UE4 Modelling Tools | Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial

hey everyone welcome back to the design den today we're going to be taking a look at one of the more less talked about features of the new unreal engine 4.26 update the mesh editing tool and with us here to do it we've got will chambers who right now is an online course instructor for epic games so will's going to take us through the basics and show us how level designers and environment artists can use a tool to block out spaces or full environments faster and more efficiently than ever before all right so let's roll the intro and let we'll get right into it [Music] hey everyone my name is will chambers and i am a online course instructor over at epic games with the latest release of unreal engine 4.26 came some new modeling tools these tools will help improve your level design efficiency inside of the editor they may also be utilized to craft environment assets as well i thought it would be beneficial to showcase these tools to everyone in the design den or to anyone dealing with level design inside of the unreal engine editor in order to access these tools you will need unreal engine 4.26 installed and a specific plugin enabled let's go to edit plugins and we're going to search for the specific plugin called modeling tools editor mode and we're going to tick this box enabled we'll get a pop-up just telling us that it's a beta version so it might be unstable or removed we're going to click yes and then we're going to need to restart our editor just for the effects to take place so let's click restart now traditionally we would use the basic geometry or bsp brushes in unreal engine for level design or in some cases an external 3d software like 3ds max maya or blender to make more elaborate meshes with these new modeling tools we will be able to create all of our level design content directly in unreal engine and have it automatically populate a folder of our choosing of those newly created assets to do this we're going to go into our modes tab and we're going to find the new tab called modeling we can also access this by pressing shift 6 so let's click this we'll see this new tab will open up and if we go down to the bottom of this panel we'll see that generated asset settings will be by default it may be set to the auto gen folder make sure that you change the location to a current folder and then we're going to right click our content folder and let's add a new folder and call this level design so now with our level design folder selected any new asset that we create within the modeling tool set we'll be able to populate this folder with that new content we'll also notice that we have these new categories primitives create transform deform etc we're going to start with primitives so this is nothing new so you can use these pre-made shapes to start modeling whatever it is that you're trying to create if we select box just by left clicking it we'll see that we get all of these new shape settings we can change the height the width depth subdivisions we can also change whether we want to snap to everything inside of our scene or if we want to snap to the ground plane so what we're going to do we're going to leave everything default and if we go inside of our editor with the box clicked we'll see that we now have a primitive we'll also notice that it will keep allowing us to keep making more boxes inside of our scene if we just keep left clicking so how do we how do we get out of this so let's control z the last couple of boxes we made so once we've made our initial primitive and we're happy with it we'll click complete we'll now notice that we have our new mesh we'll also notice that it's been populated into our folder now if you want to make changes to that box you can do so inside of your details panel but if you were trying to set it up within this initial uh box primitive tool you wouldn't be able to select this asset and then do it again in fact if you place it in your scene and try to adjust these things you'll notice it actually does it on the next one before you place it so just keep that in mind if you're a little confused as to how it works that's what's happening here so we're just going to click the complete check mark so we have our finished asset here and what we're going to do is we're going to go into our next category which is create and we're going to use this awesome tool for level design called the draw polygon tool and if we select this we'll get this little gizmo in the center and what we can do with this is actually with all the default settings we'll be able to freehand draw any shape that we want along the ground and then once we finish and close the shape we can actually drag up and down wherever we want to extrude the shape and then just left click again to finish so now we have this more elaborate shape and we can continue building more shapes we're just going to keep this one and we're going to click complete so it keeps the tool we'll actually notice that we have this new extrude and what you'll quickly notice is that when we start actually using this polygon draw tool quite a bit that our folder is going to actually populate pretty fast so it's a good idea to keep things organized so rather than referring to something as extrude d26d etc it's a good idea to stay on top of this so if we just either press f2 or if we right click and choose rename let's just call this building underscore a and then this way we have an asset that we can actually reuse in our scene if we actually put some time into making this a building or it might even remain a block at least now we'll notice that when we drag it into our scene it actually comes in labeled it gives us some idea of what's going on it's also a good idea to use folders so that we also can keep things organized it's really up to you as the designer how you want to approach things and keep things organized so let's delete that and the next feature i'm going to show so let's click complete the active tool is going to be the ability to actually create a mesh boolean inside of unreal engine something that you could do with within the bsp tool set but not with as many like elaborate shapes uh at this kind of efficiency so you can build multiple shapes within seconds of using this new modeling tool set that would typically take several minutes of using the bsp editor so let's let's pull this shape over and i'm just going to intersect the two meshes and let's select the mesh that i want to cut into and then the secondary mesh that's going to do the cutting and we'll see that we now get this new option mesh boolean let's click it we'll notice that we get these two new gizmos that pop up the one that the mesh is being cut into and the one that's actually doing the cutting so now you'll see i can actually click and drag and if i come in over here you can actually see that if i move this asset it'll cut into it or the other gizmo i can move that one as well so once i'm happy with it i can also change the operations so a minus b b minus a which would be the other building actually cutting into it so you can play around with these settings an intersection everything that you would kind of expect from a boolean operation and so now what we're going to do is we're just going to click accept we'll now notice that we have this new asset here so we've kept our building a and everything it's just creating a brand new asset for us so we can call this and if we press f2 as the hotkey for renaming we can call this building b underscore b so now we have this building but notice that the uh the pivot is actually not in an ideal place for snapping to the ground now this is a new feature that's specific to this new toolkit is we can go into our transform category and edit the pivot so let's click edit pivot this allows us to click and drag wherever we want to put our pivot and this doesn't just limit itself within this modeling tool set you can do this to any pre-existing static mesh in your content like like your content browser you have the ability to change the pivot at any moment in time to update everything across your project you also have the ability to use these predefined box positions such as center bottom top left right back and front and if i click it you'll see that will now snap to the center to the bottom to the top and then when you're happy with the pivots position you just need to click accept so let's put this to the bottom and we're going to click accept and what we'll notice is now that it is snapped to the bottom if we were to drag in a new building b it'll snap to the ground okay so the next thing we're going to look at is going to be inside the deform category and what we can do inside the deform category is actually do some sculpting now there's two different kinds of sculpting inside of here and there's regular sculpt and dynosculpt sculpting is going to use the pre-existing geometry to sculpt from whereas dinoscope is going to create new geometry based on what you're trying to sculpt it'll add extra geometry to kind of make sure there are enough faces to kind of sculpt whatever it is you're trying to do so let's try using the sculpt tool the regular sculpt tool and we'll notice that we get these new settings over here for a brush the type of brush that we want to use so let's try to use the drop down menu and select inflate and if we increase the size here and now if we left click we'll see that we actually get some pretty harsh edges because it's a low low poly asset now let's hit accept and if we go into dynasculpt actually we'll notice that we we have all the same settings over here and let's use again the inflate tool and what we're going to notice is this time it's going to create new geometry to allow us to sculpt whatever we want and the other cool thing about this new modeling editor is it actually creates collision data as you're working on it so if i click accept and i go to show collision what you'll notice is your content will actually get complex collision enabled by default now if you don't want the complex collision you can go into your asset so if we were to open up building b for instance and if we open up this window we can go to our collision and we can go to auto convex collision so we would select it and then over here we can select the whole count the max amount of whole verts etc we'll just keep it like this and hit apply and what we'll notice is actually when we hit apply we're going to notice that we actually are getting the complex collision so if we just do a quick search in the details panel we'll see that's set to use complex collision is simple we're just going to go to project default and now here's our low poly collision so as we can see here it's not really giving us great results so in this case it actually might be better for us to go with a more complex collision data so we can just undo what we did here redo that okay hit save all right so the next thing we're going to take a look at is going to actually be within the groups so if i go into polygroups and if i go to polyedit this is where you can actually start to select faces edges etc which is pretty cool so i can grab from that face i can grab from this face um so it it's basically like a select faces mode you can also see that you can make it select edges or vertices so it's up to you how you want to use this tool but that's just inside polygroups and polyedit and you just need to tick these boxes with whatever you want to kind of select so if i want to select just faces i need to disable these other faces here or these other options rather and now you have the ability to do that so let's cancel and remember you can always click cancel if you don't if you want to kind of undo everything you just did the other thing would be the edge insert so let's make a new box so we're going to go back to our create tab and let's draw a new shape really quick something basic close the shape pull it up and i'm just going to hit complete let's break down these walls so it's a little bit easier for us to see delete a couple of those assets and if we go to back into our polygroups tab we'll see that we have edge insert now this is great if we find out we want to be able to move some more faces so we can see that we have this little vertices highlighted and if we click we'll see that we can actually drag to where we want that cut to kind of happen hit cancel let's pull this up a little bit polyedit okay and so yeah we just are going to select again you have to go from one edge to another click and it'll create that new face just give it a second sometimes it has to generate that new data and because it's generate it's updating the asset within your content browser as well so if you do notice a hiccup uh in your system when you're doing certain functions just remember that is constantly populating your folder with the most up-to-date information so now if i go to polyedit i have these new faces this allows me to now pull from this new face so it can be very useful for making changes on the fly okay let's hit accept and then the next thing that you want to take a look at um you can go into the triangles tab and this will allow you to kind of simplify meshes remesh it edit materials weld edges it's a little bit more i guess kind of straightforward to what these do you can kind of explore them i'm not going to get into that um we're going to move to the next tab called uvs and normals and so this is where if you're using like the typical checkerboard kind of format that you would want to have probably some proper uvs to go along with it now the difference here is that we're using static meshes rather than bsps bsps would kind of self-correct their uvs in a way that's like world aligned whereas this one it's going to be a little bit different so if you notice that when you're sculpting you get some really wacky looking uvs you can actually go into the global uv unwrap tool and if we click that on our asset we'll notice after a few seconds we should start to see this kind of action take place where kind of tries to fix geometry along edges so it properly carries over from one face to another face you can also play with the chart stretch the uv scale and you can just hit accept on that when you're happy with it again you can play with these settings um until you're kind of content with them it can take a couple of tries in order to get it to work properly and there are other ones as well so you can do some uv projections and other things like that uh you can even go into a uv layout baking maps uh things that you would be used to inside maya blender 3ds max etc the other cool thing is in the next category which is your volumes um you can actually change these meshes um into a volume or you can take pre-existing bsp and make it into a static mesh something that you could do before you just have to right click it and then convert it but this kind of simplifies the process so if i want to convert this shape into a volume all i have to do is have it selected and go to mesh to volume and here we see the conversion mode minimal polygons triangulate the polygons it's up to me and then i can choose the new volume type do i want to be a blocking volume camera blocking volume kill z volume whatever it is that you want to be so if i want it to be a blocking volume i select the blocking volume and hit accept and now i have a blocking volume so let's undo and then the last thing is hair and hair doesn't really apply to us right now so i'm not really going to delve into hair but that is a new feature that has been involved with the new 4.26 release so you can use fully dynamic hair curves inside of unreal engine and kind of play around with those hair physics and materials in real time so at this point i'm just going to create a couple of shapes so let's use the draw polygon tool and i can just click and drag around make a little city okay and again we can see that my folder is already getting filled with these we'd want to keep these all labeled if you don't want to label all of these because it might slow you down at the end of the day you can actually select your assets in your scene and then just put them into a folder and we can just call this buildings so that's kind of like a uh another efficient way of managing that stuff if you don't want to have to manually kind of go in and re-label these all individually you can keep them kind of populating in your folder and then just quickly throw them into uh folders that kind of define what these extrusions or whatever these shapes are just to kind of keep things a little bit more organized when things get a little bit more complex in your scene um the other thing that you can do is if we uh let's let's take a box and we're actually going to let's have two boxes actually and then we're going to make one with a subdivision of 10 on the height 10 on the width and 10 on the depth and then let's click complete and what i'm going to do with this particular box is i'm actually going to use deformers so if we go to the form we'll notice that we actually have this space to form and this is where you can do all the cool things like bridges and other kinds of deformers so here we can see i'm kind of just i just clicked my asset and now i can see a visual of where this bend is occurring so let's keep defining it here and the other thing you can do you can play with the lower bounds the modifier percentage so you can have it totally um kind of bends to this now this is great for a number of reasons so you can make bridges you can i mean from this asset alone if i hit accept um i could use this as a modular piece to kind of create some kind of tunnel like a sewer tunnel there's a lot of things that are great about this the ability to use deformers is a great thing to have in engine the other thing is you don't have to worry about the collision again you automatically get the complex collision which means you can just jump into this and you will have no issues with collision something that you would have to deal with in vsps you'd have to make sure that you use a not only your additive brush but then you'd have to come in and do a boolean cut and the difference here between bsps and static meshes is the performance cost using bsps can get very performance heavy uh fairly quickly if you even have just 100 bsp brushes in your scene it'll quickly add up and then you also when you start doing boolean operations where you're subtracting subtracting from multiple brushes these are all things that very quickly become a costly thing to do so that being said that's one of the things you can do here so let's undo this and so let's go back and toggle off collision and so if we go back into space to form we can play around with flare and twist are some other options that we have and so if we play with the modifier percentage we'll see it's doing some kind of wonky things here and that's because it's actually at a vertical position so here we are let's tone down that modifier percentage and we'll see yeah we can we can totally twist this and if we had more uh subdivisions on our mesh we could really make some pretty uh elaborate looking static meshes okay so we've made our final scene here and so now we can just kind of run around our scene so if we go to play from here and for some reason we have bob ross as our mannequin that's always good and we'll notice that yeah we can we can run through everything has collision and if we stop this we'll notice again that if we use some more elaborate shapes so let's remove everything from in here and if we were to make a boolean cut so again we just select the object we want to cut into then the object here so let's pull this down a little bit make a little building we can go into our create mesh boolean hit accept and we'll notice that if we play from here we can actually run right into our building because we have complex collision and all the collision data is right here as we can see it keep in mind that these tools are great but they are experimental in early access don't forget about these tools along with the amazing bsp stair brushes so things like the linear stair brush and the curved stair brush are really great just remember that you're going to want to probably convert those to the static meshes so you can utilize this new modeling tool set along with them i hope you guys found this introduction to the new modeling tools in unreal engine 4.26 helpful and that these new tools enable you to work more efficiently in unreal engine as both a level designer and environment artist that's some pretty awesome functionality right i'm actually pretty excited to use it myself and thank you so much will that was really awesome i know people on the discord are going to find it super helpful and hopefully now out there on youtube as well and if you have anything you'd like to add or questions for will go ahead and comment below or hop on the discord and jump in on the conversation i'll put the link below and i have to say it if you enjoyed the video like it and please subscribe it helps out a lot and i'll see you all right back here next time in the design den

Channel: The Design Den

Views: 15,788

Rating: 4.9582462 out of 5

Keywords: Unreal Engine, UE4, Tutorial, Level Design, Environment Art, Modelling Tool, Modelling, Blockout, Game Design, Game Development

Id: hdk5Bf4zZwk

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/faxfrag]

Could you export them and further edit by other program like blender?

[u/ojrask]

Holy moly that sculpting workflow is neat.