How to create a Game Environment in Unreal Engine 5

okay where we're left we're left um so what are we gonna do today is to create um an environment okay so I will show you my I will show you my thought process on how to create an environment I will start from scratch from the very very beginner if you're a beginner I will show you the basics and if you are an advanced user I will show you my thought process on how I go creating environments because it's not only like drag and drop it looks easy but inside there is a lot of thought on how to make the shapes right how to put them the right angle where to put the lights and all this art theory that is usually left behind by most tutorials because you know we're teaching you how to use unreal but at the same time I also want to teach you how to use the skills where even if you don't use unreal you can apply these skills to painting to sculpting to any other kind of Visual Arts okay so let's get started the first thing you have here is your viewport your viewport is a visual representation of how your game will look like so the first thing you need to learn is how to move around just right click and you will move the camera just like that just and if you hold the right Mouse click and use the W S A and D you can just apply like if it was a spaceship right left Mouse click if you move around you can also fly like it's a spaceship everything is a spaceship here and unreal and the middle Mouse click you can pan around between two axes right my favorite way to navigate is using the right Mouse click and then I'm using the w s AMD just like any game if you play games you should be very comfortable with this and I can just move around and I if I press Q I can go down or I can go up with it okay the next thing is of course you can place objects so you can click the green plus icon and go to basic and then you can just go for example shapes and grab a cube you can find the cube if you move around like this but there is a better way you can just press f and then you will be able to move along the queue and if with the alt right Mouse click you can zoom in and out to add left Mouse click you can choose rotate I can move it like this if I press one of the gizmos here okay with w e r okay with W I can move E I can rotate r i can scale notice that as I do that the right screen it's also changing and that is because I can also change the values here just like that I can rotate like this one feature that is very important when you create environments is to make sure you use this world icon that means you're either using the world or you're using the local coordinates so if I put a local coordinates and I move in y-axis I will move along the face of the object just like this like this direction so I can move in y-axis or I can just click here I'm moving the y-axis will be this one the one in the world which is the one you see here in that down left corner so I can just click the right left Mouse click just to move and I can just change between the world coordinates and the local coordinates okay this snapping is just a snap I can just change this to 500 and you will notice what it does I will snap each 500 centimeters or units I can go back to 10 or I can disable this to have like a lot of precision I typically remove those when working with nature so the same with rotate and scale if I rotate without this I can just rotate any kind of degree and if I turn it on I can rotate only every 10 degrees in the right side you have your outliner basically these are all the actors that are in your scene so if I click in this Cube you will see that you have the cube you can also press f2 to rename this my my little Cube and you will see that the name is update and also no you can just select here is actually useful if you have a lot of objects so just keep that in mind Okay so let's start I I'm and I'm checking checking your comments uh just in case if you wanna ask something uh I know a lot of people will focus on creating open Words usually it requires less thought or Interiors you need to lay down some things and then just put your assets for me it's the same in this case I'm gonna do both I'm gonna do interior part and an exterior part and I will put both nature and man-made elements so you can see what will be the difference to work with them so let's get started if I go to file go to new level I can just choose the kind of label that I want in my case I don't want to empty open world because just for the sake of this demonstration I don't want to use the word partition I will just use an empty level okay so I will just click create do not save we don't want to save this now you will see this black screen and if you're used to opening unreal you will think that every time it has a sky that's not true because not every people need to Sky for example if you are doing an interior and you don't see the lights and you have any windows or something maybe you don't need the Skylight and you will save resources there so how can you create a skylight you can just go to lights you can just put the light here and notice that you can see any light and that is because you don't have a skylight here you only have a light so if I put my shape here you will see that the light is actually working so if I rotate this like this you will see that I have different shadows this will be very important to know how to make our environments look pretty working with lights so if you want to add a like a sky you can just go to the sky atmosphere and you will have this now there is a better way to do this let me just delete those and you will see that I cannot see my cuff it's like invisible but it's actually here there is no light that's why it's dark that's the way it's supposed to be so if I go to window and go to environment light mixer I can just create all my lights here kind of like creating all the sauce right okay the Skylight that was very like Sky atmosphere volumetric clouds and height file and you see that my Shadows are really harsh and the reason is my Skylight is not capturing the the sky in real time so I can just click here on the sky and you have the properties here you can go to real-time capture and there you go so we should be good to go so where do you go from here you have a bunch of options if you're creating a big environment you can create a landscape it will be very very useful to you and if you're creating a small environment and maybe you don't lead the landscape but you can also use it because it's very easy to modify and the collisions are very precise okay so we will create an environment first I can go to landscape in the selection mode I have different selection modes I can go to landscape and here there is a bunch of settings I can use I can make this one number of components bigger which means my environment will be larger I also have the section size if I make it really small each quad will be super super small right it's like tiny as I make the quads bigger obviously your environment gets bigger too so I can just go and go for the defaults you don't really want to make a super big word I can make a two by two where I can have multiple grids inside the quads like just it will make it just much bigger right I don't need to do anything else but just keep in mind I will use landmass so if you go to edit go to plugins landmass you will see that I have this on just click on it and you can restart the editor I also have the water plugging the water and the water extras you can just click the water you don't need the water extras just click on water and you should be good to go and that's pretty much it when you restart you will have something like I do you can edit layers let's create and it will just create your landscape how can you achieve good performance with nav meshift have a huge map calculate the nav mesh dynamically with the player I'm not a programmer I know how to program a little bit but if if Ram is here I will let him know about that question and and he can answer you my thought will be just put an app mesh in places where you have the gameplay do not put it everywhere so that's where I will go for but if you want to do it dynamically and all this stuff I don't think I can answer that question for you but I will let Ram know because we also have a programmer here don't worry okay so first things first you have players in this in the left the layers will allow you to you know just like Photoshop you can have different layers where you can paint and add different things you can do the same here for example I can just sculpt here I can use click like this and I can remove the layer intensity if I go zero it's like nothing happened and I can even go minus one I will go negative here I will just leave it on one tools that I typically use are the sculptle and the flattened tool will flatten everything so if I go here I will flatten this out very good for level design where you want the flat terrain and you want to put houses or anything like that that's that's great or if you want to erase things you can also use the flap tool just like this to make everything flat awesome then you have the rump you can just click on the ramp click on two surfaces and you can move the other surface where you want your rug to be you can press enter and you will have a ramp and you can go back to the flattened tool and just go do something like this if you want to smooth this area you can just click on smooth and smooth this area just a little bit something like that okay this is pretty much it you can go and add other things you can add like patterns like for example I can scope like this sculpting like with patterns I can put any texture actually if I want it so for example I have some Mega scans here I will show you this thing just in a in a while this is a Content browser I can use control space and I will have some folders I can just go to my services like for example this one and I can just go here and put it this and I can just go for the blue Channel now I can let me just put the tool string to something like this and you will see that I'm sculpting based on the alpha texture that I that I have which has a lot of noise you can also change the texture to green or red it will give me different results right so I can use right click clear sculpt yes I will clear all the data so what I want to show you it's this land mass plugin where you can just sculpt your terrain and using procedural tools which a lot of people like so before doing that let's add some water remember I told you you got go to plugin and add water we can do the same here we can go here to the place and type water and you'll have a lot of volumes here I wonder ocean so I can just drag and drop this and wait for the shaders to compile Okay so here I have my ocean now by default it has those colors so you see that my landscape it's now small you can see it's this was my landscape it's not that we lost our landscape is just that the ocean works with splints if you click on one of these splines if you don't see it press G with like this is like you're in game mode press G again to get out of game mode make sure you press Alt 3 or out or make sure you click on the where is it there you go click on the spline and click on one of those splines and you can just move it like this if you go like this you will see that you have the same as you had before where your landscape is like that typically you don't want that so let's just go for something like this and of course you can right click and add a spline here if you want and just so long have any shape you want okay now all this and I will just save this because just in case let's call a new folder called live stream like to level okay I can just go ahead and change this just like that okay so what you have here is in your landscape you also have a layer with water so if I scold here you will see that I cannot sculpt in the boundaries of this basically this is my my Shoreline generated automatically with with the landscape so if I want to sculpt on top of this I can just create a new layer and I can sculpt here let me just go back to the same tools we have just like this and I can just call here if I want it okay so I will just flatten this okay and there you go so that depends on what you want to do normally you want to sculpt under the water so that your sculpt it's Modified by the water just like this right so if you go to the water Body Ocean you will see that you have some you know some properties here you can play with okay like the curve settings like where you want your curve for example I can just double click on this and let's say I want to add a key here I can just put a something like this and you will see that I no longer have the smooth falloff so I can just play with the follow I can just delete this key and you will have you know your smooth transition from the shallow water to the deep water right that's something you can do if you want and also let's try to find a way to play our game so let's save it if we play here you will see that I can fly and that's not necessarily what you want so what I will do is to import a character it's very easy I can just control space I will open my content browser you can also go to window and go content browser click on this and I will show you all this thing in a minute if you don't know I know it's very basic but some of you may know know about it so I will just go quickly over the content browser is use a older structure where you can organize all the assets that you would use in your projects that's pretty much it okay so if I control space I can have the floating window of the content browser here which is very comfortable so I can go to add and go to feature or content pack then I can go for a third person mode add to project and it will come with all the necessary assets for my character it will come with the character it will come with the game mode with the enhanced input so now when I if I play the game nothing happens and that is because I haven't called a game that we need to use this character so it's very easy we just go to the world settings and go to game overwrite and I can just go for the third person game mode now when I play we will see that I have my character here you can just go here I can go over the thing that I scoped and I believe there was a bug where you cannot go underwater so I can just walk like Jesus and that's not normal it shouldn't be like that there was an error with the with the volumes of the water and I'm not sure if I can fix this but I can try I can go to the collisions Collision presets and it shouldn't be it it can be like I don't know overlap and let's see if that helps okay that helps I can go under the water now so let's play from here you notice that I play where my camera is I will I will spawn like a overnight or Call of Duty like from fall from the sky that usually not what you want so there you go once you see that once you are inside the water you have like a like a volume here kind of like to simulate how it looks underwater so if we want to start our game we can go to the green plus icon go to basic and put apply your start Now by default the arrow will point at here if you play your character will star at the ocean and that's okay but I want I want it to look like this I can move it up press end and by pressing and I can snap the objects into the ground that's something we will we will do a lot so let's go back it's our layer one let's let's just clear the sculpt here okay so I want to add some some montins or you know something so instead of sculpting like this I can just go on and no add some blueprints so if I go here to blueprint I can select the blueprint brush and I can just select the custom brush land mass and nothing happens that's because I need to click here and once I click it you will see that the shaders are compiling if you don't see anything don't panic there you go so now my shaders are like this I can just move things around and basically I have like a pyramid right now there is a bunch of things I can do with this so what I can do is to play with the settings first you have the basic ones it's like you can invert the shape like you will have very weird results you can go for the alpha blend like minimum maximum or additive Alpha blend looks works most of the cases you can cut the shape and with that it doesn't look like but I have pretty much tap of the shape I don't have any pointy shape or I can just change the polo for example 30 or 35 or 40. if I go 90 it will be like 90 degrees which it may or may not be something you want the material you don't really need to play with anything of that I can go to static mesh not really spline mesh paint layers let's just go for the effects first is the blur so you can see it's very sharp and if I press like 100 that's a lot right so I can just put like the tree and it will smooth everything out I can go to the curl noise and change the chord size like this and the and the strength like this just play with those two values use don't be to stream like put like five otherwise you will get results like this okay what else we can do we can we could change the curves but we're not touching that displacement can be very important so we can go for for example let's put a high value like 248 and you will see that I'm using this tiling noise right I can move this up okay and I can also change the noise remember we had some noises here for example I can use my rock cliff and I can use the channel the blue Channel and I will use that clip I can also go for this one and I will just have different results and of course with a bigger resolution you put like make things a little bit better you can change the tiling of this and this will basically give you a lot of flexibility because if you move the spline you will also move the noise with you just like that and just go for something like this and then you can add the spline Point here or you can delete the spline point if you don't like it if you want to click move everything just make sure to go to the outliner and you can click on the landmass I can you can just put it here you can leave it like that or if you want you can scale it and you will have something like this now the good thing about this is that I can just alt click and without I will duplicate an object and I will have something like this and I can make this one bigger and I can add another spline Point here if I want and that's pretty much what you can do with this other things uh smooth blending like the inner you can put two thousand or two thousand in the other you will see that it Smooths out very nicely 2000 is for the app you don't really need it for now you can do the same here you can put two thousand and you will have a much better result with this okay so what else you can do you can put some splines here so if I go to water I can go to the river and you can just drag a river here and you will see that my river is like this I can see the direction of the river because last time told me it was in the wrong direction so this is going this way so let's just put it all the way here and you can see like it's kind of blendy but it can do a better job so if you want you can go put the water on top and it will if you put the water on top it will adjust everything that you have sculpted which is typically what you want really you can move this thing down let's let's move this blank and it will affect the environment okay I can just put a river across the whole environment I can use alt click something like that and I can just put a link so I can just go to the green plus icon put on wider and just put a link here and just by doing that I will have my Lake just like this now I can change I can change this I can add display there is also an option to add some noise into this so if I go to water not the water let's see it should be on the on the landmass I'll have a quick look and type noise yeah you have the curl noise just as gives us the one time so you can buy five that's too much you can play with something like that and you can do the same with the river you can type River here and you can change the color noise to 0.3 something like that that's very nice if you put the noise is much more natural so I highly encourage you to do that let's play with a 502 not much difference if you put one that's too much so let's put three let's put three here should be good enough so let's try and play your game we're too far from our River so let's go to the player start click here and now we can just move it something like that let's just play and now I have the same issue with the with the volume and notice that the at this thing it's like floating I can't fix this very easily I can either put this one here this one down there for some reason it doesn't go down I can just create a new one and I can just sculpt here just like that I can smooth things out and just like that I can just fix this part right on this code let me just go to the brush size very low and I can just go and do something like that if you want it yeah it looks okay so if I go to my River I can do the same for the Collision because it was very weird it used to work pretty nice before yeah let's go to overlap and then go to my Lake and go to overlap and that's it you can just play here make sure our players start it's on the top now we can play and we have our our River here it's great I don't know why our post processing is not working well it's always something you can put by yourself but it will be nice if it worked out of the box here for sure okay so these are pretty much the basics of of landscape if you want to modify the water you can go here you can go to the ocean first and find the material it's using it's here check material yeah this one here not this one that one that one was the LOD so if you go to the water material it will be the water material ocean you could if you click on this you will have something like this okay where you have a lot of options you can try and change those for example let's close this I can go and generate form let's see how this how do how this works so uh there's a lot of settings here there you go sticks maybe that's something you want yeah it's very pretty you can do the same for this for the river absorption if you don't know what the settings does you can just change the color to see it change okay so if I go black what happens it looks like black I guess uh let's go here I put purple like contaminated water okay if I put this you would have something like dark position oh what happened it stayed like that go back there you go um home is gathering not really there you just go to the water opacity mask we can put like zero to see what happens or 100 or minus one thousand nothing really so what else I think this one changed a lot yeah this one changed a lot so you can put something you can put something darker if you want other otherwise maybe you feel like you're in Cancun which is very nice so you will have that kind of water maybe I won't judge you if you want to have that color it's very nice so you see that there is a discrepancy between the colors of my ocean and this and that is because you also have the hlld water so make sure you have the same the same settings here for example if you go here and put one it should change not exactly sure but anyway uh the level of water I believe you can just move it if I let me try now it's very evident this thing I should go back to what it what it was let me see if I can revert these changes oh now just leave the ocean form yeah you can enable waves too because I think should be enabled by default yeah it is enabled by default anyway uh we can do the same here we can put our cow sticks the lake will have pretty much the same properties just with you know different values so you can just click on all sticks and that's very nice and you can do the same for the river uh you can revert you have materials River to Ocean favorite Lake you won the River one so the river one you can just enable caustics and let's see how it looks like yeah I can think about doing the block out for another live stream but I mean this is technically a bloke out it's just using landscapes oh that's great all right and take take doing environments takes a long time no wonder I I do those very very little let's chill out for a bit bye let me just read the questions I believe it has Reflections you just need to play with the with the material settings by default you will always have reflections using lumen which software knowledge do I need to enter into game industry that will really depend on your role uh not everyone needs to know how to use the engine but it's a very nice skill to have if you're going into the 3D World which is what I did when I was working in Ubisoft you need to use like 3ds Max or Maya or blender each company will have its own preferred method for you know each company will ask you for hey I will use max here so your artist will be done in Max so that's what they will do so you just check that software that each company is using it's very simple if you check for the job requirements they will tell you oh you need to be very good with 3ds Max or it's like okay and you know which software they're using um other than that I think the software is pretty standard across the industry using Photoshop using substance painter or substance designer it's the standard now so you should check into those uh tank how can you change the level of water I I'm not sure maybe you can move it or you can also move the landscape right you can move it up and down and that's it level change so for example if I if I just sculpt here and I keep sculpting and I bend the water level has changed from this perspective right that's something you can do foreign as you can see it's a lot of work to do environments I will do them from time to time but do not expect to have this kind of live stream very often because if I want to make an environment I will do it for my own game so that I can use it right but for for this time it's okay Okay so I'm having some neck pain let's let's continue let's continue uh let's add some materials it's gonna be very easy what is a material it's like a painting you put inside your surfaces either 2D models or landscape or whatever so you can put textures you can put uh pretty much have anything so what you can do is go to content browser let's go to the folder we created called live stream and here we can create a material so right click and go to material and then M underscore landscape like if you double click on this you will see that you have this window here now Landscapes work a little bit different so I will show you basically how this works I can write Mouse click and move around and I can just right click and create some notes you can also have your palette where you can see the hot case here like for example Panner with P you can just drag and drop or you can press p on while holding it press the left Mouse click and you will have it okay same with texture coordinate something we will use very often so for now I will just show you how to put a color I will press three and click and this will give me a constant three vector you can also type here like constant and you have the constant one vector constant to Vector three and four so for example I want to have a Green Landscape something like this I can just go here and by default my landscape won't have anything because I haven't applied the material so I can just go to landscape here and inside my landscape you have the material I will just create a material instance for now create a material instance just like this and I will call it Mi landscape material instance is something that just like you saw with the water I can just change the properties there so I will put this thing here and it should change yeah it's the whole island pretty ugly but I can go back to my landscape and right click and convert parameter and this will be my color for example I can just leave it like that so what I can do onto a space to open my contact power and then click on this I can change the color so if I move this around so you can see I can just click here and I can just press one of this and you will have a little bit of a nicer color for your landscape now the thing with Landscapes is that you don't want to go for the traditional Road like this where you can just add some color on it you can a lot of people think you can only paint you can add some things you can add textures into this for example I can just go to my mega scans go to surface and I will show you how I add those in a in a minute I can just go here and drag this and I can just put this thing here and you will see that I have my texture here and it works so you can overlay this kind of textures on top of everything you have painted so you can have more variation Okay so let's delete this and what we're gonna do is to add some textures first so you can go up and go to quick sell content and here you will have a huge Library of different assets that you can use oh wow this one looks really nice let's go here oh that's very nice may want to do a another tutorial on using this once it will be very very cool but anyways uh let's go back to home if you see here you have a lot of assets not only materials but also you have assets and 3D plants and you can just go to surface and you can type here like send for example and you can just try to look for something you want for example this one or this one or this one for example I can just download this you can check the quality here medium quality should be good enough for textures so you can just download you also have this Rocky scent can you try and once it finished downloading you will see like a green check here so you can just click Plus and there you go now you have your material here which is great let's add another one click add and there you go now you have your materials I did the same for a bunch of those if you want to see which ones I added I can go to local here you will see my whole Library I added this Rocky ground here at Ground and this one and maybe some rock cliff I believe yeah I had a rock cliff so let's start with that if you want to add a layer let's check which one you want to add Rocky ground that could be Player rock let's check not very interesting here at the ground okay let's go for okay let's go for this one I can just drop all of this and put it into my landscape and the first thing you need to do when you drag textures especially with Landscapes because you will have a lot of them you can go here and go to Shared wrap and what this will allow you if to have more Textures in your in your material if you go here you will have to text your samples Samplers form 4 to 16. you can put much more than that if you use the warp note so how can you use this well the first thing is you need to paint this texture so we're gonna go and put a landscape layer blend by default it's not going to have anything if I click Plus you will see I have a layer name I can put layer 1 a pro tip for you you don't want to rename this as for example rock or grass or anything because in the future you may change what the layer texture is and if you want to make a master material where you can have snow material and sand and different biomes then the layer name won't make any sense where it says Rock but it paints snow right so that's why it's very simple to keep it with numbers like layer 1 it will be layer 1 always so you can just go here and put it on the base color and if you apply it your landscape will turn black I see a lot of comments especially from my Island tutorial video where a lot of people it's like hey my landscape turned black I don't know what to do just go to the landscape and if you go to paint you will see that you have uh Target layers here and it should show because we just create the LA the material here so if it doesn't show the fix is very simple you can just create a new level and then open this okay so now when you go to landscape you will see that you have your layer one I can go click this Arrow icon and I can just click weight Blended and I can just click save it will just save in the default folder where your map is inside there will be a folder with the layer info if you click on this you will see this is these are some of the properties you can change for each layer if you want to go deeper but for now you will see that it looks like a solid color but here I can actually see this thing here just like that okay so what's the next thing you need to do you can press U to create a texture coordinate or you can go Tab and press texture coordinate and you can press m to multiply or multiply like this and you can just multiply this and put that constant constants are very common so you can press one two three even four you have different constant values in this case we want to multiply this UV tiling by one for now I can convert this to a parameter and say landscape UVs purchase UV highly low value there you go so if I connect this here play nothing will change because I haven't changed my UV tiling but I can go for something much smaller if I go 5 you will see that it's become small and small so I need to go the other way around I can go for zero point one and maybe that's too big or too small we will see chip one to go out of the game mode and let's see this looks like a decent size to me it looks decent I feel it's okay now you see that we don't have any properties just a color and it's quite non-realistic and the reason is we're not using the other textures now I can just copy and paste this and put this thing here and go to the normal and hit apply or let's just get up right here and now you will see that you have your remote much better right so this will turn out very ugly it will become a spaghetti if we continue to do this for all the textures that are in our environment so my personal way of doing this is to create a material from this so I will right click and type make material attributes and I will go here to the base color this is the normal map which will give me the aligning information detail and just go here and here I can just connect this actual coordinate here the red one will go to ambient occlusion the green one will go to roughness and I can just put this thing here now this one will be my height but I won't use it for now so what I can do once I apply you will see that now I have this and now I have my material here but my material is not it's only connecting the base color and what I want to do I can either break material attributes and I can connect those just like this or I can do something much more simple where I can just click here or any part of the graph I can use material attributes and now instead of connecting all of those I will use a material attributes that come by default here so when I hit apply it's still the same all right now that we have our first texture we can add more it will be very easy let's go here and press C and comment layer one ground let's go for another texture let's go for this we can go for the Sandy gravel so let's grab this and then go for a shirt wrap you could put this as a parameter if you want it actually I will do convert to parameter this will be my layer one Albedo this will be my layer to layer one normal and this will be my player one mask the same thing can be here convert the parameter layer to Albedo layer 2 normal right click Layer Two mask let's Ctrl C Ctrl B and actually we're gonna do something different we're gonna go here and put a name and I can put a ad name reroute declaration node I can just click on this and then I can just put my Global UV highly and now what I can do is to type Global UV tiling and I can connect those like this so instead of this being here I can have something like this and now this is like a Wireless Note where I can just connect this and this will be the same as connecting from here which will make my graph more organized so I can just make material attributes and connect those here and now I can just add a new layer all Layer Two and I can go here and connect those okay now I can go to landscape and I can just add a new layer here if I don't see it you know Quick Fix new level empty level open recent levels and now when you go to landscape you will see the layer two create and now what we can do now what I recommend is to paint on layers where it's a base one because if you have different layers where you have your painting it will become a mess when you paint on other layers and then you want to fix something you want to paint on on top of another layer and it won't work so I always recommend to paint on the base layer if you really want to have like another layer you can do this but just keep in mind it can get really confusing so if I want to paint here I can just paint in this area I can just paint something like this to paint the same here I can do the same for these ones foreign click you can erase there you go and we have a little Shoreline for us which is good that's nice the size looks good to me Okay so what else you can do well you can keep adding layers but I want to fix the blending here and we're gonna do that by using the height map if you go here to the mask you will see that you have a height map here and this will serve as the layer information for enough for your blending modes so what you can do is instead of putting the weight blend here you can go to height plate and in the height blend you can you can put the one before if you want which will take this as you know it will take it like it's a mask where the black Parts won't have any layer and the white parts will have so what I can do is to go here and put a chip contrast and here I can press one right click convert to parameter and put type on face and I can just put one for now and this will be I will put a name rewrote again this will be my layer one right so I can put my layer 1 height here you can also put the layer two if you want but if for the sake of trying things out we can just put it here and now with the height blend you will see that something's happening here right like it's it's not entirely smooth anymore which is great so let's go for our material instance let's go for the material instance and then we can just change the height contrast for example I can put two number 10 I can put 50. if I put 0 you won't have any contrast if I put minus 50 you will have the contrast but in Reverse right 50. even if I put two high values it won't work so I can just play with five looks like a decent number that's great so now you can paint even better because when I go here I can go to my layer info I can decrease the size of this I can just paint a little bit here and you will see that you're actually painting with the height information which is nice you can shift click and little by little you will be able to paint the surface to your liking which is which looks much better in my opinion so let's add the different textures that we need to add so Let's see we want I guess we add the Sandy gravel first let's close this yeah Sunday travel was added Rocky sand you may want to add another variation here so let's go to the landscape and this is make sure you you use shared wrap don't forget about this it's very important so go here and go to Layer Two and the ground and the Sandy ground there you go I can just copy and paste this I don't need to do it again this time will be the three Albedo L3 normal L3 mask I can just go here and edit three I can go to my landscape add another one layer three put a height I can just do the same thing here but for this I can go here and this one will be my layer 2 height and I can put it here so I can put my layer 3. and my layer 2 here and let's add another one just so we don't restart the level over and over remember this will will need to be shared wrapped Ctrl Ctrl V this will be my L4 go back to check this one uh this one not I'm not really digging it yeah this one uh for sure we we want some rocks here too so let's put uh oh sorry I didn't change the the elevator of this one you just put the rock here is it the rocky ground no it's not it's the rock cliff let's put the rock clip here and for the normal also put the Rock clip normal and for the mask we will put the rock Clift mask oh sorry it was in the layer tree um it's okay it's okay you just change this name uh with but the problem is now when I update this you will see that I have a different texture here which is not what I want so let's revert this very fast uh Sunday gravel yeah I was changing here and then I uh my bad there you go so normal layer 3 normal will be my rock clip and layer 3 mask will be this one I don't know how why it looks like this there you go lie I will be my layer tree layer four layer for alvido before normal Pro tip here the longer the more texture you have the more variations you will be able to to create so just keep that in mind let's check this ground not much difference check this uh this one could do this one could do so let's let's go here and put I believe it's this one yeah put this one here this one here and this one here and now we just need to create a mask and the layer 4 blend this will be layer 4. this will be height blend we will copy this and put it here layer 3 height now we can just connect this one here layer four and then layer 3 height okay so now that we have this we can open a new level start and now we can go here go to landscape and add the layer information there you go you got the layer information you can go here and let's paint something so let's go up the brush size we can paint the scene like this you can just decrease the size and if the colors don't match we can always change the color either in the material or in the texture and then let's check this one remove it see players updating repairing shaders so strange I'm using am I using the same texture here all right granted not oh I am my bad uh let's change the texture do something let's see how it goes with this now you don't need to change here you can always use the material yeah I cannot not like it that much so I will use the layer rocked so instead of changing here I will just change it in the material so I will just go to my folder live stream go to material instance and then I can just change here to anything I want Mega scan surfaces material instance I believe rock layer should be this one right yeah rock layer yeah it's okay so I can just paint it here if I want it I can just go back here and if this is too green it's very simple you can just change the material instance or you can go to the Rock clip and you can just change the saturation here to 0.5 and that will be much better you see that the color actually is very very important for your stuff okay guys let's have a break we're almost one hour oh we have a long way to go very long way I will go through the questions uh live stream blocked out in the future I will I will do it I think I already answered that one how about work with different height map layers I'm not sure what you mean if you mean like that texture information from the paint layers or the landscape information from the from the landscape the new procedural stuff we have tutorials on it I will put a link in the description when I when I finish the video or you can use browse or Channel we have quite a few tutorials on it where you can quick start your uh your journey in using the procedural stuff so make make sure to check it out if you are interested in learning that I painted foliage grass and it disappears when I look at it that's very weird it's hard for me to answer this kind of questions here it's a lot of factors uh I'm not sure exactly what it could be uh do you also each individual people uh no but we do have a group a private group for the people who take our action game course so if you are interested going to unfgames.com there you will check our action game course if you want to create a game from scratch it's a great course it has a step-by-step tutorials on how to create a game from scratch and you can try the first lesson for free if you want in addition to that we you you will join a group where we can give you feedback there and you can share your project with us you you can have feedback and also a lot of live streams that we don't share here are also there which cover topics more and more complex topics and very useful for your game Development Career so just check it out uh can you add sound to the water of course you can just add song to any kind of surface you just need to understand actor now if you if you want to create a RTS game so we have a we have a tutorial 11 hours on how to create a game with RTS the action game is I mean we use an action game for example but the principles apply to any kind of game of course the programming how to how to start the level how to block out the level how to finish again basically it's now on Early Access that's why it's cheaper than it should be but once it's on Steam it will raise the price but it's okay I mean if you're just learning out don't go to uh don't commit to that yet you can just go to our free tutorials they are great they have a lot of information and you can learn a lot from there too um split the river into multiple placements that's a good question I think I will just go about adding another River here let's try it out the wall of this just try it out like this yeah just like this and you can see that because my water is like that on top of the of the landscape you will have things like this which is maybe something you want is it going up oh it's going off I see the comments coming last time I did something like that and now people were like why the water stream is Flowing up and not down can you change the direction of the water it should be inside the material but you can either rotate this and that's it now that we have this I actually like it so I will just go and move this thing like this and I will put a nice 0.2 .1 something something like that yeah definitely doable you can do it you can go here and if you see like water here that's why I mean these tools are great but you can also go and fix this kind of stuff yourself you go to sculpt and go to Layer Two you can just start sculpting on top of this sorry not flat and I will I should use this code there you go and you can also use like erosion you can reduce the threshold and you will have much more natural result just like that and you can do the same here I actually like this mode a lot especially when there is lining a lot of erosion will make your environment look much better like here for example you can increase the brush size and I can just go through relation here but just here outside this part and you can just sculpt here or parts that are showing the water a little bit that's it uh water with Niagara I'm not sure I'm not sure uh how things are going I wouldn't just wait for creatures like this to come up and wait your own game if I mean that would be nice if everything will be available but think about it a lot of old games were made by using pretty old software and you still see the games that very old Street Fighter Sonic Mega Man whatever they didn't have the tools you have today it was a lot of work a lot of technical work and it of course more technical work will to stop you from actually having your idea proof that hey right this this is very nice but I don't know how to make it and right now you have a lot of tools so I highly encourage you even if like oh you know I'm I'm gonna wait until you can have procedural stuff like this to radio again huh wow you you can just start now I mean if games like those were made like many years ago you can also think of different different way so creating your own game oh clear paint oh it's it's this is what I mean when I shouldn't paint here I should always paint here otherwise I will have problems just like this just like this there you go okay we are one hour and a half let's let's do this we can make it where do you go from here a lot of people start adding materials and in textures and other things and they really don't know what what to do so this is where meshes come very handy because landscape won't really solve all your problems it will solve some of them like Collision when you play you don't need to worry about collisions right it will solve the big shapes but if you want to have more interesting shapes and this kind of stuff uh it will be a good idea to just it will be a good idea to just put some meshes and replace the landscape which is what we will do so if I go to bridge you can use rows through here and type block and you will see a bunch of rocks there are many things you can you can find here I like this Sandstone Terrain that you can just put in the background I won't download it because I don't want to mess up with the streaming or actually yeah maybe just the medium quality it's okay it will be like very low low quality if I click add I can go to my assets I can go to static mesh if you don't see these filters you can go here and you can just check any filter you want by default I use a lot textures static mesh material this kind of stuff so where is our there you go I think it's this one yeah and this should be good enough for background so if I go here you will see that have a very interesting background here and you can do the same you can rotate this and from this angle you will see that you have your background and it's just so nice because backgrounds are highly underestimated especially when people start doing environments the reason is a lot of people focus on the things that are close and not so much on the things that are in the distance but you can just play with the shapes here you can mix them if you want and you can just rotate those put it there you just put them like this and just by having that you will feel that your world is actually much bigger than you thought you go here you can go for something like this then make something very big like very very big that's great so doing this kind of stuff it's very important because you need to have the background in your project otherwise it will just feel like you you have again not a real world right Okay so just like I did with this I did the same with all these assets here this rocks we're gonna use these rocks and see what we can create so let's go Ctrl space and let's go for static mesh and let's see what we can create let's let's put this one here and at this point I don't want the snap here okay what I want to do is to scale this up in a way that I have full freedom just like this now what about the landscape well you can blend this landscape with this you can still go for something like this and go for local and just rotate it like this if you want and you can scale this like this and this asset may not be the best example so I will just go for another one this one is really nice so you can just go here and use this asset now what you want to do with these assets are basically you want to create like interesting shapes for example like this you want to start very big so if I go here I will just go and put this asset here and I will do the same here I can just rotate this I can alt click and rotate and basically put things like this where I can just replace this landscape with with some meshes here something like that and you can see that as soon as I do that like my terrain actually looks much better now right let's try to use the same asset over and over until you know we can that's pretty much the rule for doing level art you want to reuse us as much as possible these assets until you really feel like you need more variation I can just go here and let's try another one maybe this one something like this so you can can play with this like this and move this thing here do so that you have something you can scale this up and down when you rotate stuff make sure you your assets are in the same direction as your you know in the same flow of the landscape right like this one for example is not a very good example so I can just go ahead and try another one for example this one I could try to like avoid this landscape completely and go for something like that maybe that's something I want I can try let's see if it works maybe not maybe not like if I go here I want to check the light by the way Ctrl L to change the direction of the sound it could work so let's let's keep playing with it go here and we can go and Ctrl C to be honest I don't know why we have this issue I think it happens since I don't know since since when it starts happening in my computer I don't know if it's a version of unreal is it the material what is it linear color let's see it should be here maybe maybe you don't want the sharpen for this it could be I don't know let's see well so far so good okay so let's let's just keep adding stuff remember try to reuse as much as possible and here I'm not really liking this blending it should it could be the colors but I think it's mostly the shapes yeah something like that and then we could try to put this one here now when putting these assets you want to make sure you know what what is your composition here and I'm already experienced with this and I don't think too much about it but when you create something like an environment you should have like a focal point for example uh this is my focal point so all this will guide into this so you mean you need to make sure your flow is right for example this mountain here it could be like this or not this one maybe that's not a very good very good example but this one you could rotate like this and then you can have something like here where you do have some contrasts if you want uh in my case I want to play a lot with the verticality so what I feel like it's lacking I will go to my Layer Two I will just sculpt here I will increase the brush size and I will just flatten this out and that's a little bit too much so I will just go to platin and put it like here I can just go to smooth too something like that yeah this size works works works better and I can go to the Eurovision and play with this just in case this kind of detail is mostly when the player won't really notice that much but you can just change the size and you can have a more natural look but all these things don't matter if you just put a mesh there then it doesn't really matter so I like this so what I can do it's uh maybe I could put a lake here and something here or just leave it like that another thing I can do is to play with the elevation here I can just go back and put a ramp and just like this I can take that this is too much and and do something like this that's too much let's go back yeah something something like that and I can just come here and this is the smooth so maybe maybe I can have like a big believe here like I can just go ahead and duplicate this thing something like that and you can just applicate this thing like this you can rotate around it if you feel like it's not right hey uh let's finish let's finish up this parts uh for example we could have something like this is good if I go here and write this one out this one could be very good for for mountains let's see if this one Blends nicely so here and yeah not bad under the same here and duplicate and rotate in the local axis something like that and just put it in position and then we can just go ahead and applicate this one too we can make it bigger for parts that were not going as perfectly normal something like that and you can do the same here you can go ahead and have this thing like this and you can see the detail that it's creating this this part so just what is this oh it's like three I don't want a tree now maybe something like this yeah this one will Ruby I like it okay but let's let's put the same things here the rule is if no one notice it's repeated you can repeat it foreign we can do the same here this asset is great when you find an asset like that just repeat it over and over until you're tired of it you can go here and not here we can just go ahead and we can put something like that and here we could um we can start putting some assets here not this one [Music] you want to have some shapes here you notice that I already have some Rhythm here where I can have something like this and something like this we still need to close up some of these parts but mostly I feel it's it's going well so we can just add another one not this one sorry this one we will leave it until the end I'll try this once now we can go for the local you can rotate you can this site something like that the problem with doing this is now the focal point is here so what we can do is to put one of this let's try to duplicate it first we can try to cover up this part something like that maybe and you can here you can rotate this around to try some new shapes I like this shape here and then we can we can move this thing here to have like a kind of like a slope and then I don't know if we can try to try to put this one like this uh you can just move it here the idea is that you want to have nice shapes here so if you remove this if you put that rock there and this is behind you won't be able to see the silhouette so that's that's where the challenge is it's all about playing with shapes and this kind of stuff you see that there are a lot of colors we will deal with that later have a lot of colors in the Rocks which you may or not want but usually you want to have color Harmony in your scenes so what you can do here it's actually connect this to I think you you should put a the ram here but just thinner yeah something like that but sorry not here you can put the ramp here and here yeah here it's fine just need to move these things a little bit and this one we can rotate 180 degrees you saw that you don't see the same asset at the same rotation there you go and here we can go to the landscape and just some smooth these areas like this yeah some something something like that you can do the same here if you want to experience what it's like to be a level artist working for Ubisoft this is pretty much your work day you can do this for eight hours a day five days a week 200 something days a year not for me for sure at this point we just want to get into the flow of all this environment here you want to have the medium shapes too you don't just want to have big ones you want to have medium ones so here it will it will be a nice idea if you just drag this thing here and just put it like this oh let's let's try out our game uh for sure I will pull so let's go to the player play your start there you go let's see how it feels like it's totally different when you and you start playing your game yeah starting to take shape it's in this point where you really want to you really want to put some music or or just quit I will put the camera I don't think you need to see the UI that much it's just drag and drop and drop stuff now it's just not only drag and drop when I'm doing this I'm thinking about the shapes and the lining and whenever I I want to check shapes and lining I'm constantly moving around my objects to see if if I can put this object here or it will be weird if I remove this object my composition actually looks better for me because I like this shape that I have here that's very important hey oh no wonder I was lagging I had the static mesh editor open when you go into detailing your environment you can just go ahead and just have this kind of things here luckily for me I did a lot of things other than doing level art in Ubisoft otherwise I think like it's nice because you have like the theme like if you're working in Assassin's Creed like you have like the story and everything and you want to put some things here and there I mean it's nice I I want I want light to you it's uh it's kind of fun from time to time but for me I always wanted to experiment with different stuff pretty much always and this is why I got into indie game development actually just so that I can keep experiencing different stuff for me indie games were much much more rewarding personally I mean that doesn't have to be the case for for everyone but it was for me I don't know about you like do you feel like you want to go for a triple a company one day that was definitely my dream when I when I start out and it's a lot of effort the good thing about joining a triple a company is that your skills are really sharp so once you get there like there is a lot of room for improvement but it's a lot of grinding too consider it that's something you you may or may not want is a lot of people like it and if you do you will go into bigger and bigger projects yeah some people go full full in the that's okay there is no there is no answer for that I feel like I want to have something here I'm not super happy with the shape of this yeah in the companies for fun but there is also a lot more risk they have much less budget typically smaller companies are way more fun because you have more responsibility so your actions matter much more for example in a big company you can you only have to do like a small thing in order for it to work and that's that's okay but you won't feel as important unless you are like a director or something where your decisions are quite important but in order to get there you need to you need to be a lot of years in the company and play a lot of the political games that you will find in any big companies not just game companies this is this is very very this is very common for for game companies uh but there is a lot of political game there is a lot of Game of Thrones type of stuff so just be aware of that whenever you put an object here make sure to always put a smaller one next to it it's a lot of it's very basic but a lot of people fail to do this kind of thing many times what do you mean by your right weddings anyway I can just change the the body ocean it will give you a much more natural look if you put zero here is too perfect yeah one looks like a nice number foreign weddings is it like getting married for political reasons or what [Music] uh I use a lot of games for inspiration a lot and you know a lot of people think uh if you you make if you make games it's different from playing games that's that's true but I find as an as an indie game developer I find it much more useful to play games rather than in a big company just because you need it's more creative and if you're making a game you will have Parts where you need to think and get inspired and sometimes you're just playing a completely different game and like hey I didn't know I I like I like to do uh I would like to do this too in my in my game right or you analyze some games in a way that for example you could just find inspiration from currently I use a second layer because you can find inspiration from a lot of things you don't know when you explain something and something clicks and it's it's just nice uh for this kind of stuff I might want to go procedural maybe well we can try uh if you want to build procedural here you can just go to edit plugins go to procedural material mesh component okay and let's just create one really fast it's it's the same I did the last live stream hopefully my memory don't don't fail me so I will just go here PCG and put PCG um Rock online ah yeah it will be safe it will be safe so I can put this fly uh get splan data the actor Will all the actors and the attack will be the spawner I will just create a new actor here new actor or excuse put this one out of real time this will be my Supply owner and just go here and good attack will be owner there you go now you can get the data here apply sampler and put it here and then you can project this into the landscape then you can the projection you don't want the rotation of the landscape you can transform points here if you want and then spawn Stone mesh static mesh spawner let's just spawn mesh for now uh which mesh we will use this one so just let's just put it here let's try it out let's let's remove this and let's just go for our spline just put the PCG here first and just just leave it there and then you can go for the spawner see where is our oh I didn't add the spline uh this spline component there you go now you can see what what's happening explain spawner there you go now I can just move this the thing here now what I can do is just increase the number of spawn points and the transform so let's go here this is a little bit tricky I have a second monitor but I want to show you how it will look like transform points let's change the rotation first uh minus a 180 to 180. that's the first thing the next thing killed one Maybe and also the spline sampler can increase the subdivisions for or this where you can just put more and more stuff okay and also uh you may want to put the projection to yeah maybe it can work the projection for the landscape now I can just I can just go ahead and because it's projecting in the landscape I will have a lot of variation here now this is not usually what you want so this just go for transform points let's make it bigger again offset minimum C axis minus 10. and the offset Max minus 10. maybe minus 30. minus 30. minus 80. yeah at this point it's much more obvious so also the scale you may want to scale in the in the y-axis no in the x-axis here you want to scale this in the x-axis so you can just put two here and rotation minimal rotation minus 10 maximum rotation 10 in x-axis so you have some variation and because this is projected into the landscape I don't need to worry about where I put my my splines and just go back here and that's it I can add more uh I can add more and more assets to this let's just say they're online I don't know that will work Rocky ground okay Rocky ground I think I already had this one let's try it out yeah we have this one now this one is another color but it will work uh but the first thing I need to do is to I will go to a flat surface here I will put it here by pressing end and I will go to the modeling tab and I will just go to the form with lattice and what this will do is to make sure I don't have my plane floating when I spawn it so I can just select all of this and just go down and you can drag the middle one and go up and just like that you have some of it in the ground but not all of it you can use move a little bit this is the thing about the mega scans asset they don't usually adapt to your current what why you want to use them so you need to modify them a little bit something like that it should work fine it's a little bit more just in case hey accept and now we can put it on our spline on our procedural spline oh the form we we did it before is very simple you use go to the material of the water and click enable caustics oh the form should be different right I'm not sure if this material has something but water materials are quite complex so just keep that in mind so now that I have this I can just go to my procedural mesh spawner click Plus and then I can go to this one now I have it and transform points maybe minus 20 and minus 45 will be better yeah much better and I actually like the let's just explain sampler it does it have a seed value there you go seat you have more variation like this and you can just make it bigger transform points maybe 2.5 something like this much better I can see my points are like this which is not what I want uh this is why I'm not a super fan of this kind of stuff usually I will just go here and scope my landscape a little bit and you know problem solved it's not nothing out of this world and if you see more of those like for example here you can use scope here and you can just smooth things out like this now that you have this uh it may be a good idea to have uh different texture for this because textures can really can really add a lot of differences from this Rocky ground may be a dissolution for this so it should be here right uh Rocky ground yeah the first Rocky ground so let's go back to our landscape let's just duplicate this this will be my layer 5. on my Rocky ground will be this one here no more mask and then I will put the same thing I did here but for the layer four this will be my layer for height and I will have a fifth layer here this is the same stuff we just did before I will be a height blend on all right just connect this one here you can also use that in rename roads if you want apply you scale your UV tiling by pointer texture coordinate multiply and just multiply by the amount of that you want okay so now that we have this let's go to new level and open our live stream level again and now let's go to our landscape and paint and let's add another layer info for layer 5. there you go now let's see see how it goes foreign here a little bit is it the one that I had before Pokey ground oh it is the same one no wonder how about this one I don't really like this one but let's find another one in quicksil Bridge I'm looking for something noisy but not that one not that one maybe this maybe this can work repetitive grass material [Music] um I'm not sure what you mean for repetition you always try to break the repetition with something so in your case if you want to make the grass less repetitive add more variation okay let's let's try this one hey there you go let's try it out why I cannot paint here ah I'm using this mood idiot there you go now I think it's not really something I want here wait oh yes yes this paint here not this one why layer 5 is like this oh I'm using the same uh no wonder you see this is what happens for a streaming that goes that long this is why I don't want to make environments because it takes so long and I don't like to be seated here like for a long time there you go you can just go here and okay let's add another spline to this area so let's go to live stream uh this is already very cartooning unless you go to Cancun pack the spawner and here it should be all the actors right all World actors Ah that's very interesting I cannot have more than one spline here that's this boner it should work that's very interesting um blind spawner Ah that's very strange spawner this is a spawner I'll select multiple I guess I guess not let's go back here oh I need to put a force regen I I was passing okay let's just grab a spline here let's just duplicate is the beauty of procedural stuff there you go nice nice okay I feel like I want to take a break from making this environment shall we have a part two in the future otherwise I won't make it very good I'm already more than two hours also the reason I left Ubisoft is because I don't want to be more than two hours in one computer and so let's not go back to that um next things I will add for this will be um would be more Mommy elements more shapes more stuff I feel like we have covered a lot we will continue this uh I think tomorrow tomorrow maybe the same time we will start from here if you missed this video don't worry so I will I will put a compilation of all these steps together so you can create your your own environment okay so let's go let's go with the questions hey I've been learning UE and 3D aren't about a year I want to make a prototype I'm planning to do so my question is that I start with character creation and animations before this is this wrong there's nothing wrong I mean eventually you need to uh you need to make the stuff and everything takes time like learning how to animate make characters and all this stuff takes time I started in 2012. so when I started I was learning pretty much everything animation bfx modeling a little bit of programming and at the end I decided to specialize in environments so you need to at least know what's what's happening so that you can easily prototype your game now if you want to prototype really fast best way Marketplace assets to save a lot of time and use a lot of blueprints blueprints are the I think the most important skill you can get no matter your your where you specialize blueprints will always be there to help you like just now I just created this thing procedurally and I didn't place it by hand so maybe I will do that to fill out these spaces who knows Alejandro Garcia hablanos en espanol Bandito foreign [Music] okay one last round of questions because before we wrap this up It's been a long session at least for my standards okay uh thank you everyone for coming remember if you want to learn more check our Channel we have a lot of tutorials programming creating an RTS creating a crazing game creating a platform game up pretty much almost every game and also we have tutorial for 3D modeling creating environments a lot of this stuff and if you really want to learn more make sure to check our website where we teach you how to make a game from scratch and we will publish it to steam you can start the first lesson for free now so go check it out if that's something you're looking for uh I will catch you up later okay thank you everyone for coming I don't worry I will let's have the live stream tomorrow to continue this environment there is a lot of things to finish here uh we cannot leave it like this this hurts my eyes but you know good things takes time so hopefully we have something here we will continue to work on this bye

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 6,870

Keywords: unfgames, unreal engine beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial

Id: XUT06cqC68k

Length: 160min 25sec (9625 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023