Ocean System for Rendered Cinematics v2.0 | Overview & Tutorial | UE5

foreign foreign hey there Dylan here and welcome to this first look and tutorial slash overview of my new ocean system for rendered cinematics version 2.0 which is now available on Marketplace as of today so without further Ado strap in and let's have a look at some of the new features and a little tutorial on how to actually use this system some of the main changes that we have from the old version which was on Marketplace before version 1.0 and a few little hotfixes here and there is that the original version was a fully opaque material so you couldn't do any translucency with it and it was not physically accurate for water in any case it's all faked but with this version 2 we have switched to a single layer water material which is technically also still an opaque material but basically lets the engine render what's behind it into a secondary pass and allows for kind of translucency and light scattering based on depth which is exactly what you want for a water body um so that's the main change between the versions here there's also some Shore foam and revamped wave foam included as well alrighty so as you just saw at the beginning of the video there was quite a nice little render of some scenes a little quick scene that I whipped up which is the same scene that you can see here on my screen just without the ocean because we're going to add it in and see what we can do to kind of get a similar look and feel as we did for the intro stuff so as you can see I've got a bunch of bigger skins rocks here and such the first thing you want to do in terms of when you've added the plugin to your project is head down to the Cinematic ocean folder so everything you need is situated within there just like any other asset pack the first thing we're going to need is the blueprint which is BP underscore ocean so if we drag that one in as you can see already we've got quite a nice looking little preview of what's to come so let's just get that to the right height the intended height looks pretty good so essentially what you're seeing is a preview of the ocean so it's at the lowest possible quality and right away we can see that we're getting some really nice translucency going on here which but essentially the stuff that's closer to the surface is a lighter blue which as it gets deeper and deeper it goes to the darker blue color there's some light scattering in there as well so really nice and it's the good thing about this is it's fully customizable and pretty physically accurate in terms of the science of what you're setting in terms of the settings so that's really cool we'll touch that on that a little later but first let's have a look at some of the blueprint settings so the way this blueprint actually works is that or the whole asset works is that it basically displays in a grid array a bunch of high resolution polygon planes which are then displaced using World position offsets to create the nice details of the ocean and the blueprint essentially is needed to manage the loads of this so that close to the camera we get the high resolution meshes and at the further away from the camera we are the lower polygon count they go otherwise you essentially would run out of vram very quickly as you might have noticed this ocean stops suddenly um as it's at the moment said to just use a five by five grid of planes now in order to change that we can enable the outer plane setting which essentially gives it a massive plane that goes to kind of almost Infinity at least in unreal's terms uh to kind of fill out that Horizon now because it knows where the camera is it is always moving away from the camera like when the camera moves it moves so you never reach that plane of low quality because the blueprint is automatically saying all the high-res stuff near the camera and keeping the low-res stuff away let's get right into some of these settings here so first section we have is the LOD section so this basically controls some lot settings to do with the planes in the system so we've got a few settings here we've got LOD scale log distance lot bias and the debug load mode so what these do what do these do most the time I use the lot distance myself they're kind of a bit interchangeable because they do similar things or they're all interconnected it just depends on the way that you want to use the system for example the lot distance controls the distance in units it takes to change down a lot from the camera position so if I drop that down to 100 and hit play you'll see that you know everything's low quality essentially because nothing's quite close enough to the camera to get a higher quality lot if I set this to 500 and hit play to see the actual Geo then we can see straight away that it's higher quality if I move the camera down and like close and then far away you can see the quality changing via a pop and that's because we are the settings are a bit low quality and you can even see gaps in some of the planes because of the quality difference between them so essentially you need to kind of balance your settings so that you don't see those gaps so we in this case we'll probably up the lot distance uh for this and then basically you get like say two planes next to each other that were the same quality and then the other where it changes is far enough away that you don't actually see a gap the lodge scale does a similar thing that scales the LOD all of the lot numbers and then the lot bias is kind of like a bias so it's like a a non-linear um effector so you can kind of make it so that all of the high-res stuff is really close to the camera and it drops off quite fast with the debug load mode essentially what that does is it assigns a color and if we hit play we'll be able to see the kind of distance that we're dealing with blue is the highest quality load and then Green's the next one and so on and so forth so it's a really good visualization to see what you're actually doing with the system so then we jump down to the grid section which is also very important so this essentially controls the types of like the the bits and pieces to do with how the grids laid out now the main thing that I use here that you will probably use is extent and density the extent is the actual size of the plane here it is with the outer plane disabled so you can see what we're seeing so I've set the extent to one so that's only showing one plane based on the base scale so if I hit play here you can see it's just one plane so it's not very high quality we don't have much going on there but it's a really good way to preview because the performance is really good with one plane so you can really kind of start to see more of the detail and stuff come out as you can and then then essentially what the density does is that for that one plane unit we can actually up the density within that so we can go two and what that means is now there's four planes there in a grid so that's we've doubled the density of this grid so that's really useful for upping the quality without upping the extent and essentially um really pushing the quality to its Max so if you want really close-ups with the water or if you're you're just want that more detail to come through for the intro video I believe I had the density on about six or seven and for some of the close-ups in that intro video I had them at like 12 or 15. so you can really really pack it in there and get some really minute details going it's really handy another thing to do though once you're up the density um you can lower the load distance because the planes themselves are smaller so you really want the high detail they don't have to be or the high detail planes don't have to go out as far so it's all a bit of a balancing act to see how it reacts and what works for the shot that you're working on now the base scale um generally I don't really touch much because that's essentially just like the scale so you can do that with the density anyway it's just a different way of looking at it so that's just the base scale it's kind of just a default value so now we head down to the materials section so this one here essentially is where you would set your Ocean material which is for the close-up stuff and the far material which is for the far away kind of the the outer plane essentially um these are set by default to the single layer water the new one there's also a Shadows option here which does not actually work for this single layer water version but it does work for the original version now I don't really recommend to enable that anyway at all even with the old version it's extremely performance intensive and doesn't really add much that looks nice of you a lot of the time the Shadows kind of break the illusion of the water and you don't really need it most of the time based on the shading that you actually get from the Shader so don't really it's kind of like a bit of a useless option nowadays you've also got down the bottom here the global material scale which is a global scalar in the Shader that connects to the Shader so you can scale a lot of the kind of wave generation sizes World scales uh down or up so you can make it larger for example or if we set it to 0.25 we can make them a higher frequency detail so that one there's just there if in case your scene scales a bit off or you you basically just want a little bit of a different look to it so it's super handy to have so what we've also got is I've actually included the original version one materials in here still so it doesn't break any compatibility and backwards compatibility stuff so there there if you do want to use the old opaque materials which is the m ocean fire inst and the M ocean inst materials there which you can just swap in to the material section there so it's nice and easy to still get the old look if you want it so now that we've gone through some of the blueprint options there let's head on into the actual Shader options which of there is many as you may well know if you've used the original version of this asset so let's open it up here now we've got some new options here but what we'll do is we'll go through everything because this will act as a new kind of overview for the whole system so the newest new edition up the top here is color and opacity and that's because the new single layer water stuff no longer have we no longer have to set silly kind of values based on height for color and all of that fun stuff we now just have some a bit more scientifically accurate uh kind of uh parameters here so first one we've got is absorption which is the actual wavelength of light that the water absorbs so essentially what you're looking at here is because it's red we're getting a Bluey green result in the ocean because that's the that's the water that actually gets reflected and the rest of the wavelengths get absorbed like in real life so I'll just give an example here if we play around with the settings here a little bit the color so if we tweak this to different uh colors as you can see we kind of get the opposite color kind of coming out in the the light that gets reflected instead of absorbed so we'll get some green there we can get some real deep purpley blues if we sew it to Yellow if we set it to Blue we get some Reds and oranges and things like that so you can definitely get some kind of fantastic Fantastical looks to this with this system it's very customizable now there is a little bit of blue still in there and that's because of the scattering color um attribute which uh further adds like kind of the deep scattering color to it so as you can see if I pull out the color it's just kind of like a more of a white scatter uh and then I can change it to different colors as well and give you kind of interesting results and then without any brightness obviously we have no scattering so that's kind of what it looks like there we set that back to normal um what we've also got here is we've got refraction which obviously controls the refraction of the um scene color underwater if we hit it to 1 0.05 then we get more one nothing at all I don't know why you'd want it like that but you can do it if you want you know always open to whatever people want um so and then we've also got water murkiness which controls basically the depth um like kind of like the the amount that you can see into the water body as you can see we've also got the water scattering intensity here which obviously just controls the intensity of it so you can go pretty crazy with that one in the second section here we've got the foam which a lot of it is kind of new um to this uh this version just all kind of similar to the old version this foam isn't fantastic by any means but it's a little bit of an improvement on the old stuff that we had we didn't even have Shore foam at all in the first version so we do have Shore foam based on the display the distance fields of the meshes that intersect with the water so you get it around the edges of it and there's a few different stuff this is fully procedural foam as well so there's no textures involved it's all using the inbuilt noise functions in unreal so it gives a really nice effect I think for for the type of foam in the way it's generated at least um so it kind of works we also have a bunch of controls here so we've got the phone brightness so we can lower our brighten the the kind of the color the Albedo value of the um the foam we've got a bunch of height values for the wave foam we've got a bunch of the shore settings so we've got for instance the shore foam distance here um the short foam bubble scale which kind of controls those bubbles in there if we change the short distance you can see that it kind of just ramps closer to the edge of things so you can really tweak the look and feel of the water to your liking you can even turn it fully off with the shore foam malt um further down we've also got the obviously the wave foam stuff down here as well uh which the we did have an original wave foam in there but I've just adapted it to the newer slightly newer foam system so it's nothing special um you can see some of it going on if I hit play yep there's some over there and there's some down the bottom of the screen um you know the drill it kind of just based on height at the moment to be an ounce later on probably early next year we'll get some nice surrender Target based foam into the asset hopefully next we have the guest settings which are the same settings exactly the same as the first version that I put out so nothing different there there's a lot of different control in here very flexible you can get lots of different looks I highly recommend kind of going through and you know just experimenting seeing what different looks you can get because there's no real use explaining each individual thing there's little explanations of what they are when you Mouse over them and you can just the best way to kind of understand how that changes the look is to actually just play with them and see what the result is to be honest then we've got your normal settings so just a few different settings down here standards exactly the same as before the version one and same with the specular wave group A and B and the wpo stuff all right so now that we've gone through those I wanted to do a little section here on actually rendering this asset I get a lot of questions a lot of the time about what are the best settings to use issues that people have with motion blur and things like that specular hits so I just want to go over a few of these right now for this as well so I've set up a little camera here in a little sequence and essentially first I want to set up kind of the look and feel of the water to be high enough quality now the way to do that obviously in editor normal like in a normal editor mode we can't see the high quality version like the actual version of how it will look when it's rendered so for that we have to actually hit the play button so we can see we've got some detail there going on I think we need to crank it a little bit so this is when we would stop the playback so if we bring that up to up a little bit to four let's say and we hit play and I think that's a little bit more detail so you know we like to overshoot it a bit because you know when you're over sampling things with samples in renderers it feels good to have a little bit more detail than you need there so we've got that sequence set up there now let's jump in and see what rendering settings we should use to kind of get the most out of the asset so let's create something a entry into the render queue here the sequence is called tutorial and let's open up the settings so first thing we want to add I'm just going to use jpeg because this isn't a you know professional piece of work or anything so we're just going to stick with 1080p as well for now just to demonstrate something and then we want to add anti-aliasing first we'll set the override anti-lising on and set the method to none that's key and then we'll set the temporal sample count to the default that most people use which is eight so this is how many temporal samples it'll render and merge them into one frame for output now there is a huge amount of high frequency detail in the asset so the that the main issue we're going to run into here which you'll see is that we'll get a little bit of aliasing and a lot of blurriness kind of noisy blurriness not smooth blurriness so if I hit render here let the shaders compile all right so now we can see that it's starting to render and we'll let it go through a bit of frames here as you can see it's going through eight samples per frame at 1080P and we can see you know we get quite a bit of detail here it looks fairly cool um like like kind of like water I guess so we'll let that go through and do some frames there so once that's done um we'll head into the uh the folder and we'll have a look at some of these frames so immediately what we can see is that because of the high frequency detail a lot of the highlights are very noisy and kind of blurry and that that's because they're being stepped so the samples there's too much time between them and that's too much movement in between those samples so there's a bit of aliasing as well all over the place and that's also due to the lower resolution the 1080p render here so your main way to fix this for example the opening shots of this of this video with the high quality renders are done with 32 samples and you could even go higher depending on the speed of the ocean movement and the closeness of the camera to the ocean to get the right amount of motion blur and have it be nicely smoothed out with little aliasing so what we want to do is let's go ahead and change that to 32 samples and we'll do a little render of a few frames so we'll let that go through for a couple take a look at them so immediately you're seeing a much nicer motion blur for sure now all of that those highlights down the in the bottom um the screen left hand left bottom left side of the screen are a lot smoother the blur is no longer stepped in the highlights there's less aliasing all over there's still a bit though especially in those glancing angles and the way we can get around that is we need to up the resolution higher as well so for instance these opening cinematics of this video were rendered at 1440p so 2560 by 1440 and I do also recommend even doing some at 4K even to get the best possible quality most definitely so we'll set that to 1440p First 2560 by 1440 and we'll render a few frames and as you can see it's already feeling a bit better here in fact we could even probably up the quality of the actual um the water here because it feels like it's dropping off in quality a little too fast so what we'll do is we'll grab the actual settings that I used for the opening cinematics and we'll apply them to our scene so the settings that I used for this the opening scene was we had a lot scale of four lot distance of 400 the extent of 3 and the density of 12 so we've got a lot of planes close up to us and there are lots more than they were so what we'll do is we'll open our tutorial sequence and we'll try rendering that for us so let's go through with that one now obviously the higher you go it's going to be a lot slower but the quality I feel will be a lot nicer and sharper so you know what we'll either do is we'll even try some 4K renders here again will take longer I think the opening cinematic um took about an hour and a half to render the main shot of that so not too bad just left it going went and did some stuff with the kids so as you can see now um here what we've got here is a lot sharper a lot higher quality and much better and then in motion it's going to look even better like it'll look like those opening cinematics there so those are my kind of tips for the rendering of it now in terms of specular highlights this is a note that I've been rendering all of these today with no Bloom at all in engine and that's because um when rendering with no and anti-aliasing sometimes the bright spots kind of overblow and with combined with the sampling um you end up getting kind of like these faded glows on on bits of the the um on bits of the ocean and it's very apparent when you use convolution Bloom which does look really nice sometimes but it can look bad with this asset I'll just make a note of you can make it look good with the asset as well just depends on your lighting setup and how lit up and what the specular highlights are doing in the scene so sometimes you might come across where there'll be a lot of specialty highlights and you might need to tone down that bloom threshold and or kind of up the time samples to kind of smooth that out um but yeah you can definitely make it work uh but you know a lot of professionals would do the bloom in a in a stage after once you've rendered in some post-process post editing software uh like after effects or nuke uh resolve and things like that so yeah well that we come to the end of my overview and first look at my ocean system for rendered cinematics version 2 which again is now available on Marketplace for purchase I hope you enjoy it if you have purchased it please leave a review if you did like it and if you didn't like it so much you know I'm always open to feedback and ways to improve it got lots of planned features in the future hopefully my list is very long of requests from people on what to do some of them I will be able to do some of them probably not but we'll find out I guess in the future so I hope you enjoyed the overview leave a like if you did and hit me up on Twitter or Macedon or co-host wherever it's still alive by the time you watch this video and until next time take very good care see ya

Channel: Dylan Browne

Views: 99,764

Keywords: UE5, UnrealEngine, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5.1, Water Shader, Ocean Shader, Cinematic Ocean, Unreal Ocean, Unreal Water, Ocean System for Rendered Cinematics

Id: hfGRXRG_pMw

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022