Foliage in Unreal Engine 5 | Beginner Tutorial

hey what's up creators today we're going to be showing you how we can quickly populate our scenes using foliage and the foliage tool inside of Unreal Engine 5. this video is part of our free 7-Day beginner course available on our website go to vertishub.com and start building your dream video game today for now though let's hop into Unreal Engine 5 and build some foliage [Music] for this video what we're going to be doing is taking ready-made foliage and then using the Unreal Engine foliage tool to bring it in very quickly and make all of this random the pack that I've used for this is the messic Flatwoods brush it's available for free on the epic games Marketplace what you're going to want to do is download this or any foliage all your own foliage and add it into your project once we've done that we can hop straight into Unreal Engine and we can bring this into our scene now that is a really straightforward doing all of that what we're going to do is just find our foliage in the content browser for me if I go to my content browser content and FL underscore music Flatwoods I can see all of the static meshes here that I've got available to me everything from grass trees just everything now let's take a look at bringing this into our scene now the foliage tool inside of a real engine it's built to primarily work with the landscape tool that being said you're going to want to have a landscape in here that we can put all of this onto if you'd like to learn how to build landscapes for yourself be sure to check out our free landscape Video available on our YouTube channel links in the description once we've done that we can go into our foliage mode by going to selection mode at the top setting this to foliage and we can start bringing all of this in now the foliage mode is going to bring up foliage within our place actors panel if you don't have your place actors panel what you're going to need to do is go to window load layout and ue4 classic layout once you've done that select your foliage mode again and you're ready to go but now what we can do is we can see our foliage mode and we've got a whole bunch of tools in here select paint single fill there's lots and lots in here what we want to do for now though is actually start bringing some of these Assets in so I'm going to go to my folder with all of my foliage Assets in I'm going to apply a filter by going to the filter icon here to search for static meshes and this is going to show me all of the static meshes and I can bring one of these into the scene or into our foliage mode so what I'm going to do is just find a tree here I'm going to left click on this and drag it into my plus foliage type this is now going to give us a foliage type that we can start working with and if we go ahead and left click on this I can immediately hold down left click and I can start painting them into our scene now with this you can see that there is so so many trees it's super dense and they all look very similar at this point this is where we actually need to start going through some of the different settings to show you how to control this foliage mode to make things work in the way that you want to and we're going to make this super simple super easy and break it all down for you let's hop back in okay so breaking down the foliage mode then we have a piece of foliage here if we want to paint it we want to click on this to make sure the check box is clicked then we're going to go up to the paint mode in the top left with this done just like we saw we can hold down left click and it is going to paint the foliage where our brush exists we can see the brush on the scene is this light blue section here what I can do with this is I can control the brush by increasing the brush size up or down so I can do large pieces of landscape or foliage at one time or I can turn it down and do smaller sections most importantly though what we have up here is our paint density we saw this was way too dense this was like a super super crazy forest and you can't really walk through that what I'm gonna do is change this paint density by simply left clicking on it and dragging it down and I'm going to set it to about 0.15 now when we do it you can see it's a lot less dense still a bit too much so I'm actually going to set this to 0.05 and now paint it in and you can see it's getting better still very much a dense forest so we can just keep turning down this number until we get to a paint density that works for us and I've just painted some in here and you can see these trees now are a little bit more spread out which is fantastic and if I was to go ahead and press play in this you can see we've got our trees they're spread out and they're just looking absolutely great so now we're able to place our trees or our foliage into our scene and we're able to change the density of that and that's fantastic what we want to be able to do now though is we want to make these look a little bit more random making these trees have different sizes different rotations and that's all in the foliage settings so what I'm going to do now inside of Unreal Engine is I'm going to hold down shift and left click to just erase with this brush now what I'm going to do is scroll down to the foliage settings on the left hand side in this foliage tap we can see here we've got density just like before and we can adjust that but the important setting that I want to break down with you here is our scale X with this we can change it so it's not always the same size tree because we can see all of these trees are identical what we're going to do is have these trees go between 1 and 1.5 and now if I go ahead and paint them you can see these are all varying different sizes and that's great if I set the max value on that to 2 you can see that even more especially if I go ahead and turn down that paint density even more to a lower number you can see all of these trees here are starting to look and feel a lot more random which is great there is a lot more settings that I can go through in here to make this even better A lot of these are actually controlled by default next one is our random your so you can see these have all got different rotation but if I turn that off and then start painting them in you can see they're all in the same direction and you can tell this is the same tree over and over again that being said make sure that your random yaw is on with that on though with our different scales set up and our density set up we actually can start painting in some trees that look very random and look very good you don't have to do it as quick as this though I'd also encourage you to take a look through some of the other different settings that we've got here I'm not going to explain what each of these are for now I just want you to know the important ones that is I just want you to know the important entity and then the minimum and maximum scale and then knowing that you can randomize the EUR on this if you're enjoying this video be sure to join our community Discord server where you can collaborate with over 6 000 aspiring game developers just like yourself so we now have trees in here and we know how to randomize them what I want to do now is I want us to take a look at bringing in other assets at the same time because you're not going to want to just paint in one single asset at one time you're going to want to do your rocks your grass your bushes your trees and have a different density for each of these let's do this so the next thing that I'm going to do then is I'm actually going to find some grass in this asset pack here and I've got one here fake Clump and I'm going to bring this in as a foliage type now to paint both of these at the same time I need to make sure we've got the tick box here then I can left click and I can start painting these and if I get down and close to the ground here you can see it is actually placing this grass however it's got the same kind of density as the tree and that's not great that's where if we just press Ctrl Z we need to be changing the density on a per asset basis so with our paint density up here set to 1 we can then click on the asset and change the density down here so I'm going to change my density here to 5 on the trees and then paint it see how it looks if it's too much again you just turn that number down and now you can see that we have got plenty of grass which is great but the trees are still going to be dense so I'm going to just keep adjusting this until I get to a point where I'm happy so I'm going to set my density on the trees to 0.5 and now they're sparse and we've got lots of grass that's fantastic but now you're probably thinking Luke that grass is way too small the next thing we're going to do is go down to our grass make sure we've got the grass selected and just change that scale X minimum and maximum so I'm going to actually have this go from three all the way up to six and now when I paint this you can see we've got net we've now got some lovely long grass in here and this is looking great and I can paint both of these anywhere in the scene and I know it's going to look the way that we want it to look because we've actually set up all of the settings on a per asset basis and now I can jump in press play and I can walk through this probably gonna notice the grass is way too long there so what you might have to do is just adjust that value to something a little bit more sensible I'm going to set this to go between one and three and I'm just going to turn up my density to accommodate for that and now we can walk through this and we can see our grass we can see our trees and it's looking fantastic at this point I'd love to encourage you to add more foliage types to your scene adjust all of the settings on a per asset basis but using this foliage tool you are going to be able to make some visually stunning levels using foliage inside of Unreal Engine 5. that's it for this video though I hope you have enjoyed it as always stay awesome keep creating vertis signing out [Music] foreign

Channel: Virtus Learning Hub

Views: 67,685

Keywords: foliage in unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue5, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, foliage, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5 nanite foliage, ue5 foliage nanite, unreal engine 5 nanite forest, ue5 nanite foliage, tutorial, ue5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial beginner, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner, unreal engine 5 tutorial for beginners, ue5 beginner tutorial, virtus learning hub unreal engine 5, virtus learning hub

Id: Mg3N0xKGJRw

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022