Here are a few non-exhaustive answers:
How do you manage / version assets? Git? Git LFS? ...?
Disclaimer: I'm a git Zealot, and use it for everything BUT version control with UE4 where Perforce is the King.
I might sound like someone having Helix shares but I don't :) Here are a few reasons for that:
- Perforce is built from the ground up to handle binary files and UE4 is just about that. So you need a VCS that is blazing fast with them and also allow you to exclusively lock files across the entire server as you cannot merge binary files. While you can do that with Git LFS 2, it still does not beat Perforce for general performance. I don't have recent metrics but Git was significantly much slower than Perforce when handling millions of files, we have dozen of millions in our repo.
- Perforce allows you to selectively "clone" parts of the depot, this is super important as it gives you granular control over your work.
- Perforce Streams are really fantastic, it is like Git branches but on steroid. You can setup complex Stream Graph setups where down Streams are giving a filtered view on parent Streams allowing you to curate what people see which makes a huge difference when you are an artist and are not concerned about getting 20-30Go of debugging symbols and other developer related files.
- Perforce is fully integrated with Unreal itself but all the tooling from Epic Games. This is what they use and support in their own pipeline.
I would recommend reading all the articles from Dan Bloch, starting with "Life on the Edge:
Monitoring and Running A Very Large
Perforce Installation", https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c..., and then "Still All On One Server: Perforce at Scale", https://research.google/pubs/pub39983/.
How do you import photogrammetry assets? Do you need to process them in other software first, and is there a desired format to put them in? What's the best way to import and version them?
Agisoft Metashape, Reality Capture, Zephyr 3D are some of the typical software in use. You usually need an optimisation pass in DCCs such as Maya, 3dsmax, Houdini or Blender. Then, FBX is kind of the geometry standard for UE4, but it also supports Wavefront Obj files, USD to a degree and Alembic caches among other things.
Is networking support for multiple players something that works out of the box?
Yes:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/InteractiveExperiences/N... Are there tools for integrating sensors like VR tracking and Kinect? What about adding real time point cloud data into the scene?
VR is really well supported and in the context of Virtual Production you can track a camera with a Vive Puck for example:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/WorkingWithMedia/nDispla... There is also a Lidar Import plugin now:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Lidar... How do you tweak shaders? Is there a good guide to shader development that is Unreal Engine aware?
UE4 shaders are HLSL and there is a graph, i.e. the Material Editor, where you can author them visually:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Mat... You can also add custom HLSL directly there. There are plenty videos on Youtube and the Unreal Engine channel has a ton of good ones:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBobmJyzsJ6Ll7UbfhI4iwQ How do you delve into raw C++? Is Rust supported?
UE4 codebase is massive and will take a very long time to get around. Blueprints help a lot understanding some of the architectural concepts and looking at plugins code with a good IDE, e.g. Visual Studio certainly helps. No official Rust support atm!
Cheers,