just so that you can identifythem, and generally know what each part is used for.Dominating your view are these great, big" "four panels that just kind of take up allof the primary space, so let's start with them.These are your viewports." "These allow you to see your level while you'reediting it, as you add objects in, as you change textures, adjust lighting.This is how you see what it is you're doing.Now currently, it's a little bit hard" "to visualize that.So what I'd like to do is open up a level that is included with UDK, so that wehave kind of a point of reference, something we can look at here inside the Viewports.So I'm going to go to the file menu" "in the upper left corner of the screen, clickFile and come down to Open." "And I'm going to choose "VCTF-Sandstorm.udk,"one of the included maps with UDK, and click the Open button.Now, this is the Sandstorm map from the game" "Unreal Tournament III.It's completely playable, and we can edit it right here if we want to make ourown versions of it." "The reason I've opened it here, isso that we can get a quick demonstration of what these Viewports are for.Now, I'm not going to go into actually navigating the Viewports, that's somethingwe'll touch on later in another video." "But you see that using this perspective viewportin the lower left corner, I can look around the world, I can see all of the little objectsthat are placed inside the map to actually turn it into a playable game.I can see all kinds of things that the game" "player generally doesn't see, or ifI want to, I can actually visualize the game exactly how the player might see it, includinglittle effects like lens flares and whatnot." "Also, if I really want to get an idea of howthe game is developing, if I've changed some things and I want to know how the playeris going to experience those, I can test the game right here inside the viewport.So I can just click the Play in Viewport button," "and Boom, I'm actually playing UnrealTournament III right here inside the viewport." "So, here's flying around in a vehicle,and of course shooting rockets (because it's important to be able to shoot rockets).So, let's go ahead hit Esc and jump out of there.So, this is what the Viewports are all about." "Seeing the actual environment that you arebuilding, being able to get an idea of exactly what the player is going to see while they'reactually playing your game, and to be able to edit things on the fly.Now, there are two different types of viewports," "you may have noticed.You have the really pretty one down here in the lower left hand corner, which has allthe nice lighting effects and whatnot; you also have three other views surrounding this.These are your schematic views." "Think of these like blueprints, or elevationprints." "They show you what the world looks like inwireframe, and we can change that and work with that information in a variety of differentways, which is something we will talk about later on, once we start focusing specificallyon viewports." "So, in short, that's what these guys are." "They're just ways to see your level.Now, each viewport, you might have noticed, has its very own Toolbar.These are just a series of buttons that allow you to control the behavior of this viewport,if you want to change the way this information" "is being rendered to you, if you don'twant to see it in this nice, pretty, lit form, you can change it to a variety of other settings.Like, in this case, we're just looking" "at the lighting information.We're not looking at any textures at all.Or if we want, we can just look at the textures and not look at the lighting, and we'lltalk a lot more about these various modes a bit later on.Now, that's it for the viewports." "That's really all I need you to knowright now; is what they're there for and some of the things you can do with them." "Now, from here, let's jump all theway to the top of the viewport." "You're going to notice some thingsthat are fairly standard in most applications." "You have a standard menu bar, with thingsyou might recognize, such as the File Menu, and an Edit Menu.We'll be going into each of these menus, and giving you an idea of what kind of optionsyou'll find in each one, in specific" "videos over that." "Underneath the Main Menu Bar, you have theMain Toolbar." "The Main Toolbar is really here to give youquick button-based access to many of the frequently used commands that you'll be usinga lot as you use the editor." "Things like creating a new level or clickingSave if you want to save your current progress." "You can open up a variety of different browsersto help you find assets to load into your level, and we'll talk more about thata bit later." "In short, really just your most common functionsare all found in the form of a button, here along the Main Toolbar.But that, of course, is not all the buttons." "You'll notice here on the left handside another stack of buttons." "This is your Toolbox.Now, the Toolbox is here to allow you to put the editor into a few different modes.Now that sounds a little bit scary, it's like "oh, the editor has all these differentmodes, I mean, what can we do in these modes?"" "You'll find that they're allpretty specific." "If we want to model geometry and actuallydo extrusions and move points around and reshape pieces of geometry, we have a Geometry Mode.If we want to shape the terrain of our levels, for example, we have this nice sandy groundplane, if we want to maybe change that and" "carve a canyon into it, we have a TerrainMode." "Just some generalized modes that allow usto work in specific areas of our level, and that's something we'll covera bit more as we go forward." "But there are other things too; various objectsand articles that we can add into our levels, such as simple primitives, cubes, cylinders,cones, and whatnot." "We can add volumes; we can show and hide objects.It's almost like an extension of the" "Main Toolbar.Various functions that you'll be using quite a bit as you create your own levelscan be found over here, inside the Toolbox." "Now, at the very bottom of your interface,there's one more line." "This is the console bar.Console bar is where you're going to go to get a lot of information about whatit is you're working on at the moment." "For instance, if I select one of the objectshere, let's just grab this dome." "I'm just going to click on it, andas soon as I do, right in the middle of the console bar it tells me that I have selectedStaticMeshActor_3002." "So, that is number 3002 of all the variousmeshes that have been placed in this level." "Just a way to tell you what object you haveselected, but other information will appear there as well.As you move objects around, it'll give you their location.As you rotate them, it'll feed back their rotation.All sorts of things you can find down here." "There's an area next to this wherewe can type in the actual scale of an object;" "if we want to stretch it, make it bigger orsmaller, we can do that by punching in numbers, and a variety of check boxes to control howwe interact with objects." "Would we like objects to snap to the gridfor precision placement, do we want rotations to be snapped.So that we don't get really tiny degrees of rotation, we can snap it to say, 15 degreeincrements, if that's easier for us." "At the far end, there is also a box for AutoSave, which I turn off for the purposes of recording videos, so that you guys don'tsee an auto save window pop up while I'm trying to talk to you.Generally, I would recommend that you leave" "this on.The idea of Auto Save is that while you are working, it will stop for just a moment andsave your progress so that in the unlikely event of a crash, you don't lose yourwork." "So, that's a quick rundown of the maininterface." "Now, just a review.The four big panels we have here are Viewports." "Each Viewport has its own Toolbar along itstop." "At the very top of the interface, we havethe Main Menu Bar." "Down from here we have the Main Toolbar, whichis just a series of buttons that give us quick access to common commands.We have the Toolbox, which allows us to change the mode of the editor, as well as a few othercommon commands that we'll be using" "as we rough out and block in our levels.Along the bottom we have the Console Bar, which gives us important information aboutthe objects that we're manipulating, as well as the ability to control how theyare manipulated; are they snapping?" "Is there rotation being controlled in any kind of aspecific way?" "So, there's your main interface." "Now, that's not quite all!" "There area few other parts of the interface that are by default, aren't visible, which youneed to know, just at least generally about and how to get to them.The first, and probably most important, is" "the Content Browser.The Content Browser is where you're going to get any asset you'd like toplace in your level that was created in an outside source.Now, when I say that, if you are completely new to the world of game design, you mightnot know what I mean." "To help illustrate, let me just open up theContent Browser." "There are two places we can do it from; oneis here inside the Main Toolbar, there is an Open Content Browser button (notice thatit has a little tiny "U" on it for" "Unreal), or, we can go View  Browser Windows,and choose Content Browser." "In a nutshell, the Content Browser is hereto give us quick and easy, searchable access to exterior assets.These are things like textures, which we would have createdin Photoshop, or 3D models that we would have created in 3DS Max, or Maya, or one of themany other 3D animation packages out there." "Things like sound effects, things like particlesystems; anything that we had to create through any kind of exterior means to place into ourlevel, can be accessed right here." "We'll talk specifically about the ContentBrowser, and how it works, how you can navigate it, in future videos as we move forward.Now, this window that contains the Content" "Browser has several different tabs, and Idon't want to go into all of these tabs right now, but I will mention one veryimportant tab, and that's the Actor" "Classes Browser.This gives you access to any object that is integrated into the Unreal Engine 3 game engine.Things like cameras, things like weapons, vehicles, ammunition.Things that actually required some level of scripting to be integrated into the game canbe placed right here." "These are different than assets, because they'renot really the kind of thing that we would have created inside of, say, Max or Maya,though they may have a 3D model, they may have a texture associated with them, and inmost cases they will." "These are things that required some levelof programming to integrate into UDK, and so we're going to access them throughthe Actor Classes Browser." "Now, this is something we'll be usinga lot as we get deeper into creating our own worlds, as we need specialized objects, suchas maybe a weapon pickup, or a place to put a vehicle, or even specific kinds of lights." "Alright, now that's everything I wantto cover inside this very general walkthrough of the user interface.Of course, there are other parts of the UI that you will be getting in touch with.Just to mention a few; we have things like" "the Cascade Particle Editor, we have thingslike the Matinee Animation Editing System, we even have Kismet, which is a visual scriptingsystem, but these are all things that will be introduced as you move further along.Right now, I just want to focus on these basic," "primary parts of the user interface.So, let's go ahead and move on from here, and go into some specifics on each oneof these parts, and you can learn more about these key elements as we go."