Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial | Create a Forest Environment in UE5

foreign [Music] scene inside Unreal Engine 5. so I'm going to teach you all the techniques and uh the workflows that I use to make this scene before we actually start with this video I would like to give you a shout out to all the people who support the channel on patreon so thank you so much for your support on patreon and really helps a lot okay so we're going to start from scratch here I'm going to create a empty project and we're gonna use Raid racing so uh turn on rate racing and then just create a project after creating the project we are going to set up our lighting so just go to the environment light mixer and here you can add your light so I want to add everything except the volumetric clouds [Music] select the Skylight make sure that it's removable and turn on Real Time Capture after that let's add a post process volume in the level there we go in the post process settings search for infinite exchange make sure that you turn that on next search for exposure and make sure that you turn that on as well and set your exposure to a question number this way your exposure is going to be locked and the brightness will not change [Music] you can also rotate the sun to change the lighting in your scene so this looks pretty good once your lighting is done you can group all the lighting elements into a folder [Music] okay now it's time for the terrain generation and uh you can you do this like in multiple ways you can do this inside Unreal Engine if you want but I'm going to use a third party program called Gaia so this application is amazing I mean it has a node based workflow and it allows you to generate procedure Landscapes it also has a free version so you can like download the free version from the website so we are going to use Gaia in this video you can use World creator World machine if you want so I'm going to create a basic landscape here so I'm gonna add a pollen noise right here so you can just right click and search for the node that you want this will give you some polar noise you can play with the settings right here so I'm going to increase the scale you can configure these settings as per your liking [Music] next I'm going to add a rugged node so this will add some more fine detail to our landscape after that I'm gonna add an erosion node and as you can see just out of the box erosion gives us a very realistic looking landscape lastly we are going to smooth our landscape so for smoothing I'm going to add the thermal smoothing node so now landscape is looking good so let's take care of the texturing of the landscape for texturing there are many workflows and um I'm going to use the masking workflow so we are going to like generate some Marsh maps and according to those mask Maps we are going to like apply different question materials to a landscape so for masking I'm going to add a slope node foreign [Music] so when you select the slope node you can just see the texture I mean you can't see the landscape mesh so just select the thermal node and you need to pin this as underlay and now you will be able to see the mesh as well [Music] so in the slope you can choose the classic style and the slope basically um gives you like a black and white Mass map so this is a very cool way of like isolating different regions of your landscape and then texturing it based on this black and white mask so a material Mass looks good but we'll also need a displacement map for the landscape generation so for the displacement map I am going to add an output node and this output node will output a displacement texture so in the Bell you can rename this output node to height map when the output properties you need to change the format this is very important because Unreal Engine has some recommended file formats so you can select the png's extreme bet after that you will also need to Mark these nodes for export so now in the build tab you notice that we have these two nodes and these nodes are going to be exported so we also need to select the file format of the slope node right here so just select the PNG as well for the slope so we are exporting these both Maps as 16 bit pngs and that will work really well next we have resolution so here for Unreal Engine we have some presets in Gaia so we are going to choose the 4k1 now if you're using the free version there are some limitations here but again it doesn't matter as we are going to like add a lot of garage and foliage onto a landscape so for the resolution I'm going to select 4033 pixels and now down here in the terrain definition you also need to set the scale to the same value so if your landscape texture is like 4K texture it's like four zero three three by four zero three three you will need to set this scale value to 4033 so these values should match so everything is looking pretty good so you can start the build process this will take some time and after that you'll get two textures one will be the height map and one is going to be the mass map okay so back in unreal we are going to go in the landscape mode and here we are going to import our landscape from our texture so we are going to select that texture right there and you need to change the height here the only thing that you need to change here is the height again I'm not going for like one to one realistic scale so you can change the height to whatever you like for me a height of 800 works fine so we have created our landscape but currently we can't see it because of the exponential height Fork so you need to hide the exponential height Fork and there we go so we have our landscape now um you need to move this landscape on the z-axis something like that and yeah this looks pretty good so now you can bring back the fog the exponential height for so as the name suggests this exponential height fog is a height fog so like it is based on the height so you can move it on the Z axis to increase the density okay so our landscape looks pretty good now let's add some quicksil assets so add Quick Fill content so here we need a rock texture so download it at whatever quality you like download a garage texture as well and we also going to need some grass so download This Grass acid so after importing the assets let's create a landscape material so I'm gonna create a material here and double click to open it so now we are going to import a mask map [Music] after importing the slope texture you'll notice that this is looking like reddish in Unreal Engine this is completely normal because this is a grayscale map so I'm going to drag this texture idea and we're going to use the red Channel and as you can see we have a black and white texture there so basically now the idea is uh I want to like add grass in the white parts and I want to add Rock in the black parts so this is what we are going to achieve and for that we are going to add a loop node so the slope node basically takes in like a mask map a black and white texture and you can add different things in the white parts and the black parts so we have two inputs here the A and the B one and we are going to add our grass and rock textures so let's add our grass textures so these are quixel textures so I'm going to add them like that and first we are going to just focus on the color Maps first similarly add the rock textures as well so just add them and again we're going to focus on the color map first now we just need to Simply add these Textures in the B and the a slot and this might be inverted for you I mean so just play around so for example if you're getting the rock texture and white Parts you will need to like invert this slope so for me the grass is in the B and the Rock is in the a now here we need to do one more thing we need to add the UV because currently like this texture is not like UV map properly so let's add a landscape or coordinate landscape layer coordinate so this is a special texture coordinate node for landscapes and uh the way this works is like you need to add the resolution of your landscape so we used a Terrain scale of 4033 units and we also exported these maps at a resolution of 4033 right and the scale right here mapping scale just add four zero three three if you go back in the scene you'll notice that we have all the textures in the appropriate parts so our Loop is working really well the texture repetition is a lot so for the texture repetition you can add a texture coordinate so I'm going to add a multiply connected in the UVS of the grass texture add a scalar parameter we are going to call this something like grass styling and this value is going to control the texture repetition of the grass now we can duplicate this and you can do the same thing just add one more scalar parameter and this is going to be the rock scale [Music] so if you go back in the scene you'll notice that now our landscape looks pretty good we have less repetition in the textures and this looks good but now we have another problem and our landscape is like quite shiny so we don't want that that is going to be controlled by the specularity and in a similar way you can give different uh glossiness values specular values to different parts of your landscape so let's say your rocks can be like uh more specular than the grass so I'm gonna add two scalar parameters here call It Rock specularity and gross specularity so in like PBR workflows generally we don't touch specularity I mean the specularity value is set to 0.5 but in this case like I'm gonna like lower down the specularity and the specularity is going to also be like controlled sort of uh using the roughness map so we are going to do that later on now let's take a look at adding some more detail in the landscape so for that we are going to use normal Maps again the workflow is very similar just connect to low and we have two normal Maps here the grass normal map and The Rock Norman map and one more thing all these textures should use the same UV values so make sure that you add those properly as well so lastly now we are going to add the roughness map and connect the alpha right there now in quicksil a bridge like the way these textures work is we have like a mast map so this map right here this is called a ORD map so o stands for ambient occlusion and R stands for roughness and d stands for displacement and those things correspond to like different color channels so like in our case we need the roughness so that corresponds to the green Channel so just add the green channel into the loop again connect the UVS properly [Music] and the material looks pretty good so our material is about done so this was like a pretty simple way of creating a landscape material so we have some roughness and we have some normal detail our landscape is looking pretty good now I'm going to add some trees and for the trees I'm going to use Mega scan trees so this is the black Walder pack and you can get it for free in the Unreal Engine Marketplace and since I'm using Unreal Engine 5.1 you can turn on nanite okay now I'm gonna start adding some trees and changing my light let's try this out so if you go to nanite visualization you'll notice that this tree is using nanite actually I've noticed that if you turn on nanite on these trees you get a very uh big performance boost I mean the performance boost is like insane so we'll start some trees in the foreground and the background now you can place trees manually but I will choose to add these trees the rest of the trees using the foliage panel so you can go to the foliage panel select the trees and add it into the foliage now to view the foliate settings you need to scroll down and just drag this window up actually this is a glitch in 5.1 so now you can like change these values you can change the density you can give it a scale like a random scale value make sure that you set the mobility to moveable all the foliage that has wind applied to it or that is like moving you need to set those for these elements to movable if you don't set that to movable you are going to get some Jitter while you are moving and that is because of lumen so make sure that you set those to movable if you have static foliage elements like rocks or stuff like that is completely fine you can change those to static okay so in this process I'm just going to go back and forth change the density and just paint these assets on my landscape make sure that you're only painting trees where there's grass that's one thing to keep in mind [Music] so I've painted some trees after that we're going to add some gross assets so this is the graphs that we imported from quicksil bridge and since we are using UE 5.1 we are going to turn on nanite on the grass assets as well now select your grass and add it into the foliage now we are going to paint grass so make sure that you are selecting the grass assets and like disabling the trees if you don't like the garage density you can always go in the foliage settings and change the density so I'm just going to paint all of these grass acids in the bounds of my view because I don't want to waste resources and if you take a look at the nanite scene you can see that all of these assets are using nanite one more thing you can also use part tracing to render this you will see this part racing setting if you are using raid racing so while we created the project we turned on rate racing so that enables the part Tracer as well now if you go back in the post process volume and search for like part tracing you will see all these part racing settings so you can basically include the sky atmosphere as well in the part racing you can turn off the denoiser so if you include this guy at mods from the pod racing you can see that we have a very realistic looking scene in my opinion the real-time view looks better I think so yeah that's it so if you learned something in this video make sure that you like the video also uh check out my patreon page I upload a lot of different like unreal projects there so like if you want to get all of that stuff make sure that you check out my patreon page lastly subscribe to the channel for more videos like this that's it thank you for all the support and I'm going to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: pinkpocketTV

Views: 42,369

Keywords: ue5, unreal engine 5, ue5 tutorial, ue5 beginner tutorial, ue5 forest tutorial, ue5 nanite foliage, ue5 nanite trees, ue5 nanite grass, ue5 forest scene, ue5 forest landscape, ue5 realistic environment, ue5 realistic forest tutorial, ue5.1 new features, ue5.1 nanite foliage, unreal engine 5.1, create a forest in ue5, 3d environments in unreal engine 5, create a photorealistic landscape in unreal engine 5, ue5 path tracing, gaea to unreal engine 5, gaea tutorial, gaea ue5

Id: K1DMZkCmX1Y

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022