Post Processing in Unreal Engine 4 | UE4 Tutorial (2020)

since the last time I made a video on post-processing a lot of features have been changed so in this tutorial we'll go over all of the new and old stuff and learn how to set up a good post process in Yui 4.22 and above if you end up finding this video useful consider subscribing to stay up to date with new videos with that being said let's get into it to be more precise in this video we will see how we can transform this scene into this this one into that and this into that one we will go to the entire process only for two of these the Japanese shrine scene and the statues in the forest scene with all that said let's get into the Japan inspired scene in contrast with a level that we will do later this one is moody dark and Misty and my post process was done with that in mind to achieve that I wanted to introduce as many shadows as I could while preserving details I wish I could have gotten better contrast but if I were to increase that the shadows would become too dark not something I'm a big fan of alright let's see how well I can redo it while explaining my steps first of all what I always like to do with my post process is to enable infinite extent this way it is going to affect the player everywhere in the level so let's go into that which is go down here and enable in yet extent now the second thing that we are going to do is to go to bloom and set the intensity to zero and that is because bloom is a very artificial effect it adds light to your scene that is unnecessary and it is going to kill the realism and this post process is the base that I always start with whenever I make a scene this is the foundation that I always used because I never liked his bloom and if it extent is self-explanatory now let's go to exposure and enable metering mode and let's say this for manual now with this we will have access to all these camera settings those being shutter speed ISO and aperture and if you don't know what these are there's going to be a link down in the description of this video to Peter McInnis video about the basics of a camera it is a very good video when I highly encourage you to go and watch it now let's say the shutter speed to one the ISO to 2500 and the aperture to 4.5 now let's also set the maximum aperture to 4.5 just to make sure this works and that should be it now the exposure is pretty good now let's go back to chromatic aberration chromatic aberration is an effect that's place the RGB cards into three different directions in such manner that you will be able to see the colors individually at the edges of objects let's say the intensity to 1.3 and the start offset to 0.7 start offset represents how far away from the middle of the screen this effect takes place and because 1.3 is a pretty high value I don't want this to be visible everywhere on the screen the dirt mask is an effect that can be used to create a world camera look more impressive HDR effect or camera imperfection I'm going to skip this effect as it requires bloom something that I'm not using the lens flare is the effect is kind of hard to explain but you can see it on the screen I'm also going to skip this one because there's no direct light source that can for those lens flares let's go to image effects a lot enable vignette the vignette effect can be used to add focus on an object and what it does is basically darkening the screen around the edges I'm going to set this value to around 0.55 Green is pretty self-explanatory and you can currently see it on a screen it is going to add a great that you can see through camera while shooting in a dark environment for green jitter and great intensity I'm going to set both to 0.2 so it isn't going to be that visible but it's still going to be there let's go to color grading and the first thing I always like to do is to go to saturation and set this to 1.2 now the colors are going to be more vibrant but I feel like the shadows shouldn't have any saturation so let's set this to zero and in order to compensate for that let's go to highlights set the saturation to 1.2 and at the same time let's go to highlights minimum and set this to minus 0.1 this way we're going to have more highlights into the scene all right that's it for the highlights and for the shadows for the contrast of the shadows I feel like there should be less contrast they are kind of harsh right now so let's set this to 0.9 and as well I would like to give them a blue tint so we can do that by going to gamma and set this to a black color make sure you don't overdo it because otherwise it is not going to look great something around this value should be just fine that's it for the color grading let's close this down and we're going to skip film and mobile tone mapper and we're going to go straight for the rendering features now what I'm looking for is ambient occlusion I want it to be very harsh at a contact between two objects I'm going to set this to one as well I'm going to set the quality to 100 pretty much everything else is useless for me because I don't have reflections or translucency into the scene but what I want to do is to set the screen percentage to 200 or 400 for games I don't recommend setting this to something higher than 100 that is because it is going to greatly impact the performance so I highly recommend setting a slider that is going to go from 50 to 200 if you want the player to be able to experience the levels at 200 percent and there's that for that scene let's get on to the next one that being the Roman statue scene for this one I wanted to get a calm sunset vibe with a mysterious feeling to it as the statues in the middle of a forest motive aside let's jump straight to the post process and see why I did what I did for this scene I already got my post process foundation set up so we can go directly to exposure and it this time we are going to use auto exposure histogram for this type the only thing that we will have to do is to go to minimum brightness and maximum brightness and set them to the same value this way we won't have variable exposures depending on where we look usually I go with 0.71 one being darker so let's try with 0.7 first and see how that looks and I think this is fine so we are going to go with that now for chromatic aberration I want this thing to be clean so I'm going to go with 0.2 now this alone is going to be a very subtle effect but the combination with grain and depth of field it is going to look a lot better we're going to skip that mask camera and lens flares go directly to image effect and I don't know what value would look good for the vignette so let's just see what looks good I think around here is good now for the green jitter and intensity I'm going to go with 0.1 and you 0.1 I don't think I want a lot of green in my scene and that's it for the lens now for color grading let's set the situation to 1.0 on global let's also go to contrast and cities to 1.1 so we get a little bit better contrast now let's close global down and go to shadows then let's go to contrast and set it so blue tint once again don't overdo it and it should be fine and they should be it for color grading we can close it down and let's go to rendering features now for the ambient occlusion I don't know what value would look good so we just have to try and see and I think somewhere around here is going to look great so it's not so obvious but let's also go to advanced and said call it hit 100 close it down and once again there is no translucency or reflections in my scene so we don't have to use anything else let's go to screen percentage and again we can see listed 200 400 or if it's for a game you can have a slider and this should be enough for this one now for this third scene I'm only going to go over lenses and color grading because the rendering features is pretty easy so let's see bloom again set the zero I do not like bloom at all for the exposure I went again with all the exposure and the minimum and maximum to one now for the chromatic aberration I went with something subtle 0.3 you can still see it if you really try to but it comes in combination with a green in the sky and the vignette effect and they all add together to make something noise third masks camera and lens flares were skipped and so forth the image effects these are the values the vignette is almost close to default I'm pretty sure this is by default 0.4 the Grange is the zero and the K intensity is 0.12 maybe you can go higher with this but I think joke went off so it's fine then for the color grading let's go to global and saturation I palm this up to 1.2 and a contrast because this is a dark scene I went again with 1.1 now for the shadows I did the same thing as in the first thing set the saturation to zero that is mostly because this log and anvil would look pretty bad with saturation on one as you can see everything is a lot more red so by setting this to zero is going to look nicer and then for the gamma again slightly to the blue side so we are going to have a blue tint you can mostly see this in the grass if I'm going to disable it you should be able to see a subtle change one thing to pay attention in the rendering features though is the reflections I used screen-space reflections and I set the quality to 100 and a maximum worth next one this way the reflections on this anvil and on the log are going to look much better than default and that's it the last thing that I want to talk about in this video are LD T's le T stands for color lookup table and this can be used as a way to color grid in ue4 if you're doing an environment this is going to be a nice way to save time but not for a game or level that is because although you are going to save time this is going to come with the price that depending on what when you're using you're going to get varied results but if you're making an environment that should look good this is a great way to save some time to create an LED you're going to have to have a special program such as Photoshop or something like it that way you can apply effects such as curves contrast and so on what you'll have to do is to download the color neutral LUT save it as a JPEG and import that into your program in this video I'm going to use Photoshop now normally you would not know what effects to add the figures that we will have to import in Photoshop the image of our scene and this is my Roman statues scene which has no post process on the first thing that I want to do is to set the exposure to a better value so let's go to adjustments click on exposure and then drag the exposure to the left side something like this you look good the next thing that I like to do is to go to curves and make this an S shape I'm going to set the whites to be higher and AB legs to be lower and this is a nice way to create contrast now I would like to set the whites to pop up more so let's do that by adding a levels adjustment and let's drag the right handle to the left side just a tiny bit if you're going to go too much release to the left side the whites are going to lose details now let's also drag the middle handle a bit to the left if you feel like this is too much you can always go to opacity and set is to lower value okay the last thing I want to do is to set a saturation to something higher so let's go to here and saturation and it should be good now let's take a look at how it looked in the beginning and how it looks now to apply the same effects to the allottee you'll have to drag this window out of here click on the group and drag this into the LUT let's toadies back in here and now you can see the group in here and by disabling it you can see the difference now let's save this is a PNG and import this into ue4 once you import this into ue4 it is crucial that you set the texture group to color lookup table it is right here and against the difference in the compression let's close it down and let's go into the post process then let's go to color grading let's go to misc enabled color grading LUT select your image and then click on this arrow and now you can see the difference now of course you can use this in combination with a built-in tools which usually gives a great result and as well if you don't like having turns the LUT is you can always go to color coding ldt intensity and that is the lower value and it's all the time it takes to create a nice LUT as you saw post-processing is an important step in creating environments and levels it is the element that helps bring out a detail get everything else together the good part about it is that it is so easy to customize and get different moods very fast and you don't even have to worry about messing it up but you can always come back and adjust these values if you ended up finding this video useful consider subscribing to stay up to date with new videos and support me as well and as always thank you for watching I want to give a huge shout out to all my patients for supporting me this month and not only and especially to these top tier supporters Aaron Skinner Butler al-qahtani Darkly and why fracture labs owner dr. IRA Redwine groove and seemed to her the Nexus t9 for more resources regarding this video make sure to visit its discussion once again thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Nitrogen

Views: 52,254

Keywords: ue4 tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, ue4 post process, ue4 post processing, ue4 post process tutorial, ue4 post process volume, ue4 realistic lighting, ue4 realistic post process, ue4 better lighting, ue4 level design tutorial, ue4 scene tutorial, ue4 graphics tutorial, ue4 photorealism, ue4 photorealistic, epic games, Ue4 4.25, ue4, unreal engine 4, Unreal engine

Id: kU6D-goGk-o

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SPACEMONKEY_01]

Dude, thank you for these!!! As a veteran animation lighting and comp artist, I love your tutorials!!

[u/Nitrogenlive]

I hope this video will be helpful! If there's anything you want to ask, don't hesitate to and I will make sure to answer.

[u/swaybread]

is it worth it? Thanks

[u/Maurotto]

Very useful! Are you planning on creating lighting tutorials as well? I'm pretty interested in realistic overcast lightings and I haven't seen any

[u/DagBagz]

u/Nitrogenlive You’re nailing it! Found your videos a week ago when jumping into unreal for the first time. Keep it up. If you keep making this helpful tutorials your channel is gonna blow up! :-)

[u/ThaLazyDog]

Looks great! Keep it up!

[u/Hizu_CuteDevil]

That is some great work!!

[u/ehh_scooby]

your first video got me through my portfolio classes in college lol! great video, i know there has been a lot of changes to ue over the last few years so im going to have to take a look at this to get a better idea of the new features and how they work:)

[u/Zartris]

You posted the exact same video a month ago here on r/unrealengine.
It's a very good video, but don't post it multiple times.