5 Tricks you (probably) don't know about Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine is pretty easy right I mean you just drag and drop some assets yet you can't get the same realistic look as some of the creators are putting out you know I too struggle with that and the problem is not some complicated wizardly in fact these are oftentimes simple tricks and tips but you gotta know about these things so that's why I've put together my top 5 tricks for beginners things I wish I knew earlier we're gonna do that on the brand new Amazon Creator z17h8 Studio more about this bad boy later but already a huge thanks to them for sponsoring this video oh and trick number four is really gonna blow your mind guys so definitely stick around but I'm gonna start off with trick number one let's go into the landscape modes you see I really suck at sculpting I can try to use the Scopes tools to put together some landscape but it will never look good that's why you should always work with height Maps height maps are basically black and white images with some strange patterns but Unreal Engine sees that as a landscape the brighter an area the higher the Peaks will be so a gradient part is gonna be a hill now you can find find such height maps all over the internet I even came across a free tool called skyline's map generator which basically allows you to generate a height map from a real City and you can even use Photoshop just draw some brushes or generate a fractal noise anything is going to look better than if you were to sculpt it yourself so how do we use such a height nap now well when creating a new landscape you're gonna choose import from file then you just browse to your image file and hit import you'll get an immediate preview if the hilts are too tall you can decrease the Z scale and if you'd like to change the size you can adjust the overall resolution you know some height naps come with suggested section sizes and resolution but when you're done you just hit import look at that beautiful mountains number two you're hopefully already familiar with the quixel library we can download tens of thousands of models materials and whatnot completely for free and some of the stuff you'll find in there are walls and doors you know the stuff you use to create a house anyways you drag a wall into your scene and you notice that it doesn't cast a shadow the light just goes straight through because it doesn't really have a back now we could do some Shenanigans like duplicating that wall and turning it around but that's a mess and it's not how you should fix this instead select your mesh and in the details panel find the material that is applied to it double click on it and in the right hand panel scroll down until you see two sided simply enable that and your problem is solved now it's that simple because all quixel assets come with material instances which is basically a bridge from your real material so that you can create user-friendly options but if I were to create a basic plane and drag a picture of my cat to it you'll bump it to the same issue but this time if you go to the material we don't see these user friendly options on the site but don't freak out you're looking directly at the material itself and not a material instance here you want to go to the left hand side in the details panel and enable two cite it from there you know guys in this beautiful landscape right here is being rendered in real time at cinematic quality on a freaking laptop now calm down now just to give you you an idea guys it comes with the latest 13 gen Intel Core I9 CPU the one that I have has 24 cores learning a 2.2 gigahertz you know and then the GPU which is the Nvidia RTX 4070 it's verified for Studio drivers which are designed for Creative tasks you're gonna notice that video editing compositing or 3D design is not only going to run smoother but also more stable furthermore 64 gigs of ddr5 memory 2 terabytes of fast nvme storage but what makes this laptop really stand out is its display in my opinion MSI has always had incredible displays in their laptops and with the new z17 they take it to even higher levels this right here is 17 inch guys Quad HD resolution running at a 165 Hertz it is spin tight but I unfortunately don't have the MSI pen yet I'm trying to get one but none of the local stores here in Belgium have them in stock now you could use your fingertips to move around that goes perfectly fine as well but you know the pen just unlocks so much more and finally it covers a hundred percent of the DCI P3 color space base which makes the laptop perfect for accurate color grading tasks you get a 90 watt hour battery you can control the battery consumption through the MSI Center and prefer battery life or performance it comes with many options such as cooling control application priority and more finally you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports and the latest Wi-Fi 6E for blazing fast Network speeds I mean I'm running this project here from our server wirelessly and I love that it has an SD card reader here on the site you know it's one of those small things which makes me really love this laptop to take with me on trips you can learn all about the Creator z17xh Studio from the link in the description Down Below guys and if you participate in the Amazon Trader Awards you can actually win this laptop right here together with a bunch of other MSI products as well as a ticket to Adobe Max all you got to do is submit a creative work the deadline is July 20. there are three categories graphic design animation and I'll be judging for the film category now you can make a short film video art or perhaps something with Unreal Engine also for that I'll leave a link to it in the description down below all right now let's continue with trick number three so you download something from the quixel library or anywhere else this works with any 3D model by the way and you feel like it's not the right shape like you want to modify that model somehow well that's actually pretty easy inside unreal the first thing you want to do is head over to the settings and choose plugins we're going to look for the modeling plugin enable that and then just restart unreal we can now find under the modes modeling once your desired object is selected you'll see a whole bunch of options in here but I'm going to cover the three most importants that you want to use most of the time and the first one is going to be pin Cuts this can basically cut a piece from your model you can rotate the raster or move it to Define what you want to cut off in the example of this chair we might want to cut off the back so there you go a little bars tool next up is lattice now this one is pretty cool as it allows you to warp your 3D model you can simply select some points and move or rotate them to deform your objects pretty cool to make some art right now all jokes aside is oftentimes very useful if a 3D model doesn't connect that well with other objects and you need to deform it just a little bit and finally we're going to check out its pattern now this is very useful to fill a room with the same object as it's going to duplicate that you can create a row of chairs put them into a circle for an AAA meeting or just a grid we can change how much we want to populate the room and even add some fun modifiers to the rotation position and scale maybe not so useful for chairs but it can be for other creative work and out comes trick Number Four Guys which is gonna blow your mind so I've put together a very quick environment which is created with a bunch of pixel assets looks pretty cool but not the floor obviously so I'm going to apply a material to it which also comes from quixel now it still looks very bad I mean you can tell that it's flat the Rocks don't blend in they have this hard Edge so I want my floor to be 3D rather than flat so get ready to be amazed guys we're gonna go back to the modeling mode and this time I'm gonna start off by creating a simple rectangle I'm going to scale that up a bit from its properties and also apply that same material to it and then just hit accept and now let's find the remesh tool now this is based basically going to slice up the rectangle in a mesh so that we can use that to reform it and you can increase the triangle count to get more detail 20 000 will do then just hit accept now we can go over to the displace option and already you can see some weird stuff going on now we want to make sure that it displaces according to the material and not something random so for the displacement type we're gonna pick texture 2 2D map this allows us to insert a displacement map in the bottom and this works exactly the same as with a height map that we spoke about before now qixel materials come with an ARD texture file if you open it you can view its color Channel separately each color channel has a different usage it's a great way to pack multiple options into a single image and the blue channel is our depth map so I'm going to drag that one into the displacement map and set the channel to Blue and as you can see this makes the Rocks pop out it's not much so let's increase the density to around 40 perhaps and if you like to have more detail you can increase the subdivision if it's too spiky just decrease that value all right looking good let's hit accept and if we drag this patch now over to the Rock here you can see how much better that it Blends in we don't have that hard Edge anymore and looking around the floor is a life now you can combine this with a lattice displacement to make it a bit more uneven you know push some parts up under down and whatnot I would then just duplicate that rotate it to other places and just start layering basically oftentimes you want to bend it again with the lattice displacement and that's how you can get fairly quick a very realistic grounds where all your other objects are gonna blend in and this brings me to the last trick what I've got right here is a very simple level sequence within I've got a horse that is running over my landscape and a camera actor following that horse now it looks great but the camera movements can be better I mean right now it just has a starting and ending keyframe which follows a linear path I'd like to add more movement more action to it without having to keyframe all of that manually so what I'm going to do is go back to my content browser right-click to create a blueprint class and on the bottom look for the default camera Shake component then hit OK and let's rename it to shake now going back to my sequencer on my camera actor I can now click on track and choose camera shake you can find your blueprint glass in there just select it and the first thing that I'm gonna check is if my shake layer is trimmed correctly to my timeline when that is done let's go back to the blueprint and open it up now you might want to open your sequence again and reposition that window so that we can see everything at once the camera Shake only occurs for a second from the timing option we can increase it to cover the entire sequence and if you don't want to ramp it in you can set the blend options to zero now let's go to the location options we can choose how much the location has to change with the amplitude and how often with the frequency setting on top are the global settings but you can also Define that for the X Y and Z parameters separately if you like so let's try something around 10 and for the frequency let's choose 3 and I'm going to do the same thing with the rotation and choose a value here as well now you can play back your timeline and look for a setting that works best for you you know and the results are quite amazing guys it seems much more realistic you know even if you were to shoot on a crane or gimbal you always have some camera shake so you want to make sure to reproduce that inside Unreal Engine now if you're still struggling with the basics of Unreal Engine I highly recommend you check out my under Legend 5 course for beginners which also focuses on Virtual production it gets you on track super fast and reviews have been super positive Link in the description guys I hope to see you there and thank you so much for watching guys thank you MSI for your support and as always stay creative

Channel: Cinecom.net

Views: 360,689

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, epic games, game engine, virtual production, unreal engine 5.2, Tips And Tricks, 2D, 3D, UE5

Id: ZF7Vwc8L1ok

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023