How to Get Started in Unreal Engine 5

unreal engine 5 is officially here and it's pretty fantastic with incredible power a bevy of features and the intuitive controls you've come to expect this free 3d tool is the killer app you need to see to believe what up what up wimbush here and today i'm excited to bring you guys unreal engine 5. now i've been using the early access for a little bit now so i reached out to my friends at school of motion so i can give you guys a guided tour to get you guys started now this isn't going to be everything that you could do but it's going to give you a solid foundation on where you can get started and let your imagination run wild in this video i'll show you how to download unreal engine 5 how to navigate the menu to open a new project how to quickly create using mega scans lumen and other assets and how to build and light your sand using a new interface before we begin make sure to download the project files in the link below so that you can follow along [Music] okay to get started first you want to go to unrealengine.com you can see we have a brand new loading page here showing one of the demos from the ue5 demo that they revealed a couple of days ago and to get started in the upper right hand corner we want to click on this download button here so i'm going to click on this and that's going to bring us to the licensing page and now since we're creators we're able to use unreal engine 100 free the only time you have to pay for it is if you make an interactive experience like a video game in which if you have a million dollars worth of revenue then you have to pay them their five percent as you can see there and the royalties but since we're going to be using it for motion graphics and broadcast and whatever else we want to use it for like daily renders or something of that nature we're going to be free to use unreal engine for free so if you scroll down here to the bottom i'm just going to click on download right here and that's going to bring us to this screen here and so if you don't have an epic scam account already you want to make sure you sign up for one but if you do have one you're just going to hit login now and then from here it gives you a whole plethora of ways to sign into epic games like i just made a separate epic games account it just keeps it clean but if you want you can sign up with facebook google even some of your gaming consoles and even with apple and so i would suggest just you know making a brand new account with the epic games right here and then once you do it's going to download the exe file and which is going to install the epic games launcher so once you have everything up and running and installed this is the epic games launcher and this is what you're going to see now if you're already experienced with unreal engine you'll notice we have a brand new tab up here this is ue5 and that's exactly what we want to go to to get unreal engine 5. so i'm going to click on this and that brings us to the unreal engine 5 page in which it gives you download the early access and which i want to reiterate this is a beta is so some of the functionality might be a little bit weird and might be a little bit slower than what you're used to but it is in beta and it's going to be worked over for the next couple of months so take that with a grain of salt now if you want to check some of the stuff out that came with unreal engine 5 they have the sample project down here which showcases all the new features like netknight and lumen which is really cool make sure you set some time aside it is a 100 gig download but if you watch the youtube trailer that they revealed it's exactly that demo but you can play it and you can explore around in the world and you can kind of just dissect it and see exactly how they built it out [Music] once you have the early access installed you should have a tab up here in the upper right hand corner if i click on this down arrow this actually shows me all the different versions of unreal engine that i have installed you can have multiple versions installed which is really cool so if you started on a project saying like 4.25 and 4.26 came out but you didn't want to upgrade because it might mess up your project you can totally keep that version in there and so you want to go to the one that says ue5 early access and you want to click on this and there we go it's loading up unreal engine it has this pretty cool splash screen here and once it's done loading we have the unreal engine project browser here which is completely revamped with the ui and everything it looks really clean here on the left hand side we have our recent projects and if you're familiar with unreal engine 4 this show all look familiar to you it's just reskinned and so we have games here we have film video and live production which is this is what we're going to be using we have archviz engineering and construction and then we have automotive and product design and so if you notice as i click on these these have a whole bunch of different templates that will get you started so say that you wanted to make like a first person game you click on this and it automatically gives you everything you need to get started with a first person shooter there if you want to do like a top down experience something like diablo you have that option but i like to go to the film video and live events and i like starting with a blank slate so i'm going to click on blank here and then down here under project location make sure you save it to where you want your unreal engine project to save to and then over here on the right hand side under project name i'm just going to name this school of motion underscore ue5 and then we're going to click on create and here we are this is what you guys have been waiting for this is the brand new unreal engine 5 as you can see the interface is completely redone it should look familiar if you've been using a royal engine 4 but the interface is a lot cleaner it's a lot sleeker like if you were working at unreal engine 4 this should look really familiar to you on the right hand side we have the world outliner still we have the details panel still but if you notice on the left hand side we don't have the actors panel and so for those that aren't familiar with unreal engine 4 let me show you exactly what the old interface looked like which is really cool because we could kind of go back and forth between the two so if i come up to window and i come down here to load layout it actually gives us the option to bring up the old unreal engine 4 classic layout in which if i click here this is exactly what unreal engine 4 looked like but it still has a nice interface here and so this is what i was alluding to before we had this panel called the place actors which kind of gives us the easy access point to all the different things that we need here so if we wanted to add stuff like player start or if you wanted to come over to lights it has all of your lights sitting here if you wanted to come over to virtual production cameras it was all easy to access here having the place actors here on the left hand side just gave you easy access to all these different things that i use a lot but as you can see it does take up a lot of real estate here on the left-hand side and so for me i like this old interface but a lot of people do like the sleekness and having a bigger viewport here so i'm going to go to window come back down to load layout and i'm going to come down to default editor layout and that's going to bring us back to how they want us to really interact with unreal engine 5 and if you need to add anything to your scene it's right over here under main under create and this is where all that place actor stuff is and so it kind of just gives you a pull down window instead of having it inside of a panel there so you know whatever you're more comfortable with feel free to use it [Music] so the main thing in this demonstration that i want to show you is how we can quickly create with mega scans using unreal engine 5 with night illumina technology and if you're not familiar with what nanite is basically if we have a high polygon object we don't have to use any normal maps or any displacement maps we could take like a really high polygon object straight from zbrush or mega scans with even like a million polygons on it bring it directly into unreal engine and with their new technology that thing just runs like a breeze we don't have any type of delays we don't have to decimate our models or anything and what lumen is is basically from my understanding it's going to be a replacement for ray tracing so luminous going to be affecting your lights your shadows your reflections everything that we were kind of amped to inside of unreal engine 4 with ray tracing we're going to get faster results with lumen technology and unreal engine 5. and if you guys would like to take a deeper dive into it i'm actually going to leave this link for you guys so you can see the official documentation for unreal engine 5 their early access i would suggest that everybody go through it if they really want to understand how the ned knight and luma technologies work if i just scroll down through this screen here you can see that it gives a pretty good explainer about everything that's going to be inside of unreal engine 5. you know the interface changes and all the things that work and don't work as of right now because remember this is a beta and so certain things aren't going to work like i know offhand the foliage tool is kind of iffy right now inside of unreal engine 5. so i'm not going to display that but i am going to display the stuff that works okay so getting back into unreal engine 5 i'm going to come over to content and then i'm going to come down here to where it says get content and i'm going to click on quicksilver bridge so basically what quixote bridge is is giving you all the assets that we have for free through mega scans and so what these are is you know it's a whole bunch of different items we have a whole bunch of different landscapes we have you know all types of materials it's a really cool library it has thousands of items we have some foliage in here so if you're not familiar with quiksil bridge is completely free with your epic games account and the reason that we were able to access it inside of unreal engine is because it's all integrated now so in the past it was two completely different platforms you had to download quick so bridge separately from unreal engine but now it's all built right in which is really cool because a version that's built in actually has all the models with nanite technology already built into it so let's go over here i'm going to come over to home and then i'm going to come over here to collections in which if you're brand new to quixote and unreal engine i would suggest everybody come to collections because this is kind of like a curated gallery and where they put all the different things like for this example i'm going to use this arctic isis snow pack here which is really cool but if you scroll down you can see that we have some like renaissance type buildings we have some nordic coastal cliffs we have sand dunes and so let me click on something here let's say like dystopian slums and so it's going to show you the renders that they created internally using the different assets and if i click on assets these are all the assets that they use to make those renders which is really cool so it's showing you exactly what they did to make that scene there that you see here under renders and if i come back over to collections i'm going to go to the arctic ice and snow there's some cool co-renders that we can make in there as well and if i click on acid this is better because it's actually showing us some of the 3d models that they used here as well so before we can start downloading everything here you want to make sure that you're signed in so up here in the upper right hand corner you're going to click on the head there and it's going to say to sign in so i'm going to click on this and then i'm just going to sign in with my epic games account and once we're signed in we should be good to go so i'm going to click up here again and i'm going to come down to preference and under preference this is going to allow us to put a library path where we want to have all of our stuff saved and so with night technology a lot of these models can get quite large like even up to 500 megabytes so you're going to want to make sure that you pick somewhere that has a lot of space and then you're just going to click save and then if i scroll down here you can see that i have some of this stuff downloaded already and then the ones that have the green arrow that means that we can actually download these and so caviar if you're going to be using the nanite type models it might take a little while to download so make sure you have enough time to download those so if i do click on like the snow hill here if i come over here to my right hand side right here under medium quality and click on this you can see that we have a selection for net night in which this is what we want to use this is what we all have been waiting for so i'm going to click on that night and then we can actually just download it in which i already have some stuff already downloaded with the night technology like if i click on this one here for the snow embankment i already have it downloaded and so it's as easy as just clicking add and you can see right here in the lower left hand corner it says successfully exported so i'm going to come back to unreal engine then i'm going to come down here to my lower left hand corner where it says content drawer and click on that and that's actually going to bring up our content browser and under mega scans 3d assets you can see that we have our snow embankment here and so from here it's as easy as basically just clicking and dragging it into our scene here which is really cool so if i scroll on my wheel it's just going to push inward like so and then if i want to turn i'm going to hold down the right click on the mouse that's gonna turn my camera head and then from here it's kind of like moving in the first person video game so if i hold down the w that's gonna move forward if i hold down the s that moves backwards the a on my keyboard moves left and the d moves right then if i hit the e that goes up in the q it goes down so if you play any type of computer games like call of duty or doom it moves exactly how you would inside of a video game but make sure you're holding down the right click on your mouse button to navigate so we have a snow embankment here but we have this platform here and it doesn't have any type of materials so i could just actually add like a snow material here so i'm going to come back to content come down to quiksil bridge and let me scroll down here i think i have some snow already downloaded there we go i have the fresh one swept snow here already downloaded and it's at the highest quality that we could pick so i'm going to click on add and it's successfully exported so i'm going to minimize this again then i'm going to come down here to the content drawer and this time over here under my mega scans we have a new folder for surfaces which is already selected so i'm just going to click this snow drag it into my scene here and you can see that the shaders are compiling it should work pretty fast but now we have some snow in here which is really cool so if i click on my snow embankment i can actually move this up a little bit in which we're getting some snapping and i don't want that i want to freely be able to move this so if i come over here into my top panel over here on the right we should see some stuff highlighted in blue so if i click on this one here that will disable the snapping and now i can freely move this around but let me click on my rotate tool here so i'm going to click on this right here this is rotate you can see that it's still snapping when it rotates and that's controlled by this one right here so if i turn this off it's no longer rotating in increments and that's what these numbers are right here so if i turn this back on and then i click on this 10 this allows us to move it in increments and so right now at default it's at 10 so say that i want it to snap in like 45 degree increments and if i click on here and move it over now you can see each time it's snapping in the 45 degree angle the same thing right here for the movement if i click on this for the snap sizes let's say if i do it to one turn this back on click on my selection tool and this snapping but i have an increment of one so it's snapping not as much as it was before when it was on 10. so let me move this down a tad bit somewhere around there and then this is scaling snapping right here this arrow that's kind of pointing up to the right hand side but i'm just going to leave that on i don't really want to mess with that and just for fun right here this is the camera speed so right now by default it's on four so let me turn this all the way up to eight and this is going to move our camera really fast whenever we use the wasd so if i right click on my mouse hit the s button you can see that it's going super fast when we're navigating around the scene so i'm going to come back over here and click on four and let's say i'm going to hold s i'm just going to go somewhere distant into my scene and let's say that we get lost like we can't find where we're at we're working in a really large scene it's quick and easy to get back to where we need to be if i come over here to my royal outliner and i'm on this snow embankment right here i'm just going to select this and double click and it snaps us right back into where we need to be so if you ever get lost all you have to do is find your item inside the royal outliner double click i'm just going to take you right back to where you were before so i'm going to move this down a little bit this is looking pretty cool but let's add some other stuff in here as well so i'm going to go back to quick so bridge let's look for some more stuff that i have downloaded i have this though embankment here as well i'm going to click on add all right and we should have it added to the scene i'm going to minimize it come back down to my content drawer and here we go we have this snow embankment this is as easy as clicking and dragging into my scene and there we go so you can just start placing it quick and easy just like that so at this point i always say it's kind of like messing around with legos you know you just have your scene here you just click in a dragon everything into your scene so i don't want to bore you guys building out an entire scene an unreal engine you know this could take hours or minutes depending on how much detail you want to put in here but let me take you to a scene that i already have built so that i can show you some of the difference between lumen and ray tracing inside of a scene [Music] so this is the scene that i built inside of unreal engine 5 i did it completely the same way that i just showed you guys using the make it skins assets nothing too crazy all i did was click and drag a bunch of assets that i liked inside the library bring it into unreal and just kind of place them exactly where i wanted this right here is just a cube with some type of metal material on there that i also got from the mega scans library i just wanted to show some core reflections happening on inside the scene here we have our sun in the distance there we have some volumetric clouds all running in real time and so for this demonstration here i want to show you guys how we can actually build out this completely real-time atmosphere and lighting so i'm going to come over here to my details panel and i'm going to strip out all the lights and then i'm going to show you guys how to build this from scratch all right so it looks like we have a blank slate here but we actually don't like if i click on my landscape you can see that i have some geometry in here but we have absolutely no lights so to get started i'm actually going to come up here under main where it says create i'm going to come down here to lights click on directional light if i look over here in my raw outliner it has a directional light and so i kind of want to maybe organize this a little bit better and there you go you can see our light slowly starting to come in it doesn't look any good yet that's because we have to you know dial in some of the attributes here which i'll show you here in a moment but first i'm going to click on main i'm going to right click and i'm going to create a folder and i'm going to name this one mega skins i'm just gonna drop all my mega scans assets and everything into that folder i just like to do this to kind of organize everything actually i could drop my cube in here as well and the landscape and that way it should keep it clean so you guys can see what i'm bringing into the royal outliner and so i'm going to get started with this directional light i'm going to select this and then down here under the details panel i'm going to move this up and under location under transforms you can see on the right hand side we have this arrow that kind of looks like it's making a u-turn now this is going to actually reset our property values here so what i like to do especially for a directional light is start at absolute zero so i'm going to click this and you can see that our x y and z is all zeroed out our rotation is already zeroed out as well but if i click on this reset value here you can see that it actually put a y at a negative 45 degree angle which brings some light into our scene and it put our sun at a 45 degree angle here and which is why it looks really blown out and we're getting these hard lights in which we could dial all these attributes and if i come down here under intensity where it says lux i'm actually going to do 3.16 and just by default unreal usually says that 3.16 gives you kind of like a more natural sunlight vibe to your scene there and our scene isn't really looking that great still so i'm going to come up here to my left hand side where it says create i'm going to come down to visual effects and i'm going to add a post process volume and what this is going to allow us to do is kind of dial in some of our lighting settings here so if i bring up my details panel here again if i come down here under bloom i'm going to turn on my method here in intensity in which i'll show you some examples here later once we have everything dialed in but i'm going to scroll this up come down to exposure and i want to come down here to where it says metering mode i'm going to click this on come over auto expose basic and then under exposure composition hit zero and this should give us more accurate lighting whenever we're dialing our lighting's in and there's one more setting that we want to have here so under men ev and max ev i'm going to turn both of these on and put them both around one and so now whenever we're dialing in our lighting we're not going to get any type of overexposure or any kind of funkiness we should be able to just dial everything in and i think that's going to be it for right now so let's start adding some more stuff to our our sky and our clouds and our atmosphere here so i'm going to come back over to create and under visual effects i'm going to add a sky atmosphere and then under directional light i need to click on one more setting so make sure i have directional light selected i'm going to scroll down here and just keep scrolling it's closer to the bottom the setting that we need but right here where it says atmosphere sunlight i'm going to turn that on and there we go so once you have your directional light and your sky atmosphere in there you want to come down here to where it says atmosphere and cloud turn our atmosphere sunlight and then that gives us our environment there but we still don't have any clouds so i'm going to come over here to create again come down here to visual effects and let's add some volumetric clouds in which boom now we have our clouds here and everything and what's cool is if i come over to my directional light let me scroll back up to my rotation here if i start rotating this you can see that it's actually affecting our environment here so let's say we want to have it there that looks cool that looks like kind of like a sunrise over there and if i scroll this over to where we can start seeing our sun a little bit somewhere around there and actually let me i don't want it to be totally dark and this is where you know this is where your art direction comes in there we go we can see the sun poking in right there which i think looks kind of cool yeah somewhere let's say somewhere around there and before i start really dialing all this in let me add some atmospheric fog in here so i'll come back up to create visual effects and i want to add some exponential height fog you can see that it really fogged it out and so if i come here under my details panel where it says fog density actually before i do that i want to scroll down here to volumetric fog select this then i'm going to come up to my fog density scroll it down a little bit there you go so you can see how it's really affecting our atmosphere here somewhere around there could be cool so we just want like a little bit of atmospheric haze in here so as i'm playing around with my lighting i'm noticing that my post process of volume isn't doing anything so if i click on my post process volume here then actually select it in my scene if i click on the g key here that's going to bring up this box and so if i click the g key on my keyboard that kind of you know makes everything disappear in the scene just to make it cleaner but if i click it again then we can kind of see all the items that we need and so this is why i missed it because i didn't realize that it's only affecting everything that's in this box here is so in order to have a post process a volume affect everything in the scene i need to make sure i have it selected in my world outliner and then down here under search i'm going to type in unb and that's going to give us a shortcut to this right here which is unbound infinite extent so if i click on this and there you go you saw our scene flash and that means that everything that we did inside the post process volume is now happening throughout our entire scene so i'm going to click on the x here then let me go back to my directional sunlight i'm going to put it back into the position that i had it before and there we go so now we have the lens flare that i wasn't getting before and that's because now we're being affected by our post volume so i'm going to come back down here to post process volume i'm going to come down here under bloom and you can see if i turn it up it's actually going to turn up the intensity of my lens flare there which could look cool you know depending on what you're going for artistically and if i scroll down here a little bit as well it should give us some lens flares there we go right here and you can actually turn up more of the intensity there if you want turn it down i'm gonna hit ctrl z we can actually control the bokeh size here and this is all working real time in your camera which is really cool you can change the threshold if you want which i think i'm just going to leave that at default and then you can add a bokeh shape if you want if you have some type of grayscale image there or black and white you can change the shape in there and i think maybe for this example something i don't want to go too crazy so maybe bring our bokeh size up to that maybe our intensity down to like 0.1 so we're just getting like a little halo effect in there and i think that's going to be yet for the lighting so let me see if i can get some better reflections in here if i come over to create and then come down to visual effects we can add a sphere reflection capture or a box i usually just go with the box here and so that's going to bring it to the middle of our scene and i'm just going to drag it until we get somewhere around here and then if i scroll up in my details panel make sure i have that selected i'm going to come down to scale and i'm just going to make this like 5 000 sort of really engulfs my scene here then if i come over here actually if you look right here it says reflection captures need to be rebuilt and so what that's going to do is basically just give us some better reflections in our vicinity here so if i come over to build belt reflection captures this should only take a moment so we have a better reflections in there but still a little bit hard to see because we only have one lighting source right now we have our sun that's off in the distance it actually just got covered by the clouds which is kind of cool to see you can see that the clouds are moving in real time in their sky here there you go you see the sun's starting to poke through the clouds again so that's really cool you know how that stuff is interacting with each other but let me add a couple of lights here in the scene like i want to have this obelisk kind of be maybe our focal point that we kind of look towards and so i'm going to come over here to create come down here to lights come down here to point lights and i'm just going to navigate this around my scene somewhere around here like so and then i'm going to come over here to movable in my details panel and then for my intensity maybe bring it down to two click on light color here let's maybe add actually i could do a color picker so somewhere around there could be cool actually make it a little bit brighter so i just like having a little bit of like a blue hue in there somewhere like that don't be afraid to put like a bunch of lights in your scene depending on what you're going for so if i hold down the alt key on my keyboard left click and just once it turns yellow if i just left click and drag that makes a duplicate in our scene so i could really just start going around my scene and kind of putting more lights in here as i see fit and this is basically how i did it for the other scene there as well so you can really just go in the town just kind of dialing in all your attributes so you can really spend a lot of time just even dialing in just the lighting in your scene to how you see fit so from here this is basically how i lit my scene and everything it's not exact because i don't have the exact attributes there but let me pull up my previous scene and i can show you guys the difference between lumen and ray tracing so here i am back in my original scene i'm actually just going to click on my scene here click on something in here and click g just to clean it out a little bit and so i want to really look at my cube here because i have some nice reflections on here and everything and if i come over to let's say my post process volume right here and i'm going to look at my details panel so i'm actually going to just scroll up so we can really see everything down here if i keep scrolling down to where we have global elimination now right here under method i already have it selected on and it's selected under lumen now if i select this it gives us a couple of more options so we can actually have no global illumination we can have a screen space and we can have ray tracing so let me show you the difference between the different versions here so if i click on ray tracing this is what the scene look like it ray tracing this is pretty much what we got with unreal engine 4. you know you have to switch up your lighting a little bit to make it look better this doesn't look bad but it doesn't look as good as lumen so let's see what screen space looks like so you saw a little bit of difference especially there and like the shadows so let me go back to ray tracing you want to really focus in on this area here there you go so it gives us a little bit of unrealistic shadows in there and if i click on none this is what it looks like but see what happens when i click on lumen it looks like a completely different scene like lumen really makes this shine it makes the highlights it makes the shadows everything look that much more realistic and it gives us a cool effect so same thing with reflections here i have lumen selected so let me click on ray tracing you can really see in the cube there like we do get some nice reflections in here and everything it's better than the screen space which this is with screen space what it gave us so you can see we're ray tracing was a big update that we were used to in the last version but once we click on lumen it's night and day like it looks really phenomenal there and that's basically the difference between ray tracing and lumen and the cool thing with lumen it actually works with not only nvidia but amd cards as well so you have to look at the specs and see exactly what they recommend that you have for your system but with ray tracing that only works with nvidia cards but with this new luma technology if you have an amd machine you should be able to take advantage of it as well which is really great for everybody out there we can all take advantage of this really cool technology so this is basically the demo that i want to show you guys getting set into unroll engine 5. hopefully this gave you a good starting point to really go in there explore as i was saying before a lot of this stuff is in beta and so take that with a grain of salt it might work a little bit differently how it worked in unreal four you'll find some stuff doesn't work yet but hopefully over the next couple of months we're going to keep getting continuous updates to it which makes it a lot better a lot faster and a lot more acclimated how we used to on unreal engine 4 and then by the time the final release comes out this thing is going to be amazing so what i would suggest is basically going into unreal engine 5 playing around with it and then you want to learn unreal engine 4 because everything that we know in four is going to be even better in five and so that's just going to give you a good foundation for when this is finally released as you can see unreal engine 5 is already starting to showcase some incredible power and we're only in early access and so over the next couple of months unreal engine 5 is going to continue to be fined and it's only going to get better and faster from here but still if you're ready to make that next jump into 3d design they bury barrier entries only a few clicks away if you liked the video please subscribe and click on that bell icon so you'll be notified for the next free tutorial and check out my youtube channel in the link below so you can see even more amazing techniques in unreal engine you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 42,510

Rating: 4.9463086 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: ovMk4G3se1M

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021