The Secret to Animating Realistic Clouds | Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial

so you want to animate as a sunset like this or a full day cycle or change in weather but the default Vol metric clouds are just depressing and how do even make them move sure it's a start but compared to real Skies they need some more luckily for us someone has already done the work it was just hidden from us in a sample project and the best thing about it that it's free to download for everyone so in this video I'll show you how to use the clouds from Hillside sample to animate time lapses like this [Music] so the first thing we got to do is to download the hillside sample itself for this go to Epic Games launcher andreal engine and samples here you can get an overview of what's inside of this project there's a ton of cool stuff to study besides clouds so feel free to play around with it to download it there will be free button here click on it and then click on create project pick a location where you want to save it and the engine version and click on create be aware though this sample is over 60 GB besides the loucher saves it actually in the W cache for in my case because I was creating it on a separate dis I actually needed over 120 GB of space just because there's a copy of it stored in the VA cache so be aware of it I'll see if I can just save the cloud separately for you and let you know in the top comment of the video once you're in inside of the hillside sample go to Hillside effects then clouds and materials here you can find several presets for different moods of the sky I find this one the last one the most universal and this is the one we are going to use to copy it into our project right click on it go to asset actions and migrate make sure that all of those boxes are ticked especially Hillside material parameters we will need it later click okay and navigate to the content folder of your project and just in the content folder click select folder once you are in your project make sure the volumetric plugin is enabled so just go to plugins search for it and enable it and also that there is Sky atmosphere in your scene add volumetric Cloud actor now we have the default volumetric Cloud so let's search for that material so let's go to Hillside effects clouds materials and find the material we are after this is this one go to your volumetric Cloud actor scroll down to Cloud material and drag and drop it into the slot now we have those beautiful clouds in our scene and can use them for anything you like let's adjust some parameters to make it look even better first let's go to our directional light scroll down to atmosphere and clouds and enable cast shadows and clouds on atmosphere and cast Cloud Shadows this one is a big one as you you see it changes a lot about how the scene looks because this makes the lighting change based on whether or not the sun is shining through the clouds or not now navigate to volumetric clouds change the layer parameters I like something like 3.5 for the bottom and 11.3 layer height now increase tracing max distance to at least 100 I will I will leave it at 200 now go to Cloud tracing and enable it for view counts let's set something like four and for shadow tracing distance 30 okay nice now I really like how those clouds look I think it's a perfect combination of realism and a little bit of cinematic look but of course feel free to open up the material instance and play around with the parameters too just keep in mind it's more of an art than science so always have references of the Skies you want to replicate now how do we create the sunset timelapse of the scene if I just move around the Sun yeah the lighting changes but the clouds don't move anywhere so let's see how we can make the clouds naturally move as the times goes on here I have a sequencer this is what we use to make animations in unreal I have set my camera and animated the sun to go from 8:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. if you don't know how to do that check out my last video where I went in depths on how to use Sun Skype Ling for geo accurate Sun animations this time however I want to create Sunset animation so for the first hour I will set 9:00 a.m. and for the last one I'll go for 740 so 7.7 to make the clouds move we have two options we can either play around with wind vector and we find it by opening up material instance under globals uh scrolling down to wind Vector let's see what happens if you speed up by 50 but honestly it's a guessing game and unnecessary much better way is to increase the speed of the in-game simulation luckily the material of the clouds was already set up to account for it all we need to do is to add a Time delation Track you find it by going to your sequencer clicking on track and time delation track it was added to the sequencer and we can increase the speed of the time by changing this value in here as you can see the benefit of it was that not only the cloud started to move faster but also the water and actually also the wind on the tree was ped up so it's a much faster way to control time in your game now by how much do we speed up our time you can get into technicalities of by how much we are actually speeding it up in our case we pack roughly 1 hour into 10 seconds that means we actually speeding up as a Time by a factor of 360 but that's way too much since we are dealing with a simulation not real life you got to play around with that value until it feels right the best way to do it is to look at an actual reference footage of Cloud's time lapse and compare it with your scene I have found that for 1 hour a value of about 15 Works quite good if you render the animation you'll notice that it doesn't render all the frames in this case only 40 frames were rendered which is exactly 15 time less than 600 the amount that we wanted to render the reason is that time delation is only partially supported by the sequencer so we set our time delation to 15 it means that we need to increase the amount of frames that we want to render by a factor of 15 so let's go to our playback options and set the and frame to 9,000 extend everything to fit the timeline great now it actually renders the amount of frames you want and the clouds differ naturally in real life however the clouds don't just stay in one spot likely this material has a setting Sky texture placement which does exactly what we need naturally you would say if you drag volumetric clouds into the sequencer you will be able to control it the only thing you could do from here is only to change the material itself not the parameters this is where we touch on the topic of material parameter collections but going into details about it is way outside of the scope of this tutorial luckily though they were already set up in the hillside sample and we can just use the existing ones but if you're interested in changing your own materials from the sequencer let me know in the comments below if enough people request it I will do a tutorial on it to change Sky texture placement click on ADD track go to material parameter col collection track search for Hillside and click on it under Hillside material parameters click on plus and choose Sky placement offset go to the first frame and add a key then go to the last frame and set set your offset parameters I found that 0.2 for roughly 1 hour feels right and I just want to rotate it a little bit so I'll set 0.1 for the G now our clouds are moving towards the horizon just one more thing I would like to change is to set those keys to linear because our time is linear and I want the movement of the clouds to match that to make the clouds move into another Direction go to the last frame again and just play around with those numbers if I put negative numbers here it will start moving into the opposite direction play around with those numbers until they moving into the direction you would want them to move now we are ready to render so let's click here to render it out click on settings one more Nuance to do is to change the uh file name into frame number relative if you don't do it you will get this error choose a location click on accept and click on render now the render is complete what's left for us to do is to render it into a video file using any editing program in the last video I briefly showed the tests required to do it in the free version of the vure resolve if you don't know how to do it the video will be in the description and here is a Time code for it now to render any other time of the day let's duplicate our sequencer I want full day so let's let's call it full day open it up and do it basically the same way set the hour you're going after in the first hour uh the last hour in your last hour let's say 9 so we went from roughly 1 hour of time to filming 5 hours of time to account for it let's increase time delation let's not go by five let's go by four I think it's a bit better and since we increase time delation let's increase the frame count as well what we want is 20 seconds of footage with a frame rate of uh 30 so we need 600 frames but we are speeding up Time by 60 so let's multiply it by 60 and this gives us the actual number we need to set in here fill the whole timeline I'll just change the camera CU I like how uh daylighting is displayed on the architecture click on tracking it again one more thing to adjust is Sky placement offset you're filming five times more actual time so let's increase it by five and render it out make sure frame number is relative click accept and click [Music] render to animate different weather conditions going from Clear Sky to cloudy or fully covered like here uh we can animate cloud coverage so let's duplicate our sequencer again go to Hillside material parameters in the sequencer and go for coverage of set for the first frame let's set something aroundus 0.2 somewhere in the middle I like the value of 0.3 about here and at the end let's clear it up again and I want it to happen a bit sooner before actual Sunset happens and this is what we [Music] get if you like this video please consider subscribing I have many interesting ideas coming and if you want me to cover any particular topic feel free to let me know in the comments below but also if you have any related or unrelated questions just go ahead and ask one of the benefits of a small Channel like mine is that I can really find the time to pay attention to every single comment feel free to take advantage of that till the next time

Channel: Unreal ArchWizard

Views: 1,707

Keywords: unreal engine 5, ue5, unreal engine, archviz, cgi, art, beginner, course, architecture, tutorial, guide, lesson, exterior, render, animation, SunSky, sun and sky, movie render queue, MRQ, unreal engine tutorial, 3d, lighting, day night cycle, unreal archviz, unreal engine archviz, unreal, timelapse, Timelapse with Photoreal Clouds in Unreal Engine 5, Timelapse with Photoreal Clouds, dynamic clouds, volumetric clouds, lumen, hillside, hillside sample, unreal engine clouds, unreal engine timelapse

Id: j4TW25OOONU

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024