Recreating the Mars Surface in Unreal Engine

without without wit Bush here today I'm excited to show you guys how we're going to create the Mars environment using Unreal Engine now this tutorial is geared towards the students that are part of the UCLA smash program but I figured I'll put this up on my channel in case anybody else wanted this information so without further ado let's get right into it so to start off we're gonna need to get Unreal Engine and the way to do that is we need to come up to Unreal Engine comm and then it will bring you to this website here now Unreal Engine is a game engine at heart but now we could be used for things like virtual production broadcast arts vis a whole bunch of different things so when you come to the site you'll actually see some tabs down here and if you're like interested in anything in particular just click on one of these tabs and it will show you like a use case study of how unreal is used in like these different scenarios here but the gift started for us we're gonna want to sign in here and if you don't have an account already we have a couple of different options here so if you want to just start from scratch and make like an epic account you could do that here or you can sign in with like Facebook Google I like using Xbox Live because if you do play games you can do some stuff that are like cross-platform like fortnight if you want to play like against PC or Playstation you would log in and kind of hook up your epic account with your game account so I like logging in with my Xbox account here so I just click on this and my information is already saved in here so once it's verified it's gonna get me logged in like so and so the next step from here is I want to come up to the download tab and which is going to give us a few options now with Unreal Engine recently they announced that if you use this platform with anything like broadcast or virtual production you can use a 100% free I guess they're making so much money off a fortnight that they could kind of do that type of thing but if you want to make like an interactive experience like a video game you don't owe them any type of money unless your game makes 1 million dollars in revenue which at that point you're like 5 percent so I'm just going to select the creators license here where it says 100% free you still like that then you just install it and you'll be good to go and then the next step from here is we want to go to a website called quick SOCOM so what quick soul does is they kind of specialize in making photogrammetry objects which is basically stuff that looks photo-real so say that you have like a statue they'll take thousands and thousands of photos of that statue then they'll stitch it all together in 3d and what you have in the end is like a photogrammetry statue that looks real when you look at it so if I come down to mega skins right here we can kind of browse through some of the assets that they made here so I'm going to click browse mega skins and what we have here if you watch their tutorial like you'll click right here it says go to video and it shows you how they made this scene and these are all the different assets that they used to make this scene which is kind of crazy cuz you think about it like to get this cliff they actually had to take probably like millions of photos and then stitch all those photos together to make it a big 3d object of this and what's cool about this stuff is it's been used in like big blockbuster stuff that we see today like Jumanji and the Jungle Book and even games like Call of Duty and things of that nature so I'm going to go back to quick SOCOM because the platform that we want to download here is called bridge so if I click on this basically bridge is just like File Explorer but it's taken all the assets that we were just looking at and putting them in one place and what's cool about bridges once we download like a asset that we want to use it's a one-click solution to send the dough for the Unreal Engine so we don't have to do like any texturing or anything of that nature we click one button it sends it to unreal and then we're just good to go so it's almost like playing with LEGOs at that point if I click on download here it there from there you're just going to install bridge and then you'll be good to go so once you have bridge and everything downloaded the next thing we want to do is go over to the NASA website to get the HDR file that we need to start building from so I'm going to click on here I have my tab already set up but I'll leave this link down below so you don't have to search for it but this is on a NASA's website and they have a whole bunch of 360 images here that the Mars rover actually took and the latest one that we have here if I click on it you can see that this is actually 1.8 billion pixels and this panoramic shot and so what they did was they made this free to the public you know it's one hundred percent fair use that we could use up for anything that we want and I actually had a friend that took this and made this into like a 360 VR photo here which if you go to his YouTube channel I also linked this down below as well but his youtube channel was creator of his name is Hugh and he put this up on his YouTube channel and you can actually circle around Mars here and if you have a VR headset you can actually see it in VR as well which was really cool but what I did was I asked you I said hey I saw what you did can you shoot me over that photo so I could start messing around with it in unreal and he said no problem because if you go to the NASA website you can see that it doesn't have any sky or anything in here it's the way he did was he created his own sky here it said that everything was complete so if I go back here this is a alpha channel up here and it's not good please so I mean you could put your own the sky in there but I thought what he did was really cool here and so he shot me over a couple of fouls and if I go to my fellow Explorer got to see this is the one that he originally sent me which this is pretty cool but if we're gonna make an environment that we're gonna be walking around we don't want to be walking on top of the Mars rover here so I asked him if he could paint this out in which he said no problem again and so he sent me this one over here which has the Mars rover painted out which is cool because now we can start using this to construct our scene but unreal won't take a JPEG like this for an HDR the way that we needed it so what I did was I took it in after-effects did a little bit more cleanup and I made this file here which I'll make available to you guys in the link down below so that you guys can follow along as well so don't worry about stitching this stuff together or doing any cleanup I'm gonna give you this file and you'll be good to go so once you have everything that you need here download this file here so you can follow along the next step from here is we're gonna open up Unreal Engine and get everything started up in there so once you have everything is start from unreal this is the scene that's going to come up here and so from here you'll see a couple of things like feature content basically this is just a browser to show you the latest and greatest stuff that they have here but what we want to go is up to library and if you don't have any engines here you want to click on engine versions click the plus sign and then it's probably going to give you this version here 4.25 point which is the latest version I'm gonna delete this is already having installed it depending on your internet speed this can't take a little bit to download so I do recommend doing this ahead of time but once you're ready you'll just click the launch button here then it's gonna open up Unreal Engine for you so once everything's ready we're gonna have a tab here called project browser these are some previous projects that I've been working on but what we want to focus on is down here where it says new project categories we have a couple of different categories like one for games one for television one for arch fees and then one for automotive design usually I do this one here since I do work in television but for this example I want to show you guys that we can actually interact with our environment and kind of run around it and everything so I'm gonna click on this one called games click Next and once we click Next it's going to give us a template here which we have a few options so this is for people that really want to make games and interactive experiences we have like a template here for first person so if you want to make a first-person shooter it's already set up for keyboard or mouse or if you have an Xbox controller you could use that as well but the example I want to use is over here it's called third person yeah so I'm gonna click on this one here because I just want to show a character running around the scene so I'm gonna click on next and then we have a couple of settings here which I usually leave a default it didn't down here it's where you name your project like right here is where you're gonna have your location folder click on the three dots here pick where you want to have it and then over here I'm just going to name this Mars underscore UCLA OneNote is unreal doesn't like spaces like if I click space UC gives us an error here so I usually do underscores whenever I want to make like a space or anything of that nature but I'm gonna click create project here so whenever we open up Unreal Engine this is the default platform that is going to give us the start down here in the lower right hand corner we're gonna hit dismiss where it says new plugins are available we don't really need to worry about that right now and then down here below that it says project file is out of date it always says that for some reason I just click update there we go we're all good to go here so to get started there's gonna be a couple of options that I need you to select first before we get going so if you come over here to settings come down to plugins and then over here wrist is built in I need you to click on this and then in the search bar I'm gonna type in HDR and that's gonna bring up this platform here called HDR backdrop I want to enable this because this is how we're going to be able to bring that NASA HDR file into our scene and then down here you're going to see it's going to say restart so click on restart now it's just gonna restart unreal it doesn't really take that long boom all right so everything's restarted I could close the plug-in window and then right here this is the default scene that always comes up it's our template so if you kind of just want to play around a little bit to see how stuff works just click the play button right here and I'm going to be using my keyboard and mouse so if you're used to playing video games the way that you control this character is w goes forward s goes backwards a left and D right and so I could kind of just move around here and I'll use my mouse to turn the screen like so and then spacebar would jump so right off the bat you can see we don't even have to do any type of programming or anything to get started here which is really cool then once you're done playing around just hit the Escape key and there we go we're back to normal so I'm scrolling out with the mouse wheel and then if I hold down the mouse wheel I can kind of move around my scene like so but what we're going to do from here is we're going to start a blank screen and we're going to start from scratch so I'm going to come down here to where it says content browser we're gonna click content and I'm going to right click in here and make a new level so I'll right clicked go right here where it says level and then it's gonna come down here and say new world I'm just going to name this Mars underscore UCLA and then I'm going to double click on it it's gonna come up with a window say save content I'm just gonna click save selected and then it gives us a blank screen here and so from here we can start adding the components that we need to build out our scene so over here in the top left where it says place actors I'm going to type in HDR and that's going to give us the HDR backdrop that we had enabled earlier so I'm going to click and drag this into my scene and you can see it gives us a default HDR to kind of work with so if I come over here let me pull this up where it says detail and this is where we could control everything like a location rotation and scaling so what I like to do is from an X Y Z here I like to zero everything out so I hit 0 then I hit tab 0 again hit tab and then hit 0 and then click enter and that's gonna Center everything up so if I hold down the Alt key it didn't hold down the middle mouse I'm moving around my scene a lot faster and a lot easier and didn't if I scroll I can scroll backwards a little bit and then from here I kind of want to replace his background with our Mars environment the one that you downloaded earlier so I'm gonna go over to my file explorer I'm gonna look for this file right here this is Mars without rover underscore winbush click and drag this in here and then it should take a second for it to compete over okay and now it's inside of our scene so what I want to do is make sure I have my HDR backdrop right here selected then we're gonna click and drag the file that just brought in here over here into this box that just highlighted green just let that go and now we have our Mars scene in here but it looks all blurry and so we have to fix our HDR that we brought in we need to tell it it is high resolution and then not blur it so much so I'm gonna double click on an image down here that we brought in Mars without Rover underscore winbush double click on that and that's going to bring this window up here so there's a few things that we need to do here and so I'm gonna extend this a little bit it looks like we need to update our project again some just click update there we go so we should be good so down here where it says level of detail I'm gonna click on this one it says Jun settings click here and then I want to come down to one this is no MIT Maps and click on that sometimes it's going to take a second just fourth they calculate but once it does you can see that automatically our picture is already a lot clearer than it was and if I look back in my viewport it looks a lot more clear but it's still not clear as it should be and that's because if I come over here and look it's telling us that our image is only 512 by 512 which is a really low resolution so there's a way around that that we can fix it to tell it that it's a hybrid Ellucian that what it is so the fat out we brought in is pretty large like right here where it says imported this is the file size that we import it is really large so that means we could go a lot higher especially higher than 512 and so I'm gonna bring it in that a K which is 81 92 imma click enter and depending on how fast your computer is this is going to take a couple of seconds to calculate but once it does you'll see over here in the viewport it's going to be a lot clearer okay I'm not gonna see already on the left hand side it's a lot more clear over here so imma come up click the Save button here then I'm going to exit this out and now you can see that we have a really clean landscape here if I'm our scene since this is a photo like we can't get too crazy with it but I mean we can move around and the decent amount of space and not have our image distort but you can't go all the way to the edges because this isn't really a fully built scene and since this is an image what we could do is we could start bringing in like the 3d objects over from mega skins in here let's start really dressing this up so we can make it look a lot cooler than what it really is right here so there's a couple more things I want to do first though like on my intensity here I'm gonna bring it down a tad bit maybe like point eight and your intensity is how much lights being illuminated by our HDR file so you notice when I brought down to point eight they got a lot dimmer here and then underneath hair for size I'm gonna make this about 500 and this is just gonna make our width a lot larger and our scene so we have a little bit more real estate to run around in and then on our projection Center I'm gonna click on this right here just arrow and then where it says Z I'm gonna take this up to like 200 and there we go our scene so be good to go so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna start bringing in stuff from mega skins but first let me actually let me come over here I'm gonna click X over here and my place actors and I'm gonna come down to basic and then where it says players start I'm gonna click and drag this in here and then I want to make this absolutely zero from a location as well and what this does is basically whenever I click the play button here this is where a character is going to spawn from if I do it now let me click play you can see our characters falling through the floor so if I double click back here and my royal outliner races players start that brings us back to the center here and the making sure that our character is not gonna fall through the floor we can actually just bring a plane into our scene so let me do this again if I come over here where it says place actor's basics come down to plane I'm just gonna click and drag that into my scene and then in my transform here at my location I'm gonna zero everything out and then 4 you can see it's starting to spaz out here we'll fix that in a minute for my scale I'm gonna make this 500 by 500 didn't Clips the entire real estate and then from my Z location I'm just gonna bring it down to like negative 1 it so now if I click play my character is on the surface and we can actually start running around here which is really cool and now let's start just bringing stuff in from making skins to really dress this up but first let me see a landscape that I kind of want to focus on first like I like that hill right there so I'll probably start building right here started adding some cliffs and some rocks and everything and kind of have this off into the distance so if I come down and open our bridge this is quick so a bridge and so this is basically the program that will give us access to all the different files that we need so if I scroll down here you can see that we have a bunch of different textures we have a bunch of different 3d objects and that's all that our disposal so we can use this all 100% free you don't have to pay for this at all which is really cool so I have a couple of things saved out already I'm gonna click on favorites and these are some of the assets that I'm gonna be using so if you want to follow along I would just type in limestone rocks limestone rubble and then limestone rocks again so let me actually type it in up here so we can see [Music] so when I type in limestone rocks we're gonna click on 3d assets and then we could just scroll down and kind of see all the different things that we have access to so if you guys want to use actually something different you guys are welcome to do that I mean to have a whole bunch of different options in here and so let me go back to my favorites because this one right here it's actually called small rock and what this is is basically we could bring these in we can start painting our scenes with them but first let's start bringing in our larger assets and then I'll show you guys how to use this as well so I'm gonna click on just say let's do this one first this limestone rock one here so what we're gonna do is come over here first you'll need to download it so let me actually show you how you download stuff here so if I come over just come over like 3d assets click on assembly and then let me look for when I didn't download so here we go so I didn't download this one right here so you see this little green arrow here you would just click on this Daniel C is start spinning then you search to see a percentage here and that shows you that everything is downloading and then once it's done downloading then you'll have a blue arrow and then you can export from here so I'm gonna go back to the one that I was going to export click on limestone rocks I'm gonna come over to export settings and what I'm gonna do is right here for texture resolution sometimes you have a K sometimes it's only four and two I usually just work with 4k so I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna leave everything else at default just jpg mesh format and FBX and then for mesh LOD we want to use LOD zero we can't use a high polygon one but that might be too large and so LOD zero is a good one to get a lot of good information in there and have it still look for the real and then down here I already have it installed but where it says export to when you click on Unreal Engine it's gonna ask you to download it and so just you'll click on the download button well automatically install for you and then you should be good to go you just tell a version 4.25 and then that's all you really need from there oh yeah installation folder you want to make sure that you have it and in here so depending on where you start unreal you want to go over to engine and then plugins and then once you have that installed you should be good to go then once you have everything set up you just click export and then you'll see in the top right and we'll say exporting to Unreal Engine and once it's done I would tell you it's successful so let me close this down and once it's done importing into unreal we should see the folder change down here in the content browser so I'm gonna close this message log out get down here you can see we have a 3d object in which if I click and drag it into my scene there we go so it's just like Legos we just click and drag it in our scene that we could start building from here so if I look up here in my top right you can see this right here where it says selecting scale I'm gonna click on that and then if I click over my object that I just dragged in if I left click and drag I'm gonna drag it over to the left it's actually making it larger and if I drag over to the right it's making it smaller so I'm just gonna click and drag then I'm going to click back up here where it says select and translate I'm just going to move around my scene here a little bit I start moving this rock in the places that I want it to be so I actually probably make this a lot larger and if you don't want to scale it with this you can always scale it over here where it says transform so let's actually see what it looks like at 6 by 6 you could probably even go larger maybe 8 by 8 make it really massive something along that line then move this around here let's say I want it to blend in with my scene a little bit more you can see these rocks are a little bit more tan than this one here so if I come down here to my lower left hand corner which is limestone rocks underline green here I'm a double click on that and that brings us up to our material manager so if I come over here where it says albedo this is where we could control our color so I just want to make sure that checkmark this one on albedo 10 and then checkmark down below it whereas 10 intensity and let me actually make this slope as smaller so I can see my viewport because what I want to do from air is where it's white this is where we can actually pick the color so I'm going to click on this and it's gonna bring up this color picker which if you use Photoshop or anything of that nature this should look familiar to you so right here where you see an eyedropper I'm gonna click on this and then I'm gonna click on my scene to a color rock that I kind of want to use so somewhere around here might be good so I'm gonna click on that click OK and then right here I'm going to start moving this up and it looks like it might be making a little bit too tan here so let me move it over to so I'm just gonna play around with this 212 fine something that I like there and then I'm gonna blend it in a little bit better with the lighting so I'm going to come over to lights come over to directional light and drop this in my scene I'm gonna close this out click on my transform here I'm just going to zero out my location for my light the rotation one zero it out as well so we could use some lighting in here as well the kind of flush art our scene so right now we're at let's say on or Y let's start moving this over so you can see as I'm rotating my why my son is moving and it's affecting my 3d object there so I kind of just want to miss with the X Y Z here actually the Y Z so I guess something that I think looks pretty good and it's gonna blend in with my seem pretty well and so maybe something like that I didn't notice we start playing around with our scene more we can start blending in a little bit better I'm gonna click on this drag it down a little bit more and then we can actually duplicate this as well actually before we do that you can see right here where it says lighting needs to be rebuilt I'm actually gonna work with all dynamic lighting so I'm going to click on my light up here right here where it says movable click this and that gets rid of that and now my lighting saw dynamic so I don't have to worry about any errors or anything up there so now I want to click on my object I'm actually gonna hold down the Alt key click and drag and now it made a duplicate of this rock in which I could just kind of rotate it and start playing around with it like this so you can see how fast we're starting to build our scene out so just gonna click and drag these rocks out maybe drag this down rotate it a little bit something like that and so that we don't start getting really repetitive let's start bringing in some other assets as well so I'm gonna go back to bridge let's say we want to bring in this one to be like a foreground rocks so I'm gonna click on export here and drag and drop these and then I'm gonna actually make these a little bit larger as well so you can see what we're doing here we're just kind of set designing our scene just like point it down to blend in a little bit with our scene there something like so so I'm just going to set these on this little piece here so I built out my scene I just kept adding a whole bunch of 3d assets until I find something I like and this is what I came up with here and so I moved my lighting around a little bit and I got this shadow is kind of interacting in a way that I liked it but I still think it's a little bit too bright so I have my direction or a light selector right now I'm gonna come down to intensity I'm gonna bring down my lux - maybe like 7 maybe I start 5 whoops let's try 5 somewhere around there I think it's looking pretty good I might even be able to do 4 let me see yeah so something like that's looking pretty cool so remember there's little rocks I was talking about let me go back to bridge and right here where I see a small rock let me click on this and what we could do with these assets are we could actually start painting these around our scene that just really blend it in and make it feel realistic so I'm gonna click on export here and this is going to export a whole bunch of little tiny rocks and we actually have like a paintbrush and unreal that you kind of just go in and you just start painting on the surface it's really cool so you make this smaller and actually there we go we're all set to go and so now to activate this what we need to do is come up to modes come down to foliage and then we can actually click and drag this rock into our full of the chair then we want to make sure it's selected and when I come over to my scene you can see we have like a big sphere and this is where it's actually going to start painting all of our rocks but before we do that let me come over to these settings here and I'm gonna make the scaling maybe a little bit bigger so say like three massage three maxsize for and this is just going to give us a little bit of variation on a rock some of them would be three some of them be size four then let me come down a little bit for my offset we're gonna probably do negative three and max negative one and that's so that we can have it go below the surface a little bit we don't want it floating on top so what negative does is it's going to go in our z-axis which is pointing straight up and down and it's gonna put it in the negative direction and then where we want to go next is random pitch angle I'm just gonna move this up a little bit so this is just gonna rotate the rocks at random angle so what we're painting them on they're not all going in the same direction it doesn't look like a pattern then over here where it says size this is the size of our paintbrush so I like to start smaller so maybe like 125 and actually before we start painting let's come over I'm going to make this a little bit bigger so let's say men for max six all right so my size is that 125 I'm just gonna start clicking and painting and you can see that we have rocks appearing in our scene here these are a little bit larger we can make them smaller if we want but this kind of shows you how to paint brush works so now we're just kind of painting then some rocks on our surface here and kind of just blend in our scene and if we want to have smaller pebbles in here we just come over here where the skill is so let's say maybe one max size - and this way we can start paying in smaller rocks as well and you can see it a kind of spread out here so let me hit control Z we can make our density a little bit smaller by coming over here where I say this density this made me do 300 see what happens there so yeah maybe 500 there we go so it's given us a lot more density which means there's a lot more clumps going on we can also change the density up here as well so if I click on one up there and there we go something like that is looking pretty cool so from here it's pretty much just lining up your camera how you want it and then you're good to go this actually come over two modes coming down to select let's click on play we could kind of walk around our scene here as well so this is the clump that we made for a scene so say that we want to shoot our character in here you kind of just line up the camera and this shots looking pretty cool so I know it's a little bit exaggerated but I kind of just want to show you guys how you can take stuff from NASA kind of feel like different set pieces in there and build your own landscapes so if you want to start making like little scenes out of this and animating it you're all good to go so hopefully this helps you guys out I know there's a lot to digest there so hopefully you guys come to my talk on July 9th if you can't make my talk and ask me live you can always leave me a comment down below or if you want to ask me anything ahead of time you can always hit me up on social media as well or I do have a discord channel where I'm usually out all day so if you do have a question make sure to hit me up on there's different avenues and until next time I'll see you guys on July 9th I can't wait to meet you take care you

Channel: WINBUSH

Views: 8,138

Rating: 4.9287834 out of 5

Keywords: motion graphics, winbush, tutorial, immersive, school of motion, mograph, unreal engine, ue4, ue5, ucla, smash, ucla smash, mars, nasa, 360, vr, hdri, hdri backdrop, getting started, student, megascans, bridge, quixel, design, 3d, virtual production, set design, game dev

Id: 1lF-RbxfCoA

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020