Create a Photoreal Beach in Unreal Engine (in 15 minutes)

the morning my name is Clinton Jones and I love creating photoreal 3D environments I draw inspiration from the places I've been around the world and the experiences I've had that shaped me as an artist recreating personal memories allows me to not only revisit those memories and feelings but more importantly they offer a unique and personal angle to create my art from it's almost a shortcut to developing your style and artistic voice so in this video I'd love to show you how I'm utilizing 3D software to bring my latest trip to life in the hopes of inspiring you to create your own unique experiences and since creating quickly is so important in today's day and age I want to show you how I'm creating these speed environments in one day's time shout outs to Aces for sponsoring this video stick around to learn all about the aces Pro Arts Studio Book Pro OLED laptop and how it can keep you creative on the go now if we're gonna create this scene quickly it's crucial We Gather the right reference a few months back I attended the third annual camp mograph a yearly multi-day Meetup where 3D artists Educators and Industry professionals step away from their computers and into nature to learn laugh and relax together as friends and family since Camp was held on the beach this year we gathered together on the warm sand to experience a glorious sunset together every evening the images and videos from this triple act as my creative cheat sheet and give me everything I need to pack our scene full of sentimental detail I'll begin creating any powerful free program called Unreal Engine 5. you can download the software in the description along with a number of other useful tools and resources but I'll start with the game project file in a blank scene with RTX enabled to navigate we can hold right click and use the was and D Keys q and E to Crane up and down and the slider on the top right will control camera sensitivity with an object selected spacebar Cycles between position rotation and scale gizmos control backtick will switch between local and World orientation F will snap your viewport to any selected object and the G key will show or hide viewport icons but where do we start I want to lay out the main building blocks of our scene first mainly the ocean the dock and our sky as well as our camera angle now if you've been watching my videos for a while now you know I'm all about getting to the overall Vibe as fast as humanly possible so we can spend time on the details later so let's sketch out our scene by adding an ocean by first ensuring the water plug-in is enabled and let's create a landscape object first for our ocean to live on let's switch to the landscape panel and create a landscape and search for ocean in the place actors window which is where you can create lights cameras volumes and various other objects like water and drag it out into our scene but for now let's lock in the next biggest element the lighting now you can use the default lighting setup in unreal but I'm using a plugin called Ultra Dynamic Sky it's incredibly versatile and extremely easy to use so let's adjust the volumetric cloud amount time of day slider and fog amount to get our lighting to the 90 Mark to add light shafts I'll search for them in the details panel crank the light shaft slider to make sure the effect is working then dial it back for a subtle look we can adjust our sun radius for a more dramatic effect tweak the sky saturation and overall intensity if needed now let's add our main subject next the old wooden dock since speed is my main goal I'm utilizing this asset pack on the epic games Marketplace and kit bash the dock based on my reference images from cam to make final tweaking easier I'll select every doc asset and hit Ctrl G to group them and now that we have a subject we can finally set up our camera by searching for cine camera in the place actors window dragging it out right clicking and selecting pilot camera choose your favorite aspect ratio lock the camera's Focus to the dock and line up your shot remember it's a waste of time to work on things the camera can't see so it's crucial to set up our camera angle early on in order to further focus our creative efforts and since I want to export an animated scene and ensure my camera stays locked in this position I need to create a timeline or a sequence as it's called an Unreal Engine let's drag our camera inside and add keyframes to the position and rotation to ensure it's locked in place and in case we move it it'll automatically snap back don't forget to set your frame rate to 24 for that nice filmic look and set your preferred timeline duration and to finally lock in our look I'll create a post-process volume from the place actors window which can use to control the overall look of your scene just be sure to look for Unbound and check Infinite extent now I like to make subtle color shifts gamma tweaks add vignette and film grain as well as control or render settings like changing our Reflection from Lumen to Ray Trace which is crucial for a scene like this now I'd consider this about 80 complete I'm generally happy with our lighting camera and composition and we got here in no time at all so let's move on to the next most important element the crowd atop Our Deck using miximo a free animated character Library by Adobe I'm able to grab a handful of different characters performing different actions by dragging the characters into the sequencer and selecting their animation you can drag out their handles for an infinitely looping character and since we're dealing with silhouetted people from a distance you'll never notice the duplicate stock characters that fill up this dock now for my favorite part adding the custom details that will make this scene special and specific to the time we all spent together in Silver Beach Virginia it's the story element that makes your art significant so I'll break each added element down in order of importance to the piece starting with this tower that was so unique to this location so let's kit Bash one from assets I found on cgtrader.com and get it out there I don't even need to texture it since it's only seen in silhouette and to connect this Tower to the rest of our scene I'll add another one way off into the distance and a smaller antenna attached to our dock it's what take makes it from a recreation to an artistic interpretation I did the same thing with both of these pieces of art referenced from my trips in Newfoundland Canada but now the image looks empty on the right side so I made this old fishing net in Cinema 4D by locking up the vertices of a sweeped spline and enabling rope Dynamics from there I made this low poly seaweed piece and cloned it across an identical spline a few feet higher with a cloner object and random effector I gave the seaweed a cloth tag and hit play the dynamic rope catches some of the seaweed on its way down giving us the perfect look just add some bamboo supports from the mega scans Library which come free with unreal 5 and we're starting to balance things out back in Cinema 4D I'll quickly model a buoy duplicate it across our mid ground and subtly animate them up and down in sequencer to fake that bobbing on the surface of the watered look since I know I'll create a nighttime version of this scene which I'll walk you through soon I'll create some string lights to draw the AI to our dock in c4d I'll use the same Dynamic spline technique on a sweep spline to set up our lights model a basic bulb and use a cloner set to object mode to duplicate it across our scene I'll export an fbx and bring it back into unreal making sure to uncheck combined meshes that way I can light up the bulbs only and for the final touch during our last sunset together at camp mograph we experienced this special moment the timing was perfect and I had to add it in so I modeled a low poly kayak in cinema animated the paddles with grayscale gorilla's signal plug-in which gives you full loopable control over any attribute from there I created a basic character in Das 3D a free character generator software brought him into c4d Auto rigged him using daz's importer and animated his hands to match the paddles I baked the single Loop down to an Olympic file brought it in unreal as a geometry cache and animated the loop across the Horizon with sequencer now I love taking my hobbies on the go and when it comes to 3D art and video production the Asus Pro Art Studio Book Pro OLED laptop has me covered and it's packed with Hardware to make creating scenes like this possible from anywhere in the world first off it's equipped with a gorgeous color accurate 16 inch 4K OLED display which guarantees true black values and the perfect accuracy we need when dialing in our look it comes loaded with an Intel I9 processor an Nvidia RTX A3000 with 12 gigabytes of vram and a flexible memory configuration with up to 64 gigs of physical RAM it also ships with a 4 terabyte SSD drive for quick file transfer and storage for all your applications now a really cool feature I dig on this Pro art laptop is the Asus dial which lets you control things like brightness and volume on the fly but also allows for mapping of custom inputs like brush size saturation or layer opacity the pro art Creator Hub lets you customize performance color screen calibration and the Asus dial settings the laptop's been a fantastic to my 3D workflow for on-the-go creativity and it's a wonderful professional grade laptop for any Creator so if you guys are interested in checking out asus's Pro art laptop for your on-the-go creativity 3D modeling video production click that link in the description it really helps me out thanks for your time everybody let's hop back in to the art so why stop with just the sunset scene let's have fun and experiment to see how far we can really push our scene for the night version it's almost as easy as moving the time of day slider until we see the moon and we can dial in its position with the moon offset settings crank the moon radius just a bit mess with the moon phase to get that copywritten look and tweak the texture brightness to make it a little bit brighter now it's super important to give yourself time to explore the various settings as you never know what you'll find and where your art can go let's light up our dock since we added those string lights earlier I'll apply this basic emissive material instance to our light bulbs but this isn't enough the emissive lights don't actually light up our dock so I'll create a rectangle light from our place actors window adjust its size and place it just above our string lights but I want to see the shape of the light in the fog and the only way to get that look is by ensuring our fog inside of ultra Dynamic sky is set to volumetric only then can we crank the volumetric intensity in our rec light settings to see our volumetric light shafts let's create a basic sphere from the place actors window add a red emissive light and place them atop each antenna for a touch of sweet sweet detail and that completes our night version but what about a super foggy version so years back I explored the Mount Wilson Observatory with my good friend young and when we got to the top we were greeted with an amazing sight massive Towers peering out from the thick layer of fog now let's see if we can get that same look with ultra Dynamic Sky selected let's change the time of day add some clouds and take the fog slider up and definitely adjust your exposure if need be let's search for fog in the UDS details panel and if we increase the base fog density and foggy density contribution we're getting close but now our Tower is gone but check this out if we tweak the foggy height fog fall off slider we'll start to get that effect we're going for finally I'll hide everyone except a lone character now I'm gonna be honest with you I almost couldn't figure out how to fix this ugly extra bright reflection on the water so if you're getting the same issue it likely has to do with the absorption settings on the water material so I just set the absorption to black and it fixed things write up so much better and with that we have completed all three versions of our scene but to export them and call it a day right now would be a disservice to your time and your art it'd be like making a song you're proud of but not taking the time to mix it properly so we need to do a bit of color grading and add some post-process effects to truly bring our art through the finish line and I'll be doing this with a free non-linear editor called DaVinci Resolve I'll start with the color grade by working in the shadows the mid-tones and the Highlight values first then in another layer or node in DaVinci since it's node based I'll apply any color or saturation tweaks next I'll create a node to add vignette another for Bloom which really helps me pop out the deck in our night scene and don't forget to blur your CG renders Just a Touch because perfectly sharp footage doesn't really exist and finally I'll add film grain last on top of everything else you can use DaVinci's built-in grain but I like to use grain from a pack called gorilla grain set to Overlay for best results after adding a bit of music with Paul stretch and Ableton Live our very personal unique environment is complete tonight if you want to follow this tutorial step by step that's totally fine it's what we all have to do to learn these programs but I'll encourage you to also use your personal trips and experiences as a jumping off points to push yourself really helped me find my style and I hope it helps you too this is the first video in a small series of speed environment breakdowns so feel free to subscribe so you don't miss those as well as my next big Community challenge in February of 2023. my name is Clinton Jones keep learning keep growing and I'll see you guys soon [Music] foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 317,478

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

Id: HJsgjZCyAyI

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 26 2022