Atmospheric Design with CAVESRD | Unreal Engine

[Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome everybody thank you for joining us thank you for hopping in matt what time is it over there man it's uh one o'clock in the morning west australian time i really appreciate you staying up late uh with me it's freaking awesome man it's 9 a.m here in california and it's 1am in perth and we have come together to do this stream for y'all it's going to be a very chill stream i got to give a shout out to my man adam feverkin who put that custom music together for your awesome visuals all that was from your various games your various experiences that you've put together and there's a link to your website in the description down below where people can hop in and play those games and explore those environments do you want to tell me a little bit about why and how you got into making those things matt yeah so i guess um talk about what you'll be downloading first it's essentially like like i make um naturally inspired unreal engine environments and i'm currently in the process of putting together a video game which is a compilation of all the environments um which you'll be able to download and essentially a photography simulator so you can walk around at your own pace just like take a bunch of photos um and just sort of like absorbing the atmosphere i guess yeah it's such a cool idea man i love this idea so much it's like i feel we're so aligned on just like the atmospheric music and the imagery man i love what you do so much it's so good and it's very unique like i i've never really seen a video game like this where you just kind of walk around and take pictures you know of course there's pokemon snap but this is very different and like there are games like flow or or journey and like those games are art pieces um but there's definitely game elements to it this is like very relaxing where you walk around with a camera and take really cool shots of of the environment and you put these environments together in such a cool way i'm very excited to jump in with you and like figure out how we're going to make this how you make these so yeah i'm i'm so excited as well man thanks everyone for having me by the way like it's great to be here i've never done a stream before so it's awesome to see like everyone in the chat yeah this is great yeah man it's gonna be a blast i'm i i feel like having guests on is the way to do this like hanging out with someone who you admire and creating art with them that's the way to go and sharing off all their art is so cool um hunter i see you thank you for that super chat much appreciated brother very good stuff um yes it's good to be back it's good to be back yeah it's 1am where matt is it's 9 a.m where i am we are coming someone says i look tired i'm not too bad honestly i've been i've been preparing for this so it's fine it's all good yeah so hey what are we gonna do today what are we what are we gonna do what's the goal um i had this idea um i've been watching a bunch of youtube videos from a youtuber called craig adams recently and the styles of videos that he does he does like like silent hiking films that's a way to describe it he does like long like 15 minute compilations of an entire hike where the video is essentially just footage of him walking with the sounds of like his footsteps and nature hey i can switch over to your display if you're ready oh yeah yeah i can get up the video yeah it's on younow so yeah cool um so i'll just place in the background i suppose so he just does like atmospheric like shots of him walking through like amazing landscapes um i personally have relied on his videos a lot to like put in the background while i'm working i find it's like a great uh a great thing to have i'm watching inspiration um yeah so he just like captures all the great details and i thought that this would just make like an awesome um an awesome like base for like a project like some of these environments have like such great detail um and there's one part in the video like a couple minutes ago like this awesome like red sun coming through i really i saw that scene i was like yeah i'd love to make it out of that so beautiful yeah we'll we'll see what we can achieve on this on this stream um hopefully it's not too ambitious i've only got like a few hours but now yeah i'm so excited yeah so basically we're going to create a small environment very much like matt has created for his games but these are obviously to a much larger scale we're going to break down we're gonna boil down uh your skill matt and we're gonna apply it to a very small scene that you're gonna help guide me through um and the audience as well unreal engine is free and y'all can hop in and learn with us for free if you have unreal engine um i think we're in version 4.27 we're going to be in here and we want by the end of this stream we want to have a downloadable exe file that you can play and hop into and like explore this environment that we're going to create right now for yourself so that's pretty sweet that's the goal yeah that's the goal obviously yeah with australian internet i don't know how far we'll get with like uploading the build and everything but aim is to have yeah playable exe file downloadable you can like walk around uh just look at everything yeah we'll see we'll see how we get sweet sweet um i just saw i just saw will for sure in the chat yeah what's up great to see you man i love i love his tutorials i've learned so much from you man yeah he is he's the one he's freaking so great so nice um he was on last month we did a live stream together and that dude is that dude is the best yeah i watched three i watched through that was great um shout outs to my boy devon williams holding it down in joja good to see you dude well i'm not seeing you but it's night i sense your presence that's that's the important thing um so where do we begin man let's let's switch over here let's open up unreal engine uh yeah i can i can tell people a bit about who i am i guess people have no idea yeah well yeah here let's i'm getting ahead of myself thanks for thanks for hitting the brakes on that who are you just cause what are you doing i don't i don't upload youtube videos like i'm not yeah i wondered like who is this guy um yeah so i um yeah i'm from i'm from perth west australia i am currently still an engineering student regretfully i really wish i could by now um but i picked up unreal while i was studying uh and that sort of stemmed from me doing a bunch of photography back when i was in high school and that continued i used to love taking photos while i was traveling um i sort of built up a knowledge of like color correction and like i did a little bit of videography but not too much and i was at a point where i really felt uh yeah like i could dive into something that can stick my teeth into you know like photography is great and all but um but i really felt like there was more i could do i wanted to like move uh move the mountains move the sun and have more like customizability about what i was creating so so this was about um about three years ago it was the beginning of 2018 i do started diving into unreal and um and yeah since then i've just been like just it's a matter of like googling every single problem you have on the unreal answer hub that's how you get there yeah it's a lot of trouble shooting the constant troubleshooting absolutely it's it's a huge program there's so much there's so much stuff man it blows me away um yeah so i just yeah i began to make scenes that were inspired by you know the places i've been the photos i've taken um i always found that photos are the best like point of reference you're making a photo realistic environment it's great to like look at the way light interacts with things and um and as well as realism you also want to put like your own flair on things you know like with colors and atmosphere so yeah that's that's sort of how i i got to hear um unreal sort of has a lot of facets in like lots of industries um i've been very lucky to be uh in this spot as lots of people have sort of converged on on unreal yeah um because yeah there are so many there's so many applications for it like it started out as a game engine and it's really fleshed out in those aspects um but yeah like i figured you know has a lot of what i needed um and then through that through making environments i've been able to like to work in like bits of films i've done like live visuals and on a little bit of game development yeah all sorts of stuff i think it's really cool that you are a photographer first and you base a lot of your 3d art on the places you've been um i don't really know of anyone else who does that kind of thing because that's i love traveling i think we're both very similar and that we love to travel and we both love japan very much and going to these places where you don't feel like you actually feel like you're exploring a new place that's why traveling is the best you meet new people you discover new places and you get lost in a place that you've never been before and sometimes when you go out into the mountains into nature without your phone and you have a camera and you have some ambient music and you're out there just enjoying nature that's so inspiring it's so inspiring and it's funny because like we have this instinct to capture that bring it back to our house and be like man i just want to be in that as much as possible let's create an environment based off of where i was it's so funny but like it gets me so excited it's the best yeah i mean even even back from like i used to watch corridor quite a lot and i like immediately recognize that from your work like you put out some amazing renders like oh thanks man i automatically like connected with that i particularly loved like i loved the the render you did in the car next to the docks that's my favorite one of yours i appreciate it man that was yes that was based off a trip that i took with adam the feverkin the guy who did the music at the intro here who you know of um it's cool that we all all three of us are connected in like one spot now on the stream that's that's awesome um but yeah it was a trip with adam and like i've never been to such an intense place before um and i just wanted to capture that as as much as po i want to like distill it down to a video you know an experience so it's amazing man like when i saw that i was like oh clint has like the perfect idea of like what i'm about heck yeah dude that's amazing um i'm really i'm really amped to to dive in with you and like see what we can create i feel like we could just do this for hours and hours and hours and hours and that's true listen yeah there are always tons of details to look at um before we hop in maybe clock's ticking maybe we should get started oh yeah go ahead yeah yeah we should get started i just want to give a shout out to one dead duck for the super chat i really appreciate you um everybody here everybody who's hopping in i know i've been streaming less these days to take some time for myself and it's been great it's been fantastic so i really appreciate everyone who's hopping in here and learning with us today so let's do it let's hop in shall we yeah let's do it all right yeah thanks to shannon hunter shea linda boulder yeah good to see everyone sorry i just love i just love having like a live reaction all this is awesome oh you don't have to apologize for that dude absolutely people are holding it down yeah okay so um do you want to describe to us what we're in here like what what's going on in this scene can anyone get this scene or is this like uh what what's going on here so i just set up like a template project for us to work with i i was tempted to go from nothing but obviously um time is against us i just thought like it's great to put in some trees and whatnot because we'll be relying on mega scans for a lot of stuff we include but uh mega stands doesn't have any trees at this live stream which i think it's actually planned or i've heard rumors or announced some sort of announcement the trees might be in mega scans at some point in the future but uh until then yeah it'll be us like we'll be importing a whole bunch of surface textures for the landscape we'll be importing a lot of a lot of meshes that we can lay out over the ground and when we import these meshes we'll be using a bunch of our custom-made master materials that i've already imported into the project so my project's looking a bit more complicated than clint's maybe but that's because i imported the first person blueprint that i'm working with this first person blueprint is like um essentially the the game format that i use for my my project so you have like a camera that you can use and walk around with so i included this because at the very end of the game i'll be able to just put that in the scene and then hopefully click compile and then we'll have an exp that's playable um so i thought it was best that i figured that stuff out beforehand smart yeah but yeah aside from that so where to jump in um i've got a list that we can start off with so i was just gonna like make a start on the landscape um i'm gonna be importing some materials from mega scans so just jose thank you for the super chat appreciate you very much thanks for hanging out with us so you're building what's your plan here you you said you want to go and create that like sunset uh tree scene from the video yeah that's the goal so yeah i watched a bunch of the scenes from the video and i tried to like gauge what the ground looks like what kinds of like assets will use to put this together um i had browsed mega scans for a while just like searching some key terms that i thought would help like you know mossy rocks and um those surfaces so uh i'm gonna show my screen stream right now but we got um yeah you're on yeah just some cool we got some like varied surfaces i picked like a couple different types of snow and brown textures um yeah i think i'll be starting with uh yeah these surface textures here which i which i won't use um the mega scans plugin for i'll just import those manually uh just because the mega scans plugin creates materials automatically but we actually have a master material that i've made that i want to use so i guess clean if you're following along we can go to like a masters folder all right let's see here okay in landscape maskers we'll want to create a material instance from the landscape template master material got you so that's a right click right at the top create material instance suite and i'm going to go into my folder that's saved on my computer and just like drag those textures in into where so just into the content browser oh got you i've never done it this way actually really yeah i've never done it this way that's good good for now we're going to want our albedo our displacement and our normal maps oh i see you're talking about the actual textures the image the images yeah so in in mega scans there's like a function you can click go to files and it opens up the file location for you perfect so this is for your ground plane right we're building up a ground plane essentially yeah so the way landscape materials work is you can choose a couple of different surfaces that you like to blend between because i've imported my landscape mask material already most of the hard work's been done for us we can just import our textures into the project and then get those into our material instance that we've made i guess to show off the landscape template that i've made which is here goodness um we've got like a i mean it looks clear to me but i guess that's because i'm because i've built it yeah what's the simplest form of this it looks like you have a few duplicated things right yeah so all of these are different material instances and they all blend using this node which is going to be a height blend so we'll be referencing all the albedos and normal maps here and then in the middle we've just got a bunch of like parameters we can adjust things like brightness color tint desaturation they all come into this node here yeah yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure exactly how much material design you've done with but um i guess i'll just yeah i'll just try and stay as clear as possible with what i've done here in notebooks so you're basically combining a number of materials on the left right if you can go back to that to that material view um so you're combining a bunch together into that like middle node right what is that node in the middle that they're all going into what is that what's called the layer blends layer blend got you okay and then all right what's going on on the right and here we've just got um i guess these are sort of like hacky kind of workarounds that i've done so i've sort of split the material attributes here which is just means i can do sort of last minute modifications like here i've got like a texture overlay which helps like the vary the brightness in the distance um and then down here we've got a um we've got contact shadows we've got material contact shadows these are actually really really cool i'd love to talk about these a little bit more a bit later but um you should be able to you should be able to open the same material on your end right yeah i i yeah i just need to choose what material i want for the ground um cool and yeah um but i guess because yeah i i favorited my material so i know what i'm putting in already that's good that's good do you want to maybe like link those up while i figure out what ground plane i'm going to use yeah sounds good i mean i'm i'm interested to see like i'm sort of happy that you'll be choosing a bunch of different services and assets so we'll see like it might be yeah it'll be interesting what you come up with yeah i might try and go for like a snowy scene to have something a little different um but yeah i remember we were looking at we're looking at that one shot um like with craig walking through like some foggy sections i cannot be sweet yeah yeah agreed um and hey william i really appreciate you answering questions here in the chat that's really nice of you man um one of the questions here hunter was asking is there a way to collaborate in unreal engine um and and william mentioned uh omniverse which is a possibility uh but hunter's basically asking like are we working on the same file or two separate files um this is two separate files right now but yeah how would how would you collaborate on one file in unreal engine i've out of experience i've only worked on my own projects i haven't i haven't worked collaboratively on a game or anything like that um but but i'm aware that um you know collaboration is the whole thing there's like version control and everything implemented through like through github you can you can set up the project and people can download branches and everything uh yeah it's a whole thing i just haven't i just haven't delved in too far into it yeah same but it'd be nice for these streams actually it'd be pretty sweet to like do some collaborative that's true yeah thinking about it now like if you're working on a similar project in the future yeah you really work really well um also shout outs to khalifa for the super chat much appreciated thanks for hanging out with us and chillin um and and william again i really appreciate you answering those questions in the chat man that's super super nice of you very very cool um it's quite a treat to have you in there as well man so okay i need to figure out what the heck i'm gonna do like what what i need to figure out what my ground plane's going to be i'm going to start downloading a bunch of snow assets and bringing those in um if you want to start downloading your ground and like maybe once you get things set up we can talk about how they're set up is that does that sound good yeah no problem i'm just um chugging in a couple of textures right now okay sounds good yeah i guess once i've got things set up i'll i'll walk you through it so um oh we got casey up in here snap casey edwards very talented composer he is the go-to he is the man composer casey what's going on we used to live together but saying we used to live together sounds like it was so long ago i feel like it's only like a year ago what up casey good to see you dude oh man boards of canada ah i wish you have to put that on yourself i wish i could do that right now i do want to figure out a way to like add music to these streams because it would elevate the vibe the right music would elevate the vibe no doubt all right i'm just downloading excuse me for not yeah good forgive me for not um looking at the chat too much i i'm really concentrating on this deadline i really want to get something together let's do it yeah but i guess i also yeah i also don't want to like go blazingly fast or everything so no one can pick up on anything that i did so now we'll we'll go back and we'll touch on things that need to be touched on yeah cool cool if there's anything like like glaze over or there was a chat question that um highlighted something please please let me know sounds good well i gotta update my plugins i'm ready for i guess i can explain what i'm doing i'm ready for like my next step i'm importing my textures um yeah before i um yeah like so i've got my landscape um material instance here so i'm just gonna where i've got it set up is that each each texture is like a parameter so i can just like feed in what i've got i've chosen a variation i've chosen two snow textures um one ground texture and one leaves texture i actually might have forgotten these section so your master material you're saying that this instance which we're using to populate to a bunch of different pieces of geometry you wouldn't drop the instance on things so yeah the reason we use an instance is just so we can like manipulate the different parameters of the material on the fly like if you want to adjust like brightness color anything to do with that uh if you have an instance the the effect will be immediate on the landscape uh instead of having to like you just did it within the material you'd have to like compile and wait for it to compile yeah and that's very it's like very different because in cinema 4d or blender like you don't really do that and i was like why would i need to create two of the same material here this doesn't make any sense but yeah basically you have a master material which is the full material built out and then you have the instance which is the one that is easily duplicated throughout all the different geometry in your scene so it just keeps things running a lot faster yeah pretty much um like i like i don't actually have any i don't have much experience with other renderers like unreal is sort of the only thing that i know so um that's awesome i have to like at some point at some point i'll have to dive into like another render and see how everything is handled it's that curiosity um like i was meaning to pick more seriously but i think blender and unreal engine is a great combination together like oh absolutely they're both free right and like you can't really model in unreal engine like unreal engine to me at least for my purposes i'm using it to bring assets together and uh to build out environments in real time and of course you can like gamify it you know which is what you have done uh you turn it into a video game for me i'm i'm here for like the photo real uh real-time environments for storytelling um and for you know for like narrative scenes essentially for vfx um but it has so many uses and that's why this program is so darn confusing at times it's because it was originally made for games but people are using like now it's it's kind of starting to be marketed as like oh you can actually do this for vfx and like production too and there's so many layers to this program that i don't use because i'm not making games but you but matt you are tapped in to the game side of things as well as william too you know william william was in that as well but both of you guys are like very attuned to this entire program and this is this is your jam so i'm i'm very excited to be learning from you and be doing this with you man this is super cool i'm such a new thanks man yeah i guess william like william like he um he sounds like much more of a veteran like he said he was around like during the unreal engine three days like the source development kit and stuff like that like i've gone through a couple of forums but like that's about it like he he definitely knows much more in that sense um but you know like um i i've been thinking about it a bit like which would would it be a good thing for unreal to split into like a cinematic renderer and and a game development tool and it's an interesting it's an interesting um conversation but i think like the more i've thought about it i actually rely on a lot of game tools for the um or the rendering stuff that i do like through through the game development integration i can like do so many complicated things that would have taken me ages to do in a traditional renderer like i i put out a scene recently which is essentially um like it's a bit hard to explain but all the instances on the landscape sort of like fly up into the air sort of um harmoniously yeah let me let me pull that up real quick let me let me oh i can do that you want to let me think uh really hard for a second where is that um here we go it's funny this video is adam sent this to me and he's and this is titled cave's reel for punisher bro oh yeah i saw that okay here we go let me switch over so yeah this like exploded out view i i was wondering how the heck did you do this yeah like i was gonna say like so traditionally that kind of stuff would take i mean i would assume it would take like key frames animations and things like that you have to keep framing a lot of stuff um but uh yeah considering it's a game development engine you can just have a material that references a single value and then make that value unanimous among all instances so the value would be respective of okay here's the center point and how far away from the center point is this instance so you have that and then you'd essentially have just like a sweeping effect from from zero to one and then it would just bring in like it would make all of the assets sweep up into the air um and so yeah i was quite i was quite happy with that one when i put that together because um yeah dude it's awesome obviously the scene took quite a long time to make and so just putting just doing like a quick render with like a cool effect i don't know it's lots of fun it's really good well it really like lets you see one how many things are going into this how many little assets and how many pieces are either hand placed or actually that's a great question do you hand place all your stuff like how much of it is scattered around uh randomly well not randomly but like you know autumn automatically scattered versus hand placed when i first started i definitely like did a whole bunch of individual instancing like using the foliage tool just like placing things here and there yeah and yeah that was super time consuming so yeah more recently like the last few years i've been delving into like procedural foliage tools and things like that yeah which which can be really useful um i've sort of found that the best the best outcome is to have like a combination of the two where you're like starting with instead of starting with a blank slate you start with a completely procedurally generated like forest for example and then instead of so instead of building from nothing you're like starting with a forest and then building back on things that you don't like and then adding detail to parts where you need it i found that that's so much faster than yeah placing instances from scratch and like doing all of that like what we're do what we're doing right now essentially kind of yeah i'm still sorry i'm going so slowly by the way um i it's okay i'm just putting my it's like no i have no like ability to like work until here why don't you why don't you get it i'll take over i'll i'll uh i'll talk them through my process here which is just me grabbing assets and bringing them in which was really difficult to figure out at like the very beginning of things so basically you download unreal engine okay you're like how do i even download unreal engine that's the first thing i asked and you and then you got to get the like epic games launcher it's like no i want to download unreal engine but that's how you do it you got to download the epic games launcher and in the epic games launcher you know it brings up this whole thing right here and basically you're going to hit this unreal engine tab on the left and you're going to go to library and you're going to download different versions of the program and we're in 427 right now people are all hyped up on unreal 5. um so that's how you launch it and you jump in and then you're presented with the program you're like okay well how do i make stuff look good where do i go from there well getting the mega scans plug-in is probably uh the next thing you want to do this comes pre-installed in unreal five and you can browse the marketplace for all of these free assets it's like it's ridiculous how all this stuff is free it's not fair like it it's ridiculous um i'm gonna just download this real quick because that looks cool um but i believe boy it's been a minute since i've done this but once you download bridge you're essentially going to manage plugins perhaps you want to make sure that you have your unreal engine plug-in installed here and when you export things there's a little cog on the bottom right which you all can barely see you got download and export settings and you want to make sure it's going to unreal engine make sure the plugins downloaded and it might need to be enabled here um by going to settings plugins perhaps and if i search for mega scans it is enabled yeah and you'll need to restart and then what you can do is start downloading stuff and exporting you'll see in the top right export successful and back in unreal you're gonna get a little load bar and it's gonna just work its way over across the internet all the way into your scene this doesn't matter and snowy embankment let's see bam here we go right and then you have your scene which you drop in and i'm navigating through this program by holding right click and using wasd just like you're playing a first person shooter or something and orbiting around the scene and spacebar actually cycles between the different navigational tools so i'm just hitting spacebar to move this stuff around i don't know what i'm going to build yet i don't know what scene i'm going to i mean obviously i'm doing a snowy scene here i just don't know my composition i don't know the layout of my stuff i think what i'm doing right now is just gathering assets i'm gathering as many assets that i'm going to use to build out my scenes essentially my legos i'm getting all my lego pieces ready everything is laid out in the world outliner so if i were to clean this up i can select all my geometry and in the top right here this little folder we can click that and just type geometry boom and i like to make another one for light so i have my skylight and let's see exponential height fog directional light i'm just going to put that in a folder called light and this blank template here this was actually matt sent this over to me so that we can be sped up and working quickly on the stream but when you hop in you might start with a blank template you'll be you'll be uh what's the word um you'll have a menu and in that menu you're going to see like do i want to start with a blank template do i want to start with uh you know a first person shooter template and you can choose between game or television and production right and you essentially each one of those templates toggles certain plugins on and off for what you're specifically using it for so i'm i usually go with the like film and tv template you can do a blank one or time of day template just to get you a sun and uh some atmosphere and whatnot in your scene already so i'm just dropping stuff in here and trying to build out my lego pieces yeah how's how's everything going you need to give your hand with your landscape um i don't want to save kids just at the perfect moment every time i'm i'm just down though i'm like gathering assets right now so i'm still i'm honestly kind of like trying to avoid the material setup maybe we should i should just rip off that band-aid and like jump in with it um i'm like oh shoot that looks advanced but let me download a couple more of these embankments um how are you feeling you feeling like you can talk about some stuff right now or uh yeah i i wanted to mention yeah i wanted to mention like with the whole design of the scene um like usually you would make a composition with your with your environment and like frame everything up nicely get everything looking perfect um but with what i wanted to make on the stream i guess you'd sort of take a different approach like this is how i usually approach my my landscape because i just make a huge sort of half randomly generated environment with a lot of like sporadic placements for trees like twigs everything and then the final render sort of come from you know like random angles that i found in the environment so once you put a whole bunch of random stuff together i found sort of in the same the same vein of real world videography and photography you have an environment that exists already and you just go around and like find angles and obviously for some for some projects like that's not the right way to go about things obviously you need like a really specific look specific composition um but i found that you know in some aspects it really does help like if you if you make a composition from something that's randomly somewhat randomly generated it just creates a lot of like nice i don't know how to say it like like opportunities to discover um interesting angles on the fly right yeah it's sort of like something that's more naturally inspired i suppose like if you're taking shows in the landscape uh trees are never placed perfectly anywhere like like people who do landscape nature photography have to like make their own angles and nothing is ever placed completely perfectly um that's a great thing yeah that's a really great point and you know like it reminds me of the that cabin breakdown that blender guru made you remember that one i think i saw a bit of that yeah yeah um is such a great video you all should check it out blender guru he walks you through like 20 to 25 minutes the creation of his cabin uh piece of art and he talks about like i've never heard this before and you just described it very similar to how he did and basically what he says is like he places his cabin he scatters his trees and then he like randomizes the camera's position and its focal length i think and the sun position and every frame is a new position for all of those things and he hits go and it just makes like thousands of them overnight and when he wakes up in the morning he can toggle through each one and like pick the ones that look the coolest so it's like a it's a it's like a random seed but for your lighting your camera angle and your focal length so it's a great way to generate ideas very quickly and i've never done that before but it that's actually a great idea for like what you're describing about randomly generating your environment and then trying to find the cool angles within that and then of course hyping those up and building those out once you find something cool you know yeah absolutely i totally agree like it's just yeah with with maybe for people who've only ever done like structured um scenes and structured compositions so it's like it really helps like i know with inspiration and i guess it's sort of real relatable in some ways like you know like i don't know if everyone's seen like bob ross but you know you have like happy accidents and like mistakes those are all good like i've sort of found that that that sort of imperfection like helps a lot with trying to make something yeah because it's like it makes sense because it's a random discovery that works and it's almost like a gift from heaven that comes down it's like oh snap i wouldn't have been able to do this with my brain but i recognize with my brain that it's cool so i should probably roll with that um you know they say they say the same thing when you're when you're shooting a movie like you're gonna plan things out as much as possible when you're making a movie you're gonna have a storyboard you're gonna have a script you're gonna have like pre-visualizations for fight scenes you're gonna have everything pre picked out you're gonna have rehearsals the actors know they're gonna do it a certain way but when you get there on the day and randomness you know hops into the mix which it always does that can be chaotic and stressful but i think to a great filmmaker or a great artist that random chaos can be harnessed and if you're aware of the greatness that comes from that and you can harness it it's it's gonna like add a level of like magic to your art and it's so rare that i get that in 3d because everything is just hand placed and hand done but the way you describe that man that that's really cool i'm glad that that element can be brought to this process yeah it's good to hear i mean that's sort of just the way i've always done things and i know in a lot of cases it's not the best way but yeah like how i like to do things i guess that's great um did you by the way did you need your help how are you going i'm chilling i'm just uh you know downloading assets and like okay um i think i will need help when we get to like the material side of things but yeah what do you suggest okay if we want to do this random generated version of like what you're talking about how would how would we go about doing that right now what do i need to do to to get that going so uh if we had more time i would suggest using procedural foliage volumes which involve you know you've got a lot of foliage assets and you place them all into the volume and then you have to set all these parameters and get everything uh neat so it has like these clusters and all this complicated stuff but for today i think um once we've got a landscape that looks looks decent i think we'll chuck a bunch of um foliage into the foliage painter and then just sort of um am i randomly you know like place classes of trees here and there i think that's the best way to do things it's often for me it's like i like to do things a bit more quickly than spending hours like arranging procedural foliage volumes um got you okay so maybe the randomness style isn't the best way to go for this stream right now because we're on a limited time i mean it's still it's still somewhat random like we're still going to import like a height map for the landscape hopefully and um and then when we when we paint we're just going to paint with like a huge brush so we set like the density of trees and then we just paint over a section we'll get like an even distribution of the trees cool so yeah there'll still be like a random element to it for sure all right sounds good sounds good what am i missing it looks like you got it looks like you've got a bunch of stuff i i think i'll help you get your landscape set up properly um sweet so we've got pretty much the same setup right now like we've both got a bunch of assets that we've we've dragged in uh you've got some nice snow fascists which looks great um i yeah i've set up my landscape material so that i've i've been able to paint a couple of surfaces on the ground um so where are you at with that have you made a material instance yeah i've made the material instance but i don't have any materials plugged in so maybe i should find a couple uh a couple materials to drop into that instance i would assume that's probably the way to go yeah yeah yeah so if you if you found any surface materials that you want to use for mega scans you can either i guess i i've dragged in the textures manually but you're welcome to like import them and then you can still use the same texture yeah let me um okay so i'm gonna download a couple a couple materials here a couple snowy materials um and then we're going to manually drag them in and drop them into your custom instance is that correct yeah essentially yeah um i'll have to tell you how to set everything up but um at the moment uh so i had to create the instance put in all the textures in their respective slots and then after that um you'll have to open up the landscape painter mode and then you'll have to make uh landscape layer files so uh it's not very complicated you just have to click like when you create a new layer you just click create weight blended layout and that's essentially it okay all right we'll get there um let's see i should download a a variety of snow textures i'm assuming right yeah so the maximum is for the material i've designed is for textures um and i i usually like to include yeah just a bit of variance like you don't necessarily have to use all the textures i guess if you just got like one significant like snow texture and one maybe rock texture and that's what you're going with i think that should be fine all right sounds good sounds great all right i'm almost done here so i need to navigate to the files actually on my computer and i think you can you can just import them it does create material instances but you can't use those as long as yeah i think exporting uh using the plugin should be fine because it imports the textures as well yeah all right let me do this then let's do right we're chilling in here let's bring in this like snow trampled material let's grab this wind swept snowy stones material and there's like a fresh windswept snow i think any one of these will be fine grab that okay all right and those all because we got our mega scans plugins set up those are all coming up into our scene right now so i have three which i think will be fine i guess for this um i might explain about um something i really love in landscape materials which is the contact shadows um [Music] so regretfully um before the stream i couldn't i didn't really have the time but i would have loved to include like height maps with um with each of the textures so what i'm doing right now is i'm just like putting in new texture samples to sample a displacement texture just to sort of demonstrate this effect but um well question first do you have a visual example of what you're talking about at this right now not right now i'd have to i have to get that set up first um but so contact shadows are essentially just like really detailed shadows uh when you have your lighting in unreal the default it comes from a directional light it's cascade shadows and they look great and they respond to moving objects and everything which is awesome um but if you like zoom in really close to like the edge of a an object in the scene there's not really any detail there you have to like really bump up the um the trace i think oh not the trace count but um yeah you have to step up the quality which is like a huge performance hit um so you're talking about this between the tree and the ground there's just like a nasty hard line that seam right there right yeah so the shadow sort of like sort of cuts off halfway if i just enable contact shadows real quickly really quick you'll know what i'm talking about so you sort of see like the the detail doesn't extend very far because contact shadows only sample like two objects that are really short distance away from each other okay but around objects like maybe i'll find something for example so if i have something that's um with half blending in and out of the landscape this isn't perfectly blended just yet but are you'll sort of see just like much more detailed shadows come from the object as opposed to if i turn off contact shadows then they disappear so got you okay yeah that's that's what contact shows are and contact shadows in general i suppose it's worth mentioning like i when i design my scenes i design with optimization like considering i want to use these environments in real time it's not always a choice that you need to make if you're just exporting some renders like some nice um ray trace lighting but uh yeah these all of these all these tricks and things i'll be i'll be showing will mostly be with the mindset of like creating an optimized environment so what you're saying is that contact shadow that looks realistic if you were to have that on literally every single piece of geometry that you're scattering across your scene it would your frame rate would drop considerably and you wouldn't be able to have like a 60 fps experience in your game so so what i'm saying is contact shadows are essentially like a technique you would only use for for games because they're because it's very efficient like you can essentially have contact shadows over the entire scene as many as you want for free because it's a screen space effect like it's very cheap gotcha so what i'm saying is like if you were to do this with ray tracing you'll have to like pop the settings a lot um or just like have uh have that kind of outlook over the scene in general but contact shadow is just sort of like a trick if that makes sense like a trick that helps like get some nice details in where there are like small changes in the geometry obviously when you get larger distances or you get really close to it it sort of like dissolves like you can see here but um yeah it's very much like a uh an optimization trick to get some really nice uh really nice details sweet once i get these uh contact coats up within the material so within the landscape material it's um essentially yeah it's the same thing but it's embedded into the material so even if you don't have any geometric detail in the material and no displacement and no bumps or anything um if you have contact shutters turned on and you have uh this this bunch of arithmetic here enabled it will allow for like some shadows to come in on the landscape um yeah it's just sort of like a neat trick hopefully i'll be able to get something that's uh presentable yeah sounds good i think right now i i need to catch up to where you're at as far as uh well let's see do we want to scatter some stuff around and start to build a scene and then once we have something uh let me let me ask you this do you want to do you want to do the contact shadow thing now do you want to set that up now or do you want to start building a scene what would you prefer i i usually leave scene building to like near almost near the end okay cool cool yeah i think i'll do my contact shadows while you're while you're still working if you're slightly behind have you got the landscape set up i i have my materials downloaded but i don't have anything dropped into that instance i don't have any like yeah i don't have that stuff set up okay cool so um i guess i can i'll talk you through it just so we can progress at the same same rate yeah um let me know once you've got the the landscape material instance up okay um just want to quickly shout out a couple people one day duck i appreciate you for that super chat there yes i can export multiple items at once from quicksilver thank you good stuff um what else alex thank you for the super chat as well i love a good snowy embankment as well that's why i'm putting that one together um i'm very excited about this so we're gonna get this ground plane going and get our you know i've never done this before so i'm i am at your whim here so we got uh in the masters folder under what was it material functions nope uh yep so content masters and landscape masters is where i put the materials got it okay so i'm in the instance right now cool so if you scroll down to global texture parameter values you'll see yeah a bunch like normal one normal two yeah yeah that's where you put in all of your textures so if you decide which ones you're going to allocate to be like number one number two yeah uh you would slot in the albedo into the albedo slot and then you spot the corresponding normal map to the normal got you so um it's just normal and albedo that's all we really need yeah that's all we're dealing with a lot of materials go into like specular maps all sorts of stuff i this material specifically i've decided to reference the albedo as a specular map just to sort of save performance that's how i'd like to approach it um because i figured with a lot of albedo you can actually draw some specular detail like depending on the surface obviously but um for a lot of my purposes i found that representing the albedo for specular works pretty well it's um it's what i like to go with all right so i got everything in here cool um and then i love to include my displacement maps obviously my preference is not to include that as a separate texture parameter my my choice is often to embed the displacement map into the into the albedo with photoshop you can like modify the alpha channel so that it displays the displacement map so in the material you just reference the colors and then from the alpha you reference the displacement and i found that that's a great performance saver i don't know if that'll make sense to many people but i just want to put it out there it it's it's it's a high level tip that half makes sense to me and i think if if um i don't know if we get to a point where you can show the difference between like at the end show the difference between what it looks like with or without um but i think the p for the people that that makes sense to i'm sure they're like heck yeah absolutely i'm i'm such a like i said i'm such a noob and i'm like trying to follow here um so i really i really appreciate your patience with me as we're uh no no as we're creating this together and uh evolver what's up good to see you welcome back thank you for the super chat thanks for the support and thanks for everyone just hanging out with us and uh and chilling we got a steady steady viewer group here i appreciate you all um yeah sort of sort of apologize for like really concentrating on the project i'm like maybe maybe i'm pushing this too hard like i really want to get something out at the end of the two hours but i've been meaning to read through the chat for a bit we'll be good we'll be good so i got this like material instance set up what's the next step how do i how do i like visualize this how do i use this okay cool so if you have your landscape selected in the details panel you'll be able to insert your landscape material instance where it says landscape material got it okay so it's just darkness so yeah that's that should mean it's working great so i think i'm bringing you a screen now uh actually it's probably a bit delayed but um so once you've got that set up um you want to go into landscape painting mode by pressing shift three shift two sorry shift two and then you'll see a bunch of slots um for each of them you have to press the plus icon which says create layer info and then you will want to save a weight blended layer all right i'm switching over to you i guess okay cool so in target layers in the height map area or because i'm trying to find out where that is so if you're in landscape painting mode it should be just in the landscape tab got you yeah i'm in the landscape tab sculpt tool settings brush settings target layers yeah um so in the layers you'll see like just uh something empty so if you press the plus icon it says create layer info i've already done this in my landscape by the way um but once you have those created you'll be able to to paint some textures onto the landscape okay i'm trying to find where this plus button is you're like such a noob right now it's all good no no that's so good does it add components to the landscape uh sculpt paint here we go i had to go to the paint tab up in here so it was that manage and i wanted to go to paint and there i can see these textures okay so it looks like i already have them there um [Music] and i probably want to get rid of this texture for can i just delete that i think i think texture 4 you'll have to leave there for now so i think for my project i was able to get i can get i've got my contact shadows working so i guess i can show that off quickly uh okay i'm running into errors and problems but here let's switch over all right i'm just gonna go oh i think we visible i can't hear you oh there we go oh i haven't haven't done anything yeah i thought you were talking and i couldn't hear you yeah we're saying okay oh no okay um so yeah i've got my contact shadows enabled at the moment so if i go ahead and turn this on and off in the directional light it's hard to see kind of but maybe the textures are too small to scale the light's not um but you can sort of see like you know like where the normal like has a little bump there's like it's just a short shadow coming down i might i might work on making that a bit more prominent but can you slide through it again before and after so that's oh yeah with and that's without so this is currently without or this is currently with i'm not sure it's not it's not very noticeable maybe i'll work on it so the darker flatter version is without and then like the more like sharpened version is with i i might work on making a better example for that because it's not too not too obvious but um i yeah i really wanted to just talk about like uh material contact shadows because when i first discovered it i was like oh this is amazing all this detail um this is something that you discovered from the uh the the australia pack right is that what you said yes yeah yeah so um from the australia pack on the unreal under marketplace which is for free i downloaded that and i looked through the materials because um the creator of the australian pack uh andrew spamberg hamilton he um he was like a developer of dice for a long time he like has a lot of experience i just really wanted to dive into his material design see what see what he's doing like see what like the the best material design is and yeah that's how i learned the technique that's awesome yeah this is all free too by the way you can download this for free and hop in and explore this and like you just basically reverse engineered what uh what andrew did to discover that technique that's cool yeah that's awesome this is such a good mind yeah go ahead yeah yeah it's an amazing pack it's like yeah amazing um i yeah i think i might try and move on to like getting my landscape like height maps and looking good um if you if you feel like you're struggling just give me a shout sounds good yeah go for it so i might let's see i might just cheat it yeah so for the people for people who haven't been watching since the start we're making um making like a nepalese inspired winter landscape um if my screen's still up i'll just pull the video off again yeah i got you yeah just in case so um these uh vlogs by craig adams he does a lot of hiking videos and we found like this nice like nepalese uh like hiking trail um so i thought i would have a go at trying to recreate it um so yeah that's what we're doing at the moment obviously not very far yet but we'll just we'll just see how we go so you're trying to throw i think it's important height map or displacement yeah yeah i um i was gonna create another landscape from scratch i just deleted my old one and then i'm gonna import files yeah during the stream has made me realize how how bad i am dude it's it's really difficult to do it's very difficult to focus on like very minut things and it's like you feel like people you're like oh who cares about this one little thing but like people actually love it they eat this stuff up man it's freaking awesome to yeah we'll we'll for sure he's he's really good at it i wonder if he's still here yeah he's he's killer i've ever i actually never watched this uh one of his streams before but definitely would like to in the future here yeah i'm almost i it sucks that i miss most of your streams as well because most for the most part they're like from from 1am to 4am yeah it's all good yeah if i'm pulling a bender and like working on something i always have it like in the corner so what are you up to right now what are you what are you doing in your scene uh just i've got my height map in which is looking alright i think i might just go ahead we've got some weird looking i mean i think i know i know what's wrong here like i i've imported a file that's like not nearly high enough resolution uh so we've got all these lines looking like look like minecraft here yeah yeah but i think i can fix this pretty easily if i just like going to smooth the landscape sculpting tool i think i'll i think i'll somewhat go into like con concentration mode so i can get something together i think after this i'm gonna i'm gonna jump into like getting my my sky dome set up so like with my hdri sounds good i'll be moving some pieces around on my sounds good once you've got uh once you've essentially once you've got your asset set up and you've got your landscape working like being able to paint materials i think we'll get our skybox setup sounds good it looks like a bit depth issue yeah yeah it was just like a like an awful quality jpeg but you know like even even if it's a bad quality jpeg like it's enough to just get like the outline there and then you can go in with the smooth tool and just like make everything look much more smooth right now sweet it's a good tip because then you're essentially going to throw your own landscape you're going to throw your landscape material on top of that that's the one that like switches between three to four materials right that right now i was going to mention quickly where i got my height map from um i use a website that i named so i'll just look up quickly it's called tantrams.get heightmapper and on my screen i've got it now it's like a um pretty much a world map of that's been heightmapped and so you can you can zoom in on any part of it that you'd like and then it you can extract you know you can render out like a short screenshot of the height map which is pretty cool um i found it doesn't have a lot of really close detail but um but yeah for large landscapes i found it to be to be pretty helpful like for this um for this scene i just got like a little excerpt of like the himalayas i have no idea which part of the himalayas but i just like chose a little spot that's incredible could you do do you can you actually grab that link for the audience can you put a chat yeah yeah that's a great resource yeah i forgot how i how i found it actually twice um yeah i found like there are tons of resources for height maps but i found it's just so easy to just like open a browser tab and yeah just get a high map just like that that's amazing let's see yeah i'm having trouble here it's going against air it says this layer has no layer info assigned yet you must create or assign a layer info before you can paint this layer okay okay so um on my screen now i've got my landscape um option open and so you've got your target layers right and you've got your like slots your four slots yes four slots here so see how csos has none after each of the labels yeah so on the far right there's a little plus sign which is create layer info yeah and so [Music] with that you create a weight blended layer and you can save that anywhere in your your content directory and after that it'll essentially reference that layout oh okay so does that sound clear have you is that working yeah that is that should be yeah oh snap okay yep i'm seeing things now that's fantastic so the reason we go weight-bended layer instead of a non-weight blended layer is because in most of my landscape materials i like to reference the displacement map and that just gives a really nice um transition i suppose between materials it references the height map and then it like sort of overlaps them in a more natural way sweet i'm so excited to be learning all this stuff and i can't wait to like figure out this workflow here dang i'm still getting the thing slayer has no layering fluid sign yet i have signed all four layers what is going on oh that's strange i mean for me i yeah once the layer was created and i can see it in my my landscape tab it doesn't say none it says the layer that i just made and then i'm able to do some painting i don't know why it still says nay uh target layers see i don't think i'm supposed to do anything else oh shoot someone someone in the chat just says one of my best friends uh was part of the leads of the mission that got the data for the height map how cool is that oh snap wait i know i know this guy i know hunter oh snap that's awesome that's awesome wow that's super crazy small world is this house working in directx 11 yes um me at least i i'm not going to be relying on any brake tracing for this project we're just going with um traditional dynamic lighting hey caves did you get that height map link by the way i don't think i saw it in the chat yeah i posted it in the chat oh i can do it again you did wait soda did you see it i i guess i don't come up as a moderator so it sort of blends in but i don't i didn't see a link that's weird you can send it to me on discord okay yeah i'll do that quickly oh sorry about the coughing i just like swallowed my coffee the wrong way oh dude you're all good sweet all right pinned it that's a really cool a really cool service they got here for free too what the heck how are you doing how are you i'm just about yeah i'm i'm just about ready like i've got a landscape that looks like ugly at the moment but i'm just about ready to like start laying down some trees all right i'm gonna need your help i need i need you to help a noob out here so i am currently at a point where like i'm trying to paint but it's not it's still giving me this error that this layer has no layer info assigned yet and then you have to create or assign a layer info before you can paint the layer but everything on the left is basically assigned i added the plus sign to everything okay so i'm not ready so it doesn't say none anymore underneath the label no okay is that a white blended layer or the other the other type no this is the first option the one that says parentheses normal okay oh man i'm sorry yeah i'm not sure um it's probably probably just doing some noob thing that's like um i mean if you want you can screenshot on discord really quick oh let me just try and restart it let me restart my program i'm gonna switch over good work all right in that case at the moment i'm just um tweaking my landscape materials because everything's looking a bit funny at the moment i'm holding you back caves no no not at all i love i love this vibe i love this is like a one-on-one tutorial it's great it's awesome it's awesome to be able to yeah just like i'll give you a kickstart i know that you've been lying down unreal for a long time like um yeah i'd love to be able to help you like make the stuff that you want to make like there's nothing worse than just like you know dealing with a program just like not knowing where the buttons are yeah it's tough at first you know it's like you're crawling through the program hey it works now man a little restart yeah a little restart i'll do it oh nice for some reason it's gray though there's like parts that are like gray like camouflage or something but i that's fine we can we can move on that is strange why is it doing that you see this by chance like looks like camouflage should be white right it's snow is it this one is it no it's not that oh i think i know what you mean um yeah so if you open your material instance that's because of the macro variation that i included and i think by default i accidentally set that to full so if you search in the details panel macro you'll be able to set your macro intensity to zero dude somebody knows what they're talking about snap yeah yeah yeah when you're ready uh should we get into like uh skybox and like let's do it is she all right cool let's do it so let's let's go through this together because we're both sort of on the same level so if you go into engine content in your content browser search sky yeah and drag that into the scene and go to details and scale that up to life okay he said one more time you said in the content browser do what now the content browser so you're able to find engine content there's like a panel on the very side that you can pop out like a list and from there you select engine content and then you can search within that folder engine content i in content the content folder let me switch to you while you show it's so tiny so i'm gonna get this over here i can zoom in it's just this pad this tab here you can like select this um window yeah okay yeah i'm on that and then select engine content and then from there in the search bar you can search skype here oh weird i'm not seeing that folder that engine content folder so does it just like content for you yeah just this content yeah i wonder if that's like a project setting that i changed like years ago yeah just contact like it's unreal for you i could add a feature or a pack content pack starter content or something it's like i don't know if that's this is what i need to be doing but probably not just such perfect settings anyway here you go for it you add it and then i i think i have enough info to like add a x uh uh uh height or what is it exponential height fog i can add some of that and like work my size i can get i can get that far but yeah why don't you why don't you go for it i've just put in my um sky sphere and i just like to take that mesh from the content files because it says you haven't bought it yourself and now in our masters folder i've got a material that's set up for skyspheres so i'm gonna create an instance oh if i got the wrong material oh no so i'll be able to put in i'll be able to put something in but it's not going to be projected correctly i'm just going to import my sky texture quickly oh william's william's still in the chat and he's giving me so he says you need to go to view options in the bottom right of your content browser show engine content yes check box show engine content william you're a life saver thank you much appreciated so now on the left i can actually i can see if dang my head is in the way big old head is in the way but i have that pack now engine content and you said sky sphere uh matt are you still there yep i'm still there uh what was here what was the thing to search for yeah sky sphere and it's a folder is that right sky atmosphere uh it's a mesh it's a mesh um so so if you have the engine content selected in the left pane you should be able to search skies here and it should be the first option oh boy it's like a static match you can just drag that into the scene i'm just getting this must be by okay look this must be rough for people who know what's going on apologies i am i am my fingernails i'm just hanging on by my fingernails scraping trying to keep up with a master working his magic right now oh man oh man we're gonna get there we're gonna get there i appreciate everyone's patience this is what happens when you don't know how to use this program you know this is what happens you notice how to use this program you make a full year i mean the thing the thing that works me about unreal is like you know that that option was just like a thing hidden away in project settings you know and you never know to like search for a way to find it um i often i found that some like some really crucial settings just boil down to that you know that one check box and you have no idea where it is oh that's that's question brutal it's like you move into a new house it's a mansion it's like that's the biggest house you've ever been to and all your stuff is just scattered around and you're like i thought like how am i supposed to know is up in the attic in this drawer under the floorboard like how am i supposed to know where these buttons are but you know you know you hang out with matt you hang out with uh with william and you watch their videos and their tutorials and and you know then you figure out oh that is under the floorboard i'm gonna move it into my pocket i'm gonna have it in my pocket for next time so [Laughter] thanks for your patience dude i think i found it though i don't know it's a problem skysphere material um which one there's four sky spheres um it's just the it's just the static mesh that you need um now and i just drag it out into the sky uh yeah we're on to the landscape we're on to the lake sorry wish i could i wish i could see um what's the what's the name of it i have i have four names here i have uh uh editor sky spheres guy sphere material sm sky sphere sm sky i have two sm sky sky skyspheres i'm searching it everyone's like everyone's editing skysphere full alert editor skysphere okay and i just drag that into the scene okay my sky went gray so looks a little uh let's see where is that even oh you just drag it i think drag it onto the landscape so this place like right in the middle i think i'm i'm probably doing the wrong thing you gotta drag bp skysphere okay thank you chat i really appreciate you bp skysphere all right um yeah okay this guy just turned all orange and stuff i just don't know where it went though because it's like i'm applying it to something is it an actor that is like in the scene or is it a material it's like essentially an actor with the normals that are inverted so it can only be viewed from the inside show me on your screen what does that look like where like where is that where would you click on it the moment i i've got it scaled up 500 times so that's why it's like covering the sky but if i put it right back down to one you'll see just like a dome like a weird extra projector all right and show me where you're getting that from all right so engine content uh such sky sphere there's this editor sky speed here that i just dragged in editor sky sphere yeah okay so i put that on the landscape just so it's like placed in the center and i can work with it um and then in the details panel when you've got that selected scale it up around 500 times you can do more if you want all right give me a second and that essentially just wraps the entire scene inside the inside sphere okay it's weird because it's not i'm not i don't think i'm seeing it in my content browser or sorry the world outliner i'm not seeing it in my world outliner so i don't know where it is in my scene okay if it's not in your in your world outliner it might not be in scene properly like uh if you if you drag it onto the like the background where there is no background it'll it might not like be placed correctly i might i'm probably doing this wrong because the chat is yelling at me to like sky uh bp sky sphere yeah i don't know if i'm like it's weird because like based on your screen i'm dragging the correct thing based off of like this discord view of the screen share of my other computer um but yeah i i don't i don't know it just looks like a massive gray box this guy goes wait look what is being added oh i see okay no there it is but why the heck is it grayed out like that why is everything out that's strange jeez cursed uh i wish yeah it's such a shame i can't see a real update real-time update of your screen um otherwise i'd be able to help you so i just went full screen on me but everything else is greyed out besides oh it's precur it's because i'm in paint mode i would assume oh maybe that's my bad i need to switch to select oh good so select would be shift one there we go and i think this thing is like that's my bad utterly massive which is why it's encompassing the whole screen okay so it's just a gray blob right now is what this thing is i guess i may as well mention like it's slightly with the newer versions unreal it's slightly less obvious which like which which mode you're in currently like i've just i'm just so used to pressing like shift f shift one shift two shift three to change between um but yeah that's that's a prominent thing like if you're in the foliage editing mode and you want to move an object you would have to change to um shift one which is just like the object's editing mode yeah that's before you can do anything so good to know oh man yeah that's my bad man sorry today it's all good man it's like like i said my fingernails are bleeding from crawling uh and just trying to make it work um but you know i think i just took my first step so i know exactly that i i need to be in select mode shift one in order to move stuff around so okay yo we got our editor skysphere up in here i'm maxing it out like it came in as it's totally encompassing my entire scene um it's just a gray void which also yeah so what i did was i went into masters in the content browser masters backdrops and then i've got a material called uh backdrop which i created an instance and then from that instance i feed it in a custom uh custom texture now i actually forgot to include like there's a version of the material that lets you reference a hdri and then it maps it around you but uh turns out i've got to include that version of materials so for now it's just an image reference so if you have any hdri that you can bring in as an image like a jpeg or png oh interesting it will work it just means the bottom half of the of the sphere will have to be obscured like on my screen if i disable the fog um like a repeat to the clouds gotcha okay so that's a jpeg or you have an hdri and i need to get a jpeg i i used a jpeg i had a jpeg version of the same image i was gonna use okay okay i can i can find something as we as we move forward cool so yeah what else yeah you got that sky you got that sky coming up i got it i got it figured out enough like i'm not going to take any more time to like find a j i can find a jpeg at some point but gray right now is fine i don't really need unless it's crucial to like figuring out what the lighting is here because i can see that the sun is poking through so we're gonna probably are we are we is this hdri like faking the sky essentially and then uh or this jpeg rather and then we actually choose the lighting based off the sun is that how it works yeah essentially i mean ideally you would like line up the direction of the sun with wherever the sun is coming from in the hdri yeah of course like obviously actually like this is just my process you don't have to use a hdri backdrop for your scene like a lot of people especially recently are utilizing like all the volumetric fog stuff all the sky atmosphere stuff which looks amazing um yeah i i just wanted to go with this because i really enjoy using like a really high quality picture instead of using the like cloud volume metrics because i love the cloud volume metrics but i found that when you compare the two it's like with a static image you just get much like much more detail in some spots and everything looks like overall just a bit more real sweet i like on my screen at the moment i've got just like yeah some really nice nicely shaped clouds um yeah so that's what i thought i would just like just do things the way i usually handle things yeah absolutely actually on your side if you felt like just like dragging in a sky atmosphere asset and then a volumetric cloud as that you'll have like a very similar effect and you'll have like your own custom sky which is probably actually a much easier way of doing things yeah let me let me let me give that a shot so you said a sky atmosphere actor um and what else so i guess you could hide the current skyscraper if you want um but now the skylight or the uh the sky yeah the mesh space you would go into your details panel and and uncheck visible or you can just hide it from the rolled out liner yeah yeah and so yeah just drag in a sky atmosphere asset and then a volumetric cloud asset and i think you'll have to go to your directional light and then search here and then you have to check atmosphere sunlight in your directional yeah um that that's pretty sweet we got some clouds up in here um the first thing you said to add was a what a uh a volumetric cloud in a what and a sky atmosphere got you and that stuff yeah it's so it's so handy so it's so useful for getting something that looks automatically like really great um and it like reacts to like the direction of the sun and everything um it's awesome yeah it's like it's it's super great if it comes out with like so much amazing stuff man ah i'm i am oh wow that's really cool that's great these are you want to stick with that yeah i'm gonna stick with this i'm gonna i'm gonna go like easy mode oh no i reckon like you'll have some like dynamic movement stuff going on better than my scene so yeah um all right i reckon for now let's let's go through like our lighting setup i'm gonna i'm just gonna like place some trees down and um do a bit of painting cool and then i'll i'll get straight into lighting because that we can both do at the same time sounds good so i'll play some stuff as well yeah if you want um so [Music] have you used the foliage so much a little of shift three right yep shift three and then i've just dragged in i've just selected a bunch of static meshes from my content browser and i've dragged those into that page now i'm just going to start painting some stuff so you can drop your trees in there and stuff yeah yeah i'm just dropping a bunch of trees for the moment all right i'll try and do the same and then how do you do like would you add sticks to that as well or would you oh yeah i mean if you want something um yeah so you just did the same thing as me like uh like it's all really dense at the start you just like dial down the density um down to like i've got like point zero three oh and another tip is to uh in foliage tab you select all of your instances and then go to the option that says align to normal it means all of your trees uh won't bend the direction of the landscape so i think you've got a flat landscape so it should be fine but in my case i've got a bunch of hills so it just helps having um having all the trees being upright instead of pointing yes direction yes exactly aligned to normal is checked okay so basically if i add hills later they will stay upright as well is that correct uh yeah yeah that's right sweet okay so i i've found out that a lot of the trees aren't particularly optimized like i have a whole process for like creating billboards um for trees and foliage that will utilize it effectively um but for now i don't think i've five times through that yeah that's fair that's fair yeah billboards for those who don't know uh uh is an effective way of just like saving performance when you've got trees in the distance it essentially swaps the 3d model out with a flat plane or like a very simple uh mesh um and then the goal is to get that transition between the full quality mesh and the billboard to be as seamless as possible so once you um once you're moving away from it it like transitions and then you get that performance boost as soon as the high quality model is loaded out that's incredible man have you ever thought of making tutorials because i feel like this knowledge that you're dishing out here like we could each one of these things that you're saying could just be unpacked and like dived into oh it's it's very nice for you to say that um i might do someday i just i guess whenever i sit down at the computer i really just all i can be motivated to do is just like work on work on something yeah like a project as opposed to making a tutorial but um but maybe someday like i like i definitely have some tricks that i that i that it took a while for me to search for yeah uh that could be useful for a lot of people but yeah it's just a matter of i i'm i don't know if i'm a good public speaker or not i don't know if i'm good at that whole like youtube format and making tutorials hey guys you just gotta like amp yourself up you gotta start with hey guys really intensely hey guys what's up and then you just you know then the rest just flows you know yeah you do ten push-ups before you record which is hilarious because that's why literally i was like yeah i just do some push-ups before we uh before we go live yeah that's a great a great recommendation like i'm gonna start doing that before before my zoom calls maybe it helps like uh this stream i didn't need to just because it's more of a chill situation but when you gotta like get all hyped and stuff you know it's a great way to get going um question for you i know there's a noob this is a noob question so in i'm in shift f3 mode i am in foliage painting mode that is confirmed um but my brush went away i can't see anything anymore and i'm clicking on the the landscape and nothing is is spawning do you know why i'm not too sure it might be because your um voltage instances aren't selected so in the in the pain you'll have to go over and like take all those boxes where each of the trees are they're all ticked yeah okay um in that case uh just check like the size of your brush which comes up in like the tab yeah i hadn't touched that that that remains the same density was the only thing that's changed that's that's strange and i have paint selected the paint brush selected i mean you say you say i would be good at tutorials but i i'm sorry that i can't like help out these kinds of problems yeah i'm just sort of watching a couple seconds late i wonder if i have to have the landscape selected your your landscape's looking nice though like normals picking up the light stuff lots of painting going on yeah we'll figure it out we'll get there i think i've almost like made a landscape too big like definitely getting some frame hitches yeah keep it when your cake is small keep it super small i might suggest like in your case you're probably better off just going with that small square that i put in the project oh that's exactly i'm not even gonna i'm not even gonna try and go outside of this zone that's pretty sweet is that working again for you or no my brush is gone but it's all good you keep doing your thing i think we can both um we can both do our lighting setups at the same time that's for sure yeah definitely a lot to go into so just a time check so it's uh nearly 3 a.m for me here i think i'm very happy to keep going i really want to get something um somewhat complete yeah why don't you just bust it out just like you you go off like i'll i'll be chilling back here you know dabbling with this thing but why don't you just tear it up you know take as much time as you have to put something together and like explain as you can as uh if you know as you can and if possible but yeah go for it right um but i guess we may as well do our like lighting setup together because that's essentially yeah we're both ready let's do it yeah um so so first off i always change all my lights to movable and this is like a trick that i overlooked when i was starting and it frustrated the hell out of me so yeah if you go to movable that essentially means that like the light is essentially dynamic it has no built-in effects what you see is what the final product will look like so with your with the skylight and directional light we both both move to show actually i want to show distance fields so i think that's worth sharing um so i enabled that within the project before i send them over so it should be enabled um but for those who want to try out distance field you have to go into the project settings and then just enable this fields restart so in the directional light there is a section called distance field shadows and you'll if you check that and then push the cascaded shadow maps distance all the way down to zero and we're not seeing anything at the moment it's because i maybe haven't enabled it but this instilled uh like a really a really cheap way of getting like some nice uh nice detailed shadows like with different fields if you mess around with your parameters in your directional light right with the source angle you can get like this nice like uh i guess it looks somewhat messy on my stream but you got this nice like transitional effect between objects that are really close to the ground and objects that are a bit further away so you'll notice that on my screen you've got like a this tree here when in comparison to the trees in the distance those trees like the shadows blurred out because it's um further away from the landscape surface but uh with the tree that's really close you get like these nice like sharp shadows and also by disabling the to get to get uh distilled shadows enabled or like visible all the way up to the camera you have to reduce the cascaded shadow maps distance to zero um can you show honor you show the difference between those okay so i'm gonna okay yeah i'm just save all the contact shadows so at the moment we've got distance field shadows and then if i turn on cascade it looks like that but you'll notice like at the very base it's not very detailed the shutoff show sort of cuts off yeah it looks like it's floating yeah so if i turn that all the way down to zero you get like still a bit of a cut off but the idea is um yeah much more crisp shadows with objects that are really close to the ground and then it sort of fades off into like a more natural gradient i think the reason this is looking fairly messy at the moment on my screen is because um because a lot of these trees maybe haven't had their distance field shadow resolution set to the right amount like if you have all these artifacts it means you have to bump up your this is filled shadow resolution that makes sense to some people that's definitely definitely a lot of settings yeah that need to be totally aware that i'm like jumping up and down between difficulty levels like every minute so i apologize for that i'll just be constantly asking questions so that's um so basically that harsh shadow line that connects this tree to the ground that setting is a distance field setting that's what you're is that correct yeah that i guess that is also possible with ray tracing but a way to get that without ray tracing is to use distance from shadows actually i think i think distance field shadows are a form of ray tracing actually it is ray trace there are ratio shadows but it's such a it's such like a performance buddhist style like without using ray tracing i found if i disable cascade shadows which is the traditional dynamic shadowing method like i automatically get like so many frames back it's it's great this is awesome so what you're doing is you're optimizing your scene this your whole workflow is based around optimizing your scene to make it look like it's photo reel to make it look like it's ray tracing but it's not essentially exactly yeah yeah like i because i want my environments to be efficient from the ground up i just always start with that as a base like um yeah and once you have that you can always like tweak values and make things more expensive later on but um but yeah the whole idea is to just like you know look at photos try and try and emulate realistic lights in like the most efficient way possible and then that's how sort of how i put um environments together what are some resources for people that like you're talking about some like very advanced stuff here some very uh very specific stuff where do you go i don't remember where i learned this originally um i watched a whole bunch of epic uh live streams outlining all these features there is one video particularly on distance fields which is really useful um but uh yeah like sometimes it's really hard to be aware of these these features like you'll find that like for me contact shadows i didn't know where i wasn't aware they existed until like much later than i would have wanted um but it was just like you know as soon as i knew what they were i could like search documentation search like the video coverage and then that gave like a good um amount of information on how to use it okay yeah that makes sense that makes sense so i hope you all taken notes write down these things you got to look into and dive deep you know you can do it with the documentation or just you know youtube your stuff um but from this point where would you go from here okay from here i have sort of got like a vague scene put together with dan with snaps oh trees yeah i'm just gonna try and put in some more details from here on like scatter some assets around um i was just about to use the landscape tool to apply a noise painter to get some more like detailed variation on the ground that's sort of a trick i like to use sweet um yeah i wanted to say as a disclaimer like keeping in mind all the stuff i design is that i want to be able to use for like real-time applications so i'd love to turn my environments into playable demos and like vr software and things like that so obviously a lot of these techniques aren't necessarily applicable if you're planning on making a render or or producing a scene it's great though with different like outputs in mind yeah it's such a different workflow from you know from what i'm used to and i think there's so much to learn from this so you know as we as we get as we approach the future and and get into the metaverse and whatnot like creating these virtual environments to play back in vr is going to be huge and i think knowing all these things to to optimize your scene for for that kind of setup is going to be very very very valuable yeah i agree i agree and i think um i think even for even for pushing out like uh normal renders like if you have if you have a really large environment sometimes it's only possible to work with a project that has a large environment if it's optimized like if you if you build it without um being careful about like poly counts or texture extra resolution and things um or if you like aim for like the very highest target of quality right from the from the beginning yeah it's often really hard to work with like a huge environment like the good thing about unreal is all of this like optimization stuff is built in if you wanted to have a huge environment you can work on one area and then as soon as you zoom out the detail is loaded out and then you zoom into another area on the other end of the map several kilometers away and then as soon as you put the camera there all the detail is there that's awesome like that's essentially yeah like essentially what makes unreal stand out from other renderers i think like other renderers you have to like stay somewhat confined within like your your play space like uh you're not able to like make landscapes that are kilometers long and have that filled with grass just because you know it's like impossible to work with um but yeah unreal is just about honorable and unity actually both unreal and unity being real time major games it's sort of um it makes sense it makes sense it's such a cool like if if you can figure out how this sandbox works it's the coolest thing to to explore and like build from and there there are certainly times where like i i can get frustrated and overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that unreal has to offer and i really appreciate you like you know helping us out and and pointing us in the right direction where it at least y'all you know like i was saying please take notes and and look up these things because he's pointing you in a lot of super solid directions here and of course we only have limited a limited amount of time here um but there's just so much to unpack i feel like we could just do this for hours and hours but it's almost 4 a.m where you're at so we're getting to the point here where we'll probably want to like start start building out the scene and hopefully getting to the point where we can export an exe for people to to hop into the world and like and explore for themselves yeah i think i think with a bit of a push i might i might go into concentration mode for a bit and just like yeah see what i can do do it that's all good i'll switch over to my screen and uh and i'll i'll see what i can do here um i'm trying to go with the simplest version of a scene here so i'm probably going to crank the fog up a whole bunch at a certain point here i'm just gonna place these around and you know what i might even go with a i've been in unreal five recently so going back to four is like it's not that bad actually so yeah learning planning unreal five would probably be the right thing to do at this point i think almost all the engines are pretty similar all in all but um yeah i think everything will be almost solely in in unreal five from here onwards um i just use unreal four because yeah i'm slightly unfamiliar with real five and they use it a handful of times and um a lot of the yeah lighting options are much more stable than unreal engine 4 considering unreal engine 5 early access yeah it's just so beautiful though like the way everything reacts in unreal 5 and the way everything works together it just works seamlessly and there are times where it glitches out but everything's kind of like preset for you which is cool yeah yeah and with like all of their like aluminum like lighting i i was amazed at how like how quick you can get like really nice results yeah just by like placing a couple lights and you're seeing it's like not it's absurd oh man have you seen the um have you seen the matrix awakens demo from from epic not yet no oh man i saw that yesterday like my mind was blown i i work with unreal all the time and my mind was fluent by that project like they've just been like keeping it secret for a whole year they suddenly bust out like an open a photorealistic open world matrix city yeah it's nuts and is it free to download and hop into yeah i think it's um ps5 and xbox only so i can't try it i just have to experience it through a youtube video but uh same same but it's like the culmination of like all the tech and all the money they've put into like advancing all the stuff they've been working on just like culminates into like that project they and they went ahead and recreated like some scenes from the original matrix at the start of the side of the video which i thought were excerpts from the film i thought they'd just taken and put in videos but no they're like like real time unreal engine 5 like recreations of scenes from the matrix jeez that's insane yeah salmon uh i think nick it was sam sam and peter were telling me about it yesterday um and i i didn't know what it was like because i i saw unreal just kept like pushing it on their instagram and i'm like okay i don't i didn't click it i just didn't click it but i thought i thought yeah they're just trying to push their like matrix license yeah but actually it's well worth it like the project is i'm surprised they didn't share anything about it until now it's like a massive project dang it that it like didn't get leaked or anything just looking through the chat we got um this exam here on the east coast yeah oh thanks for sticking around uh 2 am in vietnam that's legit yes this is just about this is just about the only time like where everyone is awake sort of i guess i wouldn't normally be awake but yeah right it's like we we picked the perfect time we picked the exact perfect time to do this the only honestly it was here in wa someone someone's in in perth someone's in west australia really iron hudson oh snap oh yeah everyone everyone check out the epic uh yeah the epic project the matrix awakens uh the dialogue is kind of corny actually in parts of it but you want to watch the end of the video because that's where they just like walk around the environment and showcase everything all right so i'm gonna go back into concentration see what i can get done i'm happy to spend like another 30 minutes on this that's that's plenty yeah that's plenty i'll bug you about fog settings later but i'm gonna get everything placed first yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna get stuck into that pretty soon as well um because i i haven't like i haven't got all that much to work with at the moment i think the fog will like definitely clean up the ambience a little bit it's gonna save my render i gotta cheat it so hard i'm gonna like get that super wide aspect ratio was it like 27 64 by 27 i think all right let's see if that paintbrush works i'm going to mention something quickly um so i i've hooked up all my materials to work with a snow shader so i've got a global parameter that i can adjust so i can import a whole bunch of assets that don't essentially have snow on them and then once i enable like the shader or i turn up my values i can get like some nice detailed snow appearing on like the surface of the assets what the heck okay okay what is that what's going on there how does that work um so so the master material the master surface material references a material function and that function essentially takes the uh the pixel normal so each pixel with the direction it's facing it takes that normal and decides how far upwards it's facing and if it's facing far enough upwards it like colors it completely white and also turns the roughness all the way up okay so with that you get an effect that like the surface that looks like it's facing upwards it turns that white and then that's how you get uh like a nice overlay of snow and then it's also influenced by the normal texture so that's how you get like a like a detailed like gradient you can see on the rock there's like little bits of snow that's great that's very similar like in octane a fall off node essentially where you're like masking out just the parts of the the geometry that are facing up towards the sky and you can use that as a mask for whatever material you want so that's cool that you can do it here unreal it's just a bit more a bit more of a process if people wanted to look that up if people wanted to dive deeper into how to do that what would they google um i don't think of how i had taught me to remember how i learned it but um but no not specifically not the specific tutorial but like just the wording um yeah no i think like there are lots of different ways to achieve it i think just search like you know like snow no material function something along those lines um because everyone has a different way that they approach it yeah and yeah if you find a youtube video with something that looks appealing then it's and yeah you can follow along with that there's no material function right cool i've realized now that like my performance is like fairly like i'm only getting i'm just getting my friends 30 frames a second pretty rough um most of these trees i think are pretty high quality i'd have to go through and like produce the led selection oh boy um actually i could go into like some console commands like you've got um like useful useful console commands for optimization uh like yes i did so then that like essentially uh it essentially changes the difference the distance that at which each tree swaps out a lower quality led ah i see and in doing so that changed like you naturally changed all the trees at once so now i went from 30 frames that was like 50 frames just from doing that and there's almost no like no difference um there's also huge in lod so i said minimum led to one that means it doesn't reference led zero anymore it goes straight to led1 even at the closest distance was it was that the force lod uh that was foliage dot min lod one um what do you say how are you going do you think we should get into like some fog and atmospherics uh wherever you think you're at if you want to scatter some like ground stuff um yeah i might i might do that in between um but sure i've got some ground stuff set up yeah yeah if you think that when you're in for uh yourself if you're still working we can do it in like 10 minutes no i i mean if if this works for you i think it's something that i need to do anyway so if you feel comfortable going over that right now then let's do it i just think at the moment like i'm a little bit like not that i'm displeased with the scene i think i got some nice like atmospherics and colors going but i just realized like there are so many like things i need to tweak like you've got like the the ground texture that's the wrong scale you've got like um you know just like all these material values that i could have like spent some time just like changing um and i'm not sure if i'll get time to change all those so in that case um yeah let's let's see what we can do with lighting and effects because in my opinion i think the lighting and like post-processing are done on the scene like always pulls the most weight you know like you can you can import as many high quality models textures as you want like get those looking perfect but just change a couple of parameters in your post process and that makes a huge difference like bigger than anything else that you've done so um agreed it all comes down to lighting lighting and effects yeah yeah absolutely okay so i'm going to go ahead and drag and post process volume into the theme and in the details panel i'll go ahead and unbound so that it applies to the camera no matter where it is in the scene not just in the whole game with that um you can just like make tweaks and then decide how your scene's gonna look actually we should do fog before we start that's the only saving grace for me at this point no it's going to be the same for me as well actually like i yeah we'll see so i'm going to have you you've got your exponential height for yeah right okay so i'm gonna go and enable volumetric fog so we might get some like nice rays coming down bump up my fog density i'm going to reduce my fog max opacity so we might get some of the clouds still in the sky like i found that it's useful to have a cut-off point so you can still see the sky if you have fog's max opacity that one might shroud out too much of the sky it's like a harsh line for me zero is completely off but 0.01 is completely on interesting i i also just realized um you know with if you have distance field shadows enabled right up to the camera you won't be able to see any volumetric braids so i'm going to re-enable my cascade just shadows this i think the main parameter to look at is your extension for your volume volume metrics like once you start bumping that up you really start seeing like some ray effects and all sorts of things extinction scale yeah and then also scattering distribution if you want like a really dramatic like strong sun it's really good to bump up that scattering distribution and i'm going to go for like a red sunset look so from the the youtube video that i was referencing like some nice nice red sunrise light um see what i can do your scene's looking really good man like that just shows like you don't need a huge landscape to like make something impressive yeah i think i i just need so much more time spent with this in order for it to even even for me man like i i sort of know everything it's on my fingertips but then i just just diving in i realized like all this stuff all these details i would normally tweet if i had like hours to spend and apologies to the chat like i've really been meaning to like interact with the chat a bit more like you guys are all taking your time hanging out but like 250 people showing you that yeah we're all chilling though yeah great stuff we work with it we work with it why not use rtvs not too sure what you mean what are rtvs i are vts sorry i'm not sure i'm not sure what that is real volume someone said why are people choosing unreal at the blender um i guess like big environments i suppose i i guess i talked about a bit about that before to me they go together they're perfect absolutely i use blender i use blender for all of my custom made uh 3d models yeah i always go for blender yeah like they certainly go together this is where you put put the pieces together you know and this is where you do it in real time oh yeah one someone bring up brought up a good point with um pixel depth um personal and virtual texturing virtual texturing i don't personally use i've experimented with it a little bit um and it's a great way to get like your assets blending with your landscape if you want like a snow texture to come up the roots of your trees and things like that but um but i found that you know there are other alternatives like like you mentioned pixel depth um if you include a pixel depth offset um with your landscape material i suppose i was trying to like demonstrate that properly before but with a pixel depth offset it references you can reference a height map and then when you merge assets with the landscape it essentially blends them according to the height map and it's super great um try and get quick also i i hate this snow tiling as well like i definitely notice it um that's sort of what i put my macro variation in my material for like about to bump up my macro intensity yeah and get the scaling right that gives enough variation but it sort of gets rid of the um a little bit that makes sense if you have like right now i've got like a really subtle like reasonably subtle macro effect on the snow it like helps so much with tiling like hmm i see what you're doing okay so it's like it just it's adding noise to the scene to make it yeah kind of i um i also have like my textures way too small which is a problem so maybe i can demo some of the um maybe i think the pixel depth is strong enough like i think the material i've chosen can actually have much depth to it like it's fairly flat material if i zoom all the way in you can see it um essentially references the height map to blend smoothly i guess it kind of looks smooth like the difference here between the mesh and the ground um that's something i like to focus on with my scenes like when you get like two pieces of geometry that just like fit together and then there's like a really distinct line between them it can be super jarring so um pixel depth offset is a great way to just like vary up the the transition between meshes um okay pixel depth offset that's what i need to look into okay cool it's good to reference a height map texture for that it makes like some really convincing effects but if not um you can also just plug in like a scalar parameter maybe like multiply that by a temporal a dita to get like a really smooth transition and then that's essentially like a fade you can have like your your asset like opacity fade out into the landscape so it's like a really smooth gradient sweet but yeah that's that's 105 has so many amazing features uh someone said in the chat well i i would say unreal engine 5 is 98 on real engine 4. like you've got some some nice features just to fit on the top and then but the bulk of it is still what unreal engine 4 is actually so you've got like all the same stuff to me it's like it's just cool how it automatically sets up the lighting in the bounce light and everything for you and it just looks so beautiful i'm i've really been as a beginner i've really been enjoying it and like getting a pretty immediate uh image that looks nice makes me like more excited to to continue to like create in the program you know yeah absolutely you're talking about like unreal engine five but yeah like yeah booming and stuff yeah yeah that technology is so impressive i'm not sure if i'll be able to use it for the the game i'm producing bots um now what you're doing now is beautiful like your workflow is absolutely incredible i was going to say like i'd love to use like lumen and stuff but it's actually not particularly designed for masked materials like my landscapes are filled with plants right and for plants you have to use mass materials um and there's not a whole lot of support for that at the moment like if you look at the stuff unreal engine is doing with 105 it's all like opaque message opaque meshes you've got like the desert uh environment which looks stunning but yeah all opaque meshes and this latest matrix awakens uh thing they put together is again all opaque messenger meshes for all the buildings um so yeah i'm wondering like will will natural environments be it like sort of a standstill with android g5 i'm not too sure but um but it's interesting if i maybe i'll still be able to use my old tricks and and get by but i'd rather know them than not you know yeah i mean i i try really hard to just like it's important with any software to like you know spend the time learning new features because um it's always easy to like stay in your stay in your comfort zone and stick with what you know hence i haven't really picked up any other renderers aside from unreal it's sort of part of my laziness but yeah it's all good yeah hard to switch to a new program that's why i've had such a difficult time here is like trying to figure out how to switch to a new program and like there's so many roadblocks there's there's so many hurdles to jump over but you know for me i have to find the wins the small wins along the way and like forcing myself to complete a project was a huge win for me like that music video i did was a huge win and that pushed me further to like continue learning this program if if you don't have small little wins for yourself it makes it really hard to to find the motivation to keep going yeah absolutely let's see i think i'm i think i might be somewhere i'm gonna have maybe like a horribly unoptimized package at the end of this but something don't forget the obnoxious requirements someone said uh yeah i mean you know on religion 4 when that came out the requirements were pretty obnoxious back then as well like i i was trying to run unreal when i started i had like a um amd like really cheap card i was getting like 30 frames a second um you know that stuff that stuff changes with time like assume the standard will be like the rate these cards are getting developed like the standard is going to be like exponential the cards are going to be like insane it's just that's my prediction i guess yeah it's just gonna it's gonna keep getting better and better and more accessible that's a that's a guarantee yeah i mean unreal like they they really push accessibility like with all their features like everything is just like you know dragging into the scene and it works like um especially with like nanite all of that virtualized geometry stuff like you don't have to worry about poly counts as much super cool and like in the future you you'll only have to have like a base knowledge all right i'm gonna i'm like getting something ready here i'm just gonna go into like some color correction it doesn't look like we have too much time yeah i was meaning to mention i guess i'll mention it quickly for those listening like there are some great features with lighting that i use like this installed ambient occlusion if you've got distance field enabled for your shadows or for some other reason um ambient inclusion is a great like like looks so great if i enable it real quick oh it's already enabled yeah it's like a oh well it just like makes these like nice ambient occlusion spots where it seems like it would naturally fit it's super handy um yeah that and um you've got other tricks like you know screen space ambient occlusion and uh i i used to use these um these decals for my from miami occlusion when i wanted like some really big spots i'll just one of my tricks actually close my heart like you might get it decal material and i put that into my decal and then i put that in the dark spot also you're hand placing these like ambient occlusion decals yeah yeah it's like a hand placed thing like it's if you want like in specific areas there to be [Music] much more variation so at the moment can i notice that yeah you can sort of see like there's a darkness patch wherever i drag this decal yeah i just enabled this field ammunition to show this off but yeah um yeah it's smart because it doesn't affect skylight like that's because it's an ambient occlusion decal that only affects shadows um and i expect this is what they use like when i look at some games like gta for example you've got these cars with like nice ambient occlusion underneath the car it's because they've attached an ambient occlusion decal to the bottom i think that's why because when you get the sun coming in under the car there's no shadow but then as soon as it's covered in shadow again it's like you can see the the influence of the ambient occlusion it's pretty cool it's a pretty smart thing it's just crazy that like all of your your games are so handmade like down to placing the shadows that's insane that's so cool yeah i guess i guess i i used to do the same thing um it's just quickly i mentioned with lights as well if you pop in like a point light uh and then just turn off shadows um turn off details uh then you can get like a convincing like bounce light effect but some some areas obviously this takes a bit of experimentation but wow um but it can be pretty cheap as well and if it comes up in the fog your specular scale to zero work that totally makes sense though like you set it to more of like a a warm kind of light and it'll bounce right off that's so good exactly wow it's all these lights that's great but also keeping in mind like screen space global illumination which is useful as well it has like a fake uh fake gi effects um yeah it's just like it's a shame it's like just about like the end of the stream and i'm just like remembering about all these tricks but it's all good it's like as long as people can like if you give them the stuff that they can like go off so screen space global illumination right that's what that's another thing uh yes yeah i mean that's uh yeah that's a pretty effective one i think you have to choose between screen space uh ambient occlusion and global illumination you can't have both enabled at once yeah i guess this is just like leaving little easter eggs for those that like watch the whole the whole stream or the whole board they'll be able to find the real [Laughter] matt how do you work with big sorry i'm just reading chat matt how do you work with big maps without the engine lagging um i'm getting a bit of lag at the moment but you just got to like uh adjust one thing is adjust your landscape leds it doesn't have a huge influence but it's helpful and another one is yeah just like optimization in general like keep your poly count slow keep your lods like reasonably aggressive um that cold distances we have the objects that you can't see in the distance so it like calls them out of your out of your vision uh yeah there's all sorts of stuff that can relate to that so how are we looking what are there any other things that you would need to do to to bake this out as a as an exe or you think we can we can export this thing the tips for that are essentially file package windows and then you just wait and then it takes a while to like compile all the shaders um which it takes longer the first time than subsequent times but um i think yeah after the stream i'll just like hit that compile button see where it gets i mean if i um i i go to my first person character which i don't know where yeah that look and then just do you want to go full screen i'll go full screen on you and you go full screen and unreal and go your first person and just kind of like walk around and then that's kind of what people will be able to see when they download the exe there should be a link here in the description by the time you're watching this hopefully in the next next hour or so but you you it's 4am so for you so honestly i'm feeling i'm feeling fine like i yeah i've been i've been building up this a little bit i had my coffee you know i've been coughing all streams um but yeah so i at the moment i i just put in my first person template and essentially gives me like you know wasd controls i can walk around um i have a camera i can bring that up i can zoom in on stuff take some photos i might zoom in on a tree just see what we're working with focus in i've got some nice details it's so cool um actually it's cool because this template also has a bunch of optimizations that i put in my all my game settings so if i like put my quality all the way down um you might be able to get some of our frames back somewhat thank you all right i'm just going to get stuck into my um like do we do we have a specific like limit on the stream like do you reckon i'm happy to work just a little bit longer to get to get something that looks really good i can i can so here's what i need to do i need to move my car real quick that's to take 30 seconds um i need to come in come back here and announce the winners of the weekly challenge i can do that while you work that might take 15 minutes or 20 minutes i'll go through some honorable mentions and then to wrap the stream up we'll come back and see what see what your scene looks like and then uh and then we can call it that sounds good to me i'd be happy to look at weekly winners as well though i was i was excited to see like what people have done cool yeah let me um let me run to move my car real quick i'm gonna are you good to be i'll just leave you here with the audience doing your thing oh yeah i'll be back in like a minute and a half and then we'll get into those weekly winners good times see you in a second sounds good sounds good all right cayenne he said he was from west australia it's at almost 4 a.m here yeah that's that's where i am as well it's 3 30. i think we got the same time zone what's in the decal um i'll just check quickly simple i made it a while ago it is um you've got like a radial gradient so if you plug in a density into the radial gradient um it just effectively has a circular drop off for the ambient occlusion i found that was a good way instead of having any half edges like harsh edges on the edge of the decal um yeah it just gets like a nice sort of like a paint brush type thing you can place around and i've just got like a strength did a bit of math and then it's like super simple i'm tempted to just like go full focus mode but i feel bad ignoring the chat so i'm just gonna check in every once in a while making a game kind of yeah i'm making a scene which i can use as a game if i'd like to um obviously not everything is in very good shape at the moment and we don't have we're not optimized terribly well but um yeah the goal is to to prop this first person template in and then export an exe file and then people will be able to download it and just walk around uh yeah it's absolutely cool i use assets i'll make it myself uh almost almost completely i almost completely source my assets so there's a whole bunch of stuff available like mega scans uh the unreal marketplace i just like download inbulk my library is huge i just got back from trekking surprised to see it that's crazy i i would love to do that trick i saw that video and yeah it's on my bucket list for sure looks stunning looks sonic never been to nepal and sorry i'm not really focusing i'm just gonna do that's awesome too awesome to be here man i'm so i'm so it's so cool to like interact with you guys uh what gpu i've only got a um i've got a mobile 2060 so i'm running this off a laptop right now um and it's sort of sort of all i've got to work with at the moment but uh with the stuff i'm doing like you know i can push decent frames like i'm not i don't have too many issues the reason why my shadows turn like super black and i'm really confused are you saying oblivion i've not played oblivion but yeah i guess this reminds me of skyrim in a way so there you go oh man it's super hard to work at the same time maybe i'll just like read the chat yo yo here we go how you looking looking good i i am i've run into a problem with my shadow i might just give my project a quick a quick restart so yeah just to see if that fixes the problems with the shadows [Music] um i'm just uh hanging out with the chat having a good time sweet i'm gonna i think it's time to review some some weekly art how does that sound yeah for sure that sounds great sweet okay so uh every single week on the discord the link is in the description um we do a weekly challenge and the prompt this week was upside down so i'm gonna review the upside down winners reveal the five winners uh they if you win you unlock the entire discord server it's a full server full of a bunch of artists who are you know trying to help each other out and share their work and get advice and give advice it's a nice place to um to go for that kind of stuff and outside of the five winners we're gonna talk about the honorable mentions as well so let's uh let's let's jump into it here all right so like i mentioned upside down is the prompt for this week so the first winner of the weekly challenge this week is soulnate with this super cool time magazine cover um definitely reminds me of the spiderman uh the spider-verse like scene where he drops down into the city it's like the same body position but i just love the way that you took that and you moved it to a different kind of setup i think this is really really cool i don't know how you're gonna get that little biplane that little cessna in space but hey you know you pulled it off it's freaking sweet um matt can you see this art by the way yeah i was just figuring out i just had to open the stream on discord but yeah that's good now yeah man it's pretty sweet yeah it looks iconic looks like a yeah i could use that as a color for sure i feel like the only thing i would say is like you're cut i just realized too you're cutting off time you're cutting off the bottom text and i would maybe i would i'm cool with that i love how the plane's upside down yeah yeah exactly that's like that's the whole point right the prompt was upside down so they're doing it in a pretty sweet way soulmate's a great artist puts out really cool stuff um next up sotomante working behind the scenes do you mind just hiding the art for me while i uh bring up the next stuff thank you so much sir next up we have one dead duck with this pretty pretty brutal scene here um it'd be a be a rough scene to to come across especially in one of your games matt that'd be uh quite the site do you put easter eggs in your games by by chance like do you slip stuff in i have done some stuff but like nothing in the vein of like horror or anything horrifying like i want to i want to build trust with people playing my games i'm not going to chuck in like a like a jump scare anymore no that'd be rough you've asked me about it yeah people ask me about it but no i'm like straying away from that stuff yeah that's good that's good what about sentimental items do you put sentimental items like you sneak those around your uh your scenes oh yeah that's um that's one of the mechanics like there are a bunch of collectibles around and the object changes depending on which environment it is yeah that's cool heck yeah um oh yeah this i love like the atmospherics like you can never hate like having like a good foggy background i love like the color correction done on it as well yes absolutely one dead duck puts out solid work um wins these weekly challenges quite often and i believe uh this is made in unreal engine i think unreal five i'm pretty sure he just started getting into it so he's doing a really really nice job um so congrats one dead duck you get the challenge winner roll this week who do we got next coming up in uh number three so i'm going to watch you just hide it right off the bat because they're going to double stack here but number three we got jc kb with this beautiful beautiful scene um i'm a huge fan of the last of us and there's a scene in the last of us too where you go on this village and it's lit like this it looks like this but you added this like ufo in here as well like it's so well done it's so well lit i love your colors and everything that's awesome yeah sorry i can only see like a small version of it but um yeah like those those reds and blues i always love like those that color scheme no matter what yeah yeah it looks great i love that lighting so much such a big fan of that style so jc kb congratulations you got the challenge winner roll this week keep it up i think this might be your second or third win so congratulations to you up next uh in no specific order all right but this is the fourth one here jack the hack i love this so much it feels like a wolfenstein game or something uh but you got this character running on this on the top of this mental asylum i i assume is a mental patient it looks like some crazy testing going on or something or like it's all jacked up i wonder where they got that sword from that's a pretty cool looking sword i just have so many questions about this scene but i love your color i love your composition i love the framing and the atmospherics you have in this i think it's super cool so congratulations jack super nice super nice work it reminds me of um i used to play a bunch of battlefield one and those like this look like one like outfits it's really hard to tell but it's like he's got that trench coat vibe to it and the guns like i don't they look like sticks almost i don't know some experts probably waiting ready to like own us on that but it's the boots and the long coats but yeah they actually don't look like guns from this view maybe they are though but anyway jack the hack congratulations very good stuff and finally we have our very own visual killing it with this like dude your render quality is insane this is basically yeah that is not yeah that's like a picture it's like a really well-lit uh picture that's insane how good this is your character work and your render quality is off the charts man um absolutely put that in the genre of like zoom like look really closely and squint to see if you can tell if it's a render or not that's the character yes exactly that's what i strive for with all my renders and you are killing it right now visual so congratulations since you're already you're a moderator right mods can win this thing it just comes down to the art you got the good art are you gonna win this or not um but since you already have full unlock of the server you got your challenge winner role ready to be passed off to one of our honorable mentions and i don't know if he's first up but i will definitely get there uh when it comes along so sotomante working behind the scenes right now if you could just uh work from the top down on honorable mentions and just tell me who it is and all i'll get into it all right we got lil child support uh as the first honorable mention i dig this so much like i love your silhouette i love your colors and i love your framing and i think this just looks awesome so you should please keep it up i've seen you on the server doing some awesome stuff keep doing your thing this looks fantastic yeah your colors and your silhouettes are great i love working with silhouettes it's the best so good um honorable mention number two we got dre g up next i believe yeah this is awesome i love your colors here i love your composition your framing is super solid um you came very close you came very close to winning this one if i had to give any advice or any like any pointers maybe i don't know maybe move some of the asteroids below the astronaut as well and maybe take the two out that are behind his arm by his by his fingers and his arm and move them down below the actual astronaut oh it's very like the harsh the harsh space like coming in like with strong shadows looks good chris yeah the space lighting is a really hard vibe to nail and you did a really good job here so dre g congrats for that honorable mention keep it up doing good stuff next up we have what do we got uh triple 07 is next up for honorable mention i love your composition i love this idea so much it's such a cool idea um your lighting even is fantastic like this is super solid i feel like you can probably get some crown molding up there between the the wall and the ceiling and i i'm having trouble deciding like what that is on the window on the right is that the moon is that outside it's a little hard to tell but overall i really dig this what do you think matt yeah it's like super super interesting i personally like i would have to wreck my brain to come up with that kind of concept i think that's really cool yeah it's super sick really good stuff triple 07 keep it up um next up we have pics win for honorable mention you came darn close very similar vibe i just love your colors love your composition and i love your lighting so i wanted to give you a shout out i thought this was super cool keep up the good work very good stuff and finally we have the game factory for honorable mention and visual is going to pass his weekly challenge winner roll off to you you like yours the most and this is just a cool little cool little video here at this point i'm like wait what how do these two places like what is going on okay okay okay it's a little space set up and they have a very intricate diorama that must have taken so long that's awesome uh the game factory very good stuff i dig it congratulations to all the challenge winners soul nate one dead duck jc kb uh jack the hack and visual y'all are doing great stuff you got the challenge winner roll and the game factory of course very awesome uh matt we're we're nearing the end here we're at the end of this stream did you want to sounds like it do touch on any last little things before we wrap it up i mean i'm not too sure i think um yeah i wanted to mention that i'll i'll be putting out an exe of this project that i did um even if yeah obviously the cracks are there like i threw it together um but yeah i'm excited for people to to watch the vod and then maybe try it out if you were to leave the link in the description i think that's a cool way like like seeing seeing the seeing the software downloading downloading it and like exploring yourself um it's like definitely definitely heightens the experience like it definitely changes everything i'm super yeah i'm super excited for you guys to try it out you also uh like unlocked download of your latest game right that's also in the description yeah um yeah i i think i'll i think i'll leave that enabled for quite a while so i'll leave it up for like the next week or so it's like a beta for the game that i'm working on at the moment which is the entire game is a compilation of environments that you're able to explore and take photos in but the beta is just one environment it's an environment inspired by the italian alps um so if you have a pc rig that you can try it out on you don't necessarily need a high end graphics card i think um 1060 is like the minimum recommended spec so sweet um so yeah try it out let me know your thoughts i have a discord and stuff um yeah i'm just trying to build something that hopefully everyone will get behind um yeah so yeah man i really appreciate the the chance to like show off the stuff that i'm doing and like what i'm working towards um yeah honestly i'm super lucky i really appreciate it dude absolutely and we're gonna be in touch and we're gonna keep hanging out and learning together and i i can't wait to learn more from you and i can't wait to see this game when it finally drops the full deal but like seriously if you all want to dive into the max the maxed out version of what we just did on the stream click the link to cave's website it's in the description below go there scroll down a little bit you can download the game the beta for this certain level and hop in and see it for yourself it's it's unbelievable it's so cool um so dude thank you so much for joining me thanks for doing this together like thanks for your patience um yeah have a freaking great holiday have a take a break chill out and enjoy yourself man you find it thanks man i yeah i had such a great time and like having tons of people watching interacting with people in the chat yeah it's been so great heck yeah i do um sweet i hope you guys enjoy it yeah if you guys would be winter at the moment for us i'm starting to heat up got some warm summer days ahead um that's so crazy i don't prefer i don't prefer summer for like doing doing work and working on environments but but you know maybe i'll have to take a trip up to the northern hemisphere for a bit please do please come visit los angeles all right i'd love to someday yeah man we'll freaking do it we'll hang out and we'll we'll go on a hike or something we'll do something awesome oh hell yeah oh yeah all right man good times peace out thank you all for joining us ggs everybody later [Music] two [Music] you

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 30,245

Keywords: pwnisher, 3d, render, challenge, vfx, tutorial, cg, cinema 4d, blender, unreal engine, ue5, training

Id: 8jEpdYF5ZEo

Length: 175min 25sec (10525 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021