Learn to Create Open Worlds in Unreal Engine 5 | Landscape Auto material & Level Instance Blueprint

life yeah we should be live now okay so we're live all right so the topic of today is open worlds which happens to be landscapes for uh for a lot of topics that are related to open works cover landscapes but it's not only that it's actually a lot of workflows and you know is just the way of approaching open worlds it's different from creating any other kind of game with a smaller map because you cannot really do it manually and if you have a small team or if you are a woman army then creating an open world and doing everything by hand it's going to take a while at the same time if you are a huge team it also takes some time so how can we handle this how can we handle creating open worlds so in this live stream we're going to create this open world with an automatic material notice that i haven't paint anything here and what i can do also is to paint some grass here like this and if i get close enough i will spawn some grass so i have some automatic material going on here so so yeah so we're going to create this one because a lot of people are asking how you create one and we're going to go through the principles of how you can create this we're going to use war matching but actually you can use anything you want the principles are the same so we're going to create this landscape and also we are as a bonus we are going to go through some workflows of how you can create like villages or architecture inside your map and how you can do some instancing in a real so that you can populate the words faster so first things first uh why are open world so special so if you see this map this is actually pretty small if i play my game here let's go to our work settings i use our knight here so you can see that it's fairly big but it's really not that big as it looks like and what i mean by that is that you can still fairly finish this open world if you if you are one person you can paint by hand and do a lot of things um however if you were if you meant to create a bigger world which this one is a 1k by 1k if you create like an 8k it's gonna be exponentially higher and what i what i mean by that is like this one has a tile of four by four so if i check the manage you can you can see here i have one two three four five six actually i have more than that but when i create a landscape i will have like components here that i can use so for example if it's four by four i will have an um maximum of 16 which is basically this one two three one two three and this is my four by four and each component has its own tile so the problem is when you want to do something much bigger for example you want to do a 32 by 32 which i completely forgot how much was this let me do a multiply pretty fast ah 4k 1k yeah so this is what and then you have a 64 by 64. which i believe it's even higher so like 40 96 and if you check one block like this this is one this is two this is three and 16 is okay like we have a little bit more than 16 here i think i have we have 32 which is fairly small but imagine trying to make a world of 1 1k or 4k so or even more than that so how you handle this is essentially you you want to automate as much as possible and the way we do this is that first of all we don't it's called my la the landscapes if i if i go here if i sculpt uh let me try to sculpt something here if i go to my landscape tool hit sculpt you can see that as i increase my brush i can sculpt this and i can get something and you can see that the problem with this approach is that one it takes a lot of time and took it doesn't look too natural compared to this one so we will take a look at how we create this one so a lot of people ask so how do you do it do you do everything outside of unreal like you go to gaia or you go to howdini or you go to war machine and you create a height map and then how do you modify it so the workflow is pretty simple you want to use this like layers so for example like if you think of this as photoshop because this is a 2d map actually that is projected in 3d you have your layer 0 here and then you have your layer one like this right so your layer zero is actually your head map it could be something like this and then your layer one will be edits that you do on top of your layer zero here like for example you chop this you make this one flatter and you you do some refinement here and there especially when you want to put towns like you want to put a house here you want to make sure that terrain is flat and most of the time the height map doesn't do that so the best of both worlds is to create a auto material we will call it that way not really automatic but it really saves some time and the other one is the manual work so um let's go step by step first the way i create this is that oh amazing i have some grass here looks like i have some height map here anyway so the thing is we we want to create this landscape and there are several ways to do it you can do it in houdini or gaia or world machine in my case i'm going to use world machine because you know it's free it's fast and it goes straight to the point so what i have here in and in war machine are a set of outputs one i have my head map which is what i will use in my landscape and the other thing is that i have my bitmap if you check here if i make this one bigger i have a texture here if i go to unreal i have my textures here my auto material which is my red channel looks like this my green channel like this and my blue channel looks like this okay and i also also have another mask which is that my layer color so in the layer color we can use this to add more variation to our mask so in warm watching we create this mask by basically creating the rgb and normally what you have is a noise with a erosion applied on it so this looks you know if you take a look at this this looks fairly unnatural but if i go to my erosion tab once i apply some erosion into it it looks very natural so basically every landscape we you will apply erosion that you will look really nice i hope that unreal 5 in the future will support adding erosion to the landmass to have more realistic results i'm sure they will work on something like that because it will be really nice to use the landmass plugin and then use the erosion features to create really realistic landscapes in unreal without going to any other 3d modeling application so the second thing is that i have some inputs here and if you check the slope i just right click and create a slope and if i check the height field here i can create a slope based on an angle something like this and i can play with it and i can just choose any angle i want i can change the falloff to make it more tight or more like smooth i can also invert my selection and i did the same here for these two and i put this in the red channel and the green channel so the red channel looks like this the green channel looks like this and the blue channel is an equalizer and what the equalizer does is that it basically will grab one of this mask this is my flow mask that looks like this and it will output a grayscale value so combine those i have something like this which is my map usually in gaia and or in world matching we will have the the option to export these outputs so we are exporting this slot mask here we are exporting this bitmap material here and we're exporting this height map right so i have all these textures here so what i'm going to do is to create them the landscape again so if i go to new level let's go to time of day i will delete this once all right put my knight because my knight is awesome so i will put the landscape here and when you create the landscape you can specify how many sections you want in my case in world matching if i go to project and then project settings i already specify like my dimensions is like 1k it's like four kilometers by four kilometers and that's basically my resolution 124. it's padding by one so we need to do something extra here so instead of creating new what we will do is to create from file so what we will do is to grab the landscape height here okay and this will create our landscape but before doing this what we need to do is to reduce one size by one so that we don't have the padding and also we will click edit layers so that we have the ability to edit layers just like photoshop but inside unreal so let's go to that and we won't apply any material for now so if we click import now we have the same thing we had before we have our material landscape and we can do a bunch of things here we can create a new layer we can sculpt here or we could actually do a copy for example i can select this piece here i can scale it to make sure i have everything and then i can copy the data it's like this copy data to gizmo let's see let me see here why it's not copy oh looks like we need to copy in the right layer actually in this layer we don't have the data here so we if we copy the data then we will have this data here that we can use and we can actually make it bigger and we can paint here our landscape and if i press shift one you can see i have the same data here but where i'm using it here so i'm gonna undo this we're gonna go in into more workflow for workflows of how we edit the landscape layer uh later but right now we're going to create a landscape auto material because it's something that people are a little bit scared and they shouldn't it's really easy and real makes it extremely easy to create an auto material you just need to have the right concepts to understand what's behind it so if i go to my landscape you will see that if i click on paint i have different target target layers and these layers are like photoshop so i have my layer 0 layer 1 2 3 and 4 as many as i want the landscape auto material works like this is the base material and we will put the auto material in the base material which is a layer zero and then the rest of the layers just works as usual where we paint our landscape different materials and we can have control manually okay so what we're going to do is to create these layers inside the material so that our landscape can read the information from the material and apply it in the landscape so before doing that any questions so far yeah two questions there is a federico that says that already follows the spanish version of this channel and was asking if we were gonna explain something extra uh yeah like i just show uh we will show how to create the automatic material we will show some extra methods to you know use the material landscapes and to show off how you can create your own auto material a little bit more complex than before by using the slot mask and also we will go through creating villages and things like that uh the concepts are pretty much uh universal uh we focus on fundamentals um so that's why we will show now great um and the other question is is that the creeks asked is that the dimension thief are kind of lods for the landscape um i think you you mean this uh this thing let me put the let's call this level auto zero one let me create a new one really easy so if i go here by default is 17 so if i import you will see that i have some padding here like this which i don't want that's why we reduce the size of the components before creating minus one at the beginning so we don't have this issue um i'm not sure if that's what the question is really about but that's how i understand it yeah if if that wasn't the question you can write to us again in the chat no problem we can take a look at again yeah um by the way uh in a real five tessellation is not working in the landscapes uh in the sense we are loading all the triangles at once and this shouldn't happen in a real four there should be a update coming for landscapes in a real life in the future in a more stable version of unreal five but for now we're just gonna deal with that since unreal five comes with other nice features but keep in mind the lods of the triangles are not handled in a real five so let's open our previous level any other one before going on um nope no no okay so we have our head map and we need to create our landscape auto material so if i go here i have this textures that i export from world machine which is fairly simple i just show how to use it you can use anything like houdini or gaia to export this mask and how this mask works is like the way you gonna treat your landscape it's the same as you will treat any other kind of 3d mesh we're just going to use the mask and we're going to apply different materials for each channel so let's go to our this folder and let's create our material this will be our m landscape auto material master okay so if i double click this i will have my landscape auto material i mean my it's just my empty material and if you are unfamiliar with the material editor uh feel free to watch other videos of the introduction to materials there are several out there for us i will just do a quick one so in case you're lost you can still follow through so this is our graph where we create our logic for a material this is our viewport where we will preview our material uh how it looks like these are some properties that we have in in our materials and of course these are some static statistics that we can use to check how many instructions our material is using to check if it's very heavy or not and i will just right click and we can create different notes here and drag them into different inputs and outputs so we can create our material so let's see how let's drag our two textures here let's let me save this one first let's drag these textures and the first thing i'm going to select those and from my properties i'm going to change this to shirt wrap so that i can have more options to put more textures in my material so if you check here i have my textures and i have this one i can easily connect this one here to my base color and apply it and if i check you want to check my material actually oops let's see if our okay goes away so let's create a material instance and let's create am mi landscape base co1 out okay so this is my material instance which is an instance of this material so any changes we do here will propagate to the children and we can change parameters here so if i click this one i go to my world if i check the properties if i click f4 you can see the details panel i can scroll down or up until i find my landscape material so i will click here and then i will click this one okay and now our material is applied you can see we have our texture here that is like this so for this type of material we want to change the coordinates so what we will do is to if i press tab i can type land landscape and i have different types of landscape notes in my case i want my landscape layer coordinates which are my coordinates for this one so very easy we're just gonna put this one by 124 and we're going to connect this one um here looks like nothing has happened and the reason is is super big but if i go here you can see that i have my texture applied now the problem using this is that the resolution is super low so you don't really want to do this but just to illustrate how our mask looks like we can put this one here okay and let's connect our coordinates here so we can take a look at our mask so this is how our mask looks like now if this is a little bit confusing to you let's try to isolate each channel so for example i can put if i hold 3 i can put my red red one here i can put my blue one my green one like this and i can put my blue one here okay so let me create this one a black so i will learn these notes by holding l and i will grab the red one i will put in the alpha and the right i will go to b and the black go here and then i will put this one so you will notice that everything my red is applying into this channel and actually i can just make this one white okay so if i apply my material you can see that my material will apply in the white areas and not in the black ones i can do the same for the rest of the channels like dark green one i can apply it and then i will have a different kind of mask and lastly i can grab the blue one i can apply it and you will see i have my other mask which is my flow flow map which is basically what the terrain will create when there is rain and it will create a river i think like the river areas where the water will eventually calm down from the mountain and go down here so these are my maps so i have my red green and blue channel so what i want to do is to create a material for each one of those and you can create as many as you want in my case i will start with four materials okay so let's go to our content browser let's save everything and i have a collection here which is basically my favorite assets that i use if you want to create a new collection let's just say you want to create a new collection for this you can click here collection local share collection and this will be my how to material and then if i go to my landscape auto material i can grab all of these assets and put them here so now if i lose it i can just click my collections and i have the same for different different kinds of assets that i like to use for my projects in my case i already have these textures that i want to use that i grabbed from quixote mega scans so what we will do is to control b and let's grab the roughness here if you grab from quick cell your textures and it's black and white do not worry just click on mask here and you will have all your channels working correctly so basically our red channel will be looks like it's our ambi occlusion our green channel is our roughness and our blue channel is our displacement so let's save this and what i want to do is to grab all three here and i want to put them here okay so what i will do is to create a material from this okay so how am i going to do it i will right click and type make material attributes and this will allow me to create a material inside the material so if i go here to my rgb channels i will go to my base color i will plug the normal here and i will choose my i believe my green channel with my roughness so i will put it here and i can just swap this notes to be a little bit more organized so this is my first material and if i press c i can comment in my rock one or i can even put my mossy rock okay later if we have time we will take a look how we can create functions so that we don't need to create them all over again but for now we will start simple and we will add complexity little by little so hang in there stay with me it is very simple actually so let me go to our my other texture this will be my grass texture i will do the same here to grab my mask just like i did before i will just put my mass compression setting so i can grab my three channels and i grab can grab these textures can put them here just like this and you notice that this process takes a little bit of time and it's normal it's repetitive we just need to duplicate and do the same here okay and this will be our grass just like that and we will go to our other collection this will be our rocky cliff so we will go here grab this okay and we will do the same ctrl c ctrl v now you can see why it will be helpful for us to create the functions for these ones so that we can have a collection of different materials and we just grab them from the content browser here so let's click comment and this will be my rocky cliff okay and also i will create an another one this will be my last texture here i will go here and do the same like i did before i will change this one to mask so i can have access to my displacement and ambi location other mask that i can use no this takes a while because his 8k texture the other ones are 4k i really don't remember why i import aka texture to this but you know it's strong so let's deal with it recommendation try to not use too heavy textures for now i know we can increase the textures resolution by quite a bit for the new generation but just as a rule of thumb just don't try to put more than you need if one texture looks great with 4k or 2k or even less than 512 just use that you don't need to go too high so let's connect this and actually if if i'm my memory doesn't betray me this will be my ambient occlusion in the red channel so i will grab the red channel to my ambient occlusion here so i can have a little bit more detail okay and i will do the same for those to my red channel go to ambient occlusion just like this okay so there is one more thing that i want to do is to put some coordinates so i will hold you to create my texture coordinates or you can type texture coordinates like this and then m to multiply or i can just type multiply and then put hold one and click to create a constant now i will multiply this texture coordinates just like i did here but i won't use the landscape coordinates i will use normal coordinates so because this is a very big landscape i will put something like 0.09 to start with and i will also multiply this one let's create this convert to parameter and put l1 this will be my layer one and i will hold this one here so i can modify all of those individually and this will be my master tile something like that okay so i can use copy and paste here i like if you're wondering why i'm using layer 1 layer 2 instead of putting the name of rock grass sun and texture i the reason i do this is because in the future we may change these textures and if you work in a game before in the project there are a lot of changes and suddenly it's easier to you know change the texture but it's not so easy to change the names of these layers so in the future you have something like grass layer and you paint grass and you get rock so in order to prevent this is a good practice to use put everything by numbers so layer one is layer one and that's it and get surprised what you get with layer one so i will do the same for this ones and this will be my layer 3 and this will be my layer 4 and i will also change this comment rocky set okay put this one here and now you can forget all about these things if you create a function you can reuse your library and you don't need to do this again so now that we have this we need to put the base layer here and these are materials and the re and the way we learn these notes is by holding l and notice that if i click here i cannot put this one here and the reason is this is a material this is not a vector or or a float that we can blend so the way we are going to use this i'm going to delete this i'm going to type blend material you will see that i have different material layer blends here what i want to choose is the material blend standard you can either use a simple or the standard i find that the standard has more options but it's fairly more complex so we will use the standard so for the standard we will have our base material our top material and our alpha so just to try things out we will try to put our grass here as our base material and then i will put my top material let's say it will be my sand okay so let's put our sand here let's grab it here now anything that is on top will be my white texture so let's delete this for now we don't need it anymore and if i go here i can grab my mask and i can choose my red channel here so my red channel let's use what are you saying here put the grass on on the bottom just like this the grass will be here and then on top wherever you find white in this texture we are going to paint the other material so let's say if it's one here and it's zero here in my texture which is white here i will put the sand on top and if it's zero i will just keep the base material here which is my grass if you want to preview this node you can hold a to put an add note and i will put this here and i right click start previewing note and it's a little hard to preview here because our landscape coordinates are too big but basically the white dots will be our top material okay so we will do the same for the rest of materials and actually let's just put this material for now to see how it looks like so let's put our base color like this and you notice that i cannot put this one here and what i'm gonna do is to break material attributes okay so i break material attributes and i will put my base color here my roughness here my specular i will put zero because i don't want any specular in my landscape i will put my normal here and my amine occlusion here and this will be good enough i guess so if i go to my material you can see that it's kind of working we have our grass here and our rock pebbles here so it's working right so basically this the our rocks will be our white texture that we have here and the black texture will show the grass which we don't want so let's just keep layering on top you can play with this to see which kind of material you you want to use next but i'm going to duplicate this one and my base material will be this one now this is my new layer and now my top material will be my maybe my rocky cliff or my let's just put my mossy rock here just like that and we will put the alpha here will be my green channel and i will put it here hit apply and look what i have now i have my rug material here and i have this one and obviously my grass is disappearing because you know it's my base and there are not enough white spots for it anymore um it's a pity but it's okay that's what we want we don't want our grass to spawn first and last one will be our rock cliff so let's duplicate this one put our base material here and top material will be a rocky cliff and then we will go to our alpha here and we will grab here and we will put it here okay now that i do that now we'll have three materials i have my rocky cliff i have my other material that i can use and i have this one okay so let's what do we do now because we cannot paint anything here like if we play here play from here it's nice we have our ground and we have our mountains and we can play with those it's fairly nice to have this automatic setup but we cannot do any change let's say i want this area to have grass or something we cannot paint and the reason we cannot paint is because we are not creating any paint layers in our landscape so this is what we're gonna do next so so far any question yeah we had um just to not don't do not diverge too much from the what what you were talking about um leah mask i use photoshop a lot in my job and the rgb channels correlate to the luminosity in those specific color ranges but here we're talking about height not luminosity right so why rgb here and well he specified that he was new to unreal so okay did you understand yeah yeah so height map is just a convention name we use for landscapes so the real value is these rgb channels which are like you say luminosity values are from zero to one and my red channel has because we are talking about igv uh we are not printing uh like physical print we are using pixels uh our red channel will be this one and this is the luminosity of this one actually the green channel will be this one and the blue channel will be this one so together combined looks something like this that doesn't really tells us everything but uh these are grayscale channels actually if you go here you can see that we have our grayscale here the height map is just a convention name we use for for games uh because the height is just the zero to one value it's like this one this will be a height map where zero is the lowest part and one is the highest part is the the brightest that's why we call it height because it goes from from the ground to the top and this will give us the real displacement settings that actually create this landscape but the concepts are the same height map is just a convention we use in games yeah and about that they say yeah makes sense in this instance the red channel could be reserved for tall parts and of the height map and the blue could be for the lowest that kind of thing yeah yeah you're right that's exactly how it should be um you can of course try to mix it and try to create your your own setups if i go to world machine i have you can see i've been playing a lot with my maps here there is no right or wrong way to do it you just want to have enough variation so that you can have something to start with the auto material won't solve all your problems but it will solve your initial problems that is blocking out the landscape but you can play with any kind of map and you know the best way to do it is just do it like we have just done it just right now just try to play with it and see how it looks like in unreal and you can always change these channels and you know create different maps if you want there is no right or wrong way to do this there was another question the follow-up to to the first question that chris made about the landscape about the divisions they were talking about when you create the landscape you specify the number of sections i was wondering what those sections are for i believe it's the sections yeah um yeah the sections are a way to put the components in the to put the components in memory so right now you don't see it because i don't have my word uh or partition but if i click word partition here you will see that each style and especially if i create external actors in my project you will see that each tile will look like this here and i can choose which tile i want to load and which ones i don't for example i want to load all these tiles but i don't want to load these ones and the reason why this is important is because when you create a huge landscape when you load the entire landscape it's going to take a while to load especially if it's very big we saw the beginning that it can be like eight kilometers it can take a while this landscape is fairly small but if you have a big one you want to select these components in your file per actor to actually load different sections of your landscape so you don't have your computer crash after loading the landscape especially after you put the materials and the procedural stuff that it would load all the meshes there you don't want to load all of them at once this is why we use the components right and yeah in the creation of the landscapes there are created into sections because really the landscape is just like a grid so we have little cells so that's why we have one by one or four by four and you can specify the size of those sections and yep we have two questions one says is this only for one machine or can we use gaia any software will do i use war machine because i mean it's fairly simple uh you can use gaia too the important thing is that you get all these maps here the the slope mask and the height map we export at the beginning that's the important thing how the software you use it really doesn't matter as long as you get the textures because you only need the textures in unreal you can use any software you are more comfortable with right and the last one was from baymax they say what box do you recommend from the marketplace and i mentioned we recommend our packs you can find them in of course yeah time for the shameless promo promotion and i already dropped the link yeah i will put it on on the screen yeah yeah we do have really nice facts but in in terms of landscape um there are some nice landscape materials in the marketplace that are free i guess the that you could use uh i believe the landscape auto material became free i'm not sure for the month of forever but there are several landscape materials that you could use in the marketplace if you just type landscape auto material then you will you will get it great yep thank you liam yeah you can also get this character in our marketplace all right so uh time to continue there's still a lot of things to show um so right now we only have a static material which it's cool to start out but if you want to make changes you cannot and the reason if if we go to our landscape and we go to our paint mode we don't have any layer here we can use and you if you see here in our target layers i'm not sure if it's easy to see or not but here i cannot see any layer and the reason is i haven't create any layer in my you know in my in my landscaping my material so let's do that now the way we're going to create these layers is we're going to go to our landscape and there is a node called if we put type landscape you will find landscape layer blend and this is where people get confused about the auto material like how it works the auto material will be in the layer zero just like this it's like layer 0 this is my auto material and layer 1 and 2 and 3 will be my manual layers that i paint by hand so in any case if you want to use your auto material it's used at the beginning then if you want to paint anything more specific you can always paint by hand and that's actually what we do in games the auto material doesn't solve everything but it will solve a lot of problems so if you want anything specific just paint by hand okay so we will do that now how we're going to create those is we're going to create the layers so the first layer we're going to call our auto material just like that okay and this will be our first layer and then i have my let's you say create a new one index one and this will be my layer one and let's create three more this will be my layer one this will be my layer two this will be my layer tree and this will be this one will be my layer four all right so i have my four layers which corresponds to layer one two three and four and i have my auto material and what we're going to do is to actually use this layer blend to create the materials so we're going to our material blend standard and this will be my our auto material so we can actually comment this and put something like auto material just like that okay so this will be our auto material and we will plug this in into our first layer that way our first layer always be our auto material and we can paint on top anything we want and we can always come back to this so we will plug this one here and now we will go to our different layers let's just say i want my layer one to be just keep this one for now because we already have a layer one here and our conventions so layer one will be this one layer two will be this one layer three will be this one and finally layer four will be this one oops drag again layer 4. now we have our layers and just like that we are putting all layers here all our information and everything should work one thing before i put this once i want to make sure all my textures here are on wrap mode so that i can make use of my shader that actually allows me to have more textures by default you will only have 16 but if you want to add more materials make sure you put the wrap mode here so you can put more than 16 texture samples in your in your landscape okay so look what happened here everything became black and the reason is now we are using our layers and our layers doesn't have any information and this information is that we need to paint so we will go through each layer and we will create a weight asset by default it will create in my map location and call the level of the the name of the level and then put shared assets so i will click save here and it will create this asset here that i don't need to modify it i mean this is just some default properties so you can do the same here and you can already see that my auto material is working and the reason is that layer zero is flooded with all the colors so i will go to my weight blended material and i will do the same for the rest of the materials i put this one here then put this one here and then put this one here great i will save everything and now what i can do is actually paint something for example if i want to paint grass i can literally grab here and paint my grass here i can do the same here and i can do something like this and i have i can have my green lens i can shift to delete or i can just click and paint and now i have my grass here and i can change the brush size to just manually paint these areas if i want to and actually can create other transitions here like for example something like this we can create something like this and you know we can continue to modify our landscape so what happens now if well what happens if you want to go back to our your layer material you can either shift-click and call the layer you want to delete and you will go back to all your layer material or you can right click here and click fill layer and this will fill all your layers here with your auto material you can do the same here with the grass for example you can fill the landscape with the grass material and it will load for the first time and now everything is grass or you can do the same here three layer with your rock material or you can actually use your landscape auto material okay so what we want to do now is to have our ability to spawn some meshes and right now if i click on my grass i paint it i i have my grass and it's nice that i have something like that but i want to put some meshes here and by default i will use another layer this layer i will call this will be my layer 2 so i will call add a new index and i will call l2 grass something like this l2 grass and the layer two grass will be the same material okay so i'm gonna hit apply and now i'm going to create my share asset and now i can paint my grass here just like i have in the other one however this one i want to spawn some meshes and in order to do that we need to use a new system in a real but not new but at least new for this demonstration we're going to use the grass system so the grass system allows us to spawn procedurally meshes in certain areas that we choose in this case we're going to spawn some meshes here for our grass and we will put it on only this paint layer because i want to have my grass layer here without grass in case i don't want it so it's a good idea to always create new layers that actually have auto material generation or very say procedural meshes generated and the way we're going to do that it's very simple we're going to go to our landscape material and we're going to type grass and we're gonna put landscape grass output okay this output will put my meshes in the landscape okay so the other thing i need to do is i'll go to landscape i need a landscape layer sample okay what this will do is to sample one of these layers can be one two three or four but basically this ones it will get the information of one of those so i will put this one here and i will get this information and i will tell my grass layer i want you to spawn meshes only in this layer so the way we're going to do that is only use our l2 grass here which is the name of the layer notice that the name needs to be exactly the same with capital letters no spaces and everything in order for this to work okay so now our setup is almost complete we just need to do something else if i go to my content browser let's go to our landscape auto material and let's create right click polish and let's create a landscape grass type and if i click here i will create a new grass type this will be my grass type let's just say i don't know it's grass what what can i say okay so what this does is we'll spawn meshes here so i can have an array of meshes i can click here and you will see i have some properties here by default i will use this cube one meter cube just to showcase what it does and what you will see that nothing has happened here i should have the cube here and the reason is my grass node is not linked to my new grass type i created so if i click ctrl b to check this one in my content browser i click here and then i go to my landscape and then click here again now we are using the grass type we just created so we're gonna click apply and here we're gonna pray for this to work okay so we actually have some here some cube here looks like we have some meshes here on our on the ground but you know it's fine so now the way we're going to do this is oops we're going to our content browser we're going to change the grass type here you will see that i have some options like my density i can put like 1000 and you will see now i can see my cubes here i can put something like 800 or 500 400 150 okay so now you will see my cubes spawn right when i paint my grass so if i paint here i will have more cubes here and if i go here i can play i have all my cubes here spawning and also some cubes in the sky which looks looks like a bug so it's fine games have bugs so what you can do here actually is to spawn different types of meshes for example i can create a new type of mesh here and this time i'm going to choose a maybe a sphere okay i will put something like 10 and you will see that i have i'm placing this one basically on some parameters i can change the heater to basically put very uniform or i can add some chaos i can use random rotation i can align to surface or not and that's basically it so what we're going to do is to do something nicer we're going to go to our mega scan assets and we have some assets here we could use in our 3d plans we could use our i type lod0 let's check this one this one looks like it will do so we're gonna click this one here all right and let's grab another one maybe this one or not this one for sure okay maybe this one so this will be my second one and if i go here i i cannot see anything and that's because the density is very low so if i click like 500 then i will have more density so i will have like 800 here and then i will have like 100 1000 here what i can actually do is to change the minimum and maximum height i can randomize this for example i can put one minimum and maximum tree and this will make it even more obvious and i can put max 2 maximum 3 here so now when i play my game i can have something like this or i can have my grass here and notice that it's only happening on the areas that i'm painting so if i go to my landscape let's say i want i don't want grass that doesn't have the mesh i can easily paint this one and i won't have any mesh in that in case i want i can paint another one and this will have my grass mesh here and i kind of spawn any type of mesh just like we you saw at the beginning we can spell cubes we can spawn rocks we can spot anything we like now we can actually create different types of grass types for different types of surfaces let's say you want to put more rocks here we can actually put some rocks here and procedurally spawn all the rocks in our terrain without us to paint manually and place all the assets okay so um before going further any any questions so far um nope not not that i can see it was pretty clear all right yeah i saw that liam is leaving thank you for being here liam yeah it's also 11 p.m here where i live you're also in asia yeah i'm also in asia so um let's keep going let's do one more thing uh before closing the landscape topic so we can take a look at level instance blueprints okay so if you see my landscape i you know it's fairly nice that we have this auto material but it can look a little bit nicer so what we can do is to actually grab this color that you remember here we can use this color to add unique colors to our landscape so this is optional optional step if you want to put it or not but i want to put an overlay okay and what i want to do is my base will be this one and then i will put my overlay color here and i will put my base color here and what happens is that i'm overlaying all my landscape enough very it's very this is very strong which i don't want that so what i will do is to put a larp node and i will put an alpha i will put something like 0.1 i will put it here on b it will be the overlay note which is 0.1 and on a will be our original base color and i will put it here and just like that we are adding a little bit more variation to our landscape by using other colors here just a small color variation if i go to my unlead mode i can make this one a little bit more obvious like 0.3 let's just wait a second okay maybe we need to wait more than one second okay yeah compiling shaders uh now you can see we you you have the color overlay working uh a little bit more intense which is maybe something you want maybe not in any case it's nice to have this option in case you want to add some variation to your landscape now let's move to open words uh to do this i'm going to export some quick sale assets here i will add quick cell me see if i'm logging okay and i already have some meshes here these are not nanite i will just i just download them very quickly and i will just add them to my project just like this okay so how you want to create big worlds is let's say you want to put a village here okay this say we will take this land and we will put houses here and man-made elements and as you say you put your block out so you grab your cube here you can put something like this and you can put the floor maybe like this something like that and you notice that this is let's just say this is my this is my hometown this is my my ruins and i want to put this one in the world many times let's just say this is a very special special asset so if you want to decorate a big world it's gonna take a while to just duplicate put this one here oops let's just alt click make sure you're in word coordinates otherwise you will go crazy here you can have word coordinates or local coordinates so if you choose a wall coordinates you will use a work position to use the gizmo so let's say you want to put this one here and if we play our game you can see how small this is it's just this and let's say you need to put like 10 of these things in your game so what you can do and i will delete this for now is you can create a level instance blueprint from this so i will grab all my meshes here and i will right click and level instance and create from selection and what this will do is to create an instance as you say it's like a level that contains all these assets and i can create several instances of this level in my world let me grab some water first okay so what you want to do is to put pack level instance blueprint so it will pack all the blueprints all your meshes into a blueprint and you can change the pivot point to an actor and you can choose which actor you want to put the pivot point on in my case i just want to put the minimum z-axis which is fairly in the center and in the bottom just like here just maybe around here okay so i will just put this one here and click ok and i will name this mesh mass ruins zero one and i will also create a blueprint called bpp mass ruin01 alright now that i do that what i can do is to actually duplicate this asset and put it in other places here and let's just say you want your asset here so if you want this to be a little bit nicer you can go to a landscape let's go to our later one we can sculpt and actually sculpt holding shift down just like that we can actually flatten this this one here just like that let's sculpt this one like this and then flatten just like this and this will create some options for us to put our landscape of course i can actually put a flat here let everything and then go here and then move this one like this here and i can keep modifying my landscape i can smooth it out until i'm happy with the results or i can sculpt something here i can smooth here until i have something that i'm happy with okay and because we're working with layers we can always go back to our original we can modify this one negative one or positive one which is the original one or zero if you want to remove the layer intensity of this one these edit layers are super handful on having edits in your terrain without without destroying the work you did before so let me save everything and look what happened now is that i have this blueprint here but if i want to modify it look what i will do here i will right click edit and i will select my bpp mass ruins one and notice that everything turns black and white okay and i can modify this one let's say i want to put something like this and then put another big one here or maybe some kind of walls that i can use here like this and i can duplicate this one okay something like this and now what i will do is right click commit and click bpp mass runes save selected and you will see that all my assets have been updated and i can just duplicate this one and put it in another place here let's just say here and this way is a very powerful this is a very powerful way to create your blueprints so normally when you're blocking out your your map you will use this kind of meshes to quickly block out the the map so let's say i will play with this and i will try the game i will say okay this is fairly nice so let's try to decorate it so very simple i can just go to my content browser and i can select my assets here static mesh and i have a bunch of assets that i can use what i can do is to find the japanese ones we just created maybe this one's and we will put here like this so before doing that let's right click edit edit mask blueprint and we will just drag and drop all these assets here i will do something like this okay and actually let's smooth this one that's not what i want put something pretty straight like this okay and now we can play with this to have different meshes and duplicate this one put something like this or we can actually delete our block out which we don't need anymore we can do something like this you can put your floor mesh like this you can rotate it a little bit you can put something like this and [Music] also you can move it up a little bit to have some variation come try some other meshes here for example this one you can try something like this to put here and maybe you want some stairs something like this we can put the stairs here and we can create something like this and this is how we can create okay so we can create our walls like this okay can rotate this one create something like this if you want and duplicate this one to have you know just some different assets i go here then i put this one here and i don't need this anymore let's go back here we will put the japanese pillar here something like this and we will delete all these pillars here and we will put it here like this just like that and here we will put something i don't know maybe not japanese but let's just grab this one just just because we can buddha meets the roman empire and maybe the head of this guy here just like that okay so right click commit and then save the changes save selected save for blueprint and look what happens all my instances have been updated with my new blueprint so let my shaders compile i can actually go here and if i see that these ones are floating i can just right click edit and i can grab all of those move move them down right click commit save selected save the blueprint and all my blueprints will be updated so now when i right click and play from here now i have something in my in my map that i can use okay and of course we can add collision to this it's very easy to add collision in a real we can go here and hit apply collision now we have it let's do the same for these ones okay this one also by collision collision has significant improvements since unreal engine 5 so it's really nice addition so this is how you create open words and you can go here and you can have something in your game really fast you can see i have different ruins here for my from my map and i can always go here to my landscape and i can modify this one so i can sculpt here just like that smooth a little bit sculpt again here so i can have something really nice but i can use my auto material to actually populate the grass here if i want to make it a little bit interesting so i can play from here and now i have my materials working and i have my blueprints working i will reopen the map because it looks like it's getting a little bit lag laggy so i will save all and new level actually i will reopen unreal so just for a second let's close this let's save everything let's yes yes to everything and we will go here and open yeah it's a friendly reminder that it's still an early access even though it doesn't look like it but yeah there are yep sometimes where the stuff happens i cannot find my i cannot find my unreal level oh there you are okay so open recent levels level auto material right so let the shaders compile um that's it for myself what i want to show uh i also have like if i go here i have different mass blueprints that i created that i can use for my levels something like this could be used easily in your landscape and the way i create those is by using label instance blueprints so it's just the same it nothing changes and you can see how using level instance blueprints and your landscape your landscapes can really help you to create worlds much faster i mean i can just right click edit make this one bigger commit and now all my meshes have changes and this one is a little bit bigger and i can do the same for the ground say you want to have some ground here you can just put like this you don't really depend entirely on the landscape you can use any type of method you want in order to achieve any any kind of result the landscape is used there to help you out yeah and even though it's the same level instance blueprint you just rotate it and it feels different so with more complex stuff you won't really be able to notice that it's the same thing like paste it a lot of times in the map yeah correct uh one one rule of thumb anytime you create a game asset make sure it looks different from all the angles so that i can easily right click here and i can duplicate this asset and i can rotate it and now this asset looks different from this one it's the same it's just rotated if you make all your assets look the same from this angle and this angle you lose a lot of opportunity to reuse the assets you create so it's a yeah it's a really nice tip to actually use different angles in your in your meshes so that you can you know have more variations yeah you can see that i can use use my landscapes to just take care of this part good stuff um i'm not seeing any other question but we can wait a little bit if anyone has sure in the meanwhile i i can show you how to take this level to make it a little bit nicer so if i click click ctrl l i can rotate my sound i can have like the sunset view okay and you know uh one thing you can add to your levels that actually make it look great is you go to visual effects you go to exponential headphones and suddenly everything looks much nicer and the reason is we are adding depth into our scene and that is one of the things that in games you you need to fake a lot in order to you know usually we're not able to create very very big words um unless you're making an open world of course but it's the illusion of dev that gives the players the the feeling that the world is actually bigger than it should and just by putting this you can sense that the world is much bigger so if i go to my exponential fork properties i will make sure that in my project settings if i type i will put support skype atmosphere affecting height and the reason i want to do this is because my son has colors and right now i'm losing my tint for my sunset and the reason is my is actually adding more it's adding on top of the color of the sunset so i need to put this one to zero and you can already see what's going on and my directional instance in to zero and now my fog will actually be the same color as my landscape and you can play with the settings you can increase the fog density or the distance or the fog height you can do a lot of stuff here and actually if we go to our sky atmosphere actor we can change this one we can change the color would like jojo this is also jojo basically any number that is too big will make your game look like jojo so fox are extremely nice addition and we can use them in an array of different ways to add more cinematic feelings you can also go to our directional light and go to our light shaft on light blue and add the blue if you want a more cinematic feeling and you can have the bloom scale or you can change the light shaft you can see that i'm having some rays that are coming from the sound here they are really nice so what i want to do is to duplicate this one and put this one here again okay it's amazing how easy it is to create this world scenario all right so one last thing let's take a nice screenshot before wrapping it up let's drag our amazing light let's go here to blueprint let's put our knight here let's grab a nice shot for him and let's create a cinematic camera so if i go to cinematic cinema camera actor i can click here and then pilot so i can choose where i want my my actor to be i can put put this guy here all right and what i can do is to go to my camera settings and i can change the settings a little bit i can click the focus on on this guy and draw the focus actually have like the cinematic feeling and i can change the focal length to something like 100 something like this and what i can do is to debug this one just like this and i can just move my landscape here all right so that's that's it for for my site uh we went through a lot here we went through the landscape auto material how to import meshes how to how to paint automatic grass in our landscape just like this and we've been to we've we've bring to a lot of things let's take this guy look at the horizon just like he's he's he's a winner so all right and so we we know how to import landscapes we know how to get the maps out of war machine just like here we know how to use the maps in our project in our landscapes landscape auto material [Music] here we know how to use those height maps to create our auto material we understand how the layer blends work and how that grass node system works in unreal to spawn procedural terrains and we also took a look at the level instancing to quickly create levels in your in your game actually this is a really nice screenshot if you want to take a screenshot of this just click here high resolution screenshot or you can change the resolution here i will just click one and here i can choose take a look at my screenshot so that's it for me i don't know if you want to add something before wrapping it up um no no i have not seen any other question um just at like thanks for coming to the stream it we really appreciate all the the questions and the interactions we have in the chat and yeah yeah we will see you in the next one take care take care everyone stay safe bye

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 4,689

Rating: 4.9509201 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine 5, how to install unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial beginners, tutorial unreal 5, tutorial ue5, how to use unreal engine 5, unreal 5 tutorial fast, learn unreal engine free, download unreal 5, how to create a game with unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 fundamentals, ue5 tutorial series, unf games, unreal sensei, unreal engine 5 early access, download unreal engine 5, download ue5, introduction unreal engine 5, intro unreal 5

Id: Y-CDWyQvKhA

Length: 99min 40sec (5980 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021