How I Quickly Create 3D Environments in Unreal Engine 5 | FULL WORKFLOW

[Music] when i started my vfx journey back in 2006 i thought the most inspiring thing about 3d art was the fact that if i could think it i could create it and if i dedicated myself to becoming proficient in whatever 3d program i'd only be limited by my imagination 16 years later and that idea still has me excited to create and the duration between what's in my head and what eventually gets created on a screen only gets shorter the more time i create so in this video i'm going to show you specifically how you can bring your imagination to life in as little time as possible we'll set up our camera the environment and our lighting together to hit that 80 mark as soon as possible so we can spend most of our time on the fun tweaks and details that really make our art shine we'll set up some fully customizable foliage that we can paint over our environment and after that i'll get into the best practices for the highest quality exports so whether you're an experienced 3d artist new to the whole thing or just have a curiosity for it all i welcome you to sit back and enjoy the process [Music] before starting any project no matter how big or small i gather reference imagery and view it all in a free program called pureref once i have my general direction my next goal is to get to that 80 mark let's get started and quickly set up our project in unreal engine 5. it doesn't matter too much which level preset you go with i just need something super simple so i'll go with games and the blank preset i'll toggle starter content so we have some building blocks to build our scene with and even though unreal engine 5 defaults to lumen the new light system which we'll be using for our scene i'm going to toggle ray tracing anyway because it's honestly a pain in the rear to enable all these hidden rtx settings by hand this way it's all set up automatically if you want to use like raytraced shadows or something but if this makes no sense don't worry let's just open up our project to navigate i'm holding right-click and using the was and d keys to fly around the q and e keys control altitude and the slider on the right controls camera sensitivity with an object selected spacebar will cycle between the position rotation and scale gizmos control plus backtick switches between world and local orientation the g key will hide or show icons in the viewport and f will snap your view to any selected object so now that we're in let's get to that 80 mark starting with the camera on the left you should see the place actors window if not go to window place actors this is where we'll find a lot of unreal's built-in tools or building blocks to help us create stuff in our scene let's search for cine camera actor drag it in right click it in the outliner which is where all the stuff in our scene is laid out and select pilot camera to hop in i'm also going to search for cube in our place actors window so we have something to focus on and i'll just scale it to resemble a door looking thing now i'm setting up our camera and camera angle first so we don't waste time building stuff we're not going to see so with our camera selected in the details panel i'll choose my aspect ratio my focal length and my aperture also known as f-stop which controls our depth of field and under focus settings we can set it to track our door that way wherever the camera is it'll always be focused on the door itself and i'd say after we frame up our scene the camera is set up enough so that we can move on to laying out the environment and the thing that makes unreal engines so powerful are all the 3d assets and textures that come free with the program you can access the mega scans library here by clicking qixel bridge but to keep things moving i just preloaded some ground floors walls embankments some logs and a door just to note that these are nanite meshes which is new to unreal 5 and definitely some dark voodoo that allows us to have a ton of these assets in our scene while still maintaining a high frame rate which you can see by clicking show fps right here from here i'll build out my scene based on the idea i'm going for this will require a little bit of back and forth to get things looking right but remember we're going for 80 so don't get too hung up on the details if things look a little empty that's okay because we're gonna go and fill this environment with a bunch of lush foliage later one thing i do want to do though is open up this door to make things a bit more mysterious but this clip is in the way so we're gonna need to cut a door sized hole into this wall so let's grab our placeholder door stretch it out switch over to the modeling layout on the left here select both the rock we're trying to cut into and your cube and select mesh bull you might need to switch between a cuts b or b cuts a and after your computer thinks for a bit we got a doorway into another world but i want it to lead to a dark room so let's press control spacebar to open up our content browser now this is where all of our imported assets tools and building blocks are stored i'll search for wall which is going to tap into our starter content and i'm going to drag that out duplicate it a few times and make a little room to block all the light but once i got my room i'll place a couple rock wall assets inside so it's not just a white room and at this point i think we got our environment to the 80 mark which is plenty to work in the last major element our lighting and to best judge our lighting we got to turn off this auto exposure so in the place actors window i'm going to search for what's called a post process volume and drag it out the ppv is a global effector that lets us adjust light settings render settings color correction camera effects and a bunch of other stuff but to make sure it affects our entire level and not just this little box we need to search for unbound in the details panel and turn on infinite extent then let's search for brightness and set the min max to the same amount bam auto exposure dealt with so let's take a quick look at the things currently lighting our scene we have a directional light that's acting as our main sunlight and without it we would have no light at all and the skylight is helping with indirect illumination and overall brightness and the sky atmosphere is kind of doing the same but i honestly didn't touch it for my scene or any of these other ones now i want to go for a gloomier overcast look with maybe some soft light spotlighting this door so first i'll point the sun at our door then set up some walls to block the light across our entire scene except on the door and just so we're not bouncing white light all over the place with these white walls i'll apply one of these moss wall textures onto them and it doesn't matter that they don't look good only that they're bouncing forest colors sweet so we got that dialed in next let's set up our overcast light with an hdri which is basically a 360 image that lights our entire scene but to do this we got to enable the plugin by going to settings plugins typing hdri toggling the setting and restarting the engine and once we're back i'll search for hdri in the place actors window drag it into my scene reset the position if necessary and drop it down below my floor bam easy as that so now we'll combine both lights by turning our directional light back on and adjusting its source angle in the details panel which will soften the shadows giving us a nice blend between overcast and sunlight you can adjust and balance the intensity of both your directional light and hdri as needed and feel free to turn the brightness up or down a touch in your post process volume too and while we're here let's search for vignette to add some of it as well as color correction so we can drop the gamma a touch this will give us like a moodier feel that i really like and with that i think we've hit our 80 mark for the entire image so i started this channel 16 years ago and i am almost at a million subscribers so if you're watching this video and you're learning something that's entertaining for you and you're not subscribed consider subscribing let's get to a million from here we'll be adding details and making small adjustments between the lighting the camera and of course the environment which is still missing an assortment of lush vegetation but before we paint any vegetation we need to set up a customizable vegetation material that you can use across all your projects asset wise i'll be using the forest the world's pack by graswalt the sponsor of today's video grasswold offers production quality vegetation assets for your games your films and your 3d art what makes these assets so unique and realistic is the fact that the grass ball team travels to unique locations to scan and document specific vegetation that defines that specific environment so their 3d reconstructions are as accurate to the real world as possible that means we don't have to guess which 3d plants go together everything naturally blends together because it was captured together most of their assets offer a small and big variation and some even come with old and dead variations too each asset comes with its individual building blocks to make customization virtually limitless and of course each plant has its appropriate image textures in 1k 2k and 4k resolution options they each have eight levels of detail and each pack is pre-built in nearly every renderer in every 3d program on their website which is linked in the description you can grab a few plants they offer for free but if you want to get your hands on their entire pack you can get 20 off for this week only by clicking that link in the description and using the code punisher promo 2022 but regardless of what asset you're using let's create this fully customizable vegetation master material that you can use on any piece of vegetation in any level in any project let's dive in so let's import the mesh that the material is going to go on first which we can just drag and drop into the content browser usually i generate a nanite mesh for nearly any mesh you bring in but nanite doesn't work with foliage right now more on that in a second but if your mesh comes with other meshes of varying detail called lods or levels of detail be sure to auto import them because we're going to scatter a ton of these assets and it's better to drop the level of detail on these things if it gets laggy let's also drag our image textures into the content browser the plant mesh into our assets level and right click in the content browser to create a new material titled foliage master material drag it onto our mesh double click it to open up our material editor and we're in all right by default we're not seeing the underside of this foliage and that is no bueno so let's click double sided and hit save to update that's the part that nanite doesn't support by the way is double-sided and two-sided foliage in order for us to get the sun to shine through our foliage which is a huge part of realistic vegetation we need to change the shading method to two-sided foliage which unlocks the subsurface color option in our material again make sure to hit save for these changes to take effect and finally we'll change our blending mode to mask which unlocks the opacity mask channel saving us a bit of performance now let's drag our textures in and set them up one by one starting with base color otherwise known as albedo and it's as simple as dragging the rgb into the base color channel but i want to have control over the brightness of this texture so hold s and left click to make a parameter node you're gonna hear me say parameter or parameter node a lot parameters are basically settings we can quickly adjust when we eventually create an instance of this master material later but for now let's hold m and left click to make a multiply node which will pipe into base color and both of these nodes into the multiply let's default our brightness to 1 which will have no effect which is exactly what we're going for a value of 0 gets darker 2 gets brighter and it's as easy as that select your base color nodes and press c to group them next is specular which determines how reflective our vegetation is just right click specular and convert it to a parameter with a default of 0.5 next we'll drag our roughness texture which controls how matte versus shiny our leaves are and it's a great way to control how wet the leaves look we'll control the roughness intensity in the same way we did our base color we can default it to one which gives us a matte effect and the closer we get to zero the sharper the reflection c to group and we're set opacity is next whatever's white is opaque whatever's black is transparent we plug this into the opacity mask channel and even though it doesn't make a visible difference on our mesh it saves just a tiny bit of performance so it's good practice versus just plugging it into the plain old opacity channel up next is our normal map which essentially gives us fake detail and we'll control its intensity a bit differently this time with a lerp node a constant three vector node and a parameter node the lerp node asks for two different inputs in our case a normal map and a blue solid and the alpha controls which direction to go in setting our normal intensity parameter to zero tells the lerp to view only the blue solid which essentially turns off our normal detail one should be our default setting which yields the same result as if we just plugged our normal texture directly into the normal channel and beyond a setting of one it just gets more intense hence our normal intensity parameter the last and most important image texture for foliage is translucency which controls the amount of light that shines through our leaves again this is how real leaves behave so don't miss this step and if you don't have a translucency texture you can substitute your base color image i'm controlling its intensity the same way we set up our roughness and our base color textures with the multiply node your default value will depend on your specific texture but i'm going for a value of 0.25 and plants aren't plants without some wind now this took me more than a minute to figure out if you're familiar with how quiksil sets up their wind this is exactly the same but actually way easier to set up shout outs to the prismatica dev youtube channel which really helped me make sense of it all in the end alright so let's right click and search for a simple grass wind node and right click each of these settings to convert them to parameters i'll default the intensity to 0.15 height to 0.5 speed to 0.5 and world position offset to 0. and if we plug this into the world position offset channel and hit save you can see it's kind of working but it might as well just be floating in space because it's not fixed to the ground now we can solve this the hard way or the easy way with a bounding box uv node with the blue channel which correlates to the vertical axis plugged into a multiply which goes into the world position offset of our master material it works and it's so simple i love it this works on any plant regardless of the size too but i want our foliage to default to no wind with the option of checking a box to turn it on so i'll make a switch parameter with our wind plugged into true and a parameter set to zero as false making sure the switch defaults to unchecked plug that into your world position offset and we're basically all set up so the moment of truth let's save close out right click the master material and create a material instance which will be the actual material assigned to our mesh so be sure to open up that mesh and drag here to assign let's save and check out these custom controls that we just set up i love the feeling i get from setting up a useful master material it's a step beyond creating your art because we're actually creating custom tools to help us create art super satisfying but yo i am ocd and this is just a mess so let me show you how to organize your parameters in the material instance real quick back in the master material if we control click all of our texture parameters and change the group to something like texture attributes and save you can see they're grouped as such we can do the same for the wind parameters too and just like we can convert settings to parameters we can do the same for textures too that way we can duplicate the instance switch out the textures and now you have control over a whole new type of plant do this for as many plant variations you have in your scene and we'll be good to go hey i got a question for you guys do you enjoy the step-by-step click-by-click kind of tutorials or do you prefer more of an overview regardless of what the program is i'm curious to know your guys's answers leave a comment down below but alright so now that we've completed our setup and got to that 80 mark let's do what we've been waiting for get back to the art and fill our landscape with this beautiful foliage let's switch to foliage mode up here and drag the meshes you want to paint or scatter across your environment into the foliage box making sure the ones you want to paint are checked i'll select them all to reveal some options we can customize like min and max values for size variation how steep the ground needs to be to accept the foliage density which controls how close these plants are to each other when painted and up top we have brush size as well and just paint to your heart's content holding left click will lay down our vegetation you can shift click to erase adjust the brush size with the bracket keys and toggle single instance mode set the cycle through selected to individually place plants for the most control drop some new assets in uncheck the old ones and paint a variety for a more realistic look so we did the hard work we set up the sandbox to freely create inside of adding details will take the most time but it's the best part of the process because we get to spontaneously create laying the tracks as we go it's when the images in our heads seamlessly blend into the art on screen it's the reason i love to create whether it's making 3d art or improving music with friends it just feels so good when things work out on the fly the more we practice the faster all that setup gets too and the quicker this stage comes so let's talk about all the things you'll likely be tweaking at this point in the process mainly lighting camera settings camera position material attributes and in this case our foliage i want to bring a bit more shape to our scene and try to make the ground look wet by creating a rectangle light which will skip off the floor and if we drop the intensity we can start to get that subtle wet look but the only reason we're seeing a reflection is because of the specular and roughness channels the higher your specular the more reflective the lower your roughness the sharper your reflection will be so be sure to adjust this wetness look on your foliage as well and you can tweak the translucency too if the plants are looking a bit too bright i'll hop into the post process volume and tweak the gamma and vignette to get the right vibe then back to my directional light intensity my hdri intensity my rectangle light intensity maybe i'll add another overhead rack light to give my scene a slightly different vibe maybe another one to really pop the door out i'll mess with my camera's depth of field settings too if an angle with my focal length a touch perhaps we tweak all these things to find the right balance between too much and too little what you think looks good today may not work tomorrow and you might think you're done one day but wake up the next and feel like something's missing so take breaks sleep on it and ask a friend for their opinion so you can return to your 3d world with a fresh perspective nine times out of ten your art will be better because of it but when you're happy with your art how do we render what's in our viewport to a high res video well if you want to export a still image the fastest way is by exporting a high resolution screenshot you can adjust the size multiplier to multiply the image size but go easy on this else you want to start a fire but chances are you're trying to export a video so we need to make a timeline of sorts in order for unreal to know there's a sequence to be exported so we'll right click in the content browser navigate to animation and create a level sequence double click to hop in and drag our camera inside from here you can set the overall frame length and animate a small camera move to spice things up basically anything that needs to be animated happens here in the sequencer and once you have the shot you're going for there's a number of render settings you can use for best results and the first thing you want to do to get that set up is go to settings plugins search for the movie render queue enable these plugins and restart your engine so that when you click the little dot dots next to this little clapboard in the sequencer movie render queue will be an option so let's hop in and click settings to tweak our settings and click settings to tweak our settings nice first we'll add an exr sequence set to dwaa compression for the most control over our image during color correction which means we don't really need this jpeg sequence next i'll add anti-aliasing set the temporal sample count to something between 32 and 64. keeping in mind it'll have to render this amount of frames per every single frame in your sequence so it'll take a lot longer but it gets rid of this blurry look on our foliage in the viewport caused by the wind finally just check the override anti-aliasing box and we're done with that next is the secret sauce the cheat codes that crank your render settings to the max yes we are talking about console commands in the comments i pin my favorite ones for the very best so feel free to copy paste them as individual console commands here the only thing i'll mention is the screen percentage command let's say we tell unreal engine to export a 2k image by setting screen percentage to 100 it'll do just that but if you set it to 200 it'll render a 4k image scaled down to fit inside your 2k resolution ultimately making your image crisper and packed with more detail so i like keeping mine somewhere between 150 and 200. and finally we have output where we can select our path resolution like we just talked about custom frame rate which i'll set to 24 and custom frame range if you need it be sure to save these settings as a preset before closing out though and then you can watch the frames roll in add some subtle color correction and film grain in davinci resolve and we got ourselves a pretty sweet final result 16 years ago when i first got into 3d it took years to get to the point where i could truly create what i saw in my mind's eye today with this kind of workflow and a little bit of practice it can take just hours and maybe one day the immersive worlds we visit in our imagination can be created in the blink of an eye thanks for watching everybody keep learning keep growing and stay inspired [Music] you

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 452,944

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

Id: YZ4gSKZh6do

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022