Epic Re-Creation of Minas Tirith With Unreal Engine 5 #lotr

this one was wild and it almost broke me so I'm excited to show you the results and the whole process but first let's start from the beginning this is my Epic Quest to recreate Minister from Lord of the Rings every Great quest has a beginning where everything is fresh and new our 3D artist is full of optimism and excitement about what this project could become he is excited to learn new things and push his [Music] capabilities but along with this hope comes fear fear that he won't survive that he won't make it to the end but just as Bilbo gave Frodo the ring YouTube has given Adam a comment a challenge he has to accept it there is simply no other choice there is nothing left for him but to set off modeling boxes cylinders splines all in the hopes that someday eventually it will become Mina's [Music] TI [Music] in my last video I made a critical mistake or let me know what else you'd like to see me recreate I'd love to do another one of these I asked what people wanted to see me build next and I actually read the comments so now I've been absolutely buried in 3D for the last month recreating minth from Lord of the Rings after working out the basic size and shape of everything I then started focusing on the outer wall because I knew that was going to set the tone for the rest of the model and of course there was a ton of modeling to do and a lot of things kind of repeat so I wanted to get the style size the look everything of that outer wall just right so I could apply it to the rest of the city as well once again just like with Hogwarts the thing that stands out with the modeling here is not how complex it is it is the scale the Epic scale of this city is the hard part there's so much and it's hard to add details in the right places because it's just so huge honestly it was just a grind to get all this done there's no way around it other than to just dive in and do it and of course I use 3ds Max for that you'll see me modeling there throughout the video the modeling took me forever when I used to work in a studio full of 3D artists my boss used to harp on me all the time telling me to quit staring at my screen while watching renderings but hey this is a personal project so I can render as much as I want so as per usual I started rendering previews right away in V cuz hey I like to see what it's going to look like the model's looking super cool I can add a v-r dirt material here which really articulates all the ins and outs of the model and I think it looks good now in Unreal Engine a lot of this stuff won't translate so we'll have to see how that works out when I get to that point but now a bunch more modeling little did Adam know that the model would be just the beginning he had no idea of what lie ahead [Music] one thing I should mention is where I'm getting reference and inspiration for this model it's not easy because it's an entire city but there is one handy thing and that is the fact that weda Workshop made a miniature of this and there's a bunch of pictures of the miniature all over the internet and it matches what was was made as a much bigger miniature model for the film and of course I had to watch the films just to get a little bit inspired and to make sure I don't make any huge blunders yeah I'm not up on all my latest Lord of the Rings lore or anything like that so the thing that stands out in these movies is the World building the World building done by Peter Jackson by WETA and by tolken himself is kind of mindblowing it's huge and there's so much culture worked into it it's it's just awesome and the good news is that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to build a world in Unreal Engine 5 so yeah watching the movies was great best research assignment ever but two things to keep in mind there the movies are humongous I mean I watched for 12 hours straight the director's cut versions of these things so there's a lot of information there really it's the third one Return of the King that has a lot of Min tth in it and they're doing a lot of tricks not really showing the city too much but the miniature model is really helpful but again I mean there's a lot of different interpretations of what Min turth should look like there's the book and then there's the movie and then there's a bunch of things in between I'm mostly following the movie but again I take a lot of artistic license that you'll see throughout this video my main goal is that it looks cool and that it's recognizable as minth this actually comes up in my work all the time because I work with Architects and their main concern is always that my renderings are displaying their design properly perfectly and accurately and I try to explain to them no the goal here is to show something that basically represents your building but to get the maximum wow factor out of the image so there's that constant balance how accurate do you need to be versus how much artistic license you can take to have maximum visual impact speaking of Maximum visual impact it is time already to take this into Unreal Engine 5 I got a comment on my last video like hey I would have taken this into Unreal Engine sooner so I know what my shots are going to be and then I know where to put all my focus and I thought yeah that's a good idea plus I love working in real time anyway so here we go so I translated effortlessly into Unreal Engine using data Smith like normal I love that workflow but like I mentioned already not all my vray information comes across and I'll talk more about that later and kind of how I addressed it another thing I did here that was new for me is integrate a whole bunch of new plugins and assets purchased from the marketplace and I'll talk a lot more about that too as we go on but first I want to talk about Ultra dnamic Skies here this again while we're on the topic of comments that I I got on my last video this was something someone said you got to use this man and I had already seen it and I thought I do need to use that because it gives you way more control over the sky you can add weather effects you can animate the the clouds and just add that more lifelike sky and environment to your scene but possibly even more important than that is the fact that I can have like complete control over what my sky is going to look like and I love that because that's going to be a huge part of this scene so of course I immediately set off to start setting the proper mood for my scene even though my model's still basic I love the part of setting up the mood for my shots Ultra Dynamic Skies was huge in that respect and of course I had to use Easy fog again to add even more atmosphere I loved it so much with my Hogwarts video that I used it again and one cool thing is that easy fog actually comes with a sample Mountain as well and I used it as a placeholder it looked good for establishing what I wanted my shots to be I didn't end up using it in the final we'll talk about that later what I really wish is that I knew how to make super custom terrain and mountains and stuff that would be awesome I think it would have contributed to this project a lot but that's for another day at this point I was just trying kind of avoid going back into 3ds Max at all costs and so I just stayed in Unreal Engine and kept going adding in mega scans and stuff building up my Cliff because 3ds Max sucks just kidding it doesn't I'm a big fan of 3ds Max but people in the comments they seem to think it sucks but my real thing is that I just got sick of modeling and wanted to come in and start checking it out in unreal that's all that's going on here so yeah instead of going back to modeling I break up the monotony by SC around an Unreal Engine and then I just go back and forth throughout the project to keep myself engaged and I even use some of the modeling Tools in Unreal Engine this time just to help me out a little bit like slicing up these Mega scans objects capping them simple stuff like that one person in the comments actually suggested that 3ds Max was so wrong for this job that any basic architectural software could do it like 10 times faster and I'm here to tell you that that is absolutely not true I know every architectural modeling software there is and uh if that was true I'd be adopting a different one today and I discuss this a lot in the comments like there's blender versus 3ds Max thing a lot of people saying I can do this way faster in blender maybe you can but ultimately there's no getting around modeling you just got to do it and some people will be faster with some tools and some will be faster with others whatever it doesn't matter but uh it takes time no matter what so did you see that smooth little pan I was doing in Unreal Engine just now let me show you how I was doing that man this thing has some weight to it ooh ooh wow I feels so premium premium quality so the guys from 3D connection contacted me and said hey you could totally benefit from our space Mouse can we send you one I said heck yes and this thing's awesome it helped me out a ton on this project not only for navigation purposes but also for recording cameras it was awesome for that it's just really cool to be able to use the space Mouse to get around in Unreal Engine especially love it for that so it's got like six axes that are very very sensitive and you can just really smoothly navigate fly around your scene and there's nothing cooler than doing that in Unreal Engine with real real time this is me testing it out on another project that I was fing around with it's just [Music] cool check out my link in the description if you want to get your own space Mouse which I highly recommend it works in 3ds Max and all your other 3D modeling software as well it's great speaking of things that are working great I think my project is starting to look pretty promising I placed a mega scans Terrain in here and my sample mountains and some other meas scans objects and I think this has a lot of potential our 3D artist was full of foolish optimism this Quest was only beginning and it would get much much harder before the end the environment would be an especially difficult task but Adam had no way of knowing that at this moment he is certainly no environment artist soon this project would bring him to the brink of utter ruin okay when this project was first suggested to me I thought that city is awesome I can definitely tackle that no problem but the environment is actually going to be the harder part of this cuz that I'm out of my league a little bit that's all Unreal Engine stuff modeling I can handle that no big deal but building out an environment in real time that's something I have haven't really had to do before because what Am I who am I I'm an ark viz artist okay so what I'm using Unreal Engine for is usually much smaller scenes that is focusing on a single building this is a gigantic environment with an entire city in it and the city is dwarfed by the environment itself I'm building like a big old chunk of Gondor okay so this is Way Beyond what I normally am comfortable with and that's what I liked about this challenge but also I was venturing into the unnown so I Enlisted the help of some more plugins I got some brushify packs which claim to make it much easier to build out large environments in a realistic way of course I needed to learn how to use that so here I am testing it out getting it all ready and then later I will apply it to my scene and see how it goes and brushify does what it says it does and it does it pretty well it was actually very handy to be able to add the grab add the Rocks add the cliffs add the foliage even add a bunch of mountains that came with it all this stuff to build out your scene super quickly and easily and it wasn't hard to learn but as I'm doing this I'm starting to think I don't know if this is going to look cinematic enough and the grass I thought looked cool but I was like I don't know how I'm going to manage rendering that much grass so yeah that was a little bit of foreshadowing I was starting to get a feeling like this might be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and harder than I want it to be I don't know it's a lot of grass and we're talking about real time here not sure the best way to do this so it was looking pretty good in my practice file so I decided to apply it to my actual file and just keep moving forward with it so I still have my placeholder mountains I still have my mega scans terrain so I'm going to bring in my brushify stuff and see if I can start bringing it all together and make it work maybe you can tell from the video but I'm no pro at this part and at this point I'm still in the experimental stages where I'm trying to learn new stuff and apply them and practice them and I actually have no idea if in the end it's all going to work out I'm actually still at a point where I could just give up on the whole thing if I'm not liking the way it's going that said I think that this particular thing that I'm trying to do might be kind of difficult for anybody because I'm seeing such a large plane of grass and terrain you guys let me know in the comments if you know some better way to tackle this maybe some tips and tricks for how to render something this large with grass [Music] with all these concerns still in the back of my head I went to the comments and again took the advice saying hey choose your cameras earlier and focus on the details there because I thought maybe that would help me not have to worry about this huge grass field in my rendering so much and I could find some ways to uh sharpen the focus a little bit so I don't have to worry about such a big area speaking of advice from the comments I have to share with you a a little later some of the worst advice I've ever gotten but it's so bad that it's also hilarious from the comment section stay tuned for that but about these camera shots that I'm setting up yeah I hate them not the camera shots themselves but the way they're looking I am not really confident in this project working out at this point it does not look good to me camera shots are fine but I am still very worried about this overall environment I tried to dress it up by setting up cameras and adding detail in those areas and that worked fine but there's no way to get around that I just need to make a better environment for this thing I should just mention quickly that I purchased a new Mountain pack and put some of those mountains in here and I think the mountains are finally at a place that I like so I'm going to stop touching those I also found a few cameras that I definitely like and will probably end up remaining until the end and then I added a lot of Mega scans detail up close and personal with those cameras so that there can be more detail in the foreground for those shots and I think that is working well too so some things are working but I still fear the overall effect simply isn't good [Music] enough okay everybody I hope you're enjoying this process I hope you're learning something and I can't wait to show you the finished result but in the meantime if you are finding this valuable if you are enjoying this video enjoying my content and want me to make more if you think I've earned it please like the video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and stay tuned to the end to find out how you can get this finished Min tith model for yourself to play around with thanks back to the video one of the comments I got on Hogwarts was that my lighting was all too even and all the lights were the exact same intensity and all that which I absolutely agree with that's 100% right I was just too lazy to do it kind of the right way and go in and change and Vary all my lights and in this one obviously I'm looking for some way to dress up my renderings a little better and so I thought okay maybe with lighting I I can add some interest to the city so in this case I actually made a blueprint that would make it so that when my animation start it randomly assigns different intensities to every light blueprints are awesome for this kind of stuff it helps the lazy guy like me easily add some variation I actually made a couple different material functions for that light too so that the the color and intensity kind of flickers a little bit as it goes so it looks more like a flame and those are assigned randomly to the lights throughout my scene as well so that each one flickers slightly differently I thought it was a pretty clever little trick but that's how I did the lights so at this point I started playing with the animations more to and I had to animate those lights kind of turning on and off create some events for them and they add some interest and it's nice but what's really cool is animating the overall environment lighting those Ultra Dynamic skies were really killing it and you can animate the time of day and all that stuff and you can see everything kind of looks pretty good from this angle the grass is working in the foreground in the background it disappears and it's very hard to make it render throughout the whole scene at the same time but when you're down low like this it kind of works so this was encouraging I like what I'm seeing here but I wasn't done with that grass yet it would cause me many more problems [Music] still speaking of problems materials was another one that I didn't quite know how to tackle because again it is going to tile over a humongous amount of surface and I need to not be seeing massive repeats and I also need to see all that Grime and dirt on the city if you look from the film from the far out shots it very much has this age to it and creating that is going to be really hard in VR I had the v-ray dirt material which is kind of a collision detection and so in all the cavities and things you can make it darker or add dirt there that's really handy I couldn't find a good way to recreate that in unreal engine and it was bugging me cuz I really needed something like that I eventually figure out something later and we'll talk about it later in the video and it re I think it really helped but at this point I was just kind of lost about how I would tackle the materials overall okay with all these issues I'm trying to tackle not quite knowing how it's all going to come together I decided now's a good time to take a break from that and go back to what I know and that is creating the model in 3ds Max at which point I realized I had made a big mistake here in that I hadn't been mapping and texturing my model as I was going so now I had to go back and do a bunch of that just to get it up to speed on the uvw mapping and all that so I did that and then moving forward I basically ended up making a bunch of pieces of the city all mapped with materials on them already and then I just started copying those around in chunks and modifying them basically just adding a bunch of detail to my city not paying too close attention to how it exactly is supposed to be more like making a bunch of pieces like houses and buildings and then just populating my city with it in a way that looks about right if you get into the nitty-gritty details it's not going to look exactly accurate but again that is not the point of what I'm trying to do so so the modeling isn't the sexiest part of this job but it's necessary so for your benefit I'm going to do a super sped up time laps of what I'm doing at this point and eventually we arrive at something that is starting to look like a city maybe even ministerial things seem to be going along smoothly at this point but Adam knows in the back of his mind that he still has some major issues that he must confront his landscape and his materials are both not working well but worse than that he has no idea how he is going to fix them he is over 3 weeks into his quest and he still cannot see a clear path to where he needs to go in reality he was about to face a setback that threatened to make him give up for good if I'm being completely honest I'm really concerned that I've just been wasting my time because I don't know how I'm going to get this thing to look good and I hate wasting my time so this is one of those things where I've been spending a bunch of time modeling because that's comfortable for me but at the same time I was like losing sleep over how I'm going to get this all to work right so I had to face it and just go back into Unreal Engine and start working it out I had two major problems at this point the landscape and the the materials the landscape maybe you can see I got a different Landscaping pack that I think looked marginally better but I was still having issues with the grass so let's talk about the landscape first the grass the grass is the issue I found that with grass it looks okay but whenever I tried to do test renderings my computer would crash I found a random video that helped me out it said that I need to change one setting in my movie render queue so I turned that off and I got past that problem problem number two at some point I realized it just doesn't look very good and that is because it's not casting shadows I'm using R Trace shadows in this scene and as far as I can figure out R Trace Shadows are not compatible with the grass If someone knows how to make that work let me know please in the comments so I turned off raate Trace shadows and now I could get it to render too so I sent some test renders and now the problem is there's flickering and the Shadows look terrible because I had to turn off R tracing in the end I ended up just having to do combinations of both composite some things together in post to make it so a fully shadowed grass could go together with Ray traced Shadows there was no easy and great solution to this but I dealt with it so this is me finally just buckling down on the landscape and making it right going in painting it how it needs to be and I think it ended up looking pretty darn good maybe I don't have to quit and give up after [Music] all after I got this worked out big things started happening I had the confidence to move forward and I just started hitting it hard getting done all the stuff I knew I needed to do to have some finished rendering but before I get to that final push I promised I would share with you my favorite comment of all time on any of my videos here it is I don't know man YouTube is wild so before we get to the materials which I know I still have to tackle of course I still had a bunch of modeling to do and so I went in and did all of that too I eventually finished this was a huge modeling job like so big and it was really just tedious and I had to get through it this is the raw footage of me in my reaction at the actual moment that I finished the [Music] model okay so I had to handle the materials still the way that I did that was well you can see here I went into substance and added some extra grunge and cracks and age and those kind of things but the more important thing that I figured out was using material attributes in Unreal Engine and turning these into blend materials so I could blend this stone with different grunge maps on top of it basically and I made several different versions of that and then applied them randomly throughout my scene to the stone buildings and walls this added enough variation that things started to look good but there's one other thing that was bugging me all along and it had to do with the way the materials were appearing but it wasn't actually in the material control controls it was ambient occlusion when I look at a giant White City I need the cavities and the crevices and all of that to read darker because otherwise when you get far out it just doesn't read at all the problem is that with Lumen which I am using for this project to light My Scene you can't use screen space ambient occlusion but I really really wanted to because yeah there's Global illumination going on but I still wanted that ambient occlusion to make my edges and my crevices read better so once again a totally random video on the internet helped me out it showed me how to use some console commands to override Lumen tendency to ignore screen space ambient occlusion and I got it enabled with Lumen this made a huge difference and I'm going to save the final reveal on how that all looks for well the final reveal of the overall video but you can see that I'm also doing a few other things here to polish up that final look and that is like adding that last bit of detail using decals coping around my lights adjusting all my materials till they're perfect just adding those last little tiny things small details that make a large difference especially when I'm looking at this thing from far away as an overall City you hardly even see these things but you can tell the difference and if you're not careful this last 10% of detail or whatever can take you basically forever like you this is never done I could continue to add detail forever but I got it to a point using decals and a bunch of other techniques where I thought it was reading quite well so we're getting very very [Music] close Okay so I was ready to start rendering some previews of this thing and I did FYI they were taking about 2 hours per rendering with my temporal anti-aliasing set at 8 and I didn't really like the way I mean I loved the camera shots but I still didn't like the look of the materials basically that's when you saw me go in and add all that extra detail and also figure out that ambient occlusion thing but I did do a little experimenting with color grading and some time remapping in After Effects which after I render again it will still apply but I want to kind of show you the difference of that last bit of detail on the left you can see the ambient occlusion is going and all those decals and other material changes I did are applied and you can see it look looks a lot more defined a lot more detail a lot more grunge and on the right side it just kind of gets lost because it's all white and you just don't see a lot of that detail even though it's in the model so I really liked that I finally figured that part out because I think it improved the look quite a bit and now it's just a matter of getting all my sequences right and then rendering some finals finally so to add a little bit of life before rendering to the scene I added some Niagara smoke I added a bird generator I set up 21 sequences of cameras that I wanted to render ran them all through after effects used some of the sequences didn't use others here is the final result I hope you like it [Music] enjoy [Music] oh [Music] [Music] l [Music] okay guys it is done that was a huge huge undertaking for me and I'm really excited with the results I thought this was great hopefully you found something that you like too in the process and in the finished result if you like this please like the video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already let me know what else you'd like to see me do in the comments but seriously let me know in the comments I've been trying to respond to all the comments appreciate all the good feedback don't appreciate the haters as much the ones that are like this isn't even as good as a movie studio could produce like uh yeah speaking of that this was one guy me for probably on this one I estimated about 4550 hours this was a big one my budget was about 0 so yeah it's not as good as movie studios duh but um it was a lot of work for me and I think the end result was pretty rad if you want to support me or if you need to learn any of the software that I use 3ds Max vray Unreal Engine 5 and others check out my courses Down Below in the links I have over I actually have over 200,000 students worldwide on various different platforms so check that out super super cheap always I think it's an amazing bargain and also if you want to try this model out for yourself on making it available for sale for $5 check the links down below you can grab the model of Min turth and do whatever you want with it I would love to see you guys create something really cool with it as well once you make something cooler than I did you can hate on me in the comment section as much as you want okay as always thanks a ton for watching especially if you made it all the way from the beginning till now appreciate it always thanks and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Adam Z - Learn Archviz

Views: 241,395

Keywords: archviz, learnArchViz, lord of the rings, the lord of the rings, minas tirith, gondor, unreal engine 5, ue5, minas tirith tutorial ue5, building minas tirith in unreal engine 5, recreating lord of the rings, recreating lord of the rings in unreal engine, animating in unreal engine 5, cinematics in unreal engine 5, movie making with unreal engine 5, Lord of the Rings 3d, Lord of the Rings, Minas Tirith, 3d model of Minas Tirith, download model of minis tirith

Id: OESNVcEiiT8

Length: 34min 50sec (2090 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024