Introducing EasyMapper for Unreal Engine 5

[Music] easy mapper is a master material setup that combined World aligned tripler mapping with nanite displacement and advanced vertex painting to blend up to three materials together all in one convenient package helping you create entire environments like this one fully textured without even needing UVS on any of your models full disclosure this tutorial video is sponsored by C in reality to give you something to work with I've added five materials and soon I'll be adding an additional tilable material made with the latest version of reality capture using their new Mosaic based texturing tools which gives you way sharper results for clarity while capturing reality is sponsoring this tutorial they are not affiliated with easy Meer every setting in a material instance here is clearly laid out for easy art directing giving you full control over the tiling texture adjustments displacement intensity and vertex painting Blends which gives you complete control over the look you're going for now I've made easy mapper as userfriendly as possible and it is immensely helpful when it comes to texturing environments or assets where you just need to put things together quickly without sacrificing quality or you can use it to add character and additional detail to your existing models I built a tool out of necessity for my own project because sometimes dealing with nasty UV seams and having to manually author your own Textures in another program like substance painter can be a huge pain in the butt hampering your creative process easy mapper fixes that problem easy mapper is available on the Epic Marketplace you'll find the link down below to like button having shown you what easy mapper is and what you can do with it let's jump into one real so I can show you everything you need to know to get started now first things first when you download easy mapper on the Epic Marketplace you'll notice that it's a full project the reason for this is because in order for texture driven nanite testation displac to work you need two console variables to be enabled in your unreal projects config files you can't just add those console variables in your editor it's not going to work so by default easy mappers project is already set up correctly everything is going to work out of the box but if you want to migrate easy mapper into your existing project in unreal I'm going to show you right now which console variables you need to add and where in order for that to work so you need to navigate to wherever your project is on disk we're going to go to the config folder here and then we want to open default engine right here open it up with notepad it's fine you'll see here we need the following two console variables for that to work r.n. allow tessellation equals 1 and r.n. tessellation equal 1 when you've added these two console variables in your project under the renderer settings bracket here make sure you save it and when you launch your project displacement should work easy mapper would developed on Unreal Engine 5.3 but in the future let's say an Unreal Engine 5.4 you may not need this console variable anymore so if this Chang it in the future be sure to keep yourself updated on how to set up nanite testation in your Unreal Engine project but for now these console variables are a must so with that done let's jump into Unreal Engine 5 when you open the easy mapper project for the first time this here is what you're going to you got a brief explanation of how it works I'm going to show you how simple easy mapper is to use in any environment so I'm going to go ahead and open the level demo scene right here because this is where easy mapper really gets showcased well so everything in this environment uses one single Master material only split up with material instances so in the content browser let's navigate to the material folder let's go to Masters and you'll see we've got the easy mapper Master material this is not the material you want to work with you don't want to just apply this to your models like this because when you start editing things uh this is what you're going to have to work with and it gets a little bit overwhelming it's not very clear it's not very user friendly what we want to do is right click on the material and click create material instance we're going to call this one demo example hit save and we're going to apply this new material here to our sphere and you'll see right now okay cool we've got our default material default textures that are provided with your purchase so let's open up right here and you'll see the material instance is way easier to use way less complex everything is clearly laid out and very clearly explained and should be fairly easy for you to use out of the box but I'm still going to go through all of the settings with you one by one I'm going to move this over here so starting off with the general settings you've got used displacement used World align materials enable vertex blending if you Mouse over any of the settings here there is a tool tip that explains what each setting does so it should be fairly simple for you to figure things out for now we're not going to enable vertex blending that's going to come a little bit later but we're definitely going to keep use displacement and use World align materials and let's start off by replacing this ugly gray texture with some bricks so again provided with easy mapper are a vary of different materials and more may come in future versions of easy mapper so I'm going to go ahead and check these three I'm going to add this one here the Ard map and the normal map easy mapper uses the same texturing template as Mega scans does so you'll notice that when you download Mega scan surfaces you have the Ard map which is ambient occlusion roughness and displacement all packed into one texture that is what the Ard map is so your displacement map is included in the Ard so now we've got our brick texture applied to our sphere now the beauty of world align textures is that notice what happens when I move my sphere the texture stays in place as the the sphere moves around if I rotate my sphere notice how the bricks are not changing that means you can quickly apply easy mapper materials to any model regardless of whether or not they have UVS and you know they will be nicely projected straight this works extremely well for caves triplan or mapping is used all the time in film due to how fast it allows you to texture just about anything that is the beauty of a world align texture because then I don't need to worry about getting UVS there's no seams anywhere um there's no like straight harsh lines there's no artifacts like that it allows me to get a nice seamless look across my model now let's go through some of the other settings in material a here if you need metallic maps for whatever reason you can enable those here we've got texture offset and texture scale so if I unfold these you'll see I can adjust the offset of each individual axis I can change the offset like this and the top and the side individually like that I'm not saying you want to do this but it's really great to have that level of control over each axis of projection the same thing can be done with the texture scale right here if I want to make it really small on one side and really large on the top we can do that full control over the scaling of each axis now if you want a more Global adjustment you don't need to go ahead and have the same values here we've got global scale right here if I want to tile the bricks a little bit more we can set it to two if I wanted to tile a little bit less I can set it to 10 you get the idea and you'll notice we got full displacement of our sphere here thanks to nanite tessellation now one thing you might notice is we get this odd blending here and that's just because of the world lined transition but we can control the sharpness of that fall off here by clicking on the tripler transition contrast right here I'm going to increase that you'll notice that we can get get a really hard transition here or we can really soften it so for something like bricks like this we might want a harder transition it might just feel a little bit more natural than a feathered transition right but again that is up to you now let's say I wanted to make some adjustments to the textures or the level of displacement here we can also do that by going to the texture adjustment section here we're going to enable use material a adjustments and right here we're going to have a whole bunch more control over the texture here so now we've got like Albedo controls change the saturation or the brightness or the contrast of the texture of the albo itself this is based on the mega scans materials so if you're familiar with how those work this works the same way same thing we can add a tint we have ambient occlusion controls displacement contrast and intensity and this is where things get interesting if we want to reduce or increase the level of displacement we can do that right here we can also increase the contrast of the displacement as well we're really amping up that intensity of the bricks here same thing with normal intensity and roughness contrast and intensity here so this is what really allows you to finesse the look of your materials it's also worth noting in order for dis to work you need to make sure that the model you want to displace is a nanite mesh so in order to convert a model to nanite go to that model in the content browser right click and make sure that nanite is enabled otherwise you're not going to get displacement at all if for whatever reason you don't want to have this kind of world align texture let's say you have a model that has existing UVS and you want to use those UVS you can totally do that by unchecking used World align materials in the general settings here now we have the default UV mapping of the sphere but you'll see dudes the way that the sphere here is unwrapped we're getting these really weird bent bricks and that's exactly where World align mapping comes in really handy it can make things look a lot more believable this way now this hard transition there it's a little bit fake looking but you get the idea we can adjust that and have aligned that by adjusting the texture scale on on a per axis basis so I could maybe do something like this and maybe adjust the offset like that and that way we can fake a natural seam just by adjusting the scale and offset of the brick texture and suddenly just looks a lot more unbelievable right like I said total control over the look of your models and the projection of the world line textures now what happens if we want to blend an additional material as of now we can blend up to three different materials we have material a material B and material C here so I'm going to go ahead and change the texture for material B I'm going to go into a textur folder that is provided for free and I'm going to do break one here going to add this kind of damaged uh floor texture here in material B but you'll notice that well nothing happened the reason nothing happened is because we need to assign vertex colors to this model and the way to do that is a little bit different than it used to be in Unreal Engine 4 we need to make sure we enable vertex painting right up here in the general settings and when you do that you may think well what just happened we just lost our break and this is a back to the default material this is not what we want right we need to go ahead and enable the modeling Tools in Unreal Engine 5 by going to the settings plugins and enable modeling these two plugins need to be enabled otherwise you won't be able to vertex paint in the easy mapper project that you'll download this is already set up by default you don't need to worry about it so we're going to go press shift F5 five to get to the modeling tool or you can just click up here and get to modeling there we're going to select our sphere go to attribs here and then paint vertex colors and depending on how your project is set up or what your defaults are you may not see this you may see this or something it doesn't matter let's just leave it a lit vertex color for now this just affects the visualization of your vertex colors and what we need to do is we need to just do fill black because I think by default most models will have Pure White vertex colors across all channels so that's what fill black does we're going to we're filling black across all the channel filters here and now we can get started so I'm going to go ahead and switch this back to original material which we can see is our brick texture I'm going to uncheck GN B because we only want to paint the red Channel material a is black there's no vertex color material B is going to be the red Channel and material C is going to be the green Channel sounds complicated but don't worry I'm going to go through this with you so with r checked right here we're going to make sure that the erase color is black and make sure your paint color is just pure white now we can go ahead and paint on our sphere here and we got that other brick texture that I added in the material B slot with that done we can hit accept and there you have it we are we're blending two materials together so going back into my material instance here in material B I'm going to go ahead and check the material B adjustments and you'll see I'm I don't really like how strong material B's displacement is here so in material B I'm going to reduce the displacement intensity I'm going to bring it back down a little bit something like that to make it a bit more uh even in displacement I don't want it to pop pop so much material B and C can be controlled exactly the same way as you controlled material a so I'm not going to go through that again now how do we paint material C I'm going to go ahead and add a plaster texture here that we have included for free when you download e mapper and then when we've assigned our texture for material C we're going to go back to the modeling tools here make sure our sphere is selected hit paint vertex colors make sure that channel filter is not R we want it to be G this time the green Channel because that's what's going to paint material C and you'll see we're painting our plaster texture on our sphere right now you'll notice that we have a bit of a layering thing going on here the plaster is painting over the gray brick and the gray brick is being painted over the orange bricks the layering system works as follows it's material a that's the base layer material B is the mid layer and material C is the top layer so it's always a b C if you forget which one it is just Mouse over enable vertex painting here and you'll see right here material a is base layer B is mid C is top I hope that's clear I'm going to hit accept and then you'll see we've got our blend now again I'm just going to reduce the displacement intensity of the plaster because it's a little bit Overkill it's a little bit too much adjustments and adjust the displacement intensity you see to reduce that like that but now you'll notice you know the blend here is not very convincing it's very soft smooth kind very game looking transition but we can control that with what we call Advanced vertex blending Advanced vertex blending is not a new thing at all this goes way back to the Unreal Engine 3 days so it's nothing new but it's a great old school trick what we're going to do is we're going to go up here in a general settings and you see we've got material a b blend controls and material C blend controls we're going to click on this here because you'll notice here that the the brick walls have this awesome blend blending uh very convincing looking blend between the plaster and the brick the blend settings here are how you control that so I'm going to set the expand and contract setting to 0.1 you'll see not much changed I'm going to set the blend contrast to like 10 to really sharpen up that transition and lastly the mix slider is where things get really interesting so pay attention right here if I start sliding this this way you'll notice the the plaster start bleeding into the cracks of brick across the entire surface right if I go the opposite direction it's going to appear more like snow building up on top of the surface so you have full art Direction Over the control and look of this blend for now I'm just going to leave it something like that that's pretty cool but now you'll not we're we're not quite getting the same result that we're getting over here right and there's several different ways of controlling this so the mix here takes displacement into account so if I scroll down to material C and adjust the displacement amount you'll notice that as I increase it the plaster is kind of taking over the brick and as I reduce it the opposite happens where the it only start to build up in the the Lesser deeper cracks so it not only takes displacement into account it also takes vertex color intensity into account and let me demonstrate this right here I'm going to go ahead and paint on my brick wall over here to give you a better idea I'm going to select my brake wall paint vertex colors reduce the size here and notice what happened if I just start painting like this you'll see it's a very harsh uh very harsh transition we're not getting that same kind of soft cool stippled kind of blend here this is not the same look at all the way to do that to get that kind of look that we have over here is by decreasing the flow to a very low amount and now since our erase color is black by holding the shift key we can kind of erase what we painted and notice What's Happening Now notice that I am slowly painting and eroding away that plaster look and revealing the brick below that is how we can get a more convincing look just by reducing the flow Now by reducing the flow I can paint it back so notice right up here for example where there's no plaster at all I'm slowly revealing the plaster and covering up the brick very cool technique very convincing old school but it now works even better thanks to nanite displacement now one thing to keep in mind though when you're using vertex color on a mesh unfortunately you cannot paint per instance you can only paint per mesh because these pillars here are all the same mesh they all they're all this one SM pillar here pay attention to what happens if I'm going to vertex paint on this pillar okay if I going to go ahead and paint paint this here and I'm going to paint I'm going to fill fill white to really just give it material C okay if I hit accept now that change will be propagated to all of the pillars notice now all the pillars have material C on them so I'm going to hit undo but now you know if you cannot vertex paint per instance if you want each pillar to have a different vertex paint you're going to need to right click and duplicate it place that in a level and vertex paint that one I hope that makes sense so this kind of blending is perfect if you really want to add some kind of snow or sand building up on the floor of your environment that vertex blend and mixing is the best possible way to do that so if you want to know how to get this kind of result that we just saw in the previous shot earlier there is nothing here you haven't learned how to do already so opening up the material here you'll see I've got two materials I've got the Roman Stone floor texture here and the dry sand texture these are two Mega scan surfaces that I got off the quickle bridge so what I've done is I vertex painted on the ground where I wanted the sand to be and from there we just use the mix settings up here to really get that kind of control and blend that we want and lastly we're going to go down to material C here which is where I assigned the dry sand textures from Mega scans and by adjusting the displacement intensity here I can either make it completely Sandy or completely Stony like this you have full control over the looks you want with simply adjusting one Slider getting this kind of control is exactly why I developed easy mapper and why I am making it available to all of you it's just such a fun tool to use and gives you that kind of creative control over the look that you want in your environment now let's say you have a mega scan model or your own custom model that already has its own texture and its own UVS and everything and you just want to use Easy mapper in order to blend some additional like Moss or snow or something on your mesh you can absolutely do that all you need to do is go ahead in the inner material instance you're going to go ahead and add your mega scans or your custom Textures in material a you want to make sure you disable World align materials and then using vertex painting with material B and see you can go ahead and paint Moss or snow or whatever you want on your existing Mega scans or custom meshes you don't need to use World align materials if you don't need it this gives you a ton of flexibility as an artist and gives you a level of control that would have been difficult to set up previously everything from displacement to vertex blending is all packed up into one neat little package while we're here I'm just going to quickly segue into how we can make our own tilable textures creating high quality textures like the one found in the megas scans Library can be done with a combination of tools most importantly though photogrammetry which is scanning a surface of your choice with the help of reality capture no matter what you are scanning the basics are largely the same shoot enough photos and get enough coverage with enough overlap between photos to get a clean scan if you're interested in dedicated tutorials about photogrammetry as a whole I recommend watching the following tutorials I've made on the topic so far you'll learn everything you need to know to get started in reality capture and creating your own models and textures after you've scanned your subject and generated your model in reality capture you can export that model from reality capture and into zbrush where we can clean up the mesh polish it up a little bit and make the low poly plane as a form of retopology this plane is what we're going to use to bake the tilable texture too then you export the models both the high resolution reality capture scan and your low p plane that you made in zbrush into substance designer where you can not only transfer the color texture you get from reality capture but also the other necessary textures the normal map AO displacement all of the good stuff once those textures are baked we can export them into substance painter you'll notice that if we offset the texture here there is a nasty seam but fortunately you can tediously paint away those seams across all of the channels albo metalness roughness normals and height in order to make that texture tilable you can really just clone stamp that seam away making tilable textures is a very chky process to get right so I have to give a shout out to the mega scans team they do absolutely phenomenal work and now jumping back to easy mapper and how to use it now that Segways into the troubleshooting aspect of this video I'm going to show you an issue that may come up in your levels and that is really nasty seams that we have here uh that may happen on some of your models when you're using displacement right so opening up this material here if I uncheck displacement here you'll see everything gets fixed there's no more problem but when I turn displacement on uh you know we get this really nasty line here and the reason for that is because you need to make sure that everything has one smoothing group or at least you can split your smoothing groups but you're going to be getting a displacement gap or a seam here if there are two adjoining splits in your smoothing groups and so again a quick way to fix all this is by going on your mesh and in the editor tools we can click on the normals I'm going to set this to area weighted and maybe normal threshold and set this to 180 or something and you'll see the see the difference by setting this to 180 you're going to make sure that the whole ceiling is all one smoothing group and by hitting except here we've gotten rid of all of those gaps so as you're running into that issue that is how you fix it now it's possible that you may run into the following issue here if two objects of the same size may have different displacement intensities despite having the same material you may notice something like this or you may also notice that sometime when the camera moves close you get this weird culling like this right the reason that is happening is because nanite displacement and distilation takes the scale of your object into account so pay attention here this sphere here has a scale of 0.48 and this one has a scale of 10.74 and that is often the way the displacement Works in most renderers it takes the actual scale of the object into account so the way to fix this is by resetting your transforms so what we're going to do is we're going to click on the mesh here we're going to go to x form here and bake transform and when we do this you'll see the displacement has now returned to a more normal level that is the solution to this problem it's worth mentioning however that in order to get a good blend you need to have enough vertices and what do I mean by this you'll notice on this wall here right the blend is very easy we if I click here we can really paint wherever we want but on the ceiling here there are not that many vertices if I go to wireframe mode here you'll see this wall is way more dense in vertices than the ceiling is here right so if you don't have enough vertices this kind of weird straight line thing can happen so I'm going to go ahead and paint on that if I paint you'll see I'm painting on each vert and it's fine but we're getting a sharp line there that's just because there's not enough vertices in between the two so just be aware you may need to add more vertices uh if you want to get a cleaner blend and more control over where you can or can't blend this should kind of go without saying because you know it's vertex painting you need the vertices there to paint on but not everyone is familiar with this concept as it's a pretty old school trick so I figured it's good to know about so there is one last issue that I've am aware of that's when it comes to shadows and nanite displacement so you pay attention here as I get close to the pillar the Shadows seem to kind of pop a lot this seems to be a very inconsistent issue sometimes it shows up and sometimes it's totally fine it doesn't seem to be an easy mapper related issue but more a nanite tation and displacement related issues an immediate solution for this is if you select your light and you set it to cast Ray traced Shadows then that problem largely goes away so that is an immediate Band-Aid solution but I really hope that epic manages to fix it with virtual Shadow maps in a future release of Unreal Engine so for full transparency I just wanted to let you know that I am completely aware of this issue and pay attention to the pinned comment of this video down below that's where I'll keep you up updated with known issues and feel free to ask your questions there and that is pretty much it when it comes to easy mapper to use Easy mapper in your own project all you need to do is right click on the easy mapper folder and migrate it to your desired Unreal Engine project right now like I said we can blend up to three different materials but if there's enough demand for it I plan on continuing the development of easy mapper I'm going to add the ability to add water puddles or an additional fourth material that you can blend in on your model I also plan on creating a landscape version of this so let me know in the comments below if anything like that is of interest to you I would love to hear your suggestions that's all there is to it thank you so much for watching a big thank you to cing reality for sponsoring this video and as always folks happy rendering

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 213,082

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Cinematics, UE4 4.26, UE5, Realtime, realtime rendering, rendering, CGI, 3D, 3D Artist, UE4, Unreal Engine 5

Id: UWrCA-t0v3U

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023