How to make a Level in Unity! | Realistic Grass Tutorial

[Music] [Music] hey guys it's IQ Sam here and welcome back to another episode of rainy Copenhagen I'm back with my unity gear because why not I mean if I have it I have to flex it right so recently I started posting a bunch of more speed level design videos which you guys seem to really enjoy so first and foremost thank you for all of the support and now a lot of people have been asking for tutorials and while I will be making more tutorials unlike you know making a forest in 2 hours and stuff like that which you guys seem to enjoy I also wanted to make more dedicated topic tutorials for you know just one purpose so for instance this video is gonna be about grass and maybe the next video is about trees so I wanna make more unit mean like I wanna make the long-term tutorials to speed level designs but I also want to make these dedicated topic tutorials which are a little shorter and that we can just link people to and be like hey look you know watch this if you're interested in only grass let me know in the comment section what you think of this idea and if you have any suggestions for any topic so you can literally go wild so just you know feel free to let me know what you're thinking I think it's gonna be cool I'm really looking forward to you know hear what you guys think of this video after you watch it because this one was actually really cool I really like this one myself as well just promoting my own work last week on our discord server we ran a Q&A session where I made a deal with you guys that if you posted any questions I would take the top ones the top rated ones and display them on the video at the end of one of my videos and then basically answer them so that's what we're gonna do at the end of this video so make sure you watch till the end and if you want to become a part of the next session next Q&A maybe for the next video I don't know maybe we do this every week I don't really know like let me know your ideas in the comments but if you want to become a part of it and become the cool guy who gets his you know questions displays on a famous YouTube check make sure you join our this code by going to the link in the description and you can also become famous that's right becoming famous is as easy as posting one question that's just all that's needed but yes I know you don't want to see this face you wanna see unity editor so we're gonna jump into that so let's go alright so here we are in unity I am running unity 2019 point for the LTS long term support version and I suggest you guys to use the same but you can also use an older or newer if you want to I'm also running the high-definition render pipeline and we're going to talk about using HDR P versus u R P or the built-in for making realistic grass as well now what I'm planning to do with this video is I'm actually trying to make it a series of videos where it's probably going to be like a YouTube playlist and in that playlist I'm gonna have this video like how to make grass realistic grass and then how to make realistic trees how to make realistic landscapes so it's going to be a bunch of different topics of level design and environment art compiled into one single playlist which i think is a pretty cool idea let me know what you think I hope you agree because that's what's gonna happen I asked you for your advice but I'm also a dictators know but obviously I want to hear what you think and my idea is that I will be able to refer people to those series of videos anytime they ask for a tutorial but at the same time I will also make these two hour-long tutorials or maybe even live streams where I make the environment together with you guys and you know to explain every single step but for a more detailed tutorial I just want to link to that series so yeah let me know in the comments section what you're thinking leave a thumbs up if you guys enjoyed the video and with that being said let's get into it oh and also subscribe for more videos because you you're gonna want to watch the whole series so yeah now let's get into the video cool so now the first topic using the HD RP u RP or built in render pipeline basically the SR PS the different SR PS or the standard built in render pipeline short answer for the best quality I would suggest you to go with HDR P because there are many features that are gonna be super useful such as the subsurface scattering which is going to determine the thickness of the grass and make sure that the light passes through the objects and just in general you know HDR P is meant to be for consoles and PC platforms or high-end platforms so depending on what kind of assets you're planning to or if you're planning to create everything by yourself first and foremost teach me how to do that and second of all I think that should be easier for you if you can build a compatibility with HDR P which is literally just making sure that the shader works right topic number two so grass pictures or grass prefabs and which one you should be using I get a lot of questions about that what I have limited myself to you or the the system that I've built for myself is that I only use the grass pictures even case I'm you know adding some grass unlike a far away distance from the camera which I don't really need to be you know look very good I just basically want grass there to cover up the ground then I'm gonna be using the billboard textures however for things that I want my player to be able to move through and see and you know get close up to you or maybe even interact right I normally just rely on prefabs for that and the reason being is that for textures you know it's basically just a picture with assigned ambient occlusion properties and all these values but for a prefab you can have a entire material set to it now if you're gonna use prefabs for your grass you're gonna need a system to paint them down as well so what I'm using is a custom tool called prefab brush plus which is available on the unity asset store not not sponsored but I also know that the built in tool for unity poly brush has a feature called prefab scattering so you may want to try that and you can also check out the asset store if you want to see more of them I think there are some free versions as well I believe mine costs but yeah I'll link everything down in the description so you guys can check it out for yourself as well so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna remove all of the grass that I have here what is a terrace where's the terrace oh this is the one what are you doing here as I was saying before being rudely interrupted by the terrace we're just gonna remove all of these grass prefabs for the moment being actually I'm just gonna disable them there we go we have a clear little subsurface cat I was just gonna say clear little surface here and they just went to subsurface scattering I'm a technical person what can I say alright so I'm gonna do the steps that I normally you for my level design videos the speed level design videos and I will just basically do everything that I do there and cover up what I actually do so you guys can follow along and I'm also going to explain the steps so just follow along and ask me in the comment section if you have any questions we also have a beautiful community who's gonna be able to help you oh and speaking of promotions this might be just a good time to promote our discord server hello 22,000 members white gamedev indie dev anime as you can tell I'm not a very good promoter but go to the link in the description and join us on discord for more communication so the step number one I always do for when I'm going to paint some grass into my scenes is that I create an empty game object here so I just created and call it grass prefabs now basically I'm going to utilize this as the parent prefab for all of the grass to live with in number one it makes it easier to keep a track of all of them and number two it just doesn't overflow the whole hierarchy with a bunch of objects so then using the prefab brush tool I go to prefab paintbrush and again if you're gonna use a different tool that's completely fine it's probably going to be the same format anyway so I'm just gonna assume that you're using pulley brush or whatever it is but something that allows you to paint some you know grass and prefabs into your scene so in here as you can see we have a field where we can drop in prefab so I'm just gonna go ahead and drop one of my maybe this one yep so I just dropped in one of my grass prefabs in there so it's ready to be painted into my scene now what usually these tools allow you to do is let me find the option out there this so it lets you set a parent game object which you want to contain this grass prefab that you're gonna paint so in here I'm just gonna drag in my grass prefabs game object we created just earlier and now whatever we paint into the scene is going to be painted inside of this now usually the scale of all of your prefabs you put into this are going to be set to one by one so you know minimum and maximum being one which is the default scale now the thing is when you're going to paint in your grass by default and it doesn't matter if you're using this tool or something else when you paint them in it's all going to be in the same rotation and same scale which is not bad but it just looks all the same it doesn't look different there is no variety in there so what I normally do is number one I set a custom rotation for each and every single prefab and what I normally do is I tell the tool that I'm using to rotate you know the minimum rotation for all axis being zero and the maximum rotation for all axis being zero zero for X and Z but for Y axis it's going to be 360 so that it can rotate around itself and one more thing I do is I set the customized scale factor to either a single values so I can just pick a minimum or maximum scale but what I actually like doing is setting it to multi axis and then setting the y-axis the height of the grass to be something more custom what we can do for now is set all of these access to your point 7 as minimum and a maximum scale to 1.2 for all axis there we go oh no not point 12 and now when we paint the grass into our scene you can see that there is some more variety in there it just looks more natural now like you can see the height playing around a little bit and you can see them clearly rotated so one more thing that's really important for adding variety into your grass which is super super crucial by the way just make sure you always have some variety in there is not just the fact that you need to add more grass prefabs which we're gonna do but you also have to play around with the height a little bit so what we can do is we can actually set the X and oh my god highlight X and z axis for scale to be 1 and maximum scale you know keep it as 1.2 so what you want to do with these short grass is just pin around a little bit so paint around your normal grass and make it almost make it almost feel like a transition at some parts where it starts short and then goes up again and don't forget you can also go lower than this you just really add some variety here and see it looks really good unlike a path like right here because it just it just feels like there's a transition between the small a short and tall grass now let's get to the color of de-stress so as you can see the color is a little bit like yellowish which is kind of the color that you're gonna get by default if you're using a prefab because it's just gonna set to be you know white color but what I normally do is I just pick one of these LEDs and an edit the healthy color to be something a little bit more yeah green I also just depends obviously what kind of time of day you're having your scene so if you have a sunset you may want to make it a little bit more yellow slash orangish but you know maybe do that in the dry color but you can also set it here as you can see it just becomes a little bit more like hot in terms of color exotic I think that's nice and then the dry color you normally want to have it a little bit darker and just not give it too much color because this is the dry part right I think this is a little too dark for my taste but I'm just gonna leave it for now and then we can come back to it later if we want to but these are basically all values you should be playing around with depending on the type of grass you're using the time of day of your sky and all that stuff own also speaking of lodz these grass prefabs normally do come with bloods and it depends on the assets you're using obviously but almost all asset author's nowadays use the lod system which is level of detail I have it turned off for now because I just don't need it right I don't need the optimization or the performance that I'm gonna get by using lot because I just want to show you guys the quality in its raw pure form but obviously for a large scene or any scene where I want my player to be able to walk around I will be using LOD so you should definitely look into this as well now when you add a new directional light into your scene basically the Sun it's not going to have these shadows turned on and now the thing is when you look at this you go like well you know how much difference does make but when you turn off the shadows it really makes a big difference so make sure you have the shadow map turned on set it to ultra resolution if you can I'm just gonna flex my PC and say that I can and contact shadows are also pretty important so make sure you turn them on to high as well and speaking of shadows what I normally do is I actually extend my ability to edit the shadows in unity which it sounds cool but basically what I do is I'm normally using the sky and fog volume game object in my scene which obviously HDR P depends on volume framework so if you don't know what I'm talking about make sure you watch the other video on my channel which is link to the description which will tell you everything about the volume framework and I mean everything so what I normally do in here is I add the shadows override which lets us decide the maximum distance and a bunch more shadows options in here I also like to turn on the micro shadows but obviously this is way too dark for my taste so let's go ahead and lower the opacity and then one more thing that I do for shadows is I add an ambient occlusion into my scene which is a post-processing effect and it's also within the volume framework in unity with HDR P something's gonna turn on my effect that I have preset here but basically in this effect you have a bunch of different options including intensity direct lighting strength radius quality maximum radius and stuff like that so what I normally do is I set the intensity to be around 1 or 2 4 is obviously way too much this is too much and 3 I feel like is not very different from 4 so I normally set it to be like 1.1 1.5 to as maximum so let's go ahead and set it to 2 for now and also one more really important thing is that the ambient occlusion is going to affect everything else in your scene as well so if you have like you know a house you're gonna see a lot of shadows in the corners as well if you have it like to you know set to 4 so instead of setting this 4 just to get the darkness in the grass that you want to have I would suggest you to just increase the radius and also you know add some shadows through the sky and fog volume also make sure you have the full resolution turned on so you can actually see all of the all the shadows here this is also quite important so when you actually get close to the grass you will see that the shadows appear way darker so you know you may want to just change the intensity a little bit depending on what how how dark you actually on it and also foreshadows well important for shadows is one more thing which is called indirect lighting which is also part of the volume framework so I believe this was in my sky of fog volume yes I was right so indirect lighting controller basically lets you control the indirect lighting Wow Sam I would never have believed that what's the important to keep in mind is that the indirect specular intensity is also going to change the intensity of like reflections and stuff in your scenes so you may want to you know modify the values more carefully depending on the type of level you have but normally what I play around with is or what I do is I set the indirect specular intensity to to just to you know get those reflections out there and then set the indirect diffuse intensity to like 1.5 somewhere between one which is the default value one point five and two just like the other value because if we increase this too much you you see the grass shine as well but you know the same thing happens with the ground so if you feel like your grass is looking too dark like I do right now which I'm not gonna edit because whatever but if you do you know you can always go ahead and edit the color of the grass instead and let me say this the color of the grass makes a big difference I mean just don't think of it as like oh I can set it to like red and you know yellow and whatever but you can literally change the tint of your scene by changing the color of the grass the grass really is the one that sets the mood because that's what's receiving all of the lighting from the sky so if you have a bit of a sunset you need to have some kind of sunset effect on the grass as well and you can best achieve it through the color properties one more thing that I find really important is anti-aliasing so if I go to my camera in here you can see that I have the temporal anti-aliasing or taa set as the default one now I know a lot of people use sub pixel morphological oh my god I actually said it the SMA option which is not bad but it's just not I mean it's you know it's a high performance one but it's not the best quality taa so far as far as I've tried gives me the best quad and you can you can obviously you know set a custom sharpening affected here as well but I just kind of keep it at this value because that's what's been working out well from you so far but basically my point is if you don't have any anti-aliasing you can really see that let me maximize so you can really see that it becomes very sharp and I don't really like this kind of effect when we have it turned on you can see that it's a little more smooth around the edges of the grass blades which is really important because here you're actually you know dealing with single errs grass blades and you really want them to stick out but you also want them to feel like a part of the scene so it doesn't look like you know everything is sharp and can cut you at any time now here's one more thing that I very often play around with so if we go to one of the grasses here I'm gonna pick this one and browse down into the material field you're gonna see an option called double sided now this is actually a very good feature and sometimes I even use this with my grass which I think I can even use it here so if we turn this on you're gonna see a couple things first and foremost the grass becomes darker second of all the grass becomes more dense because now the grass that are not being rendered because the backside is facing the camera are actually being rendered because they're just being mirrored now the darkening might scare you a little bit but what you can really do is you can just edit the dry color a little bit so you can just make sure that it's not too dark with the dry color and an edit a healthy color a little bit as well just to you know have a color that fits well with the darken parts I think actually this looks pretty good in some cases with some grass if you have the double sided and mirror option turned on you're gonna have very dark back facing objects and in which case you may either want to turn it off if you can't see it if you seem to figure it out you know via the the colors but in most cases you should be able to just modify the colors a little bit and you should have a very good looking grass and also just overall I mean the density adds a lot like if we disable and re-enable you can see how much dense especially at the bottoms it becomes and I really like that oh and of course because of the density you may even want to change your ambient occlusion settings and all that kind of stuff so you know be careful with all that as you can see I also have a reflection probe in my scene and the reason why is actually because I like using reflection probes for you know obviously reflective areas but also for grass and vegetation and all the stuff it just adds a bit of a nice illumination depending on the type of light you have in your scene so for instance if I just rotate my light a little bit like this and then you know really create this sunset effect I'm just gonna change the intensity a little bit for this light and you just make it a little more hot and then we bake the after editing the whole you know scene settings we bake the reflection probe it makes the ground look nicer and that way the shadows become much more clear and obviously it doesn't add a real reflection effect to the grass which we obviously wouldn't want but it just makes the colors a little more lively and again remember I was talking about if you have a sunset scene like this you may even want to edit the color of the grass so if we just pick one of these I'm going to exaggerate a little bit here because that's normally what I do my level design videos but really what you could do is you could even set a dry color which is a little more you know exotic like orangish or you could leave the dry color to be where it normally is and then just set the healthy color to be a bit more yellow and again I'm just you know over exaggerating a bit here but that's what you have to do when you're actually designing something because that's how you get to nice effects you know if you want results I feel like you have to go crazy a little bit every now and then and just explore the options that you know you have through through the game engine and obviously when we add more grass in here it's going to look better but I will probably just cut the video short short this video is probably gonna be a little long but I just wanted to cover up every single step that I take for you know adding realistic grass into my scenes because I think the grass given that the grass is most likely going to be the most visible object because of its density right you're just gonna have a bunch of grass because of that the color the weight received the color the weight cast the shadow like everything just matters too much so you really have to I mean there it's worth spending a lot more time on making sure that the grass looks good then actually editing the materials on an object like a house because the grass is really what's going to set the vibe for the scene I mean if your grass looks bad and the house you have or the trees you have in your scene are photo realistic it's not really gonna matter because the grass is going to cover up the whole ground whereas the tree and the house are just gonna cover up a you know maybe even a big portion but a portion of the scene where this grass is going to be everywhere so I like grass I'm sure you've been able to tell by now I think this looks pretty good I think the you know the colors are very natural it feels like it fits within the scene it feels like the the Sun is hitting it in the right way I like it I like it so far all right so that is pretty much it for this video hope you guys enjoyed and had a lot of fun watching this I actually really liked this episode of how to make level I don't know what I'm gonna call this playlist or this show series of videos but I don't even know if we should turn it into series like let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments section because I really want to know what you think we should do with this now you know what time it is don't lie I know you've been waiting for this I hope you have been waiting for this because I'm gonna spend a lot of time I think this QA whoa let's go alright so what I'm gonna do is I'm recording my discord as well I believe hopefully I am I'm gonna read these one by one we'll go through the list very quickly so I'm not gonna spend too much time first one for my admin wow wow really first one for my admin are you are you using your admin privileges for something like this are you happy you started your youtube career or is there something else you would have preferred to pursue but never ended up happening I used to be a very competitive mindset karate fighter I've been training martial arts since I was 8 years old so I kind of wanted to actually go for a career in that but karate is not big enough to really sustain you for a career unless you go like the social media route which I'm really doing right now no but I'm really happy that I started my youtube career or career one of the dream goals that I've always had since I was a little kid was to run a community or become a part of the community and you know I feel like I've been able to accomplish that goal here and and I keep accomplishing it everyday which is really cool how old are you 23 now I'm getting old man when Willy dab remembered the promise I used to promise that I would dab at 200k subs but let's say I'm gonna dab at 300,000 subs write that down it's in the video now if I don't you can probably sue me because now it's in the video is water wet yes I love this community back when did you start making games when I was 12 how to become rich I don't know when you figured that out let me know though how much percent of your time do you spend on marketing for game projects while nowadays I don't really make any games but I used to spend a lot of time for that and one of the reasons why I wanted to do a lot of YouTube on top of the fact that I wanted to build a community and I wanted to make tutorials and stuff for sy ku was to actually do marketing what do you prefer milk or orange juice in reality orange juice is life but I'm friends with Danny and I know that he's gonna hate me if I say that I'd like orange juice over milk so milk every freakin day do you have any pets no actually I really want to get one though especially now that I live alone but I travel too much for work which is probably one of the problems and the biggest reason why I'm not getting one but maybe a cat I don't know what inspired you to start unity the fact that it was free for like holy crap yeah it's been 11 years since I was 12 I was gonna say 10 years ago but I'm now 23 so it's been 11 years yeah it was the only free engine around that time while only free engine that was capable of doing the things that it was capable of doing so I just started using unity how do you play Crusader Kings 2 for 4 days straight it's the only game where I can say this it's the only game where you can start a kingdom an entire kingdom by marrying your own daughter that sounds really weird out of context but it's a super fun game it's an incredible game you should really play it if you don't if you haven't been yet and September 1st is the release date of Crusader Kings 3 so don't expect too many videos in September that's all I'm gonna say do you know how to dance no but I actually watch a lot of dance videos on YouTube it's called god damn it I forgot the name these people I watch quite a lot of actually it's unhealthy at this point these are really good it's like unity and diversity by the way that's the name unity there you go these folks are just incredible but I can absolutely not dance do you ever sleep like ever I used to sleep really badly I mean really poorly and now I have a good sleep schedule where I basically just forced myself only to sleep basically the here's the thing the way my brain functions is that I can only sleep for five hours it does not matter if I didn't sleep the look you know the night before like one of the nice in two weeks ago I didn't sleep one night so I just pulled an all-nighter and then I go to bed at 7 p.m. thinking hey I'm gonna go to bed 7 p.m. I'm gonna sleep for like 10 hours and I'm gonna be up by like 6 7 8 a.m. or whatever the time is I wake up after five hours it's 12 12 a.m. what do you do on a 12 a.m. well I went out drove my car got tired got home slept again slept five hours and my brain automatically wakes me up that's how crazy it is dogs or cats favorite pet cat or dog dog I'm sorry dog cat people I'm sorry but I love cats too I love I love animals I love pets it could be a bird like I could die just of the cuteness how long does it take for you to cringe at an old work I can't watch my videos from six months ago I'm not kidding like not even a year in just six months ago which is a good thing I used to think of it negatively like oh you know how did I put this on for literally like every single video content that I've ever put but that just means you're improving so I think it's a good thing Linux gaming when oh my god don't even start it do you snore I live alone so I didn't really know but I don't think so I've never heard anything from anybody no I I don't think I hope not do you have a document would you do a unity chant that came oh cool a giveaway what is it all right that is pretty much it hope you guys had some fun with this Q&A session I think it was a pretty fun you know little twist at the end of the video maybe we can do this more often maybe we can do it with every video I don't really know let me know in the comment section how you like it with that being said it's getting warm again I need to turn my fan on it's raining outside so I don't know why it's getting warm again but yeah so I just need to go and take probably a shower and you know just chill for the rest of the day but I'm going to be super active in the comments section in our discord servers so I hope to see you guys there have a good one thank you so much for watching thumbs up leave a like and subscribe this is gonna keep going thank you for watching have a good one and peace out bye bye guys

Channel: Sykoo

Views: 71,362

Keywords: unity tutorial, unity 2020, unity tutorials, unity 2020 tutorial, unity grass, unity realistic grass, unity level design, unity level design tutorial, unity making forest, unity graphics, unity grass shader, unity graphis demo, unity make a game, making a game with unity, unity grass physics, unity grass tutorial, unity realistic graphics, unity realistic, unity 3d tutorial, unity game development, unity speed level design, level design, unity environment art, unity3d, easy

Id: iqUVJuzOd2U

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020