How to Use the Cloud Forge - Unreal Engine 5.3 Tutorial

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to arganian puzzle box now for the people that have bought the cloud Forge um complete or the volume one two or three uh I wanted to make a video um another one actually it's a part of the tutorial series on how to use it how to use the blueprints found within this package so that you can get the most out of it and you can create scenes like the one you can see behind me with ease so this particular tutorial is quite I think straight to the point quite sure straight to the point it effectively explains to you how to use the single Cloud blueprint and also how to use the cloud spawner I'm trying to be as um you know overs simplistic as possible because I don't want to bug you down with too much information you are going to have to experiment with this until you get the result that you're looking for these clouds are as for all intended purposes look you know they look quite realistic and they can also be stylized and they can be changed the material Shader can be changed this tutorial is just about how to use them and how to get the most out of them for me the most important thing is that you understand what is the functionality of the blueprints and how you can use them so you can get results like these you can build you know very beautiful scenes and you can our direct them in however uh way you want uh there's a lot to to cover with these clouds if you think about it but that's why there are multiple videos uh on my uh channel for to be able to learn all these techniques and and learn how to use them and what every Point does uh I've made sure that the blueprints are not very you know overly cluttered with information or options unless you really want them to so you could dig deeper into those systems and further enhance and develop them uh I think overall it's it's a product that's probably you know worth your time if you want to achieve uh results quite quickly and build some very very interesting and epic [Music] scenes all right and here we are in our beautiful scene Unreal Engine this is an Icelandic sort of landscape that I got from the uh Unreal Engine Marketplace I thoroughly recommend it if you guys would like to have such a nice sort of environment you know landscape land uh land masses for Iceland they're really really cool so you can see as we move around the the sun position we're able to see more of this particular landscape which is really cool uh they're very you know they're very detailed from far away but they obviously kind of lose their detail when you get up close so be careful with that but this particular scene is what I've used in one of the uh render demos that I've done for the cloud Forge so what I really what I really wanted to do is just showcase to you how you can set up your Cloud very easily so that you really get a firm understanding of you know what you're sort of getting and how you can use it so what we're going to do is we're going to open a new scene so maybe go for Iceland example number two here um and then what we're going to do is effectively start editing that add some cloud in it so as you can see this particular scene has some fog in here which are added by the actual you know creators of this uh landscape um and we don't necessarily you know want any of those because we are going to add our own so with that um I'm just going to look for fog cards I believe yeah these are the ones so we can delete those okay and now we want to create some clouds okay now let's just assume you're opening a new level and doesn't have a light doesn't have anything in the scene but that's that's fine so for example we could delete the light delete the sky hemosphere Skylight you know probably something like that you know that this is probably the bare bone so let's just say this is an empty scene without the landscape and stuff it doesn't matter I mean that's just sort of a you know something for us to work with uh but let's just say we don't have any of that right so everything is now pretty much gone from the scen and the lightning so very easily for you to set up very you know very quickly a uh lighting setup you go up here in window select the um environment light mixer and then in this new panel that opens you can click a few buttons like for example create Skylight create atmospheric light create Sky atmosphere create height fog so with those few actions we have now added a fully working uh and you know environment light so this is now as I said complete you you are able to use anything by the way there's also these volumetric clouds um I'm going to just delete those as we don't need any of them um okay so with that done we're pretty much ready now you can see there's some Shadows issues here and generally these are happening because of a you know um things like Lumen and the nanite meshes but that's you know that's a totally different topic we're we're not really looking into Shadows here as they have nothing to do with what you know what I'm trying to Showcase to you which is these clouds I'm just going to reposition the sort of the light to be a bit more you know something like that so we can see a bit of uh what's happening there right with this done uh let's have a look and over here in the content folder once you bring in the project you're going to see the cloud Forge complete VDB pack so if you double click this you're going to have three different folders which are effectively each of these contains all the VDB collections so all of the texture the the sparse volume textures that you'll use but we're focusing on you know volume one for now once you enter it you you'll have a blueprint folder a cloud Force spawner functionality folder an example map you know some rendering settings the VDB collection itself and the materials now all you really need to worry yourself with is the blueprint so when you go in here you have a multicloud spawner which is effectively just uh a same version as a single Cloud spawner but you can spawn two clouds instead of one or more clouds if you want to that way but I would normally just use the single Cloud then you also have the um single this is single Cloud depth fade you will not have this in your particular folder this is something that I'm toying with at a minute so ignore that and then you're going to have a BP volumetric um VDB which means this one is like you know the normal clouds from Unreal Engine this will allow you to drop those in the scene if you'd like to uh but uh we're we're going to look at the single Cloud for now there's also in here the cloud 4 spawner there's another uh blueprint which is called spawner which allows you to spawn clouds in a certain area and allow them to move around and die out we're going to test that one as well but let's first have a look at the single spawn so when you drag the blueprint in the scene um you know let's say it's over here right you will notice you are able to um sorry let me just get this close it you'll notice you'll be able to see it by this sort of circle circle that's sort of you know rotating in here that's the Showcase where the center of the cloud is now with a blueprint selected you got a few options in here the first one is to add a VDB texture so we're going to go back in here into the VDB collection we're going to go to Cyrus for example select this first one and just drop it in there and now the VDB is loaded but it's not visible so for you to be able to see this you can click the indirect lighting uh button and the infinite Trace button now when you do this then your Cloud will be visible the infinite Trace is a way for you to tell Onre engine that you want the VDB to to be visible from a very high um you know a very large distance now um this is a bit of an advanced thing but let's say you want your Cloud to be visible from further distances than what this uh uh option allows you you can always click the edit VDB Cloud here for the blueprint and then in the blueprint itself uh let me just make that big you'll have in the construction script you'll have this here where it says R erogenous volume max Trace distance put this number to a very large number like I've got here and also do it in the event graph try the same number effectively and when you do that this allows for the uh blueprint tick box to give you further distances now whenever you edit the blueprint you might get an issue where the cloud is no longer visible you just have to do this for one of the blueprints and it will reset and this is something technical that's happening from the Unreal Engine side of things that needs to be patched out there's nothing that I can do from my end right so we've got the cloud in here but it's very small so we're going to look at increasing that scale maybe to like uh 500 but uh and now you can see it's you know a lot larger in the scene probably as large as these mountains and that's great I'm just going to you know drop it in here somewhere maybe something like that you know uh create a bit of a barrier here of clouds um that's you know rather nice okay with that done we can now start playing with some of the settings and as you can see it's going a density of one but we can play around and increasing that density or decreasing it as needed um if you you know deactivate indirect lighting the cloud takes a bit of an uglier shape uh this is what you want to do you know with this one now some of the settings are found in here and some of the settings are found in the lighting uh system so if we select the directional light for example we can have a look in here at the indirect lighting intensity if you increase that nothing really changes but you know this is this is not going to help you for the clouds especially you know necessarily but if you start playing with the volumetric scattering intensity you can see we can bring in Far More intensity in the volumetric cloud itself the next thing you want to do is have a look at the uh Sky light in here uh make sure the Skylight is Real Time Capture movable as well and again in here you can play with the direct lighting and the volumetric scattering intensity but these will not do anything if the if the the the the light that's affecting the cloud is going to be the directional light which it is in this particular uh moment now the other thing that you can also do is have a look at the height fog the height fog does actually affect the look and feel of these clouds so let's say for example we're going to decrease that Fallout so the The Fog sort of goes up and then we can have a look at doing you know increasing the intensity um maybe we can have a look at uh making it in a volumetric fog instead of just being a normal fog and then we can have a look at you know playing around with the extinction and so on I mean this is really dependent from scene to scene now ever since we've already made the changes on the on the height fog the cloud started to capture some of that but the cloud itself I mean this one in particular if we select it again is not meant to be very dense but that can be fixed through either the density slider by adding more density or you can play with these remap input values again to play around with the density mask the cloud or increase its um you know ability you can also so all these are you know you can also create this into like a fog layer so right here we have a sort of a fog layer um just generated if you want to do that um now we also have a self Shadow so the more you increase that the more the cloud gets Shadow you know sort of shadowing at the bottom here and we can also desaturate it so what this means is as long as this color is not white and it's something else maybe like a blue and then you start desaturating you can see you can add sort of a blue tint and you can also play from up here and maybe make it I don't know into like a red or something like that and then again with the the saturation slider you can sort of play around with these settings and get various different shades let's just reset that to the normal Cloud material um and now let's try some other cloud types so maybe this Cyrus particularly so we can add that one and you can see this one has got a bit of a different kind of look and feel to it if you change the light Direction by the way this will change the look and feel of these clouds quite dramatically like depending on where the cloud where the light is the cloud will be affected so you know for example here we could darken the cloud from the bottom so that because our light is a bit more overhead uh but then also look at decreasing that intensity because a bit too density because it was a bit too dense uh for that kind of look um there's also clouds that are far more thicker so for example the common common olymbus clouds so if we use one of these as you can see this looks a lot more different and a lot more dense as it said so even at a 0.7 and you can just play around with the setting but this is quite good to build um vast scenes you know like for example this could be like a storm cloud part of a storm cloud right here uh by the way all of these clouds are reactive to local lights as well so if you drop a local light in there you will see a difference um and I can actually showcase this so let's just say we go over here we select the light and add a point light you know um and the point light is you can see over there I can just drag it within the cloud obviously this is a very large Cloud so we got to play around with the intensity so I don't know I'm just going to obviously going to really push this up and then increase atation radius and you can see that it's right now affecting that so let's just bring it out maybe somewhere around here uh maybe go for like 50,000 on the continuation and then do this as a you know something like that maybe even more you know so now as you can see the light is the the light is affecting this cloud and you could you could create various different effects by doing this so imagine lighting strikes and all sorts of things could be done this way uh with this particular effect just make sure that the light source itself is within the bounds of of the of the cloud itself right so it's hitting that now if we go back and select the cloud again and increase its density you'll see the more density it is the more it sort of swallows that light so you need more to be able to shine through okay um and yeah so that's kind of part of part of that so to speak right now if we want to look at the um um other sort of settings on this uh you could uh you know you can play around with the quality setting so if we go over here and say show FPS this this is our current FPS with this cloud in the scene and then I can click the cloud load view in here and I can have a look down um over here and I can put the shadow you know the shadow um light down sample factor to one and you can see already I'm taking a hit in performance put the shadow step factor to One Step factor to one and maybe Shadow bias to one as well now the cloud is going to have a far higher level of quality another thing that you can also do is make sure that in here you use issue blocking requests which means that the cloud will always look the way you see it here rather than lose its uh definition now one of the things that you're seeing right now when I'm sort of flying through like that you're seeing these artifacts and that's another thing that we need to fix and the way to fix it is through the postprocess volume which is also very important part of this so when you select the postprocess I would like you to go into the Lumin uh Global illumination have a look at all the set settings in here taking the boxes and so on including the advanced options and depending on your Hardware you're going to start cranking these numbers up so for example you know let's just put everything to the max the sliders themselves right right now you are going to start taking a hidden performance as you do this depending on the scene that you're you're using something like that okay now you'll notice that it's not happening as much you see like now it's not the the problem that we were having isn't happening as much and at r time it won't happen at all which is quite nice but you you see the these sort of artifacting is a combination of the Lumen quality itself and also the the actual you know like what I'm saying is like the the um volumetric fog the sky atmosphere so you are going to have to play around with these settings depending on your scene to make that work uh these options in here where it says inir lighting and so on nothing happens on this end now one of the things about the postprocess you've got to make sure in here that it's got an infinite extent ticked like it does here now because if it doesn't then you you won't you know you won't be able to see the effect of the postprocess volume as you can as you notice in here if I disable it or enable it right so it's important that you know that um now some other things obviously everything like Sky atmosphere and everything else is affecting the cloud so for example with a low sky atmosphere then the cloud looks different than what it does when it's a very high one the height also affect it so depending on what the height is obviously the cloud will look different a lot more alien U multis scattering and everything else as a contributes to the look and feel of the light uh the exponential fog as well so depending on what you're doing here the cloud will start to inherit some of the properties of the volume so you see there without any fog density that's what we that's how the cloud looks this is how it looks when you get some fog density in there so you know think about you could probably push this more although I'm not sure if that will make much of a difference so there is a there is a quite a bit of interplay between all of these systems together uh now the next thing also is in your directional light where if you type in Vol just make sure you've got the cast volumetric Shadow on because if you don't you get these very flat uh clouds so you got to make sure that that's also on again if you play around with the volumetric cloud intensity you're going to get a different look and feel of your Cloud as well um that's how actually part of the thumbnail that's how I've sort of done it by playing around with this because I was getting like a glowing effect on the cloud so you know with that volume meure intensity on and then having a look at the bloom for example you could have a look at playing with that see that so what I've done there in that in that particular uh event I've effectively created a scene in which uh the landscape was rendered one time and the clouds on top with this glow so that the landscape itself doesn't glow as much as the cloud so that was that was theide idea right okay now uh let's delete this cloud and have a look at the multi spawner so if you go in here again into the cloud for spawner and we select the BP spawner and drop it somewhere in the scene like that for example uh we have the scale to set up so we're going to untake this box and give it a scale of maybe 500 maybe a more maybe a th000 by th000 something like that and then um a height of 10 right so you can see what that looks like I'm just going to drag it out here a little bit maybe something like that okay now what we want to do is we want to add some materials in here so the first thing and make sure that they've got at least three materials loaded in so we're going to go into our VDB materials we're going to select the single Cloud material and I'm going to take this material instance and I'm going to going to drop it in there and then I'm going to take this one drop it in there and then this one and drop it in there if you need more you can just duplicate the material instances now I'm going to double click this this got got coming kind of can't say it that one right it's got that one I'm going to set this one actually in particular let me just put this up here and then I I'll open the second one um and then I'll open the third one um and then I don't know maybe just have a few more cuses something like that now what happens is this Cloud spawner will load these clouds and it will give us with a density of 0.2 going to be 25 CL Cloud spawned and they're going to move in a direction of 200 maybe the scale needs to be bigger you're going to have to play around with the settings depending on the scale of your scene so this is a very large scene so I'm not sure if that scale is going to be okay uh how long in seconds will these clouds um survive by4 so that's 20 there and that's about it really now we're going to also select indirect lighting and infinite trace and now we're going to press play so what happens is when we press play there will be clouds that will spawn in there um and right now I am not seeing any so let's have a look okay so in order for us to start seeing some clouds let's just put the spawn rate to something like a 0.2 so they start spawning quite quickly and then we can press play and now you can see the first Cloud over there then the second one the third one and now multiple clouds are just going to spawn in this particular grid you know the spawn rate that we've created and they're going to sort of move in our Direction quite slowly so what I'm also going to do now is I'm going to make this grid probably 5,000 by 5,000 going to make that about 50 okay and I'm going to put it somewhere around here maybe something like that going to make these clouds move maybe at a speed of 400 I'm going to put spawning about 50 they're spawning every 0.2 going to put a density multiplier of 0.8 and the lifespan about 25 yeah okay let's see if that's okay now also the scale is not big enough so I'm going to go for like a 100 by 100 by 100 just for just for the sake of this and we're going to press play now now the clouds are going to be a lot larger as you can see and they're spawning anywhere within that uh within that volume and they're now moving across the scene my uh particular sort of blueprint is not moving very fast you know like the one where I'm sort of navigating through the scene but you can see how this creates the you know clouds that are now moving through the scene and traversing if we make these clouds Traverse a lot faster so let's just say about thousand in that direction and also for me to maybe spawn a bit closer to them okay now I press play and now you can see the cloud sort of moving again even at uh that speed is still probably not that great but you can see how all of these are being spawned and move around now obviously you're noticing an an FPS loss and that will always sort of happen on this because you're spawning a lot of different clouds at the same time or of moving them into the scene and then they do die off so after a while of traversing these clouds will die off um allowing for other clouds to spawn and thus your performance will increase and decrease this is not a solution for you to use in a game or anything like that if you're spawning to many clouds this is more of a solution if you're trying to you know have some clouds rolling through a cinematic and now you can see that the entire time has been elapsed and all the clouds are dead so to speak I know that sounds horrible but don't worry the clouds are fine so that's kind kind of how you can use this and I'm hoping that this will shed some more light on the cloud forges functionality um and I do have an extra another video uh where I showcase how to use the volumetric cloud component as well which that's also a very intricate sort of thing now imagine if you're down here in this depression this is a bit higher and the clouds are even bigger right and we start I don't know we again let's just increase that speed as double that speed up and now let's play and you can see these clouds moving okay and now we are obviously down here and looking at them above now depending on where the um uh where the you know where the sun is they can be a lot more detailed or a lot less uh we in the material in you know here we can have a look at what does the cloud cell shadow looks like so let's just put that to a five because I think that will help with selling uh this particular thing the density multiplier doesn't have Factor anything in here because it's driven by the blueprint so now we have a thicker Cloud you know uh underbelly of the clouds themselves which should you know effectively give them a an even interest more interesting look and you can see how they're moving and this is as I said to you this looks almost you know foto realistic depending on how you put these together this is this is where you know I think this is where really shines this blueprint spawner um sort of technique it really really shines here I think it adds so much depth the scene and and you know there's so much to to work with from this so that was it for this tutorial if you'd like to support the arganian puzzle box um YouTube effort then please consider subscribing liking and commenting this video if you'd like this project have a look on my Unreal Engine Marketplace R station gumroad or patreon patreons get all the projects regardless of what they are and I think it's a you know hopefully it's a great deal for you guys but yeah if you'd like to support the channel as I've said just take a look and I'll see you guys in the next one thank you

Channel: Arghanion's Puzzlebox

Views: 9,178

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5.3, VDB Clouds, Cinematic Trailer, Iceland Scenery, Visual Effects, 3D Rendering, Game Development, Advanced VFX, Realistic Clouds, Dynamic Cloud Simulation, VFX Artist, 3D Animation, Unreal Engine Cinematics, Nature Cinematography, Digital Art, Environment Design, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Volumetric Clouds, Landscape Rendering, Blender 3D, Photorealistic Graphics, Film Making, Game Design, Artistic Inspiration, Cloud Forge, Cloud Forge VDB

Id: tUIku5XxXlA

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023