5 Time-Saving Tips For Building Realistic Environments in Unreal Engine 5

hello in this video I'm going to be sharing with you five time-saving tips for building very realistic environments very quickly I use these five tools and workflows to build this super dense lush jungle environment in just one day which was almost as surprising to me as it probably will be to you some of these tools are new for me and moving forward I am going to be using them in my workflow 100% so I'm very excited to share them with you I'm going to be covering everything from how to easily organize all of your assets so you can access them very quickly and not slow down the creative process how to approach building a super Lush environment like this in layers using reference some tools I'm going to be showing you for scattering foliage really quickly for proximity masking and how I added these vines in like 5 minutes so there's a lot to cover so let's get into it tip number one is to use Dash's AI tagging system to organize your assets the problem that I always run into when I'm building these sort of really Lush dense realistic envir environments is that I'm using a ton of assets that I've downloaded from different sources I have a bunch of stuff I downloaded from quickel bridge which if you don't know you can go up here and access using the plus button choosing quickel Bridge here so I have a bunch of assets I downloaded from that Library I have a bunch of assets I downloaded from the marketplace loaded the rural Australia asset pack which is totally awesome also downloaded the European beach asset pack for my trees I will link all these below the video if you'd like to take a look at them but the long story short is I have all these different assets from different locations it can be really annoying as I'm using all these assets and dragging them into my environment to go and Si through all these folders and find it you know in the European beach folder finding my tree here and then going somewhere else to find my material and another asset package just gets really complicated really quickly what I would have done in the past is come down to my collections in the bottom left corner hit the plus button here and made a new local collection and this is a way of just pulling in a bunch of assets from your content browser so you can access them very quickly so I would make for example a collection for trees then I could come to my tree assets here and drag in all the trees that I plan to use in my environment so drag in Three Trees here and I can click on that collections folder I can quickly access all the trees that I chose now this is great if you have five assets for trees and three rocks and two big mountain assets whatever it is but it works better with just a few Assets Now when we're talking about the number of assets that I need to build this environment we're talking all the different foliage all the different trees all the different rocks all the different ground materials all of this stuff it can start to take a really long time to organize all those into collections to be ready to use so imagine if there was a way to automatically organize all the assets that you have in your content browser whether it be meshes or materials into one place that you could very quickly search using tags and drag into your environment that is where the dash content browser comes in and one of its best features which is its AI tagging system so let me show you what I mean I come up here to the dash plug-in button here which I'll show you in a minute how to install I click on it I can just hit the content browser and I can access all of my assets through here both from quickel Mega scan from the asset packs I downloaded off the marketplace everything is organized by tag so if I type in green for example it's going to bring up all the assets that I have that are green or if I type in rocks all of my rock related assets it's super easy to use and really the only thing you need to do in order for this to work is to come up to your folder icon here click on it and come to the left side and either do your whole content browser or just specific folders and come over here and just hit compute assets it's going to throw up this message here because at sometimes depending on how many assets you have it could take a few minutes but for me this is totally fine so let's go ahead and hit start and it will just run through all my assets and they'll slowly start showing up here in the content browser as it calculates I've also been told in future releases you'll be able to add your own tags in the dash system speaking of which so what is dash exactly if you're not familiar it's a plugin for Unreal Engine that augments your experience with a bunch of really great time-saving and powerful tools for environment creation full disclosure they are sponsoring this video however if I'm honest I actually did reach out to them to collaborate on this video because I actually think these are some really power power F tools for environment art Beyond even what I'm going to cover in this tutorial there's also a Terrain tool which I did use on this project as well there's a material editing tool which lets you really quickly adjust your mega scans or poly Haven materials there's even a camera tool which has built-in color correction presets I actually don't know if I would have been able to build this jungle environment to the level of quality it is in such a short time frame without these tools I am really excited to share them with you because I think I'm going to be using a lot of them moving forward in my own workflow so if you'd like to check out those tools and download them all you need to do is download the dash installer which I will link below or if you want to head over to their website at polygon flow.io here and then you just kind of go to the download dash button and download the installer there's a 30-day free trial past that it's very inexpensive monthly so I actually think it's more than worth it but I'll share it with you and let you be the Gent of that okay so tip number two is to work in layers based on your reference what I started with was this just the basic ground shape and materials and the basic Rock shapes of my environment and this is my first layer now you might be thinking when you approach this well how do I even know what layers go into an environment and that's where your reference comes in so it's very important when you approach something natural like this something that you want to be realistic that you have really good reference what what I mean by reference so what I use is a usually a bunch of images or video that I've either gotten off the internet that have this the feeling of the environment that I want to capture or actual video or images that I took myself on location in this case I had the opportunity to actually go to Panama this specific location called Baya hunda cave on boa Del Toro was able to take these images and videos of this cave entrance that we to enter while we were there so I basically took these images and video that I took while I was there and I assembled it into this grid here and the software I use in order to have this reference up while I'm working is called Pure ref p r RF I will link them below it's a free tool super easy to use you just drag your images straight in here and you can have them up if you have another monitor you can have it up next to you this is really important because now I can start to look at these images here and I can start to identify some of the layers that go into it for example I can see here we have this brown muddy ground so I know that that's a layer I could start with and I can even zoom in here and start to see the kinds of leaves or foliage debris and things that I would find on that ground and start making those choices while I'm working on that layer this was kind of an ideal situation for this particular environment because I had actually been here so I had a memory a sense memory of the feeling of the landscape material kind of colors and w Ness and the sounds that I heard while I was there you'd be surprised what you kind of pick up on as a human when you actually can physically go to these locations this is my favorite thing to do is when I've actually been able to be somewhere like this then I can just take a bunch of images and video while I'm there and now use that as the building blocks to build my digital environment and it will always always look that much better because I'm starting from a place of really strong reference we have our reference here we can start to identify the layers looking at this here we can see that there's a muddy ground which I mentioned then we have a layer of foliage on the top of the Rocks here that's these kind of larger leaves curving over then we have a layer on the side of the rock here that it looks like there's some smaller leaves then we have the Trees of course we have Vines as a layer we have these larger pieces of foliage here and then smaller ones as it gets closer to the Jungle path I also have some other images here like these ones that I took from the boat as we were driving towards this location it shows these really large Palm plants and that's definitely something that I want to get into my environment as well so you see you don't really have to follow exactly your reference but it's going to give you all the information you need to make the right decisions that will make this environment feel authentic so coming back to my Unreal Engine project here I'm starting with this layer here first on placing these rocks where I wanted them creating a nice shape for the entrance of the cave cave and choosing my base material for my ground after that I decided I wanted to focus on nailing the ground before I added any foliage on top of it because I think once you add foliage on top of the ground it can kind of cover any mistakes and it's better if you just focus on it first before adding stuff on top of it this is just my personal approach to this environment and you kind of have to adjust it depending on what type of environment you're working on the first layer I added here was these mediumsized rocks and I kind of lined them up along the path here and I actually scattered them using another Dash tool which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes next I added a root system here for underneath where I knew I was going to eventually place the foliage in trees this is something that I didn't actually have a lot of good image reference for but I remember tripping over a bunch of these roots as we were hiking Through the Jungle so I know I definitely wanted to get them in here as well and again this comes back to why it's really great if you can to be able to travel to the location You're Building because you just get some of these little details that you wouldn't have picked up otherwise wise next I added some larger dead wood here some smaller dead branches here and rocks that you can see I'm starting to fill out the layers on the ground I think ground materials specifically can often give away that the environment is digital or video game like because they often are just materials and they don't have these layers of assets which you can't always add too many layers depending if you're building a game and need it to be super efficient but I have the processing power to really layer on as many as sets as I can so this is I'm just really going for realism here so layered on these rocks and small Twigs here again using the scattering system that I'm going to cover in a minute then I added a layer of leaves here which to me really started to feel exciting that I was starting to capture the feeling of the ground and again I always kept coming back to my reference here looking at this ground here looking at its color how muddy it is and the way things are sort of sprinkled around and trotten flat in that way I started to add that in next I started to want to add some foliage and I decided to start with these large leafy plants on top of the cave rocks so I scattered this foliage over the top of the Rocks then I added the foliage hanging off of the side of the Rocks more Vine type foliage right here again I hope you can see that I'm kind of thinking of this in layers not all at once just in layers when I was happy with that I decided to move on to the ground foliage started with the mediumsized uh foliage and just scattered a bunch of different types of jungle plants around and had them slowly get smaller as they got closer to the path once those were placed I wanted to add the bigger larger ferns that I showed you in this reference here that were kind of a darker green color much larger so then I added that in next I was finally ready to add the trees in I think if I had added first would have a little bit confused me and made it hard to focus on just this foliage but then I added the trees in and this was trees in the foreground in the background here and then it was time to add finishing touches like Vines which I then scatter some additional foliage on top of to help it feel more realistic with some hanging Vines and also some leaves and there you have it that is the entire environment now this is the approach so you're seeing how I'm approaching it layers I'm using my reference in order to make those choices about each layer but what really saved me a lot of time on this project and what made it go really quickly so that I was able to do this in just one day which is wild is the scattering tools that come with Dash this brings me to tip number three which is to use Dash's surface scattering with proximity masking what do I mean by that so the way I scattered almost every single asset in this environment was using Dash's scattering system which is super easy to use and very fast if I go ahead and open up Dash right here by clicking on the button with the dash icon it looks like a little a it brings up my little Dash tool window here all I need to do is open my content browser which I showed you earlier which has all of my foliage Assets in it so I can go ahead click on that button here with the mountains to open my assets I'll navigate over to some of my foliage assets maybe we'll even type in foliage which will show me all my foliage I've downloaded all I really need to do is is shift click then once I have everything selected I just need to hold down control and click and drag them literally onto the ground where I want to scatter them and what I'll choose here is scatter here but there's a few other options if you want to just drop them or randomly pick one of the ones you've selected there's a bunch of different tools you can even drop them with physics on the ground I'm going to choose scatter here and there you go it has scattered them over my landscape here so I'm going to actually close my content browser here what pops up with my scatter are the settings I need to adjust the scatter which is really cool about Dash just doesn't show you settings you don't need at once it'll just pop up Windows as you need them it's just really easy and straightforward in that way so here's all my scatter settings if I'm not scattering enough foliage here all I need to do is up the density here so I'll maybe choose like8 now I have a ton of foliage in here the only problem is that I need it to not be on the jungle path I want them to be cut out by the path and the easy thing about using the dash scattering system is you can cut it out and use where objects are placed in your environment to mask it so I'm going to lower the density really quick so I can see what I'm doing here but I have made a spline using another of Dash's tools which has a super easy spline drawing function so I've made this spline to represent where the path is here in the jungle so all I need to do is add this to my scattering tool to mask out where I want the scattering to be with it selected here I'll just come over and scroll down here to proximity mask number one cuz you can add a bunch of them if you need expand that and just hit the plus button so now that I've added that I'm going to go ahead and up my amount of foliage again since I like it to be extra dense so come up to the density here and add eight back in So now with our density back up I can come to the distance under my proximity mask and just increase it to like start cutting out my scattering so I could just up that to.5 and it'll start to cut out a little bit around to maybe four and that was a little bit too far maybe two and that works pretty well so I have all of my foliage scattering and then as it gets close to the path it starts to disappear and I can also have it scale as it gets closer to the path slowly start to scale down in size which gives it a kind of a more natural look so if I scroll up here to the falloff section this is how the objects will fall off when they get cut out and you can try clicking and dragging here to finding the right scale for you but I'm going to probably just choose 01 here if you think that the foliage is like not big enough then you can always just come back up here to the the Min scale scale and Max scale and easily adjust the random ranges that you have in the scale so adjust how big they should get to and how small they should get to so I could up this to three in the max scale o that's way too much up it to two so now it would be a random scale between point4 and two I have a lot of other settings here in the scattering options like using noise to break up the placement of the foliage I can syn the objects down into the surface I can align them with the surface in various ways I have really found anything that I needed to do with the foliage that I couldn't do using these settings so it's super useful another thing you can do with the scattering options is for example if I take a look at my existing scatter here which I can always open and readjust by just coming and clicking on it and then if I come up here to the dash settings and I just click this little icon here it will open up my settings for whatever I have selected so you can always go back and adjust even though the settings window will disappear so things stay simple for you while you're working you can always just get right back to it very easily so if I come back to my scattering that I used on the top here I can always just use the feature masking here and what I'm using this feature masking for is masking it so that the plants will only grow on top of the rock they won't grow on the side so I'm just using an angle mask here and I'm using a value of 50 which I could also increase up to 90 for example if I wanted the foliat not to grow so far over the side can very easily play with this value to get some different looks for example I can drop it down to 20 to cut out more of it or raise it up to 90 to have the foliage spawn further over the edge of the surface so that's really how I approached scattering every single object you see here I even used it to scatter some foliage along these vines that that I made just by selecting this as an object and hitting scatter on top of it the tools are very adaptable and very easy to layer on top of each other honestly this is probably the most exciting thing for me is to see how quickly I can use these scattering tools to layer this environment up so at this point some of you might be wondering okay this scattering tools look awesome but why are you using them instead of PCG procedural content generation framework or when should you use each of these is this one here to replace PCG these are really great questions and so far what I can tell you is that this is very good for building these smaller art directed High Fidelity realistic environments and PCG is really good at building a really large area very quickly using rule sets so you couldn't necessarily use this approach to build an open world environment that would really work likewise you couldn't necessarily use PCG to so closely art direct some of the parts of this that I did so like exactly where I'm placing trees exactly where the vines are kind of going across the path I guess you could use PCG to do that but it would just take a lot longer so there really aimed at different types of workflows this is going to give you these tools to create my hero locations within my larger PCG simulated areas and I really think you can mix these tools a lot of different ways but they just have different strengths but I would also love to know what you think as you're seeing these tools here how you think that they could maybe work together and play in the same sandbox so let me know what you think in the comments below this brings me to tip number four which is that I lit this environment using the ultra dnamic Sky system this is a really awesome asset on the marketplace which you can download and add to your projects and I did the lighting for this environment as well as the environment particle effects through this system so let me show you what I mean so you can find this asset on the marketplace under the ultra Dynamic Sky asset once you've grabbed it and added it to your project you'll find it in your content browser here and what I did to light my environment is simply go to the ultra dnamic Sky folder here go to blueprints scroll down and drag in my ultra dnamic Sky which creates my lighting scenario automatically and you might be wondering why I use this instead of the existing Sky atmosphere and volumetric clouds that come with Unreal Engine and this is just higher quality to be honest it's very well calibrated you don't even need a post-processing volume it's all part of the asset if I zoom out here you can see has a really beautiful cloud system here that could be all controlled through the asset it can also change all kinds of stuff like cloud coverage and time of day even has a beautiful star system here which I really appreciate and as well as that it has a weather effect system the way I use this was to add these subtle raindrops to my environment but you could add a thunderstorm for example we could just go ahead and drag in the ultra Dynamic weather asset into our environment it also comes with some weather presets so I fine-tuned these raindrops look this particular way but if you wanted to add the rainstorm you would just go to under the ultra Dynamic Sky you could find blueprints under blueprints you would go to weather effects and then choose weather presets and these are a bunch of weather preets just drag straight into your environment so we could go and add a thunderstorm here which is really cool or you can even use a snow blizzard which would be pretty weird in the jungle but there you go climate change this brings me to my fifth and final tip which is to use the dash cable tool to add vines or cables to your environments to add that extra layer of realism and visual interest this is really exciting because I don't even know how I would do this without the tool I've kind of avoided adding these types of things to my environment because it's just been such a pain to like draw a curve and then figure out how to extrude surface along it it's just a hassle and this tool is really easy so let me show you what I mean so you basically start by choosing two objects that you want it to spawn a cable or in this case a Vine in between I'm going to just use this little Cube here one and then the other over here maybe Vine cables to be my start and end point for my Vine select them both and I'll come up here to the dash search field here which is how you access every single tool in dash very easily just by coming up here and searching it go ahead and type in cable we see the cable tool here I'll go ahead and click on it and with my two cubes selected I'll go ahead and hit the plus button here with the objects field which is exactly like adding the spline to our scatter for example so hit the plus and you can see it just creates a cable right away very easily and I can go ahead and play with the divisions for how complicated I want the geometry to be or the radius for example I'll probably make this5 make it a little bit thinner and I could scatter more of them by just increasing the duplicates number here so maybe I'll add three or four but to make this look more Vine likee I would probably need to add some noise to it to make it a little more wobbly so I can come over here to the noise intensity and maybe 2 or 0.1 and uh to further add some realism and kind of break up the shape so the noise is not repeated throughout I can come over here to the Tilt option and drag here or if I'm dragging it and it's not changing quickly enough I could hold down control and drag that will kind of help me break up the look here a little bit and this is all Dynamic so I could come back here and move the cube around and it would adjust automatically which is awesome and for the vines that I've already placed in here the scattering system is also adjusting for the foliage as I move it in order to add a material on here that's super easy as well I can just grab the vines here we'll come over to our asset browser again this is why the asset browser in dash is super useful because you don't really need to go back to your content browser almost at all you can just grab grab everything you need from here so I'll come over here and go to all my assets and just type in bark which will bring up a bunch of bark materials that I have and I'll drag in this buttress rote onto the vine to give it uh the vine material and that's it now we can just go ahead and fine-tune the positioning here to kind of hide the attachment and we just added a whole bunch of very realistic looking Vines and there's other options here you can add as well to the cable settings for example we could add broken Vines hanging off of it very easily by coming over here to The Cut Rate I could up that 2.5 you can see would add all these kind of broken Vines hanging off and you can see why this would work really well with cables as well for like electrical cables or telephone poles and things so it's super easy to Just Adjust and get the look that you want if you interested in downloading Dash like I said you can download it from the description I hope you found these tips really helpful and I hope you feel inspired to pick up some of these tools or work flows start using them in your own projects and if you do build something awesome based on this tutorial or of the tutorials on the AAL Arts Channel I would love to see it so tag me on the AAL Arts Instagram or if you want to see more YouTube tutorials from me specifically you can probably see them popping up right here somewhere otherwise I hope you have a wonderful day and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Aziel Arts

Views: 3,904

Keywords: unreal engine 4, UE5, Tutorial, realistic environments, environments, totrial, PCG, procedural content generation framework

Id: OHX8Gds3T0k

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024