[MUSIC PLAYING] >> Welcome to
Unreal's Tips and Tricks. Today, we will be covering
Unreal's modeling editor tools with some additional
tips for speeding up your workflow in the engine. I do want to note that these
are evolving tools in beta that will improve over time. I'll be using Unreal
4.26 to showcase the current possibilities
with these tools. To get started, you can go up
to Edit in the top left hand corner and select Plugins. I'll go ahead and type modeling,
and then the Modeling Tools Editor Mode should pop up. If this is not enabled,
go ahead and check it and restart your project. To pull up these
tools, I'm going to go up to the Modes
button, select Modeling. And you'll see that a
modeling window pops up as well as some
new toolbars here. The Primitives is going to allow
you to create simple geometry. I'll go ahead and select Box. You'll see that there are some
parameters on the left hand side. I'll go ahead and place
a simple box for now and hit Complete at the top. Now, you'll see that it
has come into the scene. You can also find it
in the generated folder down at the bottom in
your Content Browser. So I'm going to navigate
through these folders and find the box here. You can change
where this is being saved by editing the
Modeling Mode Quick Settings. This can be found at the
bottom of the modeling window. Now, I'm going to go ahead
and add in a cylinder as well. You'll see that you have
some additional options here, such as radial slices. It's going to change with
each of the geometries. I'll go ahead and
bump this up to 64 and place it next to the cube. Now, when I hear
Complete, you'll notice that those
parameters go away. So it is good to know
that you want to make sure that you have all of
those settings set before you hit Accept. Once you do hit Accept, it's
going to embed that information into the geometry. So you will not be able to have
the ability to go and change it, but you can change the
scale, location, rotation just as you can in the
asset in your project. I'm going to go
ahead and align it with the box set I have here. Now, even though you
can't change the geometry, you will be able to start
to layer some of these tools in order to get shapes
that you want and need. So to showcase this,
I'm going to select both of these
geometries, and I'm going to come up
to the Create tab. And I'll select Mesh Boolean. And you'll see that I have a
couple different operations here. I'm going to filter
through these now to take a look at them. We'll go ahead and
select the B minus A. And you'll see that you
have some different output options here, whether you want
to create a brand new asset out of it or perhaps apply
it to the first object you selected or second. You also have the ability
to choose whether or not you want to keep those
sources or delete them. I'll go ahead and Accept. Now, I'm going to take a look
at some of these other tools. I won't be going
into them all, but I am going to show you
some of my favorites that allow me to create
quick geometry in Unreal. So I'll select Polygon. You see that a grid pops up. So if you need a shape that's
a little bit more custom, you can come in here
and draw your own shade, and then extrude to where
you would like it to be. You can also use
the PolyPath tool. So say we want another
wall in this space. I can draw a wall, pick the
size or the width of the wall that I want, and
then the height. If you have exact
dimensions, you can also add it in
here underneath Shape in the modeling window. I'm going to go ahead
and hit complete on that. And you'll see that the
pivot is in the center of the wall, which would
be great for some needs. But say I actually need
the pivot to be at one of the corners of the walls. You can go into the Transform
tab, select Edit Pivot. And I'm going to hit
W and move the pivot to the corner of the wall. You'll notice that a warning
pops up on the left hand side. This is letting you
know that this is going to change the original asset. So if that pivot point is very
important to keep and retain, it might be nice
duplicating the geometry. And that's actually a really
great workflow for the geometry that you're editing using these
tools to always make a copy and duplicate. So if you ever need to revert
back to that original asset, you have it. So I'll go ahead
and Accept here. Now, there's another way
that you could temporarily change the pivot here. And you can do that
by holding down the Alt button and your
middle mouse button and editing the pivot as needed. So perhaps, let me raise
it to the middle here. In case I need to edit the
wall of a certain height. Once I finish
editing the wall, I can click out of the geometry,
and then select the wall again. And you'll see that it is
going back to the pivot that I set using the
Transform Edit Pivot. Now, I'm going to go ahead
and set a material for this. So on the right hand side,
I'll type in Wall Paint. Add that in. And now, say I want
to place this quickly within the project. An additional tip is
using that middle mouse button again, as
well as the Control button on your keyboard. And dragging up or
to the side, you'll see that a line
starts to pop up. When I drag it up, it's going
to take me to the top view. So this means I
can quickly filter through different viewpoints
as needed so that I can align my geometry correctly. See that? It's not quite perpendicular. I can rotate it here. I can also hold down the
middle button and drag. And you'll notice
that a number pops up. This is a great little
ruler so that you can always check and see a certain
size while you're working in your model. And I'll hold down Control
and drag diagonally. This is going to pop me back up
into my perspective viewport. Now, let's take a look
at some other options under the Transform tab. You'll see that you
have Select here. This will allow me to
edit some of the existing geometry in the project. You do want to make sure that
you have the asset selected that you want to edit. So I'm going to cancel out
of this, select geometry, hit Select in the Transform tab. And you'll notice that the
edges of the triangles are here. So that's going to
help you know you're working with the correct asset. So I'm going to zoom in
here, and I can actually start to paint these
triangles to select them. I can also control
the brush size to make it larger, smaller. I can hold down the
Shift button to deselect some of those triangles. I can also use some
of these selection edit tools to grow or
shrink my selection. Now, there's a couple of
different options of things that you can do
with the selection. You can delete these triangles
or invert the normals of them, which can be very
helpful if you've brought in some geometry
that has just one plane with the wrong normal. You could also detach
and create a new poly group of these triangles. So that can be very
helpful in editing geometry that you have in your
project without having to go into the original model. Now I'm going to show some of
the possibilities of the Deform tool. To showcase this, I'm going
to bring in a primitive shape. I'll bring in this box here. I'll hit Complete. Now, I'm going to go
back to the Deform tab and I'm going to hit Displace. You'll see that I have a
couple different options that I can filter through on
the left hand side. Actually, kind of like
this sine wave tool, so I'll go ahead
and accept that. And then I'm going to play
around with the Sculpt tool. So you'll see that I have
some brush size options here. You can start to
sculpt the geometry. I can control the
size of the brush by hitting S and
D on my keyboard. And you'll notice that the
number on the left hand side up here is changing
as I do that. I can hold down
Shift, and it's going to change the direction
of the sculpting. So I can go in and start to
edit this a bit as needed. I could also use
the DynaSculpt tool, which is going to liquefy
that sculpting a little bit. So you can really start to
extrude different elements. I'll go ahead and
hit Accept here. And you'll notice that
the UV checkerboard morphs with the geometry. Now, this might be needed,
it might be intended. However, if you
would like to change that you can go into
the UVs/Normals tab, selective UV Projection. And pick up the UV projection
method that you prefer. You could also unwrap. So I'll go into AutoUnwrap,
and then I'll hit Accept. Now, these seams
might not be ideal, so you do have the
ability to edit the seams. You could take a look at
the UV layout that you have. There's a lot of
different options here that are going to allow
you to have some control. You could always go back and
apply another sculpting tool on top of it if you
want to further edit some of this information. Now, these are just
a few quick tips for creating simple
geometry in Unreal. However, you can really start
to layer some of these tools in order to get geometry
that you would like. I hope that this
improves your workflow a little bit so that you can
quickly edit or manipulate geometry that you have in
Unreal without having to go back into the original program. That's all we have
time for today. Thank you for watching. [MUSIC PLAYING]
