Making Realistic Grass in Unreal 4

this video is going to be on making grass for unreal 4 so the idea is going to be trying to make kind of realistic looking grass will be using photos to start with and just building up some meshes is fairly cheap grass as well so you can quite easily fill a big landscape full of it and and it should also look quite nice from a top-down view so it's not God when you look straight down on there it's not got a kind of nasty young look of planes that you get quite often in game grass okay okay so because we're making realistic grass we're going to start with some photographs so this is some these are just some photos of its grasp that I took and I've cut them out in Photoshop and just kind of added some padding and stuff sliced and cut out and then I've added some padding and made another channel actually I've cut the white bit of this off the top the Alpha just for this and for this example so the next thing to do is go press Max and and stick them on sand planes so simple as that and now let's set out pivots to the base okay so I've got all my pivots set to the base of these and looks okay so the next thing I'm going to do is just to kind of scatter these around so let's move them all face outputs and what I'm going to do is I'm going to make you let the plane fact now I'm gonna make the top of it cylinder so this little cylinder here will at the top of this episode of space booster circle I'm just going to paint those grass meshes onto that and so what I'm going to do is use the object paint stuff for this so I'm going to get an object pane and let's see and I want to I'm just going to do them one at time so I've got a bit more control I want to paint on the selected object which is this circle and and let's just pick an object so let's go edit object list let's pick a bit grass time-sucking Prodi these two little bears across together so I should now be able to and some works see so paint with objects and lists and now can paint those onto that so they're obviously not looking quite right and we want to align them to why by the looks of it and what else we want to do we want to run rescale these so let's make them something between say 50 and 130 so randomly scale between there and so let's select this convert to objects let's paint them just random Nathan moment so something like that and I see worse committee and we can just kind of move them around a little bit think so let's increase our spacing I'm just trying to create something random so I paint a few in thank you more in this time let's move that around a bit and fimo it's going that so once I've done this I want to make it nice kind of nice and thick with lots of grass and once I've done that I'm just going to add and painting the other one so come back once I've done that okay so paint those things in I've got a nice kind of random and country grass I'm just going to delete the circle on the base so I'm just going to this base by them like as well I'll just come in and try and get rid of those right so that's going to be my kind of grass I'm going to try and get this something that looks like this into utter a full now is there can't really bring this in that's three and half thousand birds so now if you want to cling for grass for three and a half thousand verts so what we're going to do is to take this down and first of all oops first of all I'm just going to convert all these back to normal eggs for Polly's and then I'll just attach them all together it's a girl one big mesh now and now let's just put my pivot back at zero right so I'm going to do is these are all planes so I can't bake this out and in the way that we normally would so I can't make a plane protection map on and use a rendered texture to bake at these at the normal maps of these so I'm going to have to do is to create a normal map kind of manually and what they do is I'm just going to tell this over 90 degrees so once these I want to change this to look like a normal map let me just take off these hedge faces or anoint me I should take that off I should I think this is going to work better as well having a pivot I'm just going to put a pivot kind of in the middle of the object okay so I want this to look like a normal map so what I can do is I can just set up some lights to make out this as normal max what I need is a bunch of all right bunch of just normal at direct lights so I need on two three four five and in fact I asked fine so I need to I want these to light up at the moment they're just sending a light down where this cone is this yellow coating is I just wanted to find the bit that says here and directional parameters turn on overshoot and that means it'll just kind of light up everywhere in since this is a directional light it's it's kind of not coming from this source it's just pointing in that direction so this one's pointing straight down so to make a normal map what I need is set this to one three one two eight two five five nice car - one multiplier on it let's put one multiplier on it then I've got a so Green is up and down so this one is going to be an green so 0 255 0 and actually because we're using unreal for let's do the greens the other way round so let's say that green 1 2 minus 1 means this cup in paste actually the lights don't have to be this this side by the way I don't put the light anywhere and I'm just putting them kind of facing in the right directions I'm not facing the right directions by putting this one at the bottom and this one at the top and so on just so it's a bit easier to visualize what's going on so that should be a positive green one then this one should be a and C+ bread and it should be negative read I just need to put a flat color on here as well so let's just copy that in their name and take the diffuse color right so if I now like this with my seeing lights and lights and shadows steam lights look so I should be getting something now that is looking like a normal man doesn't quite look right I'm just workout white okay the reason this is looking a bit weird is just I've not ticked 2-sided inline material there you go that's looking much more like a normal map out right so what I can do is I can just take a screenshot of that mouth and that will be my normal map and so I want to do to get a nice screen shot is to I'm just going use I'm just going to save this ah and so press and okay so find the species deal with them I would see windows open so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a camera so camera just a free camera fine coin that straight down and let's just move this so this window now is showing what my camera is seeing let's just position mark and I'm going to want to kind of spin this round so and go fetch faces and and look a normal map so naima never seen lights now I'm going to want to go to spin this round and keep you all on the screen so it's not quite gonna work I'll date rights and so now please render these out so let's go to our room and surrender settings rendering render setup and render these out at 2048 Surrender oh and for a render let's just make sure that I'm on the correct screen so rendering render why once you've rendered that out uh-huh we just need to save it somewhere a bitmap ah don't do bitmap so I should we save it save as a PNG and so that we've got the Alpha included in there when once D then is you basically want to turn round 45 degrees and render out again then send it around another 45 degrees and render again and then turn another 45 degrees and render again and you also want to render one out like this with it turned up on its end so I'll do all of those and come back okay so I have my the five images that I wanted so I can load up and show you like that now I need is a so this stops my normal map I now need a diffuse texture so it's great back what I'm going to do is take all these lights and let's just save this before there if name these lights are cones just will be white now so that will give me a nice even nice even lighting on the on grass just make sure they were positive and of course I need my my diffuse texture back on there as well like that so you can see I've got nice even light I've not got I've not really got any hard shadows or anything which is what you would want for an albedo texture so that's going to be really nice for an IV though so I'll just render all exactly the same things you can read one out spinning around 45 degrees render it again this time render them as diffusers as something that I have not mentioned up to this point and I've just noticed when I've rented this out you need to I'm not quite sure why you need to do this because padding should take care of it but if you render these out with your ambien color in your material set like this you'll get like white lines around everything like so I'm not entirely sure why but if you set those to black we'll get rid of that okay so I've rendered all of those maps out and then I'm splitting see Photoshop we're putting together onto a sheet so I've got all of my normal maps there and I've got all of my diffuse our video maps here what I'm going to do is just add some padding to that so I'll just duplicate it and blood alphabet and then just keep on it's been blurring nice mix and padding like that I just put a layer of green underneath as well okay okay so that's my and that is me but it's almost my diffuse texture let's just turn off traveling as well so copy that uh since my alpha made up like right okay so that's um not stress sniffles processing so that fuse and that's just that's imparting to so this is wrong so that's my normal okay so starting you file in 3ds max now we just need to build some grass meshes so um it's correct playing smokers Nazi might say and we can save this defuses TIFF I'm saying this is TIF because 3dsmax seems prefer than like that okay for the past Jana and go pan out and start to build by actual meshes so scale the in middle and then cut out the other ones it's one save three and for and I'm no need to make these into a bit more useful measure so on and get rid of as much of thee translucent areas that can just make a bit cheaper it's going to cut off a bit cross that I think they see using shape meshes like this so do that okay so now I just need to put these together into a I kind of single mesh so and she's going to connect some of these together here and this is going to be my ace so this will be this will be really good this one because what you find quite often in games is that when you look at grass sort of straight down towards the ground it starts to look really crap because you start see the the meshes that pointing upwards so that's why I've rendered out this map so when we look down it gets nice and we just get to see something basically that's going to go there and bottom and then these will go together like this so you just senator pivots on those so we got this one this was our next one which was I just kind of put it over the top I said this at 45 degrees like that should get quite a the normal map should stuff line up quite nicely and set out once 90 and then this this will be one three five so something like that and then this one goes in at the bottom okay and now absolute of variation in this that's pretty much this mesh but I'm just going to break these up little so instead of them all pointing straight up I will just kind of move them up a bit like this okay looks pretty good thank these were for Heights yep so let's attach these together move back to zero in the world and just kind of get it set up so it's going to sit nicely here unreal back since the pivot okay the bad shape okay so that's it I'll save that for us mesh and now exports it so crafts I call this plus the tips that made one of these already it's FDX and then open up unreal a stodgy scrub and a quick scene that I can paint some grass and see ah let's just create a new folder for this too and it starts bring everything in so we've got add grass mesh a diffuse and normal okay slice create material create material from Innova in there as well and actually looking about it my normals come in as a normal map so to change it to a normal map so sorry sneeze can change the compression settings there to be a normal map okay to the bringing back in right so I'm just going to set up something so I can control the strength my normal and so let's just multiply it by parameter called non strength so I just want to multiply the red and green channels by this and that's like flight 3 that's my normal and my boy wants dinner set is material to the mask and shading model should be two-sided foliage and I want to make sure the two-sided is ticked as well and then our our flesh going through our capacity mask looking way better and well let's just plug in some things into our roughness so Craig scale value all that roughness maybe set it to about one-seventh now we can maybe add in a roughness map later on and I also want to scale a value in my capacity so let's call that hope last see also one three four now and then I'm going to multiply this just by a number as well orco a lot so amount and I was going into my subsurface color and think that should just about px and quite right let's see if we can change some of our parameters I'm sorry so let's use a subsurface default mount one save that and create material instance let's put the terror instance onto our grass smash it's not looking quite right in that see what happens when a crit is the game so create a new foliage I already got one and let's create leaf father Jack turn here how amusing the the distance field lighting so I'm just going to tell it to use to cast those distance little shadows I said it's movable should I say now 2004 now see what happens retain some I've got some these old matches as well nose off okay definitely not looking right just have a look okay so at the moment I'm multiplying my normal amounts by zero let's give it some of that normal map you can see what difference the normal map will make Kyocera instance so that's making the normalmap stronger each time its glow off it's normal not getting stronger and weaker think something out definitely to do here is play with my diffuse map little bit see what size these are as well drop links the world they're not see bad things are quite small so I'm just going to scale them up the bet and I'm wondering if also perhaps as you see Photoshop is in 16-bit yes so let's change that to an 8-bit file and save that so that's why my normal ding come in as automatically as a compressed normal map I'm saving as a TIF I want to do that say that as Photoshop file has to faster right so let's bring these back in then this is going to fix quite a few things so three imports okay I call this coming properly now hi very important normal Maxwell okay so it's mostly just case of playing with settings and stuff now so this looks right so I can change them out scrub my normal map one should be okay and we can change the opacity of this which can be how much light comes through it sometimes I find that bringing the multiplier on this sub surface mount just softens the look a bit as well okay so there's a few more things that we need to do one thing is at the moment and all maps kind of working that the normals are all facing in different directions which is giving us a funny look so what we'll do is we'll just change that oh sorry not on one edit normals and I just want to try and point them upwards it's always better pains day let's ask off my normals pointing upwards now and let's just explore this again now the helps make it a bit thicker as well yep they look better now I think so I can play with maybe my pasty Evette think I need to in Photoshop I think I just need to kind of desaturate all this quite a bit they were like that say fats so another thing I can do is add some wind so it's about some wind up you need put some a vertex paint modifier on um then once these make all the vertices black in that vertex pain and the top one should be white and the methyl ones around here can be some kind of great so that means that the when wind have flags on it did the bottom will stay still and then it moves a little bit metal and moral it's off okay let's explore that so I'll just move my normal map up a bit you see it's just this just piece of tweaking this and so it looks right I might go smash my normals again right if you can go mess with my mesh and until I get the lights in just the way that I wants it sleepy or in here a bit more dense system it's just a bit it's a bit dark and it's a bit Bitsey come trusty still so let's try some levels and she can't track this coming in right again okay so I'm getting that now I am it's not like you can see but it's not quite right though let's one minute a is I'm just going to correct color I'm just going to multiply that by my diffuse texture I'm sub stuff as well I make up routes that I was caught in my tent so she's quite useful to have that so pairs that I can try some slightly different colors out with my grass Matthew green I think in this case it needs to be a bit more along here a bit more red maybe a little darker as well we see it looks quite nice and thick from the top one thing I definitely need to do is I need the ground texture underneath this to match it which you really isn't doing very well at the moment and so that's something that I would need to go back and fix I think just sort of speculative alyou that I've gotten here is about right for grass actually and so obviously I could change that just by more shiny with my roughness or I can make a better offer oops perhaps a reference okay shiny rough so I've got us grass in as well you can see and see how the normal map is affecting that so it's down a little now okay so I saw got more tweaking Steve and I think I'm going to leave this video I would manage Steve one more thing so she's put winded so for some wind I painted my vertexes so cream bring the vertex color and then I just use one of these simple wind as a wind simple grass wind say my and I just put I've got no additional world position offset because I'm not doing anything with the world position offsets obviously that zero my wind intensity and we'll make a scale value call that win amount the wind weight is where the thing that we paint in our vertex colors for and the finally wind speeds let's just plug something is that as well wind speed save so time so you put that swirled position offset say that and and where I say my serial instance I'll turn wind so that looks like it's going too fast slow down a bit going to be heavier sign up the amount so I think we go satisfy three just point one a bit of subtle wind 12 days I'll pause this video I'll tweak things for more and now we'll come back with the finishing cereal okay so this is my finished results I think oh this is where I'm going to leave it now anyway so all I've really done is just tweaked I'll use altered shells the spectra value a tiny bit and I messed around my normals a bit more but I've not done anything special at just masking settings until until I got the result I wanted I've also painted in some of these other bits of grass that I have they've got these little white I don't know what you call them but sort of white grasp it's like that on them just a few of those measures just right a bit of variation so I hope this video helps and that's it

Channel: barry lowndes

Views: 175,602

Keywords: 3ds max, photoshop, pbr, pbs, physically based, nDo2, bake, grass, unreal 4, ue4, Unreal Engine (Video Game Engine Family)

Id: Z-XDMoMNnF4

Length: 51min 15sec (3075 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2015