Detailed World Building in Unreal Engine 4 w/ Javier Perez | NVIDIA Studio Session

hey guys my name is javier perez and i'm currently a senior material artist at playstation's visual arts service group i've been in industry for about nine years now in this final lesson we'll be taking everything that we've created in this video series and create a small little environment that we can use for our portfolios i'll be covering techniques thought processes and general understanding of how this environment was made so let's get started so here we have the final scene and what we're going to try to replicate right now i have a cinema camera actor so that's why we're getting that nice depth of field and the bokeh i added a few settings to get those or that result but if we just stop piloting this guy and we can kind of zoom out and see what's going on in the scene uh there's not really a lot going on here um i'm just gonna uh get out of game mode see what's going on so we just have a couple lights um we have the two splines here um some fog and just some pretty preliminary meshes um we're still using that same rock wall that we use with our first tutorial um we have the foliage that we just finished up in the last tutorial and then that same rock material i applied it to some meshes that i had created uh previously before this tutorial so feel free to either create one for your yourself or just download it off one of the many websites out there here's a dirt material applied to the spline road so kind of what we're doing there and a lot of it's it's basically just being hidden with the fog so we're just trying to get that sense of there's a bigger fuller environment here so to begin let's just go ahead and start off with a blank slate let's go ahead into file new level and for this guy we're just going to start off with a completely empty level nothing in it so let's go ahead and choose that and the first thing i'd like to do is i'm just going to hit save and then save the current as we're just going to name this let's see nvidia ue4 demo cool that way if anything crashes or anything we will have backups automatically generated so i'm just going to hit unlit on this guy so nothing really going on here um one of the first things i like to do with these kinds of uh scenes is instead of creating the whole background and getting that sort of feel to it we're just gonna go into all classes and then we're going to start typing out hdri backdrop so we're going to just click and drag into our scene first thing i want to do is just make sure this is zero zeroed out and this essentially is giving us a nice just background and some lighting to go with it so we get that sense of um just like a full environment here we have the backdrop and everything and it it gives us a subtle um hdr and then it affects the lighting a little bit as well so uh first thing i want to do is let's go ahead and change this guy so i'm going to try to find something that's i'm liking a little bit better for the scene so the first thing i want to do is let's go ahead and search and when we click on the magnifying glass we get a few different options to choose from so go ahead and drag these guys in here that one's looking kind of interesting one other place that has these guys is um if you go ahead and view options and show engine content show plugin content we can actually scroll down into our hdri backdrop and we'll have oh well we're already in here but once we actually select one of these we can go into here and then we'll have way more available here so we can go into this desert outer and i believe this is the same one that i used for um the final environment as well so let's go ahead and keep this one next up one other thing i'd like to do for this guy is just general environment things i like to do is set up a post-process volume so we're going to do that by going into the volumes we're going to make sure to look for post process and we're just going to drag this guy in here again just trying to zero everything out that way it's easier to find now instead of um changing the bounding box to encompass the entire environment what we're going to do is we're just going to look for bounds we're going to put infinite extent so this way it affects the entire scene no matter where you are in the um in the area or environment go back and then one other thing now that we have this set up we can turn off that adaptive exposure so i'm just gonna look for exposure here and we're gonna make sure to keep min and brightness at 1 here next up let's start bringing in our actual content that we've created so far so we're just gonna hop into our content and i'm using the same folders that i've used as we're creating this whole series so i'm just looking for the mesh one and let's believe it was this one right here so i'm just going to bring this rock wall in here again set it to zero zero zero cool let's move it to the side let's go ahead and apply a material on here so let's go to our materials and let's do this instance here great just gonna copy this a few times so let's go ahead and turn on squid snapping and let's make this kind of small actually let's make this maybe 100 cool i'm just going to grab this a few times here because this is instance we can go ahead and change the tiling as we find it suitable we're starting to get that weird um effect because of the tessellation that's going on on this guy so what we can do is just grab some of these or any of these that are giving us that issue uh let's double click on the actual mesh click on here opens up the actual asset details window so let's look for bounds here and let's do on i believe it's the x let's just bump that up to like two or something cool and now we're not getting that flickering anymore so we could either do that inside of the details pane or we could have easily selected each and every one of these meshes uh looked for the bounds in the details and just change the bounds to go here so two different ways so keep that in mind now that we have this rock wall let's bring in our road so just gonna go back into our content folder and i'm just gonna go into my road i believe it's this final one so let's just bring this guy in here again let's just set this to zero zero zero and currently we don't see our mesh because like we set up in the blueprint until it's pulled out a certain amount it's not going to bring in our actual mesh so once we start pulling it out we can kind of see what's going on here so it's exactly what i was looking for so now that we kind of relative idea of where this rock rock wall is we can quickly just take off uh grid snapping and just move it ever so slightly to where i think would be a good position just gonna move this over here and cool so again i'm just gonna keep pulling this guy and i think around here let's try to add like a nice bend here so add a spline point here let's go ahead and grab this guy and start there we go bending this road a little bit let's go ahead and grab this guy and maybe just bring it in slightly and bring this guy in slightly as well so we'll get like a harsh 90 degree turn here cool now one thing you might not know in when i showed you the final um environment is uh i basically just duplicated this uh once so ctrl c ctrl v and i just moved it ever so slightly so we get the impression that there's more of a ground than meets the eye so we just want to make sure that there's no seam here so let's actually go ahead and unlit and i'm actually trying to find the same we can see it slightly but it's enough where once we start adding the foliage on top you will probably will never know that it's there so let's just let that cool so now we're starting to get something a little bit interesting here if you guys want to see how your materials are reacting right now we can easily just drop in a directional light really quickly so make sure to change it to movable and we're just gonna move this over a little bit kind of get turn off the snapping on the rotation here so let's see there we go just looking for something a little bit more dynamic here that gives us some nice shadows like right there is kind of interesting and just kind of move it around we're going to be tweaking this light slightly or more so we're going to be tweaking a lot of these guys towards the end but for now we just kind of want to see how these guys are reading right now so that's looking pretty cool all right so now that we have this guy what we can do is start bringing in our um rock mesh so again this was just a mesh that i created um outside this tutorial so feel free to sculpt a box model or whatever you will to just create an interesting silhouette or shape i basically for this entire environment just use a single rock so it's just duplicated a bunch of times let's go ahead and apply our final rock material as well so click on this guy apply it to here cool just gonna rotate it and again we can just scale it do anything crazy at this point i start kind of figuring out where i want my shot to be so um i'm just going to move this over here and i basically set up a camera we're still getting a little bit of that flickering so we're not going to worry too much about it but at this point i'm actually going to bring in a cinematic camera so that way we can have an idea of where our shot is and we can start moving this these meshes according to what our camera is seeing so let's go ahead and bring actually let's delete this what we can do is we can just hit create camera from hit sending cinema camera actor okay and let's go ahead and there we go so let's just move this like right here would be interesting i'm just gonna mess with the focal length a little bit just tweaking something i want to be a slight zoomed in here maybe not so much cool i think that's pretty good so let's stop piloting this guy we can go ahead and see select that camera here and now we can begin to move these rocks and duplicate them how we uh actually sorry about that let me just click the camera and then we're going to click this pin preview and then there we go so now let's go ahead and just move these guys willy-nilly to our liking here it's kind of interesting right there one thing that i did on our final version of this environment was i kind of wanted to have like some dynamic shape that's why we have that interesting looking almost like it's a tower or a cliff tower or something like that so i'm just gonna try to replicate that a little bit here just gives the impression that there's like a rock another rock wall there or something like that so down slightly here cool there we go okay let's go ahead and duplicate i'm just holding alt and then dragging which is making a duplicate here okay always looking at this to see how this is reading et cetera et cetera it's trying to get some interesting shapes going on here interesting silhouettes cool kind of liking what's going on here let's go back into this flickering and see if we can mess with this a little bit more bounce yep set this to four or something save great now we're not getting that flickering perfect maybe we can scale this one slightly down we do want to have that idea of large medium and small forms so it's a good idea to scale some of these guys down then see what kind of results you're getting here okay so once i move this guy we have that blank split uh space here maybe scaling it up one thing when creating this rock is you wanna because we're just literally duplicating um this mesh over and over you want to get something that's not too unique that way when you're duplicating it doesn't give the impression that you're just using the same rock over and over what you can do is you can if you're having trouble with that you can just create a few different variations but for the time and purpose of the tutorial just keeping it just to one single rock cool you might have a small little gap here so i just want to take away any of that stuff and we can keep fiddling with this forever but i think i'm just gonna leave it here maybe just move this guy slightly back a little bit cool one other thing that we can do is we can actually do another duplicate here if we're having some trouble here so maybe move this guy back back here we'll probably just end up covering that little spot with foliage just to give the impression that something's there cool so let's go ahead and unpin this guy and move on forward here once you're happy with your layout let's go ahead and go back into that um that one directional light that we placed and let's go ahead and mess with those settings a little bit um let's actually just go into the hector and now that we're in here we can start messing with some fuse settings here so i like using temperature i feel it's a lot quicker than changing your life to be either like warm or cool so let's go ahead and do that this guy and again i'm just going to start rotating this guy to kind of try to get some dramatic shadows or something like that so i thought that looks kind of interesting okay let me move cool this might be more or less the kind of lighting that i had in the um final scene so we'll just keep it like that for now gonna mess with some of the source angle make sure cast shadow is on this point is just kind of playing around with the different settings here there are a few that i know i i like turning on so i'm just trying to find where those are here specular scale the specular scale kind of helps the specular response on your object so if you think you're getting too hot of highlights feel free to turn that down uh here we go the shadow length so by default unreal always sets this to zero in my opinion once you start cranking this guy up to 1 you'll notice like for example even here if we have that 0 by default we're not getting a lot of shadow based on the normal information but once we start pushing this out you can see now we're getting those nice shadows coming from the information that we had here so always keep that in mind when you're turning this guy on oh and i'm liking i'm actually liking this highlight that we're getting there so i can move this guy a little bit cool because you're controlling the camera now any sudden movements um that's what your camera will be moving forward so keep that in mind cool all right let's bring in another part of another big part of this just scene is just the overall fog so let's go ahead and drop in some believe it was atmospheric sorry not that one exponential there we go let's start tweaking these guys i'm just going to go ahead and plug in the same values that i used on our final scene just because i want to get as close to what our final look will be so you can either plug in these values or [Music] mess around and try to find some cool kind of look for your scene so i'm just sampling off screen so if you're wondering where i'm getting these colors etc let's see two i'm just copying some values as well okay we're going to turn on volumetric here it's giving us some crazy results oh already look at that man that volumetric really really does a number on this guy for sure cool and that's about it for the height here so or sorry for the exponential height fog so that's looking pretty cool nice you know i might change the final look for this guy but for now i'm just going to try to keep it or match it somewhere close here so let's go ahead and do that one other thing that we can actually do is in our hdr hdri backdrop we do have a few options we can play with uh the two that i mainly use i described one of them is changing the hdri itself but you can also tweak the intensity of this guy so the hdri affects a little bit of the lighting so you can kind of see the reflection of it but if we bring this down ever so slightly we start getting some darker areas so try to keep it similar to what i had in the um in the final one as well so i believe on the final one i had a value of 0.75 here cool let's actually go back into the exponential height fog and maybe we can mess with some of these settings a little bit maybe like 10 or something nope there we go what i want with the fog is i just want it to hide a little bit of what's going on so you know make it feel like you want to go back in that area to see what's behind there and already we're getting that kind of nice feel there too let's actually try to bring this guy down slightly one other thing we can do is we can actually bring down the color of this as well so i'm just gonna sample off screen as well here let's go back into our fog and you see me um kind of doing the same things i'm kind of fighting and pushing and pulling stuff you know once you change for example some of the lighting you might want to go back to the height and adjust it and same thing with the height if you change or tweak a little bit of it you might want to change the lighting so it's just a constant back and forth here trying to find um the right values here like because i i liked in the final that you can kind of see the silhouette of that guy so and let's actually i'm gonna choose my camera here i'm gonna unpilot it i'm gonna dock it here okay and i'm gonna move this guy over slightly there we go okay let's unpin this guy let's go back into piloting this dude cool let's go back into our camera here directional light yep and let's see what we can do there here one instance now source angle yeah so you'll notice when we mess with the source angle we're getting a sharper fall off here so i try to keep this pretty high one thing you'll know is that we're getting um we have the directional light in a certain angle where this is getting super dark uh this is where i begin to introduce a second directional light so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to copy and then duplicate this guy so copy and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to move it on this side and what i'm going to do with this guy is just let me move it to the side so it's not sitting on top i'm i'm gonna turn off the shadows because i do not want any shadows being casted by this guy all i want is i'm essentially using this guy to light up the shadows slight ever so slightly so just start off at one here but let's turn these guys on and off you'll notice we have we go from the super dark shadows we turn this on slightly and now we're getting some interesting um just bringing up those shadows ever so slightly cool thing is that we can also rotate it and we can get some cool uh reflections here as well so already we're starting to get something kind of interesting we might want to also depending how on how it's affecting our scene we might want to turn down the specularity of it as well so let's actually go ahead and turn down the specular of the main one here awesome cool so i think at this point uh would be a good opportunity to start painting in that foliage so to do that we're just going to go ahead and go into our modes we're going to go into foliage and here you'll get this dialog box asking you to drop in any foliage that you want to paint so we're just going to go back in our content browser and again i just have the two basic foliage pieces that we created from our last tutorial we just have the grass and the fern so let's go ahead and drop these guys in here cool and when you select each one it gives you a different um details pane and you can adjust the settings per different foliage one thing that you can also do is that these check marks tell you which foliage to paint you can either paint all of them so right now we have both uh check boxes on or we can individually paint each separate piece of geo so let's go ahead and do just the grass for right now uh the first thing i'd like to do is i'm just going to un-pilot this guy because there might be some subtle changes we want to do on these guys so let's go ahead and do that once we have this guy selected all we have to do is hit the pane paint sorry and we get this nice cursor with the bubble we can hit our bracket keys make it larger or smaller depending on how much you want to paint so let's go ahead and just do some brush strokes here so um i'm holding down the left mouse and i'm just painting but you'll notice that nothing's happening and that's because if we go underneath here all of our grass is being painted underneath so why this is happening is due to the fact that um uh the tessellation the the foliage tool doesn't like tessellation so even though you have these undulations and this change in silhouette and shape all it thinks it's painting on is uh your flat plane um before it was tessellated so what i like to do is i'm just gonna go ahead and actually erase all this stuff so let's try to erase as much as we can right here i'll tell you how many meshes are actually painted so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go into z offset and change this to maybe 10. this this requires a little bit of tweaking based on um how much tessellation and undulation you have but let's go ahead and do that one other thing that i want to do is i'm just going to bring this up to like 10 000 the highest just so we can kind of see what's going on here so once we have that we have to go back into paint and now let's go ahead and start painting so now we're getting the expected result i think this is a pretty good um [Music] the the 10 is pretty good for these areas that are kind of seeping lower where the water is but we're still not getting the grass on this kind of higher level where it's essentially where i'd like it to be so i'm just going to control z that really quick i'm going to change this to 15 maybe that'll give me the result i'm looking for and let's do a brushstroke here again um still not where we want it to at this point you can either keep tweaking or we could just leave it as is i'm just gonna tweak it one more time see i think that's pretty good the pro the issue with the the way the mesh is right now that requires quite a bit of um messing with these parameters is not only do we have this higher plane but we also have this lower plane so we'll probably want to mess go back and forth and mess with these values as we're painting so let's go ahead and control z that and i'm actually going to move this down to maybe 7 500. give us a little bit here that's looking pretty cool maybe even lower here i want something that's full but not we're still getting a little bit of you know spacing here like that's pretty that's pretty nice right there so let's go ahead and go back into um or actually let's hit our camera actor by hitting select uh oh actually we have to get out of this mode so let's go back in select mode pin our camera go back into modes go to mesh paint and sorry not mesh paint uh foliage and let's go back into paint and now we can start doing our thing here so cool i'm just going to go wild back here because you know not you probably won't go back here based on the shot of this guy so just go kind of wild here maybe something like that just a few clicks here and there to kind of fill up this spot it's a little bit intense there here we don't want those showing up on the rocks so that's that's looking actually kind of cool let's try to fill up this gap here but again um i think we're painting on some no we're good we're good we can erase and let's actually go into that camera and see what we're seeing it's looking pretty cool let's go ahead and erase some of this stuff here a little bit and go back into paint just subtle clicks at this point cool yeah it's looking cool all right so maybe actually let's go ahead and erase some here still want it to feel somewhat believable here so paint a little bit here yeah i would say that that's pretty that's a little bit better again you can kind of tweak to your heart's desire but for now we're just gonna move on uh now that we have the grass we're just gonna do exact same thing with the fern this time i felt that painting each foliage piece separately gave me a little bit more control and kind of picking and choosing where each piece will end up so that's why i did it that way if you guys want to paint everything at the same time feel free so let's go ahead and select this guy hit paint let's bring this up okay pretty intense there cool let's actually scale these down so we do have a few options to scale down the size of the mesh so if we go into scale here put these maybe to 0.5 possibly you can change the max and min um i'm just gonna do 0.75 here see if this gives me the result i'm looking for yeah that's looking pretty nice okay every time you control z all of your foliage might disappear and that's because it's recompiling the shaders so keep that in mind we're running into that issue where um some of the foliage is actually going underneath so let's see if we can figure out what's going on there okay so we essentially have to change that um that setting as well on here um let's do i believe we found it let's look at the grass looks like it was at 15. because these are a little bit taller let's try 17 for good measure here and let's go to paint it's looking cool yeah i like that one happy little bush there cool so let's again keep painting yeah let's go back into our main camera now we can kind of get a better representation of what's going on here nope that one just keeps wanting to creep on through i'm actually gonna erase this one i like this one just because it's giving me an interesting silhouette towards the edge of the frame which i'm a big fan of um so we can i'll keep that one that one's kind of cool too actually i like stuff creeping out of frame because again it gives you that sense of there's more to the scene than there really is so let's go ahead and move back here yeah so with the shader of this guy i do have a um world space variation so that's why we're getting those interesting colors coming through on like different areas um that one's cool all right uh so let's go ahead and open that up just so you can guys just so you guys can kind of see um what is going on with that shader i'm gonna go ahead and go in the contents and let's go into the materials we're going to open up our master foliage shader so pretty standard stuff most maps are actually plugged in to just the respective inputs but on the albedo and the transmittance is where i do have that world space variation i'm just taking that world space variation node i'm dividing that by a scalar parameter and this is the size of that variation that we're going to have basically what it's doing is it's taking this splatter map and what this splatter map is is i basically went to substance designer chose um a clouds and then chose a gradient plug that into a gradient sorry and chose a few random colors so it gives me um this kind of map and what this map does inside the shader based on the position it is in the world it's going to if you were looking at almost at a top down like if we painted um ferns over here versus ferns over here we might get some that are green as opposed to over here that are yellow if you guys can think of it that way um i have a hue amount uh parameter that controls the the hue of that discolor or sorry that variation so even though i'm choosing like green and yellow um i want i might want to shift that slightly and i'm just using a blend overlay to blend that over our just regular atlas texture or albedo i'm using that same small graph here i duplicated it and just plugged it into our transmittance and our transmittance again pretty simple stuff plugged into our subsurface color but here i'm just controlling the tint of it the brightness of the transmittance and then i'm introducing that variation that we just talked about in the albedo again blend overlay controlling all that stuff so let's go back in here close this guy so i would say i'm pretty happy with what's going on here um let's go ahead and maybe mess with that initial directional light so let's get out of this foliage paint mode hit select and maybe we can start messing with the brightness try to introduce a little bit more of what's going on here so this guy in there we go set this to like 23. nice now we're getting some cool almost god raise effects we're starting to get pretty close to what we have in our final scene um at this point i mean it's really up to you guys to mess with the initial um what was that the post process volume so we can change the colors the contrast the um you know the overlays on the camera etc etc so sorry the film grain all that all that uh fun stuff so let's go ahead and go into this guy one thing that i do like adding just to the overall post process volume is i'm actually going to try to find it here let's see it's what i do on every single one of um the environments uh let's see i just gotta find where it is here if you guys are hearing that that's my scroll wheel trying to frantically look for it here we go pro uh post process materials so i'm just gonna hit this guy and asset reference and what i ended up doing was if we go back into the content browser um we have our let's go into materials i actually don't know if i added this into this one i'm trying to find it i might not actually have it in here oh no there it is we have this sharpened material so what this does it just sharpens the overall look of your final screenshot um i basically just um sorry we can open up this guy um it's just uh something i found online so feel free to i believe if you type in ue4 sharpen you'll find it but it's just a quick material parameter that you can plug into your um your post process volume so let's go ahead and just bring that guy in here so just plug this guy in here and kind of see what's going on like let me see it's super subtle i think let's reset this like even here like you might not see it on the recording but once you have it in there you can do some crazy stuff like i'm not gonna mess well i'll just mess with it here i believe it's at a point five so if i let's go ahead and just crank this up pretty intensely kind of see it start getting that weird effect here so maybe i'll just leave that 0.75 or something cool so let's get a game mode here everything's looking pretty cool so let's maybe mess with this directional lights oh maybe we can get that same highlight that we had in here there we go just wanted that same highlight that we were getting in um our final uh scene here so g and at this point let's go ahead into our post process volume and start um tweaking these guys so i'm just gonna go through a few of the um parameters that i tweaked in the final uh material so again feel free to either um follow along on some of these tweaks or honestly i i just uh it'd probably be better just see what you guys come up with um i know this is probably the funnest part of the whole tutorial is just changing the different colors and just messing with a bunch of this stuff gives you like a really cool um look to it in my opinion so this guy up slightly here let's go into color grading let's turn these guys on i'm just going to plug in some valleys here cool we got that nice warm tone and [Music] copy this guy saturation paste cool again i'm just pacing off screen here so oh let's turn this guy on so but it'll give you an idea of what is going on here it looks like some crazy stuff happen here so again it's one of those instances where when we mess one uh parameter or one little tweak it's gonna affect uh the rest of it so there we go that's looking pretty sweet gamma again this is all under the color grading tab here uh the only other thing i believe that i messed with here on the shadows was the gain it looks like pace this guy coffee under mid-tones didn't touch the mid-tones and touch the highlights um just because i didn't touch these doesn't mean you guys can't uh feel free maybe you guys will get some interesting and cool results out of it color tint as well nice cool i think that's pretty much everything that i touched on this guy so let's just lower some of these collapse some of these kind of see what's going on oh feel free to turn on the bloom as well the bloom gave like a pretty cool result here it's looking interesting yeah so i mean we can mess with these parameters uh for days but you know uh feel free to just mess with these and see what kind of results you guys can come up with i think i might actually change the tint of this guy like in that kind of greener if you go here cool and finally the last thing before we finish this tutorial is just messing with our final camera settings so if we go into our cinema camera actor here let's go go to the very top and again i like to change you know changing the width and the height can really give you a dramatic feel like i like how changing the width introduced a little bit of these rocks um we could turn on some of the let's see the depth of field here so here we go this is a preview of what's getting a depth of fielded out so keeping that in mind oh oh wow that's actually pretty cool zooming in slightly will give us a nice um result here let's bring in this let's bring this down here oh there we go okay maybe we can we're getting some insane depth of field here so bear in mind when you're adjusting these values they are super sensitive so there we go and let's can we increase oh sorry about that can we maybe point five yeah there we go so now we're getting that um depth of field out there so whoa so just play around with these guys um it'll it could give you um your shots a little bit more realism to it with the nice depth of field and it'll just look cool for your final for your final portfolio shots and that about covers it for this tutorial um i hope you guys learned something feel free to share your final images would really like to see what you guys come up with and i'll see you guys in the next one peace you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

Views: 5,605

Keywords: NVIDIA, NVIDIA Studio, RTX Studio, NVIDIA Creators, NVIDIA Design

Id: 9VVniaNXQiM

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020