>>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 ♫
