I Finally Discovered AI Lighting for Unreal 5: A Game Changer

historically one of the most challenging things for a creator has always been nothing or more specifically the Endless Options of opportunities you face when first starting a project right it's the blank page if you're a writer or the empty canvas if you're an artist or that endless void of a viewport for a 3D artist it's the reason why traditional painters would Prime their canvas by splattering paint all over it or I like to assume the reason why 3D programs like blender or zbrush start with a cube or sphere in the viewport equally at least in my experience there seems to be a correlation between the scale or difficulty of a project and the challenge I feel in just simply starting it both of these are reasons why I find the new tools that AI is bringing to us so exciting that they're able to give us new ways to generatively fill those blank canvases into to shorten the time between an initial idea you have in your head and being able to test what it might look like at the end of your project today I want to show you how I've been doing just that when it comes to lighting my 3D scenes in unreal and blender where now with AI I'm able to take existing solutions for early stage lighting skyboxes and hdis and now with just a few clicks be able to apply a much more intentional art-directed mood and atmosphere to them so that while I'm working on a prop or maybe a full scene I'm able to get a much better feel from the very start on what they might look like at the end of the project once I've fully built out the world around them as a little preview here is a scene that I lit in unreal 5 in less than a minute using this method but before we get to that I want to give you an over rview of everything that we'll cover in this video first we'll do a summary of what a Skybox or hdri is why you'd want to use one and how AI is changing the game in this space second I'll show you how to create your own using AI in a much more art-directed way like I mentioned in third I'll do a quick tutorial on how to set them up or at least how I set them up in unreal 5 and blender which will be completely beginner friendly so if you've never used 3D before but are considering getting into it I've got you covered and for those who stick around to the end I'll give you a little sneak peek in an upcoming tool that teases the ability to be able to copy and paste art direction from an image directly into unreal so that sounds completely crazy and is a bold claim but it actually does look quite promising and is releasing this year so we'll save it until the end of the video but for now let's just quickly spend a minute reviewing what a Skybox is in short a Skybox is a highresolution image or procedural texture that is wrapped 360° around a 3D scene to provide a basic background setting and lighting information for that scene h CIS are functionally the same for the context of this video so you might hear me refer to them interchangeably but they do technically differ from a standard Skybox image in that they hold a much higher dynamic range meaning you can raise or lower the exposure of the scene and the hdri in the Skybox will still hold enough information to account for those different exposure levels okay great so why would you want to use a Skybox or hdri well for some projects it could actually be used in place of the real environment in the distance for example not needing to model far off mountains or Landscapes or maybe even clouds but they're also often used as simple placeholder Lighting in the early stages of a 3D project for those of you familiar with 3D projects you know they can be quite complex whether you're in a studio or even just as a solo artist it means juggling a lot of different assets with varying degrees of development while balancing the overall scene lighting and art direction that ties them all together every artist in studio Works a bit different but as an oversimplified insight into the process at least how I work I start with an idea or Concept in our Direction build out my supporting references Block in my scene and then bounce back and forth between modeling and texturing as I swap out placeholders for the fully modeled and textured assets all while continuously evolving and pushing forward step by step the overall look development and lighting within the scene since this process takes quite a bit of time the earlier I can get a feel for how those very initial ideas might look way later in the project I end up saving a lot of time this is why stages like blockin exist in the beginning which is to literally put blocks or very simple shapes in place of different assets it ends up looking incredibly simple but practically it lets me get a good feel for the size and space of things in relation to each other before spending a large amount of time building them out in 3D or texturing them now in order to visualize these scenes early fortunately unreal blender and other software have really simple and easy systems in place to preview them when modeling and blender just like in other modeling packages you have this everpresent viewport light you also have extra controls to visualize cavities and shadows and also an option to quickly toggle into a lit mode that makes use of an hdri or when you're texturing an asset and say substance you can also preview your work in a simple scene wrapped again in an hdri unreal also has a few different options for this where with just a few clicks you can create a hyper realistic sky and if you want to even swap in different Sky boxes which you can Source from places like poly Haven which unreal points to in this documentation so at this point you might be asking what the problem is then well like I mentioned earlier if you're looking for something a bit more art directed outside of say a photograph of a garage or a grassy field say for example a cyber Punk or sci-fi scene or a fantasy setting you're a bit out of luck since the way most of these are created is that someone with a camera has physically gone to a location taken panoramic photos and stitch them all together to create a 360 Skybox this has gotten a bit easier nowadays where you can create seamless textures and just create them in CG or 360 cameras have made the capturing process a bit easier but most available hdris you find online have required somebody to go to that location photograph it Stitch it all together and then to offer it up for sale on places like poly Haven as a quick example of what I'm talking about here is an old student project I was working on at Think Tank which I've since hidden from public but I think it illustrates this concept well I was working to replicate this 2D concept art here in 3D since it was a 2d concept I wanted to get a feel for the overall space to make sure the proportions of what I would later be modeling would work in 3D so as I blocked out the scene I wanted to throw a Skybox placeholder in that had a cyberpunk feel to it naturally I tried to find hdri images of a city at night ideally something like Tokyo here is what currently exists on poly Haven the number one resource for this that unreal even links do for a city at night you can see that this isn't exactly what I was going for I did keep looking around the web to find different packs this was the most popular one I could find at the time it does have pretty cool images and they do have a bit of a cyberpunk feel but I really wanted something that capture that downtown feeling with the skyscrapers surround you so I think it's a good time to take a look at the tool I wish I had then which is called Skybox AI by the very appropriately named block Aid Labs here we are on the Block a lab site as you can see here they say you can craft an experience in one click infinite 360° worlds are here with Skybox AI they're panning through few examples of things you can really easily generate and if you've never seen a Skybox before this is this is what it looks like and if you click conjure your world it'll take you to inside of Skybox AI itself you can see it's a really simple UI down here you have a few different options for prompting and over here you have a few different options for having a little bit more manual control over what's going on you can just click here at paint it gives you a grid room and you can paint in structures for example gigantic doors like here windows and as you prompt it'll use these as guidelines or frames for that I've never used this I've never really needed that defined of control since what I'm really using skyboxes in general for and especially Skybox AI is just getting loose rough lighting into a scene that is a little bit art directed then I can build out to more defined lighting that I control more more specifically in unreal or blender so we won't use this for now I just wanted to show you that it exists um I think we'll need to erase this in order for us to to generate with problems without it using this guide okay so here we go we can drop out these go back to image view get rid of the grid all right let's type in a prompt I think we had talked about cyber Punk so let's try just quite simply cyberpunk City here you can see a lot of the different models that is trained in that some of them are price locked to paid tiers some of them are marked new they just recently dropped a new pack which is quite interesting Styles is not really something that I would use they're very ethereal and psychedelic but they're really cool I think what we're looking for here is cyberpunk though so let's go ahead and hit cyberpunk and just generate here's what I gave back to us it is indeed a cyberpunk city it's has all those prototypical things you would assume would be there all of the big tall buildings the advertisements the strong LEDs the environment filled with fog and being at night and mysterious I didn't even prompt in night but it just kind of new I would have been very happy with this back when I was a student to have found a Sky Box like this for my scenes already a good start there's of course other options of things that it lets you do you can remix this which as it says you can keep the structure but fine-tune the look you can do things like add an aspects of time of day weather materials visual style it's a really nice feature if you just want to keep that same structure and just make some adjustments or if you have something more specific in mind you can describe what to avoid maybe I don't want specifically red in my scene I can just prompt out red and we'll get rid of those and keep everything else mostly the same it's not an exact science in my test like it does include maybe some red further away but it does it does make nice adjustments towards what you're asking it to do we go back to create new get rid of negative prompt what I use most of the time is this enhance prompt tools I'll type in a very simple prompt and I'll use enhanced prompt which is based on AI and I assume tailored to work very nicely with their different models they have so I just trust that this works very well with this I would assume so the cyberpunk city let's go ahead and just enhance the prop and see what it gives back to us so let's go ahead and generate okay so here's what it gave back to me and at first glance I like this so much better let's read the description of what it gave us neon drenched Skyline angled skyscrapers towering holographic Billboards glowing tram lines star packed Cosmos backdrop I don't know if we have that necessarily but the vr360 cyberpunk style blend of futuristic architecture high contrast color Smoky fog Ambiance I really like this I like that it's a little bit more expansive and spread out and we don't have those big bright red LEDs right in our face so I think this will add a lot more of a balanced look to my scene I think that this is some already something we can go ahead and throw into unreal and see what it looks like here is an option of where you can download I believe some of these as you can see with the Stars are locked to paid plans the one we're going to be downloading is HDR so you would have to have a paid plan to download this let's go go ahead and download it and see what it looks like over in unreal here we are in Unreal Engine 5 it's very dark right now cuz we haven't added any lights but you can see I've added in some kit bash buildings and props and a little bit of water on the ground so we can actually visualize what things look like when we add in the hdri sky boxes that we had made let's first give it a base lighting that unreal is kind of known for that sort of hyper realistic uh lighting so if you go to window environment light mixer it g gives you a bunch of options and let's go a and click them and see what happens so let's add a skylight let's add an atmospheric light let's create a sky atmosphere and let's create some height fog okay what you see here are all of those things added let's let's add them to a folder to keep things organized into our base lighting added a postprocess volume which I'll talk about in a second but here's all your things so the directional light is your sunlight exponential height fog adds fog to the scene gives it a little bit of depth we'll change that to volumetric fog which has a bit nicer look and then you have your Sky atmosphere which is as you see up here it's a Sky Box you can see it's got a little bit of a realistic world and then a skylight here is where you can either have it as realtime capture which is realistic to the scene or you can specify a cube map which is our hdis or Sky blockes which we could point to specifically we won't be doing that here because what this will do is it'll add that light to the scene but you won't actually be able to see it in the Sky Box we'll be adding an hdri setup that unreal has built in so we'll go ahead and leave that for now as going back to Real Time Capture because we'll be turning this off let's turn all this off and start from scratch so if we turn this off here turn off the directional light we'll leave the fog on and then we'll add in an hdri in order to to do that you need to go to plugins if you haven't enabled it type in hdri go ahead and enable it and then you'll have to restart the engine so then when you come back in here to add something to the scene you click the plus and then you can start typing hdri pure hdri then we can click hdri backdrop and it'll add it in and you can see it's using just uh grassy field and Meadow and sky and it does start at the origin so if your ground is near the origin you'll just need to bump this down a little bit so that it doesn't take so it doesn't block the block the ground okay so we have that here and let's move it just a little bit more down hdri backdrop let's drag it back into Bas lighting and then let's talk about the postprocess volume what a postprocess volume does is you can add it here as well postprocess volume drag it in is it lets you control the processing of the scene so things like exposure which I've already made some adjustments too so if you type in exposure here's where you have controls for whatever you have selected up here you can change it from where default is auto exposure histogram down to manual because we're going to want to dial this in so every time we move the camera it isn't slowly adjusting the volume to match so I put it on manual and this will kind of depend on how bright your scene is and for here I've set it to 10 so here we have a nice base okay so postprocess volume is on one last thing on that is you're going to want to change it to infinite extent by default a volume is a volume it's a big box and it controls the processing within the box but here we want to control the exposure for the whole scene so we'll change infinite extent Unbound to on okay so that's done we have our hdri backdrop placeholder and this is where we're going to add in our Sky boxes we just made control space will bring up uh all of your different assets and I've already all I did was I found them in my downloads folder and drugged them in here's a few we made here you can see see that red one that we had had so let's go ahead and click it you can drag it into here or just click this little arrow and whatever you have selected will insert it okay here we have that first one you can see those big bright red lights and it is now wrapped around our scene it's very snug though let's go ahead when you drag in an hdri it's very small so let's go ahead and enlarge it to make it feel more like a sky pushes it out reveals some of my other buildings that I had brought in here earlier and and yeah so here is what a Skybox looks like I have added in a couple of cameras so to do that you can come here create a camera here create a Cate camera actor and then once you create it you'll be able to see them here so let's go ahead and go into the first one I made here is just kind of a typical shot of the buildings uh few in the distance different ranges you can see the red lights casting pretty pretty strongly onto the buildings and here you can see another camera that I've set up on these smaller ones here if you push G while you're in your scene you can toggle off any sort of overlays or UI overlays so here you can see the reflections of the Sky Box some of the buildings in the background now let's go ahead and compare some of those uh some of those different uh Sky boxes I brought in just to see how big of a difference it can make let's go back to the first shot and we'll open it back up and we'll go from this bright red light over to let's say this one it in and you can immediately see a drastic difference in direction of the scene this is this is kind of what I was talking about earlier when I was saying that I had found a uh Sky Box of a city but it wasn't quite the art Direction I wanted didn't have a lot of the colors I wanted and it didn't have a lot of that sort of mood that you're seeing in here let's try let's try to add in another one here here a little bit more subtle you get a little bit more yellows here it's a little bit softer and then this last one a lot of more pinks and then let's go over to the other camera and again see how this compares here you see actually the Sky Box here next to the buildings let's add in this you can see here Skybox building and how it's reflecting off of all these things this is something that you can get a little obsessed with I really think it's something just to get a nice quick Sky Box in here it's very helpful so that's how I would treat it but if you do imagine a specific mood it'll let you get there so that when you're modeling out and texturing these things it'll already be in the environment that you will later fine-tune a real uh lighting system for so if you're actually adding in some spotlight and things and you do plan to have more of this look and a fine tun it it at least gives you a nice base to work from okay so I set up two other scenes just to give you some more examples of how the HD can be helpful outside of the Cyber Punk here there more of an atom punck scene these beautiful models came from kit bash 3D I threw them together cuz they're nice and reflective so they'll actually have a quite a big impact on um how you can experience the hdri here we have the hdri on here's HD off you can see it's just using a basic City for the reflections right now if we open up here go to our HD we had imported go to an atam hun folder I created and let's go ahead and see here insert and you can see it has a it has a huge impact on the reflections up the Chrome up here especially watch this when I change it to the next one but also here the yellows feel very different than they did before if let's go ahead and reset this to see what the original was here very blown out just blue clouds Skies maybe you would end up treating these materials differently in substance designer as you're creating them because you have this kind of bland world again let's go in here create one of our more art directed ones toggle it in you can see here again on the Chrome in the windows the entire environments and again more to the more to the DraStic one very very big impact let's get out of this camera and just toggle around and see the reflections much closer and Tighter as you'd be reviewing things here we go here's a nice view let's go ahead and give this a change back to default with maybe the more subtle of the two much much different grade and here as well with a stronger one okay so before I show you a final scene unreal which is more in my style and something I tease on Instagram if you follow me there show you very quickly over in blender how to set up an hdri it's also very easy and buil in let's pop open blender so here we are in blender and a blank viewport let's add in a mesh with some beautiful modeling just to have an example of something to see uh our Sky Blocks against we are currently in just uh solid mode here click over in here this is where we can add in our hdri or Sky Box in this view come down to the world add new come into color and changes to environment texture throws in pink just as a placeholder but by clicking open we can go to our downloads and select our HD I'll go ahead and select mine and I've added in one of the ones that we just generated and you can already see even though our gray box is just gray you can already see the hdri taking an effect so really quick and easy to set up in blender we can go back to viewport mode it'll toggle it off and then we can continue our modeling toggle back in and we have our different H eyes we can add really quick and easy okay let's hop back over to Unreal here we are back in unreal 5 in the scene that I had teased earlier in the video it's a very very simple scene if you can see if I toggle out of the camera we have two characters a Rover a rock a cliff our nice HD texture on the world and I've set up a couple cameras so let's hop into one of those cameras let's go to camera one once you've added in your camera you can come down set your blade counts you can set your your focus here um sometimes it gets a little rough with the focus it can't quite get things that are too close so you can turn on the debug plane and just manually move it to where you want to focus and then toggle that back off you can set your aperture for that depth of field and your focal length here and then set up your camera you have this nice beautiful shot again default lighting like I showed before want to togg all that on of course the exposure is too high but it's just basic daylight uh lighting back off I've added in my hdri set it to a large size to make sure it encompasses the world and then just added in my hdri and I've controlled the exposure again through that post-process volume set to infinite extent typed in exposure dialed in to where it made sense with this specific Skybox that I made in Skybox Ai and then just as like kind of a final touch I've added in an exponential height fog set to volumetric maybe wanted to make it a little bit more mysterious we can dial up this fog let's let's say 2.1 here it feels a little bit more dystopian he's lost on this planet it's it's a really nice look that you can achieve really easily with these Sky boxes so let's go to camera 2 here I want to just compare the Sky Box in this scene to uh the default on so here we have the Sky Box you can of course rotate it if you want to bring in more of say the pinks or maybe specific mountains even in the background like I said before you don't need to model them you could just add them back there if they're just simple silhouette shapes but let's get back into camera 2 let leave our fog off for now and then let's compare this to default so here would be a default hdri I think you can kind of see what I'm getting at here and then let's let's add back in our our ones that we've had let's go back to open up here go back to our hdis make sure we have it selected toggle it back in okay so this is this is what I'm talking about um let's compare one of the other ones that I added in here it's a little bit more pinkish a little bit more subtle glowing let's add back in the fog notic there's a little bit of a bug that I get sometimes if I try to change hdris while the fog is on everything will dim I'll have to reset the exposure so I'll just toggle this off back here here bring it in in PO on and really dial that in let's let's bring it real strong see how strong we can get it toggle into full screen okay so yeah that's it I hope that these examples were illustrative in in how powerful a tool like this can be in the early stages of a project of course if I was actually creating this scene and I really wanted to dial on the lies I would spend a lot of time fine-tuning and making sure that the lights are reflecting in the right places and I'm telling the right story but just as an initial test getting the right mood in a world this is this is extremely powerful so I'm very excited to see what else uh Skybox offers us in the future and of course what other tools AI is going to let us uh explore and and help get our projects kickstarted off the ground uh quicker to see our Visions earlier into projects like I mentioned so yeah I hope you found that all helpful or at least interesting I'm still trying to experiment with balance to find a good middle ground between beginner-friendly overviews the give enough content for those still new to 3D but still interested in how AI is beginning to shape the space and hopefully short and to the point enough for those of you who are already familiar with 3D for those of you interested I've also left a link in the description for 10 free Sky boxes that I generated and use including the ones that you see in this video and finally for those of you who've stuck around let's give that new tool I teased earlier a quick look so here it is it's called revery Ai and it promises copy and paste from an image into unreal 5 you can see 80 level covered it here on September 5th where they show a little demo of what the tool will eventually allow you to copy and paste interestingly it starts with overall art Direction at the top of the list I'm very curious what that's going to include but it also includes lighting weather landscape and even soundscape from the test I've seen so far most of what is being done to them is very similar to what we covered today where you copy from an image and paste it into unreal and it automatically sets up that sky box for the image and lighting that postprocess volume for the exposure to match the image and also a bit of height fog to match the atmosphere within the image he promises a release later this year so since it's already October it seems we'll already be playing with an early access of this quite soon which I'll keep you all updated on he's quite active on Twitter and has a newsletter for update so if it sounds interesting check out his site I'll leave a link in the description but I'll also update as soon as we get access to the tool itself so yeah again I hope you found today's video helpful speaking of newsletters I've also recently launched a future familiar newsletter where if you don't have time to check news sites every day and you still want a five minute summary each week or month on the new tools and Tech dropping especially as AI continues to evolve and shape the World building space I'll leave a link for that in the description so whether it's over there in the newsletter or over here on YouTube I appreciate you all being here I appreciate all the support until then I hope you have a good one and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Future Familiar

Views: 87,218

Keywords: midjourney, midjourney ai tutorial, midjourney tutorial, midjourney ai, how to use midjourney, ai art, how to use midjourney ai, midjourney tips, midjourney how to use, midjourney video game asset, ai video games, ai in video games, ai artist, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence course, new ai tools, ai, futuretools, ai tools, matt wolfe, blockade labs, skybox, hdri, hdri blender, hdri maker, skybox blender, skybox unreal

Id: 5Q9Mox8c-4s

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023