Create a Forest in UE4 in 1 Hour

[Music] hello everyone my name is Victor LeMond in this tutorial I'm going to cover how I went about creating this environment it was created in an afternoon and is made entirely using mega scale 3d assets and materials with the exception for the terrain I'll be going over how I made that as well the first thing I'm going to do is create the paths or the road and I'm going to go for a vehicular type Road with clear tire tracks as with most things in this scene the process is very simple and it's more about the materials and its presentation that matters rather than the geometry itself the general shape is good and that it tells well once I started adding some irregularities to it making sure is pretty evenly tessellated so that it can be displaced nicely in Unreal Engine and I think this looks good too so let's move in the sides same thing goes for this model very simple evenly tessellated geometries it has an interesting base shape while making sure it repeats and tiles nicely or outwards and upwards a bit allowing me some space to place the dance highly detailed vegetation and scatter assets near the pass around this area I'll just use unreal terrain so this will cover that nicely the reason for not using a to rain for the entire scene is that this while adding some challenges gives me more freedom and options you could do both ways but this is my preferred workflow for scenes like these when you be mapping these modules at keep them within the zero to one space and also as a single UV island with no cuts right time to head into unreal alright so what we have here are the meshes that we just made and they are completely untextured so what I want to do now is take a look at the material I have the master material that I usually use for things like these which allows me to vertex paint and do some cool blending so let's open up the material take a look at it so this really is just a basic vert expand material we have this vertex color node here just red and green channels and we're doing a multiply and a power here just intensity and masking power and the same thing goes for this one these are the exact same except I haven't commented this one for clarity and these are just plugged in to the lips which learn the different textures and same thing here we just multiply with a vector node here so we can tint them and it's pretty much basic stuff here but there is a small difference here from the most common vertex plan materials and that is the noise mask here and basically what this does is it allows you to blend two different textures based on a world position texture so if I just go in here and start previewing this node we can see that we have some noise here and I then multiply that with height mask so if I preview this so we can see that there's a blend with the texture as well and this is plugged into the multiplier within herb nodes as well and here we have UV 1 2 & 3 or I grasp Eva 1 and UV 2 and that is pretty basic aliy the materials it's very simple I'm just going to make a new material instance and call it forest ground tutorial and I'll just assign it here so right now there is not a lot of data going on at all while there is no blending going on so what I want to do is I want to open up the vertex painter here and I'll set the paint color to white and I want to paint in the green channel so I want to get some grass painted in here so what I'll do first is I'll just do a rough paint job here along the middle make it a bit irregular here and there and along the sides like this and next I'll use the red channel so what the red channel is is the sand it's the is another is a third texture so I'll just use this to paint along the sides of the grass here I'm just going very rough now I'm going to go in and tweak this later on like so now I'll increase the brush size and reduce the intensity a bit increase the viewport and now I'll start removing some color here and there make sure to check the green as well start painting it back in you so something like that and as I mentioned before this might be a bit hard to see was the knowledge blend here so we have the tiling here so if I just go ahead and play with this we can see that there's some there's something going on here and as I said it might be hard to see but that is the mask at a very low scale going tiling across the surface so if we increase the scale you can see it's very very very covers promotional thing but if I decrease it we get a nice chunky areas which break up the original texture so if we set it to maybe around 325 3.9 we got a nice soft blend here between the two materials I can try just setting a ridiculous value here so we can set it to zero and 32 for you can see there's it's very subtle but it helps break up the underlying material or texture so I'm just going to go in and quickly do some more editing here I want to break up the I want to break up the grass ever so slightly a bit here in the middle I'm going to edit this a bit more once we start tiling the tiling the assets up to make sure they tile at least close to the camera I might add some grass going out here as well that is good right so I'm going to do the same thing for the lips as well and I have a an instance setup here and I'll go ahead and select it and go into paint mode again and this time I want to use quite a bit smaller brush because I'm mainly gonna be working with this part here so I'll make sure the red and green are selected now I'm masking in some sand because I want this to look sort of like a mudslide as if we're in a sandy area which pine trees don't grow very well so I'm just removing the grass here right along the like under the overhang there something like that and I'll just go ahead and make the size a bit smaller and add some grass back into it so it meets the bottom part better or like the path module there that looks good and I'm also going to remove some of the green here you now go over and that later it's a bit of going back and forth to get a nice even blend and I took pretty good so what I'll do now is I'll actually just go ahead and delete this and duplicate this over rotate it around to 180 degrees and turn off snapping and just make sure it meets something like that and I can move it up a bit as well that is good alright so let's go ahead and tile this up so since I made the correct size I can just use the snap to grid function and it's going to tile up nicely and we also made sure in Maya to use it to make sure it tiled well both in the UVs and an actual mesh so this is a good start this gives us a lot of room to play with vegetation and so on so let's go with this so here behind me I have a couple of assets that I've selected that i will use to dress up the dress off the sides here so i'm going to start off by taking this one here and i'll put this on the lips here on the edges and i was able to try and intersect them with the turn off this snapping mode here I'll try and intersect them and make it look like there's like rocks poking out of the sand getting this weird lighting glitch here there we go something like that and I'll keep adding this I could flip it and others into the negative direction and push it down a little bit so we just get a few rocks popping out like that and something like this and I'll try and keep the spacing a bit more irregular so it doesn't look obviously tiled so or not tiled about repetitive so something like that maybe push it up a bit start look pretty cool I'll do the same thing on the other side as well just take them like that and rotate it around under an eighty degrees and push it back towards this direction you just adjust them so that fits more tightly or snugly you it's already looking way more natural right so with these added on I just want to check it out in the when it's baked so just it's billed and there we go so there's much more even nice now so let's continue adding more stuff okay so I'm gonna go with this stump here and I'll just duplicate this and move down here oh and if you didn't know about this it's really nice feature if you hold down shift while moving something the camera goes along it's so handy when you're like placing assets like this I'm just going to place this stump here I want it to sort of sort of intersect with the lip here so you can also see the M you sort of see the roots going all the way down the ground and upwards over the side here something like this could work and I'm also going to place this because this is going to be like our main view for the renders so I'm going to place this it's nice and close to the camera camera is going to be around here so and these are not the determine of the color values that are from the negatives library I've adjusted the material slightly add a more contrast and power and so on something like this and the intersection is the one that going to be covered by foliage later on as well so I'm not too bothered about that he's looking at trying to add some variation and interest in the overall composition here because once we as we saw before like the baking there's a lot of difference and we're also going to get some trees going along the edges and in front of the Sun and so on so that's going to alter the the lighting quite a bit I also want this stump here on the other side I think I'm rotated slightly to something like this and a bit smaller maybe probably going to move these around a bit later on but just over there maybe yeah and I'll move this a bit closer to the other stump as well so let's give that a shot okay so looking a lot better as I think it's about time I start adding some vegetation here and some scatter assets actually let's start with the scatter assets first that's going to go on the ground here okay so the first thing I'm going to do is make some more real estate for the modes here so we can more clearly see what we're doing here so I'm just going to switch places with the outliner and the modes here and I'll go ahead and I have some assets here that I prepared from the from previous projects and what I'll do is I'll just select all these branches here and these are all grabbed from the mega scans website and I'll get some rocks here as well and that should be enough for this first pass and let's just check out the scale so these branches are way too big I'll just remove those for now and that is good just make sure the density is a bit lower try 50 instead of 200 still too high maybe 15 see if that works looking a bit better he's going to reduce the density of the rocks as well maybe a hundred instead that is good all right so what I want to do is I want these mainly on the edges of the road here because that's probably where they would gather in real life so because here you're walking and driving stuff at that so what it mainly want it to be around here we can already see it blending with the asset we've placed there before and also play some up here on the on the edges as well some place one or two here in middle as well you all right so let's exit this foliage mode and build here see how it looks once we've got some better lighting going on but we can already see it's looking way more natural now and it's going to be even better once we get some nice tall grass and stuff like that in there along with some leaves actually before building you realize we should add some leaves as well I have some leaves here already loaded so I'll get disabled everything except those and I'll go in here I have some scattered leaves here and these are also grabbed from the mega scams website so I'm just going to reduce the scale ever so slightly on these set it to 0.7 up to em let's see 10.9 is set perfect right so let's just put these here along the sides yep the lighting as you can see is not representative of what you're going to get later once is base I'm going to make this a bit smaller and I measure again I would use the scale here as well a little bit more so such a lovely surprise when you bake the lighting it my experience it usually turns out better than dynamic lighting but the only downside I just mentioned is that you have to wait for it once it once it's our baking and once you've baked a few times you start getting an idea for what it's going to look like once you actually do bake so we don't have to bake as frequently you can sort of imagine it and imagine it beforehand look at that and just a couple of leaves here in the middle as well just actually make an entire line here and just delete them instead by holding shift and clicking something like that okay so now we can hit bake exciting and boom look at that awesome times add some other types of foliage so I am going to try and find some grass here I'll start off by disabling all of these select here are some grasses this one and I'll use this one as well and let's see how it looks I'm gonna reduce its size here to around 40 and the scale is way off here so I'll set it to let's say 0.5 to 1.1 maybe that looks better yep let's try that so I'm going to start off by painting this middle part here I'm just paint all across it and I'll go ahead and actually the scale might be a little bit off especially for this middle part here so I'll set it to 0.5 to 0.85 or something yeah that looks way better cool alright so I'll just go ahead and paint this entire strip here it's kind of hard to see I'm bait lighting but I'm is trying to keep inside of the this year and stripped in the middle and I'll do a quick pass here on the side to make sure it doesn't spill out too much on the on the dirt here on the sides looks good now I'll go ahead and stamp out some grass here on the sides and now I can actually increase the size since it doesn't really matter if it leaks out on the sides I'll do a quick erase erasing pass here okay so now we'll increase the size even more because I wanted to sort of grow more and more the further out the decides to go so I'll set this to 1 point 1 and this to one point 35 and check that out see one point three could work here on one point five should work I'll just stamp out here and I don't want to grow on the stump here so we remove that make sure the this area around the stump here is nicely covered I'll try and see which grass it is that's there we go got it so we can already see that these and you can't see the intersection anymore and it's going to look even nicer once we bake it since we it will blend together so much better there we go and I'll just paint over here as well and delete some of this so we don't get too much over draw if you want to check out over the over draw by the way you can go to optimization view modes and quad over draw you can see it over drop does it stamp out on this side as well you hit bake and see how this looks as looking a lot better awesome you can see it's intersecting nicely here or well actually you can't see an intersection but it's blending very nicely there so let's go ahead and add some more types of vegetation here I'm looking for something that's a bit taller so should have something here that should work nicely so I'll select that one and just check it out yeah look at that so a nice tall grass here it's obvious place some here and there along them in the middle just try and get it nicely spaced out because I it could easily add too much fidelity or noise to the scene if if there's too much just try and I'll try and hold my horses here is such a nice assets I love this one because it's really adding adding some believability to the scene it's kind of very easy to sort of just go with grass and think yeah that's that is good and just stop there but there's so much so many kinds of vegetation Xin in the wild they don't really think about so this is the sort of grass where like when you're walking in the woods and if you're afraid of ticks like I am these are nightmares because zero they always hang out over the path so yeah I'm gonna go with that I'll delete cup a couple of these so there's not too much there we go and let's see if there is something else something taller so remove those or not remove them but I'll choose this one it's also some higher or taller kind of grass I'll just increase the scale here and there we go perfect all right so let's just stamp this out here and there so these are also tall grasses but as you can see they're a bit more a bit thicker so I think is gonna work pretty well with other types of grass we'll just added be sure to add some here in the distance as well even though you can barely see them it's gonna add some nice silhouette or shapes back there so we'll remove this one maybe and like that just go back to our main angle here because I wanted to sort of just feel overgrown so having stuff here along the side is kind of really help with that especially when we start adding some terrain and like a backdrop to this so we're gonna yeah we're going to work at a terrain as well with some trees so this is just this is just the beginning so I think this looks pretty good so let's go ahead and give this a bake and voila awesome alright so before we move any further I want to go ahead and add a to range we have some more context to the scene here so just I click the terrain here or landscape and I'll set it to minus 100 minus 500 and let's see where that ends up so let's try minus 450 perfect and I want to set it to 31 oh it ends up over there okay I'll just move this over here and slightly this way as well so we have some more space to work with I mean we just want to add some hills and stuff so we can sort of round this in with a landscape so let's go ahead and it creates here and start painting so I want to reduce the brush size to let's see three and a half thousand should do nicely and let's go ahead and start adding some hills just want to elevate this this area around our play area so to speak so just it doesn't have to be pretty just make sure it's surrounding your area nicely because I always like kind of woods where it feels like everything is almost falling over you like you're in a sort of a crevasse with the world used rising around you feels very very epic you and now smooth everything else and increase the brush size to maybe four and a half thousand a set we got some broader strokes here it is really just to get some basic shapes going so let's jump back in and check this out so this one should go way down I'll lower that later just when I get the base base down here and I could even see move this down a little bit like that unless you work nicely I'll just smooth everything out a little bit more so you get a bit more rice in the sky going all right cool okay so let's just go ahead and add this material to the terrain as well add that there perfect so this doesn't have to be pretty it's just everything most of this is just going to be in shadow so are we or are we really just want is the color of the grass here so blend together nicely and let's go ahead and start adding some trees here so we can get some idea of the overhang and the lighting so I'll add these trees here this tree and I have one more tree down here so let's see if what this looks like I'll reduce the over or the rotation the max rotation alignment word is called let's see here aligned max angle so I reduce this to form a V that's better because we want some sort of angle but not too much and I'll also reduce the density it is pretty crazy right now so set it to maybe five that works perfect cool so I'll just go ahead and surround ourselves with some trees here all the way around and I can also increase the scale so let's check this out so this is a three one point to set it to one point four and two two point two it gets a nice variation going there's new young trees and some older trees set this to 1 point 2 and 1.35 and start painting these out as some trees really close by here because we want the some nice shadow casting over here and I'll add some trees over here to the horizon as well and up here on the edge of the ridge here and now I'll increase the scale to 1.6 and to here and increase this one as well to one point sixty five and two point five these are the trees that are going to be more in the distance so I just want to exaggerate their size a bit we got some more shadows in here and I'll increase the density as well to be eight so you can get some more trees in here I'll remove this on bugging me all right so starting to get there it's we can't really see the edge of the terrain here we're going to use some smaller bushes as well to cover more up I think this is a pretty good start so let's go ahead and also add a reflection capture here so we get some subtle reflections here and I'll just duplicate this up and make it smaller so 500 maybe perfect alright so let's go ahead because now we can see we have some nice shadows going on here I'll actually go ahead and add a couple more like ridiculously large trees to catch some more shadows this is going to be our really old trees two point two and three mastodons trees here into catching a bit too much shadow there this is always a tricky part trying to locate the trees that are casting too much shadow because I want some shadow on this part as well so let's just okay so this area here should be there we go perfect right so let's give this a bait and see how it turns out this is always interesting because we might want we might have to go back and remove some but we'll see you so let's a fake here or build okay so it's definitely getting there we're going to do quite a bit of color adjustments and lighting adjustments as well later on right now actually I'm just using a directional light here that's Emma Skye light of course but that's all I'm using here and so let's go ahead and add some more foliage in here so what I want is I really want this to feel sort of overgrown like like a real forest so I'll go ahead and add some juniper bushes here these ones and reduce the size of the brush so it's a bit too big but I'll go ahead and use these for the surrounding areas or like bordering here so I'll set the scale to four and six and see if I can actually set them to eight and ten users or cover up more of the surrounding area like a backdrop cover up the edges here there we go as now seven to one and three I think is going to work me one to perfect so I'll go ahead and add these around the edges here you just refrain ourselves in here I'm going to add some of these they're perfect and some more here on the edges to cover up the intersections here start to shape up here awesome alright and let's see if we have something else I think have some ferns yep there are some ferns that I can use as well I'll add these sporadically here around the edges I'll reduce the size a bit as well a bit too big so 11.2 to point to things you work well you also we can put there so at this point it's really just about having fun and seeing what you can find so I have these these sticks here that were too big previously so I'll go ahead and set the scale to three and five and people can get some sticks in here like or large branches I would say they are not sticks and something over here cool so and one more thing that I'm going to do is for these trees that I just added I remember the resolution is probably fitted pretty high so I'm just going to check this out so the resolution I guess at this is 32 for now just sweet and get some faster baking and I'll also select the grass here set this to 16 is that it's really just for previewing purposes so well let's go ahead and remove this tree actually because this one is bothering me as well so select everything and just click there there we go there's really no point for that to be there remove that as well just remove that anything that does really affect our our scene and there we go all right a little bit cheaper so let's hit bake or build all right so let's check it out cool really really shaping up here and that's awesome and I love these these small trees are just sort of bending in I'm gonna do a lot more tweaking so I'm gonna go ahead and add more more variations here and so I'll see you in a bit you all right so I've done quite a bit of tweaking so I just did a the size of the trees around here and move stuff around and I think it's time to bake now so and I also just the terrain a bit in the cap there but I just kept doing what are they before just adding grass and other types of foliage making sure the it's layering nicely so that's one really key thing about working with nature environments that I've learned is keeping my layering like don't just go with one size like you make sure it is larger in the back and go smaller and smaller and like these huge trees back here smaller trees in here thank almost tiny trees here and large branches up here and small twigs in here and making sure you keep in mind where stuff should go so let's go ahead and just bake this and let's see where where we end up okay so it's really looking nice and damn it's now looking really cool so I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the at the lighting stuff like that because right now we've mainly focusing on the content and not the presentation and it's the entire lighting is just a directional light intensity at 220 stationery and it's volumetric so for in volumetrics volumetrics volumetric scattering intensity and it's casting volumetric shadow as well and there is also a skylight if I can find it there we go and also to also set the stationery and it's set to seven in intensity to get a nice even lighting sort of like an overcast today and let's see here it's yeah it's set to one in volumetric scattering intensity and I also have a volumetric height fog I think no it's atmospheric - exponential height fog that's the name and here are the settings for that so it's 0.01 sort of a blue tint to the in scattering color and the volumetric settings its first of all it's enabled and it's a - 0.4 in scattering distribution albedo is slightly tinted blue I believe oh no it's actually entirely white and you can see the settings here so the settings for the scene and lighting it's very very basic and and we're not using any post-processing at all so far so but I have a post process volume setup here that I will enable and show so if we enable that you can see it's a huge difference we can just turn it off and let the exposure adjust and we can turn it back on again there's a huge difference like everything changes the colors the shadows the lighting the fog changes colors and so on so let's just take a quick look at this so the first thing I've done here is I've changed the white balance temperature so it's up to five thousand eight hundred so it's it's a bit it's a bit warmer and if I change colder I mean so I can change this we can see it's a huge different just that so this is a big part of the whole and change in the atmosphere and I'm also using the new color grading in unreal as of oted 4.15 I think it is and it's extremely powerful so you can check out the settings here so the saturation is 1 contrast 1.15 it's small changes but it's really making a huge difference and down here we have the color grading lookup table I can show you this so this adjust the colors and I made this in Photoshop so if we turn this off and on again we can see that also makes a big difference is it desaturates a little bit and also has a bit more blue to zyne so the way you create a color lookup table at least the way I do it is I just take a screenshot of the M of the scene without any lookup table and of course at all enabled and I add the lookup table chart from the website and the documentation for unreal images add that underneath a bunch of adjustment layers which are tweaked until I am happy with the result and then I export the lookup table I set it to color lookup table in the texture group and then it turns it turns out like this and let's just take a quick look here I'm doing quite a bit of adjustments here in the shadows department so just take a quick look here small adjustment to the gamma and a small adjustment to the offset as well and I'm changing the mid-tones ever so slightly as well the saturation making it a bit more saturated to give it some more vibrance you set it to it's a very very small difference but you can see it gets warmer especially on the graphs here I'm pointing at my screen for some reason bhaiyya so if you look here on the graphs I set it back to 1.1 it gets warmer and more vibrant and let's check out the highlights as well so it's saturation here very very subtle difference but all these small things each contribute to a big difference same thing here very minor and here in the tool mapper dozen adjustment as well you can take a look at that and I've set the bloom to 1.5 just to give some more atmosphere from from the fog just to give the volumetric fog a bit of a bit of a boost well it's nothing too over the top that's the way I like to wear it like I I try and keep things pretty subtle I go pretty over-the-top to begin with and then I just work my work my way down so let's say I put it like this and then I like after done some more changes I sort of step it back and see paradise sweet spot like in-between is easier to scale back to the scale up in my experience auto-exposure there's also big thing so I stepped it to one one one hundred and one hundred so there's no auto exposure whatsoever in the team I like it is easier easier for me to work that way so the exposure doesn't adjust when I look in different areas same thing when I want to do photographs I like to work with manual settings and gives me more control and easier to see the result and no lens fair is at all and no that's a field and very very basic get at the intensity of the Emelda clusion to 0.65 because otherwise I think the grass gets too much occlusion and if I set it to zero it gets a bit too little exposure or occlusion so a nice middle ground here and global illumination just default settings very very basic very basic stuff the main things here that I kept and keep in mind is the white balance the color gradient lookup table and tweaking the a mint occlusion so we don't turn it on and off often on again just the see more clearly and you can also see the auto exposure doing a lot of work here so if I turn this back on boom got very nice result here and sky is nicely blue with a sort of a hazy over cat look so to recap what we did was we created a very simple or two very simple meshes here so the ground and the sides we created a very or we took a look at the very basic vertex material with a mask noise mask which blends the two matte synchro material together we started adding some very rough meshes two of them shaped like big energy variations to the terrain or ground to end the immediate surroundings then we started adding small details the rocks and the twigs here and there then we start working with the small grass in the middle and the sides here and we worked our way up with bigger and bigger grass on the sides here later on we start adding the trees going from small to large or working with small large trees with large trees in the background and the small trees or smaller actually stand here in the middle and that is a very good workflow at least for me to sort of work with the late work with layering from bottom to top just small to big and always keeping in mind try and keep the assets in logical locations so more leaves and more twigs here on the sides and mainly just grass here in the middle and big trees at the back small trees here in the middle and these stumps here because in in woods in real life they these are mainly trees that are being cut down to prevent trees from falling over the road or take down thick trees and so on and then these small trees are growing up so try keep that in mind we're working on we're working on natural environments such as these and I really hope you learn something from this video and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Quixel

Views: 5,561,971

Rating: 4.9346051 out of 5

Keywords: Forest, UE4, Megascans, Quixel, Realistic, Woods, Real, Game, Art, Environment, Scan, Photo, Trees, Vegetation, Fast, Create, scan, texture, render, computer graphics, realistic, materials, artstation, lighting, compositing, scene optimisation, assets, modelling, render pass, digital art, colour correction, megascans bridge, vfx, cg, photo-real, photo-realism

Id: FzoY062kY1s

Length: 53min 29sec (3209 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/GodlyHair]

This was incredibly informative. I usually skip to the end to see what the end product looks like but I sat through the whole thing because he made it very accessible. It's honestly inspired me to try something like this when I can use my desktop again in the near future. Thank you for this post OP! You may have awakened a new hobby for me.

[u/lionrom098]

Really impressive work. An hour went by fast