Getting started with Digital Twins: Analyzing the built environment in Unreal Engine

Learn at your own pace

This is a step-by-step course that teaches you to setup your first Unreal Engine project, work with 3D assets and build a user interface for bespoke functionality.

Sessions 01: Project setup
The first part of this webinar will focus on establishing the scope of the project that we want to create and on explaining how to make it a reality. Things such as performance targets, memory budgets, gameplay features or planned functionalities are ideally laid out at the start of the project, just so that we can account for them in advance and have a broad idea of how our app should be coded We’ll take a look at that in this first episode, and we’ll also start defining the Unreal Engine project as we move along.

Session 02: Creating a digital twin
Having laid out the foundations of the project in the previous video, this second part will delve deeper into how to actually import the 3d model of a city into Unreal Engine and how to treat it in order to achieve the goals laid out in the first episode. We’ll take a look at importing 3D models, creating levels, implementing a bit of logic to interact with the different objects and those other general elements that are needed to get an app such as this one up and running.

Session 03: Adding tools
The third class will focus on creating functionality on top of the 3d models that we now have imported. We’ll explore how to create a Daylight Analysis tool using the blueprint system, something that will help us visualise the amount of daylight that a given area receives throughout a day, as an example of the kind of tools that can be created inside Unreal.

Session 04: The UI
The fourth lesson explores how to connect our users to the underlying logic of the app by creating a user interface that enables them to interact with the systems that we’ve previously created. We will also revisit the Daylight Analysis actor and see how we can now communicate with it in an interactive way.

Session 05: Wrapping up
The last video will wrap things up by taking a final look at the different systems that we’ve created so far and improve upon them - sometimes by making the background processes more efficient and some other times by simply expanding upon what we’ve previously done. We’ll end up packaging the app and playing with the end product to send things off.