Week 02 · Editor fundamentals — FMX 430 Spatial Computing

By the end of this session you can

Navigate the viewport fluently — fly, orbit, frame, and adjust camera speed without thinking about it.
Place, transform, and organize actors using snapping, the outliner, and a naming discipline you'll keep all semester.
Pull assets from Fab into a project and migrate content between projects without breaking references.
Enable the Unreal MCP server and Epic's UE skills so Claude Code can act inside the editor — and audit everything it does.

2:00 · Brief Learning to live in the editor

Every hour you spend fumbling with navigation this month is an hour stolen from design later. The editor rewards muscle memory: the goal today isn't to memorize menus, it's to make moving through 3D space as unconscious as scrolling a page.

The four panels that matter

Viewport — the world itself. Hold right-mouse and fly with WASD; scroll to change speed; press F to frame whatever's selected. If you learn one shortcut today, learn F.
Outliner — every actor in the level, as a list. Messy outliners are how projects die. Folders and real names, from the first actor you place.
Details — the selected actor's properties. Transform lives at the top; everything else an actor can do lives below it.
Content browser — your asset library on disk. This is the panel version control sees, so its hygiene is graded hygiene.

Actors, levels, and the discipline of names

Everything you place in a level — a mesh, a light, a camera — is an actor. Levels are the containers; a project holds many. The convention we adopt today and never abandon: prefixes on assets (SM_ static mesh, M_ material, MI_ material instance, T_ texture), descriptive names on actors, and outliner folders per system (Lighting, Architecture, Props). When an AI agent starts creating actors later today, you'll discover why this matters: an agent inherits your project's habits, good or bad.

Assets come from somewhere

Fab is Epic's unified marketplace — the former Quixel Megascans library lives there now, free tier included. Scanned assets are seductive; the skill is restraint and consistency of scale and style. And when an asset is worth keeping, migrating it between projects (with its texture and material dependencies intact) beats copying folders by hand every time.

State of the Art · A generational hinge

UE 5.8 is the last planned major UE5 release — Epic is ramping up UE6 (early access reportedly targeted for late 2027). Meanwhile Unity's GDC 2026 roadmap headlines graphics and runtime work, not XR. Discussion: what does it mean to master a tool at the end of its major version — and who benefits from being the bridge generation?

Epic announcement · Unity roadmap

2:45 · Guided lab A composed corner

You'll build one small, deliberately composed scene — a corner of a room with three or four assets, lit by a single light — practicing every fundamental along the way. Small and finished beats big and vague.

New level, saved properly
Open FMX430_Sandbox. File → New Level → Basic. Save it immediately into a Content/Levels folder as L_EditorDrills. Unsaved levels are how work vanishes.
Navigation drills
Two minutes, no touching assets: fly with RMB + WASD, adjust speed with the scroll wheel while flying, orbit a selected object with Alt + left-drag, and frame with F. Then do it again without looking at your hands.
Place and transform
Drag a few basic shapes in from the Place Actors panel. Cycle the gizmos — W move, E rotate, R scale — and turn grid snapping on from the viewport's snapping controls. Snapped-to-grid now saves misaligned-forever later.
Outliner discipline
Create outliner folders — Architecture, Props, Lighting — and rename every actor you've placed to say what it is. Cube3 is not a name.
Pull assets from Fab
Open the Fab panel in the editor (or fab.com in a browser, signed in with your Epic account). Grab three or four free scanned assets that could live together — same era, same wear. Add them to your project and note where they land in the content browser.
Compose the corner
Arrange your assets into one corner that reads as a place, not a pile. Add a single point or spot light from Place Actors and shape it in the Details panel — intensity, color, attenuation. One good light is today's whole lighting lesson.
Migrate something
Create a second blank project (or use a neighbor's). Right-click one finished asset → Asset Actions → Migrate, and watch it carry its dependency chain along. This is how content moves between projects all semester.
Commit
git add -A && git commit -m "Week 2: editor drills scene". Push it. Pre-AI-lab commits are about to become very important.

4:00 · AI lab The agent gets the keys

Last week the agent could only read files. Today it can operate the editor. First we wire it up — the official Unreal MCP server plus Epic's UE skills for Claude Code — then we let it place actors and audit every single thing it does in the outliner.

Setup · Wire the agent to the editor

Edit > Plugins → search "Unreal MCP" → enable → restart the editor. Then in the console: ModelContextProtocol.StartServer

Add the local MCP endpoint to Claude Code (see the AI Lab tab for the current connection steps) and install Epic's unreal-engine-skills-for-claude-code plugin. Smoke test: ask the agent to list the actors in your level. If it names your renamed props, you're wired up.

Prompt 1 · Spawn and arrange

In the current level, create a ring of eight cubes, two meters in radius, centered on the origin, each cube half a meter on a side, sitting on the floor. Put them in an outliner folder called AI_Ring.

Watch the outliner while it works. Then verify with the tape measure of the Details panel: select a cube and check its actual location and scale. Did it get the radius right? Are they on the floor or intersecting it? Every discrepancy goes in your log.

Prompt 2 · Redirect it

Now make the ring irregular — vary each cube's height and rotation so it feels hand-placed rather than generated. Keep everything inside the AI_Ring folder.

This is the actual skill: art direction of an agent. "Feels hand-placed" is a taste judgment — see how the agent interprets it, then push back in plain English until the result matches what you meant. Note how many rounds it takes.

Before you call it done

The MCP server starts and Claude Code can list actors in your level by name.
Every actor the agent created is accounted for in the outliner — nothing mysterious, nothing orphaned.
You measured at least one agent-placed actor in the Details panel and compared it to what you asked for.
Your pre-lab commit means git diff shows exactly what the AI session changed.
Today's session is in AILOG.md: prompts, what it did, what you corrected.

5:15 · Crit / share Corners up

Everyone shows their composed corner and their agent's ring. Two questions each: what did the light do for the composition, and what did the agent misunderstand first? Next week Project 1 launches — start thinking about a real space you can measure.

Homework — due before Week 3

Task	Deliverable
Scout two candidate spaces for Project 1 — rooms, corridors, or courtyards you can physically measure and photograph.	Photos of both spaces plus rough overall dimensions, ready to show at the start of class.
Fifteen minutes of navigation and placement drills in your sandbox — fluency is homework, not talent.	One new small composition committed and pushed to your sandbox repo.
Log this week's AI session properly.	`AILOG.md` entry #2: setup notes, prompts, what the agent got wrong, what you fixed.

Resources

Unreal MCP in the Unreal Editor — official docs for the in-editor MCP server you enabled today.
Epic's UE skills plugin for Claude Code — engine-aware skills; install per its README.
Epic Developer Community — Learning — the editor-fundamentals guided courses feed directly into the Week 7 exam.
UE 5.8 announcement — the generational-hinge reading from today's brief.