Creating Extra Detail in Unreal Engine with Second UV Channels

hey everyone this video is from a talk i gave to the students at southwest college in northern ireland earlier this year it covers the second ue channel workflow and how to use it to give your assets some extra detail using custom masks i use this heavily during the creation of my most recent scene no honor in fire which you can see on screen now at the time recording the scene was at an extremely early stage so most of the assets you'll see are a work in progress but i thought that this method really helped me ground my assets and add extra storytelling to them in this talk i cover the basics of this workflow in detail from the uv unwrap stage to mask creation all the way up to setting up the shader in engine this was recorded live on discord due to covet 19 but i think it may be useful to some despite its unedited nature that's all from me hope you enjoyed the video cool sounds good first of all thanks paul thanks so much for having me on i appreciate the opportunity um yeah what's up everybody my name is cairo i'm currently an outsourced artist working on a couple of projects i'm not really allowed to talk about at the moment and i'm from south africa so please excuse the weird accent so basically yeah like paul said i thought it would be um useful just to go through one of these modular assets that makes up one of the buildings in my scene at the moment sort of from the uv unwrap stage in your modeling package all the way through to ue4 just to get a better idea of how to set this all up so let's get started so i thought this assets probably easiest to go through just because it's not too complex and it's sort of big so hopefully it'll be easier for you guys to see what i'm doing so basically as the name implies you're going to be setting up a second uv channel inside your mesh so that you can have either a trim or a tileable inside your first uv channel and inside your second ue channel you're going to have a unique unwrap inside the zero to one space which you can then use to layer masks inside unreal engine using the different masks generated in painter so um just to talk a little bit about the uh trim we're using over here so just something to keep in mind when you're creating trims and stuff like that i'm sure you guys have done this to death by now but um just because i know that my scene is a lot of you know wood and thatch and stuff like that obviously that's what the majority of my trim is going to be uh and also including rope and some wood damage uh logins stuff like that you can see that this is still a little bit work in progress so the nice thing about the second uv workflow is that you're basically maintaining the textile density of your trim sheet or your tileable while using these masks to sort of accentuate your asset so like i said you basically just model whatever you're trying to do and then you just map this these uv shells to your trim and then that's basically the first part done that's your first uv that's what you should be familiar with so now the unique part comes in by just doing something like this so first of all um just to go back to the trim quickly so like i said this trim is just a 2k texture and i'm using a 512 textile density for this scene so if you're using some type of textile density checker inside your modeling package just make sure to set everything everything to the correct scale so that everything works nicely across your scene then for the unique things get a little bit different because obviously we're not maintaining that textile density so i think for something like this it's something like 1.4 so it's a bit of a a rule of thumb at the moment but i've kind of been playing with a few of these assets and just uh producing the master different qualities texture resolutions just to see which is the most effective and i've noticed that at about quarter res of whatever your textile density for the trim is so in this case 512 you can sort of get away with that so anything around 1.28 is going to be pretty much fine in some instances with larger assets you can go lower so you really don't need to worry about the textile density inside your your unique uv unwrap excuse me so basically what i did for this is i just duplicated the trim uv channel into this one and just did a quick and dirty auto pack of these islands and i made sure to leave the rotate option off for this mask purely because we're working with a material like wood which in and of itself is kind of like extremely directional you know you've got wood grain that always follows one direction and stuff like that so i just wanted to make my life when creating mast a little bit easier so that if i want some type of mask that follows the wood grain i don't need to worry about triple or anything like that you can just do a straight uv projection for that you might be wondering why my unique uv unwrap is inside the first uv channel as opposed to the second that's purely because at the moment painter doesn't have the functionality for multiple uv channels so basically it discards every other uv channel after the first one so because we want to texture the unique unwrap obviously i just put that in the first uv channel and ufo doesn't really matter which way you set this around because you can just change this around with a texture coordinate node so after you've done all of that mapped your trim done your unique uv unwrap you can just export that to ue4 and then we can also start generating masts inside painter so just to talk a little bit about my logic behind the mask creation and stuff like that so i know i wanted color variation to the wood so that the tileables wouldn't be as sort of flat and repetitive as they are i knew i wanted dirt to collect in the crevices of the meshes and it sort of had to make sense for each individual mesh has to be like context context specific and then i wanted wetness and moss because of course i'm working on a pretty swampy environment so those sort of go with the territory um so first of all this is we're obviously using a very trim dependent workflow here and tile levels and stuff like that so there's not much high poly going into this but we still want to use generators and stuff like that which are going to have to use curvature and ao and stuff like that so first of all whenever i'm working on an asset like this i'll just bake mesh maps using the low poly mesh as the high poly mesh so you just bump up the resolution i don't have any material ids and just bump up the anti-aliasing and just bake your mesh maps and then you can use all the fancy generators that come with substance so i don't spend too long on this but just quickly go through how i would go about creating each mask i'm sure you guys have done this plenty of times so for the color variation first of all as i said wood is very directional the grain only goes one way anything that sort of deviates from that is going to look a little bit strange so luckily substance has this wood gray scale which is just multiplied with the normal clouds just so that it's not applied everywhere i like to blur most of these rgba masks just so that they aren't so dependent on the resolution the blurring just helps that a little bit and then you'll notice if i turn off this pain subtract over here unfortunately the floaters are also the floating geometry rather i should say are also receiving all of these masks and i don't particularly want so in this case if you look blender those areas over here are just my wood damages and stuff and they don't particularly need masks unless i really want it so you can just turn off basically everything that's affecting the floaters over there so that's going to be an important one inside the scene because if i hop back into unreal quickly i'm just going to unlit i think the dirt is really what pushes the second uv workload here so if i turn off all my masks over here you can see that with just the base trim and just the floaters and the multiple tileables over here it looks pretty flat there is some variation due to the color variation inside the trim but it's really the mask that brings us together so you can see the dirt that collects in all the crevices over there just works really well so i think the dirt is the one you should probably spend the most time on to make sure that your acid is like really really grounded so because of those mesh maps that i baked i can just use this uh generic mask builder i'm sure you guys have seen it tons of times before so one thing to keep in mind again with the floating geometry if you're using that workflow if you're not don't really worry about it is that especially this mask builder the legacy one it's very dependent on ao so if you're going to bake your make your low poly with itself the the baker is going to think that the floaters are occluding your other geometry so it's going to cast ambient occlusion over there and then you're going to get dirt in a very weird straight line under your floating geo over there so it's just quick to paint it out really quickly really dirty doesn't have to be anything fancy literally just with the default brush and then um the reason why there's a second dirt mask over here is because like i said with this generator it's kind of um it's not great at taking scale of things into account so by the time that this gets to an appropriate level when you bump this up it's sort of blown out these smaller pieces over here so if you if i just enable this over here pretty much exactly the same thing with the mask builder but just at a smaller level just so that i can have finer control over those small areas over there so i think i just decreased the ao and the curvature and that really makes a big difference because preferably you don't want your mask to completely cover any of your assets because then in engine you're just going to get solid flat colors which doesn't look extremely realistic or grounded so try to avoid that as much as possible and then let's move on to wetness quickly so this is the one that you can kind of play around with a little bit because obviously where water gathers and drips and stuff like that is very situational so for lots of my assets which are more flat obviously they would be receiving water from above from rainfall and from below from the swampy environment stuff like that so for this wall in particular i know that it's sort of propped up on these struts so it's not going to get a huge amount of water all over and it's also covered by the roof however because it's you know a very moist water filled environment there is going to be some moisture to speak of so there will be some sort of water saturation from the wood coming up from the ground and then also from quite some mossy damp uh that roof there's also gonna be some over there i mean as long as you can slightly justify what you're doing with all of this i think it works out fine okay uh last one moss so as i've said before obviously moss goes hand in hand with water so the areas where you have water are the areas where the moss is first going to accumulate and then also in lots of the reference i had the moss was sort of present in these long stripes along each plank so that's sort of what i was going for over here keep in mind that um we do have the vertex painted moss inside engine so this mask isn't supposed to give you any sort of like volumetric or like moss that sort of has normals and stuff like that this is kind of just like the moss that would first form and it's not really fully coalesced yet cool so now that we have our masks generated what we want to do is we want to export these to ue4 to use with our shader now the problem is we don't really want to spend a ton of time like packing all these channels inside photoshop or whatever exporting them one by one and then having to pack them so i've quickly set up a output template which i think works pretty well for all of this mask creation so it's just called a cairo rgba mask so essentially because i set up a base which is black and then all of my different channels they're just referring to the base color so they're not transmitting any roughness or any other type of information so you can just straight up export your base color to the rgmb channels and then the engine will be able to unpack those separately for the alpha channel where the moss is i've just set this up to use the opacity now this does require you to create the opacity channel inside painter but i think that's a little bit easier than maybe creating four user-defined input maps and having to set those up every time at least your base color is always there and you can always use it as masks so in order to get that opacity working for the alpha you just have to go to your channels and just click on an opacity map which i think i've already set up so it's missing over there there we go opacity so you can see that you when you enable the opacity you now get that extra option over there so you just need to make sure that for your moss the opacity is set to one and it should match this over here so keep in mind before you export your masks you'll want to turn off this color over here because if you keep this color on this is still uh this is the base color so it's going to basically add this to your red green and blue masks so you want to avoid that like i said you can set up your own like custom output templates which make things easier for you as long as you get everything into the right channel so you would go ahead you would export this at the resolution that your modeling package told you so whichever gets you a pretty decent textile density so this is a pretty big asset nearly nearly 9 meters so 2k seems okay it's gray scale so it's not going to be too big so you would just go ahead and you would export that and then you would get it inside unreal and it would look something like this so when you import it it's going to import as default but because we don't intend on using srgb we don't need any color information we can change this to masks because we only want to use the rgb and alpha channels individually as grayscale textures so if we take a look at this you can see that we have our color variation dirt wetness and the moss so i think what i can do now is i can quickly show you how the how the shader works and then we can go about how it's set up okay so we have texture parameters for all of our trim sheets so i've just packed this into diffusion opacity and then metallic roughness occlusion and height and then a normal and then you have the mask which drives the specif the specific acid that you are looking at so as you can see from here the instance has controls over each of the masks and then we also have controls for vertex moss which i can just turn off at the moment so like i said i think in the reference i had this really nice blue variation to the wood so if i wanted to change that to something less saturated and maybe more bright i can do that and that's being driven by the mask and then i also have a power parameter so that can be adjusted separately pretty much the same thing goes for all of the other masks that i've created over here so for the dirt we can bump that power up beyond to so you can sort of set ranges where you can find where these things are going to act as they should and where they're going to get too overpowering and you can clamp those if you want to and then lastly there's stuff like wetness which i'll go through when i go into setting up the shader but this one just essentially darkens the albedo also have controls for stuff like roughness which maybe you can't see over here let's get a spotlight there so your control over how rough or not that water is going to affect your surface and obviously the more intense the mask the more this is going to affect that cool so there's a couple other options over here which i'll go through inside the master materials so let's get into that so this is pretty much it it's not too complicated um paul actually if the students would like this to be made available to them i don't mind sending it to you or posting it on our station for free or something you should like that that would be amazing carol yep chris no problem so um easiest way to work our way through this just so that you understand it is probably from left to right left to right you know a designer style so on the left over here we have all of the different you know the normal options that you have to set up for your material so i'm using a mast material over here because i have some opacity inside my trim for the floaters and the nails and stuff like that so that's why i've set the material to mast uh interesting little quick tip which i actually only found out the other day is obviously a master or translucent material is going to be more expensive than your normal opaque one but you don't have to set all of your assets to mast so even though the master material is masked in each inside each material instance there's also material property overrides sort of hidden at the bottom over here so say for example i know that this wall doesn't have any bloaters and i know that it doesn't have any subsurface or anything like that so i could theoretically go in change that to a opaque and change that to default lit so it just helps you get a little bit more finer control over the optimization side of things just in case you'd like to do that there's also a two-sided option over here so you can see that i don't have two-sided enabled by default inside my mouse material however i just need to go into my instance for the thatch where i am using two-sided and just select it like that okay sorry i got sidetracked um cool so bass trim setup like you saw in the instance this is just uh diffusing opacity and all the other different texture parameter inputs so this is basically what determines which uv channel the mesh is going to look inside for you so i know in blender we had the unique in the first uv channel and the trim in the second so you might be a little bit confused as twice as one over here basically ue4 starts counting at zero so this is still the second uv channel even though it says one you can see over here in my rgba mask we have the texture coordinate index set to zero so that's all going to be set up as you need and then also because we've unwrapped the trim so that it works we don't really need to worry about tiling and the same goes with the mask pretty much that's inside the zero to one space so you don't need to worry about tiling pretty much at all using this method so if you look over here where the masts are affecting our diffuse our roughness and our normal you can see that i have obviously various different scalar parameters which are driving the instances and then i also have material parameter collections which i'll go over a bit later when we get to them so it's pretty straightforward how i've set up all of these masks to affect your assets basically i'm just using simple lips for everything because it seems to work just fine for what i intended i don't really need the uh the masks to have access to height information from the trim or anything like that it's not that fancy but this seems to work pretty well because of the mask we generated inside painter so first of all over here a link to our red channel of the mask we have a scalar parameter which is just the color variation power now you could potentially for this use a cheap contrast node which would allow you to control the influence of said mask but because i'm quite specific about how i go about creating the mast inside painter i don't really worry about that and also in this specific environment contrast tends to get a little bit too harsh too quickly and like i said i like to to blur some of the masks just to avoid that so i'm pretty comfortable just using a multiplier for this and pretty much all of the other diffuse all the changes over there so it's pretty simple your bass trim goes into a your color variation parameter which you can change in the instance goes into b and then this goes into alpha pretty much exactly the same thing with the dirt color and this will go into that loop the only difference here is the dirt is going to affect the roughness so you're basically just using a lot of loops over here i've basically set up so that this is the roughness for the trim and then it's going to add a certain amount to that i think 0.7 is probably a bit high that's going to white out all your reference values so probably bump that down to a lower value i think i have it set like 0.2 0.3 something like that just so that your base roughness can sort of shine through and then going back up here to your wetness so obviously wet objects don't have a specific color they sort of reflect the base properties of your trim in this case or tileable or whatever the case may be so instead of using a specific color over here i'm just darkening the material using a simple subtract i believe when like photogrammetry artists and stuff like that when they when they have to do this i think they square the albedo so um if i try something like that it looks something like this [Music] which i feel is just a little bit too saturated for what i'm looking for so after this i would probably have to add a desaturation node so i think in this case it was just a little bit easier for me to subtract from the albedo with itself basically so probably not going to use one i think in my final instances i have around 0.1 and that seems to get a pretty good result so if i just quickly open up this instance again so you can see that we have the wetness darkening effect over here so obviously this would reduce crush all your values back down to black so just play around with that value and you'll get something that looks pretty natural okay back to this now we have the mos color uh which is multiplied by the most power very similar to the other ones and the reason why this is a parameter is just it's just easy for like quality of life stuff if you ever decide to change your moss tileable anything like that it's just really easy to come back in here and change that hue going back to roughness we have a lip which directly lips the roughness of the trim with the dirt and then you can just set a wetness roughness which i thought was a little bit easier than subtracting and trying to have to work out that it's not going below zero or anything like that pretty much the same thing with the moss i sort of eyeballed this just to get it pretty much the same as the tileable and then that takes us to the static switch parameter we have over here so now this i think is especially useful for optimization because pretty much my entire scene is using the second uv workflow but there are also areas where it's not for example this thatch so if i open up this material instance over here you can see i've used that static switch parameter to just turn off the rgba mask functionality so that it's not so expensive so if i just go into shader complexity quickly you get something like this so i mean overall the second uv workflow is not terrible for optimization but if you're sort of fighting for any frames you can get might just be a good idea just to anything that doesn't need the second uv you can just turn it off okay so as long as you have this static switch parameter and the same one with the same name is applied to all of your changes for the diffuse the roughness and the normal it's going to work pretty well then for the false input for the rgba mask it's just leading back to your bass trim so it's as if your second uv changes never happened paul would you like me to go through the vertex mask blending or yeah if you have time please yeah that would be good cool yeah no problem um so the master is pretty interesting because i've just created a function for this just keep things a little bit more tidy stuff like that so probably the first thing you'll notice about the moss which i think is useful for a lot of things especially inside ue4 is the fuzzy shading grass shader or node rather so what this does is basically it sort of bends light around your your mesh sort of like this you can sort of see that the inside is a little bit darker than the outside kind of like a fresnel but it's a little bit more useful and because we have the inputs for diffuse edge color normal which actually i can actually plug in that normal so it'll just bend light a little bit more accurately it makes things a little bit look a little bit fuzzier more like moss in this case so now this sort of relates back to the second uv workflow so this is our second channel where our trim is stored so everything inside our trim according to our unwrap over here is the same texel density so that's why i decided to tile the moss using this coordinate index because everything is the same textual density so you don't have to worry about your moss being slightly different scales uh depending on your unique unwrap so it just makes life a little bit easier so that's the actual moss setup but now let's talk about uh setting up the blend so obviously with the vertex color we want to have some control over how much it's blending and it sort of needs to blend with respect to the height and stuff like that so this is a little tip i've picked up from some some artists and stuff like that so basically we're going to use a height loop and that height clip is going to drive our alphas for the most slip so from the material function we have all of our outputs so basically just because i'm a big dummy um i like to put moss into green because moss is green and so basically every mesh you import from blender at least this could be different from different for different softwares the vertex colors are going to be white meaning that the red green and blue channels have all been painted in so to speak so i sort of just um set a one minus x note over there so that you can subtract the green i'll show you in a minute how i do that so now this is the this is the part which actually makes the blending look quite realistic so basically we have a high texture for our moss and you'll need a high texture for your blending if you want this to work pretty effectively so basically we want to create contrast inside of that height so that we can determine um how it's going to blend with your surface because if you look at the height over here it's okay there's some areas of dark and there's some contrast but we want to be able to play around with that so that only the highest areas of the mass obviously show up so that's why we're using this lerp to create contrast so basically we set an arb sort of arbitrary value of negative 10 into a and then we use the b value as our parameter and this default is set to 10. so now if i preview this you can see that this is given the the mask quite a bit more contrast so this is how it's going to vertex paint when you do that so if i were to change this to something around five which i think it is for the majority of my scene you get something like this so it's basically just raising and lowering the cut-off point at the bottom over here so it works pretty well so into the transition phase goes your vertex color um after the loop you just want to clamp your values between zero and one because if you have your height map below that or above that it's going to give you some weird um so yeah that goes into your height texture the height loop does come with this default contrast but i don't find it as effective as this methods but so you can can play around with either of the two cairo where does the value sorry to interrupt you where does the value of 10 come from it's pretty arbitrary it's sort of like a ratio so i could make this negative one and this one and it'll give me exactly the same thing okay so now if i just want to get the same results before i just have to make that negative one uh sorry 0.5 more or less so it's it's that's why i said it's pretty arbitrary so you could make that's a percentage you could make it a decimal whatever you want really got it cheers cool so like i said um all of that is contributing towards this height loop and then that's going to be the alpha which drives all of your different mosses so those are pretty standard they're just going to go into all of your default parameters over there and then the final thing over here is just the subsurface scattering so this is where material parameter collections come into play and um i said i wanted to touch on this a little bit more so basically if you've never heard of them the difference between a material parameter collection is it will affect all of those instances across your scene no matter what the the values are inside the material instances and stuff like that so anything that i want constant across the scene i'll put inside a material parameter collection anything that i want to kind of vary from asset to asset i'll put inside a scalar parameter so let me show you how this works quickly so i have it over here material parameter collection so basically how it works is you can set up scalar or vector parameters pretty similar to the material editor itself so i wanted a way to control my overall second channel mask power and then also stuff like mass scattering puddle normals that scattering moss normal stuff like that so if i drag this over here this is going to affect all of my assets pretty much at the same time not too sure how clearly you guys can see that but it's there so basically how you go about setting this up oh god no how you going about setting this up is you just go into materials and you create a material parameter collection and then you'll just have to add different scalars or vectors depending on what you want and then it's pretty much as easy as just dragging this into your material editor and then you just select from the drop down whichever the scale is or the vectors you've created so it's pretty useful for when you want changes to be done globally instead of having to worry about doing it either through the material editor or through tons and tons of instances uh so last thing over here so as i was saying uh before i got distracted by that this is why i have the thatch scattering intensity and the moss scattering intensity as material collection parameters instead of scalars and stuff like that so the last little switch i have over here is just use subsurface for diffuse so basically when i want to use the same mos material for thatch i just have something like this which i can click that on and then instead of only having subsurface scattering on the moss i'll have it all over so quickly before i forget let me just show you how that blend contrast for the moss works so it's probably easiest to do it here so like all vertex painting you do need actual verts for this to work well but i found that you need significantly less than maybe you would with other mess methods uh so like i said i'm just going to untick everything except green and then we because we put in that one minus x node we're actually going to be painting with black essentially so i want more moss over here so we're going to do something like that then you can just go into your material instance for this specific asset i actually wanted to change the mos tiling for that so now we have all these vertex mass parameters which are either drawn from the material function or from our main material so here's the blend contrast so we can play around with that and as you can see it's pretty good at adhering to the height to make it look how you want so it's really nice for um maybe times when you need less heavy moss sort of at higher places and then heavier moss at wetter places so let me just take one final look at here to see if there's anything i've forgotten oh yeah so one last thing is just the normal so this is another parameter collection so i just wanted to flatten the normal a little bit where the wet mask is applied but also only where there's excessive wetness so essentially the logic behind this is when there's a good puddle over there so basically when you have the water being applied to the surface the normal is going to be flattened a little bit just to allow for better reflections because as you know wood is quite noisy so it does sort of disrupt from some of those nice reflections that you might want so this is also a material parameter collection so i can just play around with this and you can see this is basically the wood as it is in in the normal map in the trim and then i've set it to something like this just so that catches the lights a little bit better cool i think that's uh pretty much the shader setup um yeah happy to answer any questions if anybody's got so that's a really impressive shadow very very cool the way you've implemented different things i i haven't heard of uh material parameter collections before um so that's i can see a use for that for sure so that's like a global parameter essentially cairo yeah pretty much yeah so that if you want anything to change across the whole scene just plug it in there it's really cool um i've got a few questions um the first one actually is relating to blender um as some you may have know may have sort of gathered from my twitter i'm i'm currently learning uh blender uh that textile density tool what what is that that you're using there to check the textual density checks check it yeah i'm pretty sure it's free i can actually i'll send you the link after this okay and yeah do you unwrap in blender yeah um it depends like all of this stuff is pretty much planks and cylinders yeah so it's not really much of a problem to unwrap here so if it was something more complicated i'd probably go with like ryzen something like that because for this auto packs pretty much the way to go okay and in painter if you just don't mind going back into uh you see your green channel so that just confused me so why have you got um two like two elements to your green mask let me show you quickly um so so i was using the uh the moss builder that pretty generic one so the problem with that one is if i take away the subtract uh like i said it's not really like it doesn't really take scale into account so things sort of get overpowered and also you're not going to get such like crazy ao dirt over here so i wanted that level everywhere else except there so i just subtracted that and just made one with a bit less levels got yeah okay dude that's so cool it's such a really cool workflow yeah it's really cool even the way that polish on me i'm using the user um defines yeah for the masks yeah um it's insane to see that you could just do it through rgb that way as well without using user ones i just create a preset using the user's um cairo it doesn't matter like what what green it is i'm blue and red in painter to do that does it have to be a certain value yeah so you just want to make sure it's pretty much completely okay yeah yeah okay gotcha i mean you could do some pretty interesting things if you like mix those up a bit but then you'd have to like think think deep about which mosque you want mixing and yeah how would you um go about like previewing that that you know that it's what you want i was actually going to mention this but it seemed a little bit like complicated even in my head so let me so what you can actually do is then bring up designer quickly so designer their bakers actually do have support for uv channels so what i did for one of these trims was you can basically bake your trim onto the asset so basically it'll take all of this information over here look at how it's applied on your unique unwrap over here and then do do its best to sort of match that so obviously you're not going to get great text or density or anything but it's just it could be good as like a preview tool you could just basically put it at the bottom of the stack over there and then you'll also have like really cool features like you could bake out the curvature of your trim the height the ambient occlusion all those normal like mesh maps you could bake those out and then stuff like your moss could actually like adhere based on the height and the curvature and stuff like that um so it is a pretty cool way to go about it and you'll definitely get cool results um i just don't know if it's like worth the time investment to bake out every single asset yeah one of the things about this workflow seems to be the the speed like how quickly you can get materials down uh for sure uh but a good way to check i guess uh does anyone have any questions and sorry just on steve's thing about like visualizing stuff you could you can set up your masks using like rgb and stuff and then like okay i know this is going to be sort of this color in engine uh the sort of roughness so you can sort of visualize like that as well uh just have like maybe like duplicate layers stuff like that like i said it's so quick to like export masks back and forth that you can really do this in like a couple of minutes uh i had a question about the collections again uh it was something again i i wasn't aware of it either but whenever you create that does that just mean those nodes are automatically within the material editor you don't have to like um touch anything a bit weird because like i i've only like recently started using these as well so you can't so like for example if i go back into the master it's weird because there's no like material parameter collection in over here so the only way to actually get these in is to drag and drop which seems a little bit weird but hey yeah so it's basically just a case of dragging into the material you want to select the parameter you want and uh yeah you're good to go cool cheers i know it can be sometimes weird with certain blueprints that are made and you have to attach it to the blueprint to actually see the references to it and stuff so let's just check in yeah now luckily it seems to be like pretty easy to use thanks there will probably be lots of questions after you leave cairo this is the usual the usual student approach to questioning you know ask when the person's gone i'm too far off being a student myself i know okay well you can relate then um but that's going to be super useful for us man like um a couple of these guys are 100 wanting to to utilize something like this in their in their sort of final portfolio pieces so um i think this the insight you provided is is phenomenal and even just your shader setup is really good sure stevia go um seeing the um i think it's the second trim one is the one with the ambient occlusion and stuff your height uh it's something that i haven't really used a lot was it that one height yeah what would you use the height for um so i actually don't have a use case in this example but you could you could implement it so that this blend or other slip with the moss was sort of integrated with that height that's something i'd planned to do initially but now seeing the results with the moss i don't know if it's worth that extra like cost would that like require tessellation or something for the height to work or not necessarily tessellation i mean i mean you could just um how do i go about this so at the moment the vertex painting is probably where i would use this just to get a better blend between the moss and the yeah i mean like let me show you what this height map looks like so it looks pretty much something like this so my wood is like there's not much variation in it and all mixing this with the moss would do is make the moss up in like these really really like narrow crevices which like wouldn't look good so i'll work out a use case for it cool cool man thank you so much cairo that was that was amazing man stop recording cool you

Channel: Cairo Goodbrand

Views: 998

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine, game development, ue4, video games, environment art, 3d art, tutorial

Id: hVnhqjZXYAU

Length: 49min 32sec (2972 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021