In this lecture, you'll learn about how to create blueprints, and I'm not talking about the blueprints visual scripting language in Unreal, I'm talking about something else. So what are Blueprint? Their prefabricated entities, in other words, they're entities that we've configured to behave the way we want them to, and then we've saved them as a blueprint. What are they good for? In the editor, they're useful for adding multiple instances of that blueprint to the map. And as we'll learn later in the specialization, they're also really useful because we can spawn blueprint from a script. I've already built my project, I've put the orthographic camera in and set up the light source. I've imported the yellow teddy bear static mesh and its material and textures, and I've created a script called TeddyBear that logs a message saying, hi, I'm Ted. I added that script to the map, so if we run the game and go over to the output log, we see it says, hi, I'm Ted. Now, what we want to do is we want to turn the script into a blueprint, a reusable asset that has both behavior printing out a message and a visual representation the static mesh for the yellow teddy bear. I'm going to remove the script from the map, before I actually create the blueprint I want to put a folder in my content that holds blueprints. So I'll go to our Blueprints folder, I know that's the name of the project as well. Already have an Art folder that holds the mesh asset, I have a Maps folder that holds our single map, and I'll create a new folder. That holds all our blueprints, the one blueprint we're going to create. Now I'll go back to the script. And I'll right click the script and I'll say, Create Blueprint Class based on TeddyBear. What that does is it brings up this dialogue for me to name my blueprint, and I'm going to always put BP_ for Blueprint Underscore for this blueprint asset. And I'm going to make sure I put it in that new Blueprints folder that I just created. Once I click that cream button, I get the Blueprint Editor panel here, and the blueprint already includes the script, because we said we were creating the blueprint from the script, but it doesn't have the yellow teddy bear static mesh yet. So we can come over here, notice that I have the blueprint editor not maximized and moved out of the way. So I can navigate over here in the content browser, and I will drag my static mesh here onto this sphere, the default seen route. And as you can see at this point, I now have both the sphere and the teddy bear, but I can get rid of this fear by dragging the teddy bear up one more time. And now I just have the teddy bear in the script built together into my blueprint. I'll compile it, just like we needed to compile the level blueprint when we set up the orthographic camera and I'll save it, and I'll close this. So if we go to that Blueprints folder, we now have this blueprint, and if I place one in the scene and make sure he's zero in the x, when I run my game, I can see in the output log that he printed that warning. I'll also say that I can drag multiple instances of this reusable object into my map, making sure that I have them visible in making sure that they're in the y z plane. And if I run my game again, we can see all three of them and we can see in the output log that they all printed the message. One of the things that's really nice about these blueprints, is not just the convenience of being able to drag multiple instances of the blueprint into our map. I can go back to visual studio, and I can change the message. In the script and recompile it both to make sure I didn't make any mistakes and to make sure it has an effect when I run the game. And then back in the game, if I run the game again, you can see that all three of those instances of the blueprint are out putting the new message. So if we set up these blueprints as reusable assets and we decide to make a change to the behavior of the blueprint, then that change automatically takes effect in every instance of the blueprint that's in the map. And, of course, every new instance of the blueprint that we bring into the map later. To recap, in this lecture you learned about blueprints and you learned how to make one. You learned that they're useful for adding multiple instances of the same blueprint to a map. And I told you that later in the specialization will also discover that blueprints are great when we want to spawned those blueprints into our game.
