No Nodes Procedural Environment in Unreal Engine 5 - Dash Tutorial

hey everyone welcome to another video here at polygon flow my name is Galen and in today's video we'll be covering how I made this Canyon scene in unreal using Dash the approach to this environment is simple in that we will be anchoring all the rules of the scene to two spline actors every adjustment that I make to the individual points along the spline will affect all the actors on one side of the canyon making the scene highly customizable via Dash let's start by looking at all the actors we will employ for this environment I have several scanned Cliff pieces here that will serve as the main elements of the canyon walls here to start just a quick note to say here that I employed the modeling tools to cap off the back faces of these pieces before I got started next I have some ground elements to break up the terrain I'll be doing two passes with these pieces one that will be closer to the canyon walls with larger physical features and the next with higher frequency details falling off from the previous set I'll also be adding in an amount of foliage that will follow similar logic where the actors will mostly hug the canyon walls with all that out of the way let's get started let's start by creating the main shapes for the canyon walls the sply tool and dash is highly versatile and gives you a good amount of settings to play with as you draw over terrain or existing stat static meshes one setting I'll be adjusting here at the outset is the spacing between spline points with the Canon wall meshes being pretty large I want the spacing between points to be larger than the default setting here in dash if the spacing is too close together it will be difficult to make large scale adjustments later on now that I've drawn out the basic shape for what I want the walls to conform to Let's pair up the logic for this spline with path scatter path scatter essentially just gives you a curve as a projection method and has a ton of features that we can affect in order to get the look that we are going for let's begin by adding in the curve we drew as the main control arm for the tool after selecting it here in the viewport I'll just hit the plus button here in the path scatter window to pair it next let's select all the wall components and add them to the scatter Tab and just like that you can see all the assets begin to populate along the path the first adjustment I'll make here is the scale of the assets we want to add in an amount of variation from asset to asset but not so much to where anything sticks out next we can start to affect the density at this stage it might be worth revisiting the Minimax settings that we changed earlier to see how everything looks in concert obviously we don't want any gaps along the path but we also don't want too many meshes inter penetrating so I'll likely make adjustments to this as I go another unique feature in path scatter is the ability to add parallel Curves in the settings without drawing out new splines altogether I won't be employing that feature here in this example as I want to have control for each side of the canyon individually but just be aware that this is a super useful feature if you want one or several repeating paths in your scene there are a ton of features in the path scatter window here so I would highly encourage you to mess around with each one of them until you get the exact look that you're going for now let's take a look at the ground scatter for this environment we'll still be using the spline we initially Drew out to help inform where the aets get placed but not through the path scatter this time to be clear you could still use path scatter if you wanted to generate a similar effect with slightly different settings but I chose to use the surface scatter for this use case let's start by loading in the necessary assets we'll also start loading in the surface input here at the top in my case I generated a procedural terrain mesh using Dash and used a simple sand materal material across the entire surface next let's load in some of the larger ground scatter elements here at the top of the window as you can see by default it scatters across the entire terrain Dash has some really simple and effective masking features that we can lean on to Anchor the scatter to the same control arm that we set up with the path scatter example in this case I'll be leveraging the proximity mask feature let's select our initial spline and load it in into the objects tab using the plus icon as you can see we need to invert this mask and increase our distance until we get a soft fall off from the spline we can supplement this mask with additional noise as well if we wanted to break up any of the hard lines in the resulting scatter as I mentioned before I have another ground scatter element I'd like to use here with a different frequency of detail that will fill in nicely with the other pieces that we just laid down I'll speed through the Section But ultimately we are using the exact same method in surface scattering while masking for the spline actors and once again we'll use the same method for scattering foliage along the canyon walls all right now that we have everything connected up to our initial spline you can see that every adjustment that we make to individual spline points affects all of the actors that we are using here in the scene this makes for a highly directable scene in that everything is linked to our initial spline actor creating simple logic like this in environment creation reduces iteration time drastically as you can see here I created a second wall for our Canyon employing the exact same methods to have two independent control arms for the scene now I wanted to employ some of Dash's physics features to create a rock slide at the end of this Canyon there are many ways to accomplish this using Dash but I wanted to try something a little different for this scene to start I've sourced a few Boulder assets that I think will look pretty good for the rock slide next let's type grid scatter in at the top of the toolbar after we load the boulder assets into the instance meshes section we can start to build out a large grid of rocks above the canyon obviously the more pieces here that you create the more intense the computation will be on the physics side of things so be conscious of what you are loading in and to be clear it's worth running the simulation a few times to see exactly how many actors you need for this type of look and just play around with a couple settings until you dial in the look that you're going for as you can see I'm also creating a wide range scale-wise from actor to actor so that it doesn't look like all the same few rocks just scattered around I've also checked random spin to on and added in some rotation Jitter so that the assets themselves will have nice variation once they start to collide with each other the random remove slider also helps create some nice pockets on the grid for even more variation now that we have our grid built out we'll need to bake these pieces down into individual assets luckily Dash lets us do this super easily okay and now for the fun part let's open up the physics tool and watch these pieces fall into place for more detailed breakdown on the physics tool here's a link to a previous video where we cover every aspect of the feature set suffice to say that we need to make every one of these rocks physics ready using Dash and Ensure that our Collision for everything above and below is set up properly one thing that is worth pointing out philosophically is that this exact same method of World building can apply to a completely different use case I've paired up this tropical scene with a single spline and I'm able to affect change super easily as a result obviously the computation becomes more taxing depending on the resolution and complexity of the assets so keep that in mind as you start to optimize this method for your own personal workflows all right and just like that we've made a really simple scene using Dash and a handful of assets thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you able to find this video useful we'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Polygonflow Dash

Views: 7,058

Keywords: Dash Plugin, Unreal Engine, Architectural Visualization, Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial, Efficient Design Workflow, Real-Time Rendering, Game Development, Unreal Engine for Beginners, Unreal Engine Plugins, Poly haven, megascans, environmentart, How to scatter grass in ue5, AI content tagging Unreal engine 5, How to do Post Processing in UE5, How to create a path in UE5, UE5 Realistic, photorealistic, path tracer, canyon, cliffs, procedural cliffs, Procedural environment, 3d rocks

Id: 6U2jbJmqs4k

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024