Create a Post-Apocalyptic Road in UE4

hey everyone Josh powers here with quick cyl and in this breakdown I'll be walking you through some of the techniques I use to construct this post-apocalyptic suburban street scene the scene is almost entirely made up of mega scans assets that I not only exported straight from the library but also leveraged inside quick so mixer to create unique environment textures for the street and sidewalk and though creating such a detailed environment is always a challenge the task was much easier to achieve thanks to the gigantic list of assets available on the mega scans library which allowed me to focus my efforts on the environment art itself and not the monotonous technical work also be sure to join us on the 23rd of this month at 7 p.m. CET for a live stream where I'll be going over some additional techniques in greater depth and also answering any questions you might have and on that note let's jump right in ordinarily I would probably build this scene with modular assets that I could snap together to lay out a larger level however since the scope of this level is fairly limited I built out the street and sidewalks as unique meshes with pretty basic you v's okay I've imported my geometry and unreal but now I need some asphalt materials to apply to the street there are numerous asphalt materials and decals to choose from in the mega scans library but I wanted to add some custom details to these textures so I decided to take the asphalt scans and load them up in the mixer to create my own surfaces the base asphalt covers most of the scene so I wanted something that was a little weathered but didn't have a lot of unique details that would become obviously repeated throughout the scene I then duplicated the mix and made a couple variants of the texture increasing the damage and adding more grime by blending an additional scan data and adding decals once I finished I could either export the texture Maps through the export tab or as Viktor demonstrated in the dust to breakdown video which if you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend you watch it I can save the mix to mega scans library and export straight into unreal from bridge to do this I'll go into bridge and click on the mixer category where I'll find the three asphalt mixes I just saved out from mixer if I hold down control I can select all three of them and export them at once back in unreal I now have a custom surface folder with all three of the materials I just imported from bridge I'll copy each of the materials into the route custom surface folder now I could manually make a vertex blending material myself but thanks to the mega scans live link I don't have to all I need to do is open up live link and then I'll select the three asphalt materials and then I'll click create material blend on live link if I look in a folder called blend underscore materials I see that I have a blend material automatically generated for me all I have to do now is drag and drop it onto the road and I'm ready to paint with the vertex painting tool selected I switch between the r and g channels to paint down the different asphalt materials i just imported each color channel reveals a texture set based on how they're assigned in the material and you can even paint down puddles using the blue channel however in this case i chose to implement the puddles through mixers so i don't use the blue channel as i said before i'm primarily relying on the base texture and then using the secondary and tertiary texture sets sporadically to add some visual interest and textural breakup to the street this is looking pretty good but it could definitely use a lot more details so now i'm ready to start adding some decals decals are a simple but powerful way to add a tremendous amount of depth and detail to any environment it's also perfect for hiding repetitive features in your textures and it will help make every pixel in the environment feel unique I like to layer decals which I can do by adjusting the sort order so I can quickly construct new unique details for a higher level of visual fidelity as well as help me get the most mileage out of each decal for example by placing some grass Tufts just over this crack I'm not only adding a subtle depth of realism to the shot but I'm also disguising how often I use this same crack decal and other parts of the scene and of course decals can also be used in much more subtle ways such as asphalt debris dirt grime and leaves which will allow you to really transform the look and feel of your scene after following the same process for the sidewalks the scene is really starting to come together so now it's time to drop in some props I jump back into Bridge and select multiple props by holding ctrl and then export them into unreal with a single click I start off by placing down some of the larger prop assets like jersey barriers trees road signs barrels etc I then move down to some smaller props such as trash food containers and broken masonry here I'm layering decals with props to really help blend this asphalt rubble pile into the scene because the place decal will bleed onto the rubble geometry it really helps soften the transition from the prop to the ground as I mentioned with the decals when you layer assets you can get some really great-looking results okay so the scene is really coming along but it's still feeling a little stale and one of the reasons for that is because there's a lack of vegetation in the scene in any post civilized environment we would expect to see nature reclaiming anything constructed by humans to help me achieve this look I heavily rely on unreal scatter tool also known as the foliage tool back in bridge I have quite a large list of 3d plants that I can choose from that will fit this scene nicely I'll again select multiple assets by holding down ctrl and then batch export them into unreal I can actually have live link automatically propagate these plant assets into the foliage tool for me just by checking these settings here but I want to start out with just a few specific assets so I left that off this time I manually dragged those assets into the foliage tool window and then adjust some of the settings so that it can start painting them down in the grassy areas next to the sidewalk I then take a few more plants such as some dead grass clovers and some weeds and more sparsely populated the area to mimic seasonal die off and overgrowth of other non Graf's vegetation this not only adds more interest to the lawn from an aesthetic standpoint but also adds another layer of realism I like to place some of the plants by hand particularly in areas where I need to be mindful of the composition of the camera shot or in places where I need specific scale and rotation to match up with the environment such as grassy decals cracks and the curb so the scene is really shaping up but I need to make sure that I have sufficient detail on the ground especially for some of the closer camera angles I have I'll pop back into the library and grab some small rocks and pebbles to spread around the scene because these will be no larger than a couple of inches in world space and in some cases even smaller than that I can utilize a really handy feature in bridge to set the LOD of the asset to four or five since they won't need to be too detailed this will save me a lot of time and headache when it comes to performance and it's all done automatically with live link okay with the rocks loaded up I'll do a quick pass with my scale set a bit larger and the density a bit lower once I'm good with that I scale it down a little as well as increase the density and finally I scale it down even further and make the density quite high and begin painting and erasing the pebbles to try and replicate a lot of the subtle detail we see on the ground in the real world though I'm painting all around the shot I try to keep the bulk of the brushstrokes close to the camera or around contrasting surfaces like garbage props so that I'm not wasting Polly's on pebbles that will blend in with the surface right behind it I then do a quick pass with additional detail props such as small branches and cigarette butts though quality textures and decals can really take your scene far there's no substitute for 3d geometry especially on a low angle up close shot like this where the effects of a normal map really start to break down the reflected lighting in addition to the screen space ambient occlusion and contact shadows that geometry provides adds a boost of realism that simply is impossible to achieve with textures alone though we only covered a few techniques in this video the rest of the scene was built using the same methods we just went over and as you can see in the time-lapse footage I was able to take a very simplistic block out consisting of just a street and sidewalk and transform it into a highly detailed believable environment that's running at a smooth frame rate even on an older PC and thanks to the mega scans library along with bridge mixer and the live link plug-in getting the content I needed to assemble this level inside Unreal was quick and painless being able to import ready-to-use assets with just a few clicks lets me focus more on the artistic side of the scene and less on the tedious technical tasks I really hope you enjoyed this video and that it was helpful for you in some way don't forget to tune in on the 23rd at 7 p.m. CET for the live stream and if you have any questions be sure to leave them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them in the live stream thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time

Channel: Quixel

Views: 201,219

Keywords: Quixel, Megascans, PBR, Texture, Textures, Texturing, Stylized, Stylised, Materials, 3D, Sculpt, create, 3D art, Games, VFX, Decal, Quick, Fun, Time saving, Speed, Scans, Scan, Photogrammetry, Tutorial, Minutes, Beginner, Guide, Procedural, New, UE4, Unreal engine, post-apocalyptic, post-apo, TLOU, TLOU2, The Last of Us, The Last of Us 2, Days Gone, Quixel Bridge, Quixel Mixer, Mixer, Bridge, Environment, environment art, art, real-time

Id: kJuiSERx_AI

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019