Top: oh look, SIGGRAPH.
Bottom: a smattering of amazing folks in LA
Hey folks!
Alex here with some news. First up:
Live Unreal Engine classes start Wednesday
Reserve a free seat →
Yes I'm teaching again! Working with SensAI on the Worlds in Action hackathon (speaker, mentor, judge) and being part of three wonderful sessions at SIGGRAPH (talk, workshop, panel) reminded me how much I love sharing knowledge and tools with eager learners. At the height of my 8-year partnership with Epic Games, I regularly taught 3-4 classes per week on their behalf, and while it was a struggle to balance with everything else in my life, it was an absolute blast.
So I want to get back to it, and for the first time, doing it much more publicly.
The biggest challenge? Settling on what to teach and when. I've taught hundreds of classes, but in many cases it was simply along the lines of being told "give ILM an Intro to PCG class on Tuesday" and then I would just do it. Even when I companies sign up for corporate training, their needs tend to be narrow enough that it wasn't particularly difficult to plan out a 30-course curriculum (and btw, yes we are still doing that)
So I took a pass at doing something like that aimed at the general public, and it looks something like this:
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Unreal Foundations: Zero to World
Wednesdays starting August 5.
Editor & ecosystem → world building with Megascans & Nanite & Fab → Lumen & lighting → cameras & Movie Render Queue.
You leave with some portfolio-ready cinematic renders and a lot of lessons in gotchas and what not to do.
- Every class runs each Wednesday (11a–1p ET) so it works from Europe to the West Coast.
- Friday office hours every week — bring anything you want to discuss.
- $299 use code NEWSLETTER20 at checkout for 20% off.
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That's ready to go, but I'm second-guessing myself. I want to teach what will be most valuable to YOU, dear reader. So here's what I'm doing: this Wednesday August 5 at 11a ET / 8a PT will be a FREE session. I'm making it as simple as possible:
Reserve a free seat →
Come hang out. This first one will be loose. I'll teach some Unreal basics, take some requests, point out some new features in 5.8, but this will also very much be a discussion. I'll have a couple of my other instructors with me and we'll be gathering as much information on how to plan our future classes. And if you'd like to give some feedback right away (or can't make it to the class, which yes, will be recorded, just register anyway), here's the same poll I'll be giving live:
https://www.alexcoulombepresents.com/training/#poll
What's cooking in the Lab
One of these is Unreal. The other 3 are all exported and rendering elsewhere!
A few things in active development, hardware-verified and getting closer to a real release:
- Forage — an AI-first scout for the Fab/Marketplace packs you already own. You describe what you need ("castle with horses running around the gates"), it finds the 2–3 best-fit packs in your own library and installs the hero assets.
- UnRealityKit Bridge — UE simulation driving RealityKit rendering, for genuinely native Vision Pro apps built on Unreal logic. Also in the early phases of a similar export to Pixar's Renderman.
- Pinchwork — a universal OpenXR hand-tracking template for Unreal (including Apple Vision Pro!), so you stop rebuilding the same hand-interaction rig per project and device.
None of these are for sale yet but the Lab has early-access signup for each and it's been exciting to see those waitlists grow. I'm also thinking that if I create a monthly subscription to our training content, some of these tools will be available for free as long you're subscribed. We'll see !
And of course there's always a ton of free and open source work available on my personal GitHub.
Don't you also run an XR studio?
Yes! Agile Lens has been busy, and that's the main reason I haven't been able to carve out more time for teaching. Recently we celebrated ten years of immersive work, and of course if your team wants to go beyond training and needs full-service consulting for XR, spatial computing, or complex Unreal Engine pipelines, that's the door: agilelens.com/contact. Be sure to sign up there for the Agile Lens newsletter — Unreal NYC meetup nights, live shows, demos, betas — all separate from what you'll get from this newsletter.
How to stay in touch!
These newsletters won't be very often. If you want to stay more up to date with what's new and exciting with Alex Coulombe Presents:
That's all for now! Any questions? Drop me a line anytime by simply responding to this email, and I hope to see you this Wednesday.
— Alex
Friendly neighborhood Unreal authorized instructor
