Creating Grass with Color Variation in UE4

[Music] hey everyone my name is Victor Amon and welcome to this quick video tutorial in which I'll show you how to create a quick lawn or general grassy area I'll be going over how to procedurally add some color variation and how to quickly set up a material using your mega scamp's textures so this scene here can be quickly edited using this color variation slider I can also drag it down a bit so as you can see if I set it to 0.1 or an maybe negative 0.5 whoops that's not too that negative minus 0.1 I mean there we go so it's a very very nice and quick way of adding some some slight variations to your to your environments so let's start off by going to the mega scans library here so to find your 3d grass simply go up here to this drop down to the upper left click 3d and you search for grass and here you have a whole bunch of variations you can check out the other 3d assets by removing that tag so I have some hay bales and rock formations trash and a whole bunch of different assets that you can use in your projects oh yeah so by choosing any of these you can follow the tutorial it doesn't really matter which one you choose it's this technique Amu's you can use with the rocks as well if you want to if you want some slight variations in the in the tint there as well so let me just bring them over here so we have our models right here so it's actually really really easy what we'll do is we'll quickly create a new material and we'll call this grass master I'll open this up just drag this over to this monitor and we'll start off by loading our albedo we'll put this here I'll make this window a bit bigger and I'll zoom in a bit so you can see better well do next is I'll drag out from this a speed three color variation and I'll click a mount here right click amount and promote to parameter and I'll call this color variation I'll set the default value to zero point zero point one drag this down here and plug it into base color so what this will do is it'll give each instance of grass a slight color variation which will be extremely handy because what you don't want is repetition and like it looking monotone so this will really help with that so I'll try this up here next I'll take my roughness map and just plug this straight in and in the specular I'll plug in just a one vector here or a scalar parameter I'll set this this to zero point twenty two and you just plug this in here so in my case I haven't downloaded the specular nor the cavity so I'll just use a flat color value here for that for this example next up I'll just plug in my in normal map and here's a neat little trick that you can do if you want to easily be able to adjust the intensity so the normal thing that I used I used to do before it was to create a vector here convert to parameter name this normal intensity and I was at least like 1.5 1.5 and 0.5 and that will boost the normal map intensities if we preview the node here we can see if I just zoom in here set this back to 1 1 and 1 we can see that it becomes a bit more intense like so so let's stop previewing so instead of doing this what I can do is I can drag out from here and break out through a float three components this will let me adjust the RGB values and like so so what I'll do here is I'll create a scalar parameter name this normal int set the two in one by default or actually zero by default because what I'll do here is I'll drag out from the RG and B values and I'll add to the R and G and next I'll subtract from the B channel because if you remember before what I did here in order to boost the value or actually in this and this vector here I increased or I added to the Orang T channel but I reduced from one which is the default value to around 0.5 so by adding a subtract here just move this back a little bit like so I'll drag out from this and the type in make float 3 so this will sort of append everything together again so I'll drag out from this result in to be here so just drag in to the normal here like so so next up we'll go ahead and set this to be masked and I want it to be a two sided foliage shader so next up I'll drag in the opacity and we all need the red channel here because they're all the same so I'll drag this into an opacity mask like so and there we go so I'm go ahead and save this and I'll create a an instance open these grasses up here just move them into the tabs here and grass master intent instance so apply apply and apply there we go so if we drag these out here we can check them out in our editor I'll just put them all here so what I can do now is I can just demonstrate the normal intensity slider here that we just introduced you can drag it both ways and if you want to make it even easier for you you can just go in here to the scalar parameter and set the slider min to minus 1 and aside or max to 1 and save this so now we won't be able to UM increase the values to beyond those values so minus 1 plus 1 so you set it back to zero we can drag it up to maybe 0.4 or something like that just compare just makes it pop a little bit more so one thing that I forgot to add is the translucency so what I'll do is I'll just drag this in here and copy over the color variation drag it down here and plug it back in so when you copy something it adds underscore one so if I remove this it's going to use if I change the colorization slider or value here it's going to change the value up here as well because they have the same name so that's pretty handy I set it down to 0.1 again I'll drag this into sub-surface color and I'll go ahead and save so if we check here in the viewport we're going to see some umph there we go perfect so I'll go ahead and close this and close this down and like so so now I'll just select all of the assets that I place here and I'll go into the modes here into the foliage painter and I'll just load these meshes here so let's check out the scale to see if that's if it's a correct scale and just wait for the shaders to compile there we go yep scale looks okay so I'll increase the density to maybe 600 just go way over the top and maybe maybe boost this scale to around 1.5 to 2 or so and I'll just boost the brush size so let's go ahead and fill this whole this whole patch here and there we go so now if we close down the modes here I'll just move it back to where it was we can go into the instance and if we tweak the color variation parameter that we added before we can see exactly what it does so if I really boost this value you can see what's going on here it randomizes the color of colors very nicely so we set it to zero it's very uniform which can if that was that's what you're after and that's perfectly fine but if you want some more ruggedness and you can add a value here so it is a low value like 0.1 will does a lot of difference and make this a bit smaller so 0 and 0.1 maybe 0.08 or something like that close this down now boost the light intensity a little bit so and I'll just add produce the sky light a little bit as well I'll just load one of those here and drag it out there there we go so that's one way of creating grass so let's just make it look a bit nicer adjust the focus here we can zoom in here you get a nice close-up alright so that's it for this at this tutorial and thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Quixel

Views: 110,174

Keywords: Grass, Lawn, Nature, Foliage, Realism, Realistic, Megascans, Photo, Photorealism, Computer, Art, Game, Movie, Film, VFX, Green, CG, Tutorial, Fast, Quick, Easy

Id: 7NeUiHhHTjM

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2018