Learn Unreal Engine 4 for Blender Users - UE4 Beginner Tutorial

hi everyone if you are a blender user and you want to learn unreal engine then this tutorial is made for you in this tutorial we will go over unreal engine but with a focus on its similarities and differences with the blender that's how you can easily transfer your skills from blender into unreal engine and at the end of this tutorial we will also create this open world environment you see right now so we will go over some of the fundamentals of unreal engine first like level creations creating pbr materials and most importantly how to bring your blender creations into unreal engine and then we will go over the fundamentals of lighting and create this real-time architectural visualization scene to demonstrate how to achieve photorealistic lighting in unreal engine and finally of course at the end of the tutorial we will make a large-scale environment with an ancient shrine to the suzanne monkey head and also a golden hour version of it now do not be intimidated unreal engine and blender actually share a lot more in common than you think and that's because blender eevee is inspired in a lot of ways by unreal engine so without ever having used unreal engine before you're probably already familiar with a lot of the tools unreal engine uses so with all that being said let's jump into it so this is what we see when we open up unreal which is the unreal project browser real quickly to download unreal you need the epic games launcher and then go into the unreal section choose an engine version and download and install it i'm using 4.25 for now on but you can use pretty much whatever version you want to use so if i go into here we can select any recent projects or we can create our own project using templates and templates are pretty cool because if i go into games i can click on first person and we get a first person game automatically so that's pretty cool but i'm just going to be using blank for now and then if i hit next we get a bunch of project settings and we can generate a new project give it a name and choose a location so i'm going to keep everything as default right now except make sure with starter content is selected because we'll be using some of the starter content to help us get started and i'm going to save this in my desktop because i want easy access to all the files that make up my project and i'm going to give it a name i'll just call it my blender project and then hit create this is what you should see when you open up an unreal project for the first time now before we jump into our 3d viewport and start navigation we first have to go over the content browser which is this big window down here because it's pretty important and how unreal organizes this project compared to blender so blender files operate off of a process called linking so essentially blender file can link to an asset located somewhere on your computer disk and this is great because multiple blender files can share the same asset and these assets can be anywhere from a texture to sound to even other blender files and this has a lot of pros namely that your blender files will save a lot of memory so i rarely see blender go above 10 megabytes and you also create your own file management system so it's very customizable now there are some comms that is you can easily break your links if you reorganize your files or you move your project to a new computer so you have to go through and manually relink everything which can be a hassle and if you want to edit your assets you have to open that up in a separate project or maybe even a separate program so unreal does something differently in that it takes an asset located on your computer converts that into a u assets and stores it within the content folder of your project and these assets can be anything from textures to sound to even 3d models in the form of an fbx file or obj now you have some pros and that the assets will always be within the project so you do not have to worry about re-linking and you can edit the assets within the project so you don't have to open up a separate project everything can just be in one single place now there are some cons and that you can get very very large file sizes oftentimes i can have some projects going over 10 gigabytes even into the 30 gigabyte ranges now to better demonstrate how unreal organizes this project i have a little monkey head right here if i open it up in microsoft paint we can see it's just the default suzanne monkey head so on our desktop if you remember that's where we selected where our project should be we have a folder and if we open up this folder this contains all the assets all the data that makes up our project and if we go into content and then into starter content we can see that if i go into starter content within the content browser it's pretty much a one-to-one representation of what we see here and if i go even further into let's say shapes we can see we have a bunch of dot u assets so this means if i go out and still within the starter content folder if i drag in monkey head you'll see we won't see a monkey head now because we need to convert monkey head into a dot u asset and we can even say that it's telling us right now you need to import it through unreal and convert it because i'm real smart so if i want the monkey head in this location i need to drag it into the content browser and then it'll give me a bunch of fbx import options i like to not create new materials and then import and don't worry i'll go over what all those settings are in a bit and how you can change your blender creations into fbx files but we can see now that we have a monkey head located here and if i click it up it's working really fine in unreal engine and if i go back into my star content folder and refresh we don't see anything that's because we first have to save now if i go in here we can see that we have the monkey head dot u asset located within the content folder of our project you can think of the content browser as unreal's own file explorer that contains all the dot u assets that make up our project so now it's on to the fun part and that is how we can navigate and explore our 3d world right here and before we can do that we first have to open up blender and see how blender handles navigation so blender is pivot based we basically choose an object and now we're able to rotate around that object and that is great for when we're trying to 3d model one individual object but if you ever try to create a large open space in blender or environment you know how hard it can be trying to navigate that way it's kind of like playing a first person shooter with a trackball it's possible but there are better alternatives so unreal gets around this problem by actually using video game controls so this is very important you want to hold down the right mouse button and with the right mouse button held down we can now rotate and look around our camera and then we use the wasd keys to move around just like any video game we've ever played so it's pretty good because we already have the muscle memory down to able to move around like that and we can also use e to go up and q to go down so again it's just the wasd keys with the right mouse button held down and that's how we pretty much navigate around our world we can also change and adjust our camera speed by going up here and changing the speed we can also change the speed in smaller increments by holding down the right mouse button and using the scroll wheel so scroll wheel down and now i'm going pretty slow and then scroll real up and i go a lot faster so right now you should see a little cheat sheet up they go that's basically all the controls you can just take a screenshot of that if you really need to so not only can we navigate our world by using the wasd keys but we can also rotate around objects just like in blender so to do so you want to select an object by just left-clicking like in blender and then if we hit the f key we can focus up on that object and now holding down alt and the left mouse button not the right mouse button we can now rotate around individual objects just like in blender so i can select that object right there hit f hold down alt and rotate around it and with alt still held down instead of using the left mouse button i use the right mouse button to zoom in and out so that's pretty cool we have both options to be able to rotate and go around our world but personally i love to use the wasd keys since i have the muscle memory there so now let's go over how we can move scale and rotate objects in unreal i mean pretty obviously if you're a blender user you would assume that this gizmo right here moves my object around so if i control z i can actually come up here and now i can rotate it and i can press the button right next to that and now i can scale it so the shortcuts are w if you want to move an object e if you want to rotate it and r if you want to scale it so control z to undo those and we can also see that actually oh yeah right now we can actually see that we have a little square in between the different axis so i can use this to just move an object around locking it kind of like using shift when removing an object in blender also you'll notice that we're right now increment grid snapping we can turn that off by clicking on the icon right here so now it's no longer on a grid also rotation it's snapping at 10 degree angles right now we can turn that off there and we can turn off scale snapping there we can also adjust the amount so right now it's going every 10 units and keep in mind unreal units are centimeters so right now it's snapping every 10 centimeters if i change that to 100 centimeters now i'm going to be snapping every meter so i'm going to hit ctrl z undo that and let's go back to 10 and disable the grid snapping so to duplicate objects all you have to do is hit control and w and you can't see anything because it duplicated it in place but now we have a new table personally i don't like to do that instead i like to hold down alt and with the translation gizmo i could just drag out a new copy hold down alt again and drag out another copy so alt is a good way to quickly duplicate a lot of objects another thing you should know is that if i move this into the air right there we can see that there's a little world icon that means we're moving it in the world space if we want to move it in our object's local space i can hit it and now we're using the local space of my object so if i rotate this like this we can see the z-axis is pointing in the direction of the object not in the world so i'm hit delete to get rid of that also within the content browser you can bring in new objects by just dragging in a new guy so now we have our little monkey head in there so to delete object all you have to do is select that object and hit the delete key and let's delete that table right there and now let's make the crappiest level in existence which will just be a house so under star content let's go into shapes and now we have a bunch of dot u assets so i'm going to drag in this cube hit r and let's go scale this to make it a wall hit w and now let's go to alt and drag this wall out right there and let's hold down alt and let's drag out another wall and this is a neat little trick if we hold down shift while removing object we can lock our camera to that object and i use that all the time so now let's hit e to go into rotation mode and make sure our rotation snapping is set to true that's how i know we're getting 90 degrees so w again and let's move this to make it the back wall and i think i'm just going to scale it a bit more like that and hold on alt and let's make the front so again it's going to be a really bad looking house just to demonstrate unreal's modeling tools and a couple of other things that we're going to go over in just a bit so like this and you'll notice that my screen's brightness is changing right now and we're going to go over that in a second but let's add in a roof drag this in the middle here and scale down because that's kind of creepy if a house has a roof that's all and we'll notice that in the top left here we say lighting needs to be rebuilt seven unbuilt objects we get rid of it by clicking on build don't worry i'll go over what build lighting actually does in a bit but long story short all you need to know is that it is baking in shadow maps everywhere so this will just make our house look a little bit better and there you have it we have probably the crappiest house in unreal engine but it was a good exercise to help get us situated with the tools of unreal engine so let's go over the viewport controls and specifically why our screen was getting brighter and darker randomly and that's not actually random because if we go into our house you'll see that our screen gets brighter and brighter and then if i go outside the house our screen becomes darker again and that's why we built the house to demonstrate dynamic exposure this is the same as a blender's exposure located in the color management tab where if i bring it up you can see the screen gets brighter and i bring it down and the screen gets darker now on reels exposure is just like that except it's dynamic so kind of like how our eyes work so if you're a blender user you're probably not used to using a dynamic exposure so we can turn that off by going into lit and under exposure settings we uncheck game settings so now we have console exposure and even if we go into our house our screen doesn't get brighter and we can adjust our exposure right here we can bring it up to make it darker and bring it down to make it brighter let's just keep it as default at one for now and while we're at it let's go over all the different options we have up here so first off we have this little drop down in the top right if i click on this we have a game view mode so if i click on this we get all of my widgets back here and then if i hit g which is the shortcut i can hide all the widgets and see what the player will actually see in game so g widgets and g no more widgets so that's really cool and i use that literally all the time it's kind of subconscious at this point and we can also go into full screen mode by clicking on immersive mode or just hitting f11 on my keyboard just like in blender we can also go into orthographic modes like in blender by clicking on this car icon and we have a bunch of different orthographic perspectives to choose from click on right you can see that now our world is in an orthographic perspective if i hold down the right mouse button i can pan and use the scroll wheel to zoom in and zoom out so you probably just notice unreal switch view modes into our wireframe and we can say that it's a wireframe by coming up here and we have brush wireframe now if i get it out of my orthographic if i hit perspective we can see that that changed back to lit so right here is where we see all the different view modes so we can see where scene looks like unlit we can see what it looks like with just the lighting the reflections or the wire frame so this is just a really good way to kind of debug your scene if something isn't looking right you can go through each of these view modes and they have shortcuts and see exactly which channel is causing issues and fix it there now let's go into our show flags but first let me press g to bring back all my editor widgets and under the show flag we can see that we have a bunch of on and off switches and if i go to grid and just uncheck that box we can see we no longer see our grid so this is just a good way to go through everything and check and uncheck things if you don't want to see it so sometimes you might expect to see like a landscape here and you're wondering where is my landscape make sure you go under show and make sure landscape is checked on before we move on let's actually go over the user interface real quickly and what all these different windows here actually mean so to the right here we have the details panel and the details panel is basically like blender's object properties so we have a bunch of properties here that we can change specific to whatever object we have selected now don't be overwhelmed i know there's a lot of different properties here but pretty much we only use 20 of what is actually here the other 80 are for very specific circumstances now right above the details panel we have the world outliner which is literally just like blender's outliner so just like in blender we can organize a world outliner into folders so if i expand out my world outliner right click an empty space i can create a folder and call this my folder and then just go through and drag whatever objects we need into that folder and i can also press on the i icon to hide and unhide things i don't like or i could come into here left click on any items in here and hit h to just hide them and then hit ctrl h to unhide everything above everything we have the toolbar which is a selection of commonly used tools so we'll go over what each tool actually does once they are needed but one thing you'll probably notice that's different from your toolbar is this mega scans icon don't worry i'll go over how you can install the mega scans plugin later in this tutorial and to the left of everything we have the place actors window so this is essentially a collection of really common actors that will always be placing into our world and this is also where we're going to see and find all the different lights here so to just place the actors it's just like the content browser all you have to do is drag an actor into your world now one window that isn't included in unreal by default which i think should be because we use it all the time is the world settings to get the world settings you want to go into the windows go down and click on world settings and i will get a new window right here and this is essentially all the different properties and settings of our world and we're on the topic of adding in new windows let's actually go over how we can customize our user interface so each of these windows has a little tab right here if you don't see this tab then you probably see a triangle right there all you have to do is click on the triangle and then we'll get back that tab so if i click on the viewport triangle we can see that there's a tab right there and if i select this tab i can move it around and pretty much dock it anywhere at the top here or even dock it like that so it's like little different tabs that we can switch in between so that's pretty cool then if i ever want to hide these tabs all you have to do is right click and click on high tab and that tab will be replaced by the little triangle icon again so you can go through and really just pretty much customize user interface to your liking if you ever customize your user interface to the point of no return don't worry you can come up to window go down into load layout and go default editor layout so now we have our default user interface back again so that's pretty much the user interface within unreal engine in my opinion customizing unreal engines user interface is a lot easier than blender's ui so with all that being said let's actually create a new level right now so i'm going to go up in starter content into content and let's create a new folder by right clicking go in new folder and let's call this my folder because we're creative and one thing i should point out that if you don't have the star content then that's because you forgot to select it when we were making our project but do not worry you can always add starter content by clicking on add new add feature content pack content packs and starter content right there so let's go back up let's go into my folder and we could right click and create a new level that way or we go to file new level and now we have a selection of different level templates so if we did the original way that would just give us an empty level but i want to start somewhere specifically within the default level template and save selected so now if i hit control s we want to specify where i want to save our new level and i'm going to save it in my folder and call this my level so this level will basically be like our demo level from which we will show how to create materials and import objects from blender into unreal engine but first let's decorate this place up a bit if we go to content starter content materials i can apply any material into my world just like i'm dragging in an object so i'm going to drag in a material onto your object let go and now we have that material applied to that object i actually want grass right now so i'll bring that in and let's add in a spear so we go back into starter content go into props and let's use this preview mesh right here and rotate it that's how it's facing us now we're getting the lighting needs to be rebuilt up here again i can fix that by clicking on my light right here and setting this to movable so now that did go away beforehand we fixed it by clicking build don't worry i'll go over what the differences are between building and using movable lights in a bit okay so right now our grass is really dark so i could go into lit and then uncheck game settings and then let's bring down ev100 to zero that will just light it up but we have one issue and that is if i press play we can see that the exposure is still dynamic so whatever we have in lit in exposure will not affect what the player actually sees so to create a exposure that will affect both us and the player we need to create a post process volume from the place actors and drag it into my level just like that so really briefly the post process volume basically gives us access to a lot of nice special effects and also color grading for example if i go into global we go to saturation i can bring that from one to zero and you'll notice there isn't a change but if i go into my post process volume that saturation did apply i know everything is black and white so to actually take this post process and apply it to my entire level i have to go down all the way and uncheck actually check infinite extend unbound so now that post process volume is affecting everything i'll just get rid of that saturation because that was kind of weird by clicking on this little back icon right here this yellow thing and i'll just set anything within my details panel back to its defaults so to actually now change the exposure right here i can come up here go into exposure go into media mode and let's make it manual that'll just get rid of dynamic exposure giving us one constant brightness so now if i go to exposure compensation if i change this we're also not noticing effect that's because in lit game view is turned off so i need to turn back on game settings okay so now it's working so i can bring this up like that and bring it down and now if i press play you can see that our player is no longer getting dynamic exposure and both the brightness of what the player sees and the brightness of what us the editor sees are the same this is just a little bit too bright right now so i'm gonna go back in my post process and let's make this let's make this 9.5 okay so now it's on to the fun stuff and that is creating materials within unreal engine and how they're different and similar to materials in blender and you'll probably be surprised there are a lot more similarities than you think so to create a new material or pretty much any asset all you have to do is just right click in a blank space in the content browser and we have an option to create a lot of different assets let's just do material for now and let's call this my material and then you can double click to open up that material and right now this window is floating we can dock it up here and it's kind of like tap so now we can switch in between the two so you're probably wondering right now why unreal shader looks very similar to blender's principle shader and that's actually because blender's principle shader is literally based largely off of unreal's materials and if we compare both shaders side by side we can see that lava inputs are the same like base color metallic specular roughness and normal but there's also a lot of inputs that don't match up exactly but that's fine because if you've ever made a lot of materials in blender then you would know that for 90 materials we are only going to use our base color metallic roughness and normal inputs and this is the exact same case in unreal back in unreal engine we're actually in luck right now and that is just like in blender unreal materials operate off of material nodes so in the palette here we have a collection of all the different materials we can use now the controls are right mouse button to pan and scroll wheel to zoom in and out just like when we were in the orthographic view now the most important nodes are probably constant and constant 3 vector so a constant as you can guess is just a number while the constant 3 vector is color so if i double click on this i get a color picker and i can choose my color it's not making any change right now since i have to bring up the value slider right here up so now let's make this like an orange and i can plug this up there like that in a base color and we can see now we're getting our oranges yellow in the viewport right there and just like in blender roughness and metallic operate off of a scale of zero to one so let's make the roughness right now pretty rough 0.8 and if i plug that in the roughness we should get rid of that shine and now the shine is gone also the shortcuts if i hold down one and left click that will give me a constant one vector and holding down three and left clicking will give me color so let's make this one plug it into metallic and let's make this 0.25 and now we have kind of like a gold material let's apply this gold material to our level so if i go back into my level i'll just drag my material on the spear and you'll notice nothing happened it's getting this weird grid like thing going on and that's actually unreal's default material because whenever we make a change to the material we have to hit the apply button which will compile our material so that's a little bit different than blender so now we do get the gold looking shine and to better demonstrate what i mean if i make a change to this gold let's actually make it kind of like a silver right now like that and then we go my level there was no change going back here and compiling now there is a change so it's not real time but i'll go over right now how you can make that into a real-time material and we can do that through material instances so to create a material instance all you have to do is right-click on a material and click on create material instance now if we open up this instance we will see that there really is no option to change our color and that's because i have to tell unreal what nodes we want to be edible within our instance through turning those nodes into a material parameter so to do that all you have to do is right click on any node and go to convert to parameter and now let's call this color and if we hit apply we can see that in our material instance now we have a color parameter so if i go to my level and apply my material instance now if i click on color i can change what it is and it will be updating in real time let's make our metallic and our roughness also parameters so if we go back into my material let's right click on our metallic convert to parameter and let's call this a metallic value and then let's right click on our roughness convert to parameter and let's call this roughness value so now hit apply we should see those parameters in our material instance and here they are so if i activate both of these go back into my world now i can bring down my metallic value and we'll see it update in real time and i can bring up my roughness and we can also see that updating in real time and you'll notice that roughness and metallic are functioning just like how they do within blender and that's because both blender and unreal are physically based renderers so before we can go into how to turn your blender materials into unreal materials we first have to download some assets so everyone can follow along the assets you want to download will be on my gumroad page and there'll be a link in the description below once you have everything downloaded and unzipped within the folder you will see a blender file and a bunch of textures basically we're going to take what is within the splinter file and convert both of the material and the chair into unreal assets and we have an unreal engine project that has some assets we need to migrate over into our current project to copy on real assets from one project to another all you have to do is open up that project and select all the assets within the project that you want to bring into your new project keep in mind if you want to select multiple assets all you have to do is hold down control and if you want to select multiple objects in the viewport you can also hold down control and select them like that so i want to bring in this folder called lighting examples into the project we've been working with so far so what i'll do is right click on that folder go to migrate and then it'll give you a list of all the assets that's going to move over hit ok now you want to navigate to the content folder of your new project and then select it so you should get a little sign right here that says content migration completed successfully so now if we go into our old project we should see a new folder called lighting examples and if i open it up we can see that it contains all the assets that was originally in this project now let's go over how we can bring our blender materials and creations into unreal engine and we're going to first start off with the materials so if we open up the blender file that's in our downloaded content we can see that i have a pretty simple material below my chair right here and if i open it up it's literally just a base color roughness normal and i'm tiling it 3.65 times and i'm not even playing with the normal right there so i would say that this is pretty much 50 of all materials maybe we would add in a metallic but that's not needed for this materials because it's just spanish pavement so we're going to take all these nodes and i'll show you the equivalent ones in unreal engine first let's organize our project just a bit by creating a folder new folder let's just call the spanish pavement and we go inside here so we're going to go import our textures that are linked to that blender file which are right here so it is spanish pavement base color normal and roughness just three textures dragging in there and they should be good to go now we have to do a little bit of setup because just like in blender how if we go into these textures we can see that we have to specify that our roughness and our normal are not colors so they aren't srgb within the color space we have to pretty much do the same for our textures down here so in our base color srgb should be checked on since this is a color but for our roughness we need to check this off and for my normal map this should be checked off and compression settings should be set to normal map and unreal is smart enough to do it automatically for us and with all that in let's go save everything now we shall create our material right click call material let's call this m underscore spanish pavement you don't need to do an m underscore that's just kind of like the naming conventions of unreal and let's open this up and with this hovering like that let's actually make this window smaller because what i will do is drag my textures by clicking on this one then holding shift to select all these textures into my material so there we go and now we can see that my textures are in here and if i go down sampler type this is set to color this one is set to linear color and this one is set to normal and those are exactly how we want it to be and i'm just going to plug base color like that roughness normal hit apply and drag this material onto my ground here and now it looks like it is working great so obviously our texture is tiling way too much right now so we're going to change the scale and the way we change the scale is kind of different to blenders and probably the biggest difference is that unreal doesn't really have a mapping node we have to use some simple math to be able to scale everything so in my spanish payment we can grab my texture coordinates by literally just typing in texture coordinates also i don't think i mentioned this but instead of going into the palette and dragging in all my notes i like to just right click in the graph and it'll give me a search bar so now i'm going to drag off from here and let's go multiply and then instead of going one right clicking convert to parameter i could hold down s and left click to automatically create a parameter and let's name this one size let's give it a default value of one plug it in to multiply like that and plug the output of those into the uvs and let's make a material instance of this right click material instance drag that onto there let's open up our material and now we should be able to control our size so maybe a size of 0.5 one thing i'd like to use the mapping node for in blender is to offset our texture and we can do the same thing with an unreal but it's a little bit more complicated since we have to use some basic vector math so if you don't know a texture coordinate is outputting a two vector of a u channel and a v channel so we wanna add our own two vector to this output and we could create a vector by right clicking go and append and then if we hold down s and left click again let's name this u offset s left click v offset connect it up like that and we now just made a new to vector and i want to add this to my texture coordinate so i'm hold down a left click to add an add and actually if i hold down control i can grab all these wires and plug them up to my ad like this and plug in my multiply like that and let's just add our vector onto everything so if i hit apply we can see that i get a u offset v offset and i can play around these and do the exact same thing as we do in blender so just giving us a lot more control for our material right here at this point you'll probably notice one very glaring issue right now and that is if i hold down control and l which is a shortcut to rotate my sun and if we look at the pavement we can see that our shadows are off right now so we can see the side that should be in shadow is getting sun and then the shadow should be the side that actually gets the sun so it's almost like the shadows are flipped and that's because a blender uses opengl normal maps and unreal uses directx normal maps so this is actually an opengl normal map which is the wrong type we don't want this one now don't worry there's actually a really easy fix for this and that is we can convert this into a direct external map by going down into the advanced options and checking flip green channel so now this is a direct accessory map and we go my level we can see that everything is functioning okay and while we're on the topic of normal maps let's go and add a feature that will just help us amp up or bring down that normal intensity and we can do that with a right-click and flatten normal so hook this up like this and like that s left click bring in that parameter and let's call this normal flatness plug it up like that so now hit apply open up that material instance we have a parameter called normal flatness and then if i bring this up our normals go away and then if i bring this down we can amp up that intensity so definitely my favorite note within blender is the color ramp node and what this allows us to do as we all know is just amp up or contrast or play with the values of our roughness so i mean well now looks really wet but unfortunately unreal doesn't really have an equivalent to color ramp but we can get a lot of the same features by just using some basic maps so by feeding your roughness into multiply power clamp and lerp you should be able to get the same features as the color ramp so something i always do with all my roughness maps is that i feed it through a multiply node and something with roughness amount set to default value as one and what this allows us to do is just increase it if i want some more roughness and decrease it if i want less roughness and as you just saw in blender i like to use node wrangler to be able to preview my roughness maps in unreal you can do something similar by previewing any node by right clicking on that node and then going to start preview node so that'll just allow us to get the same feature as control shift on node and blender also you probably notice that i have a color right here that is set to pure white and is being multiplied on top of my base color so going into my level let's actually let me get rid of that roughness since now it's looking pretty bad we can see that if i activate my color tint i now have the ability to just play around with the colors and this is great for when you have a lot of different assets from maybe a lot of different packs and you kind of want to blend the assets together now there are two ways to get a 3d model from blender into unreal engine we have the old way where we basically take the 3d model in blender and export that as an fbx and then with the fbx we import that into unreal engine and unreal just released a new way where we can directly take the 3d model from blender into unreal engine without having to export it and import it so we're going to first go over the old way so in my scene i have a pretty simple architecture visualization chair and if we look at my material it's a little bit more complicated we have now a metallic map we still have a roughness a normal map and our base color but we also have this mask up here which is essentially masking the plastic portion of our chair and we're feeding this through a mix with a color that's how in blender we can change the color dynamically so we're going to import this chair model and we're going to import that feature of changing the color of our plastic so before we can export our object we first have to make sure it's ready for unreal and to do so first thing we want to do is ctrl a and apply our rotation and scale next thing we want to do is make sure our normals are facing outwards because otherwise if they're facing inwards then some portions of our model won't be visible within unreal so we could check the normal orientation by going to viewport overlays and clicking face orientation so we want to make sure everything is blue this model is looking correct right now but if something is red you can go into edit mode select everything and then hit shift n to recalculate those normals you've probably noticed right now that our model is pretty high poly number one when i originally modeled this chair i made it for architectural visualization so we normally want a high fidelity model for those scenarios and number two unreal engine 5 will be releasing and maybe polygon counts won't be as important as they are now also the next thing you want to do is make sure our model is in the origin point of our world and we can see it is right now and that's because the origin point will basically be our pivot point within unreal engine lastly if you're worried about scale do not worry unreal is in centimeters and blender is in meters but it pretty much converts it correctly in between the two so if i shift a add in the default cube this is actually two meters tall so right now our chair is looking correct so it's just a little bit under what would probably be half the height of a person since the average height of a person is 1.8 meters so just a little bit below the default cube now if we were exporting out a rig or an animation then we would have to go into units unit scale and set that to 0.01 because there could be some issues in unreal but we're not going to be going over rigging and animation since that's a whole other topic so ctrl c and set everything at 1. so blender's default now it's time to export this chair so you want to select everything you want to export then go into file export fbx you can also do gltf or obj but on unreal streams they always seem to export within fbx and you want to choose a location right now it's going into my blend to unreal assets that looks fine and let's call this a name let's call this chair pretty basic and then within the settings here let's do selected objects only that's how it doesn't export my entire scene and in geometry make sure smoothing is set to face because otherwise unreal will give an issue saying no smoothing groups were found and then unreal will try to fix it itself so just adding in the face there will prevent that warning and you can hit export so back in unreal engine let's right-click new folder and let's be creative and call this chair now if i go into chair let's import our fbx just like how we import our textures so you just want to drag it into your content browser like that so one thing i like to do is under material import methods i like to go do not create materials and do not import textures because normally when it does create materials automatically it's pretty wrong so you have to go in and fix everything and i rather just create and import everything from scratch that i know it's good to begin with and up here under the advanced options you want to make sure generate light map uvs is checked if you do plan on baking your asset so basically what this will do is take the uvs and create a new uv map and average all those that's how the light map will look good now don't worry i'll go over what a light map is and what big lighting is in just a bit also one thing you know is that if you do plan on baking your mesh you want to make sure that all the faces are successfully uv'd and there are no overlapping uvs because otherwise that would cause a lot of issues when you do plan on baking that texture and pretty much with all that being said let's import so now here we have our little chair and it looks pretty good and also we can see our new light map uv by going to uv's uv zero we can see this is our original uv and this will be the uvs that the textures will use within our material but we also have a second new uv channel and this is basically the uv that our light map will use so this is where all our shadows and light information will go and again don't worry we'll go over lighting in just a bit but now let's make our material for this chair let's import the textures now so within here i'm going to select base color color mask metallic and normal so drag all these in and do the same process as before with unchecking srgb for all the mass so roughness is down metallic is down and for this color mask it looks like srgb was already unchecked by default and for some reason for some reason my base color was imported as a normal map i think that's a glitch so we'll just bring that back and check on srgb right there so i should check the mask okay no that one's good and then save everything now let's create a material called m underscore chair open it up and let's drag in all our textures and simply just go through and plug them up right now now in blender we used a mix rgb to combine our base color with our custom color now in unreal we're going to use a lerp and we get a lerp from holding down l and left clicking so basically we're going to plug in the mask into the alpha and whatever is white it will pick b and whenever it is black it will pick a so for white let's go and make a color here let's call this color and let's give this i don't know like a bright pink color for now that's how we know it is working and then plug this into b and plug in our base color texture into a and then in a base color and now it looks like it is working so i'm hit apply and in our scene let's drag in our chair rotate this a bit and the chair might seem small right now this is just because this giant spear is actually really big for some reason but right here let's go right click on emerson chair let's create a material instance and now let's drag this on our chair so now it is looking like it is working correctly and if i go into my material instance activate color we can see that we can easily change the color to pretty much whatever we want which is really cool so now we have a custom 3d model from blender and we also have the ability to change its primary color within unreal engine also do not forget to do this because i just did but make sure you convert your normal map from an opengl to a directx by going into advanced options and making sure flip green channel is checked to on just like before also we can apply this material to our static mesh that's how whenever we put in the static mesh we don't have to drag our material back onto it by going into our static mesh editor we can do that by double clicking right here or we can press control and e and then with a static mesh editor open we can drag the material into the material slot like that so now if i save whenever we drag in our static mesh our material is automatically applied now we're going to go over the new way of getting objects into unreal engine and it's just great we don't have to go through the hassle of exporting and importing unreal does most of that for us so first thing we need is the send to unreal blender plugin and we can get that through epic games github now there's a link in the description below if you click it you'll probably get a 404 error that's because you need to create a github account and set that up with epic games so to do that there's also a link below that link that will just simply walk you through the process on unreal engines website and once you're on their github you want to download it right here and choose the latest one once you have that downloaded you simply want to install it like any other blender plugin you've ever installed so navigate to your download select it and let's activate it it should give us a new menu up here called pipeline that will allow us to export but before we can export we first have to do some stuff in unreal and we need to move our cezanne into a newly created collection called mesh in unreal engine we need to activate two plugins we could do that by going to settings plugins and clicking on built in we will first do the python plugin and then we will do editor scripting plugin and hit restart once unreal opens a backup we need to go to settings project settings type in python and make sure enable remote execution is checked on so now in blender if i go to pipeline export send to unreal we will see that in our real we get a new file called untitled category and in there we get our monkey head so this is pretty cool but keep in mind this isn't an end-all be-all we still have to make sure our normals are facing outwards our uvs look nice and everything is scaled correctly but it is pretty crazy that now we have a direct link from blender into unreal engine also keep in mind this workflow is in early early access so things are bound to change so maybe in the future the workflow will be a little bit different now that you know how to bring your blender creations into unreal engine let's go over the fundamentals of lighting and just like materials a lot of unreal's lighting features are very similar if not identical to those found in eevee so you should already be familiar with a lot of them so here we have a pretty simple scene with just one light in the middle that's not being baked yet because up here says light needs to be rebuilt and also if we look at the shadow it says preview although it's kind of flipped right now so this is just like our typical ev scene where we don't have any bounce lighting but as soon as i switch it to cycles then start ray tracing and getting that nice bounce lighting especially on that spear right there unreal gets around having a bounce light every single frame by instead of bouncing lights all at once and then saving that bounce light into a light map texture which contains all the shadows and light details which is then overlaid on all our objects in our scene so to illustrate what i mean by that if i press build so now we can see we're getting some nice realistic bounce light and shadows on our scene kind of like in cycles especially on the spear where we see a lot of that red from the wall bleeding over here so you might be thinking this is different from how blender bakes its lighting with a irradiance volume so if i just move it in here scale it up and do bake indirect lighting we get something similar but it's not using textures instead it's using volumes that calculate where the lights are and then projects that onto any nearby objects so you might be thinking unreal isn't using any irradiance volumes well actually if we click on the spear right now and set it to movable which will tell unreal not to bake any lights on this object so it won't generate any light map textures and if we press build we will see that our spear is still getting that red from the wall and if we move it around it's still getting red and even if we move it far away the red falls off so actually unreal automatically generates irradiance volumes except they're called volumetric light maps and we can see these volumetric light maps by going to show visualize volumetric light maps so this is really cool basically for static objects unreal is making out the bounce light and applying that to the object as a texture which is way better than irradiance volumes but if the object is movable and it can't bake textures then it will default to an irradiance volume and while it's not as good as baking out the textures it's still better than no bounce lighting so let's now go over the differences between the different types of mobility for lights so i'm just gonna hit ctrl z sometimes and then also get rid of that volumetric light map and now i will select my light up here and we can see it's set to stationary and keep note that my ball is movable and it is still casting a shadow so now if i set this to static and build we can see that our light is no longer casting a dynamic shadow on movable objects so there are no shadows on this sphere now if i set this light to movable and i hit build we can see that all of our bounce lighting is gone now and now our light is fully dynamic so we're able to actually move this around but it's not being included within the actual light map texture so movable lights means it is fully dynamic so there are no baked lighting which means we don't get any light bounces a static light means it is only baked lighting so we have no dynamic lighting which means we don't get any shadows on movable objects and finally we get stationary which is the best of both worlds we get big lighting but we also get dynamic lighting on movable objects so movable objects will still get shadows so let's go over the different light types now basically in my place actors you want to go into the lights tab and we can see that we have a directional point spot and rectangle light now i'm not going to go over these because these pretty much function the exact same way they do in blender so if you want you can just drag them into your scene and see what options you have now the one light that you're probably confused about is the skylight and if we drag this in we'll notice it's not doing anything right now and that's because what the skylight does is that it takes a panoramic 360 degree photo of our world and projects that onto our environment hence the name skylight and right now we don't have any sky we don't have any environment for it to project so to get a sky there are many different ways i think the traditional ways pretty much with a sky box or a sky spear but the way i've been using and the way that i've seen other people start to use is with unreal's new if we go to visual effects sky and atmosphere system and i love this if i drag this in we don't see any difference right now because i also need to drag in a sun and then under the sun and lights under the advanced settings i need to make sure atmosphere fog and sunlight is set to true and there we go so this looks really nice and is also really realistic now we don't notice any change to our skylight and that's because we have to recapture it by coming down here and clicking on recapture so now we get a nice preview of what our scene will look and immediately we'll notice that our environment is casting a bluish tint within our little scene right here and within all the shadows so that looks really realistic but this is just a preview right now and again we can tell it's a preview because we get a little preview word right there so that tells me i need to build and there we go that's what the skylight does without that skylight we wouldn't be getting that bluish tint especially on that spear or even i don't really know if it's noticeable with youtube compression but even here so it just adds some nice realism of light coming from the sky just like in the real world now that we have the fundamentals of lighting down let's go over how we can apply those skills we learned and create a realistic architectural visualization scene and we're only going to be using baked lighting and indirect lighting that's how we get a good process of how we would go through and create a realistic scene and if you don't know unreal is one of the leaders in real time architectural visualization so knowing how to get realistic lighting in unreal can be a good skill to know so the arc vis room is located in line examples maps and arc this room so if we go into this we get complete darkness and that's because we're going to light this scene from scratch so if we go into unlit mode we can see we have a pretty simple room it's just a rectangle with a window from which all of our lighting will come in bounce around and light this scene and a door because i don't know how else a person would get into this room first thing we're going to do is add a skylight and a sky that's how we can actually see what's going on in our room but before we can do that we have to set up a sky so i'm going to set up the sky a little bit differently than before by using an exponential height fog so dragging it in like that we don't really see anything yet because our exposure has to slowly start to come up and here's our fog i want this to be pretty bright so let's make this near pure white and let's increase the density all the way and decrease the falloff now we're getting fog within our room and that's not very realistic we especially see it right now so what i'll do is under start distance i'm going to increase that that's how our room isn't getting any fog and then i'm going to add in a skylight and i want a lot of light to go into this room so i'm going to increase the intensity to 3 and let's press build and see what this gives us and we can see that this looks absolutely terrible so in order to fix up our bake we will use the light portals just like in cycles to help direct the photons through this window since this window will pretty much be our entire light source so let's type in portal and add in a light mass portal and just cover the window just like we would do in any cycle scene and then i'm gonna add in a light mass importance volume that will basically help even direct our photons even more at this location and now let's press build and we can see our bake got just a little bit better but we can help improve this by increasing our detail of our light bake within our light bacon settings and you'll notice that there's nowhere none of these windows have any settings for light baking and that's because we need the world settings so by default unreal doesn't have the world settings we can get it by going to window and world so here under light mask settings we have all the different settings we can change to help increase the quality of our build so right now i'm going to set static lighting level scale to i think 0.5 which will just increase our detail and because i set to 0.5 i want to set the indirect lighting quality to 2. because unreal recommends that the lighting quality times the level scale should be equal to one so 0.5 times two is equal to one and i'm going to increase my bounces for my indirect light and for my skylight to 10. so with all that being done if i press build we'll get a really messy build and that's because i need to go down into the drop down and under quality make sure it's either production high or medium since preview will give us a bad build especially since we just decreased the static lighting level scale which will add a lot more noise when baking on preview so our scene is slowly starting to come together and look a lot nicer but we still have a lot of issues within the bake especially in here and that's because our light map resolution is really low right now and if you remember all the shadows are being baked into a texture so that texture is way too low right now but before we go into changing our light map resolution of the scene let's go set dress this a bit so if i go into meshes i have a bunch of different little furniture so i'm going to bring in a table right there and bring in a rotary phone let's rotate it like that and let's also add in an alarm clock let's try to set this down realistically like gravity is affecting it by going into my local space that's like a rotate this easier and moving it like that and let's also add in a donut because this is a blender tutorial after all and this is way too big so i'm going to decrease that donut size and that would be kind of gross if the donut is just laying on a table like that so let's add in a plate and move the donut onto that plate i still feel like this is a pretty large donut but that's fine and i'm going to add in a coffee cup maybe scale this down just a little bit because donuts with coffee taste good and let's add in the chair that we imported chair and let's drag in that chair move it like that and let's add in the instance and change the color so we'll make this a little bit more pinkish just like that and we right now notice our reflections look really bad and that's because it's only using screen space reflection so we're going to add in a reflection cube map like an eevee instead in unreal they're called reflection captures so if we just add it like that our reflections are fixed now that we have all our furniture within our room let's go through and start changing the light map resolution and we can do that by clicking on any mesh going into details and scrolling all the way down under lighting will have overridden lightmap res and we should change this to something a lot higher like instep 64 we can do 512 and we can easily view where our lightmap resolution is on everything by going into lit optimization and a light map density so basically blue means it's really low red means it's really high and green is in between the two so i kind of want to make it orange for archivist scenes which basically means it's pretty high but it's not too high so i'll just go through everything and try to get it into that orangish reddish color so i'll select this one here and let's go make this 512. let's make the ground pretty high 512 and up here actually i'm gonna do the ground 1024 because we actually want to see all the really small shadows that will be caused from this furniture and let's increase this one 256. let's make this one 256 and the baseboard bring that to 512. and i actually want this wall to have high resolution so i'll make this 1024 so now i'm going to go into lit and if we press build we should get something that looks nice and this is what we get so far as we can see our scene is slowly starting to come together but we can add just some finishing touches and do one last big so to add those finishing touches i will bring in a post process volume and if we notice especially at this camera angle at the side here we can see the ambient inclusion disappearing and reappearing that could be pretty annoying and i feel like the ambi inclusion is way too strong right now so i'm just gonna turn that off by going into here intensity and zero we don't know saying change because i need to make sure infinite extent unbound is checked within my post process so there we go that's looking nicer and let's increase the exposure so i'm gonna go here exposure compensation min and max brightness and let's make this constant that's how i don't see my brightness changing and let's increase this to maybe 1.5 actually let's leave it at 1 for now and let's increase our bank so in rural settings i'm going to go static line level scale to 0.1 and remember we want our indirect lighting times our lighting level scale to be equal to 1 so i need to set this to 10 now and also for smoothness i'll set this to 1.3 just to get rid of some sharp edges that might occur since we're doing such a low level scale and now if i do build our high quality big just finished and notice the room is looking a little bit too dark right now so i'm going to bring up exposure to two and let's go into full screen mode and just enjoy our really high quality arc viz baked scene and we can even notice a lot of the really nice indirect shadows and that pink bounce lighting especially right here even poles that small are giving off just a little bit of shadow and those shadows have a pinkish hue because the entire room is pink so that's pretty much the gist of how you create ultra realistic arc vest scenes within unreal engine pretty much the workflow would be the same for a room this small all the way up into a larger building also i want to point out that you don't have to follow what i did exactly because if you open up all of these different meshes or the material instances we get the ability to dynamically change their colors just like what we did with the chair and there's also a little bit dirt opacity if you want to make something dirty and a dirt power to increase that contrast of that dirt so basically just go through everything and maybe make your own colors you can make an orange room blue room rainbow room just go through and see what you can create using the assets given now that lighting is out of the way let's go over how we can get thousands upon thousands of free assets using quixo's mega scan library to get mega scans first you have to download quicksole bridge and basically quicksilbridge will allow us to immediately get assets into unreal without having to manually import those assets so once you download quicksilbridge you're going to want to sign in with your epic games account this is important because this will allow us to get all these assets right now there's 13 000 for free and new assets are being added every day who knows maybe by the time you're following this tutorial there'll be 20 000 assets so once you get that down let's import an object as an example let's go banana and i see there's a nice banana so first you want to download that banana and we have a bunch of download settings so we can choose the resolution and material presets we could just leave that as custom mesh format i tend to leave it at fbx and then we can also import a bunch of level of details i tend to go level detail 0 if i'm going to do an archivist scene or if this is like for an open world environment then i'll have these all checked on so i think i'll just leave it at one for now and then we have a bunch of texture options so we don't need the ao and pretty much the only textures we do need is albedo normal and roughness just like any other material now let's press the download once you have that downloaded before we can press export we first have to do a little bit of setup so within export settings you want to choose unreal engine then you want to choose your unreal engine version and install the mega scans plugin so to do that you want to locate where you downloaded your version of unreal engine and then navigate to the engine folder and then to plugins so i'll just do that right now and then hit select folder once you do find your plugins and it should come up unreal plugin 6.2 installed successfully so now we know we have the mega scans plugin installed then you want to open up the project you want to import this into once you have your project open if you don't see the mega scans tab up here then you want to go settings plugins and type it in up here and make sure you have built-in selected and then enabled now that we have the mega scans plug-in activated right now all you have to do is go into bridge and hit export and say export it on real engine and export successfully so now if we go back into unreal engine we will see you're about to import a high poly mesh this may cause unreal to stop responding we're just going to hit ok once it is done importing we'll see that we have a new folder called mega scans and then we have a folder underneath that called 3d assets and then we have all our bananas and if we open up this banana we can see we successfully imported it into unreal and it only took a second to not counting the setup so if we put this in here and just scale it up we have a nice banana to complete our arc viz scene don't forget to press save all and let's go over how we can import not only 3d assets but materials into unreal backend bridge let's find a nice grass texture and let's see what we have i'll use this one for now and for download settings pretty much albedo normal roughness and you can do 2k or 4k i think 2k is fine for now and you want to click download i already have this download so i'm going to press export or i can hover over my icon here and i can press the export button right here and i think i'll also export a cliff material because we're going to be using these to demonstrate the power of unreal's landscape tools so let's use this one right here so rock rockcliff so i'm gonna go download this and then export so we can see under mega scans we have a new folder called surfaces and it just contains all our services that are already set up with a nice looking material now keep in mind if you don't see this little window right here that gives us a more traditional folder view you have to click this button right here also if i open up my material you'll notice it's not a material but a material instance and mega scans has already set up a bunch of nice options for us to play with now i think it's a good time to go over the different modes we have right here but before we do that let's create a new map so let's do my folder and let's right click new level and i'm going to call this landscape go into it let's save everything and we get a completely blank level let's real quickly give ourselves a sky using sky and atmosphere and a directional light for our sun make sure sky and atmosphere is selected so we can actually see our sky so this is looking nice but we have this pitch darkness at the bottom here which can be annoying i don't want that so i will hide that with an exponential height fog just like that now that we have our world set up let's go into landscape modes by clicking on the modes panel and i could click on landscape right there or i could do shift 2 as a shortcut to bring up my landscape so now we're in landscaping mode and we can see that we already have a preview of what our landscape will look like and right now we can create a landscape and we have a bunch of settings they look complicated right now but bottom line is all you have to do is make sure you follow the recommended landscape sizes within the unreal documentation so go to landscape technical guide and see what they recommend i think i'll just use the default for now and hit correct and right now we have a nice looking landscape so i could come in here and using the sculpt tool under the sculpt tab you can probably guess what this does is this just increases the height of my landscape and then i could go in with a smooth brush and smooth that out i can use a flattened brush and all these brushes they have strength so i can increase the strength of my sculpt to get some bigger patches and i can also adjust the fall off so i could bring that up for a really soft fall off or i can bring that down for a very sharp fall off and of course we could adjust the size of my brush by using the radius up here just like that or like in photoshop i can use the bracket keys as a shortcut to read it up or bring it down so one thing i really need to point out is that i pretty much never sculpt my landscapes except for making some finishing touches of course and you probably use this if you're a blender user we should use other programs specifically designed for landscapes like gaia or world machine let's go over what the different tabs up here mean so here we have the manage tab and this basically allows us to resize our landscape and change some of the settings of it so if i go into add i can add new parts of my landscape so just make my landscape bigger or i go delete and make my landscape just a little bit smaller another thing we can do is go into paint and start to paint layers so like dirt layer grass layer glyph layer but you notice we don't have any layers to paint in and that's because layers are made within the material editor so now we're going to go over how you can make a material for your landscape and to start off we're just going to create a material like any other material we've ever created so just come down here right click and let's create a new material i'm going to call this landscape actually there's already in our landscape so m underscore landscape and let's click to open this up and we have our basic material but keep in mind that what is different from a landscape material and normal materials is that you could think of a landscape material as a collection of many materials so we're actually going to make several materials in one and we'll do this with the make material attributes like that and let's do two for now so we're going to create two different materials in here and then we will blend them together with a landscape layer blend and we notice that we don't have any inputs going into this and that's because we have to add layers in here so these layers will be the same layers we're able to paint within my landscape so let's add two let's call the first one grass and let's call the second one rock and keep everything at default so keep in mind that this is going to be a very basic landscape material this isn't going to be good but this will just help get us familiar with the landscape system and now you notice we can't really take this material out into anything that's because we need convert this into a material attribute so to do that all i have to do is click anywhere within my graph and within the details let's make sure use material attribute is checked to true so now we can plug it up just like that so we will go through the process of creating these materials now and luckily we already have those textures from mega scans so if i go into mega scans surfaces grass uncut let's select these textures and just drag them like that so if we hover over these tabs they'll automatically switch them even when we're holding objects and drag them in like that so let's do the same thing with a rock cliff and simply plug them up and as we can see we have two materials that are combined within one material so we have our grass and then we have our rock and this layer blend will give us the ability to be able to paint each material now i'm going to create a material instance of my landscape and simply hold shift 1 to go back into place mode and drag my landscape into the landscape material in the details panel so this should give me something pitch black and that's because we have to start adding in our layers so shift 2 go back into landscape mode we can now see that in my paint tab we have two layers right now grass and rock and then if i press down we're not getting anything because we need to assign a layer so to do so you want to hit the plus icon and go wait blended layer and it will create a default folder for you called landscape underscore shared assets that's fine let's hit okay and let's do the same for the rock now if i select our rock and if i bring down this brush size i just go in here we can see now we can paint our texture down and then you'll notice that when i'm painting there's just one issue and that is we can notice that we can obviously see the falloff and the vertices so when you're painting within the landscapes basically it's assigning a value of that landscape layer onto a vertices and right now our landscape has vertices that are pretty spread out we could try to create more vertices by going into landscape manage resize and let's resample this and make this 2x2 and then hit apply okay so we don't notice a difference right now that's because this was before we painted so now if we go back into paint select our rock we can get some much finer realistic paint to it so there's just one issue right now and that is our landscape looks really really bad so we're just gonna fix it up just a little bit by changing our directional light to movable to get rid of that preview shadow and let's brighten up the shadows with a skylight just like that now we also notice there's a lot of tiling and our scales might be off so we can get a human reference by going to add new add feature content pack and choosing the third person once you have the third person you want to go into your mannequin folders character mesh and sk underscore mannequin so yeah we can see that our scales are pretty off right now so we can fix our scales by going into our landscape and creating a landscape coordinate node and feeding that through a multiply just like before that's how we can control that tiling so i'm going to plug this up to my graph right now and do the same for my rock and hit apply and now our scales look a lot nicer and i'm able to control them within my landscape material instance just like that so even with our scales being pretty large if we zoom out our tiling is really really noticeable so if you want to take this landscape material further and learn how to create realistic industry standard landscapes then i highly recommend you check out my creating realistic landscapes in a real engine youtube series where we will go over how to fix specular values hide that really nasty texture repetition and create an auto texturing material so if you're interested check that out the next mode we're going to go over is the foliage mode and in my opinion the foliage mode is really simple and a lot easier to use than blender because in blender in order to add grass we have to go through the particle editor but in here it's literally just as simple as a painting so first we need to drop in some 3d objects so i think i'll use my monkey head and let's also use the bananas and make sure both of these are selected and the top left hand corner this check box is checked on if it's not then we can't paint anything so with all that selected all you have to do is just left click hold and paint so now we get a bunch of monkeys and i don't know if you can notice in that but we also get some really small bananas so we can also control the density up here so we can make this more dense and we can make this even denser by going into painting density and bringing it up to like a thousand like that so now we can't even tell it's a monkey right now because it's so dead so i'm just control z and if we hold down shift that's a shortcut for erasing so bring it in like that and shift to erase our monkey heads so i'm gonna go disable my monkey head for now and we can also control the scale so only enabling this banana if i place my bananas down we can see that they're pretty small i can vary all these banana sizes by going into scale and let's vary this between a scale of one and five so now i have a new control z make max five again now we can see that we get bananas that vary in scale so that's pretty much the gist of the folge editor as you can see it's a lot easier than blender and we're going to go into this more once we make the final scene the next mode we need to go over is the brush editing mode so this is basically how we would create geometry but this mode is really really old and i think it will be deprecated once unreal engine 5 is released so this will be replaced by if i go to plugins built in type in modeling the modeling tools editor mode so enable this and restart and now we will see under modes we get a new mode called modeling so this is pretty cool if i go into primitive i can simply spawn in any meshes that i'm thinking of so let's add in a sphere type 2 and let's also bring up the subdivision by increasing the slices let's make that 100 and just place anywhere to create a new mesh and let's hit complete so we have a little mesh in there and if i go into the forms i can even sculpt on this mesh by going to sculpt and now it gives me like a weird mac cap let's change that to existing material we can see that i can sculpt kind of like in blender so this is really cool but keep in mind this is in no way going to replace a blender as a modeling tool i would pretty much never model anything complicated within unreal instead you can think of this as like some more options within your toolbox so if you model something in blender and bring it into unreal but you notice the proportions are just a little bit off instead of going into blender and having to remodel it you can just make a little bit of edits within unreal so i feel like the modeling tools once they are released will be good for fine-tuning objects that are already in unreal and creating quick block outs of a level or object and finally we have a mesh pane and this is basically how you would paint vertex color onto your mesh so vertex colors in unreal are mostly used as a way to blend between materials and i won't go over how to in this tutorial but i'll save that for a tutorial at a later date so i was going to go over unreal's visual scripting tools called blueprint at this point but then i realized i already made that video so it's called why artists should know blueprints and you can check that out we go over visual scripting but with a focus on the environmental art aspect of it now if you want to create video games in unreal engine then i highly highly recommend you check out zac parrish on unreal engine's official youtube channel he probably makes the best blueprint tutorials and you can take it from me because it was his original tutorials all the way back 8 years ago during udk days that got me into unreal engine to begin with so go ahead and check him out instead of making a blank project let's use the third person project that's how we have a guy that can run around and i think we don't need any starter content keep it at maximum this will be blueprint and we won't do ray tracing now yep unreal supports real-time ray tracing and it's actually pretty good but we'll keep that for tutorial another time and i think i would just save this to my desktop and i'm going to call this monkey shrine and let's go create that this is what the third person template will give you and you notice we get a pretty simple level and if i press play we get a character we can walk around in and jump so this will basically be our player character that will explore the small open world we are making now let's go bring in some assets that are available within the downloads so within your downloaded folder from gumroad you want to open up the project again and migrate the folder called shrine assets so just right click migrate okay and direct it to the content portion of your new project so my case is in the desktop monkey shrine then content and if we go into our third person project we can see within the folders that we have are shrine assets and if we go to monkey statue we can see we have a stone carving of the suzanne monkey head i made using zbrush and substance we also have some nice landscaping assets if i go into landscape we see i have just a bunch of random assets if i open up my landscape material you can see what we actually have so this is why we're not going to go over landscape materials right now in this tutorial because they can get pretty complicated pretty fast but if you want to know how to make a landscape material that's very similar to this then check out my free landscape tutorial series i mentioned before and if i go out here we can see that we have some alpha brushes and the alpha brushes are a bit weird right now if i go into view we can see that if i disable the green channel and blue channel they're basically just a collection of three different brushes mashed together within one texture just to save on memory so what better way to show what this landscape material can actually do than to create a new landscape and we're going to do that within a new map that will be our open world so within content let's go right click let's create a new level and we'll make this from scratch and we'll call this shrine open world and let's go into this save selected and you know completely black so we'll just add in a sky like before with a sky atmosphere and a directional sun set to movable with sky and atmosphere turned on and so this will be a good demo of a fully dynamic lighting system which means all my lights will be set to movable so we will have no baked lighting now i also need a skylight to brighten those shadows and set this to movable as well now that i have everything in here let's create our landscape by going up into modes landscape keep everything as default and hit create so let's apply my landscape material to my landscape so i'm going to go back into my landscape folder and let's drag the instance that i already have set up into this folder right here and if we go into the instance we can see that there's a bunch of settings a bunch of parameters i created so and a couple of options for you to play around with i've already set up some options i think look nice right now but feel free to change these if you don't really know what's happening right here that's fine i go over what most of these means within the landscape tutorials so now with that applied don't forget we have to now create our layers so go back into landscape mode let's go to paint and let's apply the first layer which is our auto layer and what is really cool about this landscape is that if i sculpt we can see that this is an auto material so it is automatically generating clips generating dirt on those really sharp angles and this is pretty realistic because in real life you wouldn't really expect grass to be growing on like an 80 degree incline like this so i will control z all these sculpts away just to get rid of them and before we continue on the landscape let's add an exponential fog just to hide that darkness so place actors exponential fog and drag it in and that exponential fog is dependent on its location so if we drag it up we get more fog and then if we drag it down we get less fog so let's drag it somewhere like that okay so now that's done we're gonna go through and we're gonna sculpt our landscape just a bit now normally i would never actually sculpt a landscape i would use other programs like gaia or world machine but in our case i think it's kind of fine because if i go into my landscape we have our alpha brushes which we will use to get some semi-realistic forms and i think for now i'll turn off exposure and let's set that to zero okay shift two back into landscape mode and let's go to sculpt and instead of a circle we're gonna do alpha and i'm gonna drag in my alpha brush like that so right now this is way too small so i'm going to bring this up and even then that's not big enough so let's do 40192 and we're going to check use clay brush and get rid of auto rotate so now if i press down a bunch of times we can slowly start to see actually maybe this angle you can't really see what's happening so if i hold down control and l we can rotate the sun around okay so now we can better see what is happening and i think i'll increase the strength of one so now if i just press down we can see we get some pretty realistic forms and if we play with a texture rotation we just move this around like that so what i will do is just go through and start stamping randomly and switching in between my different channels okay so my landscape is looking fine right now but one thing i'll do is get rid of my alpha go back to circle and let's decrease this fall actually increase the falloff that's we get a really smooth rush and i think i'll just go through maybe bring down the strength a bit and try to artificially bring up the edges that's how the player or your open world would have pretty obvious borders and i'm spending some time working at this area right here because i plan on the main camera view being from this location and then we have a nice little dirt path that's kind of winding up into this hill and disappearing off into the sunset now we're going to download a bunch of assets from the unreal marketplace and before you complain don't worry all the assets we will use are completely free and that's because epic games gives away a lot of free assets thanks to all the money they got from fortnite so the assets we will use is temperate vegetation metal foliage and temperate vegetation optimized and we're also going to use the landscape of background assets and these are pretty cool because they'll basically just give us some large meshes to place in the background to just give our horizons some visual interest so to add it to a project you have to download it and once you download it you can click on add to project find where your project is monkey shrine and then click on add to project once you have those assets downloaded you'll notice we get some new folders under our content folder and i think i'll add in the background right now so i'm going to photo real backgrounds maps and overview and within the overview map let's just select some background meshes i think i'll choose this one and that one and ctrl c and to go back into my shrine instead of going down here and trying to find it i go to file recent levels and shrine open world so if i control v in here we see they spawned in and they're pretty small so let's bring these back up to one and instead of going through each one and pressing one i could hit the lock icon right there and then press one that's how it scales on all the axises like that so now i'm just going to place this around my world a bit and these don't have to be perfect i'm just adding them in to help break up our landscape silhouette so it's not so splotchy now i will start set dressing and before we do i'm going to press hold down control and press one so now if i fly away i can hit one and it will snap me to that view so fly away want to snap i can also do control two control three and then one two and three so that's just a really quick way to save a location and to quickly navigate your world so i think right here will be the main focal point the main camera view and then i'm going to add in my monkey heads so shrine assets monkey drag it in it's already pretty big so like this so one big monkey head to the side it's going to be our hero element and then let's add some really large monkey heads in the background so you could kind of imagine to yourself that there was like a tribe of ancient people and for some reason they just started carving out the monkey head everywhere maybe it was a cult or maybe it was for fun i think i will move my monkey head just a bit closer like that yeah like right here so i'm going to hit ctrl 1 to make this my new points and i'm going to do control and l that's so we can actually see our monkey head so they're not in the shadow one thing you probably notice is that when i scroll out we can see that our shadows disappear so we can change that by making our shadows go just a little bit farther by finding where my sun is and under advanced options all the way down and cascaded shadow maps make sure far shadow cascade count is set to one so now we get just a little bit more shadow distance okay this is looking nice our scene is ever so slowly starting to come together so let's go work on the landscape right now and painting in different materials so i want a ground material like a dirt material that will be our path and i found if i click on this go into pn underscore grass library textures landscape textures round two and ground five to be pretty good so i'm gonna open up my landscape instance right now and just place in those textures so let's scroll down to material c and i'm going to add in ground to albedo and then ground to normal and let's do the same for d which will be a ground texture that has just a little bit more grass on it save and now if we go into landscape mode we can go to paint and let's add in some new material layers so material layer c okay and material layer d so i'm going to click on c and let me just decrease this and just drag out a trail like this will take a bit to compile okay there we go so we have a little trail going on and we can actually check the scale right now by shift one leaving landscape mode going into world settings and let's change this to third person game mode so now if i press play we get a third person in there and the dirt path is looking a little bit too large right now so i'm gonna hit ctrl z a bunch of times and let's make it a little bit smaller so just use the bracket keys to bring down that brush and now if i paint the dirt path and i actually have to go in here and bring back third person game mode since we undo that if i hold down alt and press p that's a shortcut for playing and now our scales are looking correct so this looks like a nice trail and we can imagine a lot of people use this path often let's start to paint some of our foliage in now so i'm gonna do shift three to go into folger mode and under pn underscore metal flowers let's go to folge types flower foliage and control a to select all this and drop my foliage into here just like that and i'm gonna do the same for pn underscore grass library so you go to foliage types grass foliage control a drop it in so if i select everything within this foliage box with control a and make sure the tick box is activated if i basically just press down anywhere we'll get all the foliage spawning at once and we don't really want that instead we want a bunch of grass and then a bunch of patches of flower so instead i'll deselect all of that actually control z and then go down to [Music] let me make this bigger where we get all the grasses and just select a bunch of random grasses like this hit that check mark and now if we paint down we get grass so i'm just gonna paint down a bunch of grass within our main area which is right here and if we go over the trail that's okay because we can go back and hold shift and get rid of that grass and then as we start to slowly go further out let's decrease the density to 0.2 and then even further out actually right here i forgot to paint in some grass so i'm bringing that back to 0.5 decrease this make just a little bit of grass right there a little bit of grass underneath here we got some grass on his mouth like that so shift to get rid of those and now back in paint let's go 0.1 increase my size up and just paint even some more back here so now if we go in here we can see we get some really really nice looking grass press play our character can just run around in this really intense shrub and right now our exposure for our player is all off this looks way too bright so let's fix that with a post process volume real quickly so we can just add one in go to details let's go back up here to exposure let's check exposure compensation min and max brightness and let's just lock it for now and then make sure infinite extend unbound is checked and let's make sure game settings are checked so now our post process volume is affecting our world and we can adjust the compensation so let's maybe go one is too bright how about 0.8 0.5 actually i think 0.8 looks good it's not going to press play there we go our character is running around and this looks pretty nice now what i will do is just expand out this trail and kind of cut out the grass that's growing over that trail so now we get a nice looking trail going through our grass that's slowly cut away from it and then it comes up here it loops around this massive monkey head and it disappears off into the distance now i think we're ready to just go through my little scene right here and add some flowers so i'll go in a shift three foliage mode and let's start off with some purple flowers so just go through here and just kind of place them down a little bit randomly like little flower patches let's do the same for red and bring in some little white flowers i like that so if i was actually going through here not doing a tutorial i would spend a lot more time going through all my foliage and methodically trying to place different maybe different size grasses some areas of high density grass some areas of low density grass and try to refine these little flower patches because right now they're obviously just stamped down like that but because this is a tutorial i have to go pretty fast so now we have to download just a little bit more assets so we need the open world collection which will give us some trees and rocks that we're going to use and we also need to go into the learn tab and scroll down all the way down to sun temple and then create this project because we're going to want to grab the little flame right there if you want it once you have the sun temple project opened and then just come over here to this flame and select it once you have it selected we can quickly jump to where that's located in the content browser by hitting control and b at the same time so that's where the flame is i just want to right click it because i only want this asset and go to asset actions migrate okay and locate where your project is back in our project let's see what we just added by going to kite demo maps and let's see the overview so here we have a collection of just a bunch of trees and rocks that we're going to use i specifically like this tree and that tree so i'm going to go ctrl c come up here recent levels and let's go back to my shrine and control v these in so now i'm just going to randomly spread the trees around this area another thing i will do is go back into my environment and let's go select pretty much all these rocks especially the scree right here the boulders because we're going to be using these to kind of blend are monkey with the ground so kind of like over thousands of years the monkey has been slowly deteriorating and rocks are falling off of it so ctrl c ctrl v and now i'm going to go spread all of these assets around so i really sped this part up right now but essentially i'm just placing the rock piles around and giving my landscape more weight to them as if thousands of years of erosion has resulted in scree from the monkey heads falling onto the landscape and bleeding into the ground i think one of the best analogies to the environment creation process within unreal is that it is very similar to creating stuff with legos so just like in legos where we found pieces we liked and we took those pieces put them together and created something new or original we're pretty much doing the exact same thing in unreal and especially with the release of mega scans we pretty much have a near endless amount of pieces to choose from and speaking of mega scans let's actually grab some assets from that right now so in quicksilver bridge i have a collection of all the assets i've decided to use it's basically just two assets right here for the path so dry branches will basically make my path look a little bit more three-dimensional and some fencing for it and i also have some ferns and a bunch of shrine assets so that we're gonna place around the monkey as if people have been coming there and leaving incest and praying to the monkey head and don't forget we also need a candle holder that's how our flame can actually be somewhere and then i have just a bunch more rocks and some ivy just in case we want to show that the monkey head has been there for a while and they're slowly starting to be ivy growing up the monkey sculpt and don't forget you want to make sure in export settings your project is selected so now just go through and export everything and i encourage you to not just export these actually go through the entire mega scan library and see what 3d assets you want to use and just create maybe a variation of the monkey sculpt or something entirely different before we start to place our mega scan assets i notice that my world is feeling a little empty we need some more visual interest to hold our viewers attention and we can do that through adding clouds and cloud shadows which will also have the benefit of making our world feel more alive and we can get clouds by going to file new level selecting time of day and this is kind of a cheat but then we want to select the clouds up here ctrl c go back into our world and just control v them in so now we have some nice clouds but we also want some cloud shadows and these clouds aren't giving any shadows right now and we can do that through creating a material that will be overlaid onto our sun so let's create a new material let's call it m underscore cloud shadow and go into it and we want to make sure this is a light function so change surface to light function and now only the emissive channel will be activated then we want to grab a cloud texture and unreal kind of comes with one if i go into engine content if you don't see engine content right here make sure in view options engine content is selected to true and then let's type in noise and i like tiley noise 5. so i'm going to bring that in right there and then i'm going to plug this into a missive color but this will be too strong at first so instead i will add in an ad and let's bring in a parameter and let's call this clear sky amount so the higher this value is then the less clouds we will see and let's make this a slider from zero to one so plug in like that and now let's add in a tile so let's go texture coordinates multiply and let's call this one tile amount default value 1 just like before and plug it up like this but clouds aren't stationary they move with the wind so we can actually animate this texture by holding down p and left clicking breathing in a panner node so i'm going to hook up the panner node like this and within the panner node let's make speed x 0.013 i found is a good value and then plug it the output into uv don't forget to hit compile and now within our world let's go to where our material is right click on our new material and let's create a material instance of that and drag this onto my directional light so we need to find where that is select it and scroll all the way down until we see light function just drag it on it like that now obviously these clouds are way too small so we're going to have to fix the tiling right now let's try 0.15 0.015 okay there we go and maybe the shadows are a little bit too dark so let's increase that by 0.2 so there we go so now we just added some nice dynamic shadows from the clouds within our scene and it's just help breaking up and adding some more contrast and making the scene feel a lot more alive so now i think we're ready to set dress this scene with our mega scan assets and then after we do that we're going to duplicate this scene and create a sunrise or sunset version of it so i started off adding the mega scan assets by using the foliage tool and just adding the twigs to the path like this basically the twigs will just give some a little break up into the path in retrospect i think it would have made the twigs just a little bit larger and then i went in with some rocks and i made those larger by amping up from a minimum of three to a max of four and then just randomly scattering them around okay so one thing that's very important and will definitely save you a lot of time is that if we see under mega scans we have another folder called 3d assets and then we have a bunch of folders and then you have to click into that folder and now you get your 3d asset and that could just be such a hassle having to go through several different folders just to get one object so we can grab all the static meshes at once from a folder by coming up here and selecting static mesh by using the filters so now we get all the static meshes that are within my mega scans folder and we can do the same for any other folder so this is just a great way so this is a great way to navigate your content browser without having to file through a bunch of folders so i start off first with creating some fences using the fence assets and what's really cool about these fences is that they're designed modularly so just with two pieces you could pretty much make an infinite combination of different fences and sometimes just for variety i would put the fence or the fence pole just on the ground so that's how it looks like maybe it fell over maybe some strong wind knocked it down and i'm just placing it randomly along there and then i think right about now i use the selection tool within the foliage mode to delete some individual blades of grass and the selection tool is pretty cool it basically allows us to individually edit any folger mesh so if there's one thing that's getting in the way you could just change that by itself without having to delete a bunch of other graphs and now i'm placing in some of the ferns from mega scans and the ferns were interesting since i had to open up their material instance to be able to actually activate the wind since by default wind wasn't activated and then i started adding in some rocks and i also opened up their material instances and brought down the tent since i found the rocks were too bright to begin with and now i'm just adding in a bunch of shrine assets and you notice sometimes i'll jump into play mode and that's just to quickly see a human reference and make sure i'm scaling everything correctly or realistically and i also add in some little candles where we're gonna put the flames so i'd say we're pretty much done with the day scene right here and then if i press play and then hit f11 to go to full screen mode we can walk around here and explore our world for ourselves so this is really cool and all these assets that we just used were completely free so i highly recommend you to go through and expand upon this world add new landscapes add a new places to explore and just see what is possible with all the free assets that epic game has made available to us so for the final part of this tutorial let's go through the process of turning this environment into a night scene so to start let's go into content and let's go find where our map is and control w so i'm going to call this knight and let's go into this so now we have a a new duplicate of that map that's how we can make changes without actually ruining our original creation so basically i'm going to hold down control and l to get out my sun and what's really cool is since we're using a sunscreen atmosphere it will automatically change its intensity and change its color depending on its position so if i move down like this you can see it becomes orangish purplish just like i would in real life so let's leave it kind of like right there looks good and what's really cool about the sky and atmosphere system is if i increase my camera speed and change my speed scaler all the way up to 128 click on my clouds hit h to hide them and let's also hide my exponential height fog and now with my camera speed up all the way if i zoom out we can start to see that the sky and atmosphere is literally an atmosphere of a planet so straight out of the box unreal engine comes with a planetary rendering and that's just insane only in a real engine can we get full on planetary renders without any hassle at all it's literally just dragging in one tool so if you want to learn how to use the sky and atmosphere to create entire planets in unreal engine then check out my previous tutorial we also go over how you can add surfaces to that planet and create a surface to space transition so i'm going to snap back with one and decrease my camera speed because that's way too high and bring back my scalar to one also i'm going to press control and h to bring back everything and i think for the directional lights i will get rid of the light function since we don't need it something else i will do is go into directional light still and let's artificially change that color to make it even more purpley and i think i'm going to go into my exponential height fog and play around with some of the settings so let me see where it is right now okay it's all the way down there let's actually bring this up just to increase the fog and let's change the scattering color to white and now i think in directional light it's too powerful so maybe bring this to eight yeah let's keep it at eight and also with the exponential height fog i think maybe this is too dense if we bring it back like that or let's see what it looks like using volumetrics and bring it up yeah i kind of like that okay let's add some flames and some lights so i'm gonna go into assets and then to meshes and drag in some fire and we'll notice the pivot point is really far below it so scaling it rotating it will be really hard so this is one of those circumstances where i think the modeling tools within unreal are super super helpful so i don't have modeling tools activated so again activated go to plugins type in modeling tools if i can actually spell modeling and enable yep restart now that's restarted let's go out and i have to go back into my map click on my flame if i'm able to click on it okay if you ever can't click on like a flame or like a cloud then press t because maybe your transparent selection is turned off so now okay so that's what happened so t transparent selection is turned off so then you can't select that flame but if i press t again and turn that on then i can select that from that flame so that's something helpful to know and now going into modeling tools we can change the pivot location by going into transform and edit pivot so now i can bring up that pivot that's how it's actually at the bottom of the flame and then hit accept and let's go out of modeling tools and now our flame is actually scalable and it is correct so that's pretty cool so i'm gonna go bring it over to this candle right here and scale it down so that's how it can fit like this it's a really intense candle flame but that's fine and then i'm gonna hold down l and a left click as a shortcut to bring in a point light and remember we want all our lights to be dynamic so i'm going to set this to movable and kind of position it over the flame and let's change the color something orangey or another way we could change the color is by using the temperature by clicking on this icon and then changing the temperature like this so we make this colder or warmer let's keep it up warm for now and let's select both the light and the flame and then copy it over to the other candles and these lights are way too bright so i'm going to temperature again and go to light color and manually just make that a lot more orange just like this and i would say we are close to done right now if i hold down ctrl and l we can try to just readjust the light just a little bit more and if we're going to post process we can add just a little bit more saturation by going to global saturation and bringing this to 1.1 and we are done that's how you would make a golden hour variation of our original creation and everything is looking nice right now so i would say that was pretty much the ending of the tutorial if you did get something out of it then please like and subscribe for more unreal engine content in the future and with all that being said i'd say i'm glad that this was your first step into the world of unreal and farewell

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 498,905

Rating: 4.962997 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine, blender, tutorial, beginner, ue4, evee, unreal, blender tutorial, beginner tutorial, blender to ue4, blender to unreal engine

Id: 3jM_VLzRqlE

Length: 128min 32sec (7712 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020