Introduction

Welcome to our first Unreal Engine tutorial. We have been working hard integrating UE4 into the Data Arena, and we're excited to now welcome new projects. This tutorial will walk through the process of creating a data-driven project in Unreal Engine by importing a spreadsheet, integrating our DA Assets plugin to utilise our input devices and Motion Capture system, and getting up and running in the Data Arena.

A few notes before we get started:

• You can follow this tutorial on any operating system: Windows, macOS or Linux.
• Make sure you've installed Unreal Engine version 4.25. We're currently working on support for newer versions.
• This tutorial will assume some preliminary knowledge of the Unreal Engine editor, its interface and general definitions. If you haven't used UE before, we recommend getting started here.

👀 What are we making?

For this tutorial, we'll be creating a visualisation of satellites in orbit around earth (as of 2016, view data source here). After importing our data, we will build a simulation to explore the orbital angle, speed and distance of ~1400 satellites, and display some basic information upon selection. We'll build all necessary parts to navigate our level with the Data Arena's SpaceMouse device, and give up to 8 users Motion Capture controlled cursors to point and select objects of interest. All of this can be prepared from home.

Our visualisation will be created at a scale of 1:1000m.

📦 Download the project

If you want to jump ahead, you can download the project we'll be making right here. You'll also need to manually download our DA Assets plugin and copy the contents to /Plugins/DA_Assets in the project files.

Ready to go? Let's dive in.