Getting Started in Unreal Engine 5

hello everyone unrul Sensei here and have you ever watched a movie or played a game and wish that you could create your own science fiction or fantasy worlds well you are just in luck in this video I'm gonna go over how to use Unreal Engine and kit pass 3D to create a science fiction planetary settlement like the one you see right here all of the buildings spaceships and rovers are high quality assets crafted by Kid bash 3D every asset in this video is free so you can follow along we will go over everything you need to know to create your own sci-fi settlement including how to navigate and move objects in unreal set up planetary lighting download and incorporate kit bash 3D assets to populate your environment animate the assets to breathe the life into your world and finally render out a movie using Unreal sequencer to get started we first have to download a free kit from kitbash3d.com it bashes home to the industry's most premium and versatile 3D assets these assets have been used across the industry in many of your favorite movies and video games with them you can build any world you want whether that's a cyberpunk city post-apocalyptic war zone or a Pirate Cove kit pass 3D has everything you need but for now we are going to download This One mission to Minerva a free kit handcrafted for us to create science fiction space settlements kid bash supports a bunch of programs but since we're using Unreal Engine select unreal and then hit the download button to start off I want to create a blank project so go to games and make sure blank is selected I also want to turn on starter content so we get some basic assets at the beginning now it's right I'm going to say on my desktop that's fine and for the project name I'm going to call this one Minerva Outpost and creates this is what you will see if you selected starter contents in the middle right here is our viewport this is our camera or window into our world so the controls are pretty simple especially if you ever played first person shooter you want to hold down the right Mouse button and move the mouse to look around so that's right Mouse button held down and use a wasd keys to move around you can also use enqueue to move up and down if you want to control the speed of your camera up here in camera speed you can turn that up and now we're going really fast or you could bring down to go pretty slow you could even press the G key to go into game View mode since obviously the player or our animation won't show all these editor widgets if you press the G key you can hide them now in order to add a new object into my world I need to go into the content drawer so in the bottom left hand corner we have content drawer I can select that to bring it up or I can press Ctrl n space so the content drawer contains everything that is in my project so all of my levels textures and objects are saved within the content drawer and we can see that under starter content I have a bunch of folders with assets inside of them I can go into props and now I can drag out a brand new chair or maybe even a different prop like a couch now you might be wondering how exactly do we add more assets to the content drawer because right now we're just limited to the starter contents and I want to add some of the premium kit bash assets that we've already downloaded well we can do so with a process called migration to begin you want to open up the zip folder and you will see that it is already an Unreal Engine project now I can't open it up from the zip I first have to unzip this into a brand new folder so I'm going to right click create a new folder and call this one Minerva it bash so I'm going to open up my brand new folder highlight all the zipped contents and unzip it into the new folder now that the project is unzipped I can open it up with a new project price control space to see the assets we have a mission to Minerva with a bunch of actors and kit batch assets that we're going to use to create our space settlements and we need to copy these assets into my original project and to do that I'm going to right click on the folder that contains all my assets called mission to Minerva and down here select migrates now it's going to gather a list of all the assets we're going to copy into my old project this looks correct so select OK and now it's going to ask for the destination of the project we want to copy these assets into and when we created the Minerva Outpost project we saved it onto the desktop so it's going to be located right here into my project folder and contents so let's copy that path paste it right there and select folder so now it's copying the files into the content folder of my main project okay so it looks like it was successful I'm going to exit out the kit bash project Since I no longer need it because if I go into the content drawer of my original project we have a brand new forward commission to Minerva with all the actors and 3D assets that make up my kit bash kits but we're not going to use the kit bash assets just yet because we first have to create the landscape to create an amazing landscape for our scene we can grab objects such as Cliffs rocks and ground assets from a sample that is included on real engine 5. so you want to go into the samples Tab and down here we have the Valley of the ancient demo select it and download it and then save it onto your desktop make sure you have enough space for this pack because it is pretty large alright now that the project has been downloaded we need to open it up I only want to migrate the terrain objects located in Ancient content geometry and mass so I want to migrate all these assets so I need to just migrate the mass folder as a whole now I don't want to move over all these folders so deactivate audio control rig Niagara and only have game selected click OK navigate to Original projects content folder and migrate we are back in the original Minerva Outpost project and if I press controlled space we have all the assets that we need if I want to use kitbash3d then I select mission to Minerva go to actors and I can pick any of these and drag it out and the asset is ready to go or if I want to add ground and terrain then I go into ancient contents geometry mass and select any of these large meshes right here so if I walk around I can drag that out or if I want a cliff then I can find a cliff like right here and drag that out before we can start creating our environment let's first go over how to move rotate and scale objects I want to use as an example a specific object that is located in content mission to Minerva actors and scroll all the way down until we have this vehicle Rover and drag that into my viewports to move any object you first want to make sure that object is selected and then you'll get this little widget right here that's made up of three arrows if I ever want to move this then I can hold down the left Mouse button on one of the arrows and drag so that's left Mouse button and dragging or I can hover in the middle of two arrows onto the square and lock it into axes now you'll probably notice and this is more noticeable if I zoom in that when I do move it around there's a little bit of snapping going on that's because in the top right hand corner snapping is turned on I can select this button to make it not blue and now snapping is turned off so we get smooth movements now if I want to rotate an object then I can select the rotate station tool I can rotate it and all three of these different axes but as you can tell we also have rotation snapping turned on so if I come up here I can deselect that to get smooth rotation and finally if I want to scale an object select a scale tool up here and I can scale it on a specific Axis or I can hover in the middle onto the white square to scale it uniformly and we do have scale snapping turned on by default so turn off up there to slowly start to decrease it that's how it's the size of my chair and tables the shortcut is to press the W to get the movement Gizmo e to get the rotation and R to get scaling so that's W for movement e for rotation and R to scale if we ever want to rotate it or move it along its local axis then you can select this button to change it right there and you can select that button again to bring back World space movement you can also hold down shift to select multiple objects so you can move them together now that we know how to get and move objects let's start creating the environment I am not going to use this map right here instead I will create a brand new map from a template and select basic and click rates this is the level we are going to create our planetary settlement in as you can see there's already lighting set up for us we will leave the lighting for now but in the future we are going to change it now this level does not exist in my project yet so I need to press Ctrl and S to save this level and it's going to ask for a location I'm going to create a brand new folder call it Maps and let's call this Minerva Outpost and now this map is located within my content browser and Maps so I can double click on this whenever I want to open it up first thing I'm going to do is create a camera and place the main shot that's why I know exactly where to create my environments and where the animation will be so click on the plus button up here and down here under cinematics drag in the cine camera actor so already in the bottom right hand corner we see a preview of the camera another way to move this camera around is to right click and select pilot camera actor now our viewport camera is inside of the main camera and if I move the viewport around the camera also moves around so let me go move back a little bit and I can also play with the focal length of the detail panel so I think if I zoom out the focal length of around 17 is pretty good and if I like my shot I can always unpilot this camera by selecting the eject button and as you can see our camera did move also if the editor Grid or any of the widgets are distracting you you could press the G key to hide them to start creating the planetary settlement we first have to open ancient content geometry Mass and use all these different terrain objects so to start off I can drag out ground and just place it like right there and I can select another Mass and also drag that out and I can slowly start to bid on my environments there is no secret when it comes to this phase of the environment build I recommend to experiment go through all the different objects from the Valley of the ancient demo see which ones you like and just use them before I continue building out my level a couple things I want to mention number one by default unreal has Auto exposure turned on so if I come to a dark area like right here my camera automatically gets brighter and then if I go away our camera automatically gets darker and that can be distracting at times so the way that we turn that off is to come up to the add button go to volumes and then add in a post-process volume so drag that out we're going to get this a little square and with that square selected in the details panel scroll all the way down until we have infinite extend Unbound make sure that's turned on so this post process volume affects my entire world and at the very top under exposure for metering mode change that from Auto exposure to manual now I can manually increase the exposure and I'm going to leave it at a value of 10.5 for now of course in the future we're going to change it another thing that I like to do is you'll notice that we do have a lot of object X in my world but it's hard to tell exactly what size the object is so we can add in human reference to help us with scale to do so and this is completely optional I like to go to add add feature or content pack and then select third person and add to project after you've added to project within content we have characters go into mannequins meshes and we can drag out skm underscore many for a human reference so now we know exactly how large each of these objects are and speaking of objects let's say I really like an object and I don't want to have to navigate into my content browser and find what that object is to create a brand new one I can press Ctrl and D to duplicate that is Ctrl D to duplicate an object or a shortcut is to have the object selected and hold down alt and drag so that's fully.alt and dragging is a shortcut to duplicating and one last thing I want to mention is if you select your camera and you always want to see this camera preview window in the bottom left hand corner we have this pin icon select it and now whenever I select another object to move that around that camera will always be at the bottom right hand corner and since we did change the brightness I also want to change the brightness of the camera with the current aperture so this will change the exposure if I bring this up it's going to bring the exposure down to let's go 3.5 also I'm going to move this back a little first thing I'm going to do is work on the foreground since that should only be Rock and desert I'm finding different ground objects that I like and then placing them next to each other also to save time I select multiple objects by holding down the shift key and then with these objects selected I duplicate all of them as a group to very quickly fill in gaps in the terrain do not worry about performance when you are using these really dense meshes nanite is already enabled on all of them so it will not slow down the engine feel free to use as many Rock meshes as you like at this point I'm just experimenting going through all the available objects and when I find a object that I like I move it off to the side so that I can use it later notice that I'm still changing the camera's position for this environment I decided the right side of the camera will look down a valley because I thought that it makes a nice composition but this is your planet not mine I highly recommend that you create something entirely different from me and finally at the end I'm adding very large objects to make up the background that's how from our specific camera angle the viewer won't be able to tell that the world is just floating in space instead it feels like it's just one part of a larger environment and just like that very quickly we were able to create a beautiful looking desert environment ready for us to start using kit bass 3D assets you start using the mission to Minerva Assets in our scene go to the mission to Minerva folder and actors so right here we get a bunch of different assets we can use to create a science fiction settlement now maybe these are settlers trying to establish a brand new civilization or their miners trying to extract the planet's resources these kits really have infinite potential to tell stories in this case I'm going to make it a mine so we're going to make heavy use of containers and cranes to give it a very industrial look kitbash3d provide a ton of Assets in their kits so I recommend that you take a couple minutes to go through them to see what they look like and how they can contribute to your world or alternatively and you don't have to do this you could go off to the side of the map where the camera or player will never see them and lay out all the objects so you know exactly what you can use and right here we have all the objects under the actors folder laid out and obviously there is a lot for us to work with we have an entire Road system massive Towers a dome where the entire community of settlers can gather spaceships and down here Rovers pretty much everything you need to create a science fiction settlement I want to point out that all the assets under the actors folder are actually not individual objects instead they're a collection of objects for example if I select this ship right here and select edit in Blueprint we're going to open up this ship and you'll notice that the ship is in just one object instead it's a collection of several objects that are connected to each other to create a larger object as a whole and if we want to see what those individual objects are which all the assets you see are created from then instead of going into the actors folder you go into the geometry folder so here are all the individual static meshes this is part of the reason why kit bash 3D is such a powerful tool it gives us the artist the ability to create our own objects or structures from connecting smaller meshes this is called modular design and as when you can easily fit different pieces together to make a larger object it is best to show what it is with an example over here I'm dragging out several different meshes and they all fit together since they were handcrafted to be used with each other I often compare modular design and kit batch to building a Lego set if you connect enough pieces together you can create something entirely new like a spaceship a giant robot or even a space settlement like what we're doing right here and now it's time for the fun part and that is creating the majority of the environments with the KIPP ass 3D Assets Now just because I made my train first doesn't mean I can't still change it you will notice that about half the time I'm still editing the terrain to make it fit better with the kit bash objects I also noticed that the value was a little bit too small so I decided to move the terrain and make it larger also I'm always going back to my original camera to check on the composition or change the angle as a reminder this camera will be used as my main animation so I want to make sure that the location and composition feels right I'm continuously using the third person character as a human reference to double check that the scale of my objects are correct the last thing we want is a building or staircase being too small or too big because this part is Time Lapse this process might look a lot more complicated than it actually is I'm not introducing anything new or using some secret trick all I'm doing is adding new objects and moving them around and seeing what looks best it is just like playing with Lego as a kid thanks to Kit bash 3D and on real engine we have all the pieces available for us it is our job to connect the pieces and finish the sets I encourage you to not follow what I'm doing exactly really experiment with all the objects and create something brand new that is unique to your own planet I'm creating an industrial mine you can easily switch out some of the assets and instead create a lived in settlement or maybe a space pirate hideouts the possibilities are endless the choice is up to you what to make this video is really a rough guide on how to get there now that we have blocked out our scene let's add a little bit more variation and depth to the background I'm using just one object stacked on top of itself to represent a tower or Smoke Stack which will be behind everything it gives illusion that there is more buildings or structures behind the valley and one last thing I'm going to do and that is fill in the end of the valley here with a little bit of rain since it was noticeable from the camera that the terrain just ended there now I'm adding finishing touches I noticed some of the kit bash objects were floated in space so I had to create new terrain so the objects have stuff they rest on also sometimes there might be Holes in the Floor so I quickly patched them up with a rock or ground asset at the end here I'm adding in small objects like barrels and cargo clutter to make the environment feel more lived in it helps make the environment look more realistic since you would expect some containers to be stored outside of the structures I'm placing the smaller objects in areas that make sense like next to a power plant or living quarters it wouldn't make sense to add a barrel in the middle of the valley away from all the structures where it's hard to access congratulations we are now pretty much done with the majority of the environments of course we can always change things but for now we're going to move on to lighting because lighting is the quickest way to make our environment feel like we are on an alien world right now we are using unreal's default lighting that came with this level template I want to start from complete scratch so I need to delete all my lighting widgets as a reminder to see widgets press the G key so I'm going to delete the sun atmosphere skylights and clouds also we don't see it right here but if I type in fog we're going to get the x-metro high fog I also want to delete that so now we have no Lighting in our world it's pitch black except for some of the emissive materials so to begin let's go over probably the most essential light and that is the directional lights as you can guess the directional light is our sunlight so if I rotate this around we change the direction of our sun or as a shortcut we can also hold down control and L to get up a new Gizmo and then move the mouse so that's control and L and moving the mouse to change the direction of the sun this way if I let's leave it right there for now there's a lot of different settings but the most essential one since we are using Lumen is a set Mobility to movable also if you think the shadow is too sharp you can bring up the source angle to soften it we could leave the lighting as is if our planet or Moon didn't have any atmosphere but if we do want to add an atmosphere then go to add button visual effects and drag in a skyed atmosphere system now by default this atmosphere is simulating Earth's so if we go to the settings you'll see ground radius is set to 6360 kilometers and that is the exact radius of Earth now let's say I want to simulate what an atmosphere would be like on the moon then instead of using 6000 I would use 1740 which is the radius of the Moon in kilometers I'm going to leave it at one thousand so this is a really small planar Moon we could change to the atmospheric scattering right here so maybe we wanted to kind of be like a martian Orange change that color and if I go down to Art direction we can even boost what this color looks like by changing the color right there and make it an even deeper reddish atmosphere this is scattering the lights all in real time so as I move my light around the color of the sky also changes now just because we do have a sky doesn't mean it's casting any light we need to add in a skylight for it to cast light so go into lights skylights and drag it out now you want to set this to real-time capture and also set it to movable now the color of the sky is being projected onto the environment and it has a very reddish tint right now so let's go into the sky and atmosphere and we can change it right here so for raylay scattering I can bring this down or for Sky luminous factor I can do a really wild color like purple and you'll see that the lighting of my environment changes with the sky because we added in a skylight now another thing I'm going to add in is an exponential High fog since the bottom half of the world is completely black and we can hide that with fog so click the add button visual effects and drag in exponential hype fog now the environment has depth objects at the distance are faded which makes them look like they're far away you can also increase the fog to make it look like the environment has a lot of dust so in our fog density bring that up to 0.05 this helps to add that extra layer of atmosphere to really sell the idea that this is a large Valley on an alien planet and with the fox selected I could bring it up to then add in more fog so if you bring this up as you can see we're able to control where the fog starts I'm going to leave it close to the ground for now now that all my lights are in my world I'm going to start making final adjustments so to start off with the x-metral hype fog I'm going to set its fog density back to its default value of 0.02 because I thought it was a little bit too intense and I also want to change the color of the fog a little bit that's how it's kind of like a darkish brown color to make it match the atmosphere more and I'm also going to enable volumetric fog which will scatter the sunlight in the fog I'm going to bring down the scattering distribution to let's go negative 0.39 and also to turn down the volumetric fog I can bring down its Albedo value right there so now if I hold down control now to rotate my sun we can see that there is just a little bit of volumetric distribution speaking of the sun I'm going to select the directional lights and increase its intensity to 17 and lower its angles that's coming off from the side right there to make the fog distribution stand out more scroll down and then enable life shaft occlusion and Bloom now obviously this Bloom is way too intense so we're going to bring down its scale to 0.01 lighting is probably one of the most important parts to any environment these are just the light settings I found to look the best I encourage you to experiment with all these parameters and see what looks best for your planets now it's time to breathe the life into our planet with animations so it's a great animation we first need to create a sequencer come up to this button and select add level sequence it's going to ask us for a location to save it in I'm going to create a brand new folder and call it cinematics for the name this is Minerva sequence and select save now we get this brand new window at the bottom which will be our timeline if we ever exit out of this window then we can always go back and select our sequencer scroll up and select open level sequence to get it back to add our camera to the timeline come to track and select camera cut track with that selected click on the plus button and add the camera that's already inside of our world right there so now if I select this camera button we're going to see exactly what the animation will render out to animate in unreal is pretty simple you use keyframes like every other program so you first want to add a track for the object that you're going to animate luckily for us our camera actor is already here if it's not then you want to click on the track button and add an actor I'm going to click on the add button right here and select transform which will be how we animate location to move around inside the camera instead of selecting our camera Cuts icon select the one below it now I can move this camera and I'm going to go back just a little bit and to add a keyframe click on the plus button so I added a brand new keyframe here at zero zero zero if the keyframe was somewhere else you can always select that keyframe and drag it back to the start so now I'm going to go move my red cursor of my timeline all the way back here at the very end and then move in just a little bit like right here and click on the plus button again in between the two icons to set a keyframe now unreal is going to interpolate in between the first keyframe and the last if I press the space bar that will play the timeline and we can see the exact animation that we have with our camera you will notice that for every animation there's a speed up and then a slow down so automatically unreal adds that if I want a linear animation so there is no speed up or slow down in between the keyframes I can select both keyframes by hold down shift right click and select linear so now we get a very basic animation of the camera moving into our environments now let's add flying ships to the background so let's go to Mission to Minerva actors and scroll all the way down here until we have the cargo ship so drag that out and in my opinion this ship is way too large so I'm going to scale it down while keeping in mind that this human reference right there until it is the right size like I think that is a good size also at the back here is open so we're going to have to fix that and I notice that I am piloting my camera so to unpilot I click on the eject button right there or I can select the camera icon again now if you remember actors are made up of a bunch of other objects and I can change these objects by individually selecting them so I don't need this ramp I'm going to scroll down select the ramp that's how this ramp is selected and then within the details panel I'm going to have to scroll down until we get to rendering and uncheck visibility to get rid of that same thing with the struts so select those struts and also uncheck visibility and finally we need to close this door go into local transformation and let's rotate this and move it into the ship and to move all the objects as a whole scroll up and select the first option now that our ship is fixed I'm going to move it off to the side behind the main tower so I'm also going to angle it in the direction that the ship will be traveling so the ship will start off right here and then it'll end over there so let's go move this up and so it's pretty high up in the air and move our cursor to the very beginning to animate this object we first need to make sure it's selected and then add in a track so let's go add in the cargo ship and then also add a transform to be able to move the object so let's go add in a first keyframe right there move the cursor to the very end and then move the ship that's how it's going to end up right here and add in another cursor so now when I press the space bar our ship is flying across the screen but there is a speed up and a Slowdown so we need to select both keyframes and a set it to linear now let's go see what this looks like within our main camera view okay the animation looks really nice our world's definitely start to feel more lived in and I want to add in another cargo ship so I'm going to select this one to duplicate it and then move it that's how it's in the middle of my Valley and at the center of my camera so it's going to start off right here and then start to slowly come up a little bit wait a little bit and then fly off I'm animating the transform like the other objects the first and last keyframes are linear but the middle two are set to interpolate because I want there to be a smooth transition between the ship rising and flying away now this is our animation so far it looks really nice we have a lot of the main animations in there but we can add in some smaller animations onto the cargo ship specifically the thrusters I want it where the thrusters are pointing down and the ship is rising and then they change and start to point behind the ship to Show the ship is moving away and to do so I need to select the ship and see exactly what thrusters I need to animate and specifically it is Thruster C so in order to animate this we need to add in a new track to the ship and select a specific object so it's Thruster C right there add in another track which is a transform the Thruster will be pointing down when the ship is taking off so add a keyframe right there and then it starts to move behind the ship like right there and add a keyframe like that so now when the ship takes off the thrusters are pointing down but then it turns and flies away I'm repeating the exact same process but for the rest of the thrusters here's the new animation it's the little things like the thrusters that move which can make all the difference I wanted more animations in the environments so I added a Rover in the foreground the Rover's cargo was open so I had to close it and then I animated the wheels spinning just like how I did with the thrusters turning and here is my final animation so it looks really good and one last chain I'm going to make before I render this out is delete the human reference because I no longer need it now in order to render out my animation into a sequence of images we first have to enable the movie render queue so go to settings plugins and type in movie render queue make sure that it is enabled you will have to restart the engine after that is enabled go down and click on this render icon and this will bring up the movie render queue so we need to adjust some settings so click on unsaved config and this is where we're going to make our settings first off we're not going to render it as a JPEG instead we're going to render it as a PNG file and I'm also going to add in anti-aliasing because it takes a couple frames for Lumen lighting to start working and we are using Lumen so I want to make sure render warm-up frames is enabled and we can set it to a count of 128. and then for the outputs it's going to ask for a location I already have a file on my desktop called a Minerva render so I'm just going to copy its location and paste it right here and right now it's set to 24 frames just in case we can see the frame rate on my timeline is right now set to 30 FPS so let's go over ride that and select 30fps so these are all my settings click accept and then render local wait a little bit for animation to render after the render is done if you go into your output folder you'll see a bunch of images that represent the frames of my animation in order to convert this into a video you need to add it into a video editing program like Adobe Premiere Pro or in my case DaVinci Resolve so get all your images and select all of them with control and a and simply drag it into your timeline like this now if I press play we have our finished animation ready to be exported and shared on the internet also don't forget that Unreal Engine is a video game engine so we can use our environment that we created for animation also as a game map so let's go exit out of the sequencer and then if I go into World settings under game mode override and the drop down select BP underscore third person game mode which we have since we already have the third person content pack installed now if I fly over here and press play I can play my environment and explore it as if I'm playing a video game which is really cool it goes to show how versatile kippash assets are we can use it not only for animations but for games as well and with that we conclude this tutorial I look forward to seeing what you will create with these assets

Channel: KitBash3D

Views: 102,752

Keywords:

Id: cr9cCYO23JU

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022