Lumen for Archviz | An Unreal Engine 5 Course

foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] more about them later hey everyone welcome sorry for the delay things have been quite hectic and I can't wait to share the developments that are happening behind the scenes before we get into the video I do want to give a quick rundown of what this courseless tutorial contains the focus of this video is the use of lumen for arguments here you will learn how to light and render the interior scene from scratch using only Luma GI and Reflections I do however added some sections where I will minimally explain some of the modeling and wrapping and use of materials let me know if you're interested in a detailed video about these topics separately as they are quite complex but then out of the way let's get into the video before we can start any Arcus project we need to have the right document but a lot of times when we are just practicing or doing fan art or hobby projects we don't always have the right information this is where I can highly suggest to study and learn to work with realistic scaling as you can see here I created a simple wall setup in blender I found a random blueprint on Google that looked interesting but without knowing the correct scaling it's hard to achieve realistic results we can simply Google all the necessary requirements of a home standard ceiling height door height kitchen height Etc it's not only important to look at the industry standards but also to see what has been used in interesting architecture here ceiling and doors could be much higher having these measurements will help us achieve photorealism the hard part of photorealism is The Uncanny Valley if one thing looks off our brain can immediately tell when something is fake so collect the right Data before starting any project we now know the importance of realistic and accurate measurements and how to achieve them when working without fails or proper architectural documents with this knowledge we can start on the walls of a project we need to establish what the best way of setting up our walls from your engine is and we can do this by doing some tests inside the engine itself I created four different wall setups single plane walls is one mesh single plane walls with all separate meshes walls with thickness also as one mesh and finally walls with thickness that are separated I'm going to visualize the card placement inside in my engine by typing r.lumen dot visualize.card placement space 1. we're going to type this in my console command here at the bottom left this quickly visualizes the lighting at Ray hit points in the scene we can see that the walls with thickness and are separated in our project give the best possible cards this means we get the best possible outcome when lighting our interior scene if we look at other examples we see that they look quite messy and if we visualize the cache we can see that some even have pink walls this means that the lighting won't be calculated properly and can cause weird artifacts in our interior scene with this quick test we now know how to model our walls inside blender this doesn't mean that the other options aren't viable personally I used a single plane mesh with separated walls this gave the second best results in our test with a shadow box which I will explain later I could get the best lighting quality possible using these single plane meshes we now know that we can use both single walls with thickness and single walls with no thickness with this information we can dive into blender and see how we can create these walls for an artifice project let's jump into it I have opened my wall setup that I've used in this project if you want to support the channel you can get the wall set up for yourself over at my art station I will leave a link in the descriptions down below let's remove the ceiling and see what we're working with the first thing we notice is that I perfectly traced the outline of my blueprint this can be done by importing a simple Cube and trace the outline of the blueprint with it keep in mind realistic scaling here we can see that the kitchen area is roughly four meters from wall to wall with this knowledge I scale up my blueprint until it fits those measurements but note the one square in blender equals one square meter next we can see that I've added windows and door frames into my project after I trace my walls I simply add cutouts of where the windows and doors are located later on I can fit this space with a detailed model the last thing regarding our wall setup is the floor and ceiling an easy trick I use for creating these is simply select the entire bottom or the entire top outline of the wall and fill the empty space by pressing F on the keyboard this creates a quick fill and it's perfect for sealing or floor use but keep in mind we have to fix the topology I can simply do this by triangulating my mesh but do any cleanups if necessary the better quality the meshes the better quality will have in a real after the wall ceiling and floor are created all there's left to do is create a simple unwrap because you're using Lumen we don't have to create a light map this makes things much easier to start I want to separate my walls into separate pieces I do this by simply selecting the faces of a section and click p on my keyboard to separate I do this because in the test we have done earlier we saw that separated walls concluded in better card placements which will result in better quality GI for the unwrap let's select a piece of wall and simply click unwrap we can do this by clicking U on our keyboard because we have separated our meshes it should interrupt perfectly if not make sure to make the necessary Cuts so our mesh will unfold perfectly next I switch to the unwrap editor and make sure that my walls are rotated in the right angle this makes my material face the right way inside under engine you can check this by applying a checker map when everything is perfect all there's left to do is apply textal density size I personally go for a 2K grid and attacks the density of 1024. this will make sure that no matter on what wall or object we will use different materials they will always have the same tiling I will leave a link to a detailed explanation in the video's description as well as a link to a checker map and textual density plugin which are all free to download when you have repeated the process your scene should look like this now we're done let's create the shadow box I mentioned earlier we needed shadow box to block out any penetrating light through the cracks of our scene without it our scene will look bad all we have to do is create a box around the scene that will capture the shadow in between the walls add a cube trace the walls close up the top and bottom and lastly make sure to keep the windows open by making a hole in the Box now that we know how to create our walls in shadow box it's time to export and move on to a real engine we could export everything at once but personally I think it makes it a little messy so I'm going to make separate exports for all my meshes first select the mesh you want to export and make sure to give it a material ID or more IDs if needed the material ID will cross over to our under engine project if any of the faces on our object have different ideas we're able to apply a different material to that part of the mesh next go back to object mode and click Ctrl a on your keyboard under apply go down and click apply transform this resets the values of an object's location rotation or scale officially keeping the object data in place next go to fail export and Export as an fbx here check limit to selected objects check the applied transform box under geometry set smoothing to normal only and lastly and check bake animation keep this checked if you want to export animations now I'm going to give my mesh the appropriate name which for me is walls underscore01 and lastly click export do this for the rest of the objects and we're ready to create our new Under engine file let's create an unreal project now we are using under engine 5.1 I suggest downloading it for artificials if you haven't unreal 5.1 supports more powerful Luma capabilities that we will need to achieve photorealism within our project however you can use Unreal Engine 5. it will also work fine but you will encounter lack of quality in GI and Reflections so I suggest going with 5.1 I have launched a 5.1 version and here I want to create a new project file it's important that we select the architecture Tab and here select the blank template create a name for the project select the location for the project to be saved and then click on create once our project files opened we are greeted with the main level opened we can ignore this but the only reason we chose to blank canvas is that we have all the right features enabled now let's create a new folder in our content browser called level open the folder and create a new level by right-clicking and selecting level you can call it whatever you like when named double click on the level to open it this time you will see that we are greeted by a black level this is exactly what we want next let's create another folder in our content browser and call this meshes I personally like to split up my meshes into different categories therefore I will create different folders inside the folder that we've just created this isn't necessary to do now that I have my folder structure set up I can import my walls into my project I'm going to locate my exported walls in my Explorer and simply drag and drop them into the designated folder inside my project I will be prompted with unreal's import settings here at the top I want to uncheck generate missing collisions as unreal creates two complex collisions which might result in performance loss under the advanced options I make sure to uncheck generate light map UVs we simply won't need them using the Lumen approach scrolling all the way to the bottom here I will set the material import method to do not create materials and uncheck the import texture checkbox now we're ready to import let's select all the imported meshes in our content browser and drag and drop them into the viewport if you use the same export method as in this video you must reset the location property to its developed value you can do this over in the detail panel under transform to check if everything is imported correctly we can switch to the inlet mode either press alt 3 on your keyboard or change the view mode manually by going over to the fumo drop down menu and select the Inlet View mode when we have checked our import and made sure that all the normals look good we can start on creating the environment light this is quite a simple process but one that does require a lot of iterations let's start by importing the blueprint light Studio we can find this blueprint if you have created the architecture blank canvas if it doesn't show your contact browser you can add it into the scene by adding a future content pack to the content browser from there select content and here at the starter content to the scene let's drag and drop the blueprint into our scene in the details panel set the user age right to true now you should be able to see lighting within the scene when in lib mode it can take a while because of the eye adaptation we will fix this later when we add a post process volume to the scene back in the details panel with our light Studio blueprint selected then check use sunlight use atmosphere and use fog leaving these options checked will cause artifacts when using our hdri our hdri contains all the needed data to lighter scene properly so we won't need those with the blueprint set up let's change the hdri for one of our own I downloaded a free hdrive from polyhaven I will leave a link to their website in the description import your hdri by simply dragging and dropping it into the desired folder when imported let's select our blueprint again and under hdri change the hdri cube map to your desired hdri next let's add the same hdri into the Skylight component attached to our blueprint here set the source type to cubemap and then add our hdri into the cube Maps section let's increase its resolution to 2048. we do this so all the reflections within our scene will be of high quality on Lower resolutions our environment will reflect blurry with our hdri settings tweak here's our results things don't quite look right yet so let's add a post process volume to our scene to enhance the quality we can add a post-process volume by going over to the quickly add to project drop down menu from here go to visual effects and add the post process volume to the scene by drag and dropping it into the viewport now let's select our post process volume and search for infinite extend set this checkbox to true this will make sure an entire scene is affected by the changes we make inside our post process volume settings the first thing I want to change in the post-process settings is our lens flare I'm going to turn lensflash completely off as it breaks the realism of a scene I can do this by going to the lens section find lens flares and set the intensity to a value of zero still under the lens settings I want to look for Bloom and set this mode to convolution mode I recommend to only use convolution mode when rendering images or cinematics the standard Bloom has a significant performance Advantage but it's not conservative as it can result in overall brightening of the image it lacks the visual complexity of the bloom convolution mode next let's move on to the exposure which we can also find under the lens Tab and then here I want to switch my metering mode to manual as this will block eye adaptation from happening within our scene next adjust the exposure compensator to your liking the value can change frequently over the course of development I will set mine have a value of 13.5 for now if you don't see any effect taking place in your viewport set the exposure mode to game settings under diffuse mode tab in the viewport now I want to increase my chromatic aberration slightly this will mimic lens Distortion which gives it a more realistic feeling a renderer is taking with a camera and lastly I'm going to add a value of 0.5 to my vignetti vignetti can help to keep the eye on the main subject of your render with the lens settings out of the way let's move on to the color grading section the only thing I want to change here is my white balance a great starting value is a value of 5600. this is the standard value of 5600 Kelvin the temperature of natural lighting this is however just a starting point with my current hdri a value of 5150 works better I suggest to start with a value of 5600 and slightly move that number up or down to see what feels natural remember that there's nothing more valuable than have a good references just checking out some images before you start playing around with the white balance with the lens adjusted properly we can move on setting up Lumen for our interior scene let's make sure that our Lumen settings are enabled within our project settings open the project settings and under rendering check if all these settings are shut the same as mine now that we're sure Lumen is working we can set our Global illumination method within the post-processing to lumen in the Lumen Global illumination tab I'm going to set the lighting quality to 2. this will make sure that our scene is calculated on a higher Fidelity resulting in sharper Reflections and an overall better quality GI next I'm going to increase the scene detail to 4. this larger value ensures that small objects are represented and lastly I'm going to set my final gather quality to 2. we do this to reduce Noise Within the scene moving on to the reflection mode which I'm going to set to lumen in here I'm going to set my quality to 2 set array lighting mode to hit lighting for Reflections and set the high quality translucency Reflections to true keep in mind these settings will greatly increase GPU cost feel free to downscale if needed with the post processing setup we can see that our scene still looks quite dark before we enter another iteration for our lighting let's first materialize our scene this is important as the PBR materials we're going to use have a massive impact on how the photons are going to react within our scene let's open qixel Bridge we can find the qixel bridge in order to quickly add to project drop down menu when qixels opened I'm going to download a simple wall material to demonstrate the effects but feel free to download any material you would like when downloaded I'm going to import it into my scene by clicking the import button on the material when imported I'm going to locate it in my content browser now I'm going to select all my walls and apply the material to them we can see that the effect is quite dramatic and this is why it's important to work in iterations as you can see I applied some more materials throughout the scene this is a very repetitive process all I did was look at reference images of apartments and find something I would like to replicate from there I tried to find matching materials simply download import and apply the materials as seen before I move on to the next stage I personally like to play around with different wall and floor materials grexel Bridge offers great materials that are completely free but sometimes I'm looking for that extra bit of variation as the floors and walls are big eye catcher in an interior this is where I use the reward Library offers a great variety of materials that can be used in many render engines I circled to find the Gradle Line library that works great within our engine this is why I personally reached out to reworld as I think this is something every real-time arcvice artist needs other textures are of high quality and work great with the qixel material instance so let's see how we can tweak this material instance to use it in our Creative Advantage first off I'm going to download some materials from the rewrote Library I'll stick with floors for now I'm looking for some variations in floors not only to Showcase dramatic effects but also to see how fast we can iterate using Unreal engine's Lumen on design choices before we import our textures into our project I will create a new folder and copy the floor material instance that we've downloaded from bridge earlier and paste it into that new folder now let's import the textures we need I'm going to open up my material instance and check what Maps it contains I see it contains a normal roughness and Albedo map let's only import those as we don't need the other Maps provided by reworld simply apply the right Textures in the right texture Maps apply the material to its designated mesh and tweak the settings in the instance if needed with this setup you quickly learned how we can utilize the already provided material instance to enhance the creative workflow and quickly iterate to new ideas I will leave a link to rewrote in the description as I can highly recommend them now that we know how to properly set up our lighting and materials for Lumen it's time to add assets to the scene I personally use prefabricated assets that are provided by dimensifa I make sure to First add my downloaded assets into my blender file and position them around the scene this way I can quickly visualize my project after adding all my assets I need to make sure that I set pixel density to 1024 just like we did with the flooring in the walls this way I can reuse all my materials easily without having to reskill once that is all set I can export every mesh individually to a new engine because everything is exported in position I can simply drag and drop my meshes into my viewport and reset its property to its default value you can see my mesh gets the exact location is in my blender file by adding some reward materials to our mesh things quickly come to life I repeat these same steps with all my assets until I'm happy with the results there aren't any extra tricks for decorating an interior repeating the same process as I just showed together with good reference patience and persistence will get you there I suggest studying styling guides and Home Decor books if your struggle to design your interior let's get back into illumin now that we have created our interior we can see that Lumen starts to lacking lighting remember that I've mentioned that this is an iterative process so let's start another iteration and make some changes to the lighting again the first thing I'm going to do is to create a simple emissive material in my material folder I'm going to right click and create a new empty material I'm going to open my material and add a constant value of 3 by holding down 3 on my keyboard and clicking with my left Mouse button give this a color I'm going for an orange warm color next I'm going to add a constant value of 1. hold down one on your keyboard and click with the left Mouse button set this value to 1 and then right click on your constant and convert it into a parameter this way we have control over the intensity once we turn it into an instance now we need to multiply our values together let's hold down M on our keyboard and click with the left Mouse button this will create a multiply node apply the constant values and attach the multiply node into the emissive node save and close the material now let's right click on our material and turn it into an instance drag and drop the instance on any desired mesh we can see it gives some effect to increase or decrease the effect open the instance and change the value up or down depending on your needs we can see that our emissive material doesn't really give us impressive results epic games suggests that we don't use emissive materials alone to light our scene but rather use emissive materials together with rectangle lights to boost the density and quality we can add a rectangle light by going over to the quickly add to project drop down menu go to lights and drag and drop the rectangle light into the scene but the rectangle light selected in the details panel I'm going to set my temperature to a value of 2800. this gives my lamp a warm color next I'm going to set the intensity to a value of 0.2 it's important to find the right intensity value for your project you can achieve this by looking at references and playing around with different values lastly I want to set the attenuation radius to 500 and the indirect lighting intensity to a value of 5. this kills the indirect light contribution from this light source now let's drag and drop the rectangle light above our light source and scale around the same diameter as our lamp lastly I want to make sure it's rotated down we can see that the differences are quite noticeable so when we're lighting a scene with Lumen we must add this technique to all our artificial lights I went ahead and did this for all my objects within the scene here in my kitchen you can see that I have scaled the rectangle light to fit the appropriate lamp dimensions do this for all the artificial lights and you should face similar results but keep in mind that not all intensity values are the same we have arrived at the last part of this video in this part we will be setting up our camera and render out a sequence using the movie render queue let's start by adding a camera to our scene we can add a camera by going over to the quickly add to project drop down menu from here go to cinematic and drag and drop the Cinematic camera actor within the viewport we can move our camera around easily by going over to the perspective drop down menu and select the camera that we have just imported I'm going to position my camera Somewhere in My Scene with my camera still selected in the outliner over in the details panel under the film back settings I'm going to change my aspect ratio to something narrower I prefer this aspect ratio for smaller spaces it allows me to create multiple creative shots without already showing too much in one render next to create a more intimate feeling in the lens settings of my camera I'm going to set my focal length to 30 millimeters and lastly in the focus settings I'm going to set my focus method to manual and click the eyedropper for manual focus distance with the camera set up correctly I want to iterate another time on the lighting as I see that RC needs some more fill light I can achieve this by opening the blueprint light Studio here in the outliner and increasing the skylighted density that's built into this blueprint I'm going to set my skylighted density to 2. you see it has a drastic impact in the amount of fill Light Within the scene adding this extra filler it creates more depth to the shot we can also fake this by using rectangle lights but I think increasing the skylighted density doesn't offer this particular shot the last thing we need to do before we can start rendering is to set the right exposure value a good way to do this is using helpers this is something you use all the time and I can recommend it for every artist I'm not going into too much detail about these helpers so I strongly recommend watching William's guide on lighting for beginners even if you already experienced this is very valuable I will leave a link in the descriptions down below I added my helpers to the scene you can simply create these by adding a sphere from the quickly add to project drop down menu into your viewport and apply the following materials to each sphere these helpers guide me as an artist to the correct exposure of my scene I want to expose my scene so the highlights in all the squares are visible but not overly bright you can see when I over underexpose the highlights shadows and the shapes start to disappear this is not what we want for me to expose My Scene correctly I'm going to set the metering mode to manual and I'm going to set my exposure compensator to 12. this variates per scene so I highly suggest using the helpers and see what works the best for your scene now with our scene exposed correctly we can render out an image the first thing we need to do is to add a level sequence we can add a level sequence by going over to the sequence object list and select the sequencer give it a name and save it in your content browser drag the created camera into the sequencer you will see a camera track appear with the camera track setup we can open the movie render queue we can find the movie render queue under window cinematics and click movie render queue if this option isn't available make sure that the plugin is set to enabled when enabled make sure to restart the engine now you should be able to see it with our movie render queue opened the first thing we have to do is apply our sequencer we can do this by going over to the render Tab and select our created sequencer now you'll be able to see an unsaved convict file appear let's open this here it can change some variables I'm going to change my JPEG to PNG because I'm not going to do any color correction next I'm going to add the anti-a-lacing to my render I'm going to set the temporal sample count to 32. this is a great starting value next set the override NTA lacing box to true lastly I'll add some console variables we can really enhance our output using these variables let me show you what I use for still images I use a toe mapper short bed to give some extra crispiness and increase the quality to 5. next I use the screen space it basically doubles the resolution and scales it back down which gives us a crispier image with more detail because it's a still image I don't really need any more variables so let's move on to the output here in the output I can change the resolution of my render but I'm going to leave mine at 920 by 1080. feel free to experiment with higher resolutions but keep in mind that it can cause an overload on your GPU and crash the engine if you really want higher resolution I suggest adding the high resolution tab onto the export list when the resolution is set you can change the output location mine is already set so I'm going to leave it as is lastly I want to add some custom frames as I only want to render out a still image we need to set the custom playback range to true and put in a value of two numbers that are close to each other I'm going to use a start value frame 3 and an end frame of 4. this way I can render one image now all we need to do is click accept and render our image I'm going to skip the rendering part as it takes some time but let's take a look at the final results together I'm very pleased with the results Lumen has already come a far away since lounge and I can't wait to see where it will go there's still some limitations like not having realistic mirrors which is important for interior arguments but the results are however still stunning we can wrap this series up I hope you learned something remember to make small steps for reference and stay eager to learn and discover I want to end this series by thanking everyone for supporting the channel we're growing insanely fast and I hope to see you again in the next video take care

Channel: Wessel Huizenga

Views: 69,364

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Id: y2e6qQaIdRA

Length: 32min 27sec (1947 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023