Creating Decals in Unreal Engine 5

hi everyone my name is peyton and in this video what i want to do is actually cover how to set up some simple decals inside of unreal engine 5. so i have started here with one already applied to the wall but basically i have this mega scans wall that i grabbed from the qixel bridge and i want to also just use at least for this demo i'm going to use the um a mega scan graffiti piece that i found on there as well so how i'm going to actually start with this is i want to kind of talk about what a decal is and so this will be a almost like a projection decal they're also called deferred decals inside of unreal engine but this is one that's actually being projected onto a mesh there's also geometry decals which are if you had like a flat plane that you brought in that was hovering over your existing model and then you basically apply a material with a mask and everything with it that would be more so along the lines of a geometry decal but with the deferred decal or projection decal as we see here basically this is yeah just being projected from a bounding box onto the wall and that's what we're getting so overall to set one up it's actually quite simple i'm going to actually just make one from scratch so i'm going to open my content drawer down bottom and i already brought in the actual texture maps for it i'm using this one here which just has a albedo and then you can also see that uh let me dock and lay out and then we can also have the opacity which is just a white and black mask and this is going to basically mask it out as well but i'm just going to right click and create a new material let's name it decal 01 so there we go and then i'm going to open it up so i wanted to show you how quickly you can basically make one of these but if i click on my actual attributes for the the decal right now this is just a basic material it's not going to work properly if we just have it simple like that so we do need to change the actual material type so i'm going to go down here once i've clicked on the the main attributes for the material and i'm going to change the surface over to deferred decal now we can see that it's dropped all of the options off except for world position but we are getting an error basically saying material using the deferred decal domain can only use blend modes translucent alpha composite or modulate and basically that's just saying yeah blend mode here cannot be opaque so i need to switch this i'm going to switch it to translucent um and we should be good to go now so yeah you'll see that we have a couple of options come back and some of them we didn't have previously so now that we have that all i need to do really is bring in my albedo or my base color and then my opacity so keeping this one yeah pretty simple just because uh like only need two maps to get like a decent pass now of course like if you want a lot more like roughness variation uh or you're trying to do something with more metallic uh of course you can have a lot more with that stuff but yeah just keeping it simple with like the overall look of a decal but i can plug this in with my rgb to base color and then this one of course can go into opacity so now i hit save and uh in essence like at the most basic level the decal is now made now how to actually apply it to my scene the easiest way i like to use is actually just dragging the material out typically on other like assets and stuff that would either apply material but this way when it's a deferred decal you'll find that it actually creates the decal itself so i drag it in and we can see here now that i have a bounding box that has been brought in so i can actually edit this a little bit there's a thing or two at least since i drag it in this way that i'll need to slightly adjust but overall what i want to do is rotate it 90 degrees and then i'm going to rotate it 90 degrees that way as well you'll see the square aspect ratio and of course the actual map is a bit wider one thing just quickly you can do for that is actually just copying and placing that into the y axis and you'll see now that the y uh is accurate uh to the the width and all um of what the actual uh texture we brought in and yeah i can just lock that back again because that's the decal size but um yeah and with that as well as you notice when i click on this uh it does bring up the attributes uh there's a couple of like features that you can kind of play with over here um but at like a yeah basic level i wanted to change the decal size there i can also still use like the the editing in um side of the actual like viewport but sometimes yeah the how it scales can be a little bit weird if you have this locked over here this scale you can also just nicely like scale it down one thing is you definitely like don't need it to be like this deep because what you'll find is let's say that i drag it over here um if it's too deep and yeah i don't have it disabled then you're gonna have it where it's overlapping on all assets which could be nice but for this case i wouldn't want it actually on that post so there's a couple ways you can do that either just make sure your decal is much more flush something like that or additionally if you don't want something to actually get a decal so let's say that i'm trying to put some dirt around the edge down here uh so forth you can actually go and click on an asset like this one and i can search for decal here and there's a check box where it says receives decals i can click on that and now it will not receive any decals uh in the scene at all so that could be another way to disable decals for certain meshes uh if you're working and yeah it feels like it's kind of overlapping on stuff you don't want it to touch um yeah that's one way as well so now that you know i have that gonna move it over here and you can see that we have yeah pretty decent decal it's grabbing the normal information still from underneath and we can uh put it here and have our our actual like graffiti so one other thing uh if you feel like let's say i wanted this dirt to be in front of the afk one um that's going to come down to the sort order so as you hover over it it'll let you know but basically the sort order is how you can sort between multiple decals and the higher values going to draw later or on top so if i wanted this one to be in front i believe if i click one here so this one probably has a default of zero and then this one's going to be one um looks like it yeah it kind of crashed into the wall a little bit but uh yeah so now sword order one is in front of the afk so uh that's how you can also work with the the depth of difference um and then yeah one other thing just in regards to decals and using them um the quixote bridge does have a lot of great decals uh just by default that you could bring in whether it be like some concrete breakup or some like even tire tracks for your ground or something but i wanted to show real quick if i just open up the quixle bridge you can go over here and find decals in it and quicksilbridge is uh the the bridge for quicksilver mega scans so you'll find the 3d assets textures materials and you can just drag them into your scene which is pretty nice but yeah i basically filtered it to show only decals now i can go down here and this is where i found the graffiti but i actually just downloaded the textures because i wanted to show how to set one up but if you actually just drag and drop this into your scene then it would already be set up for you which is pretty nice but um yeah i wanted to go over and maybe find some street stuff like debris or something um maybe here and yeah there's potholes i think i'm going to look real quick for gravel and then i can also put decal so uh yeah it's really nice for um basically being able to edit it in that way where you can really just bring stuff in but yeah i wanted to kind of throw something like this onto my actual ground that i have so there's also road dust that one's actually pretty cool but yeah i think it's a decal actually so i'll try it out um might not work might work so gonna just drag this over a little bit and if i just drag it in um we should see that it might take a second for it to be brought in so there we go we have our um decal in now it has a pretty large bounding box i believe as well um but yeah you can see how it kind of is messing on the wall there but i think something like this could be useful for you know getting some more uh variation on this ground which um is like pretty unfinished like material but you know getting just more uh i guess yes stuff overall i can turn these off to where they don't have decals i think they might be in a a group or so um where's my bounding box okay yeah so this will be a better situation to actually use the the squishing uh that way it's only really affecting the ground and then once this is models i can turn off where decals don't affect it that way i don't have uh that little weird error that's kind of going on but as you see like yeah just really quickly i have uh some more detail being brought in here and the nice thing about the the mega scans or the quicksilver bridge decals too is the actual material itself has um material instances that you can pretty nicely customize so this is it here and the material that is set up and i can go in here if i wanted to and add a color overlay if i wanted to try to match it a little bit and quicker to my ground which it's not too bad but there's also some other stuff that could really benefit so the the tiling if you wanted it to tile more and so forth so yeah i think it's a really cool tool to be able to bring in decals and just decals overall i think are that like that next level of detail um where maybe you can't uniquely um place stuff in your area or it's like a tiling texture um and just overall it's it's really nice to uh really yeah bring some some unique moments and uh just details to your piece without having to put it into the existing model or texture so but yeah that's about it for this video if you have any questions of course feel free to drop them below and i will see you next time

Channel: Peyton Varney

Views: 33,089

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5, UE5, UE4, Unreal Engine 4, Decals, Deferred Decals, how to, decals in unreal engine, brick wall, brick material, street graffiti, graffiti, 3d art, environment art, texture art, game development, game art, city in unreal engine, city street, video game graffiti, quixel, megascans, quixel bridge, unreal engine, ue5

Id: zmrLwZ3ViT0

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022