- Hi, everyone. Today I am thrilled to be
covering how to use the exciting, and certainly long awaited new
type of Megascans asset: Trees. Trees are without a doubt one of
the best foliage types to use, and they certainly come with their
challenges to scan and develop. Our scan teams have
worked meticulously to document every nuance and
characteristic a tree could have. From the base, trunk,
branches, twigs, and leaves, we've made an effort to
ensure these trees adhere to realistic plant growth behaviors
and natural forms of phyllotaxy. We've also considered how the tree
develops throughout its lifecycle. From a seedling to adulthood,
and seasonal changes from spring to winter, we've
included all stages of life to allow you to create
your scene with ease. In this breakdown we're going to
take a look at this black alder tree which you can download for
free from the Unreal Marketplace. We'll add the trees to Unreal and
go through the various settings that will let you customize
the look of the trees to fit any scene you're working with. Once you've acquired the tree assets
and added them to your project, you'll see a black alder folder
and a preset support folder, which includes everything you'll need
for the trees right out of the box. Inside the geometry folder,
you'll be able to choose between the forest version of
the tree or the field version. The field version, for example,
are the various ages of the tree as if it received more
direct sunlight as opposed to the forest version, where they
are fighting against other vegetation to get as many nutrients
from the sun as possible from the top of the canopy. Let's drag and drop a few of
these meshes onto our landscape. These assets come ready to use just
like any other Megascans asset. But we have additional controls
where we can edit their behavior, such as the subtle wind
animation you see in motion. To begin editing the trees, we
need to add the new global foliage actor to the scene. This is a custom blueprint
widget created specifically for all Megascans foliage. And you'll find it here in
the Megascans preset folder. Once selected, this widget
allows us to control the different behaviors of all the
foliage in your level dynamically. One thing to keep in mind with the
widget icon are the wind indicators. The blue arrow tells you the
direction the wind is coming from. And the wind sock
realistically reacts to the wind direction
and wind speed based on your parameters, which you can
edit here within the actor's details panel. Wind noise allows you to
alter the 3D generated noise to be smooth or more broken up. Wind strength changes how powerful
the wind is from a calm breeze to hurricane force winds. Wind speed allows you to increase or
decrease the wind animation speed. And wind tunneling allows
you to scale up or down the procedural noise
that generates the wind. A lower scale will represent
large, smooth swells of wind. While a higher scale will
localize the wind pattern to make it feel more random and
chaotic on a micro level. With the lighting
section, you do not need to do much except select
your scenes directional light from within the dropdown menu. This is basically telling
the shader which light source it will be utilizing when
calculating certain instructions, such as shade and shadow. The next section is
probably my favorite. Season and health. Season strength allows us to
transform these trees from spring to summer and summer to fall. This color shift is
a pre-defined value based on the biology of
this specific tree species, but your creativity
isn't limited here. Season brightness
and season saturation allow you to explore
your creative freedoms to stain these tree leaves with
any variation of color combinations you can imagine. As you can see, you can come up with
some pretty interesting outcomes. Health adjusts the tint
of the leaves to resemble the trees overall health. With this slider,
it is more than just changing the color of the leaves. It is naturally shifting the amounts
of nutrients the leaves receive. As you can see in this close
up, less and less nutrients are being supplied to the
leaves from the outside in towards the stems, resulting
with a crispy brown that truly feels near death. And lastly is color variation. These settings are off by default
so I'll cover these settings later on in the video, but
at its essence it allows you to quickly add variations
to the trees in your scene by adjusting tint, tiling, and
strength on a macro and micro noise scale. The global foliage actor
includes everything you will need right out of the box
to easily tweak realistic adjustments and effects to all the
foliage in your level. But we don't have to stop there. Let's dive a bit deeper into
the makeup of these trees by looking at the new foliage
master material hierarchy for more parameters to control. Looking at the field
number three tree variant, we can see that this tree is
separated into different material instances. The trunk or bark material,
twigs and leaves, decorations, which are items like knots, broken
branches, or irregularities, and lastly the imposter texture. These material instances are linked
to this specific tree's master material instance within the matching
folder in the content browser. And the master material
instance is then linked to its parent, the
foliage master material located in the presets folder. Focusing just on the
field variant three, the settings you change in
the master material instance will trickle down the line and effect
the subsequent material instances. Though there are some
special settings only available in certain
instances, which we'll cover. Let's begin with opening up the
two sided material instance, which are our controls for the leaves. One of the first things to
keep in mind before you start is knowing what your use case is. Are you wanting simple, quick
and easy levels of adjustment, or are you a seasoned
Unreal user who wants to fine tune every detail for
your cinematic grade shot? This usability options area
is what drives the visibility of the remaining settings. It is also tied to the amount
of instructions and quality of the asset shader. Very similar to the Engine's
material quality levels that you can change on the fly. By default, these two control
options are turned off. But you still have all
the necessary controls to edit the asset if you want. However, if you are a beginner or
need the shader to be less complex, then the basic controls
option is for you. If you want to unlock all the
settings available for increasing the quality of the shader
and the quality of the scene, then the advanced controls
option is for you, which is where I'll be keeping it
for the remainder of this video. Much like the Megascans materials,
we have typical controls to manage the albedo,
translucency, specular, roughness, normal map intensity, and opacity. All these settings are good
to go right out of the box. But everything is
here just in case you want to customize it a bit further. For example, most leaves
are naturally rougher on their underside than their
more glistening counterpart. Taking a look at this
sapling, we can not only control how smooth
the leaves top side is, but the bottom side as
well by utilizing this specular and roughness controls. This is most practical to
enable on saplings and seedlings or close up shots where the
camera or a player character will most likely be in close
proximity to the foliage. We can even alter the perceived
light that passes through the leaves by adjusting its
translucency controls. For example, we can change
the color of the translucency to be more of a red haze, as
if the biology of the plant was altered in some way. Next, we have seasons. This is much like the seasons
with the global foliage actor, but this gives us even more
control over this specific tree on an instance level of detail. We can certainly go wild with
the various options here, and I'm sure some of you will
utilize this extra level of tinting for the right shot or even
an otherworldly landscape. But let me take your attention
down here to the winter option. Yes, these assets come with an
option to remove all greenery on this deciduous tree and
expose just the bare branches and twigs to resemble
winter conditions. Quite handy when setting
up a dreary scene. Another parameter to open up more
possibilities is light influence. This allows you to shift the
surface and subsurface colors of the outermost leaves of the
tree shape based on Vertex data and translucency masking. With these parameters, you can
simulate lighter and younger leaf growth of your tree since
sunlight hits those leaves first, or simply shift to any
color you can imagine. Our tree bark is
looking good by default, but let's see if we can
sharpen it up a little. Opening up the material
instance for the bark and navigate down to the
bark detailer parameter. Increasing this will add some tinting
to the occluded areas of the bark texture, giving it more contrast we
need to make it pop out as if aged. Decreasing this parameter
will resemble younger bark. There, that should do it. Remember that color variation
section in the global foliage actor from earlier? Well here within the material
instance for these leaves is where we can enable
or disable this effect. And to visualize these
parameters, we're going to need a lot more trees. I have a variety of trees selected
to paint on our landscape using the foliage Painter tool. I already have their
brush densities preset, and I've ensured that
each of these tree meshes have the color variation parameter in
their respective leaf shaders turned on. After painting some
trees on our landscape, let's go overhead to get a good
vantage point of our foliage. With the global
foliage actor selected, we can now adjust the micro or
macro projection of our noise map that is guiding the
tinting of the trees as well as varying the
colors of the effect to truly randomize our
forest, making it feel more realistic and believable to nature. Since we have a plethora
of trees in our view, I'd like to point out that more than
half of these trees in this view are actually imposters, the
last stage of the LOD chain. Optimizing the trees is
a task our team has spent a great deal of time perfecting. Whether it is for a low
budget project, video game, or for filmmakers to create highly
realistic cinematic experiences, these assets are ready to
use right from the get go, supporting a wide range of hardware. Each asset comes with a predefined
set of sophisticated LODs and distances, but you are
free to adjust these as needed. Set your own minimum
LOD, or even specify which ones you want
to use or eliminate. The last LOD in the chain,
however, is the real time imposter. These trees utilize the
octahedral imposter tool, which captures the last geometric
tree mesh in the LOD chain from a variety of angles and
stores each view in a grid to a single baked albedo
map and normal map. Then, depending on your
camera angle to the imposter, the material shader will interpolate
between the various angles to display the most optimal
version of the imposter. As a result, the
imposter truly blends in with the other static
meshes, helping the scene not only feel more natural
but also incredibly optimized. And speaking of textures,
these new Megascan tree assets come pre shipped with 8k textures. But depending on
certain tree variations, we've gone ahead and down res-ed
to some of these in Unreal to 4K. However, you can freely adjust
these resolutions on your own to fit whatever needs you may have. Another major stride
we took to optimize these assets for various
industries is how these trees react to the wind system. You've probably noticed by
now in the content browser that there are two
subfolders of tree meshes. The pivot painter tree models
and the simple wind tree models. These models are largely
identical and to the naked eye you wouldn't notice any difference to
them if they were blended together. What separates these two is
mostly based on your use case. For lower end
applications or hardware, you'll probably want to stick
with the simple wind systems. However, if you want the best
possible wind system for high end projects, such as
cinematic sequences, then you'll want to choose
the pivot painter system. As you can see, it is hard to
distinguish between the two and the difference is mostly
to do with how the branches and leaves interact with the wind. The simple wind system responds with
large groups of global wind noise, while the pivot painter system
interacts with small, localized wind patterns amongst each leaf cluster
within the material shader. This shader is dependent on the
engine's material quality settings, so keep that in mind as well. And, if you were curious, the
impostor works with the system, too. But at those distances, it likely
isn't necessary to enable the wind. And for optimization
purposes, I would also recommend using the pivot
painter foliage for close up meshes such as
seedlings and saplings, as this system will be more
noticeable to your camera or character model. Then reserve these simple wind
versions for the taller trees to help simplify and
optimize your environment. Trees are currently in early
access and you can acquire it now on the Unreal Marketplace for free. Additionally, Trees
will become readily available to the Megascans
library within Bridge once through the beta process. As we move forward, we
will continue to improve the process for these assets. With your help by
providing us feedback, we can ensure this
development grows continuously so we can bring you the content
and workflows you desire. It's been our goal to scan and
produce the highest quality Trees to the Megascans library. With this introduction to Trees,
how to use the new global foliage actor, breaking down the master
material parameters, and steps we've taken to optimize these
assets for any industry or use case, I hope this video
has helped you get up and running with this
amazing new content. For more information about
these trees and gaining access to the Alpha content,
please visit the blog link in the description below. Thank you for watching, and
I'll see you in the next one.
