Create a Photorealistic World in UE4

[Music] hey my name is Owen I'm an artist acquittal and today I'm going to be covering creating a realistic environment using mega scan and Unreal Engine 4 I'll be covering a bunch of stuff including sending up materials throwing over lighting those process settings and how I set up my scatter systems if you aren't already familiar with the mega scan service it's essentially a huge collection of scan services atlases and 3d meshes and everything is consistently calibrated so you can swap different meshes and assets out and know that the values are going to stay consistent it's a super useful resource for any kind of artists and it's constantly evolving with many new assets being added all right to start off I've created this basic empty scene in ue4 the next step will be downloading and importing mega scans assets and then creating master materials for them if you're already comfortable creating your own master materials and importing the assets feel free to skip ahead to the fun part where we deal with lighting post-processing and laying out the assets in the scene so I'm gonna head over to the mega scans site and I've already picked at a rock the library I think is pretty cool so when we select an offset to download on the Nagas camp site you're going to have a load of options here if you new might be very overwhelming all you have to worry about for Unreal Engine is that you have the real-time contact selected you can select laws if you want their level of detail so the meshes in the distance can be defined to be lower res to save performance and then you want your albedo cavity normal and roughness maps also checked let's go ahead and download that and I also I'm going to download a plant asset because I want to cover creating both opaque materials such as rocks and also masked foliage asset such as just down the line so this doesn't have as many options just go ahead and select jpg format and download that as well so when the asset to download it you can then import them to the unrelated there when you extract the zip file you should see something like this if you selected all logs you'll see several law normals this is fine all we're going to worry about now is lot 1 and log 5 and I'll show you how to blend between them depending on the distance that you're at so we're going to select the albedo file the cavity file the log 1 and allowed 5 normals and then the roughness fall and also the corresponding FBX file switch the actual mash files so we're going to go ahead and let them import when it gets to an FBX import dialog it should pop up with something and you can go ahead and import default settings all right so there's a few things you have to set up with the textures to make sure they displayed correctly internal engine any color textures like this albedo map can be left fine it's a compression setting of default which is perfectly fine however for any grayscale maps like the cavity or the roughness map we want to make sure the compression settings are set to masks next we want to make sure that our normal maps are displayed correctly too we want to just make sure that the green channel is flipped here and that the compression settings are normal which should be on by default so do this for both of our lot normals and now the maps are all ready to use so we have our two matched assets here and right now there's no material assigned so we're going to create a master material I've made a new folder called master materials and I'm going to add new materials and textures material I'm going to name it okay I'm serious cereal so let me jump in here you're greeted by the empty material graph and it can you you probably no idea what's going on but it's actually fairly simple when you're used to it and really powerful and likely to build a lot of cool things so for this basic setup we basically connect our albedo texture to our base color our roughness texture to roughness slot normal - normal slot and then we also have our cavity map which would multiply to over our base color so we quickly go over the map types and what they are if you knew this you're probably wondering where all the colors are essentially the albedo map is the color of texture without any shadow details so there's no lighting information saved in this color map which means you can light it at any angle and it will update realistically the second map is the cavity map this is small scale shadows in the mesh it's pretty useful if you're trying to add some micro detail and micro shadowing that isn't captured by the render engine by default then we have our normal map which says lighting information based from the high poly mesh so this really helps you boost the detail the low res mesh and help get the small fine details that wouldn't be captured by a low poly model and finally we have a roughness map this is basically a micro surface map which defines how rough or smooth the surfaces or how wet or dry looks in the editor so with that said we're going to go ahead and create a new texture sample parameter and this is the node that accepts textures and allows you to bring the mat into it if you redditor just a quick note I'm actually making a shader that's a bit more complex to allow for more artistic control over the assets but if you just on the plug-and-play you can simply copy this shader set up by up here and the assets will work just fine so by default we're going to grab our albita map from that asset and we're going to multiply the albedo strength by a scalar parameter and all that is is a number so you want to multiply it by whatever I meant I'm going to call this brightness and we're going to leave that one for now which won't do anything it will just be the same intensity but later on if we wanted to change the parts of an asset it's really easy to change this value and since we're doing a master material and all mega scans offset have the same input textures all we have to do then is create a material instance and swap out the material textures for each new asset that we bring in and then we can play with all the values that were going to set up and they'll stay unique for each asset that you have in the engine which is pretty cool so I shouldn't rename it's not as well so we would normally just input this I'll be the map to the base color but we're also going to use a cavity map here so we want to do is want to copy and paste this texture parameter node renamed cavity and we're going to select the cavity map here so we're going to run this through a power node which will allow you to control contrast of the shadows here which is useful so another scalar parameter hooked into the exponent there I'm earning a mid-cap all right so then how do we get these two inputs to go to win but we're just going to multiply the albedo body cavity so now we have the albedo color with the shadows of the cavity map overlaid it's not hard to see in this material ball here but we can see it very clearly on the mat in a minute if texture memory or shader instructions are becoming an issue for your project you can of course skip the cavity altogether and up the albedo directly into the base color instead so it's also a good idea to comment what you're doing if you select a bunch of nodes hit C and it's very easy to organize your material graphs especially if other people are using it or even for yourself later on it pays to be a bit organized right now in the early stages so we're going to make a cavity and albedo comment there so the next map we're going to look at is specular input and we don't actually need specular maps however like default Unreal Engine has a value of 0.5 here and basically for a lot of mega scanned offsets this can look like a white sheen over the mesh which can actually take away from the realism so I find if you multiply the red channel of the albedo by an amount and set that into the specular input it actually gives a cool result and I think it looks a lot more natural and it gives you more control over head the specular looks rather than have a constant white kind of Sheen over the mesh which doesn't look very good in most cases so I'm gonna rename this to speculate and keep it up one for now he's going to comment it just to quickly comment on this speculative trick I did this purely as an artistic choice as I feel it gives a bit more control over how the light hits the mesh however it's perfectly fine to leave the speculum plug blank and at the default value okay so the next map we need to look at is the roughness map so I'm going to copy PLDT logic here and I'm going to rename so we're going to swap at this I'll be the map for the roughness map which is right here and you can see the assembly type actually changed the mask which is what we want we also want to change this parameter to roughness amend I'll keep it at one for now which is not changing anything but we have to control this change later on I put one too so this would this would change how wet or dry the asset looks so we'll hook this up into the roughness input and we're good to go if you want to use a rewrite node you can you can double click on a wire and move it around just makes it tighter if you're worried about the wires getting all tangled so next up we've got the normal map so it's pretty easy so over in the copy paste is this texture node maybe normal and we'll select the correct normal and you can see example the type is to normal so a common thing you want to do with own maps is increase or decrease the strength of a normal map which can help take back or accentuate details on a mesh so it's really really useful and I honestly do the material function for this normally just material function is basically a snippet of material graph code which can be then in one node which can save space on your material make it really reusable all over the place but for the sake of this tutorial I'm gonna keep it simple and just power through it now but feel free to copy me since what we're doing is we're multiplying the red channel and the green channel by a scalar parameter and then appending in the blue channel so we're not doing anything the blue channel but we're multiplying the strength of the red and green vitamins so you understand this is totally fun you follow along if you want to have the normal strength motion that I have here so we're to copy it commenting even normal meant strength and by default I'm gonna keep it one but we can change this later on depending on the asset so we've got the red channel multiplied the green channel multiplied and then we want to append the blue channel to the red and green channels appended together okay so this is a normal strength and that goes into the normal input here like the specular trick that I showed before normal strength trick is also something that's an artistic choice and it's optional but I would recommend it especially for foliage if you want to push out some of the details and maybe effect as normal and even stronger or even take it back in cases where you want to settle them in a detail but nothing too strong alright so now everything's set up so if we were to go back to the editor we're going to save at this material and we can go back at here to the editor I'm going to find a mouse material folder I'm going to create right click and create a material instance and we're going to call this rock one so then I can move this to our rock folder and we have everything nicely here in one folder so get the info textures they put meshes and a material instance for that mesh this is my usual workflow keeps it nice and tidy and easy to find everything that you need so but default you're going to be great divide all of these great added parameters in this material we can override them here with the checkboxes so if you were to create a new rock offset if you were to import a new rock out said you just duplicate this material instance or create a new one from the master material and then override the textures here so the input textures would be overridden and you can still play with the values so each tweak here is only relevant to this instance so if you make a new instance of the material it will have its own brightness value if you go to the master material and you make a change that has to be actually compiled and you have to wait for it to save every time before you see a change but if you use parameters and material instances you can tweak on the fly and the editor so I will show that off real quick I'm going to drag adds a lot 1 mesh here we're going to apply the material to it and you can see it work nicely so now we can actually tweak these parameters on the fly like I said so we've got the main brightness of the asset we've got the cavity power which is the high frequency shadows of the match each bullet weak as well with a normal strength which is how much the normal map is x with a roughness map which is how wet or dry the mesh appears it's hard to see in that angle but it's different and we were a specular matte which is the kind of white sheen I mentioned before so by default you're actually getting like this if you don't if you just had the default value of 0.5 in the original shader said if you're going to have this kind of weird white overlay over the mesh so I recommend doing what I did here taking any it doesn't need to be the right channel of the albedo but basically any mask and multiplying it by an amount and going into the specular I will just help break it up and make it look a bit more natural so I recommend doing that and general so honestly most of the maps look great on default values but to have the control we play with them is very useful later on especially if you're going for a specific color scheme or rightness level okay so next up we're going to handle the foliage example I've made a new folder here and I'm going to import the foliage files you can see the structure is a bit different to the rock outs that we had but essentially it's the same we're having variations each variation has its own blood step and we'll use the same input textures so logs zero to two are going to use the atlas texture folder and then log three are actually billboards so they'll use the billboards textures here so you have to worry too much about this but if you did want to go into heavy-laden especially in large scenes you want to definitely read the billboards to save performance so we're going to go ahead and import the albedo the normal the opacity the roughness and the translucency so you can see we have a path city and translucency here and no cavity maps that's a change from our last asset okay so these textures have been imported and the reason we need its opacity map is to tell the material which areas we want to be rendered and which areas we want to be transparent so that it correctly shows the shape of the plant then we have the translucency map which may look similar to the albedo map at first glance but this is actually measuring the thickness or the translucency of each leaf which is really useful when you're simulating how light shines early something they used and realized we can actually use this opaque master material that we just made as a starting point for our foliage master material the reason we can't use the same master material is because we need to factor in transparency and masking which isn't present in these opaque assets so I'm going to duplicate this master material here we're going to name its foliage match material and I'm going to dive right in so we already have the logic we set up before so what do we have to add if we look back at our inputs here we have this opacity map and this translucency map and we don't have a cavity map so I'm not going to remove the cavity logic here and I'm just going to add a new duplicate of this albedo section or name and opacity we're going to find opacity amount have a lot here from this project time I should apply the right one which is this one and we're going to name this opacity thickness I wouldn't really touch this but it is useful to thicken or thin the opacity depending on what effect you're going for sometimes some foliage can look too thin in the distance internet or sometimes too thick up close so it depends if we want but it's useful to have this control so you can see the opacity and the opacity mask pins here are actually grayed out and the reason for this is we have to change our blend mode from on page to masked and this will allow us to input our opacity mask here so then the last thing we've got to do is input our translucency map to enable this we got to go to our shading model which is currently a default it and change it to sided foliage I also take this two sided box easily so I'm going to change this sss and I'm actually going to navigate here to the viewport select the node you can you can browse by name or you can select the text sheet 1 in the editor and hit this arrow and it will replace it here alright so we've got this negative rename here if you're wondering why I used the word SSS and not transition see when I'm naming these it's because I'm inputting into the subsurface scattering input which is what you expect so there may be a slight mismatch of terminology there and then we'll hook that into our subsurface color and it looks like we're good to go so I'm going to add one rewrite out here just to clean that up a bit and looks like we're ready to go so I'm going to save this out that's our foliage master material done very little different from the opaque so doing this work once means that you can basically add any manage new assets and all these the same master materials and you won't have to worry about setting new things up in the future we haven't actually added in our dandelion mask yet so I'm going to go ahead and do that I'm just going to choose a single match for now and drag it out into the world ok so we're going to do the same thing as we did with the opaque mask material when I right-click create material instance we can bring this in here so I'm asking to find this material and you'll see that shaders all messed up because we didn't actually change the defaults for the albedo normal roughness maps and that's fine it doesn't actually matter as long as the mass material logic is right you can easily override this stuff in the shader so to make this look good and correct we're going to just replace the Raquel video with the down line albedo the rock normal with the done line normal and the roughness map as well so now this should be looking pretty good so like the rock asset you can go ahead and tweak all these parameters I personally think that for a lot of the foliage assets it's worth increasing the normal strength of it default value it's fine but if you want to go a bit heavier you can to accentuate those details and it can work nicely so you can see the light updates very nicely when you move it around and looks pretty good okay so this is our example finished we've got our two masked materials which is your basis for this tutorial all right so next we're going to go over setting your blogs or levels of detail to really demonstrate what a lot is I'm going to duplicate this mesh and I'm going to replace it with the lower log that we brought in earlier so as you can see there was a little pop of detail there it's kind of hard to notice sometimes with so messes but essentially what's happening is the triangle count is being lowered between each loss step so we actually have a quite a drastic loss step here from 1 to 5 if you go over here or even hover over the assets you can see the triangle count here is 11,000 triangles and here is only 1000 triangles so basically the higher the triangle can the more performance every the asset is going to be so ideally you'd have the high terminal count meshes up close and then as you get further away it would start to switch automatically to the lower Logs with lowest round cans so let's set that up right now we're going to go ahead and double click into the static mesh we're going to scroll down here to the log settings and then we can go to this log import tab import log level 1 you could definitely start from log 0 and work your way down through each load step if you wanted to it's completely a few and depends on the performance needs of your project so for me I'm just going to go for a lot of five four now we're gonna hit open and then if you look up here you're going to see a new material flowers appeared and if you start to zoom out you'll see that it switches the mesh with that material so if you remember before we actually had a different normal map for the log five so we're going to just duplicate this material and I'm going to say raka one a lot of five max so all we have to do for this large material is actually switch out the normal map so you can see this is a lot of 5mm map we're going to pop it in here and then if we go back to our rock I said we're going to assign the log files map that we just created so now many zoom out you can see it's switching if you look up here you see loved one mod 0 I need to the updating triangle pens material is also updating and this is working as intended so now if you're an editor you will notice a pop whenever you get further away mesh and in this case it's actually really subtle but if you were to turn on your wireframe mode you'll notice the wireframe changes I'll even hide this to make it more apparent but the wireframe changes as you get further away so as you can see the difference between the high lot and the low lot is quite subtle in this case and what I did by creating 2nd material with a different log normal is actually fairly overkill typically you would maybe import any medium lot with the corresponding normal map and then use the UE for auto log tools to quickly create new set of logs for you based on your own parameters so it's very fast and easy to set up and it's less cumbersome as you're only using one material alright so that we blog setup we can go ahead and start thinking about lighting a basic scene before we do that I just want to make sure that you're aware that now that we have the master material set up we could download any of these rock assets and simply just make a new instance swap out the textures and apply the instance material to the mesh and then we'd have each mesh set up the same way so it's really powerful is amazing meshes on the site definitely check out and then at the base set up done behind the scenes it's just about importing as many different ones you like and then arranging them I also only really mentioned rock and 3d assets when I was creating the opaque master material but they can absolutely be used for surfaces too as they share the exact same map type input so feel free to use the same master material for any surfaces that you download and you can still have the same control and use the same parameters as you have with rock acids I've created this terrain in world machine which is a piece of software dedicated to creating detailed height maps and has the ability to bring in masks from erosion into ue4 which can then be plugged into materials so it's a really useful piece of software however it's completely different beast and not the focus for this tutorial at all so I would highly recommend if you are interested in creating a similar landscape to this to going on YouTube and having your search for all machine tutorials this one in particular is really good this basic shapes tutorial goes over a bunch of different terrain types like snow desert and shows a lot of common workflows so if you find that interesting you could probably then check out both machine and give it a shot yourself it's just not possible to cover such a detail topic in this focused tutorial so with that said I'm creating this kind of a Scottish Highlands type of landscape and I wanted to have those nice rolling hills and created a top cliff sections as well so I've already gone ahead and created a landscape material again this is something that's just specific to grading plan tapes and it's not possible to properly cover in this tutorial however it is just a simple to material blend and it's blending between grass and the rock layer so you can see that the mask imported from old machine is defining which areas are rock and which areas are grass really there's nothing crazy going on here it's a very simple to material terrain setup here's a look inside in case you're curious but it looks a bit more complex than it actually is I just have a few extra tweaks for artistic control but I basically have the grass layer and the rock layer here and there just to material functions so I can swap them out for other materials if I want to so each one is using a set of textures I created with mega scan studio using a bunch of the basic grass surfaces so I blended a few together and I'm bored of them the same goes to the rock layer it's more apparent here that it's just being a few different scans blended together exported from Mexican studio and then imported to ue4 so I wouldn't worry too much here there's plenty of good resources online about creating landscape materials and I mainly want to just have something interesting to paint the rocks over I've imported four rock assets from the legacy on site each of them here and I've just assigned the material instance based off the master material that we created earlier so you can see the asset IDs of each mesh as I hover over them if you want to follow along with the same meshes you can feel free to do so now to start creating the actual cliffs I just moved these four rock meshes up above landscape and all I'm going to do now is start moving scaling rotating and duplicating these rocks around trying to create some convincing cliff so let's and I feel like they belong inside the landscape so this can be a fairly back-and-forth process trial and error until you get something that's looking for and don't worry too much about it scaling unrealistically it really is all about the final result and how the meshes are blending together but it's a lot of fun to actually create kind of unique new clips out of a bunch of separate small rocks and it's pretty rewarding when you get it kinda blending nicely with landscapes so it's hard for someone to pick out where the landscape begins and where the cliffs and so as you can see it's fairly self-explanatory and just moving scaling rotating nothing know anything tricks or anything of that just a matter of kind of picking out interesting looking shapes you can see right here that the kind of main cliff in the center is very obviously flat and cut off because it's an open mesh which means the back faces and the edges aren't going to be rendered so it's important to kind of hide the seam with other meshes until you're getting this natural kind of result so I'm starting at one side with these smaller rocks and I'm layering them around to give a nice border and try and hide the fact that there's a very obvious seam going up the middle main mesh so I'm going to cover the side now and I'm going to try and tackle the top which will be important for kind of visual clarity to make sure that the it doesn't not not only looks interesting but also it looks convincing and looks like it actually stands on its own after a little bit of playing around with that I actually ended up getting rid of this kind of flat mesh because it just I just couldn't kind of hide a team and well enough to pass as a very interesting cliff however later on I do bring it back and it ended in the final scene so just a matter of playing around and seeing walk it's kind of working and what is always taking screenshots changing lighting scenarios and just having a look back and forth of different versions it's easy to kind of see what's looking good after you compare three or four different versions and usually fairly simple to pick out one that works best so I'm just kind of finding the spots that are weakest and moving new copies over and when you rotate them around you basically get a new side of the rock that is not ready visible which to someone who's just looking at this whole cliff as a whole they're not going to realize that it's the same Rock duplicated it's going to look like a different part of the cliff and nothing more so don't worry about reusing rocks a lot it's fairly easy to get a lot at a very few input rocks which is really really useful so start with as few as you can and then build them up if you feel that you need more unique shapes alright so after a bunch more scaling rotating and moving I've come up with a layout that I'm fairly happy with next I'm going to go ahead and walk through setting up lighting and post-processing from scratch so I've deleted all lights in the scene and we're left with a black silhouette of the landscape and rocks so nothing's left right now and I just tried to add a directional light to the scene which is your main sunlight change the moveable here because for the scene I'm saying with completely dynamic lights however if you're thinking about baked lighting or if you're optimizing you want to make sure you're on stationary or static but generally it's actually quite nice to work with moveable lights while you're in this stage which is you're blocking out the shapes and you're blocking out the different areas of the scene so right there I just dropped in a skylight which is your ambient light so this is the light that is indirect so coupled with your direct sunlight you'll notice you get a nice realistic tone especially in shadowed areas where the Sun isn't hitting you still get a little bit of fake band sliding which is nice to give that feeling realism to the scene next I added an exponential - fog component and this controls our global fog in the scene and as you can see I'm adjusting the start distance so that the distant parts of the landscape are affected by the fog and little bit of contrast so that our foreground is a bit more in focus and we can kind of get a better sense of distance it's important to note that you shouldn't go too crazy with this because it can look really unrealistic and kill the realism very quickly if you have two values fairly high so I experiment with the density the start distance and the height fall off and find value that works with you so next up I'm going to grab a post process volume which is the component needed for post processing the scene switching in to unbend make sure it affects the entire scene at once and you can see there is loads of different effects you've got rendering features we've got tone mapping and we fit all kinds of different cool goodies to play with here so I'm going to start with the emmys occlusion which is our shadowing and it's important to increase its fade a distance parameter here to make sure it's affecting the world and a large scene like this the default data distance can be quite low which means that you won't see an effect on distant objects then when playing with the power which is essentially as strong the amédée clusion is and the radius which is how far the distance is that another object and include another so I'm setting it down to a two or three which is a fairly low value but it's important not to go too heavy again with this because it can just look pretty fake if you have it at unrealistic values I'm also resetting the auto exposure here setting the min and Max into 1 which means it doesn't change because often if you're working on a scene and you change camera angle the auto exposure is going to mess up and it's going to change the exposure greatly and you'll start having to tweak values and realize you're kind of being messed over for the auto exposure because it's giving you different lighting values for different camera angles also just playing with bloom right there you can see with Hylian values you get this horrible kind of wet effect and it looks very fake same with the chromatic aberration and you can see that it looks very overdone if you put it past a small value so I would recommend turning bloom off keeping chromatic aberration at a very low value if any and the same goes for the grain and the vignette as well these going to effects are cool but if you overdo them it's very obvious and just kill then you're going to really going for so just be careful with these lawyers they can make or break your scene for sure taking a little look at depth of field here which essentially emulate said that the field works on a camera so you can have objects in focus and blow the background which is really useful for close-up shots and getting a more cinematic look overall in your scene so if I you reduce the field of view you can see the depth of field is more apparent and then if I find a sweet spot and just tweak that the field you get a nice kind of contrast and this is all very much taste and takes a bit of tweaking to find a cool result but especially with the scans you can get some really nice foreground shots if you just really zoom in on the details and blur at the background I'm going to leave this off while we work on the scene but just to quickly go over the color grading as well it's a really nice set of tone mapping and color grading tools in the editor and these are really good just like photo editing or video editing software to make final tweaks to the image when you're almost done but for now we're going to just work in the scene and I just moved all my lighting components into a folder which is useful to keep them grouped together and close together so you can quickly make changes they often depend on each other so you can see changing the angle and the temperature which is how hot or cold light is can make drastic changes to your scene so it's worth doing this all the time while they're working on it to find the best angles sometimes you realize that a different angle works way better so also under the skylight you can see that this tab here that says lower hemisphere solid color checkbox if I turn it off you'll notice that the indirect light actually brightens up quite a bit and it's almost a way of getting fake indirect lighting to your scene you also do this by choosing int int when the check box is checked and you can actually make the indirect lighting a bit more matching to what's around it so you can make it a dark tint of green to give slightly green shadows on top of the rocks so grass that was reflecting onto the rocks just for a bit more realism it's just a kind of advanced tweak but it can make a difference if you're sometimes your shadows look really dark in black and it doesn't really fit the tone of the scene so this is a useful tip also change the intensity I wouldn't be too scientific with any lighting values at all I think it's always about what looks best in the end so to play around see what looks good it's often finding the balance of the skylight and the directional light that's the hardest thing to do but you can see there I find a kind of value in the middle that looks pretty decent and then changes the directional intensity I get increased it a little bit and just playing with the angles like I said really important you can get so much out of it and never never kind of commit to one angle unless you're very very close to finishing the scene because there's always rooms change and that's the power of the engine you can keep changing and keep tweaking things and it's all updating in real time which is amazing now that we have the lighting setup I wanted to show you the difference between the actual meshes like the rocks we have here in this scene and the rock assemblies which are on the site like this one right here basically assembly is a selection of small rocks little scattered rocks and one mesh which is really useful to help integrate the rocks into the scene so in this case I'm using this asset and I'm going to start scattering these around the large rocks here to give a sense of depth and give a sense of kind of fall off from these rocks because right now they look very obvious that they're just big meshes that have been just set into the ground so to try and break them in and blend them in is really important I opened up the foliage painter tool which although it says foliage is also released 'fl for painting smaller meshes around as well as hand placing a lot of scatter meshes it's going to take a long time so I'm using this scatter said as I said before and isolated them all to single machines and bring them into the foliage meter tool I can see here that with them selected I can have control over the density the scale the rotation and put to other stuff so I'm lowering density and I'm increasing the scale so minimum five maximum twelve to give it a bit of variation but right away as I paint them out you can see does that kind of ugly kind of border and them from the actual base of the mesh and this does not look good does not natural but luckily ue4 has a really nice easy offset parameter here which can fix this problem really fast so basically saying I want to spoil my meshes minimum eight units under the ground which will hide that kind of space and if I think about again you can see we've got a perfect result it looks like the rocks are actually command and resting on the ground in a much more natural way so that's awesome I'm going to start painting all around the my new place rocks now and trying to make them feel like they're integrated a bit more so this is the fun part you can I've also just to make a note I've deselected static meshes in the filters tab over on the paint toolbar so it won't paint on top of the existing meshes it'll only paint on the landscape right now which is really so please want to have these around the rocks and not on top of the rocks too you can often get some weird angles and you see the board is coming out again in that case so I'm just playing with densities and scales and trying to paint around and seeing what looks good often it's a good idea to go overkill and then start erasing when it seems - too much but so far it seems like it's going pretty well it just really adds that nice natural line of where you can't notice lots of landscape and what's the actual acid anymore it's really good for blending I think right here I realize this patch is just too much so I undo that and focus on a different area so like I said making nice changes to the scale so you've got some variants in that it's really good and it's the raising areas where the fall-off seems unrealistic you want anything to feel too consistent or too kind of circular like the tool is the perfect circle so if you start noticing perfect patterns it's going to be its then start raising them away and make you feel a bit more natural so at this point I've covered most of the rocks and I think it looks a lot better I think everything is integrated much more naturally and we get this nice fall-off around the rocks which is exactly what we're going for so on this rock here as felt it was a bit strange so I increased the scale and blended in some bigger rocks there as well now that we have our cliff sections feeling pretty natural I thought it's best to move on to foliage so I imported this grass I sit the same way as we did with the dandelion earlier on and like the cliff assets I'm just playing with the density in the scaling in the scatter tool and seeing what kind of results I'm going to get so right here I just think it's way too dense so I'm decreasing the density until it feels like it's at a reasonable amount we want to be conscious of performance here and the higher density is obviously going to be much more performance heavy than low densities so I found a density that feels to me like it's decent I'm still getting good coverage but I'm not kind of sacrificing the frame rate and like the rocks it's good idea just to paint and naturally avoid too many obvious patterns and moving the light angle around like this can really help expose any kind of repeating patterns like that very easily so I'm also placed lighting because I felt the grass was shading a bit strangely and with these tweaks it feels like it's a bit more natural so you'll also notice that throughout the types you might want to change lining or the material properties to suit the scene a bit better so I've warmed up the scene and I've changed the angle and just finding the kind of best spot the sweet spot and this can obviously keep changing throughout the scene but like I said keep experimenting and find what works best so happy with this and I'm going to continue painting trying to avoid obvious patches I'll be going over again and erasing and when you start bringing in more and more different foliage assets the repetition or any kind of obvious procedural patterns will start being phased out if you start placing other assets in different random ways you'll really start to break things up and socia really fun so this is like the base grass layer of the scene and then we're going to further push it up with other assets all right so I've brought in a bunch of new assets from the next campsite some clovers tall grass dead leaves a bunch of other foliage assets so starting with the clovers bringing them into the foliage banker tool and adjusting density scale Patti Jewell and this is going to really start helping to break you up the kind of holes and the repetition with the grass so as I start painting these out you can see the holes are getting filled in and your eye is picking up all this nice new detail it's really important to note that you shouldn't go too crazy with the detail if you if you were to paint this at the ends of the grasses your eyes starts to just lose track of what's going on and it becomes too busy and too difficult to look at so it's a good idea to make sure that you have kind of patches especially for these kind of very detailed clovers and with the patches at least it brings your eye to certain areas and uh splits up the training a bit which is really good so I'm just kind of going over and looking and seeing which areas could use a bit more variation and I'm going to do this with every other fully adjusted that I'm using the seen until basically every layer I add it's going to expose new areas that feel like they need to have more variation and as I keep adding more assets those areas get fixed and they're less and less problem areas until we have a pretty much final looking scene next up I'm going to grab this done the line asset I'm going to throw it into the foliage so as usual and this is a really detailed asset so I'm making sure that when I'm painting that the scale is going to be correct and it's going to feel like it belongs in the world don't always use the same scale for all different assets sometimes things I she look better scaled up or down even if it's not on the present real world realistic you can still work in the scene so I'm just finding a scale that looks pretty much right here I'm just painting around making sure it's not too obvious or too out of place but that it's still adding something meaningful like it's often you can paint something and it actually just disappears because it's too small or too insignificant so in that case you wouldn't even bother having it there in the first place so you can see now between the terrain material and the assets we're getting a very nice kind of variation in terms of the color palette that's coming out we're getting kind of dark yellowy green up to the pure vibrant green as well so we're getting a lot out of it which is pretty cool and there's still a lot of patches you can see they're empty looking and them quite work so we're going to add more different foliage assets to help fill those out moving on we're going to grab some tall grass assets and bring them into the foliage painting notice I'm using log two here and this is because I'm just being conscious of using optimized assets to make sure that since we're painting these really dense cross assets we don't want to be using this super detailed higher poly assets we want to be using acids that look good enough for what we want and just range in this distance these look really good and there's no real reason to use the expensive lot zero or load one meshes so I think the Telegraph's is actually adding a nice amount of new height variations is seen nicely kind of hiding some of the rocks and just adding a bit more depth but it seen is at the point now where I feel it's time to evaluate the lighting again and see how it's hitting because I feel quite dense and a bit busy to the eye so I'm just going to work on changing the directional light intensity the sky light intensity dropping down the indirect light a bit and then moving around the light angles to see how the different angles are going to affect the scene overall and it's good idea to play with different kind of light scenarios so right here I'm going for a kind of sunset scene and sometimes you might actually realize that different scenarios make the scene look way better and you'll stick with those for the final version so always worth playing around but in my case I'm going to go and turn it back to what I had before and this is constant evaluation of what is working and what isn't I highly recommend taking screenshots using x9 and going into full-screen mode like this really useful to get a better sense of what's working so if you're constantly taking screenshots in full screen mode and looking back through the previous screenshots I guarantee at one point you're going to go too far and you'll realize that a previous version actually works better it's really hard to know what's working with your scene and what isn't so I highly recommend jumping into full screen mode having will fly around taking a bunch of screenshots and they'll really help especially when you're getting near the final stages of your scene next I brought in a few custom tree assets which I made using mega scans offices and a 3ds max plug-in called graphics which is really powerful and cool plugin and how they recommend it if you're building your own custom foliage because you can basically leverage the power of procedural trunks and stems with the nice scanned data from the leaves and from so it's really cool I highly recommend it if you're building custom stuff right now I'm starting to clear out some space from under the trees I'm going to start putting some dead dry dead grass and twigs under there because we want to have a nice variation from the healthy dense grass that's in the direct sunlight and then have some kind of more dead and fitting foliage underneath these shaded areas of other trees so you can see when I'm painting this out this nice dense layer you get this really nice fall off from the healthy area into the dense area and it ends up looking really natural so finally to add a little extra bit of depth I'm going to grab some twigs from the site and scatter them around also I've picked this outside out it's pretty nice and all I've done is downloaded it and separated out each individual twig as a separate mesh so that we can easily scatter it with the foliage painter right away as I start painting you'll see how fast it is to get it really nice convincing result just a really natural blend between the grass and the twigs kind of poking it it really sells that effect of the undergrowth so pretty happy with how this scene is looking right now I've tackled all the major areas that I wanted to tackle and it's going to go in full screen and have a look around see there's any final things I want to tweak just make sure the scales are right and everything is feeling good so I'm pretty happy I'm just going to go over quickly enabling that checkbox to paint on static meshes which would in this case allow you to paint wigs on top of the rocks if you wanted to add a little more depth instead of placing each rock down and having no kind of objects or debris scattered on top of the rocks you can do that here so you can be a bit hard to find a really natural-looking result but it can be really powerful just scattering little twigs and pebbles on top of the rocks just to give it a little bit extra kind of weight to them make them feel like they blend in a bit more I think this one was a bit overkill so I turn it back but scattering the twigs around near objects really gives them that kind of transition zone that they need sometimes so just to show trick to help blend your rock assets into the landscape of a better I'm just going to isolate only the rocks by hiding all other foliage layers and you may notice if you zoom closely into the seam between your rock and your landscape where they intersect you might notice that it looks very digital and harsh and in turn look very natural so it was a quick little trick that was shown actually by Ryan Brooks from epic I believe which helps you blend much more smoothly between two so you create a bitter temporal a note and multiply it by a scalar parameter and input that to the pixel depth offset input in the master material of the rocks so I've made a parameter name did a blender meant and I'm going to set the default value to something small if you set it beyond 20 you're going to start noticing that the entire rock starts to blend a little bit so just be careful with the amount here but if you play with it you can really soften that transition between the rock and the landscape so I'm going to just show you how it works right here you can see when I'm really bumping up the value you're losing some of the actual hardness of the rock but you're getting much more seamless blend between the landscape and the actual rock acid so you see that a really harsh line and then increase in the desert amount really gets rid of that so like I said it's more of a trick than a standard technique but it does help in areas where you're going to be up close you want to kind of get rid of that unnatural looking scene alright so that wraps it up hopefully you learned something new about creating environments and feel free to send on anything you create yourself to the quickl tools group on Facebook you find a lot of cool things there and it will make remember that you can apply these same techniques to the scene on largest scale to painting and moving our own assets there so with that I'm going to sign it and thanks for watching talk to you later [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Quixel

Views: 1,363,499

Rating: 4.9426889 out of 5

Keywords: UE4, Megascans, Quixel, Realistic, Woods, Real, Game, Art, Environment, Scan, Photo, Meadow, Landscape, Trees, Vegetation, Fast, Create, texture, render, computer graphics, materials, artstation, lighting, compositing, scene optimisation, scene optimization, asstes, modelling, render pass, digital art, color correction, colour correction, vfx, cg, photo-real, photo-realism, photorealistic, rocks, cliffs, nature, unreal engine, world, open world, photoreal

Id: ATX7kmET4zE

Length: 51min 24sec (3084 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2017