DON’T JUST WATCH TUTORIALS

Tutorials offer a lot of specific information about specific things. This is great if you are an experienced developer; You can skim through it or watch at 2x speed and get the information that you need.

This is not true for beginners, the tutorial will be slow and confusing, you will just follow the instructor’s orders and hopefully finish it. In the end, you will have the result of the tutorial, without understanding why he does it this way, what are the other ways to do the same thing or how you can modify or edit it effectively.

The information you will get from the tutorial will be poor and you will have to watch and suffer through a lot of them before you are experienced enough that watching tutorials becomes one of the best ways to gain information.

My solution for this is to use different ways and content to learn the engine if you are a beginner.

Epic Learning Portal

One of the things that I was thankful to find when I was inexperienced with Unreal was the library of Unreal’s courses that really helped me understand how blueprints, materials, terrain, and other features of the engine(or the engine itself) work. The courses are made by the devs or evangelists that work for epic and they can go in-depth.

Official Documentation

Also, one of the good ways to learn theory would be reading their detailed and pretty helpful documentation on things like classes, components, rendering, and anything really. If you are interested in a specific feature, let’s say pawn class, you can find a detailed explanation of how they work and some examples of how and when to use them.

Hands-on

Of course, learning only theory and just jumping in the engine will still leave you confused, so they should go hand in hand. I would also advise just opening the engine and clicking on things. Try to figure out what something does and if you feel like you don’t have a good understanding of it, go to the documentation or a tutorial/course and learn in-depth as much as you can.

Now that you know the theory, have some hands-on experience, and are ready to create something of your own, the tutorials will be way more useful. When you open the tutorial you won’t be overwhelmed by the interface, or confused by some concepts that are mentioned and will do more than just follow instructions. You will be able to watch it faster and retain the same amount of information(sometimes, even more, I tend to doze off if the tutorial is not the right speed for me). After the tutorial ends you will understand what you did and how the creation works, and will easily modify it.