Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Creating 3D Sci-fi Environment

if you want to learn how to make ghibli style textures in substance painter the latest course from the 3d coloring book was made for you i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course now let's get into this week's video hi guys my name is toma corve and today i would like to talk to you about this alien planet i did on unreal engine for new edge so it will be a quick breakdown i will first show you my work in progress chats to explain my process and mindset when i worked on this and after that i will quickly show you my workflow for sculpting in this brush and texturing and substance painter on stylized assets and for the end i will show you all the tricks i used in unreal to make this scene so yeah let's jump on it so here you can see this beautiful no man's sky fan art made by michael bills and i fell in love with the mood of this artwork the shapes the colors and everything so my goal was to recreate this concept in 3d as close as possible so how do we get from this to this well i started with the blocking in unreal engine the ground has been made using the landscape tool and i made those blocks in 3ds max this way i could set up the camera for the ratio and the field of view to get the same composition and the basic lighting i quickly added a bit of sculpt no retopology here just a decimation master in this brush and i imported it to get that rocky feeling and see how it looks after that i added a little bit of texturing in the background and i softened the bumps because it was really too bumpy and you really don't want to have that soft weak feeling this is really important in your compositions to get those straight lines as you can see in the concept for example here straight line straight line straight line and even in the background it's a round shape but the line is confident as in a drawing you don't want a wavy hesitating silhouette so my blocking was still blocky but a little less before doing the real sculpt you can see that i quickly started working on a grass because it was the most important for me the grass represents around 60 of the image so i focus on it i just added the planet in the background it's only a texture on a sphere i found it on the nasa website you can just go on google and type nasa texture you will see this website called cold sorry called ses cgi moonkit where you can download a really high quality texture you also have a displacement map which i didn't use in this project so i wanted to have a fat grass you know a large blade of grass as in the concept because when you work on stylist art all you want to do is exaggerate every shapes so at this moment i started to get this stylized feeling because the ground is simplified to a unique basic color so i know i was in the right way as in the concept i will show you the shader i used for the grass in the last part of the video on a real engine i added some details in the texture on the rocks and at that moment my grass was getting pretty good i always had this feeling of blending you can you can't really distinguish every blade of grass and you have more complexity with a cloud texture that i generated in photoshop and added in my grass shader here i added the spaceship i won't show it because it's really standard modeling in macs so nothing fancy to show here and other important things is the lighting in the background that's what makes everything pop out you can see this strong shape here and it also shows the height variations in the texture and in the end i added these foggy clouds most of them are just a cloud texture panning on uvs it's the same cloud texture that i used on my grass by the way and this fog in the center is more complicated i wanted to have something more living so i went to fluid ninja to get something cool but i won't cover these parts it's since it's a way more complex subject if you don't know fluid ninja yet it's a really powerful tool for vfx in url you can buy it on epic game store it's about 50 dollars and here you can see it's exactly the particle effect i used for my cloud it was a demo part pattern that i modified a little bit in my scene so yeah now that we have seen the process we will take a look to my sculpting and texturing workflow so i will now show you how i made these stairs so it's a really quick and basic workflow i started in 3ds max so here is the blocking i did it's not the one i used in my project it's a another one i did only for the tutorial so but it's really basic you can see it's only cubes that i put in here so after that i will just import it in zbrush so i can append the sphere and now import my blocking so now i have my blocking in zbrush and now you can see the polygroups i don't have polygroups now so i will go to playgroups auto groups and i will select these two rams to make one only polygroup for the two so i will just hold ctrl and shift and click in the vertex of the ramp now it's isolated and i can i can click on ctrl a and ctrl shift in the gray zone same thing here ctrl shift ctrl a ctrl shift and now i can click on control w and i have my polygroup now i can again ctrl shift on the polygroup control a i have my both roms selected and i can split mask points now i have my ramps in another subtool and my stairs on itself so there are many ways to add topology on it you can use dynamesh or divide or sculptris pro it's whatever you want personally i like to work in divide so you can see if i just divide here i will lose every shape so that's really not what i want so ctrl z and i just turn off the smoothing and i can now divide and i have more topology and i keep my shapes and i keep also my polygroups so that's pretty useful i will add more topology you can see here and now i can start working on the stairs on itself so you can see if i use for example the clay buildup and i start working on a box on this cube it will not affect the cube that is next to it because i've turned on in brush auto masking by default it's to zero but if i turn on this i can work only on the on the on this cube if i turn off it will affect both so i can turn it on you can see i have enough topology to work it's a bit pixelated but well in the final image we really don't see the stairs that much so it's really not a problem i just wanted to work on it because i wanted to train on the rock sculpting in zbrush so i will now show you how i did it i just used in light box the brush called trim smooth border here you have in the light box you have many other brush brushes that are not here here you have only the basic brushes you have trim adaptative trim circle trim dynamic but those sorry those last brushes are the one i used before and uh yeah in the light box you can just select trim smooth border it's really cool because it works to on the stylized rocks it's really cool it creates some interesting shapes really fast so yeah you can see it's not working on the other box because the trim smooth border tends to flatten every face so if you work on a box that is already flattened well nothing will happen so you you can just use clay build up or everything you want so just to add a little bit of modifications in the sculpt and then you can use the trim smooth border here it's working and i click on alt just to add a little bit of variations so yeah that's pretty cool now i can use h-polish for example and don't forget in the rocks it's really important to smooth and add this little edge here also in the corner so yeah that's how i've done my stairs just takes a little time but really not that complicated and i used also the uh up cracks brush just to get for example this rubble is really useful i will add a little bit of the topology subdivide it a little bit so you can see i can add some rubbles there are other here so yeah that's how i've done and i i also use the alpha r block detail uh it's pretty cool also used it on the ramps but be careful with the alpha when you're using it because it tends to modify the silhouette of the props so here you can see i will just turn off smoothing divide again now i can smooth and here you can see i can use my alpha maybe a little more topology so my alpha is working but if i make it too big it will start to you can see here it's really softening the the ramp and everything is wavy it's really too wavy you can see here it's really not good so be careful when using alphas but that's pretty cool and after you can rework on it with the h polish for example so yeah that's pretty much all the tools that i used for creating these stairs and it's kind of the same process i used on the island so here is the island that you can see in the background i don't really work on this part because it's not meant to be seen in the image just to show you here we really don't see it just a little bit here but that's okay so i really don't work that much on it just a little tip when you're doing uh rocks don't hesitate to use the h polish to flatten some parts like here for example oops i break the the topology because this is uh i think it's uh okay i have another polygroup that's why so really don't hesitate to use the h polish because sometimes it gets it gets a really good look in unreal engine that's how i got this nice shape here it's it's really interesting in the in the lighting so really don't hesitate to flatten some some parts of your rocks so here is the hypoli here is the low poly it's only a z3 mesher and here is the flat island i used it's only a unique props it's only meant to be here because i really wanted to get as in the concept i really wanted to get that feeling with those two shapes and uh yeah i decided to make it um and not just taking this island and stick other islands because it doesn't work that way so yeah this is the flat island so it's really flat because i really i don't know the sorry i don't need the the back of the island so here is the low poly and uh as it's a zero measure i have many i have really too much polygons in the back that i don't need it's really uh it's really heavy for the performance and it it's a really useless so i went to 3ds max and i uh deleted like 90 of the polygons and that's pretty much everything about the sculpting um i can show you the trees i can show you the trees so yeah it's pretty basic for the for the the leaves it's on the airplane that i textured in substance painter and this is the the details but yeah i really didn't need to work on it because it's meant to be seen in at this distance so you really don't see anything so that's not a problem that's just a silhouette so now let's jump into substance painter and quickly talk about texturing here you can see the texture i made on this mystical door let's call it that way and uh yeah once again it's a basic process only color variations and roughness variations most of the time so i started with the base color and added some roughness variations after i added some stains every time i used this grunge map i use different grunge map but all the time it's mask grunge map level to control the level of grunge and this time i use the blur slope because it's a really powerful filter if i show you the mask you can see the blur slope at the beginning it was like this and with the blur slope you can have this feeling a little painty stylized it's really cool when you want to do stylized texture texture sorry so yeah stains after i added some leeks with the grunge licks some holes and the runes so here i just used the basic brush basic heart brush and i painted with the symmetry on and lazy mouse this way i can just draw whatever i want and i added some colors and emissive so that's pretty much everything for the door now let's see the rock the cube rock same process again base color color variations with a mask editor this time i used mask editor because uh you can you can use different grunge map that you can combine and you you have a lot of parameters that you can tweak for example here in the curvature i used again the mask editor and you can see that i can tweak the thickness opacity curvature opacity so it's pretty useful here i added some stains and it's really subtle you don't really see it but it adds a lot more complexity in your texture when you do this kind of layers it's really subtle but it it adds a lot in your texture then i added a little bit of ambient occlusion and a baked light that i painted directly on the mesh after that i added some details in the texture because i saw that well at this step the texture is kind of boring there's nothing really interesting to look at and as it's in the foreground you you really want to have something interesting in the foreground it takes a lot of place in the composition so yeah i added a little bit of details and yeah that's better so we can clearly see it's not uh baked it's not something i made in the scopes it's something added in with a hate map i can adjust the power of the of the height but yeah since uh it's just for a little bit of detail so it's not a problem and there i added a little bit of color variations again so yeah that's all for this and for the islands same process again base color i will hide this so base color color variations a mask of blue dirt [Music] and i added the moss so for the moss it's only a base color again with hate so you can hear you can see here i can adjust the height and i added a another layer which is this one so just to add some color variation again and uh most of the work was here when i painted this mossy filling it's only paint i uh you can see i just add in here um why does it okay so yeah and just just add so with the here i'm i use the mouse but uh with the tablet you can you can use the pressure sensitivity to to add some add some variations and i use different layers because when i had like this some holes that i that i liked i don't want to lose them so i add some work in another layer so i'm sure that i keep these holes and here i just added a little bit of of smooth here so yeah that's pretty much everything i have three uh different texture for the islands basically i just took this file and i copied this and i just changed the the mask repainted a little bit so i have a different not here but i have different uh different texture this one here it's more smooth and yeah you can see um and uh i added this this uh this island so around the end uh in the beginning i have that this which is this uh these props and it doesn't work at all so i i made another props just to just to get this filling and yeah i took a little bit the texture to get uh since we can see it a lot i worked a little bit more on it so i added some blue variations so yeah same process i started with base color a little bit of color variation after that some blue stains blue licks here again i used the blur slope to get a stylized stylized feeling some breast mark with the leak grunge leaks that i used a lot in this project i amplified the cracks with a hate map that i painted because we we didn't see it otherwise so yeah just wanted to to see it in the in the scene like this yeah after i added the moss as i showed you and uh yeah that's pretty much everything for the texturing so you can see it's really basic for the sculpting and the texturing it's really basic most of the work in this project is uh is made with the the mood the the the mood and the grass so yeah i didn't spend a lot of time but it does the work so yeah let's now jump into unreal engine and i will show you some quick tips that will be useful uh to amplify the mood and make some changes so yeah let's go okay so now let's talk about unreal engine so here you can see the my scene in the background you can see the the plane with fog texture that i used so i can select it because it's a translucent object so you can just go to settings and go to allow transition selection or press t so this is the texture i took from fluid ninja so as i said in the first part i won't show it because it's a more complex thing but i will show you how i did this i used this plane like four three or four times it's only two texture you can see here it's one going to the left and one going to the right and this texture is is a cloud texture that i used in most of my assets here i used also on the on the grass so i will show you a little bit my shader so i have these notes to control the color and intensity of my fog it's in emissive color because the material is translucent and unlit after that i got my opacity mask so it's the cloud texture that i talked about in the in the first part of the video i will show you just after how i generated this in photoshop so i got this texture going slowly down you can see and this one is going a little faster to the left after that i got my the fade and the radial gradient so the radial gradient is just to just to show you yeah it makes the texture showing only in this zone so i don't have this corner cut and the fade is meant to [Music] to have a fade when the the plane and another asset are overlapping so i will show you the effect of the death fade so if the plane goes here i can change the fade distance and the fade is used to avoid this cutting edge just here so that's all for the fog and the texture that i use is this one so it's an rgb rgb map in the shader i'll i only use the red channel and the blues channel if i remember well so you can see here i have a cloud texture it's styling same thing for the green but it's uh another cloud texture and same thing for the blue be sure when you use this kind of maps to uncheck the srgb here because srgb you check this one when you're using the three channels at the same time but for me in the in the shader i only use here the red channel and this the red channel because i wanted two different clouds and so i only used a gray values map so be sure to uncheck srgb when you use gray value maps so yeah how i did this it's really simple just go to photoshop here i have my image you see it's in 2048 and you go to channel red go to filter render and there you have it same process for the green filter render cloud same process for the blue filter render clouds and here i have three different cloud texture and it makes my rgb cloud you you can also work a little bit with the levels and everything and well that's how i did that is how i got this image it's really useful you can use it in many ways for example i used it on the grass you can see here it's the same texture it's the cloud texture going from left to right so in the shader i'll just show you my shader grass so i have i have this this one is for the color and i have here i have my cloud texture i only use the blue for example but it's the same thing with green and red and it's going from left to right for example in absolute world position because i wanted to to work in in the world space um here i have my alpha for the grass and it's the only alpha i used for the grass so you can see it's really simple and it amplifies the stylized mood i think if you simplify the the shapes you can see it's uh it's really it's kind of united because it's it's always the same shape it makes a good mood i think and i just used this one to add some variations in the foreground and just a little bit over there just as in the concept these shapes and a little bit over there so yeah it's really simple for the grass so texture panning alpha a little bit of simple grass wind simple grass wind it makes this effect when you see it the it makes the the shape moving a little bit and i added yes a little bit of subsurface and that's all that's all for the grass that's all for the fog so now i will show you a little bit for a little bit well some things about the lighting so for the lighting i used a directional light in the background it's this one it only affects the background how i did this it's only with the lighting channel i i made i changed it to zero from zero to one and same thing for all the props in the background it's from zero to one just here so yeah directional light in the background and i wanted to have a little bit more control here so i have these planes these shadow planes i will show you where are the lights here i have no lights for the grass i will show you after how i did this but these lights affect only the rocks so this light and the shadow plane is only meant to have this cutting shadow it's a little subtle here but yeah it's it's here and i have my other light just meant to light those rocks because they are in the light and i have that shadow plane because those rocks are in the shadow so i added these shadow planes to avoid this lighting and for the grass is just a simple trick i will show you grass i have many different type of grass i just changed the color in the texture and so i can go to foliage mode i have all my grass and i can just paint the light if i want something really dark in the shadow and for the foreground a little bit lighter then a little bit lighter and this way i can have a gradient and i can really have control on my light so it's a it's a cool process if you have a light that is static that won't uh that won't that won't change because uh if i wanted to have another lighting i i would have to do all the foliage ever again so yeah it's cool because this pro this process is cool because i knew that i wanted this lighting and no nothing else so it's really cool when you have a static lighting and something that you you know what you want something that you you you won't do you won't do modifications so yeah it's pretty cool because i really have this cutting shadow cutting shadow and a little bit of gradient it's a little bit darker and going lighter in the background as in the concept so yeah that was the that was my trick photographs i can now erase this and now i will show you a little bit of post process i will show you a magical magical life-changing tool in unreal engine if you don't know it yet it's the lat maps so i'll go to my post process volume it's just here and yeah you can see be sure to check the infinite extent if you want all the parameters of your post process volume act to act in the whole scene if you don't check it it will only act in the box and the whole scene will be completely broken so yeah be sure to check this after that um i will also show you my lut so the lat map is really powerful because you can ha you can add the more life in your scene it just it just affects the color palette so you can see here if i turn it on i got that red bloomy mood and it adds a lot in your stylist scene and it's really cool so how do let maps work well you have in enroll engine docs you just go on google and type unreal engine let maps and you have this link i will leave you in the description so how does it work a lot map is this image basically it's all the colors that you can find in unreal you can download it in this page and after we'll we will add some modifications in the color palette in photoshop and put the the modified lot maps that map in unreal engine and it will just work it's perfect it's magical it's really powerful you can see without lut maps it's really cold and neutral and with lot map you have so much life you can amplify the lighting the mood of the scene and everything so oh yeah here you can also see how to drastically change the mood of your scene only with lot maps so it's really great really powerful almost magical so yeah how do we do this in this page you can just click here on let texture example you have this image just right click and save as and you can open it in photoshop after that you go to unreal engine and uh so yeah i will desectivate my led map here and you can just take a screenshot you can use the basic tool on your computer to take a screenshot or you can go here and use high resolution screenshot and so i already have this this is the screenshot of my scene and now you can change everything uh i can for example change the hue saturation if i once uh grasp something a little bit more pink change the saturation lightness i can add some brightness and contrast for example i really can change a lot a lot of things you can see you can drastically change your the mood and it will render like this in unreal engine it's a it's it's magical so yeah uh and be sure when you add some modification uh to use this kind of modifications in your in your image like brightness and contrast level curves no painting no fill layer nothing because it it just won't work so yeah brightness hue saturation maybe a little bit more of vibrance yeah so now i have my modifications i just take this and put it on my lot map so i have my modified lot map i can now save it yep can i can now save it and call it modified let map you can leave it in photoshop file it's working so you save it and then back to unreal post process here i have my loot that i used and now you can drag your modified lot maps so just a little bit of modification here just to make it work you you have to set it in let map so unreal engine can either identify it just go to mipgense mip gen setting sorry and set it to no mipmaps this way you have no modification on the texture and in texture group you go to color lookup table save it and yeah you have your lut map just drag it in your post process and set it to one well what i did oh i made i used my uh my old lot map so here i had i have my modify lot map and all the changes i made on photoshop are here in unreal and yeah it's working well it's really useful if you if you want to work a little bit in photoshop to on the color palette and it's yeah it's really powerful so yeah i think that's everything so this is the end of this breakdown thank you guys for watching and thanks thanks to stylize station for showcasing my work it's been a pleasure and if you want if you have any question or recommendation you can leave a comment below if you want to see more of my work you can check my art station so thank you again and good luck with your projects see ya

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 49,338

Keywords: unreal engine 4 environment tutorial, making a zelda environment in unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 environment art, creating an environment in unreal engine 4, how to build environment in unreal engine 4, blender environment to unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 environment course, unreal engine 4 environment course vol. 1 - the bigger picture, create environment in unreal engine 4, creating environments in unreal engine 4, 3d environment unreal engine 4

Id: q4nAIo1VAAQ

Length: 46min 21sec (2781 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheMain_Ingredient]

I don't know much about the artistic side of all this (modeling, lighting, etc), does this tutorial cover techniques that are reasonable for a game or just for a pretty video? Like, does it cover optimization?

[u/DevendraChouhan]

Just checked your channel.. you have some really good content.. thanks a lot for sharing!

I will try to follow some of the tutorials hopefully in few weeks

[u/brightsire]

Beautiful and thanks for this.

[u/Lehxra]

Nice! I'll have to try that out later.

[u/AngryDrakes]

How this sub falls for this clickbait garbage everytime is beyond me. Good for them though, milking this sub

[u/J_cordz]

Thanks for sharing the tutorial, it is really helpful for the artistic side of Game Development.

[u/psyopia]

Yay!

[u/WazWaz]

100% free tutorials on YouTube? Amazing! /s

[u/Monomorphic]

Just what i needed. Can’t wait to watch!