What up, what up, Winbush here. And today I'm excited to show you guys how we can take a scene from cinema 4D built with Pyro and actually bring it into Unreal Engine 5.3 using a new VDB import. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. But before we move on with the video, I want to give a special shout out to today's sponsor for sponsoring this video, which is Ekster. They make these really dope wallets. As you can see right here, I have the aluminum one. And the cool thing is, like, I like carrying my wallets in my front pocket. And this is my original wallet. You can see that it's actually half the size and it's super slim. And if you know me, I'm all about tech. And the cool thing is, look at this. It actually holds up to 12 cards in here and they just slide up like so. So this is the aluminum one, but also have a leather one as well, which is called the Parliament, like this one right here. So you can look inside. I have my money right there. Actually, I have my own personal cards inside there as well as my driver's license. And they did come with this tracker as well. If I pull this out like so. So this is actually a tracker that slides into the back of your wallet. And since they are sponsoring this video, I was actually able to get them to give me a 25% discount if you guys want to purchase it. All you have to do is use the code WIMBUSH on checkout and you'll be able to save 25% immediately. Or you can click on the link down below inside the comment or inside the description. And it will take you automatically to where you can get that discount. So to get started, I'm in a brand new Cinema 4D 2024. And I have everything set up here. So if you look and I just click play, I just have a really simple scene set up here. So I have a cloner that's connected to this formula, which is making these balls go all over the place and are connected to the sphere. So they travel around. Now, the reason that I have it built out like this is because each one of these individual lotus spheres, I want to actually have these be activated by Pyro. So in order to do that, I'm going to come over here to the cloner. And I'm going to come up here to tags. And then we're going to come down here to simulation tags. And then I'm going to come down here to Pyro Admitter. So I'm going to let go of the left click there. And now you see that we have this little flame here, this little flame tag. And there's a few settings that I'm going to change down here. So the first one is just going to be the density set. I'm just going to change this to two. And this was just my own personal preference thickness. I'm going to change this one to three. And then I'm going to come down here to temperature and let's say, change this one to about 40,000. Now, if I click on play and give us a second to get everything cashed up. You can see now we have each one of those little spheres. They're actually igniting some Pyro there. So we have smoke, we have the flame. And I mean, I think it looks cool myself. So let's say that you have a really cool scene built with Pyro now. And you actually want to bring that into Unreal Engine 5.3. Let me show you exactly the steps that you need to make that work. And so back into my scene here, usually whenever you put like this little Pyro tag on here, you should see an indicator up here to see his power output, which I don't see. So if you do have this happen to you, all you have to do is come up here to simulate, then come down here to simulation scene. And now with this selected, if I scroll up my attributes window, right here, make sure you have Pyro selected, and then create output right here, create output objects, I'm going to left click on this. And now let me put this back down, move us over a little bit. Now you can see that we have the power output. Now this is important because this is going to be how we export out our VDBs. So I can actually delete the simulation scene, select the power output like so. And if I move this back up, so we see attributes window. And before moving on, I'm actually going to come down here versus template file name. And let's just do maybe frame rate. I mean, you have a bunch of options, you can pick what you want, but I'm just going to do frame rate like so. And then you want to enable it. Then right here, versus Pyro scene, you actually want to make sure it's connected to our scene here. So right here, you see that it's blank right now, you just want to make sure I'm actually going to clear it. And once you do that, you see it says link to default scene. So I'm going to click on this. And now everything should be connected. So if I come over here to cache, and I come down here to cache scene, now it's going to say store files at the project location. So wherever you saved out your cinema 4d project, that's exactly where it's going to save a separate folder for that. And so I'm going to click on Yes, and I'm just going to wait for this to cash out. So once the simulation is done, actually look down here in your lower right hand corner, it's going to give you the volume information. So you just want to make sure that you have density, which it does, and your temperature, those are the two most important things when we bring them into Unreal Engine. And if I open up my folder right here, you can see that I have my cinema 4d project set up right here, and it made a separate folder called volume. Now you can see it's about 12 gigs, not too bad. So if I double click on it, you can actually see now we have all these VDBs within that folder. And now we can bring these into Unreal Engine. So for this to work, you don't need any plugins or anything, you just need to make sure you're using the latest version of Unreal, which right now is 5.3. And so what Unreal Engine opened up right now, I'm just going to come down here, and I'm going to come to my content drawer, and I'm just going to dock into my layout right here, because I'm going to look for my file explorer, and I'm just going to actually take my VDB, I'm just going to drag and drop it right into my content browser like so. And now this is going to bring up the open VDB import options. Now this is important. The one thing that we want to do is we want to make sure we have density here. And then right here, I'm going to make sure I have temperature. And where is this attributes a I'm actually going to make this 16 bit. Now you can make it 32 bit, but that might make it a little bit too heavy. So I found a 16 bit is a sweet spot there. And then for attributes B, I'm just going to make this eight bit and we're going to make everything none. I don't need any information here. So I don't need any of the velocity or anything, especially for this particular example here. So again, I just want to make sure I have at least my density and my temperature, and make sure that it finds all the files in which I have 500 to one here. So once you're happy with your setup here, I'm just going to click on import and let this go through. The one thing is, depending on your system specs, this might take a little bit longer to import. And so if you do see it look like it's freezing up, don't worry, it's actually working on the back end, just give it a few moments to import everything. Now you can see we have our VDB import it right here, it's going to be called an animated sparse volume texture. So I'm just going to save all just because I like saving everything just in case. Now to make this work, we're going to need a material setup to make sure we can import our VDB. And so I did a tutorial a couple of weeks ago showing you step by step how you can actually create this from scratch. Or you could go a separate way, which I made a lot easier for you guys, which will be copy and paste. So this website is called blueprint ue. And what I did was I actually took my material that created in a tutorial, and I made it so you can actually just copy and paste it. So look for the link down below in the comments and inside the description there. But if I scroll down here, you can see right here, it says code to copy. Now you'll see this little clipboard right here, all you have to do is left click on it, it's going to come up with this, but it should already have copied it to your clipboard. So now I can exit this out. And I'm back inside of Unreal Engine 5.3. So if I right click down here, my content browser, let's make a material, let's just call this one pyro. And I'm going to double click on it. And I'm going to make this full screen. Now let me scroll back here a little bit. There's one thing that we're going to need to do first. So right here, where we have our result note material, you want to make sure you left click on this, and then down here in the lower left hand corner, where it says material domain surface, you want to left click on this, you want to make it a volume. And then right here, where it says blend mode, instead of opaque, we want to make it additive. Now with this all set up, I'm just going to hold ctrl and hit V on my keyboard, just to paste everything in here. And now you can see we have all of our nodes from the website. It's all right here. Now it's not going to come in fully connected, we need to connect it right here to our results node. So it's really easy. This one right here, which is scattering color. Let me scroll in here a little bit, make it easier to see. So this is the very top one, you want to take this white node right here, link it to albedo. And then this multiply right here, you want to link it to a missive color. And then down here, let me scroll back a little bit, you should see this other multiply right here, you just want to left click and bring this to extension. And then if I scroll over here, where we have this sparse volume texture, this is where we're going to add our VDB. Now if I left click on this, now come down here in the left hand corner. At the very bottom, it says sparse volume texture, I'm going to click on none. And now we see we have our VDB that we brought over from cinema 4d. So if I left click on this, and I click apply, and then we're just going to click on Save, that's all we need to do. So I tried to make it as easy as possible for you guys. So you don't have to build out this material from scratch. So make sure you give a shout out to Taibout. He's the one that helped me set this all up. I'm going to leave his Twitter link down below. So to proceed on, I'm going to exit this out. And then I'm still not sure how to find this any other way. But if I come up here to where we have this box, this is quickly add the project, I'm going to come down here to place actors panel, and then inside of here inside the search, I'm going to type in H E T. And that's going to bring up, I'm not even going to try to announce this one, I'm just going to call it h volume like so. So I'm just going to click and drag this into my scene, that can exit out my place actors. Now if I scroll this down, let's say come over here to my details panel, maybe let's zero this out. So it's in direct center. Now if we pull it up, you can see we have like this dragon icon that's in there. So this is going to be actually where VDB is going to be. So this right here, I'm going to delete the player start, we don't need that in there, I could probably even delete the floor plane as well. And I'm just going to select this right here. And you can notice down here inside of our details panel, we have a material. And this is going to be where we bring our material into. But before we do that, we actually want to right click on our material that we made. And we want to create a material instance. Now what this is going to allow us to do is actually when we double click on it, you can see now we have all of our parameters exposed, which makes it a lot easier, we don't have to go into the nodes and manually select these, we actually could just come in here, turn on what we want. So I'm going to turn on my blackbody parameter, my density multiplier, in my temp multiplier, like so, going to strength this down a little bit, let's hit save all just because I want to save everything. And then we're going to take that material instance, left click and bring it into my material. Now you'll notice that nothing is happening off the bat. And that's because we have to come down here and actually animate it. So instead of my details panel, right here for frame rate, first, I'm going to hit 30, because that's what everything was set up as in frame is 500 start frame is zero. And then I want to turn on playing. Now you can start to see that we have it in here, but it doesn't look exactly how it did inside of cinema in which we can fix that in our material. But I'm also going to click on looping just so loops the whole entire time. And now what I'm going to do is come down here to where it says temp multiplier, let's crank this up maybe like 4500. Now you can see that we're starting to get a lot of that glow in there, maybe for our blackbody point one, something like that. So we're bringing in a little bit more to smoke in there like so. And you just have to come in here and play with the parameters maybe for the density, move this up a little bit, let's say five, something like that. So you can see where we're starting to really make this shine and look how it did inside of cinema 4d. So it's more just about coming in, playing with your parameters at this point. Hopefully we made this easy for you. So you don't have to build this off from scratch. And you could just come in, play with some of these numbers and you're good to go. So let me actually move this out like so. And now we can just see we have our cinema 4d pyro playing inside of Unreal Engine inside of viewport here. Now I always thought this was cool that they added VDB support finally inside of Unreal Engine officially. As you know before, you had to use a third party plugin, which was good, but it's always good to get official support. Now I know the next thing people want to ask me is how do you render this out? I'm actually going to do that in a separate video showing you how you can render out your VDBs using the sequencer, because I want to make it this easy for people to just go in. If that's the only thing they want to know how to do, they can click on that tutorial and are good to go. So if this tutorial actually helped you out, make sure you leave me a comment down below. Show me some of the examples that you're coming up with because I think this is really powerful when you use a cinema 4d, Embergen, Houdini, like I'm seeing a lot of really cool stuff out there. So make sure you tag me in your projects. And until next time, stay fresh, keep creating and I'll catch you in the next video. I'll see you soon. Take care.
