Create a Tropical Island in Unreal Engine 5 (Tutorial)

hello guys smartpali here and welcome back to another video in this video I will show you guys how to create this tropical island environment inside of Unreal Engine 5 I will show you how to create the basic Island shape using the built-in ocean plug-in inside of Unreal Engine 5. we will then apply a custom material that has a wet sand and dry sand variation you will then paint foliage such as palm trees bushes onto the landscape and we will finally customize the ocean materials lighting and clouds to get our final result today's video is sponsored by surf shark and if you're like me you're frequently visiting many different websites chances are you probably ran into issues with websites that love to track you and sell your personal data these problems can be easily solved with a VPN like surf shark a VPN is a virtual private Network that gives you more privacy online vpns keep your online identity saved by encrypting the information you send over the internet and it does this by 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without further Ado let's go ahead and jump right into the video alright so the first thing I want to do is go ahead and a launch on Roll engine 5. of course if you're watching this video in the future and if you have Unreal Engine 5.1 you should be able to follow this tutorial exactly then pick the template that you want to start out with if you're going to use this for film video Live Events or for games I'm going to choose the third person template under the games section without any starter content I'm just going to name our project tropical island and hit click create so now that we are in our project here all I'm going to do is enable a plug-in real quick so if you go under edit and search for plugins I'm going to go ahead and enable the water plugin so just type in water here and click this checkbox to enable the water plug-in click yes and it will ask you to restart your editor so just click restart now now if this is your first time using the water plug-in it will take 15 to 20 minutes depending on how fast your computer is to compile all the shaders for the water plug-in so now that we're all done doing that we can go ahead and create a new level and I'm going to create a basic level here and of course you can go to file save current level as I'm going to save this as Tropical Island map so now we can go ahead and delete this floor we don't need that and we're going to go into the landscape mode so click the select mode and change this to landscape and for our landscape size we can just leave all the settings as the default of course you could change the resolution if you wanted a much larger landscape or much larger Island but I'm going to go ahead and just click create of course you could sculpt here by using left click and then Ctrl Z if you want to undo that I'm not going to use the sculpting brushes I'm going to do instead is exit out of the landscape mode I'm going to select my landscape and in the details panel I'm going to make sure that I check enable edit layers so make sure that we click enable this checkbox it's going to pop up with this message and we're just going to click yes okay so just make sure that the enable edit layers check box is checked now we can go ahead and click the cube plus icon and under the all classes we can search for ocean and we're going to see here water Body Ocean so we go ahead and select that and drag that into our scene and you can see we have sort of this little Island with this ocean surrounding us before we go any further let's go ahead and add the landscape material that will be our sand so navigate to the project files I'll leave a link in the description below they are free to download and once you have it downloaded you just right click and extract the file go to your PC documents unreal projects wherever you have your tropical island project saved you want to navigate to the folder and just open up the content folder and then with both of these folders open up you just copy the contents of the palm tree assets folder into your content folder and once you've copied those files over the underscore Main and tropical material go ahead and close that and reopen your project open up our recent level Tropical Island map or just go to where your Island map is and double click to open that up but now we should have this tropical material here that we can apply to our landscape so if we select our landscape in the details we can scroll down until we see landscape material and just take this Mi underscore tropical landscape and drag it into the landscape material first you're going to see that our landscape is entirely black and this is because we just need to create the landscape layer infos so if we go into the landscape mode under the paint tab if you scroll down here you're going to see we have this layer tropical layer all we have to do is click this little plus icon to create a weight Blended layer so click on that it's going to ask you to save the info let's click save and then you can see we have our material applied to our landscape now I'm not going to go too in depth on how this material works but basically we go to our tropical material and open up the material instance in the details panel we have these two variables that we can play around with I'm going to size this window down like this I have two separate materials there is a sand wet and a sand dry and so these two values determine at which point should the sand wet start and at which point should the sand dry start for example if I go ahead and create a shape Cube if you put the cube more towards the very edge before the water meets the sand and if you copy the value of the Z you paste it in for the sand Min and Max and then all you have to do is play around with the sand maximum to get the desired look so this case I have the dry sand at the top and the wet sand at the bottom another thing that I want to adjust here is you can see that this part goes down and so it has the sand wet right here so all we have to do to fix this is Select our water body right here and pull this down so that we don't have this sort of divot here then we may need to take this cube move it down a little bit copy the value paste it in there and then play around till you have the desired look okay so if you want you could copy the values that I have here on the screen so now we have wet sand surrounding the part where the water touches the island now I'm going to adjust the island shape so you can take any of these points and move them in I'm going to create a much smaller Island by taking all the points and moving it in so now we have a smaller Island we can go into the details panel and under the water height map settings if you expand this you can change some of the variables in here and that will change how steep the fall off is but what I'm more interested is in the effects so this will add some breakup in our Island shape so if we expand our curl noise here can add a little bit of curl noise so on the curl one amount we can add point three and what you'll see happen is it kind of adds this breakup to our Island shape of course you can play with all these values and get the desired look that you want I'm going to add point to one and up the curl one tiling to 20 and the curl 2 tiling up to 30. so I've played around with these values but like I said you can mess around with them to get the desired look that you want alright so now that we have our Island shape let's go ahead and add some foliage that we can paint onto our Island if you head over to the Unreal Engine Marketplace you can search for tropical and all you have to do is filter by free and we have this nice tropical vegetation banana plants so go ahead and download this and add it to your project all right so once that's downloaded and added we can go into our PN banana folder so that's the folder that was just downloaded and under the meshes here we have plants and props for now I'm going to go into the props so we have this these various ground leaves and bananas so we can go ahead and paint this onto the ground so to do that we can go into the foliage mode so click the select mode and go into the foliage mode then all we have to do is shift select these leaves and drag and drop them in the foliage type now we can shift select all of these I want to change our paint density to point zero one and maybe we're going to increase that to 0.1 and increase our brush size to maybe a thousand so this looks good we can start painting these leaves on our Island and then later on we'll paint the trees above these leaves all right so now that we're done painting the leaves we can go into our content drawer and we have under the PN banana we have under the meshes plants we have all these banana trees so what I'm going to do is select a couple of these plants and drag them into our foliage and then also if you download the project files we have some palm trees so if you go over to the underscore main meshes palm trees should have three different palm trees that we can use so select shift select those and drag them into your foliage then all we want to do is on check everything and shift select everything other than Dead Leaves and bananas that we painted already so with all those selected we can paint some and you can see that the density is way too dense so Ctrl Z to undo that I'm going to set this to 0.01 and I think that's a little bit more better of a density however we want to add a little bit more variation so if you go to the very bottom of the foliage editor we have some options here for scaling so what I want to do is for a minimum scale we can do 0.8 our maximum scale we can do two so this will add variation to how tall and how small are trees and plants will look so now when we paint them we have a lot more variations on our Island so now we have all of our trees painted on our Island you could fix and adjust some of the placement of the trees you can erase some areas and you can also add rocks and various other props and what I'm going to do first is I'm going to change the water material as well as the clouds and the general lighting so to change the water material first thing that you want to do is you want to select the water make sure you have the water Body Ocean selected and you want to scroll down until you see the water material under the rendering tab now you want to make sure that in your content browser click the settings here you want to make sure you have this check box show engine content and checkbox show plugin content so make sure that you have both of these check box enabled that way you can actually browse to these water materials so in the water material we can click this browse icon and it's going to show us where this ocean water material is stored inside of our engine plug-ins water content so instead of modifying this material we don't want to actually modify this material because this is our Global engine content so this will modify it for every single project rather than the single project that we're using so what we want to do is we want to duplicate this material go up and scroll up all the way to your content folder and just drag this and copy this click copy here into your content folder of course you could make a new folder and name this water materials just to keep yourself organized so now that our water material ocean is moved in there I just want to right click rename this to water ocean modified and then we can double click to open that up now there's a lot of settings inside of this water material but the main thing that I want to change is the overall color because right now it's got this very bright blue cartoony uh sort of stylized fortnite water so if we go into the water material if we expand the absorption we want to click this check box here I want to just change two values so under the alpha or the a I'm going to change this to 10 and then we're going to check boxes scattering expand that and we're going to change the alpha here and the scattering to .04 and click save that and then we want to drag our water Ocean material onto our water material and you're going to see that adds a more darker ocean color and of course if you want you can play with those variables to get the desired look or desired color of your ocean now one thing that you're going to notice is if you look off into the distance the ocean materials are not the same so we're gonna have to modify the ocean Farm material so to modify that material all you have to do is click on your water Zone you want to scroll down about halfway until you see right down here far distance okay so click expand that and you're going to see this water underscore far mesh of course you could also search for water underscore far mesh but once we found the water far mesh material browse to it it's going to pull it up in our plugins folder so we want to do the same thing by copying this over to our water materials and make sure you do copy here and set a move here and then once it's copied into our water materials folder we can rename this to water far modified we can go ahead and open that up and we're going to make the same two changes that we did in our other material by setting our absorption to 10 and our scattering to 0.04 and now we just select our water Zone and drag and drop that and save that and now you're going to see that the water material matches up and we don't have any weird lines on the edges the next thing that I want to modify is the clouds so the default Unreal Engine project comes with these default volumetric clouds and you can use control L to move the lighting around and it looks really nice in your scene but some of these clouds might not look the greatest so we can go ahead and add some more unique clouds using the volumetric plugin so if you go to edit plugins you can search for volumetrics and you'll see the volumetrics plugin all we have to do is go ahead and hit the checkbox to enable it and restart the editor all right and again if this is your first time using the volumetrics plugin it's going to need to compile shaders so you can see that it's preparing shaders so we'll go ahead and give it a couple minutes all right now that is complete we can go into our engine folder and make sure if you don't have the engine folder you want to click the settings and show engine content and show plugin content so now that we have the volumetrics plug-in installed we can go to plugins scroll down to the very bottom until we see the volumetrics content and in the content we can search for Sky materials and we have all these volumetric clouds I'm going to choose a volumetric cloud underscore zero two so if you select your sky and actually in the outliner if you suck the volumetric cloud you scroll down you have this Cloud material so just take this volumetric Cloud underscore two and drag and drop it like so now there's a lot more different volumetric Cloud materials that you can pick from and if you want you can duplicate these Cloud materials and play around with the values of course if you're going to do that make sure that you copy it to your project content rather than in the plugin content but now you can see we have some nice clouds of course you can change the lighting and time of day by hitting Ctrl L on your keyboard if you want sort of a sunset or if you want to put this on way up in the sky it's totally up to you now of course you can go into quixel bridge and add custom assets if you don't have a quick little Bridge account all you have to do is sign in with your epic games account you have access to all of these 3D assets you can add things like these Thai Beach rocks all you have to do is drag and drop them into your scene and it'll start downloading automatically but as you can see it's really easy using some of the built-in water tools and plug-in content to create this tropical island inside of Unreal Engine 5. now if you guys enjoyed the video make sure you leave a thumbs up and also a big shout out to Surf shark for sponsoring this video if you guys want to check them out make sure you use the link in the description below and use the code smart poly for 83 off anyways that's pretty much it for this video hope you guys enjoyed and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Smart Poly

Views: 36,858

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5 Release, Unreal Engine 5 New Features, Unreal Engine 5 Next-Gen, Unreal Engine 5 Nanite, Unreal Engine 5 Lumen, UE5 Release, UE5 Next Gen, UE5, Lyra Starter Game, Unreal Engine 5 Lyra Game Tutorial, UE5 Lyra Tutorial, Unreal Engine 5 Open World Tutorial, Unreal Engine 5 Open World GamesUnreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5 Open World Games

Id: AjqO3MjBbsw

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022