How I Create Photoreal 3D Environments using Unreal Engine 5 | Art Breakdown

do you remember what inspired you to follow your passion now I've always loved to create but I remember I got into 3D art and was immediately inspired by the thought if I can think it I can create it if I knew how to use the programs then technically I'm only limited by my imagination and that thought still has me inspired today so in this video I want to break down my process for my latest piece of 3D art in the hopes of inspiring people who want to learn about the wonderful world of 3D art I'm going to cover a ton of topics tips and tricks so there's lots to take away and I'll be using a free program called Unreal Engine so feel free to follow along or just sit back relax and enjoy the process the challenge for this piece of art robots create is twofold first we want to create a photorealistic environment in Unreal Engine 5 Second is to do it in 20 days because last time I made art for my challenge I overestimated the actual days available and underestimated the actual work needed which resulted in a soul-crushing creative process using mid-journey an AI art generator I imagined an empty white stage and in the middle an old man tapped into virtual reality but I didn't want to just create a blank white virtual screen so I gathered more references of grungy warehouses and compiled them in a mood board program called puref using reference imagery is a great way to create unique art quickly even Kim jong-ji the late great pen and Ink Master who drew massive murals from memory would go back to reference if he didn't know what the object looked like but now that we have a direction to create in it's time to start building starting with our warehouse since I only have 20 days to create I want to get a version of my environment as quickly as possible that way we can tweak the light texture and composition before adding details inside of Unreal Engine 5 I'm using wall assets that come with the starter content to block out my warehouse I'll create a cine camera actor from the place actors window and right click it in the outliner to Pilot the camera once inside I'll adjust the aspect ratio to 237 for a widescreen look and finally for scale I'll import a human figure which will replace with our custom character later but here we can line up our camera make any adjustments to our walls consult our reference and scour quixel Mega scans for a warehouse-like objects qixel comes free with Unreal Engine 5 and houses a massive asset Library full of textures and 3D scans now one of the best things about unreal is we can block out our scene with these full quality Assets in real time again my goal here is to shape the light composition camera angle and texture without getting into the nitty-gritty I want to get to 80 completion in 20 of the time so we can spend eighty percent of our time working the last twenty percent of the details finally I'll add a post-process volume making sure to set infinite extent to Unbound and tweak the brightness and saturation attached to lock in our look and with my warehouse blocked out the overhead lighting sketched in a floor and wall texture in place and my camera move locked in it's time to move on to the details that bring our scene to life I'll start with some scaffolding that'll hold the screen array that builds up this virtual room I'm just building it from default cylinders and unreal by piecing together one chunk grouping it and duplicating that piece around the main VR room let's add some detail to our TV screens so I was at breakfast one morning and saw this TV mounted on the wall and the mount itself was the perfect reference so I modeled a rough likeness in Cinema 4D imported it into unreal and populated my scene with it one quick tip for you guys if you're importing objects into unreal and the little preview box doesn't look right you can toggle thumbnail edit mode and left click and drag to rotate the preview image it's super handy for keeping tabs on what you got in your content browser and this is actually a good time to talk about organization because it's already getting out of hand with all these duplicates usually I have a lighting folder a geometry folder in a camera folder for this scene the geometry folder is going to be the most maxed out so try to break down your scene into chunks with appropriately named folders to stay organized it'll be you guys out in the long run when you're trying to show and hide certain objects now let's work on building a detailed ceiling first I want to justify our overhead lighting with some rusted fluorescent lamps luckily Mega scans has us covered on the housing itself I'll use a few cylinders from the place actor's window to act as the fluorescent tubes and apply an emissive material instance to them just add some metal rods to mount them to the ceiling select everything with Ctrl G to group now you can easily duplicate it across your scene and now that we have our lights in place let's add some water pipes on the ceiling I built out a basic pipe structure from three simple pieces grouped them and went to duplicating I'll place them in a grid pattern on the ceiling here and add a bit of crookedness to them it'll help avoid the mechanical 3D look I'll Trail them down the main support pillars terminating into a couple electrical boxes and I want to add one last sealing detail so inside of Cinema 4D I'll make a huge plane subdivide it select the points I want to lock in place give it a cloth tag set them as fit fixed points and hit play then bake the object down on a frame you're happy with import it into unreal and drop it in sweet are ceilings looking pretty believable now let's move on to the ground floor details I'll grab some cracked concrete and leakage decals from qixel and slap them on to the main pillars here decals can be used in unreal to add a bunch of detail and texture to your scene for cheap qixel artist Victor Omen transformed his scene from this to this using only decals and Lighting in his Silent Hill bathroom tutorial another great way to add detail is with cables and wires lots of them and I'm adding these in three different ways first of which is by hand in Cinema 4D using splines if you draw a spline spawn a circle spline scale it down to a reasonable size and place them both in a sweep object you can get a pretty fast cable setup I'm using the exact same setup for the wire bundles I'm using a handful of circle splines stretched out and moved around for variation I'll import both of these into unreal and place them all around my scaffolding for added detail but I'd love a series of wires coming out from the bottom of our VR room as well because I'm hand drawing one set in cinema duplicating it and adding a bit of variation I should have similar related this so we'll get into that in just a second but they look great in our scene I'll just slap these cable covers on top duplicate the whole thing and give our foreground a nice bit of detail at the top of the shot it's still looking a bit empty though so we're going to utilize the epic games marketplace now if you're not taking advantage of the free stuff epic gives out every month you're definitely missing out so in the unreal section of the epic games launcher under Marketplace you can search for free for the month where you'll find five free assets every single month if you click add to project all these assets that make up the demo scene will be available in your content browser my goal is to fill out the corners of this Warehouse so I'll start with a handful of electrical boxes along the back wall and a huge generator to block the back corner next I want to add a little command station off to the left here where a technician could operate this VR stage from a computer oh and a little friend of course because you know this computer ain't running itself let's put an industrial push cart off to the right with a chunky generator on top maybe a little toolbox next to it too now another push card off to the side here behind a pile of covered support beams looks nice but oh my goodness what if there's a fire better put this here just in case now I've placed everything on with the intention of drawing the eye to our VR stage which we'll detail out in a second but I want to do one more thing and that's to connect some more wires to this generator and run them off to the right so eyeballing the inputs I generated a few more of those spline based cables gave them a rope Dynamics tag made a plane with a collider tag on it to act as the floor and hit play awesome but I want the wires to look tossed around and messy so I'll animate two large cylinders give them collider tags and bump these wires around just a bit perfect I'll bake it down and drop them into my scene for the VR stage I used mid Journey again to generate ghibli-esque watercolor Landscapes as the backdrop but I wanted there to be some movement in what I'd imagine to be like a loading screen or something so I use trap code particular a particle system made by red giant for after effects to simulate falling leaves and parented a low-res Sakura Sprite to each particle finally I added the CC Ball action effect to make things look a bit more pixelated and added a grid layer on top to cheat a video screen array I saved each individual wall as a JPEG sequence and set them up as an animated emissive material in Unreal Engine which if you want to figure out how to do that I cover it in this video here so take a look later but now that we got what I think is a pretty sweet environment there is one part of me that feels like something is missing this would honestly be a great time to send your art to a trusted friend and take a break from your scene for a while while you wait for feedback it's super important to take your eyes off of what you've been invested in for the last week and get a different perspective because you can unlock some cool stuff you never thought of since my good buddy Adam was working on the music for the top 100 Montage that this render was for I sent it to him a day later he got back and was like dude that's so sick how this setup is outside I was like bud what are you talking about let me resend the file I must have sent the wrong one he said not Chief I love the early morning light behind the overpass with the building silhouetted on the horizon cam I'm just a bit confused with what you're seeing right now but you know what I'm gonna make it happen because honestly I was looking for a way to incorporate an outdoor element to my scene somehow the planets aligned Adam saw the light and now I have a great New Angle that'll make my scene even cooler don't get hooked on idea number one be open to your art morphing into different iterations of itself chances are the V3 is going to be cooler than the V1 and if you're so dead set on what you set out to create in the first place you may miss this opportunity but let's dive back in and take this scene to the next level by modeling some Warehouse windows in c4d using reference of course after some slight redecorating and unreal I distributed them appropriately as far as my outdoor lighting setup is concerned I used to use the built-in directional light Skylight atmospheric light atmospheric height fog et cetera Etc but boy was I chomping it up big time because I did not know about Ultra Dynamic Sky which allows me to have full control over the look of my sky and even add weather all inside of one easy to use objects so I'll tweak my settings until I get that pre-dawn look I'll make the Stars pop just enough and add some slight atmospheric fog to really lock the vibe in but something's missing I want to add a ton of buildings to the skyline to make it feel like we're on the outskirts of a city and my number one go-to resource for large-scale buildings is hands down kit bash 3D I've been using their stuff for years now and I'm happy to say that they are the perfect sponsor for today's video kit bash 3D creates the highest quality themed 3D kits on the market each themed kit comes with a total of 100 plus buildings props and assets making digital World building an absolute Joy they have a massive selection of kits too when it comes to cityscapes for my particular scene ones like Neo Shanghai New York City Los Angeles Neo Tokyo Goliath or sci-fi industrial would be perfect but they cover everything from spaceships Dark Fantasy and Elysium to DMZ diesel Punk cyber district and a ton more all their kits come expertly textured with Native file formats for unreal blender c4d and all the other major software and render combos so if you want to grab one of these kits for yourself kit bash 3D is offering you guys 20 off at checkout by using the code punisher20 but they're also giving out a free full scale kit during their brand new mission to Minerva 3D challenge that is running right now they're challenging artists to build out their dream settlement using the new kit each artist laying a brick to populate the Galaxy together which honestly sounds pretty freaking sweet so if you want to challenge yourself click that link in the description download your free full scale kit and use the code punisher20 to get 20 off any kit you want links in the description go get it now let me show you how easy it is to build out this cityscape once you drop the kit into your Unreal Engine content structure they'll be available in your content browser here and if we dive into the blueprints folder we can browse the different types of buildings it's just a matter of building out little chunks of buildings duplicating them and placing them appropriately now I'm digging the placement here but I want a handful of Apartments to be lit up because the city's not abandoned it's just super early in the morning we're gonna build out an easy custom cityscape emissive texture so let me show you how next time you're in San Diego California aboard the Midway aircraft carrier at night Point your camera at some buildings snap a picture of the cityscape bring it into Photoshop align the Dank thing crush the black levels boost the highlights clean it up a little bit and import that PNG into the kit bash Glass Master material or you can just download the one that I made for free on my patreon it's up there just go grab it and it's kind of as easy as plugging the image straight into the emission slot but we want to control its size and intensity and it would be nice to toggle our custom lights with a checkbox in our material instance as well so starting with intensity I'll hold M and left click to make a multiply node and hold s and left click for a scalar parameter set to 1 as default crank this number to make our lights brighter for control over the scale of this image we can actually search for a material function called MF underscore tiling which is the Mega scans tiling material function just pipe it into the UV slot into our texture and we're good for now and to make our custom lights toggleable I'll right click and search for a switch parameter pipe our custom setup into true and kit bash is set up into false making sure to set the switcher default to unchecked let's save and close and if we open the kit bash glass material instance we can toggle our custom City Light Mission and adjust the settings we just set up on the fly now this might sound obvious but I try and tweak these settings from my actual camera angle because at the end of the day it's the only angle we're really seeing everything from while we're on the topic of custom materials let's get some smudges and raindrops on these windows and set up a fully customizable service and Perfection Master material it'll give you full control over all the surface imperfections the grunge the grime the fingerprints the smudges that you want to add to any material now it took me a minute to understand but it's actually pretty simple in the end for the textures I'll be using my Surface imperfection pack that I put together in this video here where I walk you through how I hand made these bad boys the pack is on my patreon along with all my other assets but these textures are also available on my gumroad and for people who made it this far in the video I got you all covered the first 50 people to use the code let me get them textures half off I got you I will start in my Glass Master material I'm going to drag in a smudge texture and plug it into the roughness slot by default it's looking nice but how do we control how rough or how intense the smudges are or how rough the parts that aren't smudged are well that's what a linear interpolate note is for or alert node it's identical to a mixed node an octane or a mix RGB node in blender you just hold L and left click to make one plug the texture into Alpha and the lerp into roughness and we should have the same result as before now we want to make a couple scalar parameters by holding s and left clicking the first we'll call roughness Min and the other roughness Max the order here is important by default we can leave roughness Min at zero but with a Max of one and we'll set roughness Max to one by default also with a Max of one next I want to control the intensity of the texture itself so we can hold M and left click for a multiply node that will sneak in between the texture and the lerp and create another scalar parameter by holding s and left clicking set to one by default we can crank this up to push its intensity next I want to control its scale and rotation too so I'll drag the textures UV option out and search for that MF underscore tiling function again finally I want to be able to just toggle this surface imperfection setup we just made because maybe we don't need it with every single material we use I'll drag out our setup into a switch parameter named surface imperfection into true and a basic scalar parameter called roughness into false by default we'll make sure the switcher is set to unchecked and finally let's make sure all of these adjustable nodes are grouped properly so I'll select them all and make sure they're in a group called roughness and be sure to right click the texture and convert it to a parameter as well so you can easily switch out the imperfection for any one you want select all this hit C to group it save right click our Master material and let's create immaterial instance once inside we can see our toggle for surface imperfection which unlocks the min max roughness intensity as well as the texture itself and its UV controls and feel free to switch out that surface imperfection for anything you want and with all of that we finally have our complete environment but I still want to show you what I'm doing to take the art to the max after it's rendered I want to talk about my render settings in Unreal Engine and briefly touch on my character setup I look I love making environments but I am not a character artist or an animator but I did manage to learn about Daz a free and powerful character generator that lets you adjust every possible facet of your character it's got a huge Marketplace for clothes and accessories and it'll let you post them however you'd like Daz has plugins for most software so I imported my character into c4d and used their Auto ik rig setup to hand animate this dude yes I said hand animate once animated I was able to simulate the pants though using c4d's new cloth tools it was a tedious trial and error process to get things right shout outs to Joel and my Discord for helping me figure it out but I finally baked it down imported it in unreal and got things running in sequencer unreal's non-linear editor but what do you do when your art is complete you go to render and your program crashes time and time again it crashes and at this rate it doesn't look like you're going to make your deadline that exact thing happened to me this time around but here's how I went about solving it so I started making a list of renders and settings that I had already done and I reduced my settings until I could complete a render from start to finish then slowly started raising my settings recording all of this in my render log if something crashed three times in a row I'd move on to the next test until I found the sweet spot for my scene but what if this doesn't work what if your project file is just cursed well in that case it's probably cursed you need to start a brand new project file and copy paste everything over you probably just unknowingly toggled some deep setting never to be found ever again this happens sometimes and can be quite common if you're new to the program as far as render settings go I'll link you to my last Unreal Engine video where I go over all that stuff and the only other thing I did differently on export this time was export in the aces color space which allows you to extract and maintain a lot more color and value data from your image our boy William Foshay has got you covered on that end so go check that out but with my final render from Unreal Engine there's one last thing I'm going to do to spice things up it's a super important step not to be missed and that is adding post effects it brings your render from Simply a 3D render to something that was physically shot with a camera and when you're going for photorealism it's kind of crucial so first I'll color correct my scene in a free program called DaVinci Resolve it's a node-based system so with my first node I'll tweak the contrast only making sure I retain Shadow and highlight detail I'm a sucker for vignette and I want to make sure the highlights from my sky outside side aren't affected by my vignette though my next node will be for color adjustments only and already this is looking much better and three last things that I want to do to bring this render to the max is add some Bloom which really emulates like certain coatings on lenses as well as film grain which gives your entire image a really subtle realistic texture we're all used to seeing on cameras these days and finally Barrel Distortion which if you're a fan of Ian Hubert you already know it's the fisheye effect just remember subtlety is key here after 20 days of work on a 45 second shot we have our final render foreign I hope you guys enjoyed this I hope you learned something and I hope you all stay inspired to follow your creative passions subscribe for more art breakdowns environment art live streams and 3D challenges in the near future my name is Clinton Jones and I'll catch you all soon peace [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 522,901

Keywords: pwnisher, 3d, render, challenge, vfx, tutorial, cg, cinema 4d, blender, unreal engine, ue5, training

Id: Gj8itGQqvTk

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022