Create World of Warcraft in UE4: Extended Breakdown

hey guys welcome back to another Friday stream we are live today with qixels very own Victor omen I apologize if I butchered your name you know how us Americans do today Victor is going to be showing us his incredible just absolutely incredible Orgrimmar scene from Warren of Warcraft I can't really say enough good things about this stream so I'm just gonna stop talking and let him take over from here well thank you so much Jonathan I'm really glad you like it and I have to say thank you so much to everyone for it for all the kind words and the feedback it's been it's been overwhelming and I'm really really glad you guys like it so I'm super excited to be back in this streaming share it's always a lot of fun and we have a long stream today we are going to cover a lot of different elements and techniques and tips and tricks of this scene and I'll go over the talking points in a moment but yes so we're gonna be streaming for around 2 hours I think there's gonna be some room at the end for a Q&A and if you have any questions during the stream just you know drop the question and Jonathan will try and interrupt me I could good spaces places and I'll try and answer them and if you know there is anything in particular you want me to talk about just once again drop a comment in the in the chat and I'll try and cover it so yeah I'm showing the showing the fly through of the video here on this on the screen and this is if you didn't know it's from Unreal Engine 4 and runs in real time I made a video in a different kind of style than we usually do so usually we do sort of overview breakdowns of how it was created and for this one I tried to do a different approach where I had more of a post-mortem sort of approach so I talked about things that you know went well things that didn't go so well things that were difficult and challenges that I faced and it was a it was really fun to make that kind of video and based on the comments it feels it sounds like you guys enjoyed it as well which is really really fun to see in here so and in today's livestream has a certain video I will be going over you know way more in depth and I will try and cover as much as possible so things I'll be covering is gathering or pixel depth blending how may the road leading up to the gate and banners in Marvelous Designer how I made the trees even though they're pretty basic and how I worked with a padlet and palisades in Maya fog cards how I created the cliffs on the sides how and how how I made them look better with world aligned textures how me the scaffolding for the gates the wrapping look at the the fabric wrapping around the it was it called logs for the towers etc and I also touch on post-processing maybe some lighting and then there's some key ways so if I if there's anything I missed here that you really want me to cover and just let me know in the comments so if we start off by jumping into unreal I have it open here so we can just sort of take a look at just take a get an overview of how sort of big the scene is just so you have an idea so what I what I've tried to do here was almost a sore vertical slice you know like I chose this area of Durotar and and I you know try to make this part look as good as possible like a proof of concept or you know like a diorama or something so it's a lot of comments people asking me to run through the gates and into Orgrimmar so I'm sorry to disappoint that I did not make the entirety of the town of Orgrimmar so it's like this this is this is like the the area of the world that I made and it's running as I said in real time there's it's there is no no GI or a real-time GI going on it's just dynamic lighting no nothing that nothing no weird strange builds or anything it's just 4.22 on fun wheel using mega scans assets both the 3d and 2d decals three foliage in combination with custom models that I made in Maya and I'll be covering a little bit about that as well but the thing that I got the most comments on and and compliments on was how everything sort of blended together and how everything fit together so nicely and that is something that I actually worked really hard on and it was like the first thing that I looked into like how do i how do I make things you know just to blend smoothly into each other and the way I did that is by using pixel depth blending or dithering as a there's a lot of different names so if we take a look at i'm just grab one of these assets here just drag it over here to the road or the path there we go so if i bring up the options for this one over here this you see if i this one has the transition yes so if i drag this so we get some weird dating going on but if i if i set this to 150 you can see that it starts blending together with the terrain nicely and jack covered this also in the well i think was a previous stream right Jonathan it it was indeed it was the one with him in the the alley and he did mention it was pixel depth offset with a temporal anti-aliasing blend I believe precisely so I think you covered that quite a bit in detail I'll cover it as well but if you know if you want to learn some other stuff about it just you know feel free to check that out because I'm sure he's covering some things that I'm not gonna cover but I'm just gonna real quickly show you how it's set up so we open up the master material here you can see these three notes here this is what controls the blending and it's not a perfect solution but it really really does help blending stuff together and basically what it's doing is using this data temporal a a node and I'm multiplying that with a transition know what I'm calling it it's just a scalar parameter multiplying that those two together and plugging it in to dip the pixel depth offset you can go a bit more advanced if you want to I I tried using this set up but I really didn't see any major major advantages of doing this so I just you can see here you know I just unplugged it and went back to the to the basic one but it's it's something that's getting a lot more popular I'm seeing a lot of people use the technique and you can go you know ass advanced as you want to with that and it's it's an incredibly powerful and I used it for pretty much everything not only for the rocks like this but also for the like the path like the tracks or trails going down the street and so I can definitely recommend that and its let me find a good example of it yeah I guess the streets here or the trails is a good one I just select that one find the material and if I turn that off you can see you can see how much of difference it makes it just ties it together so much more nicely but as I said it does have its drawbacks you can see there's some flickering going on it can do with look a bit strange at certain angles so be it be careful with it and you said use it in moderation I would say yeah that's for scenes like this you know with sand and a lot of intersecting assets and in snowy snowy environments it can be extremely handy as well so that was the first thing and there are a lot of really good in-depth tutorials on this online if you want to check that out so as I said we have a lot a lot of things to cover so I'm not gonna I'm gonna try not to is snow in too much into each part so moving on to the road which I briefly touched upon the if you those of you out there with eagle eyes you probably saw these are weird dots scattered across the road here and what's going on there if I select these two and hide them you can sort of there we go you can sort of see what's happening it's a blueprint which uses splines to or a spline mesh that sort of extrudes along a path that I set myself and along that path I have a material this track material you can check out the material or the texture here just a regular sand material I think there yeah there's a nice directionality going on in there so I used that worked really well I'm just gonna show you how it works so if I whoops I did you just have to give a shout-out to Jack here by the way because he's the one who is the one who sent this over to me and I use similar blueprints before but this one worked really well so if I can just find it and browse assets there we go so I just drag this out and a sign I get track material and select this part here hold alt I can drag drag it out and you know move it the way I want it and the downside is that you can't rotate or I just haven't figured out how you do but so it just sort of works in into axes and yeah incredibly powerful for things like this I think you can go this way as well yeah you can no he can't oh you saw a cam there go yeah I used that for all these different paths I have four different paths like this intersection here so what I did I just scroll back up select this one you can see I have actually have a whole bunch of these tracks just eating you know everywhere I use them down here as well oh yeah this explains why I have so many I forgot about that actually I actually made a like a field a small field here outside this Hut and I choose this path path tool to sort of make it look what's a word and looking for when you plow yeah a plowed field so yeah not the most optimized solution but it worked so yeah that's that's how I made those and I think that things are not really cool and you know it's it really did add a lot of directionality and to this to this path and I struggle a bit with that since I used just a tileable texture before so it was kind of hard to know without doing a lot of UV you know UV work to get it to get it to a branch off there so yeah this this really helped with that and it works really well here in the highlight I think so if we take a look at the tracks it's not that bad it's not the most advanced blueprint so I mean if you if you want to know how this was made just you know pause your screen take a screenshot take a look at it there we go got it so those were the roads and the paths let's move on to the next part here so do we have any questions by the way Jonathan on anything that I've covered so far oh there's always questions Victor yeah like that which is one of the most pervasive questions we're having actually two of them and they're both pretty much related is would you be so kind as to show the frame rate you're getting by hitting ctrl shift H right now so be so kind as to tell us your system specifications sure so I've actually kept the frame rate because of this dream I am for some reason getting some I had the same thing with the Silent Hill and streaming if you guys remember that for some reason my computer just you know it just dies when I use OBS or you know any sort of screen sharing tool so I've kept it to I think 30 or 40 yeah it's capped at 30 just to give ya I don't know what's going on but I'm getting I think 60fps in editor at 2560 x 1440 pixels I'm not sure what that would be ease of in game and not in editor I have a on this computer my computer I have a which CPU when I 9 and 909 what is it 99 99 hundred K it's weird I think name I have 32 gigs of RAM a 20 80 TI and I'm running I'm running unreal on a regular 7200 rpm hard drive a real beast of a machine in other words it's a piece of machine yeah so but I mean I think I think this could run on an average machine considering the fact that you know I'm running it at to 2560 pixels so I haven't really haven't really optimized it like I haven't I don't really make this with with as a game level it was more more of a cinematic spec for this one but with a little bit of optimizations I'm pretty sure it could go up to you know 100 FPS no problems at all and especially optimizations to the lighting I think lighting and the effects that were probably the main performance hogs in this moment I hope that answers the questions it does and there's more one foolish you would do another question before I move on to the banners this is kind of a question but it's also not a question that would normally be asked in a live stream but I'm just gonna ask it because it's really awesome get dunked would like to know if you could create for them a thirty four hundred and forty by a 1440 resolution wallpaper of this particular scene I have gotten a lot of requests to make wallpaper resolutions and you know what's called live wallpapers in wallpaper machine or something and one of those things I can definitely do you know I have I have a really high res render a second I can totally make a high res version upload that I maybe we can link it on in the video description or something but yeah I'll look into it definitely and thank you so much for for one thing to have Nicene as a wallpaper that's really really flattering thank you cool so let's move on to the next part because I got a lot of questions about that as well and that those are the that is the banners there are quite a few banners I think there is there are three different versions of them and the way it made them were in in Marvelous Designer so I used Marvelous Designer and just pretty much baked it down from a high to a low poly and then I used a mega scans material on that use the curvature or an AO maps on that to to get some more edge definition and so on and there we go and then I just used a I can't remember where where I got the mask or if I made it using filters in Photoshop or something and you sort of get that you know effect of it looking like it's sort of fraying up for what the word is in English so we can just take a quick look in marvellous and I'm not gonna do a in-depth tutorial on how it works but as this is the scene and it's you know really nothing nothing difficult at all it's I just made a pattern I hung it on this sort of frozen plain here put a stick here as the avatar to have it sort of interact with it looking like it's actually hanging over a pole or something then I did a whole bunch of surf free hand stitching on it so I guess if we reset the 3d arrangement like that and hit space it's not increase the particle distance so we don't have to wait for too long for it to render or simulate but yeah so there we go it's draping and now it's going to fall into place you know if I didn't know better I would say that was a grocery bag well thank you it does look like it yeah you're right so really that's that's how I did I guess I can show you just real quickly how how I put it together so what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and delete this and I'll delete this I'll just sort of keep this this avatar in place here so you we have something to work with so I'm gonna start off by making this sort of plane and that's gonna hold it in place I'll just move it like this back here right click on it so that we freeze where is freeze there we go so that means when I had simulate it's not gonna be affected by by the by physics or anything and after that I just did a I can find it I think this one no it's this one polygon so I just made a shape like this and this is free handing it and something like oops Oh No remove the whole thing he's doing real quick so basically I'm just making a you know multi sided polygon and like so so now we have this shape I'll just move that into place and rotate it so that it's you know in a good spot to start simulating and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to sew these parts here to the frozen plain so I'll just use the I think a key I always mix up the yes this one I think no this one I'll just select what I want to sew and what I want to show it to so now you can see here we're getting these lines just indicating that it's that they're sewn together I'll just do the same thing on this side like so and now they're put together so if we hit simulate it's going to drape and fall into place hopefully actually I'm going to reduce the distance of the particles just so it goes a bit quicker there's gonna be start draping and there we go so it's a really cool tool to use I use it for a lot of my projects you know for for banners and flags and you know just hanging fabric and and what I did then to to get the internal lines I just used if I can find it I think it's this one internal polygon line I just made a line like this hit enter and it's just do a couple more like that and one between those two and then what I have to do is just select lines like so and I just do you know max out the fold strength and put the fold angle to 360 and if I assimilate we're probably hopefully yeah then we can start seeing the the folds there and then we can always go into the fabric and adjust the details I think the bending weft is the one that has the most yeah exactly so this sort of makes the ear makes the folds look even more pronounced and as you can see it's really high poly so basically what I did when I was happy with the simulation on the way it looked I just selected it I made the particle distance even greater which made it made it high poly or a little more low poly I mean I just exported that so I exported both the high in the low poly and baked it in tool bag and then I assign a material to it this high level fabric material from MIT from the mega Science Library did some shader stuff where I where I did sort blended the curvature and the AO the others had control over the two different elements separately and that and that's it really so the difficult part there was getting you know the actual you know draping and hanging look you know I it's a really cool tool I remember you know ncloth in in maya and that was just a pain to work with so yeah and the good thing is you know you get a really good UV from from árboles so combining it with eight alabama Tyrael it's gonna give you the correct and deformation of the of the textures as well marvelous looks like such a really good tool I've always wanted to learn it I know some people in the chat but asking about it - what would you say is a good resource to start beginning at oh hey I approach learning things is I always have something like I always have a task I always have a challenge that I need to you know a problem that I need to solve and so you know I find the tool that we'd use and then I learn it by trying to figure out how to solve the problem and that that's usually disserve angle at an angle of attack I have on learning any any program so just jumping in the deep end and learning it but the way I learned it was actually a man you know when I made the the space the spaceship so I just go here where is it do-do-do-do-do-do-do should be down here there we go so this environment here so pretty much the entire environment it's just you know fabrics so like how do i how do i make padded padded surfaces so you know youtube videos and documentation so and i can't really give a good as a resource where you start learning I mean there are so many tutorials on it on YouTube you know hundreds of them so yeah but some good reference for it is the late and great pulpit para yeah he used it to like he was a master so you know if you want some good good resources and good you know something to look up to like check check out Paul the para stuff is absolutely amazing it's such a such an reaction I miss that guy riff buddy yeah got another question for you too we would like to know what the MIT map settings are for your textures in the distance differs greatly that differs very greatly for some some services I have set it up set it to sharpen like between sharpen 4 and 10 and on some I have turned off map map map mapping altogether and which is you know as I said before and one thing that can be optimized really really quickly and it's just you know I'm just pretty the sake of it looking sharp and crisp for the renders everything I just you know disabled mipmapping for some things this one here like the wall and I got some comments on like asking just like you asked now like how how do I make stuff in the distance book sharp yeah if I open this back up I just said the mickjen setting to sharpen 10 which is extreme if you think about it but it in some cases it could work really well and like this wall like it has this sort of like and this moss so for this it worked really well otherwise I would recommend not going above sharpen 4 or something like that because it can really distort the textures and in some cases you actually want to blur it I've noticed like sometimes you get some really nice results on blurring so do make sure to play with these settings because different projects different scenes have their different needs so you know play around with them and I know I really wanted to have a scale read well on the wall so that's why I went you know you know all the way may sharpen ten just to get every single possible detail from there and just having a look you know really high fidelity and for some other things I have disabled mipmapping altogether I think I did so for these rocks I may be wrong though no I would see why you would do that because the rocks would just become muddy at a distance for the dips become so prevalent yeah that is that is a that could happen for sure yeah it differs i-i've set it to the mid level that I found to be the you know the right choice for for the application so it's and it's hard to give a man a good answer to that just you know if you work on your own project just you know analyze it like try different settings and see see what works best and it's actually possible to like if I go in here just select it I get mega scans folder and I search for you know roughness not roughly in this roughness there we go and if I just select a whole bunch of these I can right click and go to asset actions and both get it via property matrix no I can just go in here and search for MIT and I can set set a value to you know a bunch of takes it at the same time so this is actually something that not a lot of people or not everyone knows about and it's it's an extreme time-saver you know in a lot of projects like I I'm not really I'm not really I'm not really relying so much on the roughness maps for this one I'm mainly relying on the albedo it possibly the AO normal map and not so much the roughness because you know yeah it's there's not really much lighting going on it's meaning the shade so what I did for a lot of these is I just selected you know everything bulk selected and I reduced your the resolution and changed mid map settings for a bunch of them which would normally take you know ages otherwise so if you didn't yeah yeah exactly that one by one so the only thing that I can take time and something that is good to keep in mind is you know don't select every single map in your project because that's gonna crash our engine because you know it's reading in every single texture so if you have hundreds yeah then you're gonna you know take the time it takes to load one map times that with a hundred you know so just something worth keeping in mind something you might want to answer to our buddy George in Ava's galoot II I'm so sorry if I may I think is obviously the good thing I think oh good lord well so Georgine wants to know how long it took you to make this and please accept my apologies for butchering your name again I'm so sorry so I did not count so I did you know I did other stuff as well and alongside this but I think maybe two and a half weeks of you know effective work like including you know reference gathering and recording the videos and post-processing is that yeah I think I think two and a half weeks there abouts yeah I I should probably do like yeah I should probably probably do some counting on that just yeah because a lot of people are asking me so I should I should figure that out so let's see here so next was the tree and the trees are so they're never you know really in focus they're always sort of on the side or in the background so I didn't give them a lot of love but so if I can if I just go in here I can open up the scene I can check it out so through you there we go and I'll see this so actually kind of ashamed of this oh yeah it's the way I made this yes I actually took my open up the bridge here and search for tree yeah I just used this tree stump here i duplicate head hit and I just jammed it into itself a bunch of times oh it's this is like one tree duplicated like four times oh you see um one tree two trees over there three trees and you know it's really high poly I used a lot zero I'm sorry I mean I should have confirmed conservative Polly's there but yeah that's the way I made that just jammed it into each other and then four but then there is one thing that I actually want to talk about that I'm not ashamed about that I'm actually pretty proud of and that is a technique to make the leaves look more painterly so if we take a look here like they look really lush and almost yeah almost like painterly because like that was I was going for for this this whole project they look you know like almost like an oil painting or something like it's like almost abstract you can look over here like it looks super soft and translucent and yeah so the way I did that like I really struggle like I tried to use subsurface scattering in like it just didn't fit the style like I could make them look realistic but it didn't fit so um the way I approach instead was I used transfer attributes so to excuse normal piece yeah yeah so to explain this in an easy way so I have a box here just a cube you know hard hard edges and nothing like it's just like I can create a new cube and I just you know there's no nothing going on with it really it's just run-of-the-mill cube default and what I did then and or sorry in order to do what I did I took a sphere and place it on top of the leaves or the cube in this case and are you selected a sphere select the cube and I go to mesh and transfer attributes in the options here I just turned off everything except for vertex normals which is set to on and then I hit apply it closed and if I move the cube out of the way you can see that it inherited the normal normals from the spheres we actually got a sphere sort of shading on this cube so if we do the same thing is undo that move it back and if I take a cylinder instead you can actually see the result even more clearly so I just moved this in empty a good spot and select the cube that's inside cuz mesh transfer attributes hit the options and apply so now if I delete this one you can see that nope you could not wonder why there we go yeah so now we can see that the cube actually looks like a cylinder very much like it did before with it with a cube or a sphere but it's getting a hard edge up here so if we like if we put these side by side you can see that you know the cylinder has a hard edge on top just like this one and it sort of rounded everywhere else so that is why I made the oh that's why because we're linked obviously yeah so if I delete that this one and reverts so I guess I have to delete the history and then yeah exactly so that's the way I did that so if if we were to up into reserve we do this sound is duplicate the canopy here and I'll unlock the normals so this is the way they look you know before I figure this out so I'll just go ahead and scale this up and you know delete the bottom part and I'll adjust the shape so that they're a little bit more similar maybe delete this bottom circle here scale this up and sort of fit them together select the cylinder or sphere select the canopy hit mesh edit or transfer attributes and there we go so now you can see that it was is looking way more soft and like more painterly so obviously you can you know you should tweak this and make it make it a bit a little bit more tightly fitting but yeah that is the way I made the the canopy of the trees really useful especially for like if you're going for a more painterly style like this one so go back here so now we can probably see so what I meant before about it being you know soft and round and more lush if you're wondering for the view guys who use 3d studio max like I do the reason why I called Victor and normal thief earlier is because that's actually what the script is called slide normal theif you do the exact same process Oh ready yep huh cool now you know so what do we have any questions ah let me look through it looks like it nons been handling most of them but uh here's here's a good one Chiba sck would like to know how do you achieve matching the color of all the textures and materials in the scene that is a good question so if we go to the main view here and so I'll just go ahead and hide the enlighting and go into like the unlit view here you see that the all the colors fit together really nicely and except for the wall which is a bit more cold in its colors and that is that was deliberate so what I did first like if you saw the video and sort of the post-mortem overview video I like the thing that I nailed first was environment and I spent a you know a lot of time curating and finding the acids and materials I was gonna use and you know I did a lot of work on the environment before I sort of started touching on the on the wall and a big part of that work was as I mentioned previously in this stream like figuring out like how do I get it to blend like literally blend between the assets and the surfaces the second part was like figuring out the palette the palette and the like how how to match them together easily and nicely and and one thing that I wish that I would have done was to would have been to create a what is called a material material parameter collection in which you can actually create you know scaler parameters and vector parameters to sort of tint every single material that uses that that parameter actually I did not plan to talk about that but I guess I can actually do that so if I just make a new material and here I'll call this red master and I'll just duplicate that and call this oh there we go and call this the blue master there we go so I'll price you know that that's stupid oh yeah never mind never mind what they're called so what I'll do now is I will create delete this one I will create a material parameter collection here under materials and textures and I'll call this just param collection just for the sake of this demonstration if I open this up I get nothing I get scalar and vector they both are empty and if I add an element here expand this I get a new vector I can call this like tint like global tint and set it to be white like so and I will close this down so if I now open up the blue master and I create a parameter so this is the blue master yeah so disregard the naming I'm just gonna I'm just gonna do this as a quick demonstration here and I'll just make a multiply node by holding em and clicking and if I then take the parameter collection here drag drop that into here you get new techno dear that's called none and that is because we have no parameter selected here so now that I select the global tint which we created in the parameter collection I can actually use that parameter in my material so I'll mold now I'm gonna multiply the blue color with whatever tint I have in my parameter collection if I drag pull this into base color oh and you know dudududududu is that because it's a four let me just see here I'll just do a mask that's work yeah there we go alright save and I will do the same thing for the red master please copy this open that up paste put the interface color I always make this red you see we have more of a visual visual visual guide here and I'll just go ahead and place two cubes here in the world skill this up move this to the side and this one will get the red material other one will get the blue material so um if I'm doing everything correct and not making a fool out of myself they should both get multiplied with whatever value I place here yeah exactly so getting a weird color values probably did some weird math there because II so if I if I would have used this technique with by using like a tint or they can overlay or something I could probably have saved a little bit of time where I could you know just have a master tint on everything but what I did is I actually just added a tint node to the master material for every single asset in the scene we didn't Adams are tinted with so that is the way I sort of blended everything together it was there's really not a you know ooh-ah-ha answer to it it was really just you know eyeing it and and you know tweaking the color values but you know most of the textures work or every single texture from the magnets library work together with you know without tweaking but you know for some assets like I I used some like Icelandic assets which you know differ differ from active volcanic assets is you know just because of nature but like I like the shape so I know i tented I stand like want a bit more with volcanic acids and so on vice versa so I hope I hope that answers the question and I hope I hope I hope you learned something something new here because when I learned about parameter collections my mind was blown you know i-i've said hours using this and it's really powerful you can actually reference parameters in the parameter collections in blueprints so we can actually you know drive drive vectors and send is in scale of parameters and vectors from a blueprint which is really cool so you know definitely play around with that and it's a ton of fun so I hope yeah I hope that answered the question I I think you more than answered the question really win in depth there which is awesome awesome so let's see what is next on the list so with the palisades the palisade wait wait wait ok have one more question one more question shoot so I know that you're not a programmer so this might be out of your league but some of our audience would like to know if there's a way that you could explain how to make working the blueprints a little easier for artists there's a if I could explain blueprints to artists just like a way to make it easier for like artists to work with them like you know if you're able to work with it than anybody should be able to right yeah I mean I to two years ago I think I had not touched blueprints at all and I had not used kismet which was like a precursor off of blueprints in UDK so and two years ago I actually started playing with it and it like me playing around with it actually resulted in me making a game driven 100% with blueprints so it's extremely intuitive and it's so easy to work with so like it started out with me figuring out figuring out how to open a door like press f to open door and then I was like oh that's cool can I like animate something on the door you seem do prints yep absolutely so I did that and I'm like okay so can I have the door closed after five seconds after stepping through the door can I use a volume to like open the door before I reach it you know it is it was it just made me you know my imagination you started spiraling out of control and every single thing like every single wonder if or I could I liked every single one of those were like yep you can and it's easy as heck as well so it is very easy so I guess this is really better suited for another video but I guess I can give you you know super quick rundown of how it works so what you can see here like this is probably the easiest thing you can do with blueprints so I in the level blueprint which you access here I've just made a event begin play node which really is a node that when you begin play or when you hit play or when the level loads or like when the game starts this node executes and it executes a console command which is tone mapper sharpen one which sharpens the image is like post-process effect and after it's done that it sets the max FPS to 30 and I set this for this dream as I said before I had some issues with screen sharing so whenever I hit play and I guess I can demonstrate like it's going to fire off yeah you see it's firing from event begin play into console command and the next console command and that's sort of visualized by this these circles you know go across there it's like a flowchart so let's say I wanted to do something else I can I can I can do I'm probably I'd probably don't know the command now I'm trying to figure trying to figure out something so a good way to demonstrate how it works but yeah then pick and play and then you can it's really math driven and basic math you know multiply and add you you create you create variables that you can reference and get set for variables and then you can multiply those variables together and you know if I'm like so close to like really really going all in it's explaining here but I'm trying to restrain myself because I would love to make make a stream of this because it is useful like not only for gameplay mechanics but also for like if you want to make a fly through when you want something to happen like halfway through like a door opening you know for your cool portfolio render now if I would have you make a make a light em fly it through where I'll fly here and like when I pass these Palisades I get this gust of wind flying past or something like that like that could be done via blueprints could be done via the sequencer as well which is probably easier but you know there's so many things you can do with blueprints and the learning curve is really really low and there are a magnitude multitude of extremely good tutorials out there and epics documentation covers it really well they have some extremely good examples in the launcher that are for free I think is another under the community tab so even if you're not gonna make any games I would definitely recommend playing with it because not only does it teach you I mean I I actually got better at math after playing with blueprints but it also gave me a better understanding of how Unreal Engine works because it ties in so much with you know yeah this is a good example like material regulations I learned about parameter collections because I needed to figure out like how do i edit this material easiest you know yeah that was a then people said on internet you'll make a material parameter collection like what is that that sort of reading up on that and I learned about it so you learn a lot about the engine you learn you know math you learn logic you learn you know it's really like a light you know programming light or scripting or something so yeah totally check that out and know if if you guys really want me to make a video on that and you know let me know when I'll I'll see what I can do yeah yeah I would love that to just kind of echo on Victor's or Victor's point there I would say that practice is king and the best way to learn anything and get introduced to how to work with blueprints as an artist is to learn from those who have come before Google searches are your friend I can't even tell you how many times just looking up how to unreal on Google has saved my life on some projects that I worked on as any question there's almost always someone who's asked it before and it's always easier to learn from those who came before you yeah that is that is something that surprises me every single day you know like how like this this question that I have is so specific is on each like how comes someone else has already had this question but you know I've yet to run into a question that someone else hasn't answered or asked before so all right so I guess I'll move on to the next point which is the pallet saves like these these are spiky things and offenses and stuff so this was actually something that I this is a technique that I sometimes use which I find to be really powerful and you know it's one of those things that sort of make it from you know take take a render from like 98% to 100% so if we take a look I'm trying to figure out a good way to demonstrate this so if I just make this smaller and take a look here so if I go into this view and I just train there we go and I'll check out the where it is set so actually let's just take a look here so it is if you see it look here on these palaces like they're there all they are is you know LOD five or something of the Palisades and let's see what is the pal is it I think it's called there we go yeah so like LOD five of these I put them together in Maya you know III assemble them in the way that I in the configuration that I liked and that worked nicely except the fact that they looked a bit floaty so to speak and so I'll just open up this material see if I can find a oh here yep there it is so if I just make this smaller so you guys can see what I'm doing and I have if I just sort of bypass this AO map that is here and hit save you're gonna see what I mean probably it load there we go so yeah it's looking a floaty and a bit disconnected so if you just plug this back in you can probe you can see the difference now that we're in a fully shaded mode there we go so that was a thing that I did and that was extremely like it was very very very basic thing that yielded a really big result for big difference so the way I did that it was actually very very simple so um actually let me let me start off by through giving you presenting you with a problem that I had so seeing as I used these assets that all of them have their own movies and I'm not just using one of them and like they're you know there's overlapping in the in the UVs let me open up the UV editor for you guys there we go so you can see there's a lot of overlapping and you know this one probably is overlaying yeah exactly I have a couple of versions of that one so what I needed to do was I needed to have unique you bees for every single island here so basically what I did is I duplicated or copy the you lease into a new UV set and just an automatic layout so that they all got their own space and then here's like the big cumbersome part so what I had to do is I had to make this new unique UV into UV set one or zero if you will and I had to take the actual UV set that I used in unreal to be the secondary UV set and then I bake that down like I just baked from itself to itself in toolbag which gave me the the AO and then I just flipped the UVs back to their to their correct set you know zero and one and in the UV editor or in the material editor I just set the the UV coordinate to be one because the first UV set is zero in unreal and the second is one so yeah I just I just set this AO map to to be using the second UV set I I'm aware that this might sound a little bit confusing but I hope that makes sense so yeah basically I just made two UV sets I baked the mesh that I made from itself to itself which gave me like a global AO which gave it more but like it makes it look more settled and sort of coherent and you know connected to itself and I think it made a huge difference and it's something that I use quite often actually and it's something that I like if if I had like this really big asset and I want this I want this asset like let's say yeah let's say I wanted to use this wall for example I could actually I could actually like take all these at these meshes sort of combine them together and have create a secondary UV for them bake that make a un AO map for it use a secondary UV and apply that I got this big nice chunky pre baked AO map for this whole wall if I wanted to like if you want to take this to an extreme very very useful it can be used for you know for masking materials you know just you know light masks and stuff like that it's a it's a nice very basic tip that I don't like to use did that make sense Jonathan or should I cover it in a different angle I think it makes most of the sense that we needed to make it cool but we are getting to the midway point between this stream so we have a couple of more questions that would like to know the answer to now you would fancy yourself as kind of a mixer expert wouldn't you yeah so Jose Lopez would like to know is it easy to create tileable mixers materials absolutely I mean that that is like you know it's one of the core things and mixer it you know automatically tiles everything you do like even if you freehand paint on your surface it is going to automatically tile that for you so if you paint over the over the border or the edge of the document is gonna you know loop over to the other side so I mean as long as you use a material that is tiling like all the men all the biggest surfaces are it's going to automatically tile regardless of um and you know how much you offset or rotate it or in stuff like that so yes I would say is very very easy and seeing us that that is sort of one of the core things of the mixer no authoring authoring materials that's been my experience with it so far too but it's always nice to explain that and give people the insight that we have into it yeah for sure John gee you would like to know can Viktor zoom into the wall so the wall yeah I'm it's not the most good-looking wall up close like I really made this to be sort of like a backdrop or like a diorama for like a cinematic scenario but yeah like this is like the way it looks up close so the thing is I worked with this as a as you would for like a you know a movie shot like say okay so I have like these angles that I really want to look you know good so you know certain elements like I really exaggerated both in terms of color and shape and you know everything just to make it make sure it looks as good as possible you know from those angles but yeah I would say if I would have made a shot you know really close up from close-up I would admit I would have you know put a lot more effort into certain parts that one thing that I mentioned in the video that was really giving me a hard time was this scale and like one thing that really helped me with that was making these scaffolds which fortunately made a lot of sense for me since I wanted to tell the story of you know this being very recently built like auger Mar 1.0 I they just you know they're they're still building a wall you know it hadn't been torn down by Deathwing it hasn't been rebuilt or anything so like having these are small details across the wall just made like first of all I think it looks really cool and secondly it makes a lot of sense for my storytelling mode and second and thirdly it it used cells the scale so much better because we know we all know how big a plank is I made them a little bit bigger than they would be in real life just so that they would actually read well from decisions so that otherwise I'm afraid it would have just look like noise really so yeah that's I guess yeah when it went into a bit of a tangent there but yeah I hope that the question there all right yeah yeah it wasn't really a question it was just a request to show the wall more close yes yeah so you do have a business that is the story of the wall story of the wall fantastic story - thank you you're gone whitey would like to know if you could show the top view and full rotation around your entire scene sure so as I said before it's more of a diorama it's like a vertical slice of this area so if we take a look like top down you can see that you know it's this area in front of the wall and the wall itself and then there's a little bit of like interior like to make it look like there is actually buildings behind the wall as well it was really like a movie set if you will a 360 you look behind us now we see something now we don't see something now I don't yeah there's nothing behind me it's just an illusion no but it's as I said like this is a like this was made with a you know cinematics in mind you know I had these these shots you know determined before I even went into this like I wanted you know focus on like this road I want to focus on the wall I wanted to focus on more of the environment like I had these shots in mind and like you know it's almost like I had this you know imaginary movie like this imaginary scene from a movie or you know in in mind when I made this so like that it yeah that is why there is nothing behind me because the scene doesn't take place behind me and it's good to dimension to that this is actually a pretty common technique for even for video games like there's really no reason to render anything that you can't see especially if you're just creating an environment that has a very specific focal point and a very specific set of you know things that you want to show off going through the extra effort of creating an entire world would probably have made this project take I don't know like four or five times longer do you think yeah probably I mean yeah for for the for the purposes I made this oh yeah I mean I never intended to show like the canyon behind me I never intended to show the you know the the the was it called Zeppelin Tower and did the right there like I I wanted to tell a story around this area like I wanted to tell the story of your ATAR and the case of Orgrimmar you know at the point of its construction so yeah and absolutely fantastic stuff so um we're getting some more questions and it's it's getting difficult to keep up with them sometimes but we we would like to know about the Rope blueprint what can you discuss about that the road blueprint rope work like the the rope yes yes so that is actually a very that was more of a quality-of-life thing so um in case you didn't know there is a cable actor um in engine that is I use that for pretty much all my projects I guess you know be it electric wires be it you know cables for a wall like this but you know the way this works is like you drop it into the world I just get a better view in it and then you change the end location you can drag this value up and it's going to be longer or shorter you can say you can change the length of it and well you know it's having having it reach a specific part of the world using X Y Z values is a bit tricky in my opinion like I'm sure someone's got someone in the comments gonna go like hey but why don't you just do yeah because I didn't know I'm not sure if there is a way to do it otherwise and so yeah what I did was I just made a blueprint and okay if someone tells me there is a way to do this without making I got some blueprints I'm gonna feel so stupid so let's hope that it's not the case yeah basically what I did was I made a blueprint which has an end location pretty much so yeah it's just going bananas here so what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna make this a bit let's here - - - that no just find a good value here whoa there we go all right let's make it a bit longer yeah so basically I'm not sure what's going on with length there but yeah basically what I did was I made an endpoint of the an endpoint actually adjustable in the world in threes in 3d space instead of actually adjusting the endpoint and the the XYZ sliders or or or inputs so now now I can just take this endpoint and place it wherever I want like so just makes it a lot easier it's going absolute bonkers somebody's not know why so yeah and you know you can do it now we can just I can just take this gizmo move it up a bit way easier than the the run-of- the-mill can kill the opponent and if we take a look at it like it's really nothing special and I just take the location off the cable and you get the world location of yeah yeah just calculate the distance from the start and end point and then I can set the cable length using this this length bias here and I set the cable and the width here so yeah it's not really much to say I mean if you want to use this just you know take a screenshot and recreate it pretty sure I just made this really quickly so I'm sure there are a bunch of errors in it yeah if you do find in theirs please let me know and I can improve my own so that's that's the way that works nothing really exciting it was just as I said a quality of life thing that I that I did because there's a whole bunch of wires and I just didn't see myself punching and even the X Y Z values for each and every one of them or worse yet having to model the drooping yourself yeah yeah exactly you've been around for a while you played half-life 2 didn't you I did yeah do you remember when the source engine was like the first new thing and valve made a very big point about how the cable physics were like the best thing ever yes I every time I look at cable physics I cannot think of anything but half-life 2 I mean they they it was a very physics heavy engine I mean they they did some groundbreaking stuff I think I lost you there Jonathan or are you still with me oh I muted myself because I didn't want to interrupt you oh not you we have been getting repeated requests to move on to a discussion involving lighting and post-processing so yes that is I did plan to do that a bit later but since we're a bit past the halfway mark and we are going to have an or more of an extensive QA session at the end about 15 minutes before I guess I could and let me just see here so what I want to talk about are the fog cards creating the cliffs and the world aligned textures for them scaffolding and the wrappings I guess I guess we can skip to talking about the scaffolding because there is really nothing special and you sort of god I got a glimpse of them here in Maya before and new construction errors don't say so really what I did for them was I just made these like modules using today the lowest LOD 4 for the planks and here you can just search for planks I use these for every single project oops yeah we have like 3d planks that I used here so yes but I mean I made a couple mod modules and that I placed them in engine where I wanted them so I guess yeah just cover that real quick so we can skip that part later and so what I really do want to talk about that I promise to talk about in the in the video and you know I'm a man of my word so I'm gonna cover that and that is the world of light fixture for the clips so as I mentioned in the video the way I made these clips is really really simple I made a super basic block out and you know for the entire world and I just took these clips 3d assets from the library and and I you know place them on top of the of the block out so let me just go in here minimize that so you can see just you know sort of covering up the block out there and if we take a look at the material for one of them and scroll down a bit to the W a tilings world align tiling if I adjust this B value here you sort of see this stretching going on like we get there is this texture actually if I choose the other asset here instead that it just let's hope it's not crashing here no there we go good engine there we go choose that one instead scroll back down and adjust tiling we can sort of see how everything connects so you can see this one here and this one here like these are separate assets but the actual texture between them aligns like magic and the reason why it's doing that is because I've actually created a world aligned take em I can't have a world line material within a material so if I take a look here if I can find it to do world here we go so I have world aligned texture anode and for the albedo normal and roughness and there's really not much to cover here because you know the node is in engine like you don't need to make a custom node or learn anything like you really just right-click search for world a lined texture hit enter and there you go so the only thing you need to do is you need to create a three vector or a vector parameter plug that into texture size and this size is so sorry for mixing up the terms here but like it's globally its world's world space scale instead of sort of local so you have to set pretty high values for these and I just use that vector for to control all of these at the same time so that's the albedo and the normal and the roughness all get you know the same value so that they don't get offset from each other then I plug in the XYZ texture and and use that and sort of loop that with the the base color or like the sort of the base albedo so if we look go back into the most material instance here I can actually control the the land of the world land texture if I increase this serve goes back into the default and it looks so cool when you burn like that so like if I said like zero we're only gonna get the world aligned texture visible if I set it to zero five we're gonna get 0.5 or 50% blend between the two so like I think I said it like the 0.2 or something like that to get some of the original texture information and most of the of the blender texture so yeah I mean really what it does it it it does an XYZ projection in world space and so like if we go back here I can take this one pull this out there we go and if I like rotate this like it's going to stay aligned you know like the lines here excel mentoree lines they're gonna stay was it called horizontal regardless of how I rotate this so really powerful it makes really cool stuff with it I mean you can even you know combine this with you know blending and the pixel depth offset blend to bend them even more together is it's it's really powerful and I you I for pretty much anything that is large-scale I tend to use that technique even if it's just subtle just to get some big shapes that just span across the entire world so do we have any questions on on on this on this blending by the way not yet but we do have a question from earlier that I would like to have you answer if you can find the time one of the users would like to know if you wanted to fit this into a game setting what would be the steps that you would take to achieve it I'm guessing he's asking more about you know optimization and stuff like that that would be my guess yeah so I would decrease the view distance of like the foliage which is really big I would also probably use a lower LOD of the foliage I would definitely use less sort of fill lights and you know reduce the Cascades and shadow resolution all I really like every single feature that I'm using like I'm just using it to level like I'm just pulling it all the way you know we SSAO like nuts and like crazy high dfa oh this is field AO like everything that everything that is available I'm just using it as you know I just cranked it up all the way up quality wise and stuff and I also probably would use mainly up to 2k instead of the 4k texture resolution that I'm sometimes using I'm not so concerned about the triangle count because you know unreal just handles that like a champ like it is munch is angles you know like like cereal and the the main things are ya FX would be another thing like the particles like the they're getting churned out pretty pretty hard like there are a lot of particles and there you know volumetric can the fog is volume it like yes there are a lot of things that could be taken down pretty pretty pretty pretty far without having a too much of an impact on the visual quality I think um so those were the things that I would address first and I would not and I would not yeah I mean I think I think there are a whole body of things that I could do to retain the visual quality and maybe like 85 percent remaining um you know draw distances fewer particles fewer fill lights reduce the quality of the intent like the the distance of the distance really or one SSAO things like that probably got it yeah that's a really good way to put it I think that's gonna make people happy to know exactly how to go about trying to optimize this stuff and from my own personal perspective because I do actually work on a game currently on my side yeah spare time an optimization is a tough challenge even for seasoned teams so it's fun though it is fun but there is no one-size-fits-all every project is different every way you build is different for surely it's down to using your GPU profiler and figuring out where you need to cut corners yes so that being said we are getting so many requests for your lighting and post-processing can we can we move on to that sure yes we can do that so the lighting I covered this a little bit in the video and the these are overview and it is actually a very basic set up the the the base lighting is very basic so as you can see here like I have a light source like the directional light and I have a skylight and so if we turn off the fill lights so I have a whole bunch of fill lights for this one so if you turn them off you can see sort of what the lighting is that is you know core and if I turn off the light source here you can see the ambient lighting so like these two were the two things that I nailed first having a good sort of ambient lighting intensity and having a having the light from the Sun being in a good spot so I get some you know light flooding out at the gate initially it was a little bit more because the gate was a bit more open and in in development but what I wanted was to have it sort of touching here on this part of the map which I'm getting now and so once I had that you know I started adding in like a gate field and I wanted some bounce light on the gate I wanted some and I have so many lights here as you can see there we go like I wanted some more highlights down here and gonna toggle through them all no I just started light painting you know and if I this is also something else I said before like I would reduce our amount of lights and in the scene like I'm this is I treated this like a like a painting as I said like I just you know went all out on the on the light painting and the sort of fake GI and stuff like that so what I would have done here instead of having all these sort of point lights on the on the wall I would just probably have one rectangular light bouncing it like and like this is a luxury that you have working with more cinematic style projects you can really it whole you know go go go absolutely nuts with things like this so yeah if we if we turn this back off again you can see like some things that I did and early on were the like rim lights on the on the towers here I they they sort of got a bit la lost like they were pretty dark so I sort of just added room light to be I was to call the the the roofs that was a one thing the second thing I did was adding this really really strong light behind the wall making it look like you know something is brewing behind there you know these orcs are up to no good like they're there something's brewing back there so and they see what I did there was if I can find it excuse me while I I really should have named these sorry guys but not it was now your your game to see what each of the light lights do so here we have one here we have one I think I did one more that was like the main sort of auric lights there we go I turn these off yeah there we go like this was a big thing like this other than the room lights where the towers like this was the other thing I started doing as you can see here and this is putting a spotlight to this is I think what's causing most of like the spill light coming out of here and and I've set these to be volumetric and I set the scattering intensity to four which is which is quite high I set this to like one we're losing that drama you know it's like we really need that volumetrics or you know that's a bloom volumetric bloom you're getting from the fog there's and I said it back to four there we go I guess I can put even higher you know really crazy but yeah I mean that I as I said in the video like I started out like this like you know cranked it up to 11 and then I just sort of started dialing it back you know eight seven five there we go and finding that nice middle ground and I talked a lot about that in the video as well you know when it came to when when it comes to be much everything especially when I do slightly stylized stuff and even even realistic things and to a degree is like really just take whatever you're doing and just turn it all the way and like the scale of something or like the the what's it called the silhouette of something really just exaggerated and then dial it back and I did that with lighting like everything the lighting was extreme at first like uhm on this side of the mountains here like the lighting it's barely noticeable but it is a bit colder than it is on the right side and but like I dial it back so much that it's barely noticeable like at first it was really really it was almost blue and it was almost red over here but there you know it was dialed back and like the fact that I did that allowed you know people to you know bring it up so Dan and absolutely fantastic artists I'm working with he you know he he brought that up like hey oh you know that's cool but it's it doesn't make any sense like it's way too extreme like that's I can be blue that side can't be red it doesn't make any sense I mean from I guess from a theoretical point of view I guess it makes sense you know rights being red warm and deaf left being being cold you know foreground being foreground and background being cold and warm and stuff like that like I guess it sort of makes it made sense but not from a physical point of view so yeah I mean just the fact that I had turned up to 11 you know enabled him to actually you know notice it and actually tell me to dial it back so yeah that this was a really big thing and it was this these lights are sort of what makes the entire scene I guess we can sort of select everything except was it like these hi them like this still looks really cool in my opinion like this this almost looks cooler if you if you want this kind of lighting but like this the base lighting the rim lighting and like this sort of doom sort of Mordor looking lighting like these were the first thing that I nailed like this was the composition that I had nailed pretty early on because I knew I wanted to have that back light in from the concept and I knew I wanted light spilling out like everyone everyone at work I told about you know like I show this we're like oh dude you have to make this or you know Mordor lookin orc thing with like there is war brewing war drums and there's like you know blacksmiths you know hammering having a higher and stuff like yeah so I mean yeah I had to do that and the rest of these lights are really just me you know going absolutely nuts with the lights and light painting like these are not necessary really it's just a way of you know evening out light and you know softening and softening up the image and it's these lights are really what helped me achieve that sort of painterly and Renaissance Renaissance painting look which it's something I really wanted to wanted to go for I'm should I go like way more in detail or I think well we are starting to run out of time we are about five minutes left I wanted to bring up two important points number one the whole work of the good guys so I take offense to you calling the arcs or the orcs out for doing evil things in the background there clearly the freedom fighters here they are they are sort of refugees from you know evil right evil we say yeah but that's not what I'm trying to make next number two the most important point is that PBR like any system you use in computer graphics is not a strict set of rules PBR is a guideline and obviously because the way you've set up these whites and even the materials themselves it just shows that PBR is only a system to work in that you could easily break anytime you want to create any kind of look that you really want to make it's more streamlining the art process than it is about stringently following you can only do this amount of number on the white or you can only go so far on this or that it all comes down to what looks good and let me tell you this scene looks incredible I don't care if the values are physically accurate or not does it look does that really matter in the end if it looks good not really yeah yeah I guess that that is so pretty much pretty much everything I make has like when I say stylized I'm not talking about you know World of Warcraft stylized I'm talking about it has a touch of stylization and I think that is because pretty much everything I do has its values tweaked so if if you want to make something that is you know entirely photorealistic like yeah sure I mean go for you know the exact luminous values of the Sun and everything like that but like I always prefer stuff that is a bit larger than life like you know the Sun is a little bit brighter the the mist is a little bit misty er the you know the vibrance is a little bit more you know colors a bit more vibrant than they really should be so that that is just like a something that I like to do when I guess that is why I like my stuff feels a bit more stylized maybe so yeah I mean I am I'm all for tweaking values you know a bit beyond their sort of scientifically correct values um just like you said you know Jonathan yeah man so just a quick shout out to Cordell Felix who's in chat hey how's it going yeah he said hi to you to you a couple other questions we need to cover that in number one why did you make the choice to use stationary meshes instead of moveable what would be the benefit of that and you know I think we covered it a little bit but just in case maybe we could cover that light coming through the door I'm pretty sure it's a spotlight yeah but just in case and then we should move on to color grading after that so you're putting me on the spot here like I I have no idea why put into stationary no I just drag and drop them from the from the content browser just put into whatever you didn't want to be on the spot you shouldn't have signed up for the stream yeah I mean honestly like I I guess they could have been eat any like movable stationary state of that I I don't know like I I did not really set them to be anything like the only thing and I don't know I honestly don't know why I said the stationary I'm sorry for the bad answer yeah I mean it's sometimes that's just how it is it's just how it is I mean it doesn't really they could be it could be either I mean you can see I'm scrubbing through here they look the same well it's not even just an issue of looks there are issues that come from using different types of meshes to get performance there yeah for sure our performance absolutely I I I don't want to get too much in the depth to it cuz I don't even know if I'll finish this project but I've been working on a recreation of Deus Ex in Hell's Kitchen the first Deus Ex not the rest of them and I only had some basic tile meshes set up like two by two metered meshes and I made prefabs out of them using blueprints and I didn't realize that when you convert them like a static mesh actor into a blueprint from the viewport it actually turns it into a moveable mesh and when you put enough of those around your scene even with a good computer it will run terribly static meshes are always the best way to go for performance yeah for sure so a lot of requests for your post processing settings so I think we should cover that then so the post process settings if I so what I did here I actually don't have a post process volume but what I do have is a cinematic camera in which I am right now some we just piloting a cinematic camera and I'm just adjusting the post process and settings within the camera itself so for the fly through I use slightly different post process settings for the different angles so I have yeah I have two cameras here so I think I think the grading settings and the post process things are pretty logically laid out so you know going from top to bottom so that's really the way I approach adjusting the degrading you know first I just the white balance and you know I dropped it down a little bit from I think 6,500 is the default and yeah I set it to 5,900 just to make it a little bit colder so I'm trying I'm thinking here is sort of what angle I should approach this from so there are two parts to the post-processing I guess one being grading one being the actual post product a post process features like bloom and stuff like that so I guess we can start with the rendering features here and the first thing that I adjusted for the post process was the emetic ocean and I did some tweaking back and forth throughout production as I as I got more got more and more high fidelity so if we take a look at the detail lighting here by the way I absolutely love going into detail I think if I like set the intensity to zero you can see like what a difference the ssao makes in the scene and I think the radius what it's the default is 25 no 200 yeah the default radius for this is 200 and I set it down to nine like I really wanted the SSAO to be tight and I used the DFA or distance field AO for more of like the bigger broader more global sort of a oh so I just drag this all the way down to like really make like these small details like on the like the scaffolding on the wall like I really wanted that to stand out I wanted like the small aossa over that wrapping in between the palisade stuff so um you can see just what a difference a day makes what difference it makes there we go so that is that was like the first thing so and I and I think I said it like 25 or something when I was started working on the wall and as I got more and more small details I reduced the radius as well and there are a lot of things a lot of parameters you can adjust here and that you know when I started out in unreal I I didn't even you know look two times on it things like the fade-out distance and and so if I set this to be what is the default yeah like the AO doesn't even reach to the wall so if I set it back twenty thousand now we're reaching all the way so that is a like yeah this is the default so I'm just getting some AO here and not all the way and so that is definitely something to keep in mind the rate is the power like the contrast of the ssao you can really go crazy with that you know I want to just chime in real quick too with a DFA oh it is such a lifesaver for foliage i agent making personal scenes without it if you guys saw that haul evokes seeing that I made it would not look anywhere near a school without DFA oh it does watch to bring foliage together it's it's hard to even put in the words you just have to see it in real time to understand it is amazing it is I mean especially for bigger scenes like it's so so so good it takes a little bit of getting into you know both how to set it up and so you sort of need to adjust your workflow and like sort of key is Tim at least in my in my experience I might be wrong it might have changed but like sort of keeping keeping meshes split up just so you don't have things that are too big and just you know huge chunks of stuff because like I sort of break the the fao but you know as long as you work in a DFA or friendly way it it is it looks absolutely fantastic and it can be used in so many ways that you can actually use it sort of mask your materials I haven't used that extensively but I've sometimes I used to sort of get you know rusts in crevices in the materials and stuff like that and I think it's called the FAU masking or so or AAO masking something like that so definitely check that out and using SSAO and the fao in conjunction or in combination is so so cool so I don't remember you actually covered it but instead of a skylight setting you can also get a little bit more control over whether the DF AO multiplies over the existing SSA oh yeah it just kind of goes for the minimum value that that's between the two mm-hmm so if you really want that super darkness that you just might not be able to get otherwise you got to hit that multiply button yep this one right yeah there's a small difference here yeah it is so so free cool I want to just drop all the swear words but I can't run straight it's so phenomenal that you did this and all in real time and it runs so well you know yeah yeah so here here because it actually adjusted I'm glad you actually brought up the skylight because I actually adjusted the DF AO tint to be more Brown so like by default it sort of looks like this and the day setting it to be a brown color just also helps to bring everything together a bit more so I'm not sure how well you can see that in the stream but like if I if I just make it black it separates things more which can be nice but that was not the style that I was going for with this project I wanted that sort of painterly and like like having everything just sort of blend together more nicely so yeah thank you for bringing that up that is a feature and that is a parameter you should definitely play with so do check that out for your project there are there are some really good guides like I cannot stress this enough like epic made such a good job with the documentation for unreal and like I've learned like pretty much everything I learned about about that engine is from there so go to the I think it's dog dog start Unreal Engine or something you know just search for whatever question you have about unreal and you're gonna get to talking there's the documentation yeah I think is really good about that and that is one of the main reasons why I've been using unreal since the UDK days I mean I've I've got over ten years of experience with unreal at this point and I can't think of any other tool that I would rather render my my scenes in Orion just general it's yeah it's like any and the question you have is either answered in the documentation or their answer I'm a source website like their you know their forums or like their a wiki yeah support support support page it's so so good and you do the question too that I should you know I hate to cut you off there but we need to wrap this up soon because they only have about 20 minutes left yeah we have a user wanting to know about the terrain how did you do it did you use tessellation vertex painting what techniques did you use yeah how come or are you talking about them so I will not have time to to cover every spec in detail but what I did is if I go into Maya I will just bring up the dududududududu block I was for don't say so the terrain itself and the mountains are they're just static meshes they started out as block outs like really basic stuff it was basically just a plain with I mean it's it's still very basic to be honest but I mean it was pretty much pretty much just a plain initially and there are places like a wall like a square wall or something and then these really basic cliffs so what I did was I started sculpting in my eye using just you know regular sculpt tools and to sort of find like where I wanted the path to go and stuff like that and then I just read apologized so I could get some nice UV UV mapping and greater control over the sort of the heights elevation I am an elevation differences and so on so that is the way and that is reason why it looks to way does and I just wanted to have great control and you know i-i've yeah for for seems like these environments like these are somewhat limited in scope the size and scale I actually prefer this approach rather than using terrain the terrain tool I mean that's rental is awesome don't get me wrong but I just feel I have greater control doing this you know I can UV map and I can manipulate the UVs in a different way then I can using a training tool I can also yeah it's you know if I wanted to I could like grab this I sort of have this hanging over I didn't but I could and that is not possible with a training tool and so yeah it's it's it's a static mesh and then what I did since seeing as this is so incredibly basic what I did was I used a whole bunch of mega scans assets like assemblies and like cliff meshes and stuff and I just know rammed them into the side of the of the of the of the road so this one here for example I used this extensively like a mudslide a-looking not not mudslide but it's it has this nice directionality going on in it and I'm sort of lining the entire road with that and I have these source and stony um meshes that are also rammed in there because I really wanted to look like like this is a road and like I wanted to separate it a lot from the rest and you know I almost wanted to look like these these hard-working Oryx have been digging out this area like hey I want this part to be my be my orchard or whatever like I don't know cacti orchard and thank you I wanted I wanted to have this or carved out look like orcs are Hardy people and like they they they don't care if it's rock or sand or soil like they chiseled hard defined path you know going going through door at har and so that was that was going for and and I think using this approach look would look way better than it would have done if I just would have had this or a smooth path going through and yeah I think you're right on that it when you set that up in Maya and then brought it out I honestly I need to come around to the what you think on this so I can save myself so much time by not using the Unreal 2 terrain edited the way that I currently use it which is kind of like trying to sculpt out details whereas I could just uses more of a base mesh which is what you did yeah and I often find myself caught in the trap of where I'm trying to get as many polygons into it as possible when really all I need to do is let the mega scans assemblies do a lot of the work for me absolutely I mean yeah I don't think this is more than like two thousand triangles or something it's extremely bare-bones and as you say in the the assets themselves dr. skirts and their assemblies and the cliffs like they I just jammed them in like whenever I see like a like for example here like if if I were to turn the camera around here like this this doesn't look very cool but like then I can just you know grab a couple of these assets like rotate them around just jam them into the ground and know already starting to look better so that is the way I worked a lot with the terrain you know it's it's a lot of fun and especially you know with the whole pixel depth blending it everything just blends together so much more nicely set up 250 just look at that I can take this and duplicate that like yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna set dress this entire part but this is the way I did it and I have like if you look through my content browser there like you see I have a whole lot of different assets and you're thinking wow that you know that's crazy amount of assets but really what after you know a couple days of working and setting up the environment like I found a couple of assets that did most of the work like I found like a handful of assets of all of these that when I you know there did is when they just became my go-to assets like a like a short before I have this really defined asset cliff volcanic sandstone thing I have this disassembly that I showed before I have like two of those and like those those three or four assets they did most of the work so yeah I might have like 20 3d assets but I probably used like five of them you know just rescaling rotating them using them in combination with each other like you you come such a long way with that so yeah that is really the way I work with the terrain and then in combination with these paths like this path blueprint that I got from Jack combining that with trees and I guess I guess this is a really high level thing but like you you when you if you bring in a 3d asset and you start placing it out like you have to you have to think in you know a large scale medium scale small scale extremely fine scale when you working with stuff like this because otherwise it's gonna look unnatural like you can if you look at my scene here you have these big sandstone cliffs leading down to like these medium samstone leading down to smaller sandstone slimmed down to you know these chunks of rocks and then you have you know like even smaller you need to have the entire spectrum of scale otherwise it's just gonna look unnatural I mean gradients fall offs like thinking think in terms of that so if you only have small stuff it's kind of like weird if you only have big stuff it's gonna look weird like you need the entire thing so you know using yeah I'm actually using one asset as both large medium and small scale so that you sort of goes to show that if you just you know work with materials and blending and world align textures and stuff you can you can come over away from just using a couple of assets like that so oh he's for coming coming in close now so was there another question there that I that I missed or I sort of miss something in regards to the terrain there oh there's always questions Victor you know this I love questions just keep them coming okay uh steadfast patriot wants to know are the orcs really happy living in this dirty of an environment I would say yes I would say yes I mean have you seen where they came from I what what what was it was it was his name go cool down like did you see what he made did with their planet I Haley destroyed it right yeah he destroyed it like made it all green and dead so yeah I would say that even if they only have some semi dead trees I would say they're very happy here and if you take a look in Orgrimmar in-game you'll see they're very happy they have rules and they have pine palm trees and they you know they're they're happy they're happy campers oh yeah so we have another question Tony duratec wants to know I have recently started doing trees and when I meant on real the leaves are not visible from a distance only when I get close and a tip on how I can solve that thank you yes so that could be a number of reasons one could be the MIT map settings for the opacity map for the leaves if you're using texture based leaves instead of mesh based so that could be one thing another thing could be the quality settings for the engine because you can scale that to you know all the way up to cinematic or epic I think so check that out and if it is the MIT map settings you could try this setting it to a different map mode or you could try turning off the mipmapping altogether but I've noticed and in many cases if if I turn mipmapping off altogether I actually get a really nice and crisp result but it can be a little bit you know almost flickery because you it doesn't fade out in the same way like you're getting this really really defined result in the past map so I mean I I think that is the case if maybe it could be if it's just the leaves and then I don't know I'm thinking if it could be or something I don't know actually I would probably need to actually sit down with you and take a look if you want to you know just drop an email is just you know Victor at Quicksilver calm you start me an email and maybe we could sets up I said set up a session where I can troubleshoot with you mentoring bike by Victor a man got to learn and your person to ask I hope so so gaming punches wants to know can you add 3d trees and mega scans he's not good at software like Maya blender etc I think I can field that one real quick the best way I would personally recommend and you know if you want to chime in too Victor I would say would be to use SpeedTree it is very very easy to work with very easy to learn and it the results are like just very easy to get I mean there's nothing difficult about the program and the way the the atlas is that we have in our scam library work with SpeedTree is just it's it's a match made in heaven that's how i prefer to work but if you'd like to to make trees by hand maybe Victor could give you some pointers there too yeah I don't really make it all treated I mean dude you saw how I made a tree for this yeah it's a judging you I mean yeah I I've always found it difficult to make to make trees by hand it's I I compared it to character art you know but instead of two arms they're like a ton of arms if that makes sense yes yeah so yeah I I am not the person to ask when it comes to trees and they're like my Achilles heel and yeah I'm afraid damn I guess we can't call you Victor tree man than kam Li you cannot Wow either way the tree that you did put in there looks really good yeah it's it's it's yeah it's very very hacky very optimized but I mean I worked with what I have so I mean I took the tree we have in the library and I mean I made a bigger tree out of it with leaves you know in aviation is a phrase that's called any landing you can walk away from is a good landing and an art I think anything that looks good is good enough and the thing that looks good and doesn't kill your friend meat is good yeah oh yeah there's that too yeah yeah so do we have anything else or should I guess we could look a little bit more in the post-processing that would be a good idea yeah so one thing that I like the absolute first thing that I do for every single product that I make is I turn off the auto exposure because that is that I just throws me off so bad like if I want to change my export like it went on my camera and like I never use the auto mode like I I adjust the ISO I just focal every everything shutter and everything so you know my since I do a lot of photography it just really throws me off to have the camera just adjusting to whatever I'm looking at and it can really throw off the grading as well so just turn that off unless it does your project or game a service you know if you have a lot of transitions between interior and exterior nighttime daytime that absolutely by all means use it but like if you're making something like this just kill it altogether just turn it off because it's going to make it a living nightmare to calibrate you know if as I said for a party like this you should kill it because if I would rotate the Sun ever so slightly to the left it would just change the exposure completely and you know my calibrations for the grading will be completely bonkers and everything so yeah just kill that you can do that by in the settings project settings or you can just go in here turn off the the exposure compensation and the Maxie V Max and min eevee eevee 100 and stuff like that I'm not sure if you agree like you're a real photography buff I am I am very much a real photography buff so much so that I even use the same camera settings for my to a camera in unreal so I'm assuming you turn off photo exposure as well right oh absolutely yeah but I've found that unreal hasn't actually gotten to the point yet that is I mean I love the engine don't get me wrong but it hasn't gotten to the point yet where I can actually put in the f-stop values and the ISO values and actually have them match up to real life yes that is something that I've wanted wanted for a while you know in the lens settings if I increase the like if I change the f-stop and the focal length and all that like I think that should affect the exposure and like how much light is being led in and stuff like that would just make it so you know it would it would be an actual camera you know virtual camera visible and that's that's how aperture is supposed to work in real life yeah you aperture up which is ironically or not ironically but rather interestingly the higher the aperture value the lower the numbers so of like F 3.2 means your camera aperture is huge whereas new net 22 value is super small yeah and the smaller it is the less light comes in because it's a pinpoint exactly but with that said though I think the addition of the cinema is in a cinematic camera gold like it was just revolutionize the quality of my renders and and and and you know how I present my scene is it just made everything look so much better so absolutely so grateful they added that and it just makes makes my life so much easier I haven't used anything else same here like the first thing I do turn off auto exposure put in and put in a cinematic camera and I just I just pilot that I never use the default Karen I don't even look how know how my scene looks without it I guess I couldn't check it out yeah cut that out all right so then next thing so there are two things that I really like to add and that's a matter if it's sci-fi or fantasy or contemporary one is chromatic aberration some people might go oh no but I go yeah go um so I like to set that to like 0.05 or 0.1 like a really low value but you know not enough to make it noticeable but just enough so that you know it sits there like it just adds a little bit of fringing to to the camera I think it just adds so much realism and the second one is grain I think this under yeah here it is now let's set that between like 0.1 and 0.25 like a really low low amount and the same thing goes for Vinnie adding I have it to 0.1 like you can see the difference it makes it's very subtle but like if you look here on the right side it just helps ever so slightly to subconsciously guide the eye towards the center if if they're lighting the composition isn't enough it is it's just like a visual aid if I set it to 0.5 you can see what's going on like this really pushes the eye towards the center so it can be a good aid but it can also look very very cheap and tacky if you if you rely on it too much like really your composition the lighting should do that you shouldn't really need the mean yelling you should more see the VIN yelling at a vessel or defect of a physical camera because pretty much all cameras have some mini adding some more some more some less so yeah um well is now four minutes to close but I think this next question should be the last thing we tackle alright cuz its to be the longest and I think you should take your time with it so one of our users would like to know if you have any tips to improve the overall artistic vision of say newcomers or even experienced artists to be able to see the scene in their whole head and like I said please take your time answering this I think this is something that you and I should both chime in on because this is such a broad perspective so to see if I got the question right so how to sort of visualize the end result of a scene in the beginning pretty much I would think so yeah to take the entire scene and just see it through from beginning to end in your own head and then just kind of get to where you've gotten with what you've done yes so that is a very good question I hope this answers the I mean I hope this is what you what you ask but regardless I think it's something that is worth bring it up and it's something I mean it's I've been doing this way 12 years now and it's still something that I can struggle with you know I can start something out with a very clear vision in my head and I just start and you know a day and I'm like I know this like this this isn't anything like what I envisioned at all I don't see how it's gonna look the way I envisioned it to look you know it could be really devastating but so one thing I'm just trying to formulate myself and yeah I mean one thing that comes with experience and I guess something that I wish more people would have told me when I started out was that I've noticed that you know in 95% of the cases when I feel like darn this is this is this is it's not gonna look the way I wanted to like and I had a secure vision but like in most cases experience has shown me that it will look the way in Mission if you just put in the hours like it is gonna look like crap once you just have you know block out and gray you know gray cubes and you know the default lighting and stuff but like just keep working on it and it will it will turn out the way you intend to like don't get beaten down early on like I know it can be really stressful especially you know if you know you're a freelancer or you have a gig or something and like you you have this this project you have to do when it's just like you you you can't see it but so one thing that I that can help with that is also something that I mentioned the video you know oh like keep keep taking screenshots off your scene you know so you can go back and take a look at like mmm how it has progressed you know from day one to where you are now like if if nothing if it doesn't help with anything else this helps you show the progress you've made from from day one you know where you are right now and the second thing that really helps is having very very very many reference photos and images and pieces of you know concept art and photos and mood paintings and you know anything like because it's it's something that I noticed a lot of people struggle with you know they just want to jump into making and creating but like that is that it's like a Hollywood movie you know production team just jumping straight into production without doing any pre-production like every single project has a has a a period of pre-production no matter how small it is you know if you're gonna if you're gonna mop your floor you have the pre-production of things like okay so you know where is my where's my mom where's my you know can or you know like everything has a pair of pre-production and the and making it an environment is no different you have to you have to first of all obviously have the idea once you have the idea gather your references and you know do do collages like you could group different references together you know by color by by you know different styles because it's always like whenever you know when I I actually got stuck in this project for a while or not not stuck like III went I came to a point where like yeah I mean I like the colors I like the conversation but is I mean the it's just not looking the way I wanted it to look like I so I actually started I did another path of reference collecting I had mainly been looking at screenshots and references from the real world fan art but once I started looking at the movie the Warcraft movie and that really gave me so much more material to work with so that it I mean I it just loosened ever everything up like I I knew exactly where I was going you know it's like but but and it's such a small thing by just expanding my reference library it just revolutionized the way I worked on the scene you know so yeah that is absolutely key to any project and that is reference reference reference photos observing and looking because I mean you you can you can you are going to be able to create the scene it's just a matter of like seeing like comparing compare what you're doing to what you want to do so like there is anything you have to be able to look at your project critically like if you look at your scene and compare it to the reference like or the concept and you're thinking I this is this is this is not looking good then change short you're doing look at the clock like reference what are the differences what is it that really makes the reference look good and what is the mix you're you're a scene look bad it's it's this is such a high level thing high level question and it's so tricky to answer like this is one of those things you know you sit down and talk about four hours you know over cup of coffee so it's I don't I really hope it makes sense and I guess the point of the whole thing is like reference block out and you know take a step back and look at your scene and you know track your progress do before-and-afters and just don't give up because for most of my like most of my scenes look pretty crap until the you know the last 20 percent like it's pretty I'm gonna like man this this is not looking good and then I hit a point like I just keep I just keep at it I just keep and keep working on it following those those references and then one day I'm like yes there we go now I have it and I'm noticing it's like that point is coming quicker and quicker and quicker the more experience and I I get and you know the more time I spend making environments and so yeah I mean keep at it expand your reference library observe the world stay critical you know be really critical about your own work like don't be afraid of like just taking a step back just I mean you can spend a day on something if it doesn't look good at the end of the day like don't don't fall fall victim to the was it straw man fallacy no it's not from something cost fallacy like just because you spend time or something doesn't mean you should you have to keep it like if it doesn't look good just redo it or throw it away don't keep it just again just because you spend seven hours or eight hours on it yeah yeah so I hope that your question and sorry if I went on a tangent or around there that's okay for those of you wondering the straw man fallacy is when you argue against something someone else did not argue yeah and I mean and by sonken cost fallacy which was the fallacy that I was intending to go and go for is when the whole thing you know just because you sunk in so much time or money into something like that doesn't mean it is worth more like it can be absolutely worthless but like you you see a value like you see yeah you want to keep it just because oh but I worked on this for two days like I can't throw it away yeah I mean kill your darlings you see that with gambling a lot too that's that's often where it comes in exactly names one thing I want to chime in here is we wrap up get ready to move on aside from the phenomenal work done here it should be noted for everybody that what you've seen here is something everybody can do absent evening everything that Victor is done everything that I've made everything that all of our artists a quick sort of made is something everyone can do with enough time and practice and practice is everything Victor how many years of experience do you have with Unreal Engine with Unreal since 2009 so 10 years so about the same as me I started working with unreal 2008-2009 when I was in college yeah and it's an even ue4 it was UDK yeah and you know I started learning from my teachers big shout out to Celeste who helped me get through everything I got through yeah you know she was a great teacher I wouldn't have learned what I know now without her help and you learned from other people you grow from working with other people and having that teach you and you teaching them and it's I can't stress enough that if you know something that you should share it with other people because the more you teach in the more you learn the more you actually hold on to that information mm-hmm the more you help other people with what you're trying to learn yourself the easier it becomes for you and again as I've said just a minute ago if we can do this work you guys can too it's all about time and about the everybody has the potential to do this every bit of art that you make is all about time and patience nobody chose a perfect drawing straight off the bat unless you're like some crazy insanely talented person it's just the ability to see something and visualize it immediately I mean when I drew I had this rough sketch and then I would fill in forms it's exactly how you worked here too isn't it yeah and I mean we're doing our best you know like we're making these live streams and these tutorials through guys I mean we really want to help you know shorten the learning process for you guys and I mean just if you have feedback if you have suggestions or requests you know just send them in and you know we'll we'll try and cover it for you and yeah what you guys are making like I just have to I have to have to do a really small shout-out like seeing what you guys have been making lately it's just mind boggling is so good absolutely amazing and your tongue our community right yeah our community exactly the acquittal our community on Facebook it's just so so good I'm I'm mind blown every single day and that you you guys really really inspire me um you know what to keep keep working keep getting better so yeah huge shout out to do the community and the artists out there because the end of the day we're doing this for you guys yes we're a couple of artists and we love making art and we love making everybody's lives easier the last thing I want to really say though don't give up guys just because it doesn't look great now doesn't mean it can't look great later every every bit of art can be improved every artist can be the best artist possible with the work in the practice put into there are again Victor thanks so much for taking the time to demonstrate this this is probably one of the best dreams we've had I don't I can't even think of the last time we've done a two-hour stream except for that train scene that I did three years ago yeah it was just enough to fit everything in that I wanted though yeah we had a lot to cover yeah I mean that was fun it's always fun what one time one day I'm gonna sit there and watching the questions instead of instead of talking for two hours because I want to see what you guys are saying in real time you seem to have such a fun fun time there exactly so should we could we wrap it up and and thank the guys yep so again thanks to everybody I put a link in chat for the art community which is facebook.com slash groups slash qixels group it used to be called tools group it is now called art community that will take you directly to it please join talk share your work we love seeing what you make and ask any advice if you want to know how to work with stuff if you need help with materials I've taken my own personal materials and shared them with people just because why not you know there's nothing that I have that I haven't learned from someone else and nothing that you have that you haven't learned from someone else so that being said I think we're gonna sign off again Victor thank you so much for taking the time out to ours is exceptional a lot out of people I know I'm a little tired I know you're probably definitely tired of talking by this point you guys are such a great community thank you for tuning in and for all the questions and we cannot wait to see you guys again next Friday yeah can't wait and thank you all so so much for watching and I'll and I'll see you next time see you later guys cheers Cheers

Channel: Quixel

Views: 172,959

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Id: d08EdMcCS7s

Length: 129min 0sec (7740 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019