Capturing the World’s OLDEST Stave Church in Unreal Engine 5

foreign [Music] the last time I went on a trip to 3D scanned this old cabin in the Norwegian Arctic it ended up being a ton of fun so this time I wanted to step it up a bit and capture a piece of Norwegian culture if only Norway had this rich and vibrant Viking history oh wait it does [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I'm going to show you my process my workflow the challenges and mistakes I made throughout this project because nothing's ever goes 100 according to plans especially when you need to rely on the weather I do want to thank the people are capturing reality for sponsoring this video and for making this kind of project possible I wanted to capture a piece of Viking history because God it's so cool I opted to travel to illness Dave Church which was built around 11 30 A.D making it almost 900 years old and these ornate carvings predated dating to about 10 70 80. around the time these carvings were made Vikings were still fighting in modern day England which just blows my mind so we set off from Oslo and drove seven hours to the Norwegian West Coast to songdal which is about 20 minutes from the ferry that crosses the Fjord to the church why did we go all the way out there regular viewers of the channel will know but for those of you who are new here it's for a process called photogrammetry which is how you 3D scan something by shooting hundreds or thousands of photos of an object feed that data set into an app like reality capture which will use those photos to generate a high resolution 3D model of whatever you like but here's where things got a little tricky we had two days to shoot and get the necessary data set for the scan and naturally the day we arrived it was pouring rain because of course it was now the thing about photogrammetry is overcast days are a good thing they are preferable because you don't want harsh sunlight reason being whatever lighting is around your subject will be baked into the textures of your 3D model later you want a soft even lighting because that will make your life a lot easier down the line when it comes a time to re-light your scene in Unreal Engine if you have direct sunlight baked into your textures but you want to create an overcast scene and unreal or you want your sun to come from a different direction you can imagine why things would look a little bit weird overcast good pouring rain not good because rain equals wet and wet equals shiny Reflections which is bad bad because reflective surfaces will negatively impact the quality of your scan giving you a lumpier results no bueno now this is the Norwegian West Coast it famously rained a lot here but we had to hope that the next day would be a little bit better since I was already there though I thought it would try to make the most of it by shooting across polarized scan of the carving cross polarization consists of using a powerful ring Flash and two polarizing filters in order to a remove any Reflections but also ensuring a flat even lighting to get the cleanest possible scan which would help mitigate the impact of rain but oh no oh no I had one job even though I used fresh batteries the switch of my flash transmitter flicked on in a bag during the trip and the battery drained so that was cool on day two however we got up at 6am to take the very first ferry across the Fjord at seven which gave me about three hours to scanned the entire state of church because by 10 15 or so the next ferry arrived and the place would be swarmed by tourists they would be in the way I would be in their way so I had to work fast the process of photogrammetry is often more or less the same you go around your subject take as many photos from every angle as you can and hope for the best ensure a constant exposure lock your white balance and shoot Raw photos not jpeg for the church I ended up with over 2 000 photos I figured it's better to have too many than not enough especially when you're scanning something this awesome if you want to try 3D scanning for yourself I've made a few dedicated tutorials where I hold your hand every step of the way like how I scan this old building in depth you'll find a link down below along with any other tutorials I mentioned things you might find useful to follow along with this video now because the front part of the church here had lots of nooks and crannies and pillars like this it can be pretty tricky to scan so in order to get a better result I got even closer I used a three meter tall light stand to mount the camera on with a remote trigger to get the camera higher than I would normally be able to reach now in a perfect world I would have loved to scan the entire church this way but it is a lot slower and time was running out I got to work now of course I knew I wanted to render a close-up shot of these incredible carving that have been perfectly preserved over nearly a thousand years so I whipped up my cross polarization setup again with new batteries having the flash helped a lot here because both the church and the carvings have been coated in a thick layer of pitch black tar which protects the wood from the cold the sun and the salty Ocean Air but such a dark surface is extremely difficult to scan because you need a ton of light to get a proper exposure in camera and on dark overcast days in Norway there's already not much light to work with so the flash highly beneficial if you're interested I have a dedicated cross polarization tutorial link down below usually what's really tricky about shooting out on location like this is unless you have a beefy laptop or a portable workstation you kind of just need to hope that the photos you took are good enough because there's no way to tell if everything is okay until you get home and if you made a mistake like every photo is blurry or you missed a spot it's too late this time around though I did have a beefy laptop but that's a topic for another video coming soon so after taking all of the photos and getting back home it's now time to prep the photos see how our data set turned out and what the 3D model looked like the first thing I always do is sort through all of the photos one by one in photo mechanic to delete the blurry images there is no point in using blurry ones if there's a bit of camera shake or something they will only deteriorate the quality of the generated model photo mechanic is blazing fast for sorting through tons of raw files which is why I use it then with the images called I bring the good ones into Adobe Lightroom which is where I do some subtle adjustments like reducing highlights lifting Shadows tiny bit of sharpening and noise reduction you're not trying to make the images pretty you're just trying to make them as flat looking as possible to get better texture data later I can apply changes to one image and then sync it across all other images with the click of a button here with those images processed I can then export the raw files as JPEG or Tiff and drag and drop those into reality capture which is where we will be generating the model and its textures with the images dropped into reality capture you can simply hit the F6 key and it will begin aligning those images and generate a point cloud of your model and here you could already get a good idea of how things are going to look feels like magic then I'm going to generate the model in high detail which uses the full resolution of my photos which used to take a considerable amount of time and to be fair it still does but the latest updates to reality capture have drastically improved the mesh generation time for which I am very thankful if the scan perfect absolutely not some parts are a little bit lumpy for reading that are both my own fault and for reasons completely out of my control is it clean enough for my renders though uh yeah despite being in very unforgiving conditions the scan turned out spectacularly well I also generated a separate scan of the carvings on their own those that were shot with cross polarization for the close-up shot I had in mind so I got two separate models to work with the process of generating the second mesh here was exactly the same align the images and generate the mesh with the models generated we also get the textures for free by hitting the unwrap and texture button here and before you know it you have a fully textured 3D model now ready for export it's crazy to meet a Vikings even had electrical cables and fire extinguishers man they were ahead of their time now I often get asked in the comment why I don't just 3D model a shirt like this by hand in Maya or blender or 3ds Max or whatever sure you absolutely could do that but it would take seasoned artists weeks of work to get the same level of detail the wear and tear that a thousand years of exposure to the elements brings but there's also a huge huge of satisfaction in capturing and immortalizing historic artifacts like this now reality capture is completely free to use but you are charged per megapixel only for the models you want to export using their PPI credit system the high resolution scan of the carvings for example would cost about four dollars to export but for the next two weeks though you can get 50 off your purchase of 3 500 PPI credit by using the code william50 at checkout now we can export the model and the textures out of reality capture and bring them into Unreal Engine 5. set up the material by bringing in the textures and we're ready to get started as always the first part of starting any environment in Unreal Engine is reference and blocking out the shot really placing the foundations and building blocks and establishing the composition I love using pure ref to build a collection of images that capture the mood I'm going for it's really important to not just make things based on memory alone use reference it will help you now I knew I would need some Mountains for the shot as well so I managed to get a hold of some height map data from the Norwegian cartography website and use that data in a program called Gaia to generate the mountain that I could place in the scene they get the mountain that are actually from the area the church was scanned in now to be clear I'm not trying to recreate the surrounding area one to one I'm absolutely embellishing the shot in unreal for the sake of making something pretty but I still like the idea of having something based on the real place I added another landscape in unreal and sculpted that to shape the ground you'll see very quickly we already have something in place and from there it's all about populating the area with detail using Mega scans trees I was able to quickly make a fork using the new procedural Tools in unreal but I wanted something to to Steve church so a path leading up to it felt like the right thing to do from there stone walls were added with the spline tool I felt it would add some nice detail it's pretty crazy how big of a difference adding some foliage ground cover makes if your scene feels empty or if you think something is missing just scatter some bushes and grass around and it won't take long for your shot to feel Lush and and full of life now about the lighting I use a plugin called Ultra Dynamics guy or UDS for short and when it comes to exterior lighting it makes the whole process very easy to Art Direct because I'm going for an overcast day lighting the shot could not be any easier there is one light source this guy so by cranking up the cloud cover setting we can get some nice soft diffuse lighting when it comes to the general composition Framing and overall feeling of the shot it is so important to add foreground element like you see here on the left and right adding trees in such a way that it frames the shot as a kind of natural vignetting of sorts this may seem insignificant but it is that kind of thing that makes a huge world of difference between a mediocre shot and a good one that transition between the darker tree tunnel here and the bright Airy Meadow out there tied the whole thing together I cannot stress enough how important that is to add that last touch to the scene and a bit of a Shameless plug I used easy fog which is the tool I made and is available on the Epic Marketplace link down below it makes addings mist and fall to your level way easier I have some perfect reference on location during the shoot and that there is the vibe I was trying to go for in unreal so by placing EV fog into the level I can quickly and easily art direct the look I want in just a few minutes occluding some of the distant trees with fog really helped bring the scene to life now a bit of a fun tip for those of you using Unreal sometimes I like to use this console variable because it can really give you some nicer deeper shadows in your scene it doesn't always magically make everything better but it often does you'll see setting up an environment like this isn't complicated it's just a matter of placing trees and foliage and rocks in an aesthetic manner shaping the ground in a way that feels good there's no real rule or process to it it's all about having an eye for what you think looks good again reference really helps here now that is the establishing shot but this church scan turned out so good I had way too much fun just rendering out a bunch of other shots of the church so I made some new camera sequences I set up a new close-up shot of the carvings because I had to made a new camera and also rendered this other shot which was based on real video footage that we filmed on location as for this shot here I figured I'd share a trick I love to use when I'm lighting simply by placing a large cube with a dark material on it and use that to block the light coming from behind the camera this is an old trick used by lighters on film sets it helps you shape and bend the light to create a nicer more desirable look take a look here I love the dark backlit look I'm giving the tree in the foreground but see what happens when I hide the cube or move it away it looks much flatter and less interesting a darker foreground here helped the theme feel a little bit moodier it's an easy way to control your lighting a lot better now come the time to render your shot out of unreal using the movie render queue and for those of you wondering what my render settings are I have a free render settings guide available on gumroad linked below this will tell you everything you need to know about my render settings in unreal I'm going to render out these shots in 4k and by hitting the render button here we're now ready to move on to the last and most satisfying part of the entire process color grading color grading as that last little bit of oomph to your renders it's never huge changes but it's that extra little bit of polish that helped things like lens Distortion film grain contract Shadow and highlight tweaks or other lens effects like chromatic aberration I have a dedicated tutorial on color grading and resolve down below so I won't bore you with the specifics but really there's no magical settings when it comes to color grading don't bother trying to copy mine because it's all entirely dependent on your shots my settings might not look good on your renders it's also entirely subjective and up to your own personal taste you might not like what I like I just wanted to show you my process for example take a look at this clip right here which is real footage let's break down what we're looking at here the rain on the lens isn't really distinct it's just a blurry smudge because the raindrops are physically so close to the camera sensor they are completely out of focus that makes that effect very easy to reproduce in post I just made a very quick blurry mask in resolve here in a fusion page and overlaid that on top of the shot easy peasy rain on lens look I find it as a nice touch because well when you point the camera up the sky on a rainy day rain is going to hit that lens no matter how hard you try to Shield it so it's those little details that can add a lot of realism to your renders from there I graded each of the four shots and hear the quick before and after like I said I'm not doing any major changes here just some curves adjustments for contrast added a slightly filmic look I harmonize the colors a little bit added a bit of film grain and that friends it how I made these shots everything I did here is perfectly doable by any of you if I can do it so can you you'll find more dedicated step-by-step tutorials to everything I've done here in this video from photogrammetry lighting rendering color grading in the description below so you've got everything you need to get started with creating your own world I hope you found the video helpful and if you did leave a comment down below if this is the kind of thing you'd like to see more of thanks so much for watching everyone and as always folks happy rendering do it again the camera the pure professionalism they do it again [Laughter]

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 725,295

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Cinematics, UE4 4.26, UE5, Realtime, realtime rendering, rendering, CGI, 3D, 3D Artist, UE4, Unreal Engine 5, Norway, Urnes Stave Church, Urnes, Viking, Viking Church

Id: B5hBBFM2I_w

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023