Rendering Characters in Unreal Engine 5 | Tutorial

in this video i'm going to show you how you can take your own custom 3d character models and bring them into unreal engine 5 to produce high quality images and videos for your portfolios and presentations let's get it [Music] i'm jay and this is how you can render your own custom characters this video comes pretty highly requested a lot of you wanted to know more about how you can do your own custom materials and renders and things like that so i made this video to serve as kind of an overview of the whole process to get started and by the end we'll have some you know pretty tricky things and some high quality images we're gonna start with an empty project and then build it all the way up and bring in our assets so that we finish with high quality images now this video was originally done as a whole real-time demo for my patreon members so the entire video lives there unedited along with lots of other videos and exclusive content if you're into this sort of thing also if you really want to learn more on make your own characters stick around to the end of the video i have sort of an announcement of something that i'm working on that you might be interested in okay now we're gonna start with unreal engine five and we'll create our project [Music] what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna start with the unreal engine and you can see i've got the metahumans demo now i'm going to start with the demo and i'm going to make a clone of this because i need the eyes it wasn't easy uh so i thought the simplest way is let's just clone this meta humans project and i did that for my flex project and then you can look at all their materials and use a lot of their textures anyways i think it's like five gigs all right render demo boom there we go cool so we have a clone of it now so like i say we need the eye material in epic's official documentation they even say even for shipped projects to just use their eye because not only is it an awesome material it does some fancy things and some things that are hard-coded even in my professional projects the goal is to use their eye it falls under the same licensing as the whole engine anyways so it's going to compile right now you can see in the lower right here here we go it's compiled so what we're going to do now is we're going to make a new level we don't need all this stuff you can actually delete this stuff if you want to make your project lighter there's lots of like blueprints and sample metahumans that you don't need but you do want to keep the materials and stuff so but we're gonna make a new level file a new level and we're just gonna do an empty level not an open world one just an empty level so there we go we've got our blank scene and we're ready to go now let's talk about the source assets that we're gonna be bringing in here right so if we jump over to maya okay so here we are in maya whatever dcc program you kind of want to use is fine but just to go over you know how this is set up there's just a single group with all my meshes in here and you know extra group here this is just for my own organization it's just easier for me to select like a single group so this is what we're going to export as an fbx which keeps the names and the material assignments that's important if i come over here to the hypershade you can see i have materials here and these materials are named this also becomes important because once this model isn't unreal these names help me to find what things are so just a quick basic maya thing is uh you can't have two things with the same name so you'll see meshes you know i put the word uh mesh or geo at the end not very consistent but you get what i mean so you know i know that these are geo and meshes and then for materials nowadays i just like to say what it is you know like head so it keeps it simple okay so here's our mesh so let's export this bring it over into unreal so let's go to file export selection we're gonna make it an fbx okay and now i'm gonna go to our new project render demo and now we're gonna make a new folder so in content why don't we make a new folder called characters you could also just do character or girl if you're not gonna have more than one character maybe you don't need to do this but whatever i'll just show you here we go then we'll we'll make a folder in the characters folder so this is our girl folder and then in here we'll make some more folders all right so we're gonna do meshes all right open and then we're gonna call this girl underscore sm so i use sm because it's a static mesh that's actually what we're going to be look deving and rendering in this case it's going to stop there but in other scenarios if you were to animate it then you would generate an scam which is a different kind of asset but everything like visually would translate over so this is a non-animating object so you don't need to do this but this is why i'm doing it okay just for extra organization and out of habit i guess so you can see not much going on in the fbx stuff i've got the smooth mesh i've disabled animation and that's it so it's really simple yeah i even unchecked camera if it doesn't have this data it probably isn't going to export anyway but just so you know this is the settings defaults probably work and export it here it goes now if we hop back over to unreal you can see i'm greeted with the fbx import settings now so this happens automatically this is going to be useful later when you're iterating i just want to speak really quick on the fbx import settings there's two things that i would change at the beginning of every new project you only have to do this once and then from here on out it's going to remember the one you need to do is combine meshes is true it might be that i'm starting from this project but if you start a project from scratch combine meshes will be off so that's in the mesh tab it's in the advanced so make sure combine meshes is on and then also this the mesh category in material it says create new materials no don't do that i'm going to make my own materials it even says import textures no don't do that stuff i'm going to make my own materials which we're going to talk about in a second okay so i'm going to import this it's giving me some errors unfortunately you know my mesh is probably jank or whatever but okay now if we go over to in the lower left here in our content browser you can see in our characters hey we got our girl folder and we got our mesh there it is now i also like to change the size of these these are a little a little big all right so now we can just drag the mesh boop right in here and i'm going to put it at 0 0 0 and that's where we can just put everything again in our case we're using this as a render scene we can render multiple characters once you have this project set up you can just bring meshes in here so it makes sense to just put it at the world origin that way when you drop things in you know where you can put stuff so now you can see it looks a little strange right here it's because we don't have lights so why don't we start with that we'll make a light so in unreal engine 5 you could come up here and then we're going to use erect light always use wrecked lights good rule of thumb when it comes to doing character portraits and stuff these kind of simulate soft boxes and that's what we would use to light a portrait if we were doing some kind of photograph or film or something so you can even add a texture to it you can see a source texture if you want to like get an hdr softbox image just to get some subtle difference in the reflections you know here in the upper right this little toggle is going to let me change the pivot orientation to the actual object it's going to help me position stuff also you can see there's snap going on i don't really like that here's snap for rotation there we go and i'll probably just also turn off snap for movement so now everything i can do whatever i want all right so we got a light already right great let's move on to talking about materials and then we'll massage the lighting okay so now we already have a super basic setup i'm gonna save this if you hit ctrl shift s it'll save all and in this case i don't have a level yet so we'll go to level levels and then we'll go uh we'll just go uh rendering demo level makes sense lighting needs to be built no so you can see here in the light setting see it says stationary that's no bueno we want everything to be movable because we want everything to be dynamic um that's how you get the highest quality and that's what you do for characters because they move around obviously unreal engine can do really nice static lighting that's baked but we're not doing any of that so a way to ensure that is just to make it movable you can see our error went away now okay so there we go so we have an empty level we have a model suite why don't we make a basic material and then we'll continue on with the scene okay so a little material preface here materials in unreal is one of the major differences i think from other software and i think something that people get tripped up on right especially when you compare to something like marmoset when you go down the pros and cons list of rendering 3d models at the top marmoset is really easy to use and unreal's got all these extra steps now with unreal i think because it's just so infinitely customizable it can be daunting to get into and things are kind of spread apart and you have to like kind of build things you know out of parts like you have to build things out of legos so that's what we're going to do before we get started i think i want to impart the general principle when it comes to creating materials in unreal is to first create a master material and then create instances from it so we don't get to just drag and drop a blin or a fong material which you might be familiar with already right so what we're going to first do is make the blend material and then from then on out we can create instances and assign them okay now the reason why we want to do that is because later on we're going to make a master material for skin now we can do that and then make instances and apply them to characters and if at any point we find a problem or we think aha i want to add a new feature we'll add it to that master material and it'll populate all the instances so it's the best practice keeps things simple everything's tied up that way you're only juggling you know the few master materials that you're making so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna make our first master material [Music] okay so we got uh characters and we have girl why don't we make a materials folder in our characters folder boop now is this good practice probably not but you know it's going to keep it simple in our materials folder we'll make a masters folder here we go point now let's make a new material boo here we go and we'll call it basic m m for master now you'll see epic names their uh things first they put the m in the front it's a matter of preference do whatever you want i put it at the end m for master material okay so here's our basic master material now we're just gonna create a basic pbr material that lets us tweak the parameters to make metals and non-metals and this can work just for like you know basic props and stuff and then we'll get more advanced from here we're gonna make something for the base color and the metallic property roughness and that's about it and then uh we can see what we can do with just that okay so we're just going to get started here and we'll get more advanced as we move on so we're going to make a constant so at any time you can always right click and then search you know so constant boom now constants are really popular you know when you're building these graphs so you can actually just hold the hotkey of one and click and you'll get a constant too all right so here we go we have a constant now what a constant is if it's not clear is just a number that is solid and the material instance it's not exposed okay so this is like behind the scenes like this is just what it is so we're gonna make this a value of 0.45 there you go and we're going to put that into the specular power most materials are about 0.45 on the specular power they vary you know from like 0.35 to 0.5 on this like linear scale but most materials in the world are like this except for metals lucky for us in unreal when you make something metallic it automatically makes a specular one so we can just plug this in there you go now let's start making some nodes that can be exposed in the material instance this will make more sense in a second if you're lost already hold on so we're going to make a couple more nodes here that are going to be exposed that let us or other artists tweak the material so we're going to do that by making them parameters so instead of holding down one we can hold down s and click and now we have a scalar parameter so i can name this metalness i'm gonna plug it into metallic and we'll just have it default at zero and now let's make another scalar parameter uh we can also just duplicate it there you go and then anytime you wanna rename something unreal you press f2 roughness and then we'll go roughness boom and then for defaults maybe we'll do 0.5 for this one there we go so we already got something cooking here now let's make a color we need color right so this is going to be our most customizable node and we're gonna use what's called a three vector that sounds super sciencey if i hold three on the keyboard and hit bam there we go three vector but really what the vectors are is r g and b so what we're doing here is doing a color picker that's what this is see now you'll see now i want this to be exposed to the material instance so that we can change it so anybody can change it right that's what's going on with these two as opposed to this one as you can kind of tell by it not having a name and a default so if i right click this i can convert it to a parameter and i can call this base color and then this top node is going to be all of them rgb and alpha and i can just go into base color all right so maybe we don't want the default to be like white maybe we want to be like middle gray which so now we'll save this boink all right now we're going to start making some materials okay so here's our basic master material great so now what we can do is start making instances so let's say create right click create material instance and so we'll just say shirt and now mi so now we got shirt mi material instance right now this is in the masters folder just because you know that's how it happened uh so i can click and drag it into materials and hit move boop it moved out so here we go we have our shirt material instance so we can come in here and we can start tweaking things now or we could do it on the character which might be more fun right so let's say uh we do that let's go to our character now and we'll double click the static mesh and here we go we have our asset properties for the static mesh that we exported here she is we don't really need this viewer but you can see here those material names we made before coming in handy now so shirt is this one and then we'll just drag it in there boink shirt save now this static mesh has this material instance applied if we close unreal and bring it open it'll still be there if we drop this static mesh into another level it'll be there so that's how you have to do it you have to drag it into the actual asset viewer and then save that asset so let's do a couple quick little tweaks here to the material okay double click it so here's our base color so cloth is rough right if this was you know really low that means it wouldn't be rough at all so it's like a mirror surface right now we just have our area light to reflect our wrecked light and if we go all the way up it's completely rough now something we can actually do here let's get a little fancy here if we double click our our master material here we can put a min and a max now let's see can i overclock can i overcrank it now nope now i've capped it to zero and one fancy so yeah now full rough would be full rough not everything is full rough and actually if you do like .8 that'd be good for cloth even though it feels like it should be really really rough but everything reflects some light so all right now she's got a pink shirt sweet so now let's make some more instances shall we let's look at the things we need here we need some seams that's for her shirt i know so i can just duplicate this call it seams and we'll drag this on there why don't we cool and for the seams why don't we make it just kind of a different color or something you know there we go that's our couple simple materials with this why don't we now do some metals here we need some metals don't we we need gold we need silver so we can actually bring up unreal pbr gold see we get that documentation there we go so i'll try to link this down below but check this out so if we come in here it's going over some of the stuff we're talking about right now and here you go you have base color intensities for different things and you have the actual base color rgb for things so here's gold so why don't we just copy pasta this shall we so what we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate this we're gonna call it gold mi and we're gonna put it on the gold we'll come in here and we'll see how this goes okay so double click this guy and let's open our rgb and see what we got r one g point seven six six and point three three six there's gold doink and then metalness will be one there we go and then roughness let's do like point one maybe point one five a little little rough you know what i mean and let's see what we got here with that there we go now as we add more light to scene this will behave more like gold so we can do the same for silver probably platinum 0.62 0.62 0.58 something like that okay we'll put that somewhere on the silver there we go silver now you don't have to be this accurate by the way you can just eyeball this stuff i just thought i would show you that that's what is cool about pbr is it's a standard now it's not like value to value a standard between all the different renderers but the renderers have gone through and documented what it is so in this case you could go to unreal stuff and see like the big basic stuff and then i'll inform you how to make your own things too okay so let's uh let's move on here and finish this we'll do plastic mi that's gonna go into the choker and plastic is gonna be zero and roughness will be i don't know let's see what that's like and then nothing ever goes pure black another tip for you you want to come up a little bit so maybe point one or something see what that looks like actually looks maybe that's a little too bright maybe 0.05 uh 0.02 still seems pretty dark let's see is it the roughness that's doing me we'll see it might be the auto exposure which we'll talk about in a second so we've got our basic materials down now another little thing i'm going to do as i move forward editing this is i'm going to change my camera fov just because it helps me with faces and stuff you know instead of 90 maybe we could just do 50 or something so that'll help me okay we've made some basic material instances that we instanced from our basic master material and we can get way more advanced from there so let's start stepping it up let's talk about the skin let's talk about the face [Music] before we get into doing the master material for the skin we gotta import some textures right so back in unreal go girl we've got a meshes folder now we're gonna do we'll open it up here we are and then here is our textures so here's the girl textures we'll be using just gonna drag them in here and then back in unreal there we go we have them imported you can see just by the naming it's figured out what they are great and then if i save everything it's going to save these you assets that's what i'm looking at right here in my content tray so it's now created you assets from the png's or targos or whatever it is so these are the textures that we're going to use for the skin now these were made in substance painter and exported from there so why don't we take a look at that right now so over here in substance painter this is the source scene for those textures uh you can see you know organized as such i did make another video on the texturing process but really what we could take a look at here is if we go to the export settings under girl you'll see i have a preset so if we go to this export preset so you can see here the base color channel and this is the name naming convention and then here's that you know packed map that has the ao and the roughness of metalness and then i put a user zero in here that i can use and then the normal map so this is it and then in the alpha channel the base color i also put scattering uh which we could use you know with the skin stuff doesn't do much though you know to be fair but there you go so this is exporting things from there and then for the normal map i am exporting 8k like i said okay so that's how i made these textures and that's how i exported these files which we imported right here now let's make a skin master material and hook these up all right so we'll come into our materials folder we'll do a new material call it skin m save that all right now the difference between the basic one that we made in the skin right off the bat obviously with skin we want to be translucent do some extra fancy things to do that we need to change the shading model so we're going to change it from default lit to subsurface profile which lets us use this subsurface profile now we could use one here or we could create a new one so let's do that and we'll just put it in our girl folder so we'll do girl subsurface profile okay created it so if we open it here we go so just to quickly glance through here you know the defaults are pretty good already i will say what's really cool and we can edit this later on the model is the dual specular lobe so this is pretty cool give us those two specs which we've talked about in other rendering videos which really helped to make skin look nice and more naturalistic so why don't we just keep these defaults actually so i'll save this and then we can tweak those later okay so here we have our graph so let's start making a basic skin material okay so we're going to make a couple more constants so let's do that one and we're going to do this the spec again now the spec value for skin if you want to get go by the documentation 0.35 is what they recommend we can go four uh we could always expose this to by the way if we want to and then you could tweak it however you want but we'll keep it like this for now okay now instead of using constants and stuff for everything we're going to use texture parameters search for texture parameter or texture sample sorry there we go then we'll get this texture sample we can convert it to a parameter so for this one we'll call it base color map okay there we go now we can import our texture map to here so we're just going to duplicate this twice this one will be our normal map this one will be our combined map cool okay so pretty straight forward for the base color and for the normal and we're getting an error because i'm not pointing anything combined map we're going to go red to ambient occlusion if you remember when we did a little quick overview green will go to roughness and blue will go to metalness again we can see that like if we look over here right and we come in here red ao green roughness blue metalness and you can also you know double check by looking at the texture so if i come in here and i say girl i think i named it pbr here you go so here's those channels red green blue okay i'm gonna choose my girl texture maps here but you know strictly speaking like best practice if you were going to make these materials and share them you would choose default materials that are in all the unreal engine projects but we're making a very specific scene so i'm not worried about it it helps with this demo so you can see what we're looking at here that's what you would probably want to do if you're making a master to like move between projects because these are now pathed right to our specific ones but again for our character it's gonna be okay all right so there's our master material now before we go we do have something that is important for skin materials and that's the opacity this controls the light scattering so unlike the other materials uh and unlike other shading models you know opacity isn't like transparency it's used for like the translucency so we want to make it one for now all right so now we'll save this cool so now let's make an instance okay here's our skin am i we'll move it out of here there we go there's our head so coming in a little waxy so we can expose some of these things why don't we and then we can see what they do so i converted those to parameters remember so that's going to expose them now you can see here's our maps that we have and we made those parameters so we can check this box and change it if we wanted that's how you do it normally right this would be a default texture but we just hard coded our custom one in there so now opacity if we were to change this you can see right so zero would be it's not subsurface right so now we could try doing that map remember the base color map had an alpha channel so i actually have it you know piping in some textures including like with the makeup not being subsurface and then the nose and ears being a little bit more so you know it's an example of putting some detail in the actual translucency so over here in the master material let's put this in there and then we might leave this in here because we might do something fancy in a second so we'll save this see what this looks like okay so we got it back a little bit right now probably want to fine-tune it even more so to do that we can multiply this so let's break out a new fancy note here so what we're going to do is let's name this so you see what i'm saying ss strength makes sense subsurface strength and let's try to be clear here so we have this black and white values driving the strength of the ss now white would be the strongest so that would be one and then zero would be black so if we multiply that then you know zero times one would be zero right so we get to control the strength with a multiply node so multiply is another really popular node so i can hold down m there you go and you can see i got an a and a b so we'll go a the alpha channel b the strength and then boom right into opacity so now we have control over this you know one or white times it would be the same right one times anything is the same so let's check this we got strength so now again zero is nothing and now we can just dial in you know what we want oh maybe that's too much you know you know we can actually just use this slider and to be super clear too remember the girl subsurface profile this also has stuff oh here we go i think this just um changes like how far the light goes so you know we just want this edge bleed right here you can change stuff so when we when we play around with this roughness too so if we did 0.5 that should mix both right so we do 0.6 and then 1.5 and mix them a bit all right let's save this [Music] before we get too complicated with the materials let's bring in the eye that's the main reason why we use this project right to begin with and then we'll be serial complete here right so we can come up here to the content we can just type in i refractive here we go m i refractive yeah these are all instances cool so we can create an instance here and then we're going to drag that instance into our girl directory before we lose it there we go and we'll name it girl i if i could see what i was typing this would be so much better this is torture for you i'm sure now let's apply that come over here boom there we go i should mention now right back here in the source meshes these eyes meshes i took from a metahuman project so you could either export a meta-human mesh or use the qixel bridge to bring in a file but it's important that the uvs are exactly how they made them okay so you could redo them but it's like why you know might as well it is important to note when you mirror them that you have to flip the uvs for whatever reason so these two uvs are not identically stacked one of them is flipped horizontally just a little note there if one of your eyes looks super weird that's why okay cool so let's really quick do like an overview though of this eye and why it's so cool it's all of these features also because obviously like it's faking the depth the refraction the fact that we can come to the side and we can see the pupil in offline rendering you get that by doing glass and it really like traces the path and everything but they're doing some fancy real-time stuff using parallax occlusion mapping and stuff and some other things i'm sure i'm just gonna note a few that are important parameters you know to change there's a bunch you can play with all these but iris uv radius super useful i get to choose the size of my eye there's also iris saturation that's how i did the flex eye right there but yeah you can change it right and then limbus which is cool down here limbus dark scale limbus dark power so that gets darker right around the edges and you can change the scale too if you want to less or more but that's a pretty cool little feature there too okay and then also the sclera you have refraction control you have sclera control right now sclera brightness you know seems like a lot there you go i'll just make it like point eight or something before we go too farther on i want to mention another thing that's important which is the auto exposure just so you're aware that it's there i'm gonna disable it now things might get a little bit more complicated but it's gonna give me more control something that people probably don't expect is that unreal has like automatic exposure going on so if i look off screen and i look back there i see the exposure changing that just makes things more difficult for me you know i'm juggling values and stuff so we're gonna come to our project settings i'm gonna type in exposure you see auto exposure's on i'm gonna turn that off okay so there you go so this is the actual true exposure so it was stopping down a lot and that's why the eyes were white so i'm gonna come here to my wrecked light i'm gonna start dropping it so there's one and two is pretty good so we'll leave it on two for now that's gonna help us set the values of things like specular intensity and base color intensity stuff because we have like this one less variable to worry about as we get into cameras and stuff you're going to see auto exposure gets a little bit complicated this is going to make things easier for us to control every aspect and kind of understand what's going on now before we move on from the eyes completely i should also say you know one of the things that i get asked questions about is how you change the eye color or whatever you can just you know easily just choose a new texture so if we were to hop over to custom textures i made i can look at some additional textures here here's uh an iris i just opened their iris and i did some tweaks in photoshop also you can see it's a straight up psd file so i can just like copy this right and then open up my project directory go to my content folder characters girl textures here we go my you assets that it made i can actually put the source asset right in here there you go it's going to auto generate the you asset there it is uh iris base color it popped right into here there's my custom color so i can just drag it into there and now i've got a custom color don't need my saturation anymore there you go so now i've got a custom texture it's also source file is a psd so i could just open that psd and change it and then it would auto update as soon as i save so really simple easy workflow for doing custom textures and iterating like that all right so that is the eye now let's finish up our model before we start polishing up the scene by importing the hair [Music] so quickly in case you don't know there's gonna be groom so if i pop over to the hair file you can see head hair okay so back here in the source file with my model you can see i've got my groom made up of x-gen descriptions and then i convert these to interactive grooms and then export them as alembic files so i have a video covering that too we talked about this in the girl demo so just glossing over that just showing you like where it's coming from all of the source assets for the hair and the final mesh are assembled here in maya and then back over here in unreal if we come over here to my directory we can go to the hair here are the two abc file or alembic files that are exported from maya you can see here they're not too big that's a little bit big but not too big so yeah so we can just drag these in uh let's put it in the meshes folder why not so i'll first show you we have to do some corrections so let's get into that that's that's the first thing to know about the hair stuff you can drag it in and it's cool and it works you should see this import dialog okay and then we'll just import it so there it is now i will say we're using the metahumans scene remember but if you were using your own scene you do have to have the alembic plugins you're gonna go to edit plugins and then in here we could search for groom and you can see olympic groom importer and the groom rendering there you go yeah these have to be on but because we're using the metahuman sample you know they're using that already so you know it works so it's another benefit of using that so here it is we can save to save our you assets and now this is going to be the brows and the lashes so if i drag it in right and then if i go to the origin 0 0 0 you'd think it would pop on her face but it doesn't look it's all the way down here so this has to do with maya's orientation versus unreal's orientation i think could just be olympic stuff i'm not sure the mirroring is is a head scratcher but i'll just show you how to correct for this right so location obviously going to stay the same this we're going to do negative 90 180 in z and then for scale and x we're gonna do negative one it actually comes in flip so here you can see it on her face now before we move on a little bit longer why don't i first show you some of the groom settings you might want to do here so we'll open this up and we're gonna we want to use ray tracing let's make sure we're using that now actually before we jump into that so we'll go edit project settings shadows or something here we go ray traced shadows this is off right now that means we could turn it on per light but i just want to use it for all my lights right so i'm just going to turn this on there we go and now the shadows i don't know if you saw that we might be able to like show you um okay so it says use project settings so let's say i do disable there we go so this is the shadows and lighting we had before this is not ray trace this is more of the deferred rendering stuff and then if we go enabled or just use project setting which should be enabled then there you go so what's happened is it's gotten more accurate right it's almost like the resolution's gotten higher so you can see the the shadows that the lashes are casting isn't so chunky all right we have to complete that puzzle though if we go to the groom settings here opening up the groom asset viewer here you can see right here on the main page of the strands use hair ray tracing geometry so now it's actually casting you know shadows on the actual curves so it just got a lot more accurate okay so that's one way to fix the hair you could also just do it on import so go back here that was the face now we'll do the head this one's going to be heavy we'll import it so we can actually just do that fix right here we go negative 90. 180 and negative one and then now when we put that in the scene and put that as zero zero zero should snap right on her head and then we'll go in here and we'll go use ray tracing boom okay so for the hair material covered that in another video too so i'm just gonna drag that straight in here too we have our material here it is hair custom master i'm not following the name convention but you know whatever so we'll go into master and then we'll go and then i'll just paste it in there so there you go so now we have our master material for the hair create an instance girl hair mi plop it up one more boom there's the girl here am i so we'll look at this one first put that right there and then this one right there cool there we go already better right i'm gonna gloss over this because we did do a video on this already but you can see i can also change the color so let's say we want this to be kind of a cool pinky red or something like that we could increase the noise a little bit let's first show you the length mix so so if we mix that and then we use our little cheap contrast node we go the noisiness kind of like breaks it apart is the idea right so that it's a little bit random feeling and then we can change the length we want to show roots or just like make it halfway or something like that cool so here's our pinky red hair for now now let's get a little fancy okay we have the basic setup of our scene let's first get a little fancy with the lighting i'm gonna do a skylight okay come up here go to lights skylight now a skylight is like an hdri dome if you're familiar it's an environment light now normally it defaults to this captured scene because when you're placing it in levels for games and stuff right you want it to like be generated from the scene around it but we obviously don't have a scene so we're just going to choose one so i can just go to cube map and then just choose one from this directory you know based on your project you're gonna have different ones i think the epic quad is always available because that's you know they shot that so i think that's just a default but you can already see what's happening right we have some lift if i turn this off turn this on because we literally had one light in like a vacuum of space and so we're just using the skylight to like give it lift so it's as if we're outside you know now we could angle this too like essentially rotate it to get like if we want a certain reflection or something or backlight or something like that too so i'll just put it here so it's a fill and then i'm going to drop the intensity because i don't want it to be like that crazy but you can see it's just lifting it from darkness i'm going to move on for a bit with this off we'll get to putting the hair back on but as i said before it just really slows down the scene super heavy we just want the hair there to look really nice and detailed obviously but we don't need it all the time so we can just turn the visibility off okay so we're getting a little bit fancier also you can see the reflections maybe i can show you there too big difference right metals need reflections so that's better let's make another light so something we can do is just hold alt and drag that'll copy something and then why don't we just rotate this there we go so we got it right behind her okay and now we're gonna make this really big actually because what i want is like a backlight so we have this we're gonna do a little two-point lighting setup it's actually three-point if you want to be technical about it because the fill light the third would be the environment i like to do this you know in some looks where it's just like a huge light behind the person so for source width why don't we just go super big super big that also means we need to increase the intensity uh to compensate because as you make lights bigger like physically it gets you know less strong let's try 60 or something so that's a lot maybe um 50. but you see the light wraps around her right it's pretty cool let's leave it at 10 for now but you know we're already getting something that's pretty interesting more interesting than before and now so we're getting a little fancier with the scene now let's get fancy with the skin material [Music] we're gonna start breezing through some notes right here first thing probably noticed for a while and it's driving you crazy is uh she's really glossy yeah let's do something about that so we'll go to the skin remember spec we dropped that to 0.35 can't really see a huge difference but 0.35 is the recommended spec value probably because uh skin absorbs light a little bit more so it's reflecting less okay let's go into the master and let's do some trickiness okay get this over here a little bit okay first let's make a control for our roughness we'll do what we did already with the ss strength we're gonna do a roughness strength so let's give ourselves some space here put our little combined map down here so here's our guy green coming out into roughness so let's do a multiply scalar and we'll do roughness strength just like we did ss strength and we'll go right there we'll go right there and we'll go right there now this time we're not going to set defaults so that we can just over crank and just fine tune whatever we want right so here we go is our roughness strength it went to zero but yeah so now i can go up and look at that now i can already dial it in just by dragging so that's pretty nice right there you go looks more like skin uh now i feel like the light is still super bright getting a little bit more balanced right okay we're already cooking with gas here let's talk about micro normals i love micro details and i love to use micro detail normals let's do a little soap box about this you know i'll be i'll be asked questions about how you how you get really fine detail how big you need to make textures uh what kind of detail to put in substance painter and i know i'm sounding a little bit like a hypocrite right now because i'm using an ak normal map but you know shoot me i don't know but the idea is that with micro normal details is that you'll have a macro normal which is these the baked one to one normal maps and those could be like 2k or 4k and then you're gonna have a micro normal which is a normal like this so this normal map is micro right so little pores little like this skin cellular detail you know and then we can tile that so that means the actual textile density the density of pixels of resolution there is going to be so high that it's equivalent to a texture that's way way big rather than again putting that detail in the macro map which would mean that it's in the texture okay so we're mixing two one is going to be tiled once and one's going to be tiled like 30 times okay and then we're gonna blend those two and that's how you get this this effect of just super super high fidelity crispiness okay so i love doing that on everything let's show you demonstration of that right now we'll do it on the skin and we'll show you the difference okay so this is a micro normal texture from my skin kit you know that you can get so i'm just going to use that because i have it with me so here you go this is going to be a cellular skin kind of texture let's go ahead and drag that right on cha there it is and now let's go to our master material and we're going to start blending some stuff we're just going to make the normal map group let's make a group let's make a really nice material stuff i'll show you some things that you may or may not be familiar with okay so here we have our macro normal map right first something we might want to do is have a normal strength that's always fun is like i want my normal map stronger or i want it weaker and again rather than going back to substance or somewhere and trying to dial it save it look down you can just put it on a slider it makes it super easy right so let's do that i can drag this out and then stop and then i can look for flattened normal there it is and then i can drag this out and stop and i can do a scalar parameter point this is gonna be called normal strength might be a little bit odd right i'm using flat normal i'm just doing that because it just seems like the fewest amount of nodes to to give this effect i could be wrong here and maybe you know some math wizard's gonna be like hey that's not right but because this is like the opposite we're gonna do an inverse uh to do that it's called one minus so if i put this in between here okay then that's going to be flipping it what we see in the material instance is normal strength so we feel like going to one is full strength but it's really flipping and going to flat normal behind the scenes so we're being tricky but it's okay so we're gonna default this to one okay now we want to drag our micro detail in here and again we can make it a parameter if we want and we're gonna call it detail normal right and now we're gonna blend this same thing so here look i'm just gonna copy paste this boom right now we're gonna do this one so look at that now we got strength on both and we'll call this detail that's so you can see detail normal strength we need to blend these two normal maps together there's a couple ways to do that i think the best node is this one it's called blend angle corrected normals okay i think this gives you the effect that you want which is essentially like taking the blue channel out so it doesn't stack and it also says that if it corrects the direction of the normal map what you could do is right now it's just going to be straight up and down but like if you wanted to put like rotation controls in there and everything it apparently would still work so i think this is the best you can see here the base normal is connected into the base normal and then we're going to do the detail as the additional normal and now this is what goes into normal so if we hit save we might see something scary oh gosh that's not good that's because we don't have the uv tiling controls we talked about that's the whole thing about detail normals right so let's make some uv tiling stuff again really useful things to know okay so we're gonna do texture coordinate and then we're gonna do uh multiply oh that's an n okay and then we're gonna do scalar parameter i'm gonna call this detail tiling that goes in the uvs so we're multiplying the texture coordinate with the scalar parameter number which is going to give us the tiling amount for the tiling defaults we should probably do like 10 because it's a detailed normal ew but then here let's go in here now so we have all this exposed now we've got all this nice stuff right oh we were going to be fancy right let's be fancy we talked about groups right let's do that so group watch this we're going to go normal okay so now we have normal right and i can go group normal group normal group normal probably could have done all this at once normal okay save and look at this we have a normal group with everything in here we're so fancy dude our pants are so fancy okay so now i'm gonna come in here and then still looks gross right i get you i get you a buds we can tile it so much see what i mean and then you can zoom in i'm getting clipped here but this like cellular pattern see what i mean let's do strengths you see like with and without so that's without so you can see it just like brings in a level of micro cellular pattern right that feels organic i still think we can go like way more like there we go so there's after there's before see it on the lips too see how it breaks up the highlight that's what you want details details we've got a fancy uh shader now cool we could also overcrank the skin now if we wanted to do we want to i don't know it looked kind of cool actually so i don't know it's it's hard to not overcrank normal maps i don't know what it is i'm just going to leave it but maybe just a little bit i just can't help myself like why not just overcrank it a little bit you know just a little more more better right here we go here's our lady cool might think we're already good um but we can make it a little bit fancier let's talk about how we render this okay and then i can kind of show you like the workflow the turn around and the before and after okay so let's pick a camera come up here cinematic camera actor here we go we're going to call it shot cam that's fine so normally you can just pilot these i'll show you like for instance i can come in here and go to shotcam right and i can pilot it like this i just wanted to make sure it was rotated because i'm gonna do this one's gonna be a flat one then we'll get a little bit more creative we're gonna disable the focus right now so that we can get this lined up okay now so for portraits typically you want to do 85 millimeter or higher especially with women that's just like the you don't have to i'm just telling you like what people do most of the time uh right now the current focal length is 35 so if i change this to 85 there you go the reason why they do that we probably have already talked about this but it's because these uh bigger focal lengths compress the image more you know the opposite end of the spectrum would be a very small focal length and that would be like a fisheye right and what happens things get warped and things towards the middle look bigger they get enlarged so for a face it would make like the nose look more enlarged and things like that so essentially the compression it makes the features look smaller and it also separates from the background a lot more so typically that's what people use so here's our first shot now let's talk about how we would render these out [Music] let's complete the puzzle right we have the meshes in here we've got our master materials we've got our hair we've got our lighting and now we need to set up our kind of render workflow okay so we're gonna use movie render queue to do that we need a sequence so let's close the content browser for now and we're gonna create a level sequence okay boom you can put it in cinematics it's usually where they go uh or you could put it in the character uh whatever you want and we're gonna call it girl sequence obviously this is my demo character name just name it your character name all right so now we've got a sequence so now what i can do is we don't need all these frames because we're just rendering out images we're not doing like a movie right do like four or something so here we go we've got four frames now and we don't have anything in our sequence but we can drag our shot cam in there though yoink so there we go that's just easier one two three we have three frames and it starts with one so one two three there we go now what i can show you is before we render it out i can show you something that i think is pretty useful and that is when we're in the cinematic viewport we can use these guides which really help see what i mean like she's not centered so i can center her kind of work on my composition you know they got different ones so there we go so now we're good and now i could render this out before we do that why don't we do a couple angles okay so we got shotkam one right here we'll do shot cam two and we'll change this up piloting we're a pilot now and then why don't we make this like a hundred so we're like farther away and we're like looking at the side and we're like looking at her you know and then we'll do another one let's do shotkam three and then with a shotgun three and maybe like down below like an upshot or maybe like a detail shot would be nice okay what if it was 200 is that crazy now before we do these renders let's do the focus stuff show you how i do that okay so remember we disabled it focus method disabled we're gonna do manual let's use this plane so we got the debug plane this is purple thing we're gonna line this up we're gonna put the plane right through the eye that's the focal plane there you go so right in the eye okay so that's the focal plane now it's really out there now the way that the depth of field is you know made is it simulates actual aperture so 2.8 is really low so maybe something like six let's just make sure does this work yeah so 20 20 even it's not bad we'll do we'll do 10 okay so that's that one so that's shotcam three let's go to shotcam two and we'll do that manual focus straw debug plane focus distance right in the eye good and then aperture will take off the plane aperture some x6 8 i'm looking at the ear right now it's also it's going to look a little bit different once we do the render okay we'll do eight for now and then shot cam our main camera let's go there this one i think i probably i want a pretty big focal plane here pretty subtle just to get the flyaways okay manual hey that's not bad 200 on the money dude let's do it now for aperture this one would do like 20. yeah so i'm going to save this here we go so now we got three cameras remember we got three frames let's drop them right in there so let's go shotcam two we're gonna drop it right in here shotcam three we're gonna drop it right in here on the third frame it automatically will put it in the sequencer too there you go so you can save the sequencer too by the way again ctrl shift s just saves everything so now we've got our three frames frame one frame two frame three all right and then you could have as many of these as you want by the way when i do projects sometimes it's four or five and then maybe at the end i don't use all of them but it's just a way for me to do what we're about to do which is to save a series of images that let me look at it close up in high res and then i can kind of decide what work to do what uh iterations and improvements to try and make and then i'll render out another sequence and compare and i do that a lot i do that a lot that's why i'm trying to show you how we get set up and then we can just iterate iterate iterate all right so now to continue on we've got to go to the render settings so if we click this little clapper it'll open up our movie render queue let's actually before we go in here i don't know if it's always going to be set up for you but if i hit the three dots you can see the two render movie settings here and we want movie render queue which i think in unreal engine 5 is always here we want movie render queue this is it right here so now what we're gonna do is make a little preset here's our girl sequence come in here and now we're gonna choose our settings so we'll just keep it jpeg and deferred for now easy peasy something we might want to change here is dude 3840 by 2160 we want to choose our directory so say we do render demo saved movies maybe this could be called a movie render queue just so we know we're doing here okay and then girl yeah select folder cool and now i don't want it to overwrite existing output remember because i want to keep doing this over and over the defaults everywhere else i think you're gonna be the same let me find we do want to do the whole playback range so we don't have to click that so that's good now let's add some fancy stuff if you come up to setting lots of fancy stuff you can go super deep into movie render queue by the way and you should the documentation that epic does is really good william voucher has great videos on it it does get updated so make sure you're looking at the right versions but you know you can export super high-res exrs if you want to do things in post you can do the path tracer you can do these high resolution things which i've done for like print quality which actually use your gpu to like render quadrants or stitch a quilt so you can make huge 16 32k images with even modest gpus because it's like as if it's rendering multiple images and stitching it together so there's really cool stuff you can do but we're gonna do the basic one which is anti-aliasing which sounds basic but it's still super dope so uh when we talk about rendering with unreal there's lots of ways you can do it obviously unreal predominantly used for real-time rendering for games obviously which means they got to do a render 60 times every second and we're not doing that we're just going for quality so what we're talking about is things you would do for portfolios things you would do for cinematics and intros and like splash images and like you know the highest of highest qualities ours are going to be maybe one every 60 seconds rather than 60 every one second and so some of the things we're doing is making a big image in this case just 4k but also we're going to use these anti-alias settings and essentially what we're doing is we're having the render happen multiple times and then it's going to combine it so that's really nice that's a way that we can get smoother edges crisper images you know less noise and blurriness so temporal counts let's do 16 and then we're gonna override the anti-aliasing so we're gonna do 16. you could also go 32. so i'll show you that we're going to save a preset so we're going to go save as preset and we're going to do okay we're in cinematics good so we'll go girl render preset boom okay so now if we were to close our project and open it later on um we could open up our level our sequencer is still going to be there go to movie render queue and we just have to you know choose our little preset and it'll be there so we can just keep this going okay now if we hit render it'll go through and render our images and you can see in the lower right starting to warm up and then there you go subsample is going to 16. again you could go much higher but you can see it's rendering it you know 16 times to make that one image all right here's our nice macro shot okay now let's go look at what we did so we're gonna open up our project directory let's take a look full screen there we go so see a little bit more detail than we could see in the engine yeah kind of zoom in and here's our little macro one the little micro details here okay [Music] as i said i like to get this kind of setup going a couple different angles and then we take a look like we're doing now and then we can make some changes and then do like a comparison i don't know for example let's try to change the hair color i'll show you updating a texture and then we'll see if we can get these uh jaggies a little smoother too let's just let's see all right so let's jump back here let's see first things first let's do default viewport and let's change some materials which is cool that they are material instances right we can just start changing materials okay [Music] go to the hair why don't we see what um i don't know what uh color it would be maybe like an orange that'd be kind of cool like fifth element oh that's kind of cool actually and then we could even like make it a little bit more rough you know and speaking of we can get a little even uh more tricky here actually kind of like this okay i gotta stop or else you know i'll never stop so let's go to here and like take this out we'll do a okay we'll duplicate it and then we'll go lashes even though i'm gonna use it for the brows too then we'll click that okay so here's our lashes now right and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to make it rougher so i'm going to come in here and go 0.5 there we go and then i'll also disable that and then i'll make it even darker let's go ahead and get a little fancier okay we all like getting fancy we're gonna go to the skin master material and now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make the spec fancy okay and we're gonna be able to compare that too normally with materials or pbr spec can just be a constant value somewhere around point four five point four something like that most objects on earth and typically you don't really touch that we can make an exception sometimes to put detail in the spec i think a very uh easy common one to understand is cavity map and what you would do is you make a black and white map where those areas are black and you plug it into spec thereby making it so that doesn't reflect any light whatsoever okay now i say those are some kind of edge cases you don't always make maps for spec but we're gonna use the spec map now for the skin the reason we're gonna do that is if you take a look at the detail now you know it looks okay and you can see it in the highlight but if you're doing a path trace or something more accurate a lot more complicated things be going on these little tiny form changes would actually be casting shadows and they would be occluding you know light wouldn't be spreading as evenly because we're doing a real-time render we can't get that complicated so a texture map helps in adding complexity so in this case with spec what we could do is have a cavity map that has all these little details in it and then have it affect the spec so that it feels like the lighting is a lot more intricate and high quality so we can do that with our texture map let's take a look at the texture map now let's go to girl textures here's our spec map so we'll drag it in here and you can see how it's got a lot of details in it right it's 4k in this case it's not ak but still okay still it's got a lot of detail in it you can see i blacked out the nostrils and then all these little little details so this should help it has a lot of variety and detail on the spec now what we're gonna do though is we're not gonna just gonna straight up plug it in we're gonna get fancy why not uh and i'll show you another node that i think is is useful first let's go to multiply and then we're gonna name this spec power and then we'll default this to one i don't know if this gray value is actually 0.4 that's why i'm making controls here because we're going to eyeball it okay so yeah this is definitely not enough so if we go to spec power oh spec powers f so you can see we have to go quite high to get the spec back but there's detail on our spec that's cool you can kind of see it here in the lip but we can get even more control and to do that we'll use a node called cheap contrast which is like a contrast thing that we're all familiar with so to do that let's go right here and we'll put this in between the multiplies we want to be able to play with the contrast of this all the spec detail so plug that into n and we'll go right there and then from here we'll do a scalar parameter and we'll call this spec contrast so we can go negative and then it's like nothing and if we go too much it's too much right but now we can dial it in so now you can see it feels like the pores aren't getting lit up as much now for the value we can still like come back here and i'll show you another thing that's awesome these debug viewers so for buffer visualization like if i were to do overview like you can see all the buffers right here specular here's base color here's roughness this helps you and you can look at the individual so if we go to specular there we go and here you can see the shirt which is point four right so we know we can go up a little bit maybe a little bit darker right but we can also see the contrast in the spec how much we want to get there we go so we got some more detail in the spec now there we go we got fancy didn't we okay now let's do another little turn around here boom back over in substance along with the iterating iterated on a bunch of things but like just as example you know we could just do a little um little tattooing here you know and uh just do the color over here and we'll just do um i don't know just a little little hardy poo right here so now if we come to export settings choose our directory so we gotta go render demo content girl textures select folder there we go let's go into the textures folder we're just gonna export these two and then we'll hit export there we go go back and see it's bringing them in auto updated bam bam there you go so now we're gonna do the sequence again so we're gonna come up here open up our sequence there we go anything that's like not visible it's gonna show up in the render so come over here to the movie render queue we got our preset good so we just hit render local that's going to save out three more images and we can compare okay there we go cool okay so let's go this one we got a little before and after here so yeah it's pretty subtle but you can see extra detail now because of that spec mask see our texture came through so we can see even better here so a little texture edition and there you go so here are my final renders [Music] and that is how you can use unreal engine 5 to produce high quality images and even videos for your custom characters we touched on a lot of things there i know including things like materials and lighting and all that stuff we could go really deep on those topics and i do hope to do that this again hopefully is a big overview of like soup to nuts on getting started and you could go so many places from there and iterate a lot at the end like i said at the beginning of the video if you are someone who's interested in learning more about character modeling building your own characters like this doing things like for portfolios and things like that i'm in the middle of creating my next course right now and you can go to charactermodeling.com and you can sign up by putting in your email address and i'm just collecting email addresses right now for people that are really interested so that i can notify them when enrollment opens for this next course for at least the first running i want to do it with people signing up we'll do it live as well as have videos drop every week and then we can get together each week and talk about it and do reviews and stuff like that so it's something i've done in the past i think it's a great model for learning together so if that's something that might interest you go ahead and sign up i don't know exactly when the course is going to be done as i say i'm in the middle of it now hopefully 2022 but as soon as it is done and enrollment opens i'll let you know that's it for this video thank you for watching up to this point really appreciate it i hope you learned something and go make something cool peace out

Channel: J Hill

Views: 204,972

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial, ue5 tutorial, how to, game dev, game development, unreal engine 4, ue5 tutorial for beginners, unreal 5, unreal engine cinematic, unreal engine character, unreal engine character tutorial, unreal engine 5 textures, unreal engine 5 tutorial beginner, unreal engine character creation, unreal engine 5 demo, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine materials, real time character, jhill

Id: yqGlyhPXy5A

Length: 58min 40sec (3520 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022