Make Realistic Trees for UE4 using Grove3d in Blender

hey i hope you're doing well so i wanted to show you my process for bringing trees made by the grove 9 plug-in in blender bringing those trees into unreal engine the trees that this software makes are amazing trees they're highly detailed really nice they've got these little twig things that you can buy to make all different kinds of trees and they're basically like little 3d models that get tacked on through particle system uh right now there's a special going on until december 12th 20 off so you can go check that out i'll have a link down below in this video description but because they're so high detailed they're not that great for game engines like unreal engine so i'm going to show you what i do to get those into unreal engine so first thing first you'll want to go to um quicksole and find some some objects so if you if you type in uh bark you can find um various different barks that you might want to use for your tree surface so i've already downloaded a couple but these are these are nice texture surfaces you can bring into unreal engine for free obviously um so i'm also going to look for a maple leaf under atlas this is the one down here that i downloaded because it's got some twigs already associated with it um therefore in this little pack so i've already downloaded those and i'll show you how i bring those in so first things first i'm going to turn on my little uh screencast keys so you can see what i typed on the bottom and we'll do add mesh plane so now we've got a plane here basic plane no material but i want to go to to this material and i want to create a new one and basically bring in my twig material you would think you'd bring in the albedo but it's actually easier to see if you bring in the opacity first so i will uh ah didn't bring it in all right then we'll go to twigs and we'll drag just drag the opacity in like this and we'll assign the color to that so now you can see the outline of of the twig there i'm gonna go back to layout and press tab to bring this up and i'm gonna go to knife and i'm just gonna like trace out some areas around this um i want to create like two different i'm going to use two of these two of the four just to kind of keep it simple i'll do that and then i'm also going to trace out this guy here you can be more exact if you want all right so we've got that i'm going to go to here i'm just going to select this line and dissolve edges so i'm going to select all these ah ctrl z i'm going to do uh effect vector mode or vertex mode sorry um i'm going to delete this edge here and we'll delete these vertex okay so we've got these two right here so i'm going to tab over i'm just going to move these i'm going to do a g and uh x and slide it over until i get that where i want it and then gy i just want the end of the stem to be basically right at the center there i'm gonna do apply i'll transform so i'm going to call this one twig a and i'm going to shift duplicate and i'll call this one twig b right so i'll turn twig a off now i want to actually select this and we'll delete that so this is our twig a i'm going to go to tweak b and we'll delete that guy and we'll actually take this and do g y and g x to line that tip up there and we'll do object apply all transform and then we got these two guys here all right so this first one twig a here i also want i want it to have this but i also want to give it a little bit more um density to it so i'm going to duplicate this again and i'm just going to rotate on the z and then i'm going to rotate on the x like that and then i'm going to rotate on the y i kind of like create like this right so now i've got a little bit of depth to that so i've got two two things that are coming off this one little point here um i'm gonna take this one hold shift do control j combine those back to twig a and rename it all right so i got twig a and we got tweak b twig b i know i want it to be on the end so it needs to run along this red axis so i'm going to take this one rotate around the z until it kind of lines up with the stem aligned up with the x-axis there and then again i'm going to apply all transforms all right so we got those to again b i want to go into the shading and i'm going to fix up these materials a little bit better this color is actually going to go into the alpha and this is not going to be there and then i'm going to take this albedo drag that in this is going to go there all right so we've got that that this is non-color opacity and here we want to change this to alpha hashed so now we've got our leaf there's some other stuff i'm just going to apply it later in unreal engine all right so if we go back to layout you're going to see because they're using both the same material we've got all that set up for both twigs okay so now we'll go to our grove here after we save this guy and we'll do add grove and i'm just going to change the end to twig b you can see it's six straight up and i'm gonna change the side to twig a so it's got some stuff going off the side here and i'm gonna start to grow this tree so we're gonna do um grow that's our first little guy there i'm going to grow it again so now we're a little bit bigger let's see how big we actually are here we five meters so you can see our leaves are actually too big um so i'm going to take this plane here and i'm just going to scale it down to about like that and i'm trying to take this one and scale it down to maybe like that okay so those those look more appropriate on the tree there so we want to go ahead and make sure that with these we do object apply all transform here object apply all transforms okay so we've got all that this tree looks pretty nice if we don't like the shape of it we could just do um regrow and it's going to change its shape and grow a new one for us which is the beauty of this we can say oh i don't like these little twigs here we'll just prune prune that off i'm going to prune this off so now we don't have any low limbs let's say you've got this up against a building you are making a little custom tree and you want it to maybe bend away from the building a little bit so we'll do this little this is a new feature yeah then bend the tree out a little bit and maybe prune it we'll do like a straight cut prune here because it's going to be up against our building thing so we've got kind of like a specialty tree here that we've just um we've just constructed bending all that kind of stuff very very unique and uh very nice looking looks really nice okay so now we've got this we'll do file save and i'm going to select this tree and i'm going to go file export fbx go to exports and i'm going to call this uh maple v2 and we'll do select objects mesh and that looks good we'll do export fbx check our file here all right so we're right there we're at 2 megabytes 2.2 megabytes file save okay so let's go into unreal all right cool here we are we're gonna go to ue assets and i'm going to create a new folder and i'm going to call it maple tree two all right so we've got this this is our old maple tree here we'll just turn around so we don't look at that one and we'll do import and go to maple version 2. so i'll do open in here this is what we want to choose we want to say make sure we say combine meshes that's going to combine the leaves with the branch stuff and then we'll make sure we go down create new materials we want new materials and we'll say import all right cool so we got our tree here and you can see we've got some material set up so this is i'm going to actually rename this to um leaves maple material and then this um is going to be the branch i'm going to rename this one um branch maple material all right so one thing we want to bring in we know we got our materials here so we're going to go to um our twigs and we've already got our albedo material but we need our normal opacity and roughness so i'm going to take these three and drag them in okay so imported those and then for our trunk we want this d40 maple with the normal okay so we've got our all that stuff so we'll open up the leaves first here and we've got a basic basic material set up and one thing i want to bring in obviously is we're going to first bring in the roughness and i'm going to tie that into the roughness here and then we're going to bring in opacity that'll get tied in to the mask and then we'll bring in the normal and this normals go go into normal all right so we want to take this and we want this to be a mast so we've got our our leaf going here um we want it to be two-sided and actually we want to make it two-sided foliage and we want to make it two-sided so that's our shader set up there we've got that going and then um we want to add some surface subsurface color to this okay so we don't want to pull that directly and we want to break that and we want to put in a multiply node and that is going to go in there and then this is going to go in the b and then we're going to take the color and we're going to drop that into the a so basically the light will kind of scatter through these the red light i'm going to change this to and we'll tweak this once we get this in okay so we'll do save this for now and because i want to tweak this i'm actually going to convert to a parameter and to call this sub color and then we'll save this and then i will take this material and create a material instance out of that and then let's go to the this thing and this is all kinds of messed up so i'm going to delete that and delete that and we're going to take the bark bring that in connect that to the base color we're going to bring the normal in and connect that to the normal there so we've got that we'll just make that simple like that done all right so one more thing that i want to do to this is add a little bit of movement to this so i'm going to add like a simple grass wind here and i'm going to promote this to a parameter the intensity and promote that and then i'm going to pull this off let's see promote that's my uv but i'm going to break that link i'm just going to steal it and tie that into there and then this is going to go up to the world position offset so now if i set the base to 0.3 the default 0.3 okay we get a little bit of movement there so i'm going to save that all right so now check this tree out we got some movement and we got leaves and they look pretty good and you can see it's our little custom tree that's been pruned the way we like it and bent the way we like it alright so we're gonna save that but first i instead of having this material i'm actually going to apply the instant instance to it so that'll be that'll be that okay so there's our maple tree and let's do save all and drag this tree in and see how it looks here oh yeah look at that wow see isn't that beautiful see how that light comes through those leaves look at that oh my god look at that right there see that and this is your uh custom custom tree here made in blender and brought into unreal and the performance should be pretty decent i know i've got a bunch of other things in this scene that's kind of eating up but i'm like 100 frames per second right now so that's that's pretty pretty good um so i hope you found this video helpful and hope you can start making a bunch of trees for your projects and unreal and um have fun with with grove 3d it's an amazing add-on to blender that you can create some some beautiful stuff with and of course the materials and stuff from qixel are uh are a good match to go to go with that tree the grove 3d so check it out let me know if you have any comments and uh thanks for watching subscribe let me know if you want to see some other videos about certain things and look forward to making more hear what you guys think thanks

Channel: Whitewash Studio

Views: 3,524

Keywords: Design, Architecture Rendering, 3d, sketch, VR, Virtual Reality, visualization, Professional, profession, what an architect does, thegrove3d, ue4, tree, rendering, blender 2.8, modeling, trees, the grove, the grove 3d, realistic trees, model trees, procedural tree, archviz, plant, animation, 3d tree, wybren van keulen, tutorial, modeling trees, realistic foliage, game trees, real game trees, hyperreal, addon blender, super realistic unreal engine, realistic tree, unreal engine 4 tutorial

Id: WCH0JemUEGc

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020