Procedural Nature Pack - Tips and Tricks (UE4)

hey guys pure polygons here Jacob and I was going to show you guys a little bit of an overview of the procedural nature pack kind of give you some tips and tricks on the best way to create trees and use the River spline tool and just some simple things like setting up your terrain with painting layers and getting all that going alright so let's get started first off I'll just head over here so this is after you've added the pack to your project you'll see the folder inside if you have other files you'll just find the folder procedural nature pack somewhere within your folders under the main content here and just as an overview I'll pop this down and we'll see inside the foliage is where you're going to add everything to your terrain for foliage each one is labeled grass leaves Rock small the landscape layer info you'll never actually go inside of this folder I'll show you that in a bit the materials here's all your master materials on the top from these materials you will be creating your material instances you'll never actually be using these master materials so you'll just right-click create material instance of whatever type you want and move it into the proper folder we also have the meshes most of these are controlled by either the foliage or the spline blueprints so the only ones you'll ever actually need for spline meshes or sorryfor meshes will be rock boulders possibly the rocks small if you want to hand place those instead but there's actually foliage for these ones so you can paint them if you'd like and that's about it the other ones are all being used by the spline tools and so you never have to worry about going in there so we'll move on now to spline blueprints in here we have the master River spline the tree branch spline the tree root spline which is also going to be your tree trunk spline there one the same you could use the tree branch spline for your roots as well if you want just depends on what kind of look you're going for then there's also the master tree root with moss so that's the same as the tree root except I've just already taken the liberty of applying the proper shaders for it in there which you can adjust on either of them at any time you want but I just thought to make it easier and lastly the master vine spline so this is for creating your vines not the videos just the the jungle ones and in here's the textures you'll never need to go on here either most of these are already set up inside the materials and it's just here to look at if you want to go through and pick one or pick it apart or export it whatever you want to do with it so we'll start off by going back to the main folder here and opening up the assets overview scene actually cancel that let's actually just go ahead and make it terrain first I think that'll be best just to give people a chance to make it terrain and kind of know how to get started with these tools inside of their projects so we'll click on the landscape here at the top after you click on landscape here's the the grid showing the landscape and you'll see manage make sure you have manage selected and create new then from material we're going to just type in grass and you'll see these these black materials here these four black ones are the material the terrain blended materials that I've already set up for you they're all named so there's grass tore cobblestones no puddles with puddles grass mud cobblestones no puddles and with puddles so we'll go ahead and do the grass dirt cobblestone with puddles then this terrain is a little bit big for me so I'm going to change the size down to seven seven just for you guys to to get an example of this and the sectors will be one by one and that looks good for now so let's create it and you'll see it's still black and this is actually my my giant painting brush right here we're going to go into the paint mode and I'm just going to change the brush size down to 100 just so it's a little bit more viewable and it's not so giant and it's going to stay black until you set up the layer info and that's what I told you about earlier you don't have to go into the folder layer info you can just see layer 1 and where it says none click it and layer ones right there and it'll do that for all the layers you just click it and drop down and it's all taken care of for you so now once you start painting your first layer you may have to wait for it to compile the shaders but mine's already actually been compiled just because I had set this up before and you'll see there's a little bit of holes in here actually and that's from the tessellation I'll show you how to fix that to really quickly but I'm going to fix it in the update that's coming out pretty soon then you can paint your dirt layer on top of there as well as the cobblestone layer on top of that and I've provided a puddles layer so you can actually paint puddles into any part of your terrain as well and so that's a cool little puddle there for you the shapes you can paint any shape you want and you anywhere you want and it just makes a nice puddle okay cool so I'll really quickly just show you how to fix the the holes inside of these materials because that's going to be kind of annoying for you so let's go into our materials and these landscape materials are actually using material functions so we'll go into the terrain function materials folder and do this for all three of them so we'll open it up and you'll see at the top here says tessellation fade we're just going to go ahead and zoom in where it's connected to at the top here where it says tessellation on and true and you can just right click that and break the link you can also hold alt and click it and that will break the link so what we'll do now is you'll click and hold true and drag it out and type in scalar and scalar parameter comes up now we want this in the tessellation group so it's easier to find it later so off to the left here you still have it selected you'll click none and this one actually is only layer one textures sorry I was thinking of my master terrain there's there's a few different ones but so we'll just go ahead and do layer one because it's not a texture it's just a layer one option and we'll type this in as tessellation density because what this is going to do is based off of what number you enter in here it'll either adverts or remove words and we'll set the default value to one so if you want a ton of verts you can increase this to like 10 or 20 or whatever but it's going to make the tessellation a lot more dense so just be aware of that now that we have created that we'll copy it ctrl C or right-click and copy and save this material then we're going to do this to the other three materials under the terrain function so now we'll just go in here and paste that control V and just pop this right in to true and it disconnects that other one for us we'll also do this on layer three here just plug that in and as you see it saves the settings for the group and the parameter name so you don't have to worry about that and just save that one as well so now all those guys are saved and as soon as this finishes compiling which there's a lot of shaders so I'll just start moving on to some of the other features here while this is compiling the next thing we can take a look at is setting up our foliage so now that we have the terrain this is going to be pretty simple we can just click on foliage up here at the top and you see where it says drag drop foliage here you can go into the folder I showed you earlier just the foliage folder and let's first just add the grass so go into the grass folder and select it all and just drag and drop it and that's all done for you so now you can select multiple types of grass if you want and it just randomly switches between them when we're painting here and so there's all the grass starts painting really easily and switching between the different types of grass if you want to change any of the settings just select one and at the bottom underneath it you'll see the density of the grass the the radius the scaling so if you want it to scale uniformly or non uniformly and then any of the placement settings you can just take a look through here and mess around with those at your leisure so we'll go through and actually add the rest of these also these are all the leaves such as banana fern fern large fern B and leaves tree a actually we're going to leave leaves tree a off that was something that you can actually paint on to the branches if you'd rather paint your leaves that way which I can show you later but I tend not to use it I like the spline mode a lot better so we'll copy these here well do the same for these guys just drag and drop them it's that simple I've set it all up for you and set up all the parameters for them and tried to name them in a way to help you understand what it was basically all these are just different small little rocks that you can use if you want and the different bees so b1 b2 b3 this is the same mesh with different materials applied to it so actually the rocks will all look different and I'm going to just change my foliage brush size here down to like a hundred and so there's a few different rocks so that you can just paint like that using the worldspace normals so they'll always tile properly and and read pretty well in the engine it's a few other ones here we can check these guys out so I'll paint a few of these ones these ones are kind of cool this has some of the procedural Moss generation on them that you'll see so it just randomly adds Moss to certain ones and you can always increase the amount of moss and where the moss is placed all within the material instances so I'll just remove these rocks okay so that's a little bit of an overview of just getting started with the landscape materials and the foliage and you'll see now also that all those holes that we saw earlier are all gone so that simple fix with the material functions will totally take care of that problem for you and like I said I'm going to get that updated and that should look a lot better coming up here in the next couple weeks as soon as I can get that on the market place the next thing let's go ahead and take a look at some of the spline blueprints so these are the ones that are pretty powerful they can do quite a few things the river one I'm sure a lot of you want to see so let's go ahead and place some big ol rocks in this scene we'll just grab the boulders and I like to use let's go with Boulder be to take a look at that one and all these have worldspace normals on them as well as a unique one to one normal so you'll see the one to one normal scaling here but the worldspace textures actually scale by themselves also so you won't notice any odd stretching in the texture you can make these as big as you want and they'll usually look pretty good another one thing actually about the rocks before we get started with the terrain material this has the procedural moss on it so I'm going to delete this one and I believe this one has the vertex Painted Moss let's give it a try it does excellent so I want to show you something with this Moss let's go ahead and go back into our static mesh mode and scale these up so we have a nice big rock here just like that and now if you click on this paintbrush if you paint white onto the surface it paints in some moss for you and you can change this so you can either paint with a greyish color so that it never actually goes all the way up to full white oh woops sorry I got a click okay first so you can paint black to remove parts or white to add the moss back on and if you change the strength to a bit lower it doesn't paint quite as quick and so you can be a bit more careful about where you're placing it let's make this a little higher maybe point one something like that and a cool thing about the moss here is I actually included a distance based tiling to it so you might be able to see somewhere around here and somewhere around here that as I'm zooming out the tiling is slowly starting to change so that way from a distance you don't see an incredible amount of tiling on the moss but up close you're going to get a really nice high fidelity look to it and it just slowly fades in and out so it shouldn't be noticeable to most people cool so that's a nice little feature in there now I'm just going to build up some sides to where our rivers going to be here just to get some cool foam around it because the foam only is actually visible if there's rocks and stuff in the way to cause the foam and I'm just going to kind of move these guys around and some random shapes and scale them a little bit because I design the rock so that you can get actually get a lot of use out of it just this just this this one rock here and there's a there's a couple different versions of it and you can make it look completely different and even just jam it in and out of other rocks and most the time that'll read pretty well even just because it has that worldspace texture on it so you can never tell that it's just a rock jammed into itself or even that it's the same rock jammed into itself so here we go I'll make it a little bit windy just to show off the spline to a little bit more for you guys something like this it's not too bad and then I'll just make a nice exit here off the side all right cool let's go with that if you want you can paint a little bit more terrain training materials onto here just so there's something underneath it and not quite sure what's going on with these holes here something with my visibility it's really strange let me take a look at this really quick and I'll be right back hey guys were back and I actually found a solution online to what causes this crazy flickering and it's actually a bug in the engine and completely unrelated to my pack so what I showed you early about the holes just go ahead and leave the fix in there and if you just go to terrain and sculpt and as soon as you start sculpting it fixes the problem and so basically the bug is called the flat terrain bug and if you have any parts of your terrain that don't have any interaction or sculpting applied to them then you get some weird drops in the engine and it's really strange and I don't understand it but I guess someone already submitted a bug online even so this is most likely being looked into but I'm glad that we ran into it while I'm making this video so in case you guys run into it now you know the answer to it and you can fix it also you'll see some of these back-and-forth crisscross lines here once you bake or build the level those will go away that's only just for a moment before you make adjustments or changes and they're kind of just temporarily in there but they'll definitely go away as soon as you build your level don't worry about that so let's go ahead and finally make this this river here alright so in your spline blueprints you can just drag and drop master River spline into the level and it'll be right here it's kind of small so you can actually scale it if you want just by hand like this and there's also options to scale it per spline point too so we'll go ahead and start laying this out here and like that it already creates a waterfall for you just by lowering it down super simple everything's done for you basically automatically I'll go ahead and bring the terrain down here a bit to make this work better so you can see the water awesome looks good and let's go back into our asset mode and we can just make the waterfall come right off the side here just all the way down wherever you want it to end and I'll actually be implementing a feature later that will hopefully add effects for you so it's not just the material doing its thing but will actually be getting some effects in here and that'll I think look a lot better for everybody so I'm excited about that one so the river is really easy that's about it you just place it and it's done if you want to increase the minimum speed right off to the right here you can just increase that slowly but surely - whatever minimum speed you want ten is pretty good so I'll stick with ten and we got ourselves a river any more settings that you would want to adjust to it can all be found under materials water and it's called River flow B and inside of there you'll get all kinds of stuff you can turn a cube map on and off the edge opacity on and off you can turn off the water Distortion the water tiling is actually adjusted on the blueprint so once you select that you can adjust the water tiling horizontally and the overall water tiling let's really quickly I'll show you so if you want to scale the river here you have to count how many splines spline points down it is so there's one at the beginning there's two three four five so it's the fifth spline point and right here under River scale spline you'll see zero one two three four so it starts at zero so we're actually going to use number four and you can scale scale the river here to 0.1 0.5 and it it actually goes along with the the scaling so you'll see it it tiles inwards like that and it looks kind of cool because then the river is always going right along the edge there and it never actually cuts into rocks because you'll see a lot of games where the rivers just go straight into the like that the flow goes right into the rocks and it looks really odd like the flow will just do this and just go straight into the rocks and that's just not how rivers work so this river actually works the way that it should for you let's take a look at some of the other material instances and some of the options you have of them so for grass and this goes for the leaves as well you can add actually variations to it parts of darkening the translucency lightning and variation tiling and this is all procedurally done as well just based off a world space map that it'll lighten the foliage or darken the foliage and tile the map more or less right here there's a few other options you'll want to go through and check out all these yourself at some point and see what cool options there are for you I've included a lot of shaders instances versions textures there's a lot of goodies in here that you guys should definitely check out when you get a chance and here's all the wood all the wood materials there's different versions there's spline versions and then there's just standard versions that don't use supplies and you can adjust that inside of the material instance that says is spline material and it'll be checked to yes if it is a spline material and you can just uncheck that if it's not a spline material and you'll lose all that spline information off there so let's go ahead and check that back to spline material and let's create a tree let's do that yeah so one of the easiest trees to make will use the branch spline just click and drag it right into the level just like the river and it starts off just like this to make the trunk will actually rotate the whole thing up upwards like this the whole spline and now we can grab it and in order for your branches to appear we're going to need at least three spline points so you can just hold alt and click and drag and now we have three spline points so cool let's go ahead and make the tree a bit taller this is going to be a really simple tree there's more complex ones you can make as well you can really do whatever you want with this like it's a spline so you can make the tree any shape or angle then often your options here the start scale let's start off like at 3 sounds good and then scale 0.5 make it a little smaller you can change the meshes if you want to change these two ones you've created you'll just need to make sure the UV style one to one and here's an end mesh it's important they tile one to one so that all the the textures line up when you're creating the spline and so you'll see this tiles perfectly and just works well so make sure that's what you do if you ever create meshes it's a one-to-one tiling cylinder and then you can swap out the material right here on the spline as well - any of that says spline so there's a distant spline version that's cheaper there's a different type of tree here we can switch to that one and you'll see it's a different tree bark texture so there's different versions here for whatever you want to make we'll go ahead and use a spline for this one you can also adjust the tiling of the texture vertically or horizontally along it so whatever you want there's another option for tessellation so you can make it super super tessellated like the scale or a smaller tessellation and I go with about 20 or 25 usually right here we can add the branches so I'm going to click that checkbox and it adds the branches and you'll notice that they start off actually as these branches that come out sideways like this and that's because for the most part when I create the trees these branches are coming out of the tops of the tree trunks like this and so I had them initially just set up to just come out horizontally but we'll do a tree like that later right now we're going to get do it this way so you have options for the rotation of the branches as well you can make them go around the tree with a different rotation so we'll actually the yaw is this the it's this direction like the route like around the trunk of the tree or the sides of the branch and the yaw variation is how far around it can randomly generate so we'll make this 360 so we can go around the entire tree and the pitch here is actually what we're looking for to make it like a vertical tree like this we're going to go with negative 90 and add a few more branches on here so number of branches will do just a hundred for this demonstration and underneath that there's actually branch start distance along spline so right now it's starting at the very bottom of the spline let's change this to 20 and now it starts at about this point here let's also change the scale here of the branches so the minimum let's do 1 and the maximum let's do 1 and I have it set up specifically that as it gets towards the end it slowly decreases in scale so even though it says minimum 1 and max 1 they're slowly getting smaller up towards the top and I just did that to make it easier for people and also for realism so you don't have as much to worry about so let's keep that 1 point 2 just to get a little bit more variation in there and we can scale it up a little higher too if we want just like that and now you'll notice they're all pretty flat though right across just going across right now so we can change that as well with the roll sorry about that I think the roll is going to be oh yeah ok actually the roll is dependent on if it comes straight out like this or if it goes at different angles vertically and down up and down basically so yeah we'll keep the variation for that at like 20 seems about right so you'll get some that come down they don't come straight out and the pitch here will do a variation on this one of about 10 and now we got a pretty interesting looking tree already and it's got wind on it and you can adjust it at any time and it'll as you adjust it it randomly generates the branches again so let's go ahead and make this a super tall pine tree like this or something and increase the scale the max scale let's try 1.5 we're also going to increase the number of branches let's do 150 just kind of I'm just messing with some of the numbers here just to get just a more interesting looking tree for us and there we go I'd say that's pretty good and now as you hold alt with the splines let the whole spline selected so I click off click back on it if you hold alt and drag just to duplicate it so now you have two completely different trees because these branches are going to randomly generate each time and you can change that the branch start distance as well to make that slightly different we can adjust the wind here too so let's make it let's make it a little bit higher maybe maybe just crazy to see how it looks so you can make it really crazy if you want but let's not do that so we'll have the wind it maybe two and if you just adjust any of the numbers your your branches will change so you can keep adjusting until you find branches that you like there we go so there's some really simple trees we just made let's take a break and be right back again and I'll show you how to make one of those jungle looking trees hey you guys back again so lastly I'll show you how to make here one of the jungle type trees so we'll start off with the tree root spline by M got it in alright so this will be our trunk here I've gone ahead and revert eclis rotated again and I'm using the root spline so for the trunk I'm just going to bring this up make kind of an interesting shape with it and have it taper off somewhere like this that should be good let's go with that okay so all just some of the settings again something like that looks good and adjust some of these texture tiling here 25 so it's good and from here we can start making the route so we use the same route spline that I just had start off the rotation with the direction I want it to go and we'll get right into it I might speed this up a bit for you just so you can see it a lot quicker you hey you guys so there's just a quick example of how to make one of those jungle looking trees and you can basically turn these into whatever you want as many branches you want make whatever look you want it's all yours to do whatever you want with tons of variety tons of options tons of fun and the last one is the vine spline but that for the most part works the same as all the other splines now that you're probably familiar with and so I'll just really quickly here show you the vine spline as well has all the same options the texture tiling adding branches in this case it's adding leaves and you can swap those branch meshes for whatever you want leaves vine three leaves line three one there's different different options different things in there for you and a lot of cool stuff that you can get from it up as well so we'll make this a bit bigger just to 100 just make it nice and crazy and it'll just randomly pick between all the different options that you're selecting and you'll get some cool stuff with it so just have some fun with that other than that the only other feature I may not have showed is most likely the tree twist so just like we scaled the river you can count the spline points one two so we'll use this one right here so 1 2 and we can twit we can twist parts of the tree so you'll notice it actually twists it for you you can make the twist really crazy but that's just so you can get a different look to the different parts of your trees and just another feature to throw in there to add to your arsenal you can always feel free to ask me any questions send me an email and thanks for watching thanks for supporting the pack and hope you guys have fun with it all right take care pure polygon signing off you

Channel: PurePolygons

Views: 87,303

Keywords: unreal, engine, ue4, purepolygons, pure, polygons, jacob, norris, procedural, nature, pack, environment, foliage, river, spline, tool, blueprint, node, jungle, forest, rock, world, level, game, asset, marketplace, content, purchase, buy, art, 3d, tree, speedtree, speed, trifonic, calling, texture, material, ground, terrain

Id: rhDexjv-Tg8

Length: 40min 18sec (2418 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2015