Rebirth: An in-depth look | Live from HQ | Inside Unreal

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>>Amanda: Hey, folks! We're amped to be back and while we may have been away, lots of exciting developments continued on. In case you haven't heard, our teams will be heading out to Los Angeles in a few short weeks for SIGGRAPH 2019 to celebrate the latest innovations in computer graphics. Find out what's in store for UE from CTO, Kim Libreri and hear from the likes of ILMxLAB, Walt Disney Imagineering, Digital Domain, and more at this year’s User Group You must register to attend! There will also be many presentations from Epic devs at our booth and longer tech talks at the show. The latest round of free Marketplace packs became available on the first of July. Make sure to grab this month's selections: a Custom Movement Pack, an Explosions Builder, a Fantasy and Medieval Architecture Kit, a First-Person Story Adventure Template, and a Liquid Simulation Blueprint. A Dynamic Grass System and a Modular Building Set have been added to our permanent collection as well. ILMxLAB's been busy creating new, thrilling VR experiences, including "Vader Immortal," a home VR experience, and their latest VOID experience, Ralph Breaks VR. Whether coming face to face with Vader himself or exploring the vastness of the internet, ILMxLAB continues to bring these magnificent worlds to life using the power of Unreal Engine. Find out more about both of these impressive projects and how ILMxLAB achieves such high fidelity within the bounds of VR. In addition to games, the VR space is a great way to experience history. If you've ever wondered what being on the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic was like, you'll soon have your chance in Titanic: Honor and Glory. In an effort to recreate the Titanic's interior and exterior as accurately as possible, the team has tapped historians, writers, artists, and collectors to amass a comprehensive collection of plans, photos, interviews, and other documentation related to the Titanic's design. Developed by Vintage Digital Revival, you can play a demo of the part virtual museum, part whodunit today! From the mind of Justin Roiland, one of the co-creators of Rick and Morty, Trover Saves the Universe is a VR game that was designed to fully utilize the medium's strengths. To see how the studio created Trover Saves the Universe, we interviewed Lead Designer Erich Meyr. The Squanch Games developer talks about how they came up with the story and gameplay premise, reveals how much of the dialogue was ad-libbed, and elaborates on how creating humor for a video game is different than writing for a TV show. In mid-June, we announced our Cinematic Summer event, Where we encouraged you to take the director's seat and create your own short film. The contest will run through July 25th, so there's still time to work on your creation. And don't think you're limited to game cinematics. We'd love to see your ArchViz scenes, sprawling landscape designs, or towering skyscrapers. Whatever industry you're in, we want you to use your talents and wow us with your summer tale. HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed recently relaunched into Early Access 2.0 and now features a wealth of improvements, such as a progression system, new weapons, new enemies, and more. Much of the game's charm comes from the fact that it leans on toy-driven nostalgia to create a wonderful sandbox experience. Setting up defenses to shoot waves of enemy toy soldiers within relatable childhood environments that include bedrooms and toy stores makes the game feel like a mixture of Toy Story meets Left 4 Dead. In an interview with Digital Cybercherries, the devs talked about their inspirations while developing the game, elaborate on what toys they sought to incorporate, and delve into how they incorporated both four-player split-screen and online co-op while keeping performance in check. We also caught up with Echtra Games as they transitioned to UE4 to build their most ambitious game yet with Torchlight: Frontiers. They explain how they're building the game's vibrant, animated world, which strays from the more drab and dreary aesthetics other games in the genre tend to lean on while detailing the innovative measures the company is using to develop the highly anticipated action RPG. For the Game of Thrones fans out there, you may be interested to know that one of your favorite shows includes Unreal in their production pipeline. Befores & Afters spoke with the production team behind the visualization and the execution of the finale's throne room sequence and offers a great write up on how the scene was built. And on to our weekly Karma earners! We'd like to give shout-outs to: Shadowriver, Moe Wattar, T_Sumisaki, Everynone, zompi2, PAVI_PAVI, Przemek2222, IndieGameCove, dptd, and Bariudol. These lovelies have helped out devs on AnswerHub. Want the chance to see your name up here, too? Head over and answer questions! First up for this week’s community spotlight is Scraper: First Strike! a VR shooter game with RPG and exploration elements. Created and Imagined by Jim Ivon, Scraper: First Strike uses UE4 to deliver gamers into the year 2076, where they must battle renegade robots in high-rise skyscraper complexes. Next up is Boundary, the multiplayer tactical space-based shooter that puts players in the role of heavily armed astronauts in space engaging in fierce, zero-gravity firefights. Fully customizable loadouts, weapons, and ammo types across six classes of astronaut are available for players to choose from in multiple game modes. Last but not least, in Lemons Must Die, John Lemon falls into a strange world of monster lemons, while chasing after the ghost of his beloved Liz Lemon. The pressure is on as you leak juice, your life force draining out. Run and jump through levels, exploding enemies on the way, using their juice as your life force. Thanks for joining us for this week's news and community spotlight! Have a great week. ♫ Unreal logo music ♫ >>Victor: Hey, everyone! And welcome to the Unreal Engine Livestream. I'm your host, Victor Brodin, and with me today here I have Galen Davis, Head of Evangelism at Quixel. Galen, you're going to talk a little bit about how Quixel and the team of yours use some of your tools to create Rebirth, which if you haven't seen it, we're going to play it later here on the stream to make sure that you all know what Galen is showing. Without further ado, I'd like you to do your thing now. Because it's very exciting. I'm very excited to have you here. We've been talking about this for quite some time now. >>Galen: Yeah, this is fun, I'm super glad we're doing this. It's a dream, being at HQ. >>Victor: Well, you're very welcome to be here. We're happy. >>Galen: Cool. Okay, I'll introduce myself a little bit first and then we'll get into some of the things we'll be covering. My name is Galen, I'm Head of Evangelism at Quixel, like Victor said. What that means is I'm traveling around, visiting developers all around the world, in the game space, the film space, enterprise, and everything in between, and talking about how scan data can potentially fit in with their workflow. It's really cool, obviously we have a ton of overlap with Unreal and all the clients that we deal with that are using Unreal. It's always a nice common ground that we find there. We're going to be talking a bit about Rebirth today. We're going to go into more of the story and the behind the scenes approach to the story and everything we did with Rebirth. Then we also have-- I guess you guys have already announced it, but SideFX will be here next week. >>Victor: They will. >>Galen: They're going to be doing a technical deep dive into some of the things that they did to help us out in the demo. I wont steal too much of their thunder, but they will be on next week and will cover a bunch of cool stuff there too. From there we will jump into the Editor and start messing around with some of the stuff in the Megascans ecosystem. Let's get started. >>Victor: Let's get started. >>Galen: I'll just start-- Is the video playing? No, sorry, the first slide. Is it ready? Okay, perfect. We'll just start with a brief overview of the Megascans and what we do. We are the largest scan library that's currently available on the internet. Highest quality scan data that you can get We built all of our hardware completely proprietary, in-house. It's a completely proprietary workflow for processing it as well. This allows us to control quality every step of the way. What's really cool about what we do is that we're all around the world, scanning on five continents at any given time. That allows us to get a huge amount of content from some of the most amazing places all around the world. What's cool about that is being able to disassemble your world however you see, with that scan data and using that as a jumping off point for whatever it is that you're making. It's fully render-agnostic, so whether you're using Unreal Engine or using an offline renderer, and anything in between, we cover all those different calibrations. Obviously we're going to be featuring more of the Unreal calibrations today, the Metalness workflow. Anything that you're using for your workflow is something that we cover. It's fully scalable as well. As far as the 3D Objects, they're LODed all the way through LOD 5 and we have cinematic grade quality Meshes there as well. We'll talk a little about that when we get into Rebirth. >>Victor: You showed me you can export into almost anything and that's really cool because it means that you're looking at these high quality scans and high resolution Textures and you're like, oh, that's not for me, I'm a mobile developer, or we're trying to push this for console, but I saw there was even a lower than 1024 that you can export from. >>Galen: Yeah, we have to be able to cover any type of development in that paradigm. That's what we set out to achieve with the library. It's fully scalable in that regard, right? The idea for us was to have a digital prop house of sorts. That’s the best way to think about it. Being able to go into this warehouse and pick whatever you need off the shelves and assemble your Worlds from there. >>Victor: That's really neat. >>Galen: Now we'll jump into Rebirth and talk a little bit about that. I'll start with a brief intro for what Rebirth was for us and then we'll dive in. Basically, what we set out to do was make a real-time demo. We knew we were going to use Unreal Engine from the start and we wanted to make a movie trailer of sorts, with a loose narrative and some VO and some music. So we're going to jump in to everything here but let's roll the clip first, so people know what we're talking about. ♫ Mysterious music ♫ >>Narrator: Adaptation. The ability to learn from past experience. The use of knowledge to alter their environment. These virtues defined our creators and drove them to the brink of destruction. [Music tempo quickens] But we cannot exist without them. We must save her. [Music swells] [Vehicle traveling quickly] [Light crashing] [Vehicle speeding] [Music slows] What of our creators exist within us? Humanity has always had the potential to recognize its flaws and choose a better way. Can we save humanity? [Music swells, stops abruptly] Was bringing her here the right choice? >>Victor: That's beautiful. >>Galen: It was all me. >>Victor: I see. >>Galen: No, it wasn't. >>Victor: It's that effective? >>Galen: No, so it was a huge team effort and everyone that was involved did such an amazing job. We'll go ahead and give shout outs to all the companies that helped us and all the people there too, here at the end and everything. We'll dive in a little bit to the genesis of this whole thing. So you can see exactly where we started and how the idea formed. The start of this was, we went on a scan trip to Iceland. Iceland has been on our radar for a long time. We always knew that we wanted to go here. It's some of the most amazing territory that you can get to. So we sent our largest scan initiative for this trip. There were 12 members that went to Iceland and they were scanning in the worst conditions ever, for over a month. We filmed some of the better ones here. But the idea here was that they were going to go to the most amazing place that we could get our hands on and get everything that you're seeing here in these shots. When we go and break down environments, we're literally scanning everything we can get our hands on. The largest cliff face down to the smallest rock, twig, leaf, and branch. That's the general ecosystem philosophy we take when we're taking these types of trips. What that does is, it really just allows artists to take that content and recreate that world one to one. We're giving them everything they could possibly need in order to reassemble that Eco region. We also provide a lot of reference photos from the actual trip, so that's included now, it's part of the offering on the Megascans library. We'll run through that once we open up Bridge and everything. We knew we wanted to start with forming a basic narrative. We knew that if we were to make this demo that it had to have some type of weight, some type of gravity. Something that wasn't just pretty pictures on the screen. So we played around with the idea of architectural elements, maybe a vehicle, and then a voice. All these different elements kind of came along the way. It wasn't like we had this grand vision at the beginning, unfortunately, we kind of stumbled into the success that is Rebirth. All these different things added up to make what we have now. But this was one of the initial exploration bits that our partners, Beauty and The Bit made for us, to figure out, what would it actually look like to put a big structure actually in a very Icelandic world. That was one of their initial exploration videos here. This is one of the paintings that Victor Bonafonte did did at Beauty and The Bit, and this was really a seminal moment for us when we saw this painting. This was taking a lot of our reference photos and images that the guys had gotten in the field, in Iceland, and actually mashing that up with a nice sci-fi element, which was this vehicle, which is our character. What was really pretty cool is seeing this image and then this next one here. The idea of really cementing in our minds exactly what it is that we wanted to do. When we saw these, I think it really came together. We knew what we wanted to make, and from there if was just off to the races. We had the content already cooking at that point, so that content was starting to hit the site But these were some really important images for us to start to visualize exactly in our minds what we wanted to do. >>Victor: By cooking you mean taking all of the data that you received from the trip. Iceland and processing it into actual Meshes and Textures. >>Galen: Exactly. The whole processing pipeline is something that takes a good amount of time to rev up a little bit for us but once we get the data all in a good spot, then you start to see-- If you've seen Roman Assets hit the site here, Icelandic Assets are still trickling in. Those are big pushes from trips where all that stuff has to be calibrated and set good to go before it's in the site. Again, this is going to-- This video here is going to go into some of the other shots that we're going to look at. What this is showing is the general breakdown that Victor did in his painting process of taking those reference images and forming something that would be considered final pixel here for us. These are the types of paintings that ended up fueling these types of shots here. As you're seeing, we're really trying to create it one to one. That's the idea for us. Victor did such an amazing job of making these paintings for us, and so, the rendering and everything like that was top notch on his part. So we really wanted to try to recreate one to one. I'll talk a bit about the real reference that we gather on these trips. We have a lot of photos like this, of just the guys shooting on their iPhones out a window. A simple shot like this is something that very much informs the way that our artists were working when making this demo. It seems like just a throw-away image but the thing that's amazing about it is you can gather so much from just a simple shot like this, right. How does the moss build up on the rocks? How is the moss and the greenery creeping up the mountains? These are all considerations that we have to make when we're making artistic decisions inside of Levels. So for us, taking these types of photos was so important. We've got a lot of them of just-- again, something that seems kind of pedestrian here. Nothing too crazy here but this shot specifically was one that actually, if you go back and watch Rebirth, there's a shot of the shed, the sci-fi shed. For a while we actually had basically this same shot and that sci-fi cone in there and we ripped out the cone. But shots like this are enough to inform the way that those images came together. Then looking at atmospherics as well. Fog is obviously one of those things that's so important when you're trying to craft a really believable Level. Every type of shot that we did for Rebirth-- Here, you're seeing just, how does fog lay across the ground? How does it move through a space? What does it look like close to rocks as opposed to the road and then looking at it from a distance? All of these things are super important when we're making these decisions. Then some of our hero pieces just out in the wild. These are really important shots for us as well because if you're going to place this type of hero Asset it's important to look at it and see how it's integrated with the sand, how plants maybe form around it if there are plants at all. All of these things lend themselves to the realism that we created with Rebirth. >>Victor: No one stacked those rocks like that, right? It has formed like that over thousands of years. >>Galen: Yeah, they are crazy rocks. Those were just rocks that I'm sure they walked past and were like, we have to have these. I'll show the first lineup that we did of figuring out the general flow. What this is showing here is just the progression that we were looking to create. Starting with the very cool tones, starting on a very micro-type level, very small elements in the scene. Introducing a little bit of color as you start to progress. Then having this really nice balance of warm and cool coming together to form the final composition. This was really cool to see this fully laid out and all these shots ended up making it in. Some of them are out previs shots inside of Unreal. They were super helpful. Unreal is really important for us in working through the previs process of figuring out how certain Assets would look, how terrain and everything like that was going to start to work, so we used a lot of Unreal in this previs phase to inform the way we were building out this flow. We'll get into that a little bit later here too. Again, this has informed the way that we also start talking about elements like music. Starting with something that feels very conflicted and dark and moving toward something that is hopeful and has a major resolution to it. This is a really cool lineup that Victor Bonafonte did for us. >>Victor: Would that be considered a storyboard? >>Galen: -ish. I would say this is more of a concept lineup for us and then we took these and created an actual timed out version with musical mock-ups. To us that was more storyboard-y. But at the beginning, the storyboards that Victor did were very loose sketches of-- We know that this shot is going to go to this one, that's going to go to that one. These are more of his final renders that he did. These are just paintings inside of Photoshop. From there, we started to develop the idea of having a vehicle in the scene. Like I showed you, those two shots of the highway and then also just the vehicle peeking out between the rocks and everything. The thing that was really cool is we knew that we wanted to have a sci-fi element, but we needed to explore what this world was going to be. Is it sci-fi in nature, is it more Mad Max-ey? What is the tone we're looking to strike here? We enlisted the help of Fausto De Martini who is an amazing concept designer. He did this vehicle for us. He did the high poly version of it and everything, and helped us explore what some of the shapes would look like, how the lights would sit in the scene, the fog and everything. He did an amazing job with this and this is our hero moving through the Level. The guys at SideFX will talk next week a bit about how they went about crafting some really easy tools inside of Houdini, to crunch this thing down and make it usable for us in seconds. It's pretty amazing. Because for us, we didn't want to spend a ton of time re-topologizing this, baking it, and everything like that. We were focused on other things. I'll show-- This is kind of our process of figuring out what the Megastructure was actually going to look like. This was a big struggle for us, in trying to figure out exactly what we were looking to do compositionally speaking. Victor did a bunch of mockups for us here and all of these have their own merit and everything and we decided to move toward the more inset, blocky shapes that we landed on, obviously. But this is sort of the process of figuring out, what is this World going to look like? We ran into a lot of issues, even in this very early stage of evaluating what the composition would be and does it make sense. How would these actual structures integrate into the mountains. In that last shot you see the way it kind of sits. It was definitely more of a sci-fi approach to the way that we wanted to build that architecture. And very, kind of brutalist in nature. But it was pretty amazing to see this initial mockup here of all the different versions that he did. This was the first hurdle. The second hurdle was once we drop this into a scene, is actually getting the scale to sell at a distance. Inside of Unreal, you have a bunch of camera settings, obviously. You can really bend it to your will and get it to do exactly what you need it to do. But we had to do a couple tricks to sell the scale even further. Part of that was a little bit of camera trickery and the next part was detailing the structure out in a way to where we could actually get something that was usable. They'll talk next week about it. Again, I don't want to steal their thunder here. But they made some amazing Greeble tools for us that allowed us to quickly lay out entire concepts or entire panels and everything like that. Just seeding values and getting new results very quickly. They did an amazing job with that tool. This was some of that initial exploration and trying to figure out how the scale would actually work. Because it's inset into a mountain, so it's pretty tricky. I'll talk a little about the content that we started to gather for this. This is Bridge. We will go into it with a live demo in a second. This is showing some of the stuff that we captured from the Icelandic scan trip here. I captured this specific video like a month ago, so there's probably even more Icelandic Assets that have hit since. But the whole point for us with making this demo was that we were not holding this content back in any way while we were making it. As those Assets were being crunched and processed and put onto the site, they were going up day and day for us as they were for everyone else. We didn't want to say, "Oh you can't play with our toys until we have our big moment." For us it was all about letting our entire community have access to everything, day one. So we didn't hold any of that content back. The thing that's pretty cool, and the reason I'm showing this here is that this is actually only about 20 percent of everything that we've captured from Iceland. We have a ton of content that's still left. Entire Eco regions that we haven't even started tapping yet. >>Victor: This is within Bridge, right? >>Galen: Yeah, this is inside of Bridge. We're going to do a look at that here in a second. If you're not familiar with the way the Megascans library looks, this is basically it here. It's got some nice search functionality and everything. But we'll go into that here in a second. The next thing I'll talk about briefly here is that we used LIDAR to inform the way that mountains sat in the background of a lot of our shots. Unfortunately, there isn't any LIDAR data that we could get from the regions that we were looking for in Iceland. So we actually sourced our data in Alaska These are the actual two locations right here, so if you were to go and download these, you would get exactly what we had inside the demo. The thing that's pretty amazing about LIDAR and everything is that it's actually accurate up to about 50 cm. which is insane considering the scale of what we're downloading. >>Victor: It's coming from a satellite, right? >>Galen: I'm not exactly sure how these were captured. I know there's a bunch of different ways to capture LIDAR but since it is mountains, I would hope-- As opposed to taking the thing and moving it every-- >>Victor: Yeah, could be a hike. >>Galen: Yeah, that would be a lot of work. The whole idea for us is, again, not necessarily relying on proceduralism or our creative eye. But actually using the real world to inform those types of decisions. LIDAR was super important to sell that realism there. We started to move, obviously, into Unreal and start prototyping what these levels would look like, benchmark some performance stats and everything. Like I said, Unreal was heavily used in figuring out for us, not only in the previs side of things but actually planning out how a lot of these shots would come together, how we were going to build out systems of building the Levels at night and everything like that. So each of the shots is kind of its own Level is the best way to think about it. We had to figure out clever ways of sequentially baking that stuff out overnight and rendering frames to iterate very quickly. This is one of the initial exploration shots that Owen did for us, and this is before we had a vehicle concept at all. So we had this, we called it the cigarette box, moving through the scene. You know, shots like this-- This is just, for Owen this is probably like three or four hours of work of just throwing Assets into the scene, some basic lighting, some fog, and then testing to see like, how lights actually function inside of this Level. How does it look for the rocks to react to the light as it's moving through, what is the fog doing? And the camera move itself,is this dramatic enough, is the speed correct? All these things, we can discover very quickly inside of Unreal. That's why we used a lot of this workflow here at the very beginning, as opposed to figuring these things out later. Unreal definitely allowed us to do that. Again, I'll show you some of these benchmarking tests. This is one of the very early shots that Owen threw together. I think this took him, like, four hours or something. It's just showing, basically, that you can get a bunch of Assets from our Icelandic set, and you can throw them into a level and just see how things work on a performance level. I talked a bit about the different calibrations, or levels of detail, rather, at the very beginning and so I'll circle back to that real quick because what we offer is a cinematic grade quality Mesh for all of our 3D Assets, and depending on the Asset, that can be in the millions. It's very heavy. We're not able to instance a hundred of those rocks if they're all sitting at two million polys. It's going to tank the viewport real quick. So this was an important test for us here at the beginning to start to figure that stuff out. What was the poly range that we needed to get in order to have a really stable framerate? Having a stable framerate was really important to us in building this. Every scene that you're seeing inside of the demo is very performant. The lowest one we have at any time is 24 FPS. But we have some that are way up over 100. >>Victor: Do you know what the final render is running at? >>Galen: We dumped frames for it, so it's flat across the board. For all these shots, since they're all individual Levels, they all have different performance stats in that regard. But the important part of this whole process here in figuring out what was going to work and what wasn't, was running some simple AB tests, so figuring out, okay, if we take that cinematic grade quality Mesh and we reduce it, what are we sacrificing, what are we getting from geometry if we start to crunch things down even slightly? What we found, in fact, is that doing a simple AB comparison of reducing it significantly, taking a two million poly Mesh and making it a quarter of a million. We actually had basically the same result. It was pretty amazing, actually. Our friends at SideFX helped build an amazing tool inside of Houdini that's basically a fancy version of Decimation Master. And Decimation Master inside of Houdini really allowed us to make this very quickly and crunch all of our Assets down to something that made it usable inside of the viewport. Because, like I said, performance was super important for all this. >>Victor: That's an image from the actual final render, right? >>Galen: These ones didn't make it in, actually. These are just some exploration, just simple tests inside Unreal. But just trying to see how some of these Assets also sit next to each other, like, How would plants interact with some of the sand? How are we going to get maybe a nice blends to work between 3D Assets and terrain Actors and these types of things? These were super important shots for us to develop early on and like I said, Owen threw each of these together in about four hours. I mean they're just no work whatsoever for him. He bangs them out real quick, so it's pretty cool. I'll talk a little bit about performance and the general approach that we had to building this demo in general. For us, education was also a really important component of what we were looking to do here. We have a lot of training content that's up on the site right now. I won't get in, too specific, to a lot of the things that Joe covers in his video. I think you can link that in chat >>Victor: Yeah, I'll link that. >>Galen: It's a full 45 minute breakdown that Joe Garth did for us, It's an amazing video and really, what it's showing, is how we were able to take these really nice cinematic grade quality Meshes and throw it all together with lighting and fog and cameras and everything. We weren't trying to hide the ball at all in making this demo. Like he says, there's no smoke and mirrors here. These shots are running at very stable frame rates for us. We're going to open one of the up here in a second and start to do some really simple stuff. But Unreal made it really simple for us to tackle everything on the post processing side, on the camera side of things. It was so helpful to be able to do all of that inside the Editor. We didn't have to dump any frames out and do additional modifications after the fact. It just worked. Everything came together really well and the education side, again, it serves a couple purposes for us. Primarily, it's just so we can show people, hey, you can do this too. It's important to note too, that Epic didn't give us the GameShark build of Unreal Engine. We're using the very standard version, 4.22, and, you know, and it was fantastic for us the whole way through. Definitely check out that full video because it's chocked full of amazing content. These are some of the shot breakdowns that Joe threw together for us, just so you can see exactly how some of these scenes were actually assembled. Lots of assemblies, lots of small elements that were going into the grounds to make it feel a little bit more believable in that way. Not relying on just displacement and Normal Maps to get some nice undulation in the surfaces on the terrain. Actually relying on full geometry and getting some really nice results there. These are some of the breakdowns of some of the different scenes. It's important to note, and the reason we're showing this too, is that there's no matte painting in any of these. That was one of the questions that we got from people, hey, are you guys using matte paintings for terrain Actors or background elements or anything like that? The answer is no. You know, we have everything in here, it's full geometry. We didn't even LOD anything down to, like, billboards for background elements or-- >>Victor: It's all-- >>Galen: It's all 3D Each shot is developed for the specific camera angle. That's important to note. We definitely built each shot in that way, so it's tailored to that camera. But for the most part, you're seeing no smoke and mirrors here, as the video is showing here. I'll talk a bit about the music as well. This is something we really wanted people to see. I went to dinner with my friend Jason Gallaty, who I worked with at Ember Lab. I went to dinner with him, we knew we wanted a composer to make something that was original for this demo, and he was like, First of all, I love Icelandic music. And I was like, "Okay." We're with the right guy already. We're in the door here. He had this idea of actually reaching out to this amazing musician named Terje Isungset. I'm probably butchering his name. >>Victor: Close enough. >>Galen: Norwegian? He actually records all of his sounds and his music, with ice instruments Literally, as you're seeing here, we rented out an ice rink in Canada, and he carved all the instruments out of ice. So we have percussion instruments and horns, everything. It's absolutely incredible. These elements that he's recording, if you go back and listen to it with headphones, you might be kind of surprised, like, what is that sound? Maybe I don't recognize it. It's probably ice. And that's Jason right there. >>Victor: I don't think I've seen that kind of recording setup before. Middle of an ice rink-- >>Galen: Yeah, pretty wild. He's an amazing musician. The whole theme we were looking to strike with this that Jason made here was the theme of, like, a refugee maybe fleeing something. So this vehicle is moving through the space, it's traveling very quickly and then it sees the actual structure. That's when the resolution really starts and it starts getting more hopeful and everything. It's less tense. Another really important part of what we did here was work with what was called op cap, is what our friends at Ember Lab called it. But it was a VR setup for cameras. What we did here is, we already had our camera track set up inside of the Editor. Really simple moves. You're not seeing anything too crazy aside from the car chase. But those tracks were already set up for us in Unreal, and then what we wanted to do was, instead of layering on noise that you can do inside of other applications, and you dump frames, we wanted to have the VR setup inform the way that the shakes actually happened here. So you;re seeing here, for this car chase, we're all shaking it at different levels and speeds and everything to try to simulate what it would actually be to be on a bumpy car ride and stuff. >>Victor: You mentioned they were trying to get the right weight on the virtual camera rig. >>Galen: Exactly. The guys at Ember Lab were amazing with the cameras. They were all amazing film students that they came from, Chapman Film School and everything. So they are just the biggest nerds for cameras and they know way more about it than us. So when they told us about the setup, they were like, no, it's truly weighted exactly the way we would weight it if we were to be shooting this stuff with an actual camera. You're seeing those weights. >>Victor: Yeah. >>Galen: It's cool because it allowed them to function in what was a director and a videographer working directly on the set. Calling action, the sequence starts, there's a little bit of a warm up time, and then we kick all those frames, the actual keyframes back up to interpolate between the original camera move and then the slight noise there. They did an amazing job. Our friends at Ember Lab absolutely crushed it with this. They helped us out with the music and the cameras here. >>Victor: Do you know if they're using Sequencer to record the camera tracks inside Unreal? >>Galen: I'm not entirely sure. The Sequencer was probably where all the keyframes started. Then I'm not sure where the interpolation actually happens. I guess I'll do a quick credit screen here. Obviously huge shoutouts to all of our guys at Quixel, from the guys that planned all the trips, packed lunches for people out in the field, then the scanners themselves, and everyone in between on the processing side in marketing and all that stuff at Quixel. It was an amazing team effort. Everyone really crushed it on this project. It was super awesome to be a part of it in a small way. Beauty and The Bit did all of our previs like we talked about. Victor Bonafonte and his team. They crushed it with that. Our friends at SideFX will be here next week. They'll talk about their contribution to the project. They were so helpful along the way. Then Ember Lab with cameras and music and stuff. Really awesome team effort. And everyone at Epic that really helped us create this and market it and make it something that we really, truly stand by. >>Victor: You did quite a blast at GDC. When we were playing the trailer earlier-- I pretty much get goosebumps every time I watch it. It was without audio, as well. It was just the visuals. >>Galen: Yeah, it's fun. They did a great job. Alright, cool. That's kind of the basic presentation here, so I guess we can jump in now to the Engine stuff and Bridge. >>Victor: Yeah >>Galen: Alright. So-- Oh, is it double screen? Oh, it's just a delay. I gotcha. >>Victor: It's about to happen. We're doing a bit of a new setup here today. It's a little bit easier for Galen to bring his laptop in and run it all from that. >>Galen: Perfect. There we are. Okay, cool. This is Bridge. Like how we were talking about earlier, this is basically the way that-- We wanted to build an application that runs standalone on the desktop, that mirrors the site, with a bunch of extra features in here. If you're familiar with the way the Megascans library looks on the website, this will look very familiar. There's a bunch of extra features baked in and we'll talk about some of those things as it relates to Unreal. Then we'll get into a quick demo. What I'll do to start is show you some of the new updates. The big thing is, obviously, you've seen collections and you're familiar with this Eco region approach like we talked about with scanning. So for Iceland, I can just view here-- You can view the collection this way and if I want to, I can also, in the search tab just type in "Iceland" if I want to. There's a bunch of different ways to interface with this. On top of that, I can filter by Asset type, so if I want a 3D object on the surface or what have you. You can filter that all the way down. The thing that's really cool that we've added in here is being able to 3D preview on some Assets here. You can just go to the 3D preview here at the top, and you can actually see the Asset live in the viewport. On top of that, we have the maps associated with it, so you can evaluate and see what those maps look like. Makes it really easy to make an informed decision about what it is that you're downloading before you do it. On top of that, we've included the scale feature. It's been on the site for a long time and shows whether or not the Asset is open or closed, which is pretty important for people to know. Then similar Assets, so you can see where some of these other Assets were scanned. In this case, this is a Roman Trim, so we have a bunch of stuff from Rome that's in the site, and those Assets, you would see them in the similar tab. This is really a neat and intuitive way to interface with the library. The other thing is, we're going to be rolling in a lot more reference photos of some of the things that people have really been asking for, like, cool, you scanned this thing somewhere, how does it actually integrate with the world? Like we talked about with the rocks. How does certain plant life interact with sand as it maybe sits next to a rock or in a different place. These are all really important things, so those reference photos and stuff will be hitting in a more regular cadence here going forward. I can see everything that I have acquired, I can see everything that I currently have downloaded, and then I can favorite objects and surfaces as well. This just allows me to say, maybe I'll come back to this later, download it when I have some time, or whatever. Then we have our free section of the site as well. A bunch of Assets you can go and take a look at, evaluate, test the quality, and see what it is we're offering. That's the simple rundown of Bridge, I guess. The one thing I really point people too also is the user manual. It's something that is really well documented, our guys did a fantastic job of documenting everything in Bridge. It's fully customizable in this way. We're going to talk about the Unreal integration, obviously, and everything that goes into that. The important thing to note here is that we understand that different development communities are using different types of the Editor. They might even be using a proprietary elements layered on top. So we wanted to make it fully customizable in that regard. It's something that you can go in with the API that we offer with Bridge, and you can customize it. Really simple things, as in renaming Assets, deciding where they will go in a project, all those types of things. And you can get even crazier with it, with the API because it's just-- You can do whatever. >>Victor: Where do you access the API? >>Galen: Basically, there's just a bunch of documentation inside the user manual. This shows exactly how you would obtain the build and everything and then the way you can use different calls with it. It's pretty nice. One of the things that people are really asking for too, is like a sync feature, so that's one of the things we rolled in on the new version of Bridge. It's fully documented here, so definitely go take a look. Cool. Well I think what we're going to do since we did a quick overview, is actually jump in and I'm going to throw some Assets into an Unreal scene, just to show the basic workflow. We will do some surfaces really quick inside Quixel Mixer, and then bring them in, make some blend Materials, throw some Assets in. >>Victor: Nice. A little bit of the workflow. >>Galen: We'll start inside of Mixer. If you aren't familiar with what Quixel Mixer is, basically this is our Material authoring software. There's a zero learning curve approach to blending and making new Materials and using the Megascans library. The thing that's really cool here-- You can work at whatever resolution you want, so it's fully non-destructive. Let's say you're working on a potato laptop at home, but you want to export 8K. You can work at 1024 and then download everything at 8K and kick everything back up at 8K when you're ready to be done with the project and export. We'll start with a simple 2K document here. This is the UI, it's very minimalistic, very easily approachable, it's very similar to Bridge. Like we were just looking at here, you can see the way that it's really integrated with the library here. Same search functionality. You can bring in your own Assets as well. Something to note. So you can bring in-- Let's say you want to sculpt something inside of ZBrush or you want to model something in Max or what have you, bring in your own clone stamps or whatever it is, actual alpha stamps. You can bring all that stuff in to Mixer and make your own content if you don't want to just use the library. We actually encourage this. We really want people to find new and creative ways to build their own content based on the library. It's super powerful in that regard. With the vastness of the library, the thing we found is people are making mixes where the base is something that looks nothing like what the end result is. If you go and look at Wiktor Öhman, who is our Lead Artist at Quixel, you go and take a look at some of the mixes that he's done, it's insane. He makes these crazy alien skins and they start with, like, concrete. It's like, how does this work? >>Victor: You can mix and match your own Assets there, and blend them with part of the library? >>Galen: Exactly, yeah. It's super powerful in that way. It's super user-friendly and again, just a zero learning curve approach to this. I'm going to make something really simple. We're just going to make a simple blend Material inside of Unreal. We'll export two different versions of this and we'll go from there. I'll start just with adding a basic surface. I'm going to start with this Icelandic sand and pebbles. This is a standard, run of the mill scan for us, from the Iceland trip. It looks really nice here, I can effect the different repetitions here inside of viewport. I can go and rotate the object, or rotate the scan here as well. There's a bunch of different options. I can change the color, I can effect the low frequencies, or the high frequencies, and everything in between. Make different presets if I want to. It makes it super easy to make some basic manipulations here. What I want to do, this is going to be the base. This is going to be the element that I'm going to start with and then I'm going to layer on some simple things on top and make a quick variance of it. So I'll duplicate this. Control + D allows me to do that. Then what I'm going to do is add-- We have a nice mask stack feature inside of Mixer. The best way to think about this is, if you're familiar with working inside of 3ds Max, modeling with the stack, it's very similar to that. I like to think of it as a nice blend between the stack inside 3ds Max and Photoshop and being able to hop between the two. It's pretty nice in that way. I'm going to add in simple noise here. Like I said, we're making a variance of this. What I'm going to do is try to get some simple variation here. What I'll do is lower the albedo. What we want is for this element to be a little more glossy, like it's actually something-- like it's a little bit more wet. What I'll do here is, I can go in and start to effect the amplitude of this. Let's say I want-- I can just change the seed value here, effect the frequency of it, effect the amplitude even more, so I can get something nice. Then feather the threshold until I get something that I like. Cool. That's something really simple here. Then the thing that's cool here on top of this is, if I wanted to, I could layer on additional noise on top of it and I can set the blend mode to multiply and then effect the way this masks out even that. Again, affecting the frequency, maybe effecting the amplitude here until I get something that is a little bit different than that base noise I started with and effecting the way the blend mode and the opacity on top of it effects it. To make it a little more interesting, I'll rotate it and effect the offset slightly, so we're not getting just the one to one of the gravel that originally was sitting there. Just to get a little more break-up than we did here before. Then, I want to put in some big rocks. I really like this scan here. This is a really nice texture of some larger elements and what I'm going to do is pull some of the larger rocks from this. The way I'm going to do that is build up the low frequency from this and then set it to blend from below. The thing that's really cool here is I'm only going to pull some of those rock elements into the mix here, so I'm still keeping the original gravel that I was working on before and then from there blend in some of these elements too. The thing that's really cool is I can duplicate this and rotate it. Then if I want to, I can make a really simple adjustment if there's elements that I'm looking at say, okay, maybe this element is a little too recognizable, I can go ahead and paint it out. A really simple approach to that. Just a really simple mix here. The last thing I want to do is add in some dried grass and leaves because I think this looks nice. We'll set this to blend from below, feather the thresholds slightly, and now we've got something in almost no time here, where we've gotten something that looks pretty decent and it's a nice difference from what we had before as our base. Just like in Photoshop, I can alt + click here and see the difference of the base and everything I've layered on top. I can preview all the different channels here so if I want to preview just the albedo, I can click 1, 2, go through all the different channels here. We'll call this a stream test real quick, and let's go ahead and export this because it's looking pretty decent for making a nice blend Material. What I'll do is I'm going to export this to the library We'll call this "sand_wet," and we'll make this into "Custom." Custom category-- I'm going to be exporting at 2048 for this, just for the sake of time. Then we'll click save. It's exporting all the maps and you can jump between different resolutions, but you can also jump to different calibrations. We worked in Metalness but if we wanted to jump to Spec/Gloss at any point, we could. If I go back over to Bridge now, I can see that this Asset that we just worked on is viewable and is inside of my library very quickly. There it is. That's pretty neat. Just being able to look at everything that we just did, here inside of Bridge. It's really a nice way to approach content, organizationally speaking. >>Victor: A little less going back and forth. >>Galen: A little bit, yeah. It's super easy. Then I'll export this base one, we'll call it "dry." Even though I already have this one downloaded, I'm going to blend between the two, to make it a little easier here. Let's go ahead now and bring all this content inside of Unreal. You see here, we have sand dry and sand wet. That looks all good. Let's jump into Unreal now. Here I am inside of the Level. This is a 360 scene. We're actually working on giving this to Unreal users, we're still figuring out how we're going to do that and when. But this will be a nice peek behind the curtain of how we assembled some of these areas and how the users can take this and learn from it. What I'll do here is, as you can see, we have the Megascans Plugin here at the top. I've already installed it, it's really simple to install. We have full videos and breakdowns and documentation of everything on our YouTube channel. >>Victor: We did it in a few minutes. >>Galen: Oh yeah, you and I did it yesterday. It took no time Makes it really, really simple. What we're going to do now is bring this content in. I'm going to leave this camera here and I'm going to bring in the ground plane. I've already brought this in. You have to focus on it, I'll scale it up, so we can see it a little better. We're going to be painting on the ground plane. Nothing fancy here, just a tessellated plane. What I'm going to do now is bring this content in. What I'll do is jump back over to Bridge, and let's go ahead and export these. What I can do is, I have a bunch of settings here-- I'm going to be exporting 2K with jpegs-- But if I wanted to, I can go in here and customize this even more. I can pack channels if I want. If I want to do basic RMA, I can do that. I can change the name with different prefixes, LOD settings, suffixes, and everything. It makes it really simple to customize it even further. We're going to be using a standard export for this. I have my project location here, so I’m going to be in the Rebirth folder, and we'll be using 4.22. Let's go ahead and click export. The idea here is we're trying to remove as many roadblocks as possible. We're importing here really quickly. One of the things that's really time consuming in bringing a lot of content in, is setting up shaders and doing all the work to get everything looking the way you want it to. Right out of the box, with one-click export, we have our shader hooked up. It's really simple here, just using the Megascans master Material that we have. It's a really simple Material. Nothing too crazy here. But what it does do is it allows you to make some very simple adjustments to these Materials and Textures once you've brought them in. This is just-- Let's say you wanted to slightly change the roughness value or the albedo or something like that, to match the Asset next to it. It's a really simple approach. You can modify this now if you want to or, you're working like most people are, with their own master Material paradigm-- You can use that and point to that as the target so all of your Assets go in and plug in to the correct slot. >>Victor: That's such an amazing feature because you don't have to go through and rip out what came in, and put it in your own instances or change all that. It will just inherit from it. >>Galen: Yeah, it's so simple. As you can see, everything went in here, no problem. Now I'll just look at some of the settings we have. We have simple color overlay in this Material instance, I can enable tessellation, subdivision, Levels, change the roughness if I want to, I can effect the tiling. Really simple stuff, but enough to get started and make some simple adjustments. The next thing I want to do is bring in this other Asset. I'll go ahead and click export on this. This is our dry-- dry sand. Bring this in. Now this is applied to the planes since I had it selected. The next thing I'm going to do is hold L and click and drop the light in so we can see a little better. Scale it up a little bit, maybe effect the intensity. Just so we can see a little bit better. It's a pretty ambient scene in general, so I just want to drop something in so we can see a little better. The next thing here is, if you look at the Megascans Plugin, we have this button that says, "Create Material Blends." What's really cool about this is that it's literally that. It's a one-click solution to make a simple blend Material. What I'm going to do is select these two Materials that we were working with before, the dry and the wet, and create Material blends here. As you can see, it made a Material. I'm going to drag this on to the surface, and now, if I go in to start Mesh painting, I'm just going to be painting on the red channel here. This is with no information in the red, so I'm going to scale this down a little bit. Now, I'm hitting Control and Shift, and painting on this, I can see the blends right where we were, from the wet version to the dry version. It makes it really simple to make that Material very easily. What we have inside here are some simple features. We'll look at that. It's very similar to what we were looking at before, with our other instance But what I can do is, let's say I want to-- Well there's a world of line blends here too which is nice, so if you have a 3D Object, you can have maybe snow that hits on the top of an object and blends down. That's pretty neat. I'm going to turn on some subdivisions for this, so we get some nice tessellation and bring out the larger features. We'll set it 20, and then bump the offset. Now we're getting some of the larger stones protruding a lot more than they were before. It's pretty neat, just a really simple approach. Let's go ahead now and bring in a 3D Asset. Very similar workflow here, not doing anything too crazy. What I want to do is, I have this really nice jagged lava outcrop Asset here. I love this Asset, it's so cool. I'm going to bring this into the Editor. What I'm going to do is click the export button. I have all my settings already hooked in from before, I'm just exporting 2K, and we'll jump back into Unreal. Everything is being imported, just like that, and boom, we have our Asset ready to go inside of the Editor in no time whatsoever. There it is. Again, we could take this a step further like we were talking about before, with blend Materials and everything. I'll go ahead and drop this in, scale it up a bit, so we can see it a little bit better. Alright. What if we wanted to paint a really simple blend from the ground up to this object. I'm going to use the Megascans Plugin, very simply here. I'm going to filter by Material instance, so I can see this. And we're going to grab the Material of the actual assembly and then the dry version and create a Material blend. I'm going to apply this to the Object. As you can see, we need to go in and make adjustments to the vertex colors. I'm going to flip it. Now I have my base Texture, which is obviously the base of the Asset we looked at before. But if I start to paint now, I have a really nice blend on this Object. I'm just painting really quick to prove a point here. But you see what I'm getting at with just being able to really simply make a blend super nice in almost no time. I'll just effect the strength a bit maybe, and feather this a little bit so we get some nice variation. That's the Megascans Plugin inside of Unreal. Super easy. We'll be adding more features and functionality to this over the coming months. We love to hear from the community in general if there's part of the workflow that we haven't featured yet or there's something they want to see. Those are all things that we're totally open to hearing. >>Victor: Where can they reach out to you? >>Galen: We have our social channels, so Instagram, we've got a big following there, we read every YouTube comment, so YouTube is really great for us. And Twitter as well. Our Twitter is down at the bottom, @quixeltools and Quixel Official is the Instagram. If you want to follow over there. @QuixelOfficial for Instagram. We've been posting here just regular updates of Assets that are going live, or big announcements, stuff like that. Definitely go check that out. We'd love to hear, just in general, from the Unreal community, the types of things that maybe we could do a little bit better on or anything in between. >>Victor: We can all always improve, right? >>Galen: Of course! >>Victor: They're wondering how it deals with tiling Textures. Most of the Textures, they are tileable, correct? >>Galen: All of the surfaces are tileable. >>Victor: Surfaces, but not the ones that are for models or specific for models? >>Galen: No, because the models would be unwrapped. >>Victor: They're just tileable, right? Someone asked, essentially how you deal with tiling but that doesn't go much farther than just how normal tiling Textures work, right? >>Galen: Yeah, it's part of the processing pipeline, that's one of the things we have to do, right? Because if we were to scan, let's say, the carpet on the ground, it's not perfectly tiling, so we have to go in and make some simple corrections on the processing side to make it usable in that way. We're really not making drastic changes to these Assets at all, or this content, it's just enough to make it tile. >>Victor: Okay. They were also curious what the performance cost of the basic Material that you get when you're importing your Materials. Do you want to show them any instruction counts? >>Galen: Sure, we can take a look at the blend Material, or do you want to see-- >>Victor: Yeah, we can do one or the other. >>Galen: Sure. >>Victor: Compiling, as always. >>Galen: Here it's 194. >>Victor: 194? >>Galen: Then with the vertex shader, yeah. It's pretty light. >>Victor: Yeah. >>Galen: This one is a little more involved >>Victor: That's the blend one, right? >>Galen: This is the blend one, yeah. Being able to-- Because it's actually all the different channels here. We actually have a puddle channel too, where you paint some puddles and stuff like that. But you can fully customize this too. Then if we were to look at our standard-- Standard is really basic here. >>Victor: 130 base pass? Did I read that right? It's definitely not anything that's difficult to work with. >>Galen: No, we're not breaking the bank with this. Don't worry. It's super simple. >>Victor: You can if you want to. If you throw those 8K Textures in and start populating your entire world with them. >>Galen: The future is 8K. >>Victor: Yeah. Are you ready for some more questions? >>Galen: Of course! Let's do it. >>Victor: One of our viewers says, "Hi, I'm a student environment artist and would love to play around with these Assets for a bit. What's the pricing for these? >>Galen: Hopefully we're at your college already. If we're not, then we need to be. Because we have an educational offering. I'll pull that up really quick. Sorry, they moved everything recently. >>Victor: We should mention that Quixel is one of our sponsors during our Game Jams and they give you access to-- Is it the 4K or the 8K during Game Jams? >>Galen: That is an Amanda question. >>Victor: It's one or the other, but it is full access to the library, whether they do 8K Textures or not. I'm not entirely sure, I think Amanda is looking it up. During, even a bit of time before the Game Jams, and then during the Jam, you'll be able to download the 8K-- Yeah you get full access to the 8K library and you can play around with everything that's in there and use it for the Jams as well. Which is a really nice thing to do for everyone for the Jams. And it's a perfect time, right? Because Jams, you want to play with new things and try stuff you haven't tried before. >>Galen: To answer the question about education-- The educational offering for an institution is free. We have what we call the Education XL license, but that's for the institution to pay. That's a really simple cost there but the educational offering gives you, as you're seeing here, gives you access to Mixer, Bridge, and 400 Assets. So we give those to colleges for them to go wild with. We really want to get kids using this stuff while they're learning. Because this is something that's being adopted in all the biggest video game developers and film companies. >>Victor: It's a new workflow, they're new tools, and that's what you should stay on top of when you're learning. Because the industry changes really quickly >>Galen: Yes it does. Yes it does. We try to make a bunch of YouTube content as well. If you go to our YouTube channel, we have a ton of content on there, were always making new updates, to where it's, hey, we made this new feature set for Mixer or Bridge or what have you. So we have to be constantly updating our education stuff. As you guys do, for sure. >>Victor: I'm going to throw out another link to the tutorial around Rebirth in chat there. We've got tons of questions here so I'll keep going. >>Galen: Awesome, let's do it. >>Victor: With the current computer setup, what framerate are you working with? How far down the road do you think it is to have this kind of look in real-time? >>Galen: You saw it running in real-time, so I mean-- >>Victor: I think they were referring to after we played Rebirth cinematic. >>Galen: Okay. Like I said, with the cinematic itself, each of those Levels, or shots rather, is its own Level. So they have different performance for each of those. We would dump frames for consistency because we were just making a trailer. But it never got below anything like, 24 or anything like that. But we have different scenes that are running upwards of well over 100. Everything is super performant. We were not looking to have our artists slog through, working at 4 FPS placing rocks, that is just a nightmare. >>Victor: It defeats the purpose of the real-time workflow. >>Galen: Exactly, yeah. I should note, all of our artists that worked on this project at the time were using a 1080 Ti. It's not like they had crazy cards or anything like that. Really basic stuff. >>Victor: There's no ray tracing in the cinematic. That's pretty amazing that you were able to get such a high cinematic quality even without one of the new fancy features. I should note too, for all the interior shots, that's all baked lighting and then everything outdoors was all dynamic. But everything outdoors is relatively ambient in nature anyways, so we were able to use that to our advantage on the performance side. >>Victor: Do you have any tips on setting up the lighting for a scene? And do you plan on adding trees to your scanned Assets? >>Galen: Yes and yes and yes actually. We have a lot of yesses there. First thing, as far as lighting, just a general tip about lighting. Less is more. The fewer lights you can put in the better. Once you start dropping in 50 lights to really dial it in, you'd be surprised of just how bad that could end up looking. >>Victor: The added complexity, I guess. >>Galen: Sure. Obviously you're making it a little crazier for the scene. For Rebirth, on that tutorial you’re linking now, Joe covers his setup in full for all of our shots. For the most part, we had a directional light and a sky light in our scenes, for everything that's ambient. For general notes on lighting, less is more. That's my approach. >>Victor: That's a good tip. >>Galen: Definitely look at Joe's tutorial because he'll cover the whole breakdown. The other thing to keep in mind here is camera and fog. Lighting is one component of the larger look that you're trying to get. They're definitely interconnected. Spend a lot of time looking at that part as well. >>Victor: They were wondering about the fog. Since we're here, they were curious. Is it using any of the tools in Unreal? Is it a Height Fog? Atmospheric? >>Galen: It's different for each shot. The Height Fog was the standard one we used for most of it. Kind of going out into the distance and everything. What we did do, and the guys at SideFX will cover this next week, is they did some simple fog effects for us inside of Houdini. We layered that in to break up the way the fog sits. They'll cover it next week. The standard fog was good. It gets you to that 90 percent mark, but we really wanted that extra level. Houdini allowed us to make some really nice fog. It rolled over the rocks and everything. Simple cards too, nothing crazy. >>Victor: Yeah, just mix and match a little what works for the shot. >>Galen: I should touch on the tree question as well. Yes, I just got back from Sweden two weeks ago. A couple weeks ago, I don't even know. I'm always traveling. But I just got back from Sweden, we did a huge scan trip. Covered a ton of ground, scanned so many trees, it's ridiculous. We'll have a bunch of that stuff coming up and some other cool announcements surrounding trees, soon. >>Victor: That's great. >>Galen: Yeah. It was pretty amazing to see that whole process. Literally, those guys are breaking everything down. We're scanning the leaves, we're scanning branches, we're scanning the trunk, we're scanning the base. All of it. It's all something that goes into making a tree. It was pretty cool to see. >>Victor: Exciting. I hope maybe we'll get to see some shots from that as well. It's just interesting to see all of your people working at set. >>Galen: Totally. they're all over the place. >>Victor: Yeah. Any plans for regional pricing for Quixel subscriptions? >>Galen: Regional pricing? I don't think so, but I don't deal a ton with licensing to be honest. But every license we do is a little bit different. On the business side of things, there's always considerations based on the project and everything that we can work out. No deal is ever the same. >>Victor: Okay. How long did it take for you to make this? What was the total time from, like, idea to ship it? >>Galen: That's a good question. The scan trip to Iceland was in June of last year. Basically what that means is that we're scanning all through June, the guys get back in July, a lot of them took vacation, as they well deserved after a month of scanning. It's very physical work. I discovered that very quickly on the last scan trip. Very physical work. Then all the data starts to get crunched internally, and from there we decided-- We knew we wanted to make this demo, But I would say that really, it came together probably, the final idea of, yeah, we're doing this thing, probably somewhere in July. Then from there, we started to flesh out in the previs side what we wanted to do, build a team, hire people to do the work. The thing that's pretty crazy about it is that in earnest, like, work inside of the Editor, and everything that we talked about today, That work probably started in earnest, maybe August or September. Late August, early September. Because there's a lot of planning that goes into this. There's a ton of planning. So for us, it was super short because we had to deliver for GDC. What that means is, you're not delivering the day of GDC. Everything has to be really squeaky clean at least a full week ahead. We butted up right to that line, I would say. Getting it in safe and from there, June through March, I guess, for everything. Like, everything. I should note, there were three environment artists that worked inside of the Levels. Three total. The rest was support, like we talked about. It was just auxiliary elements of the demo But yeah, three artists, in the Levels, checking things in. >>Victor: That's very impressive. We talked a little about the lighting, we had more questions there, but I like that you referred to the tutorial that-- What was his name? >>Galen: Joe Garth. >>Victor Joe Garth. Oh, he's actually one of our Marketplace creators. >>Galen: Yeah, he does a really cool product over there. He was one of the environment artists on the demo. He did-- It's like 45 minutes, a technical deep dive. It's amazing, so definitely check it out. >>Victor: Does Quixel plan to also put distance Meshes, like mountains into the library? >>Galen: 100 percent. Yeah. For us, on this last trip, was the first time that we really scanned with LIDAR, in fact. I think for us, it's a matter of figuring out the best way to deliver that content. I think the scanning part of it is something that is easy for us. I think that's something we're good at. It's a matter of mostly figuring out distribution and what people would be looking for there. If we were to deliver a mountain, even if it's a 16K Texture, you walk up next to it, it's going to be super pixelated. It's a matter of breaking it down into something that we think is going to be usable. Whether that's masks and different tiling Textures to associate with them, and the macro normal to drive the directionality, really tessellated geometry on top of that. All those things, I think, are super valuable in assembling what would be a mountain. But it's up to us to make something we think is going to be valuable inside the library. I think there is a ton of value for those types of Assets. It's a matter of-- It's a couple things, like I said. Figuring out the strategy for distribution, figuring out how it would actually work. But what I can say is that we actually have been scanning with drones. Which is pretty neat. We have a couple Assets that-- I’ll pull one of them up real quick. These types of Assets, let me see if I can find it-- These types of Assets are doing incredibly well for us. We have received great reception from the community on these types of Assets, where we're literally sending scanners up on drones and gathering this type of data. I would say this is the first step in that direction. Again, it's figuring out to make something like this usable. I think you still run into the same problem we talked about with texel density. But what is pretty neat about all this though, is that what we can do is separate the data out and extract composite masks to figure out where rock is and where the moss is, maybe there's dirt or what have you. And separating out tiling Textures from that that you would then pipe across the surface. I think that's pretty cool and it's definitely in the works. >>Victor: That's great. Let's continue. Say you can't go to these places and get a close-up view of what they look like. What additional methods do you think help create the vision of the landscape without physically being there?" I would say VR. If you can. >>Galen: VR, yeah. There's a bunch of different ways now, I think. There's so much media that you can get your hands on, even if it's just photos. Our artists that were working on Rebirth, Victor was one of the only guys that actually went to Iceland. Dan, who was our CG supervisor for this project, he had been, so he knew how to inform the team about what he was looking for. From there, if you have people that have a vision for it, they can communicate that down to your team. I think that's super valuable. All that Joe and Owen were looking at, since they never had been to Iceland, they were just looking at images and videos and all these different things. Whatever you can get your hands on. >>Victor: There's a couple of amazing Icelandic bands that have documentaries about them touring Iceland. I think that's where I would head. Are these Assets ready to go in Engine as soon as they're downloaded from Megascans or do they need to be re-topologized manually before using them?" It's straight in, right? >>Galen: They're ready to go. If I look at any 3D Asset here, we can look at the different LODs that are available. LOD 0 through LOD 5. It shows how many tries are associated with this Mesh. They're good to go. >>Victor: Someone in chat was interested specifically about that crater. They wondered if it's just one large Mesh or if it was sculpted into the terrain and decorated with different Meshes or something else. >>Galen: That's a super tricky shot, for sure. The way that one came together, is that it's actually cut into the terrain by a large gap, but then we took a lot of these big assembly pieces, kind of like this one, and inset them into the curvature of that gap. These types of Assets, these large assembly pieces, were super valuable for that. I might be able to find some of these other ones, maybe. Since we did get these really large pieces like this, like these cliffs and this type of stuff, we were able to take these assemblies and make something that really worked that crater into looking very believable, I think. >>Victor: It looks amazing and I'm sure that's why they were wondering how it's done as well. >>Galen: It's very heavy. I'll say that much. It's a very heavy scene. >>Victor: They're wondering if you'll eventually be adding cars and other hard surface objects to the library? >>Galen: Yeah. Let me show some other stuff here. We have started doing some hard surface stuff fairly recently. Simple barrels and some of these power elements, electrical boxes and this type of stuff. We are rolling out this type of content into the library. Cars is a little tricky. What I'll say in general about the library, is that everything that goes into the library is free of copyright. You never have to worry, when you're working on a game or film, is this content clean in that regard. Can it pass through a legal department without them saying, where'd you get it? If it's from Megascans, then you're good. With that, the thing is, is that we have to make sure, when we're scanning something, that it doesn't have copyright. We have to be very careful about that, everything goes through a lawyer. It's all meticulously cultivated in that way, to make an ecosystem and a library that's super easy to use from a legal perspective. >>Victor: That gets a little tricky with a car because it's been manufactured by a company. >>Galen: Exactly. Those are a little bit trickier but the thing for us as far as copyright is concerned, is that we are looking to form strategic partnerships with companies that are willing to take that leap with us, and be able to feature their brand in a way and also get scans out of it. We're working on that. >>Victor: That's awesome. We got some new questions after I went through the first time. We went through shaders. Do you use tessellation and POM on terrain Materials? >>Galen: We use no displacement whatsoever in Rebirth, actually. Everything that you're seeing is full geometry. That was a decision that we made because we knew we wanted to leverage the higher resolution Meshes in general. Then from there, that extra geometry gave us better shadow quality, and the nice undulation on the surface, like we saw in that terrain shot where there's just assemblies littering the ground. That was the approach we took for all that stuff. No displacement at all. >>Victor: "In terms of optimizing, what do you look to enhance for performance, other than polycounts?" It's usually everything, right? >>Galen: Yeah. All we can do is provide the different versions for people. >>Victor: I think it was in reference to Rebirth. >>Galen: Ohhh, okay. For Rebirth, yeah-- The big thing was the tool that SideFX made for us. Being able to crunch the polys down to something that made the scenes actually usable. That's a big thing. Number of lights, the lighting method, baked versus dynamic and everything. Fog. All those things weigh in when you're building performance. Or vetting performance, rather. It's different for every case. It's hard to say. >>Victor: Unfortunately there's no one fit, Make Performance Better button, in any project. Not yet. >>Galen: I'm sure you guys-- >>Victor: One day. Well someone is making a Make Game button in the Editor Utility Widgets. I'm waiting for that. Procedurally generated games. It would be cool, just like music. Someone is asking if you could turn on ray tracing on this demo and I don't think we'd be able to do that right here because it requires a little bit of setup in terms of the project, which we don't have time for. As far as I know, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to use the Megascans library in Unreal using ray tracing. It's just like any other Mesh and Texture. Except it looks really, really good. >>Galen: Yeah, we vetted ray tracing for Rebirth. We decided against it. It was still an emerging piece of tech for us. We were already too pot committed with the standard paradigm. It's something that's obviously incredible. It's a huge step forward for the Engine. We did not utilize it for Rebirth, but we could take some of these scenes-- Especially since they're so ambient, all the outdoor shots. Those shots, they would fall really quick to ray tracing. I think the interior shots and moving shots would be a little bit more tricky to harness ray tracing in a simple way. It obviously can be done, but it wouldn't be as simple as checking a couple boxes, and there you go. >>Victor: They wanted to know if there will be more city street, modern Assets. We can never have enough red brick walls. >>Galen: I agree. >>Victor: Yeah. Is there red brick wall in there? I bet there is. So many bricks. Yeah, I would say urban stuff is way easier for us to scan. Depending on where you are, I should say. Certain cities, you can't just walk into downtown LA and set up a rig. People will be like, what are you doing? We try to go to little bit more remote areas, just in general. But urban stuff is way easier for us to scan than standing on glaciers, you know. >>Victor: Walking on lava rock and bringing the whole team and all the equipment out there. >>Galen: Exactly. I was just in Savannah a couple weeks ago. That city is incredible. I was walking around like, we have to scan everything. Everything here. So cool. >>Victor: That's a cool mindset that most of you must have. You go places, especially you that travels a lot, you'll come to a place and be like, I just want to scan all this. >>Galen: My girlfriend is even now saying, You should scan that, and I was like, Yes, you're right, we should scan that! It's everyone. >>Victor: Hitting up everyone on Slack. Setting little Google pins. What's the weirdest thing you have scanned? >>Galen: I would say, if you would type in, Animal. Animal is probably the weirdest. We have a dead bird. So that's a thing. We have a bunch of guts. Some weird skins and flesh and stuff. >>Victor: Yeah, we were talking about how you can blend those together to make some gnarly looking zombies and otherworldly creatures. >>Galen: Yes. Pretty nasty stuff. Pretty nasty stuff. So I would say that. We've also started to scan a lot of food. I think a lot of this is pretty funny. Just to see, oh yeah, someone at our company ate an apple and then they scanned it. So yeah, that's kind of funny. >>Victor: Who's the bread maker? >>Galen: This, I'm pretty sure it's Pernila, which is Victor's wife. She's one of our scanners, out in [inaudible]. I'm pretty sure that a lot of this is her doing. >>Victor: Looks like a professional bread and pastry maker. They're wondering if there will be any sample scene from Rebirth available to look through. >>Galen: We're working on that scene I was just in actually. We're working on figuring out distribution methods for that scene. I don't have any announcements for that today, but I know that we are looking to release something. That's one of the big questions we've been getting. How did you do this? Are you guys a bunch of liars? Everyone wants to see, obviously, so we want to first and foremost, educate people. Make a ton of great content so they can consume it. Then past that, actually give them the things so they can take a look at it themselves. Like I said, all the Icelandic content you've seen in the demo is available to download today. Have at it. >>Victor: Go get it. Do you have a trees count for any of the Rebirth Levels? >>Galen: I'm not entirely sure. I don't know if we should talk about that. I couldn't tell you. I wasn't an artist on it, so I couldn't tell you exactly what some of those Levels weighed in at. >>Victor: I think this will be the last question actually. because we're about to run out of time. Any plans on scanning-- I think human skin is what they're asking about. >>Galen: I don't exactly know of that being on our immediate road map, but what I can say is that it's a little bit baked into our DNA, so Teddy, who is one of our cofounders of the company, he came from Starbreeze and he was scanning people and faces and these types of things when he was working there. That was one of the things he was in charge of. Among other things. So he actually has done this earlier on in his career. But there was definitely a passion that he had for that and everything, with scanning in general I wouldn't be surprised if that comes down the pipe eventually. I would say we have a lot of things to shore up with just the stuff we've already bitten off currently. So for us, it's something we obviously thought about a lot. But no announcements for that today, but I wouldn't be surprised down the road if we start scanning people. >>Victor: That's awesome. Thank you so much for coming all the way over to Cary, North Carolina. >>Galen: This was awesome. >>Victor: Yeah, it's great. I'm so happy you were able to make it and show us all this amazing content. I already told you that I know what I'm doing this weekend. Playing around with all of this. As for all of you out there in chat watching, if you enjoyed the stream or have any feedback, I think Amanda is about to drop a link in the chat for you. You can go ahead and fill out that survey. Everyone who fills it out and enters their email in there will take part in a sweepstakes and you can win an Unreal Engine t-shirt. I think it might be this one right now. Or very similar. >>Galen: That's a nice shirt. >>Victor: This one. I don't know if it can be seen though. Yep. Getting my laptop in the way. As always, make sure you look out for our user groups. There might be one in your area, if you want to go and discuss, especially if you are doing some amazing work. Maybe even bringing a little bit of Quixel there. Share all your work with them. It's unrealengine.com/usergroups and you can go ahead and see if there's anyone in your area. If there isn't, please go ahead and contact us at community@unrealengine.com if you are interested in starting one and we can go ahead and get you a bit of information on what that's like and what it usually entails and some tips and tricks on how to get your Meetup to-- to get some people. Get people to come there. Because it's a little boring if it's just the organizer. We have several online communities, I'm sure you might have heard of them before, but I usually refer to our unofficial Discord, Unreal Slackers. There are now over 20,000 members of the Discord server, which is very impressive. I think everyone is there to help out and learn. Aside from Discord, of course our forums. That's actually where we look out. If you did see the countdown video that we have at the beginning of the stream We'd love to see more of those. It's essentially 30 minutes of development, maybe playtesting, doing something in your project. It doesn’t have to be a game, it can be anything made in Unreal. Go ahead and fast forward that up to five minutes and send it to us with your logo or your name, and you might be part of one of our countdown videos. If you're streaming on Twitch-- I saw chat talking about it earlier-- make sure you use the Unreal Engine categories so that we can tune in, see what you're working on and maybe throw you-- be able to help you out a little bit. Or maybe just look at all the amazing content you're making. As always, follow us on social media, and a big, special thanks to all of our sponsors, including Quixel. Next week we have Houdini coming up, like Galen mentioned. They're also going to go over the part of the Rebirth workflow that they were able to help out with. It will be a couple of their developers, so I think we'll get a really nice breakdown of what they were able to do there. Hopefully a little of that animated shader fog, or the animated fog. That's what I'd be interested in seeing. With that, we are saying goodbye here and we'll see you next week! Bye everyone! ♫ Unreal logo music ♫
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Channel: Unreal Engine
Views: 39,396
Rating: 4.9302015 out of 5
Keywords: Game Development
Id: oXqfNsrWLag
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Length: 101min 10sec (6070 seconds)
Published: Thu Jul 11 2019
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