Brushify - Caves in UE4 using Voxel Plugin

[Music] hey guys in this video i'm going to be showing you a little bit of voxel plug-in so this is a plug-in for unreal engine 4 that lets you basically create voxelized terrain and what's really interesting about this is that they just added support for landscape materials and obviously in particular landscape auto materials and well i'm joe garth creator of brushify so uh yeah i thought that i'd give this uh plugin a try and you know just see what i can build with it and uh you know maybe show you guys how you can use this plugin alongside brushify to create your own voxel maps so the first thing you'll want to do is head over to voxelplugin.com uh and then you'll be able to hit download and that will take you through to the unreal engine marketplace where you'll be able to uh buy the plugin and actually there's a free version of this plugin which you can you know just immediately download for free and then try out and that's the version that i'll be using today so there is also a pro version but the free version has quite a lot of features and uh yeah if you just want to try this out i definitely recommend just grabbing the free one and seeing how it goes so yeah um the update that just came out with this basically lets you use auto materials so that's what we're going to try and do today we're going to get brushify loaded up with the voxel plugin and uh get everything working so i'm going to switch to unreal and what i've done is i've basically just created a new map that's basically empty uh there's not much going on there there's just a skydome uh which is just a default brushify skydome mesh and a few different sort of basic lighting things we've got light source for post-process volume in a skylight and what i've got if i go to edit plugins uh by the way this version of the editor is 4.25 uh but you can see that here i've got in the plugins voxel plug-in free and that one is enabled so the voxel plugin is enabled so if i go to the place actors menu uh which if i go to uh window place actors make sure you click on that i'll bring up this place actors menu you can type in there voxel and you'll see that you've now got a bunch of different voxel actors which weren't actually there before and these are actors that are created by the plugin and the one that we're going to want to use is called if you scroll right down to the bottom voxel world and i'm just going to drag and drop that into the scene and immediately you can see that what we've got is a sort of great big plane and sort of this tiling texture so this is actually our voxel world i'm going to set the location here to the defaults 0 0 0 at the origin just so that everything is nice and neat and to actually sculpt this world we can go up to the modes panel go to voxels which is now a new little uh mode that we've got and you can see that there are now a bunch of different tools here uh one for surface uh smooth uh you've got a sphere tool for creating spheres so i'm just gonna go through each of these and sort of just play around with them um very quickly i'm gonna just start sculpting a surface here just create some really cool organic shapes and yeah you can bring stuff up from the ground and you can connect you can connect things together um and this is amazing just to be able to build these really weird looking sort of almost alien shapes um and it's all very rapid like you can just do this in minutes um so yeah but obviously the one thing that's not so great is that the texture is is not really holding up it's sort of a tiled texture and you can see all this horrible nasty tiling and stuff so this is where i come in i thought wouldn't it be great to be able to apply the brushify landscape also material to this and to do that it's actually very simple um i'm going to go back to select i'm just going to save the level you'll notice that when you hit save for the first time it will say that the voxel world save object is null do you want to create one or you maybe will lose some changes so i'm going to say yes i want to save my changes to my voxel world so that's all the sort of voxel sculpting we've just done and it'll prompt me to basically save a file called the voxel world save object and this is really just a a file that contains all of that sort of sculpting information that's in the voxel so i'm going to save that now into my little voxel test level here um i've been kind of messing around with i'm gonna call this one sieve object three accepted a couple of other tests in the past so that's my voxel world saved and i think now if i just jump into yeah i've got the third person game mode selected so i just jump into the game yeah great now i can start to run around on my awesome little voxel object okay so let's try applying the brushify auto material to this object now so we want to come down into the details panel here on the right side go to the details panel of your voxel world and i'm going to scroll down to where it says materials and material config and by default we've got this sort of um it's called voxel quixil five-way blend thing which i guess is is some sort of simple tri-planar uh material but we would really want to get all of the sort of features of the brush of autumn material onto this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to content brushify materials landscape and this is the usual sort of brushify materials folder and you'd usually get this mi landscape and you drag that onto the the default ue4 landscape actor and that would be the sort of you know usual workflow for applying brushify to this now in this case that won't actually work and if you do that what will happen is you'll just get this sort of black that's quite interesting but you'll just get this sort of black shiny uh material it's really cool to see the the uh screen space reflections there um you'll get this very sort of like yeah shiny material so what we'd want is to actually create uh something that's going to allow us to use this and sort of convert this normal landscape uh material into something the voxels can understand so i'm going to right click and go to voxel and we're going to go to voxel landscape material collection and i'm going to click that and this is going to create something called the voxel landscape material collection i'm just going to save it you can call it whatever you like call it my landscape or something like that and just click that and open it up and then we're just going to drag the mi landscape onto this material slot inside of there and then and then uh just hit save and immediately you can already see that we've actually got all of these layers that have just appeared these are 12 layers and inside of each of those we can see all the usual brushify paint layers and they've all been nicely uh replicated um for us to sort of use and paint down so i'm gonna close this down now and i'm going to uh go back to the voxel world in the details panel and i'm going to choose from the voxel materials section instead of material config rgb i'm going to change that to multi-index and now we've got back that sort of yellow material from before but this time i'm going to drag a newly created voxel landscape material collection onto that and bam now we have the brushify auto material in all of its glory uh with the voxel system and i think it already looks really really cool just out of the box and i think the reason for that is because we've actually got uh planar mapping built into the brush if i auto material so there isn't really much work um that needs to be done on brushify itself for this to work if i jump into the mi landscape material for brushify and if i scroll down and disable um the triplaner mapping it's just right here try planar you can just untick it and you can see how stretched and ugly that looks without the triplanar mapping applied but just ticking this box bam suddenly we have this nice looking uh tri-planar mapping and everything looks really nice and uh and there's no virtu vertical stretching anymore on any of the slopes so yeah i really think that i got quite lucky here because i just implemented tri-planar mapping in the last release of brushify and uh yeah just surprisingly it works very very well um with this voxel system another thing is that all of the other material features of brush if i also seem to work just fine so if we go into the distance tiling for instance we can change the the tiling there and it all just functions exactly the same as it would on a landscape actor which is really really impressive you've got the reduced tiling function you see all this tiling here going on if i tick that box reduce tiling that's working perfectly that feature um to reduce the tiling on the map and make it look a little bit more seamless and of course the um the actual slopes system is working as well so if i change this to different slope amounts we can actually alter the slope and where slopes kind of appear so if we want it to be that there's more rock or less rock or um you know just how how much of the rock actually appears how much of the grass appears at what sort of angle um you know does the the rock start to come in uh so yeah i'm just gonna leave that the default something that already looks pretty solid uh you might notice the only thing that is really missing is the procedural grass types and those aren't spawning and um i actually looked into this and asked asked the creator about this and he told me that the pro version has a procedural spawning uh sort of system and they're actually looking into um doing a sort of converter of the usual grass type system so you can convert that system across i'm just going to do a little bit more sculpting here and uh use the tool to create some interesting shapes um so let's make this brush a little bigger let's start modeling some some crazy mountains and stuff little mountains and cool shapes that's what i want to make uh what's cool as well is that this is all pretty solid and even though i'm i'm actually sculpting really large sections in real time um it does appear that it's not it's not that hard to work with it's not too laggy or anything like that and if you sculpt smaller amounts it's it's basically real time so i really i really think that they've uh managed to optimize this system very well so that's sort of like the usual sculpting brush you can you know just sculpt up and down just like on the normal landscape if you scroll down to the bottom as well you can see there's this mask function and in the pro version although i don't have it right now uh you can actually sculpt using the brushify alpha brushes so you can use this basically exactly the same as you would the alpha brushes in the landscape auto material so yeah it's um at some point i'll probably pick up the pro version and uh and try that out uh but yeah you can basically switch between the the four different channels rgba and you've got the the brushify brush just drag and drop that in and i presume that that would work uh pretty well so yeah i'll definitely be trying that in the future and uh yeah so you've got surface sculpting which basically that sculpting brush uh you got smooth uh with this one you have to be careful because it will smooth very very rapidly if you have it on the default settings i had to sort of crank that really far down because if you look it's really strong so i i find that really low values on this um worked really nicely especially if i had something like this you know if i had a shape where i'd done something really um detailed and and kind of you know spindly if i if i wanted to basically like reduce this and make it a little bit less bulbous you can see how how strongly it affects things so bring the number of iterations down and the strength down and then um i think it'll even go lower and then uh it's a lot more easy to handle so this is great for just refining and so smoothing out any jaggies any jagged bits um that give it away as something that's you know sort of low poly or you know that it's actually voxels so smooth is is a really great brush what else we've got we've got mesh and this is where you can actually drag in um a mesh but that also uses the pro version sphere this one is really cool because what i can do is i can basically build this massive almost like uh if you ever saw the movie arrival or something like that almost looks like a massive alien dome um yeah and then i can put a slightly smaller one let's do that maybe even a bigger one bam okay so i've got my big domes and then you know because these are voxels as well i can actually sculpt into um this object so i can actually create a little cave it's kind of built like a cave entrance here so that's the cave entrance now let's go even deeper into the cave let's make an actual natural cave here where we can get lost inside [Music] it reminds me of the game red faction it's a very old game but the first game actually had a proper vauxhall system that let you do stuff like this on the multiplayer and it was just absolutely amazing to be able to use the rocket launcher to kind of oh yeah we've broken through and we've actually gone upward in the cave so i didn't realize i was doing that but now i've actually gone sort of upward inside this cave and and created this whole we can go all the way out all the way in yeah we created this entire thing um and you know obviously we can make a bridge now across here and then we can keep going into this into this sphere maybe we can go down a bit to the other side and obviously you could spend as was as long as you want you know sculpting this stuff have to be careful not to go underground now but yeah you can actually go clip outside and see see what it is you're doing i'm gonna go a bit further down into the ground and look i've made it out of the other side now i can use that to kind of build a little a little bit more of a even ground that we can get out of so now i want to sort of jump into the game and preview this one thing to note is whenever you want to preview things in the voxels just hit save control s and make sure you come off of the editor mode for voxels voxel editing and that way you'll be able to jump into it if you don't do that if you're just stuck in this one and you hit play you'll fall straight through the world so just something to be noted just go to select first and then hit play and then yeah we can now start to run through our newly created cave system and uh let's have a look if we can get across sort of traverse all the way through it that's really cool this takes just minutes to you know just have fun and mess around i'm going to create a little bridge here just going to jump out let's make a cube drag a cube in there make it a little bit bigger a little bit longer and let's just throw that cube and turn off the snapping because i don't need that let's just put this cube here uh yeah okay now we've got a little bridge i don't like that it's white i want to make it darker looking so just uh me being picky about things let's change this to something a little darker basic shape material let's turn this gray and then save it now we've got a new little material there that's going to help me to make things look a little bit more there we go okay cool so now i've got a little footbridge that i can go across from one sphere to another with and then we can just walk all the way down and out of this view here so yeah it really is the ultimate sort of prototyping terrain tool it's very very cool to be able to make caves this way and um yeah it's i i really can't wait to try out the uh the pro version because i think some of those features would be really cool and game changing like the ability to sculpt alpha brushes and uh and do all that stuff another thing that's also really cool when you're sculpting out caves i think is when you get a sort of situation like this where we take this and sort of tunnel up uh this way let's make a bit more of a a hole and eventually you'll get out of the cave and then you've got this cool situation where i'm just going to turn down the brush size where it starts to look really natural when you you kind of create little holes in the cave i don't know why but there is something about that sort of natural feeling of of creating holes in the cave and let's make that a little bit bigger let's maybe make that big hole and then we can smooth out the parts that are a little bit jaggy but it's cool because it just looks really natural when you looks really natural when you do that there's a little little hole [Music] lots of cool ideas can come to you when you are sculpting voxels i think let's try and get the light there that's cool i can make a skull shape you know to um water away future explorers let's do that let's bring out let's get to the end of this cave and then let's make a skull some sort of eyes for skull am i gonna get to the end of this cave oh yeah there we are i got there evil looking skull shapes it's halloween soon so we have to get ready gotta do our part let's make the nose here this is the kind of thing that if i were a pirate i'm not saying i am but this is the kind of thing that if i were a pirate i would be making in this cave so i'm not really getting through that very quickly i'm gonna i'm gonna make a little bit more of a hole i've only got one nostril i need another one let's get to the end of that oh yes there we go so we've got kind of like an evil looking skull thing going on now very ominous it's very dark and evil i imagine if you were an explorer and you came through here and then we could put some booby traps on the ceiling and yeah another thing that is really cool is the the flattened tool as well which um you can just you can take this fixed rotation so if you don't tick it you'll get sort of flattening to the normal that yeah you click on the sort of uh the angle that you click and uh if you take fixed rotation you can get that so that it fixes the rotation to a flat angle so if you just want to flatten out an area like this one we can just make sure that we flatten it all to a something like that and turn down the strength a little bit so yeah now we've got a really nice sort of stable area that we can start to design around uh evil skull room [Music] dead man tell no tales [Music] um and well what else can we do here we can actually bring in some light as well because that's the cool thing we've got this these holes um but you know this is all still dynamic lighting so i'm just gonna get the um sun object here so it's in the same viewport so it's in my viewport and i can actually move the sun around and decide where the light's gonna fall so i'm sure you could do something really cool with this um creating interesting looking lighting uh and and of course you can also um use volume metrics as well so if i take the um exponential height fog let's throw that into the scene and maybe we can go crazy with the fog density here and kind of tweak things around let's see how much fog density we have to add for it to um to really make a difference oh that's a lot okay let's go back to our skull cave if i can find it i don't want to have lost my cave oh yeah here it is okay so yeah somewhere up here yeah that's it so i'm gonna put a bit more density here and i'm gonna turn on volumetric fog as well there we go that's nice and then let's go crazy with the density yeah something like that maybe we can turn down not the in scattering color actually let's keep that high the albedo we can turn up maybe we can make that a little bit orange saturate a little bit orange let's tweak the scale on that okay that's cool and then i think we really just need to control like the uh the sun intensity so that we get more sun coming in okay cool and that's really nice so you could get these shafts of light coming through god rays that's really what you want when you're in a cave uh let's reduce that a little bit and i'm gonna go into the post processing and just tweak some settings with the exposure a little bit as well i'm gonna switch it to manual mode and then turn it on to the the right setting there so that there's the correct amount of compensation um okay so what i'm gonna do is put this one here and then i'm gonna go to the post-processing volume and maybe let's increase just to tad the um contrast okay looks cool we can also you know go in and decorate some of this stuff as well like we can go in and put in some some of my cliff meshes and other stuff so i've got these rocks um this is the sort of basic rock that comes with every brush if i pack it's really like a simple photogrammetry rock and you can get this with the environment shaders pack it's a very useful one actually so you could use this to decorate the uh the rock walls and give the scene a little bit more detail so if you find like an edge like that maybe you can just yeah do something like that basically and i just work like this but for the most part i just create random stuff and then refine it so at the moment it's all random but later on i'm gonna you know i could make it more interesting that's definitely cool to be able to do this let's maybe move this down oh yeah something like that i think with placing this kind of geometry and stuff is always about like hiding seams so like if you see a seam like this you can you can just cover that up by throwing another entity over it or an object over it trying to uh to hide things that's always the that's always the nature of real time is that you're always kind of faking a little bit and hiding a little bit uh another thing that can help a lot when you're hiding stuff in caves is ambient occlusion um so if i go to the post process here can be an occlusion just make sure you have that one dialed in to the right amount because without it you can see that you see all of these little issues but with it you start to get a little bit more um a little bit more of a seamless look so not too much but just enough that it covers up super obvious seams and yeah that's sort of how i would approach something like a cave with this voxel system let's maybe put like a a rock because you know what's missing is that there's not like a cool little rock to hit the light you know like a kind of sword in the stone rock that um yeah like this one that's what it needs it needs something like that yeah some kind of sword in the stone rock you know what i mean right like a it's like a sword that basically goes um and the top of the rock like it's something that is iconic in a way um maybe you don't know what i mean but yeah see if i can just keep making little shapes here okay cool we are getting somewhere now it looks looks pretty cool and looks quite convincing as a cave goes actually like how that looks there even though that that is just like the usual texture on a vauxhall it it just looks fine some some things you don't need to refine or change um yeah so you know what what i would do here yeah shove a sword in that rock um maybe decorate up the the floor a little bit more here just copy paste the same rock over and over and by the way if you are interested in the more sort of artistic side of things and like how i do the art side of things uh my new learn squared course just came out so little plug there for my uh for my latest course if you want to see me put together sort of full environment scenes and that kind of stuff um you know and go really in depth and just watch how i do things and how i make things really quickly and learn all my sort of little tricks because you know i in these youtube videos i i do like to you know show things but you know it's it's really hard in a youtube video to put the amount of depth into something like i can show you me working on a scene like this but you know i can't show you the full sort of length of working on a sort of 10 hour long project in you know in the small sort of half an hour youtube video so yeah if you are interested in those kind of artistic things then um yeah take a look at that i'm just going to finish up the scene and then use this as the thumbnail for this future video i think because i think it does look well looks okay i'm not gonna spend a huge amount of time on it though because that's what this is all about it's all supposed to be for like prototyping and that kind of stuff i actually don't want the grass to show up here so i'm just going to go into my in my landscape and i'm going to change the slope angle to uh not zero but the other way around -10 yeah there we go so now my cave is all nicely rock and maybe a bit of uh vignette vignetting vignetting always helps a little bit when you um are out of ideas and you want to make something that looks a little bit more focused where is vignetting oh yeah here image effects vignetting intensity just bump that up a little bit it's good because it can just help to make the cave a little bit darker and give it a little bit this this kind of darkening effect i'm going to put the chroma shift on a little but yeah and so in learn square i go through all of these sort of effects and you know how they all work and like how you can get the most out of them and all that kind of stuff so if you are interested in that kind of thing it might be worth checking it out and uh yeah this is voxels in unreal engine 4. thanks a lot for watching guys and catch you next time cheers you

Channel: Joe Garth

Views: 41,650

Keywords:

Id: 3MjHEHkjtw4

Length: 33min 1sec (1981 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020