Creating Archviz Environments in UE5 - Workflow Showcase

hello hello hello in this video I'll show you two different workflows for highquality environment Creation in Unreal Engine for the purpose of architectural visualizations one of these workflows is going to be done with only with raw tools that are found in Unreal Engine and the second one is going to be done with a plugin called Dash and by the way they have sponsored this video but they have no influence over what I say in the video The Twist is that these two workflows will have to be as non-destructive as possible and what does non-destructive mean well okay in Vision I create a Pine Forest a full Forest made out of pines and I want to change all of those Pines into Oaks a different type of a tree if it's non-destructive I can simply do that by adjusting a single setting flip a setting and all of the Pines become Oaks rather than remaking the whole damn Forest basically you can always go back on your decisions and make adjustments and for this we will use this raw scene right here that you see on the screen the house is not going to be touched we will not even change the materials of the house so basically what we're going to do or use are going to be these two surfaces right here the surface here and the surface right here right so with this out of the way oh by the way all of this is available to patreon supporters so if you will want to get the scene after it's finished then consider becoming a patreon supporter the patreon support get all of the files for free Link in the video description okay let's get on with our first workflow all right so before we begin with our workflow number one there's one more thing that I want to talk about and that's this timer right here that I will start actually kind of right right now I will use this timer to evaluate how long does do these two different workflows take because that's in my opinion a quite important thing how long do they take to reach an acceptable result so with that out of the way we'll look at the timer once I'm done but with that out of the way we can begin so the first thing that I always do is I get the Assets in right and I just download all of the assets that I will need so in this case I will use my Marketplace account I already by the way have them here but basically in my Unreal Engine Marketplace wherever it is I just got this Mega scans European beach Forest pack which seems to be quite quite a nice nice quality nice quality assets so I got those and also I just used quickel bridge to download uh where was it 3D plants uh some ferns some desert cotton pieces and and so on right so so I have some Greenery that's that's pre-downloaded just so that we're on the same page usually I mean you download it for one project it stays with you for the next right so it shouldn't take away from the workflow then once you have those those downloaded well it's time to scatter them and the problem with scattering is that well you you could go immediately to foliage mode and then choose your European beach uh trees and then go to foliage uh or rather geometry pivot painter pivot painter and you know choose a few drub them in here bam start painting whoa that's very intense um don't forget to change the density of them and there we go and you just kind of start painting painting them like so but this would take quite a long time and also if I need to add you know if I need to change something about it it wouldn't wouldn't work it's destructive right I could also use uh fill tool to you know fill certain geometry with them uh with these trees but also that is destructive and we're trying to keep it non-destructive so what do we do well we need to create what's called a PCG system if I go to settings plugins and I search for PCG you can see see that there is this procedural content generation framework um plug-in kind of um that is currently in its I guess beta or Alpha stage but you can enable it and then you can use it in your project right so make sure to enable them close it and you will need to restart uh Unreal Engine after you've done that then you just simply can create a PCG graph in any folder that you have on your in your scene all right PCG graph and I will just name this PCG YouTube okay I'll open it up and this is basically like a another blueprint system right but it has it completely its own language and another thing that you need to that you need to learn if you want to use it right so the first thing that I want to do is create a bunch of points in this volume right so I'm just going to use World Ray hit query basically um there's going to be a bunch of rays C being casted on in this area right in this volume and they will look at what kind of surfaces do they hit think of it as a blanket that's being dropped down right and the output the output is a Surface so then I can use surface sampler and this is not a tutorial this is a workflow showcase so I'm going much much faster than what I usually do in the tutorials surface showcase uh D2 um show the actual points it doesn't show any points and I believe that's going to be because we need to Trace World Ray hit Quarry as complex because this is a complex Collision mesh right so once we are tracing it as complex now this is working and we have a bunch of points right and you can see that the points as they are being debugged well it's more like bounding boxes right so with that done I can kind of do some some adjustments so for instance I can make all of the points denser so by just increasing how many there are per square meter and making sure that they are a little bit smaller so point point or rather so let's go for 20 by 20 by 20 right so we get more points and I can increase the density even further and and so on right you get the idea these two settings are interdependent then I can use self pruning to get rid of all of the overlapping entities right and basically uh at this stage I can just do setting mesh spawner I select it I click on the mesh entries I I press the little plus sign expand this expand the scriptor and here I have an option to you know use any mesh that I want so let's let's use something like like this this one right here drag and drop it in bam spawns a crap ton of trees so on every Point let me zoom in here on every point there is now a tree that is being spawned right so let me change the density of of the point extends basically we want the bounding boxes of the trees to be sorry of the tree trunks to be filled in with the bounding box so to to be completely encapsulated so I'm going to use um let's go for 50 by 50 by 50 something like that and also I will just simply use bound modifier like that oh don't forget to disconnect that like that and bounce modifier basically enables you to scale the the boundary uh that you have here to any um by any percent that you want so I'll just increase it uh by two I guess something like that yeah then that seems like it's going to be okay okay so something like that now this is a little bit more reasonable it's still very very large and also very repetitive you can see that all of the trees are looking in the same direction so for that I need to rotate them randomly before uh before they are spawned right so in between the self pruning and the static M spawner I will use uh transform points command spatial transform points like that and then for the transform point I can use minimum rotation is zero but maximum is 360 and it just randomly chooses the rotation between 0 and 360 in terms of the scale the minimum scale is uh let me lock down the scales uh8 and maximum scale is one that's fine and then offsets I will just give it an offset of minus 10 - 10 cm in both of these so that the trees sink in a little bit a little bit more into into the landscape and that's that's it basically now we have a system where you know if I have this box and I just move the Box around the trees adjust to the Box there's an issue though and the issue is called if a trees are growing on a cliff they will grow weird but in reality the trees are still growing vertically right so what you want to do is you want for the transform points to actually use absolute rotation so that even from the cliff they're growing upwards and now this needs to be fixed a little bit so it's actually minus5 I guess and like five more cm of sinking and this is good enough another problem is this the trees are spawning on the roof so this has to be a no-go Zone and we need to to fix it and that requires us to do a little bit more of a shenanigan so in my PCG volume right here I'm going to add the component to it so I just select my PCG volume click on ADD and then I just choose uh spline okay I'll just type it in spline there it is and I will just draw around the house something like that and this should close off right so I will just tick mark closed loop there it is d I want all of the points that are inside of this spline of this projected spline downwards I want all of them gone all of them deleted right so what we're going to do is we're going to use get spine data get spine data it should evaluate itself right and it just gets the spin that's easy peasy and then we should uh spline uh sampler and it should be uh on interior it should sample the interior of the spine so it it samples on interior and I believe if I now do D on it yeah you can see all of the points that are inside of the spline then I need to project projection I need to project these points onto the surface like that and then we do D here and D here so you can see that all of the those points were projected on the ground and then those points we can use as difference this area can be used as difference to get the source uh the source is the all of the transformed points right these guys oops and the projection is this so that's the difference that we carve out and we get this answer which still gives us some points what gives well that's because the difference is calculating a minimum and we want it to be binary yes or no you know either it calls or it doesn't call with that done I just connect the difference to my static mesh spawner enable it oh yeah and don't forget the lit environment and we're Gucci we have ourselves a PCG mesh spawning or or Forest spawning thing right this is the area that I want to keep non-destructive in a sense that this should be generated and I should control how much of it it is generated but everything else behind it that can be just brushed on whatever because we will all of the shots that we would take of this house would be from from these kind of angles right so I want the immediate surroundings to have hand painted ones you know everything is handpicked and completely tailored while the second plan is completely non-destructive and a system that just works and third plan is either a PNG or just brushed on whatever and it has no influence it just needs to to be there so that's that's the plan uh of course we need more than just trees so I need to add in a few more things this is where I will pause the video and we will continue once I have added [Music] them [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] we the [Music] [Music] CR [Music] we f it back the [Music] [Music] [Music] all right 1 and A2 hours huh but we have it let me guide you through the changes that I have had to make so the curve didn't work out uh there were issues with the slope of the roof and because of that that cost me like 20 minutes extra I replaced it with a solid body workflow so if here if I type in Cube there we go I created a cube that has a tag that that's called No spawn tag right and it's visible oh sorry it's invisible right so if I change it to visible you can see the cube what it's doing it's measuring a distance so I'm getting getting actor data and I'm measuring distance from each of the points to the actor and I'm basically creating a density filter from it PCG is still a it really lacks documentation and it's still very very um early at a very early stage but this is a system that we currently have and it does work now finally I can move on to the destructive portion of this whole thing and it's going to be me kind of brushing on stuff and me creating materials materials are non destructive as well I guess so now the next step is to uh create the base material and in this case I am just going to uh use one of my mega scans materials that I definitely have Mossy forest floor that seems like a pretty good one medium quality nah oh actually it's either low or medium sure then then yes we use medium quality we add it in in and I'm just going to drop drag and drop one of them in seems to be fine that one as well seems to be a okay so this is starting to look pretty good uh as it is of course the backdrop is kind of bad but you know the environment is pretty good if I change this to path tracing there we go so now it has begun so this is starting to look pretty damn decent I think right don't don't you agree and now we're deep in the shadows so let's play with the sun until we get something there we go something like that pretty good right so that's PCG moving on with we have the material let me brush on some stuff in the backdrop let me brush on some stuff in the foreground and then we're going to be done with this because as for the environment I think this is good enough to to pass all right so now we are ready to brush a few things here and there so this is where we move on to a destructive [Music] [Music] workflow okay we are done in in terms of quality I like how this looks uh so we we say that you know this is finished and we are at 2 hours 1 minute 49 50 okay slightly above 2 hours if I look at this and go like well the rocks are a little bit they're sticking out quite a bit aren't they so then I can just simply go to my PCG settings right here I can just simply specify that well actually they should dip down more so right now it's between -5 and - 20 so you know the the smaller the numbers here the more the rocks will dip down I can do like - 30 down to -30 here as well uh while this is recalculating I can grab my cinema camera actor and all we need to do is just change change some settings here I will make a time lapse of this so that it's not in the way [Music] all right on to workflow number two for which we will be using a plug-in a plugin called Dash if you go to polygon flow.io I'll leave a link to this in the video description below and you click on download Dash you will have this plugin and you'll be able to use it for free for 30 days with all of its features afterwards as a student you pay $7 per month as a freelancer you would pay $10 or $20 afterwards per month is it worth it I will talk about that at the end of the video so if you're very curious just skip ahead listen to me speak to me Babble and then come back and watch the workflow speaking of which the workflow is pretty straightforward so Dash enable you to streamline the creation process of the world right the environment also it's it helps you with texturing and so on but most of the value for Architects that I see is a very streamlined way of how you generate the surrounding environment for your architecture piece to sit in speaking of which I think we should turn on the the timer so that we can actually you know see how streamlined it actually gets and I will just move the timer right here there we go so once you have Dash installed you just open up this little icon right here and this command line opens up very autoc caddy you can type in anything you want uh any command you wish and it runs the command what kind of commands are available well you just double click on this icon right here and it shows you all of the different commands not all of them are useful for Architects most of them are but not not all of them I will be showcasing the the ones that I find to be most useful for me in my workflow also I have to note that Dash comes with its own not its own library but it's connected to two major free libraries on the internet first one uh being Mega scans the second one being poly Haven and if you want to see all of the assets from both of them you just click on all to get the mega scans assets you still need to go to Bridge and actually download them you know but but then they will pop up here so for example if I want to scatter some assets on this object or on the surface right here that are not part of that pre-downloaded ones but part of this library right here I would just simply go to my I think I already have some here there we go these bad boys right here they got registered that's great and I would just control and drag them onto the surface so I will just say scatter on the underlying object if I now zoom in can see all of these assets scattered sorry Force LOD zero there we go if I look at the options here you can see that there's plenty of options that are presented to me I can see that I can change the density of it you know to make it more dense I can change the minimum maximum scale the fall off the noise and then so on right so I can really do a lot with this method and also more importantly in this area for instance I don't want anything to grow next to uh next to this Terrace here we can see proximity mask object so I can just simply click on this little while I have the selected click on this little plus sign and give it a distance of let's say 10 cm or was it meters this looks like it's meters so let's not give it 10 cm let's give it 0.1 or 0.1 didn't work so let's give it 0.25 okay it's almost there 0.6 or 0.7 let's go for 0.7 there we go and I can just kind of go around here and see you know what kind of assets I want to add to the list of the objects so that it changes the the the behavior of the scatter with that being said I think we're kind of good to go with the with the greenery but I will then decrease the density so that we can use a different type of scatter uh to introduce more variety so 2 or5 yeah 85 sure right once this is done I just can close this and continue on if if I need to any at any time adjust it I can select the scatter and i cho can choose to edit parameters and here I'm back and the parameters of the scatter very very useful these seem quite quite cozy so I will just control drag and drop scatter here8 you know so now we have a little bit more of the foliage situation going on very cute very nice all right so now let's do the same thing with rocks I will just drag and drop them over scatter here right so now we have these three scatters onto onto trees right so when it comes down to trees it's going to be a little bit different workflow so for it uh for Dash to actually have my European beach forest in its Library it would need to compute all of the assets and that takes a very long time to do as it is right now so instead I will just use a different method for scattering these bad boys right right here I will just type in Scatter surface scatter I will add the surface in here and for the scatter I I do need to add the trees so I'll just add them in right here drag and drop in there we go so now all of these will be selected and I just click on this plus sign for scattering bam they're here so let's just find the density that kind of works I think that was too much uh we will not use surface align because we want them to be always straight up even when they're growing at tilting ground from the tilting ground then in terms of proximity mask of course we I will be very brave with this and I will just use this roof Edge right here just click on the plus sign there and the distance I'll just do like 10 m or something like that [Music] [Music] [Music] we [Music] all right I made some final adjustments we are currently at 4534 those adjustments included me creating these boxes underneath so that they Cur away stuff from the camera right and this box needs to dip down so you can see that they are interacting with with the trees right it is just the same proximity coloring that that we're doing for example if I needed to select those boxes I also set up a pretty neat system so if I go here and type in uh tags or show tags here I under tag zero I have these three cubes added right so I can very easily very quickly select them as as I need to if I were to use these boxes for more than just the three layer for you know proximity coling there's also of course right now I only showed you um scattering on the on a Surface but there's also possibility to scatter on a path right but for that I would need to create a curve a curve and we will use the curve tool for this and what the curve tool does is draws a curve right so you can choose a bunch of different settings I prefer to use just the initial smoo of um a little bit more let's say three and minimum spacing I want it to be you know like every 15 cm something like that you can also create a mesh if you want to so a pipe basically but if I now draw I can draw any any shape I want and it basically creates a curve for me once I'm done with that I hit enter close the curve tool I have it here I can add it as my path scattering tool like so I can then take let's add a sapling so add that to the scatter and now you can see that you know along this curve the trees are being scattered and I in can increase the density of them so that there's more so that's a pretty neat uh neat way of how you can scatter things as well so with that said we are almost done um I'm just going to make the one last [Music] push and okay a few last things so one is adding textures that I want to mention with the dash plugin it's quite quite nice so if I were to select just the landscape you know the landscape plane here I have an option to change the the the material settings right so I can adjust H saturation and so on I can add snow if I want to on top of this right I I can also I believe add yeah add dirt and then so on so that's one quite useful thing is that you get access to these material settings straight up by just selecting the object and adjusting its material I like that very much and another one is if I were to just find a material here if I were to take this material and just drag and drop it onto the shape it just applies the material sure but if I hold the control key and drag and drop it on then there we have the possibility to use Tri planner mapping which actually ignores the UV uh coordinates of your geometry and rather uses the true coordinates of the material itself right and then of course if I select this click on the little um icon there I can adjust the tri planner mapping scale right so that's that's quite a quite a useful useful thing in my opinion I'm quite quite happy with this plugin I will be using it uh in every single project that I do and now let's talk about or actually let me show you the final output and then we will talk about the pricing and is it worth it or [Music] [Music] not okay so let me just move aside so we can have the two pict pictures right here right so comparing outputs of the two workflows it's pretty clear that the quality and the Fidelity that I get is you know pretty similar between these two so the question becomes why would you pay for something if you can do it for free and there's there isn't a simple answer to this but I'll try to attack this question from a few different angles to learn the PCG workflow and much more importantly to learn how to to troubleshoot the PCG workflow it took me around 32 hours of training in total and in an architectural practice I feel like this time would be better spent on the design so don't you agree which brings me on the value versus the effort angle when given the chance to choose to spend 32 hours training on how to make a non-destructive adaptive scattering system workflow or or to Simply go the destructive route and just brush on the assets on the on the landscape most of the designers will choose the destructive route right because the value of non-destructive workflow is much less it's much less than required investment of time right to to learn the non-destructive way even though the PCG worklow is an objectively better system than just simply brushing things on so this is where Dash is carving out a niche to themselves they're enabling you to go the non-destructive route with minimal training required which is very nice replacing the time cost with the monetary cost of course of $7 per student and if I remember correctly $20 per professional per month and let's do a little bit of math let's say my hourly rate is $20 you know that's with all the downtime when there are no clients and and it just averages down to uh $20 per hour and 32 hours of training to use the PCG workflow it's the same thing as $640 you know of of purchase right of single time purchase that's that's like a dash license for 3 and a half years also the dash workflow was a little bit over 1 hour faster than the PCG workflow so it's 20 time $20 saved per every project so where are we with this well so first of all you should try it out yourselves since Dash is free for one month makes sense to just get it on a project when you have a project and see if it enhances your workflow or if it doesn't right that's much better than listening to some YouTuber guy tell you what to do don't you agree second I see really high value in this for designers who do more than one project per month if you are a student and you work on two projects every year you don't really need to optimize anything but if you're an architect or an architectural visualization Guru I do believe that Dash is worth it I'll see you in the next one later

Channel: Gediminas Kirdeikis

Views: 7,318

Keywords: architeture, design, arch, architec, proces, how, client, clients, rhino, family, house, lithuania, company, very, good, architecture, vray, d5render, render, real time, free, for free, alternative, rtx, gpu, bim, revit, archicad, section, dynamic, drawing, visualarq, visualark, visual, arq, v ray, v-ray, skechup, material, rhinoinsiderevit, rhinoinside, rhino.inside, .insiderevit, zaha, hadid, beam, block, ibeam, grasshopper, gh, adaptive, shecule, schedule, cinematic, d5, d5 render, course, tut, ue5, unreal engine, archviz, VR, virtual, reality

Id: 4VA0vM2VaxY

Length: 34min 27sec (2067 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024