#UE5 Series: Modeling Tools in UNREAL Engine 5.4 Part 1

hey everyone Resa here and welcome to my channel a while back I did a quick review of the modeling Tools in onreal engine 5 since then there have been some great improvements to the modeling tool set and I've been getting requests to create an updated video now that onreal engine 5.4 is here it's time to explore its modeling tool categories so let's Dive Right In and see what these tools have to offer [Music] here I am inside Onre engine 5.4 I put together a simple Studio as our focal point anything that we want to demonstrate we put that on the platform and we practice with it now first things first when you want to access the modeling mode you need to make sure that the plug-in has been loaded so I'm going to go into edit I'm going to go into plugin and I'm just going to type in modeling 1l and in my case modeling tools editor mode is enabled now you can simply hold down shift and five to switch to modeling mode alternatively you can go into this dropdown and pick modeling the way that we work with the modeling mode is fairly straightforward we read everything from left to right we have the category and the category defines specific set of tools and those tools Belong Together somehow more or less they follow the same ritual or functionalities then we have the pallet and the pet actually visualizes and shows all the tools belong to the selected category if I select any of the tools then we get to the tool properties and what it's going to reveal is the property of the tool that you selected and then we have Quick Settings that gives you access to Common setting such as path location for assets gizmos element selections new Mish objects so on and so forth so it's fairly straightforward before I start with categories there are a few bits and pieces that I need to explain the first one is understanding the key Concepts probably the most important one is Onre engine does not need to spend time on quads and Eng gons and that's a big difference in the modeling World in an application like Maya we always emphasize on clean topology even Le space quads or not have having Eng gons and Eng gons are polygons with more than four sides but in Unreal Engine that is really not a problem everything gets triangulated and our real engine has a way to deal with that and because of that you will see so many Eng gons and triangles during the modeling process it's important not to get too distracted with those I'm going to go through all of them introduce the category first and then we dive into each one of the categories and explore the pallet tools the first one is create as the name suggests uh it gets you started with building a new mesh and everything that you produce through this modeling mode is called mesh or meshes the second one is X form and it's in charge of adjusting the placement or representation of the mesh and you can see all the tools that you see in this category somehow more or less do just that then we have deform and that allows you to sculpt or distort a mesh as a whole in specific areas then model performs granular mesh editing so you can actually get into uh face selecting moving points and also school modelers really know how to do that best then we have mesh and mesh is in charge of processing the existing model optimization editing the mesh geometry and there are ways to actually use the pallet tool in here which simulates what you see in the model so these three are your editing tool set you create it here and then you edit it in these three then we have voxel and the sole purpose of having voxel is to convert your mesh into a voxel or Vox soles to perform volumetric operations not something that I use all the time during modeling but it can be actually quite useful if you're dealing with volumetric operations then we have bake and that generates textures and vertex color data for your mesh the next one is UVS which allows you to edit UV coordinates on the mesh and then we have attributes which allows you to inspect and adjust the secondary properties on your mesh and of course we have miscellaneous additional utility tools uh such as managing lods or volume conversion happens here although with the introduction of nanite we use these tool set less and less these days all right let's go and start with the probably most obvious one [Music] create before we get to the modeling tools let's quickly talk about where are we going to save these models where are going to find these models apart from the world that liner where on Earth everything is going to be saved in our content drawer it's in the underscore generated if you wish to change it you go into edit and project settings you just type in modeling to short list and in here you can actually change the name of the main folder in charge of your models or meshes there is a way to autosave as well so you can autosave and not autosave and with the interval that you specify but keep that in mind that if you autosave while you're experimenting you will end up having 50 models while you're still in the experimenting phase also default mesh type is where you can actually change the out put right off the bat without any conversion I always set that to static mesh there are other ones available like Dynamic mesh or volume but I think static mesh will get the job done at least at the beginning if you're not quite familiar with the modeling tool set all right with create we can create a box sphere cylinder and Cone so on and so forth so these bits are uh self-explanatory I'm not going to spend too much time on it with box you are going to create a box you place it left click and if you're happy with the placement you press accept two points that can be applicable to all of these tools if you wish to reposition your model you can do it via here this Delta mode is also available to you you can turn it off if you want but there are times that I've seen people do this and go accept and they're like oh um let's move it to the left move it to the right you can actually do that during the creation so I'm going to go bring a sphere with this Delta you can actually move this rotate this and position it however you want now another important thing is make sure that your properties are all set before you accept because if you accept you will lose the properties you're not going to get them back the position yes you can still reposition and resize but something like subdivision is is no longer available to you although there are tools to tweak around with subdivisions within the editing tools uh same with the cylinder you have all The Usual Suspects radius height and it says what type of output mesh you're going to get static mesh Dynamic mesh or volume which you can convert in the transform category but keep that in mind that um well that's one extra step that you don't want to make pretty much the rest are similar we can bring in a Taurus we can bring in an arrow we can bring in others like rectangle disc stairs now these are all uh the ones that we know and there is no problem with those kind of self-explanatory I'm not going to spend too much time on it it gets interesting right after that we get to a point where we see Cube grid and out of this palette Cube grid is without a doubt my favorite it's great for prototyping buildings it's fantastic for level design if you're into gaming and you build levels all the time this tool can be a very quick alternative as opposed to some of these tools to pull and push objects the way it works uh it's a three-step process first you click and you specify the block size and if I go and hover my mouse you can see the block size is way too low you can see we've got a bigger block size and if I go to the default I've got a big chunk based on your scene scale you may get a smaller or bigger block size so first things first is to tweak it to a manageable resolution I'm going to set that actually to 10 and then the second step is to left click and drag to Define an area like so let go of The Mouse and the third step is to tap e on your keyboard so I'm tapping e and you can see how I'm raising that level and it just doesn't end there you can actually select within the existing mesh that you just created using e and press e on that and it generates objects add of the existing ones you can actually go in there and select this little guy here and connect that to the other side and it's not just about pushing you can actually pull and remove faces as well let's say I want to go to this side and for whatever reason I make a decision to basically remove all of that in instead of pressing e to extrude you actually press Q to push and it removes that area I'm going to go into this side select these guys simply press Q to push that area so you can see how quickly I'm getting results here there are other tools as well for example if I go and select this guy here if I hold down Z you can see underneath the viewport I'm now entering the Corner mode with that corner mode you can actually Target vertices and points as opposed to faces letting go of the Z key and start selecting these points and this time I can combine it with q or E so I'm going to use q and it's going to push that back ever so slightly I can practice this in here as well going here you go done you select this one press Z to go into Corner mode and then Q to taper that back how cool is that very intuitive quite fun to work with and once you're happy you go except there are more hot keys to this but I don't want to spend too much time on one tool and run out of time for the rest of them uh in a nutshell that's how you use Cube grid let's go to extrude polygon now so I am going to delete this one from the scene although it's been stored in my undor generated folder and I can move on to the next tool next one on the list is extrude polygon and the name can be a bit misleading it doesn't mean that you have a polygon and you are going to extrude a component out of it no you actually design your plane uh by hand free drawing and then next step is for that for Unreal Engine to extrude what you just made so if I click on this and the default is set to freehand is where you get that Gizmo right here so you can actually snap because snapping is on you can uh turn off snapping as well but I found it actually quite useful you go and click click click let's say I'm going to go little bit crazy with that one and end it here and once that's done you start moving this up without clicking anything and it's going to raise that area as your model you can of course change that from draw mode freehand to create a ccle in that case you just single click and then drag you create your circle click and then you raise that up you can do the same thing with square rectangle with rounded rectangle you need to click twice one to specify the first side and another click to specify the second side like so so click once click twice and then you can specify how long the rectangle needs to be and then click again and raise that up and of course you have the ring as well so single click and it gives you more like a Taurus or pipe and you bring it up uh you don't need to do things interactively if you have a specific number in mind you go from extrude mode into fixed and You' be like all right anything you create I want that have only 20 units or you can say that I don't want Extrusion I just want to be a flat plane flat disc and you take it from there the rest is fairly self-explanatory you can apply materials here you can snap to surface if you want to snap to length snap to a particular axis so on and so forth let's go to the next tool now the next tool is called extrude path and that's great if you would like to draw and extrude paths to create new meshes such as walls ramps or roads again it's one of the tools that is not going to work on an existing model you generate your model and you extrude that first step is to specify your p path so click a bunch of times let's say that's what I want and then once it's done it specify all right how thick once you click on it it goes all right how tall and you take it from there it's really that simple just like the previous tool you can do that interactively or if I press complete and create another one you can specify all right I want that to be fixed the tallness or the white uh I would like this to be flat so no Extrusion thank you or ramp interactive or fixed if I go ramp interactive probably that's much easier to see I can specify the path and then thickness and then the next one is going to be the ramp and that specifies all right how steep the ramp is going to be you can come up with something like really crazy like that and then you can see we've got a ramp going on here here fairly straightforward um I'm sure you can come up with different scenarios to integrate that in your project but that's really it next tool is revolve path and you create a spline revolved around the given plane and create round shapes I went out of the studio into an open space so it's much clearer so that's the grid that you get and you draw uh on one side of that pink line and whatever you create will be revolved around this pink uh line right here now how much you would like to revolve is based on the degrees here usually 360° gives you a closed confined area you can move this plane anywhere that you want draw complete your task and move the asset back to your environment so let's say I would like to create something like this and you can see you get the result right off the bat you can go and specify how far you want this revolve to go 360 is the default also you can go Max degree which by increasing them you create fewer polygons and by increasing it you give it more density however you feel like it again anything with polygroup I'm going to skip for now so I will be talking about that in the future and we have enough examples to explain this thoroughly once it's done you create your model and it's ready to go next one is draw spline and it simply draw a spline um in the scene and you may be wondering why these two are disabled because the prerequisite for these two is to have a spline and only then these two will get enabled so you can see how these three will give us a mesh this creates the main building blocks and you apply operations on the newly created spline simple as that so let's go in let's create something really simple and the good thing about draw a spline is you get a bezier to create a nice curve if that's what you need uh you can close it or you can leave it open-ended that's totally fine but as soon as you create that you can see these two are opening now if I go revolve it revolves around the center so it gives me something like a I don't know a tunnel of some sort with no holes which is tunnel with no holes is not a tunnel and then you can actually play around with that Delta mode to get slightly different shapes and if you're happy you take it from there next is mesh spline and what it does simply turns what you have drawn into a static mesh what does this mean it means that is best if you have that spline closed so let's click and create a closed spline and now if I go mesh spline it's going to convert that into a static mesh simple as de and you can play around with the components with the modeling tool that we have available and tweak that further that should do the trick for create uh let's go to the next chapter and discuss X form now let's talk about the X form category and this category adjusts the placements or representation of this mes and I have to admit not every single tool in this category is going to be a daily use to you so we are going to cover the highlights of this as opposed to every single one so the first one that comes to mind is merch and it's something that you might use in your daily routine creating two assets just just combining two static measures into one I'm going to hold down alt drag and move that and now if I select the two I go to merge and with the default settings if I go accept I'm getting one combined mesh instead the opposite also applies and that is split but split is not going to uh basically break this down into two two static meshes it's not quite the opposite it's actually going to break down this mesh into all the main building blocks so uh when I modeled this I made sure that the cushion is separate and the handles a separate and the base is separate and if I go split on both of them you can see I'm getting lots of different bits and pieces and every single part is now now a static mesh so use that with caution if you have a model and that model is comprised of 200 individual bits in another application and you import that in Split can sort of backfire on you the next one would be the pivot edit pivot and you can see the pivot is off a little bit simply go edit pivot and specify where you want that pivot to be in our case it's going to be the bottom and you can see the Delta mode shows that the pivot is now at the base at the bottom of the chair I'm going to go accept and done I've uh talked about alternative ways of changing a pivot in my I believe one of the YouTube shorts so definitely check that out here's another way of doing that the next one is duplicate and you may say as I don't we have alt drag for duplicate we do however with this one if I go and change the model the proportion of the model like so as soon as I accept the other one follows because alt creates instances it doesn't mean that it's wrong there's a place and time for that but sometimes you want to create a duplicate and ever ever so create a variation out of your original one and in that case you got to use the duplicate in the X form because it just doesn't create an instance it creates a brand new static mesh which has nothing to do with the original one so if I go into duplicate it says all right um accept but the handle input says delete inputs so by default without changing anything if I go accept it only creates one instance for me so be careful in that case I need to go duplicate handle inputs and say keep inputs and you can name the duplicated version whatever you want from input you can say from static mes volume Dynamic mesh or from my selected input and now if I go accept I'm creating another version and this one doesn't necessarily follow the other one as I mentioned so if I go in here and apply a modifier to that one it's only going to have an impact on the selected mesh not my inputs that's the difference all right almost there a couple more and then we're pretty much done the next one is convert and to Showcase convert it's best if I bring a box into the mix and I will explain why so if I click on box and bring the box here you can actually go into X form and convert that to different types you can convert it to volume or dynamic mesh let's start with Dynamic mesh now unlike static mesh every time you create static mesh it actually shows up in the generated um folder ER Dynamic mesh only lives within your level and doesn't go beyond that so something to be mindful of if you ever want to work with Dynamic mesh and one way to identify Dynamic mesh is the icon right here you can see it's very different to The Brick looking static mesh and the type specified as Dynamic mesh and no matter how many times I'm going to copy this there is nothing going to be added into my content drawer so that's one type the other type is I can convert that into a volume and basically that's why I created a cube for this particular example because volumes or blocking volumes are actually quite popular in games where you want to let's say block certain actors uh from entering the volume like it's acting as a collision surface or you want to change something in the environment for example opening a door when the actor enters the volume obviously you need to hook that up to a blueprint script behind the scene and make that active but very very useful to convert any static mesh into volume if you wish to incorporate that into your games so that's that let's delete that one now lucky last would be pattern and to demonstrate pattern I'm actually going to bring one of uh these columns right here holding down alt and I'm going to zoom in now the good thing about pattern is you can create repetitions duplicates either linear or circular with a single click so if I click on pattern you can can see immediately I'm getting a circular pattern of these columns around my scene you can specify the plane at the moment it's XY you can specify what type of shape if circle is not good you can go line and you can have rows of columns and you can have grid and just pretty much scattered it around your Castle or um any type of architectural mesh that you're working on a huge time saer you can also go start rotation end rotation especially with the circle uh you can definitely play around with that translation you can play around with that and get some funky results for example I can enable end rotation and say in y end it 25° and you can see it starts straight and as we're moving towards the end they kind of do a bit of a slant in 25° which is pretty cool you can do the same thing with both of them let's say 25 and 25 and you get something like this as a result you can add Jitter which is a little bit of noise that you can add to the m mix at a little bit of chaos and randomization and it's great for set dressing so as you can see this tool is um by itself is not really doing much but when you put that into a particular scenario it can be a lifesaver so that should really do it for X form there are some other common tools like transforming or aligning repositioning the selected mesh in relation to one another these are common sense and I don't want to spend too much time we are only covering the second category so let's move on to the third one [Music] deform all right let's finish this particular video we can call this part one by concluding deform and we'll leave the rest of these categories for part two I don't want this video to be too long it would be hard to watch before I talk about the form I definitely need to talk about attributes inspect and that allows me to inspect the density of my model before I apply any modifier and that's very useful because you don't need to turn the entire scene into wireframe you can just select your model and go wireframe see boundaries of your edges see your UV seams any missing UVS that you have if you're getting artifact in your model you can identify those and fix those you can look at normal vectors and tangent vectors again if uh the look of the model is a bit odd that's how you actually check few bits and pieces within your static mesh I found this extremely useful uh for the purpose of this one I have a floor lamp which I'm going to bring in I'm going to really quickly duplicate that let's leave that as our backup in case if something happens to this we can bring in a new one and I'm going to split it because it's a single static mesh with split I have access to multiple parts now with that out of the way let's get into deform and I'm going to introduce the first two and they're sculpting so we need resolution every time you deal with sculpt and deform category in general asks for high poly density so if that's the case and your model is not a high poly model you can definitely subdivide it as a matter of fact I'm going to go into attributes inspect and while this is workable I can go into model subdivide level of one subdivision rest set to default gives me much higher density right now with that I can go to deform and these two are going to replicate what typical called DCC sculpting um applications are trying to do something like zbrush or modbox to some degree blender or Maya and gives you the same tool sets we have vertex sculp and dynamic sculpt vertex sculpt approaches sculpting very traditionally by pulling and pushing vertices there is really not much here you specify the size you specify your brush and you take it from there you've got strength falloff and depth of the falloff how intense the center is going to be and the transition or the smoothness of your brush from the center all the way to the edges and the way that you sort of change the fall off is through falloff and you go and pick your fall off um one thing I found quite interesting and the way that I use it the most is through these planes that go flatten and use these planes to get a flat area right here so I can go flatten and start flatting that area uh so I can sort of put a logo in there carve it so on and so forth so that can be very useful but in general I tend to use Dynamic sculpt where you actually create or generate new geometry to the mesh and somehow remesh your static mesh again tools are very typical you get the size falloff depth but the sculpt type or the brush type rather you get a variety you get the flatten and plain along with some other fancy ones that are not in the vertex sculpt and that's why I prefer that also one important option under remeshing roll out would be enable remesh never turn that off otherwise you're turning your Dynamics sculp tool into a Vertex sculp tool so that's the whole reason that's the whole selling point behind having Dynamic sculpt now with that I'm going to let's say turn this very industrial looking shape into let's say clay organic looking type of shape I'm going to lower the brush size ever so slightly and I'm going to start clicking on this base right here until I'm getting some sort of a result and you can see every time I click it feels like I'm actually adding to this volume to this geometry I'm actually remeshing this geometry which is really really cool if I go into create well actually if I go into attribute and inspect you can see I'm not really stretching any points I'm using the same level of density due to remeshing I quite like actually this um Dynamic sculpt and it's for people who are sculptors this is going to be a godsent very very useful and then you can take it from there it doesn't end there like when you create a box that ends there you can go in there and continue with your sculpt I can go and change the brush type let's say into twist and I can do something like this like something along those lines and I can use shift to just ever so slightly um fix the artifacts that I might getting and you can see already I'm getting a really interesting looking result I can now switch let's say to move lower my brush to something really really low and increase the strength to a very high value and start adding bits and pieces in there and just like that I'm getting a very different looking result as my base mesh and then if you want you can go in there and subdivide it even more to fix some of these areas go back sculpt it and take it from there you can see how quickly without even rehearsing I kind of change the look of it in no time at all the next one is smooth which to be be honest with you I'm not a huge fan of it actually kills all the details that you may have but just to demonstrate it you select a model you go to smooth and you can um just crank up this and you can see as I'm cranking up this I'm losing the level of details in my model but in case if you would like to just simplify this ever so slightly get rid of some of these unwanted faces you can apply smooth and take it from there increasing the step is going to increase the resolution and little bit process intensive something to be mindful of lce is without a doubt one of my favorite tools I remember when I moved from 3DS Studio on dos operating system to Alias that was the first time I saw lettuce it blew my mind so one thing you can do with lettuce is you create boundaries with points you pull and push those boundaries it changes the shape let's select uh this model inspected really quick because I feel like it's very low res indeed so I'm going to go into model subdivide subdivision of two should be enough let's go inspect again we have enough resolution to deal with and now I can go into lattice and you can specify how many points you want to get the points in the middle points on the top at the bottom and you can just select them and as I demonstr rated on the chair you can just simply move them to get a slightly better result or the desired look it's absolutely insane things that you can do with lattice I can go and select this one canceling out select lattice on this one I'm going to select all of these points and I'm going to kind of reshape that or you can sort of taper it down or I'm going to reshape it like this so it's more of a bulgy looking base as opposed to again clean shape then we have warp which is extremely powerful for modelers in case if you wish to change the entire shape of your model without pulling pushing vertices in some other software packages it's called nonlinear deformer something like Maya we have twist squash and stretch Bend that's where warp is coming to play so this one was set to twist I can set it to bend and I can ask that to be locked at the bottom I can get to show the original mesh or not and draw visualizations or not uh the good thing about this one is you can actually work with this Gizmo right here so I can select select that white Gizmo move it up and down to change the shape uh same with the bottom and take it from there any change you make to the Delta mode is going to have an impact on your mesh really really cool I can do the same thing with a squash and you can see I'm getting a slightly different result but the result looks absolutely beautiful I can turn that into a sort of a a cone looking lamp or move this down and create a lantern looking shape now you can see that I need even more subdivision to play around with so what I'm going to do model subdivision and add the subdivision set that one to three and that should really do the trick going to go into warp and take it from there you can see the edges are far more smoother but I just love this tool the way that this works is absolutely beautiful now with squash and flare you also get that outward Vector that you can play around with and change the shape how bulgy you want this to be and basically take it from there so I can go that and then make it look a bit wide and re shape that just like that so so many things you can do there are there's a Twist deformer also in there where allows you to twist that let's try it on this base if we can somehow twist this I'm going to turn off the show original model to see how twist works for us and you can see it's already twisting the model upper bound lower bound and gives us a really really interesting look result there is also displays that applies noise to the surface just be very careful the way that you apply this anything with texture it's going to apply that to everything and your texture may be distorted for example I've got a marble looking texture floor here if I apply displacement to that is going to pretty much ruin it but uh for let's say the base I don't think that's a problem let's bring this one actually to the mix and apply displacement to that and just a bit of a disclaimer the default value for display is very very high I need to split that that's better now if I go and apply displacement to this it's going to that's actually not too bad this looks very abstract but 10 the default value is always too high I always bring it down into something like one or two and that gives you a slightly different looking shape you've got the seed subdivision type um the actual subdivision you can crank up the subdivision to support the level of displacement and get the desired look now the type of displacement can be perlin can be a texture 2D map I have a tutorial on YouTube um in my Unreal Engine playlist to show you exactly how to work with that uh so definitely check that out because that alone requires a session by itself but it can give it a perlin noise random noise constant noise if noise is the only one that you're trying to do I would like to think that perlin would be the best one and you go in there into perlin noise options and you can select and deselect the components of that noise the what I found out is the way that this pearling noise gets applied is by starting with very very low frequency and gradually but surely applying high frequency so if I go and deactivate some of these you can see we're left with only broad Strokes like so and then from that you go and apply the secondary one and the third frequency noise and the fourth frequency noise and you can actually go in there and do your own tweaks you can create a brand new one and with this one set this one to one all the way and lower this to something like. 3 and get even a more interesting looking result so as you can see uh unlike model or mesh with deform we're targeting the entire model and we create interesting looking stuff in no time at all that should do it for this video um I will immediately start recording the second part so I can upload that right after publishing the first part so you can kind of watch that back to back thanks very much I hope you found this video useful let me know in the comments below what you made if you have any questions and see you very shortly

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 12,513

Keywords: unreal engine 5, modeling in unreal engine 5, modeling in unreal engine 5.3, ue5.4, unreal engine 5.4 modeling, unreal modeling tools, unreal modeling tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner modeling tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner modeling, unreal engine 5.4, unreal engine modelling tutorial, unreal engine modelling tools, unreal engine modelling mode

Id: NZYxf2IbL5E

Length: 45min 59sec (2759 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024