#UE5 Series: Introduction to Quixel Bridge

hello everyone reza here we are going to continue with our unreal engine 5 series in this video i'll go over quicksilver bridge inside unreal engine i'll start by introducing bridge how to download this amazing plugin and how to add content to your current open projects of course we will wrap up this video by doing a quick case study using just mega scan assets coming from quiksil bridge application it's a super fun topic i'm sure you will be using it in your own projects in the future we have a lot to talk about so let's get started [Music] all right as usual i'm going to start by just double clicking on the unreal engine icon we already have the parent icon here where we talked about basics materials uh parent versus instance uh landscape so on and so forth i can either create a folder right here and kind of point it towards the application or the project or i can start with here actually going into games or film it really doesn't matter we are going to create a new level so i'm gonna go with games pick blank um starter content on and off we are not gonna use it anyways so it really doesn't matter ray tracing off we're not going to reuse ray tracing we are going to use lumen so um i'm just going to go and select the project name and call this lesson06 underscore bridge the folder the project locations already pointed towards this folder right here so i really don't need to worry about that with that selected and lesson six project bridge i'm gonna hit create now with that out of the way let's just start by introducing quicksole bridge all i need to do is just to go to create and you can hear we have quicksole bridge ready to go if you click on that then you will get connected to this mini application and as you can see this will open a world of hyper realistic objects that been scanned uh and there are you know at your disposal they're all free it's not just assets you have um access to decals you can see a lot of different materials and they're amazing imperfections wood rubber so it's not just 3d assets or just 3d plants you also have access to surfaces and of course have access to imperfections which is great for metal things like grain grunge so on and so forth now as you can see this library is massive over 16 or 17 000 um assets in here and they keep growing of course all you need to do to have access to this free library is to log in so if you click here i've already logged in so you can log in with your gmail or with your epic games account and once you log in you should be able to search and download stuff let's say i just want to go to 3d asset and i want to go to interior and i want to go to let's say fireplace i'm just really picking things randomly and i just want to download this fireplace and use it in this scene so it's very simple all you need to do once you select this is to go in here i'm gonna go update not now and i'm going to slightly reduce the size of this you can see you have level of detail you can go with low quality medium quality high quality and nanite now i i believe nanite should be the way to go bridge for unreal engine now serves a fully nanite ready tier what does this mean this means that you can add photorealistic film quality assets directly into unreal engine without affecting performance that is very very important it's purely jaw dropping to be honest with you so i always pick nanite and i go download now this gets downloaded to the local drive so well it's a it's a good idea to double check your hard drive space make sure you have space because some of these scenes and assets are actually pretty big to begin with when you populate them in the scene they're not too much of a big deal but when they get downloaded to the hard drive you just need to make sure that you have enough space for it now once it's been downloaded click on add this gets added to your project now if i go to content you should have a content called mega scan as you can see and that has got this fireplace asset that comes with all the maps so these are the maps and this is the material and those maps are assigned to this material if i double click on this material bring this material here you can see instantly that this is not a master material it's an instance now why this is a good thing because well you can easily switch things around with these ready to go attributes for example if you want to tweak the albedo and if you think you want to bring a little bit of a reddish tone to this material all you need to do is just to tweak the albedo and the overall albedo shape and with that now i can easily go into my mega scan select the model itself which is indicated by this scion bar drag and drop it and place it right here i can go ahead and press h on these guys to hide them bring this to the center end so it's sitting on the ground and bring it over and you can see how amazing this looks and again the red tint that we have if i double click is because of this um albedo that i assign now this uh there it opens a lot of opportunities for you to play around with sit with things for example i can just bring this one back as you can see to where it is or give this a tint of blue red yellow so on and so forth but albedo is not the only thing to change you can go ahead and change the metalness you can go ahead and change the specularity of this object you can change the roughness of it right now it's very rough you can make it completely um glossy as you can see so everything has been parameterized in here to make your job easier when you would like to tweak some of these stuff so it's just absolutely mind-blowing how easy it is to uh use the asset in here and of course of course you can always think about how will i be able to customize this asset right here it's pretty much the same scenario for non-geometry assets for example if i go to surface i can pick gravel and i can go in here and say all right for the ground i would like to use this and of course you pick the quality low quality medium high or highest and you go ahead and download once that's done you can either click on add so it gets added to the current project or before doing that you can actually look into few extra options if i click on this little icon it says auto populate foliage painter which includes this material into our foliage tool so it can be populated we will talk about foliage tool in the near future also apply to selection so let's say i'm going to select this floor and by selecting the floor as soon as i hit add this gets added to the floor automatically if this option is ticked of course you may want to use your own master material or surface material or plant master material you may want to use geometry at some level if you use your assets from mega scan you want to get the geometry bring your own material to it so that is possible to navigate or browse to your content browser and link the material to the asset that you're selecting that is also possible and you can go ahead and go into the material blend you can go ahead and create a material blend just so you know in this case if you click on click create material blend it's going to error out because remember to create a material blend you need to have two materials selected which we don't have so if i click on it you get the warning that says select two or more material instances uh to perform this operation so for that you need to um actually select two in order to blend them now let's say that's what we want and i'm gonna go to the option tick apply to selection you can see floor is selected and as soon as i go add the floor gets the material now it's trying to process it and to load it up once that's done you can see it has been applied and of course the tiling of it is a little bit incorrect but that's no problem we already know how to fix that you can go to content browser you can go to this floor right here you can double click and in tiling you can of course change its tiling to something more appropriate let's say five and five that was a bit much i'm gonna try three by three and by the look of it that looks much better you can fix the orientation obviously you can offset it however you want i tweaked offset by accident and of course you can tweak albedo rotation angle ambient occlusion strength so on and so forth so these are the things that you can do you can see that as soon as i'm tweaking ambient occlusion strength how that is going to have an impact on the crevices and areas with cracks so that's that it's fairly straightforward you can pretty much do the same with deckholes as well i'm going to go into decals as well i'm going to go into quicksilver bridge bring this over and this time i'm going to scroll down go to decals and i can go to let's say debris and let's pick something i'm going to pick dirt pile and i'm going to go download and after that i'm gonna go and click on add now if i go in here and um under decals i can just find that dirt pile and click on it you can see what this decal is about you can change it change the albedo change the uv coordinates if you want to tile it add roughness or opacity to it increase or decrease its normal and then drag it into your scene so that's fairly straightforward i can just drag and drop it into the scene and here's one quick tip that if you feel like it's too big don't scale it manually like this because as soon as you scale it uh you will run into this uh issue what i usually do i'm gonna press undo i scale my decals via decal size and with that you should be able to scale it pretty easily and go ahead and position it somewhere like for example i'm positioning this here and all of a sudden i get a little bit of dirt right next to the fireplace so you can see how easy it is to just download and pretty much drag and drop and construct your scene and that's a really quick look at quiksil bridge and how you can benefit from it obviously any asset you download if you want to locate it on your hard drive you right click on it to files and it actually shows you all the um mega scan library that you've downloaded places it inside the documents folder you can have a look and it gives you a preview to actually locate which folder is what for example this one is a rock that we're about to use in our case study in a second but that's really it there is not much to it you'll get a local one with all the local assets that you may have downloaded you can always go back to them by right clicking go to files and locate them remove them so on and so forth so with that out of the way let's go ahead and do a really quick case study i mean the whole reason behind this case study is to demonstrate how easy that is to re-use what we know about unreal engine 5 to create a very hyper realistic scene for lack of better word in a matter of seconds so let's jump right in and have a look at that case study we're going to start with a new level with a brand new scene and you can pretty much follow along [Music] all right let's start with our case study i'm probably going to repurpose the bridge lesson that we have so lesson06 bridge i'm gonna double click on it and instead of working on the main level we're gonna go ahead and create a brand new level so going back to the same scene we don't need this anymore so i'm gonna go into file and go ahead with the new level i'm gonna go with empty level and i'm gonna create also while we have this it's a good a good idea to stay organized so what i'm going to do is to basically right click in here and i'm going to create a new folder and i'm going to call this bridge underscore case study and under that i'm going to create another folder and i'm going to call this levels best thing to do is right off the bat go ahead and save current level as so i'm going to go into bridge case study level and i'm going to call this rez's underscore level whatever name you have in mind i'm not really too picky about the name at this stage i just want to save my project now we i'm thinking um something along these lines so um something coral rocky sort of vibe if i go into this collection there are a few number of assets i've already downloaded i'm trying not to use my personal assets so you guys can literally follow along with no problems and we've got some reference that comes with each library which is pretty damn useful they can just sit down and have a look and get some ideas all i'm trying to do is just to squeeze a few hours worth of work into maybe 5-10 minutes so i'm sure if you spend the time you should be able to do a much better job another archive that i would like to have a look is iceland because i think that comes with a lot of goodies really good surface textures that you can use but first things first i made this landscape which is a height map landscape in the world machine application and i make this available to you guys via my patreon page if you want to use it but for terrain you can definitely come up with your own terrain and sculpt it but as i explained in my landscape video i really prefer to have a good well-established landscape to begin with as my very base so i'm gonna use this height map so i'm gonna go and into landscape let's prepare the scene really quick import from file and these are the things that we of uh we have talked about before i'm going to go and select this file coral now because the dimension is not correct i'm just going to go in here and make the number of components minus one so 1717 is the default i'm going to make it 16 to 16 so there's no stretching happening um along the edges i'm going to zoom back so i know what i'm doing and i'm going to go import all right right now we're ready to sculpt but obviously that defeats the purpose because i just brought a height map so i don't sculpt anything right so keep that in mind we're still in landscape mode let's drop in some lights because i honestly don't know what's happening here we are in the dark so let's go into light environment mixer and bring in directional light to begin with we have our directional light so we can see our landscape right off the bat i feel like this landscape should be reduced it's very tall so maybe reduce the height to 20 percent yeah that's um that's more like it you can totally see what's happening here if i sort of zoom in you can see this area needs to be um close to the water and we've got some rocky mountainy looking landscape in the far background so i think 20 is um a good result you won't believe how simple it is to make something like this in world machine so definitely give that a try all right um we already have a directional light let's put in uh sky atmosphere so don't forget to link the sky atmosphere to your directional light definitely check out my lighting tutorial if you have no idea what i'm talking about i'm going to drop in a skylight and i will be enabling the real-time capture on that as well what else do we need maybe we are going to create volumetric clouds why not get some clouds into the scene yep that should work um and definitely i need a post-processing volume so i'm going to go into create visual effects and i'm going to bring post-process volume into the scene oh i can't because i'm already in landscape mode so i need to go back in here and now i should be able to bring visual effects post process volume just drag and drop it into the scene there we have it and instantly i'm going to go into inf to tick infinite extend unbound so i can just tweak the exposure and get the exposure that i think would be right for this scene so i'm just going to go into manual and bring that up ever so slightly okay so that looks kind of good sky dome i'm going to clear the filter real time capture on has to be set to movable sky atmosphere set to movable i immediately scroll down to make sure that all the attributes that i want is here i'm gonna go to um directional light i don't think anything else is needed i'm not about i'm not quite sure about the um volume scattering or indirect lighting so i'm not gonna really investigate on that too much so let's have another look at sky atmosphere yep it's all looking good and set to movable now let's plan for this and see how we can use our assets i think it's a good time for us to um bring in quixote bridge and think about textures think about where the camera is going to be located so on and so forth i am going to uh go to landscape and go to sculpt and try to use this erosion with full strength just to be able to create a much deeper landscape i'm gonna go and switch my camera speed to something like seven or eight and i'm gonna zoom in you can see it's a very big landscape probably somewhere around here would be a good place for me to uh place the camera but for now i'm trying to kind of get some irregularities here i'm gonna go to sculpt with full strength holding down shift you can see how you can sort of remove or shave a layer from the seabed i just want that to be ever so slightly deeper i don't want to really have a super um noticeable deep sea right next to the seashore obviously that will look ridiculous and you can see i'm intentionally leave some areas behind like that which is a sort of a neat trick because last thing you want to do is to have everything sort of very neat and clean and cg looking so i'm just gonna get some dents create some dents in here that actually should do the trick for me that's good um i can right mouse button hold and press w to get closer to get closer and sort of find my location maybe zoom in ever so slightly and bring the camera somewhere around here i'm not still 100 sure what exactly i have in mind but of course that can be sorted later so this area is going to be water and then we've got some uh big rocks i really want to have a hero object right in the middle center of attention right at the center but uh we'll we'll see how we go also i feel like that i definitely need um exponential height fog so let's actually go ahead and bring that in i'm gonna go into uh visual effects and go to exponential height fog bring that in now i'll be getting fog into the scene which is good double checking my skylight real time capture is on that's great and that should give me a good starting point let's bring um bridge and see how we can benefit from some of these assets and start assembling our scene all right i've placed all the lights into this lights folder right here i'm going to bring my kwixel bridge plug-in go to local and these are the assets that i have downloaded just so you know i've downloaded them from heartland shore and iceland most of them i downloaded from these two categories so i'm going to go to local and select some of these assets that i think i may or may not use like so and i'm going to go into download and add cool once you get that done if i bring the content browser you can see that in the 3d assets folder under mega scan i have all the assets if i for example double click on one there is one with a cyan a color and that is the model this mi is a material instance which i can double click on and tweak and then i've got all the maps usually i get a color map and a normal map and this guy right here is a multi-map where rgb gets connected to roughness ambient occlusion so on and so forth usually that green map is just to save a space and headaches you can just channel all those grayscale maps into rgb maps and produce only one as opposed to three so you just need to think about all right what the ground should look like i'm gonna go to assets and just um think about the theme and look at references and see what type of results am i going to get now remember with landscape you should be able to have access to landscape material so at any point of time i can just drag and drop a drop the material into landscape material and get a starting point but obviously in almost all of these cases what you have is not going to be enough you need to go into tiling and just tweak x and y to get a slightly better result in my case i need to actually zoom in a little bit to see what i'm doing and of course this material may not be what i want at this point i kind of need to sort of have a look make up my mind and if i realize that all right this material is probably not for me you can go in here and try other materials using the reference that you have is available to you and just go ahead double click try to tweak the material until you find the sweet spot so this is a very sort of a trial and error-ish type of process for example you can see this may not look good but it may be slightly bright for my taste so i can just go in here and tone this down make this more of a neutral gray color if i want to so that is also available to you but for now i'm just going to um continue with this trial and error phase and see what sort of results i can come up with and you guys can based on your own discretion you can just follow along and have fun and once the ground level is done i can start putting assets into the scene [Music] no matter what they put me through i don't care what [Music] make happens now it's time to start populating the assets there is a really neat tool called a foliage tool which is located here but i will save the foliage tool for another case study for now i'm just going to manually place some of these uh items in here holding down alt and repositioning them is basically what i'm doing right now and at any point of time if you feel like all right i need to sort of manipulate the roughness the albedo of course you can always double click on the material instance and tweak these parameters [Music] i'm just trying to look for that hero asset i'm going to turn off all of my snapping so i have sort of access to free transformation if i may [Music] you are the sunshine [Music] [Music] remember that at the end of the day this area will be filled with water and i will show you how to create water and at any point of time you can press ctrl l and just have an experiment with your light so just having fun and see what direction gives me um better look or more interesting shapes for lack of a better word so again i'm not really sure what time of day i want to play around with but you will notice that i am going to change a few bits quite a fair bit but for now i'm just experimenting now the other piece that was hidden i'm trying to see if i can sort of combine that piece with the piece we just found or discovered rather in order to sort of kind of get a much better unique result kind of mush them together just to have a sort of an interesting look now with these areas um always try to think about the scale if what you have is small or big and how you would like this to be seen when water goes on top of it so at this point i'm just trying to have a guess but i'm definitely seeing myself going over all of these bits and pieces to change them in the future and again alt drag just to move and duplicate across the scene if need be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now we have the center piece sorted and few bits and details in here you just need to think about all right are we going to need more or we're just um populating without really thinking about the efficiency um also another thing that to be mindful of is how are you going to frame at this scene because i really don't want to populate everything across the entire scene so think about elements like balance how you're going to balance the scene and is the staging that you have has got the right rhythm to it of course at the end of the day things like if you're having a close-up shot how many cameras are you going to have is that going to be an animated shot or it's a fixed shot every single decision that you make will have an impact but at this stage i have really a fixed shot i really don't want to animate anything at this stage remember the whole idea behind this tutorial is just to sort of show you the process and prove to you that really sky is the limit when you work with mega scan and just how incredible this catalog of amazing assets is so it would be your discretion and how you are going to use it and so on and so forth but let's go to the next chapter i'm going to press save let's go to the next chapter and see how we can bring in water and then we are going to tweak the lighting some more bring fog to the equation some more and gradually but surely give personality to what we have [Music] cool let's bring water surface into our scene i put all the mega scan objects into a mega scan folder so it's much easier to troubleshoot you know we've got lights in a separate folder all the mega scan in the separate folder on our landscape in a separate folder so it makes sense if in case you would like to go back and make some changes everything is nice and organized so we are going to go to plugin and i'm just going to type in water we have a water plug-in which is experimental but gets the job done it says that it's experimental version and probably you don't want to use it for super serious project but we are okay with that we must restart unreal and um it will take effect so let's restart unreal and i'm going to save my changes and we're going to come back fantastic i'm just going to type in water and we can see now we have that i'm going to go and close this obviously i'm switching back to the default level i want to be in the uh main level reza's level we called it i'm already regretting this why i called this i really have no idea the way that you find that is by going to create or add and just type in water and you get different types of water uh the most common one is body ocean where it gives you an ocean which is totally fine but what i usually use is custom and that custom actually believe it or not creates a really neat result because it gives you a surface and you can just increase the dimension of the surface and sort of experiment with that based on the area that you have so i'm just going to put 50 in there um maybe 100 yeah 100 should sort of do the trick and you can see as soon as you do that it kind of gives you enough coverage for the viewport again up to you if you would like to increase or raise the surface level of the water or if you want to make this shallow that is totally up to you makes sense and you can see as soon as you do that you may come to realization okay i might have worked too much on some areas or i made not i made it not work on some of the other areas that i wanted to work on you start seeing flaws you start seeing areas that you can kind of tweak and you can improve on and that is good so you may go back to some of these assets and you may want to tweak i'm gonna do the same thing just uh nudge a few objects to left and right make sure what i what i see is exactly what i wanted to see sort of speak so let's go through some of these assets and just make sort of tiny adjustments [Music] [Music] of course as the water for the water itself um i'm not gonna generate any waves in here so we're not going to sort of tweak any of these attributes i may actually cast shadow for the lights that hits the water surface on on the ground and really there is uh not much in there that you want to play around with but one thing that i usually play around with is just this water surface which has got if i scroll down some global color values in there so if you want to make the water more transparent if you want to sort of tweak the rgb of the water go from let's say 10 to 15 so you can see now the water looks more yellowish compared to the value of 10 i can do the opposite go to 5 and you can see the water is very sort of tropical and clean well so again these type of changes will come down to what you want to get out of this uh project but i'm going to go ahead and just ever so slightly tweak around uh some of these attributes [Music] [Music] all right uh that's um close to what i want i still would like to get more fog into the scene because i feel like the scene is a bit dry so i need to do two things i need to go to exponential height and fog probably enable volume fog and increase the original fog density so fog density i can just increase that ever so slightly tweak that falloff a little bit so the sky is not too bright fog color needs to be turned off for sure and you can play around with albedo a little bit just to mimic so volumetric fog needs to be on and i can go in there and sort of turn that to more of a bluish tone just a little bit and you can kind of experiment with that and see how you sort of you're kind of bringing this into the scene adding definition to the scene so totally up to you i'm just going to reset i don't think that's necessary at this stage um and sky color you can go in there and change a few attributes for example what i think would be suitable is not to have super clean blue sky but more of a white-ish cloudy type of color so that can definitely do the trick okay i'm just going to continue tweaking some of the fog and lighting settings to get ready for the post process volume and do a little bit of tweaking through post process volume and hopefully finalize the look of my scene [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] also just during the whole thing um i realized that there is uh no reflection of this big chunky um piece of stone in in the water now if that happens uh you can go to visual effects and bring a reflection capture and that is going to help you with uh the situation so now you can see uh that this reflection capture does help the situation where you now clearly see the reflection of this piece in the water i can just rotate and you can see how it is makes an impact just uh creates a much more realistic result if i may so keep that in mind um i can actually sort of left mount mouse click and kind of bring it into the light category but a pretty pretty useful trick that i do use and creates a nice improvement on the underscene overall [Music] you may have noticed that i'm going back and forth with few attributes and few material parameters the location of each piece i haven't rehearsed this tutorial i'm doing it as i go as we go so that's part of the process to just go back and see if you can get a slightly better result with that said i believe we can wrap up this tutorial feel free to download the scene and download some assets try to come up with something slightly different than mine get creative have fun with the projects and see if you can get comfortable with quixote bridge bringing assets in try to tweak them reposition them change the parameters in the material attribute eventually you want to mix and match these amazing assets with your own objects with your own static missions when you bring them into unreal engine convert them to nanite and that unleashes the true power of unreal engine 5. i hope you found this video useful and thank you very much for watching this video and for all of your support until the next video see you guys later

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 8,320

Keywords: Quixel Bridge, quixel bridge, quixel megascans, quixel bridge unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, unreal engine 5 games, unreal engine 5 gameplay, quixel bridge unreal, unreal water simulation, ue5 water tutorial, ue5 water plugin, ue5 water shader, ue5 water material, unreal engine 5, quixel bridge to maya

Id: 2coLRTk06MA

Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022