Unreal Engine Goes to College: Big step towards high-quality education
One of our biggest successes in the last two years was receiving the Epic MegaGrant for the education of university professors under our roof. This venture would not have been possible without the support of the amazing team from 3Lateral that will, in spring 2023, kick off their own educative programs in the upcoming Unreal Engine Community Lab (this is a big step that we are wholeheartedly congratulating them on). So, let’s take one more look at the success that we achieved together.
The classes organized within the initiative Train the Trainers: Game Development with Unreal Engine 4 were attended by 45 university professors. Upon completing the classes, they were able to use presentations and Unreal Projects from the course in preparation for their educative programs. Today, almost two years after the initial training within the Train the Trainers initiative, Unreal Engine entered the curriculum of many local faculties.
At the time we completed the initiative, our participants had been annually educating around 1200 students in various technical and art faculties, and we hope that, through accrediting new subjects, this number will significantly grow in the upcoming years.
Our first successful education that focused on Unreal Engine made possible by the participants of this initiative already played out in the summer of 2021 in the spaces of the organization BEST Novi Sad when Dr. Neda Milić Keresteš and Dr. Bojan Banjanin from the Department of Graphical Engineering and Design at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad held a course A Dive into the Unreal, which we spoke about in our previous Unreal Goes to College article.
Dr. Sana Stojanović Đurđević from the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade testified about the quality of the class within this program, saying that the course presentation demonstrated the bases for preparing her university course Architecture and Tools for Video Games for the master’s degree program Art and Design of Video Games. This was a start of a long list of stories stemming from different cities in Serbia where our participants were.
...
Starting this semester, on the Technical Faculty Mihajlo Pupin in Zrenjanin, master students that are attending the Computer Designing subject were presented with an obligatory project seminar in the Unreal Engine tool. This is the news that will bring in results in a few months, and Višnja Ognjenović highlights he hopes that it will bring some interesting master thesis too:
“A year ago, I worked on player movement algorithms analysis within an undergraduate subject that studies AI with students who have already worked in this engine on their own. This was the beginning. The handicap was the fact that here in Zrenjanin we do not have a lab with machines on which we could work in Unreal Engine. Due to this, until now I worked partially only with students who had their computers and the engine installed. Within the work with graduate students, this year we have one group majoring in Clothing Technology that will work in Marvelous Designer and Unreal Engine.”
...
In undergraduate academic studies at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, the final project within the Design of Video Games curriculum is an original video game that students create from scratch in smaller teams. The participant of our initiative, professor Ivica Milarić encourages the students to start their projects exactly in the UE tool and highlights that the program Train the Trainers drastically helped him on an educational level, as well as with personal, creative endeavors:
“Right after the course, I started to create short Unreal Engine tutorials for beginners and publish them on my YouTube channel. Alongside this, in September 2022, I finished my master’s presentation on the animation module at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. The theme was titled Meta Vergilije: Simulation of Escapism Towards Oblivion, and this theory art project included the short experimental video game that I made from scratch with Unreal Engine 4.26. I would highlight that the knowledge I acquired on the Crater course helped me to better understand the evolution of the platform itself, as well as the possibilities it will be able to offer through the development of elements like MetaHuman and many others.”
“All 16 students that are currently in their fourth year in the Department for Design in Video Games are separated into 3 teams tasked with making an original game, and one of the teams is doing it in Unreal Engine 5,” adds Milarić.
...
At the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad, Unreal Engine is currently studied in 4 subjects within the undergraduate academic studies in the Department for Animation in Engineering, while within master studies in the Department for Architecture, it is present in the subject Interactive Visualizations. Furthermore, it is interesting that their new accredited subject Introduction to Extended and Virtual Reality Technologies is primarily focused on Unreal Engine.
“All of this is a big step compared to several previous years,” says Miloš Obradović, a participant in the initiative and assistant in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning – Theories and Interpretation of Architectural Space.
“I sincerely hope that we will continue in this direction. In my opinion, Unreal Engine is constructed in a way that you can always learn something new, so the new knowledge is constantly updated, so I would say that the new knowledge is always welcome. It is in this way that I collected some new information from your course that I used in further education and projects. More specifically, I implemented one segment within the practical part of a subject that studies non-immersive systems of interactive visualization. Currently, I implemented most of what I heard about light because this is very important to students, behind modeling and texturing.”
...
Straighten by the initiative Train the Trainers, University Metropolitan formed and accredited the subject Unreal Environment for Video Game Development for the students majoring in Game Development and Interactive Media Design in the autumn semester of 2022. Special focus was put on the highly detailed introduction to technical engineering processes that bring global illumination in real-time, as well as best habits when it comes to optimization and quality development with the help of the Epic ecosystem. On the subject, we teach students about contemporary tendencies regarding real-time graphics as well as how acquired knowledge of this tool can be applied in other creative industries when it comes to stylized or hyper-realistic digital experiences.
The aforementioned subject is studied at Metropolitan centers in Niš and Belgrade, and we are particularly proud of the fact that 3 of our participants are involved in it: docent Dr. Igor Savelljić, teaching associate Vuk Mihailović Takimoto, and docent Milan Ličina whose activities after the completed initiative present a tremendous success for us as a training center.
Namely, in the spring of 2022, Milan Ličina took over our commercial course and changed its plan and curriculum. With this, Unreal Engine Essentials stops being a project-oriented course. Instead, it has been designed in a way that participants can understand how the tool works and all it can offer, so they can ask further questions, give them purpose and create their own challenges.
“The specificity of this course is that the students got a chance to talk to somebody who does visual and interactive programming firsthand. With that said, I use engines for the necessity of creating an interactive design, in other words, I am not developing video games but rather activations. When I manage to show that you don’t necessarily have to build a shooter game in the engine but activate anything and everything in your virtual set, people are quite pleased – whether that is a visualization of an archeological dig site or interactive content within an exhibition”, said Milan in our recent interview.
Last year Milan was granted the title of an authorized Unreal Engine instructor from Epic Games and managed three successful groups of students who studied this tool in our center. For the most part, the groups were gathered within the Train the Professionals initiative that targeted professional 3D artists in the region. In realization of this initiative, we once more got big support from our longtime partners at 3Lateral and Epic’s educational department Unreal Engine Education.
Finally, we would like to mention a move that is not directly tied to our initiative but presents an important step for the growth of the local CG scene, and that is the opening of the Department for Visual Effects, Animation, and Game Art at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Presently one of the professors in this department is Darko Subotin, the original instructor on Train the Trainers: Game Development with Unreal Engine for which we are forever grateful.
In case you are interested in improving your skills in the Unreal Engine tool and further researching its capabilities, you will be more than happy to hear the news that starting this spring in Novi Sad 3Lateral is initiating a row of educative programs in their Community Lab. Follow their LinkedIn page to keep up with the upcoming adventures.
Until our next collaborative success!
ABOUT THE INITIATIVE:
The first iteration of the Unreal Engine Essentials course within the Train the Trainers initiative started in February 2021 when we, in collaboration with the company 3Lateral from Novi Sad, brought together many professors from art and technical faculties as well as two-year post-secondary schools from all the major universities in Serbia. At the end of the same semester, due to the increase in demand, the course was revived in an online format. The class was attended by in total of 45 academic professors to apply newly acquired knowledge to future commercial projects or within the educative curriculum. With this, the course achieved the status of an educative initiative with a potentially great influence on the community in the region, given that the classes of our professors that participated are listened to by 1200 students annually. In the autumn of 2022, participants got a chance to further advance their knowledge of the upgraded version of Unreal Engine 5 in one seminar. You can find out how all of this went on the official page of the initiative.
