Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial for Film: Landscape and Materials

hi everybody and welcome to another beginner tutorial in this video we are going to be looking at how to use the landscape to establish the base of our scene and we're also going to be talking about the materials i'm going to be talking about pbr how to use some of the parameters from the quicksilver surfaces and we're going to be applying this quicksort to the landscape we're also going to be blocking out what's going to be our main staging area now this is going to be a fairly small world so i'm only going to focus on what's going to be on the camera we're not focusing on building a large open environment we're just focusing on what the public's going to see in the end if you like these videos and you want to help out the channel there's a link to the patreon down below you can follow me on twitter there's the discord if you have any questions and let's get started okay here we are within the engine one of the things i like to do before we start anything is establish scale and for that we're going to bring in a mannequin the mannequin is kind of like that white robot that you see in all of unreal engine assets in the marketplace that it's usually for demonstration purposes now i already have it right here but i'm going to show you how to get it so you click on the add button that's in your content browser and you're going to go into add features or content pack over here you're going to select third person you're going to click on add to project once you do that you should get these folders over here except the mega scans ones that's from pixel and if you double click on mannequin and character and mesh you're going to see that we have a male in the female this is the skeletal mesh this is what you want to use as scale so i'm just going to drag this one over here and i'm going to rotate him so he's facing me there you go so now i have my scale to a regular human size now the purpose of this video is to talk a little bit about the landscape tool the landscape tool is something that we have in unreal to create huge terrain or exteriors uh it doesn't matter the size to be honest you can use it to create uh wide open worlds and you can use it to create smaller worlds which is what we're going to do right now so if you click on this the activate landscape editing mode it's going to take you to the landscape tool so the landscape tool pretty much is this flat plane that contains a bunch of squares or polygons where you're going to be creating your terrain now before we go here know that there are various ways that you can create your terrain the first one and the easiest one is after you created your terrain you can manually paint over or sculpt your terrain on this you can do this with the brushes that we have here or you can do it with some alphas which will give you some more detail the other way is by using a height map so as you can see over here it says create new or import from file so i could get a height map from certain terrain programs like world creator world machine and i can just import them out in here and i'll have my terrain the other way to do it is by using real world data so there are websites so you can go and you can get scan data for a specific part of the world and it will give you heightmap for that and you'll bring it here in as a high map as if you were using world creator or any of those programs uh with import file and it'll be here now the reason why i am going to be using landscape in this particular tutorial is to use it as a base for my project so it will block out the floor the entire floor on my project we're going to add a material to it but i will not be doing any sculpting or anything else where actually the background mountains there are various other ways that we can do it and we're actually going to bring other things from third party programs like blender where we can make a very nice looking terrain because we're not caring about the polygons anymore this used to be a tool that was very cool for games because of the optimization side of it meaning it allowed you to have a large terrain without uh impact on your performance we're not gonna be worrying about that so much so we're gonna be bringing a run but we need to make our floor we need to make the base of our terrain so we're gonna use this now let's go through the parameters over here you're gonna see that we have the transformation parameters so location rotation scale actually turn that back to 100 just to show you something now we have the section size which means that if i scroll up you're going to see that i have a giant square and a bunch of tiny squares so right now that giant square is divided in two sections so two by two it's four so four sections per square actually i'm just going to take it to default this is how the default looks like and this little tiny squares these little tiny polygons are the section size so this is 63 this way by 63 this way on each one of these now this is not super important for this particular series because we're not going to be doing it for this alien world we may be using it for later on and i'm going to show you um when we need it how to use it correctly but just know that if you want to increase the resolution you can increase the little cost right here and you can increase the sections another way to increase the resolution if you don't want to make your world any bigger um let me just increase the speed of this you can just change the scale so if you need a tiny world like we're doing right now you can change the scale to 60 and you see that these polygons reduced in size which give you a much better resolution if you need to do some sculpting on your landscape all right so after that all we have to do is hit create and it will create our landscape for us so as you can see we have the sculpting brush which is something i'm going to show you but one of the reasons why i don't like to use this so much is because it produces these kind of like blobby results there are other tools here but they will never give you those nice terrains that we're going to be making later on in other programs so i'm just going to undo that and i'm just going to bring this to rain so it's in line with my character so i'm going to get out of landscape mode and i go back to select mode i want to select my landscape and i'm just going to bring it down so right now is 100 so it's raised by 100 centimeters by the way unreal it's made on the metric system so that's pretty much what i'll be talking about and we're just going to switch this down to the one so remember the z-axis the blue one goes up and down so i'm just going to change this to 1. why am i not changing it to 0 because if i do 0 this is too close to the grid and sometimes that grid shows up and can be a little bit annoying like you're seeing right here so i just type 1 so it's a little bit higher than the grid now my character is no longer touching the floor so i need to fix that as well click on him and there you go now he is stepping on the floor so let's look at some of the parameters that we have right here this uh information is giving you what your landscape is about so your resolution the components um the amount of subsections etc over here and again this used to be an optimization tool so it has a ton of lod options if you need to use that added layers which we're going to check whenever we're using water we're not going to be using water right now and we have the landscape material this is where we're going to add the texture or the coat of paint for this particular landscape all right so we're going to be adding that material to this part now so for that we're going to go into content we're going to go to quinzo bridge and after we signed in we can start looking for our content so i'm going to type icelandic i'm gonna go for surfaces because again that's the coat of paint that we want for this base landscape and we have a ton in here that we can choose you can choose the one that you prefer i'm actually going to look for a specific one it's kind of like a sandy and the reason why i'm choosing this one is because you're going to see that when we put it on it's going to tile tile means it's going to repeat and this one the repetition is not as bad so i'm just going to add it i've already have it downloaded i'm going to add it to my project and also remember to use the highest quality as you can see successfully exported one asset now if we go back into content you're gonna see that now we have a mega scans folder so you double click this one um double click on surfaces and it's going to show you the surface that you have right here in this case we have the icelandic lava sand the two by two means this is two meters by two meters so that's pretty much the size of your tile when i'm after i add it you'll see what a tile means its original size is 2 meters by 2 meters now as you can see this looks kind of wet and we're going to talk about the material side of things in a little bit but know that this is caused because when you're bringing in right now at the moment i'm recording this video um i don't know why this map the ord map is coming in black and white it's supposed to be a colored map in order to displace all parts of the physical base material correctly before we go into the material let's fix that i'm just going to double click here and as you can see where it says compression it says alpha no rgb we actually want it to be rgb so i'm just going to choose default and now you see that our icelandic levesan it's no longer wet it looked pretty wet because of the roughness so we go here you're gonna see that we have all kinds of controllers let me explain something before we actually get into this now if you've never done 3d when we talk about physically based rendering or pvr this means the textures aka the coat of paint that resembles a physically correct material so this is based into a couple of maps in this case we have a diffuse or albedo map which indicates our color then we have a normal map which a normal map it's kind of like the simulation of detail in the 3d world it's one of the ways we used to use it in games back before we didn't have night we use a lot of normal maps to simulate detail and now even though we have nanite we can simulate very small detail by using normal maps so these maps allow the light to react to those details and make our assets look even better now these maps these ord maps is where the pbr part is saved now usually for other engines if you're using quiksil mega scans for something like maya or 3ds max or blender or whatever usually you get maps with like ambient occlusion roughness metalness which have to do with the pvr pbr so when it comes to the pvr your metalness is the map that indicates what's metal and what's not so it's it's just a zero or one value it doesn't have any values in between the reason for that is because in the real world something is either metal or it isn't and there's no like almost metal that wouldn't be physically accurate the roughness is as the word says it it implies what is rough and whatever is the has the lowest roughness means it's going to be smoother so it's going to reflect more light a mirror or a glass is a lot less rough than your carpet that's why the mirror or the glass will reflect more light than your carpet will and the o for occlusion there's a thing called ambient occlusion that if you look at real world objects you usually you don't notice it because it's just part of the real world but there's usually a very very thin line of darkness in between things where light just doesn't go it's a very very small line you have to start looking for it uh to see it but this is a map that allows that detail to be translated into the 3d world because these are crevices that are so small that sometimes the ray castings within the engine will not pick them up and will not produce those things that will make our results more realistic here in unreal engine what quicksilver has done is pack these maps into a single file so it's they are a lot easier to use so what they do is uh part of that map is in the r part it's in the g and part it's in the b so we have red green and blue that's where the maps are saved and that's why it's important that this is a colored map in order to react correctly so let's get our material in here first before we talk about the parameters the way you're going to do that is you're going to grab you're going to let it go here that's one way another way is you just click on it and just click this little arrow right here and that will assign it all right so after i have assigned it it's going to compile a little bit i'm just going to wait for it to compile so this is the texture for our landscape and as you can see there is some repetition in there i'm going to lower the camera and if we get closer you're going to see that this looks really nice but if we go outside you're gonna see that there is repetition and there is a lot of it this is what i mean by thailand so as you can see this thing is tiling really really hard and the way we kind of compensate for that is by adding acids to it so there are plenty of tutorials out there that show you how to mix the landscape in order to kind of help out the tiling the thing about trying to fix the tiling is you can do it to a certain point but you always have to get rid of the tiling by adding stuff to the world so you cannot expect to create a full landscape that will have a material that will not look tiled at all if you don't have any variation to it so either you have variations of different materials to get rid of that tiling or you just have assets all around the world which is what we're going to do to get rid of that tiling now this tiling is it's pretty harsh so we're going to fix it by looking at some of the parameters that the quiksil material shows us so if we go double click in your material so anything that would change here you're gonna see that instantly happens over here it may take a little bit of compiling but it will pretty quick so the first thing that we're gonna look at is tiling and offset so if you click on that little arrow it will make a drop down menu you have to activate it first so click on it and we're going to reduce this number so we get less tiling now every time you reduce this number it will make each tile bigger that means that if you reduce this texture by a lot you'll you'll start seeing pixels and will not be as accurate or maybe the rocks that are here will start look ridiculous like let me just show you what i mean so let's do a very very small value there you go so if you go crazy with this and you say hey i don't want to see tiling at this position you're going to see that these rocks look ridiculously large and not only that but they're losing a lot of fidelity and there's a lot of pixelation and this thing just doesn't work for uh what we're trying to do and we're trying to use this as a scan so i'm going to make it to a value of that's more acceptable so again this looks like nice smaller pebbles but even as at this distance it doesn't look as tiled so we can have the camera at this distance if we start going up of course we're going to start see it actually my favorite one is 0.25 that's for me the sweet spot you can tailor that to whatever you want but that is the talent that i like to use so offset this isn't something that i use a lot um because it just moves the texture around it doesn't do much to better my landscape so as you can see if i just move these values it just moves around but it doesn't change much i mean occlusion strength doesn't do a lot in here the other value that does affect a lot of our terrain is the albedo tint so let's say we want this floor to have a very particular color we will go here we also have the albedo controls which we'll talk about in a minute but if we go into the albedo tint you can see that now my landscape is blue if i go here now my landscape it's going to look pinkish so you can try all kinds of colors in here and you if you want to reset something you can just um do this little arrow right here and that will reset the values for you if it doesn't reset instantly then just uncheck it and check it again and it will go back to normal now we have saturation brightness contrast these are other ways that we can affect the color of our material so if i increase the saturation you're going to see that this start changing and all kinds of colors start appearing um depending on what you're trying to achieve with your terrain if you want to enhance the colors a little bit maybe just a tiny bit of saturation will do then there's the brightness so i'm just going to do ridiculous values just to show you what it does so if we do like 15 i have a completely um overexposed terrain so i'm just gonna bring that to one again and contrast um when you increase it increases the contrast so again it depends on what you're trying to achieve it will change your material right here one will make it brighter one will make it darker so if we do like five you can see that it gets a little bit dark now as you can see if i use a higher value of contrast it gets pretty dark so i'm just gonna turn it back to where it was i usually don't mess with the albedo controls unless i'm trying to match specifics so let's say that i bring in a prop that is probably not supposed to be in this kind of terrain but i want it to match i'll start playing with these controls until i get the color that i want so i'm just going to reset everything just to make sure that i have the base material and if we need to make some changes once we bring in our assets that will do so now there's another value in here that you might be interested in which is the roughness of it so let's say you want this to look a little bit wetter a little bit shinier so you will just reduce the roughness values you meaning you make it smoother and will reflect more light so let's do 0.1 you can see that pretty much this whole surface it's like super wet it's like uh it just rained and it's it's pretty reflective so that's why it simulates um kind of like that wetness effect so you can tailor that in case you need to make a very specific kind of terrain the alien world that we're making doesn't have any wetness on the terrain so we're not going to worry about that i just want to show you uh that this was here so after we've established our landscape then another thing that i want to do is establish my shot and the way we're going to do that it's not by using the viewport look we're going to bring in a camera so if you go into place actors i'm going to look for a cinema camera so if i actually if i type camera over here you're going to see there are several things uh there's a cinema camera actor and there's a camera you want the cinema camera actor because we're doing stuff for film and this will give you a ton of options that you can play with that this camera doesn't so we're gonna bring this one in you can see it's huge and this is what we're going to use to establish our shot so let me change the speed of my camera let me use my subject as the target i'm gonna bring it back and there you go so let's say around here is fine and now you can see that when we move the the light kinda adjusts uh in this game engine one of the things that it has is something called auto exposure which will pretty much try to make the exposure to a certain level when i'm making things it can be bothersome so as you can see this is getting super bright but if i get closer and the brightness goes away i'm usually transitioning a lot so in order to get rid of this problem we're going to add a post-processing volume so i'm just going to look here in a post-processing volume by the way that's very important why i like to have this here because i just can look for stuff instead of you know looking up over here so i'm just going to click and drag and it's this nice square that we have right here now this square has all kinds of options but for the meantime we're going to go over here if this drop down is not open just open the drop down that says lens we're going to go into exposure we're going to check these so metering mode exposure compensation the min and max i'm going to change this to one as you can see nothing has changed the reason why nothing has changed is because by default this post-processing volume it's meant to react whenever you are inside of it so that was the default reason why it was created but there's an option here where you can just make it infinite so you don't have to be inside of it you can just make it affect the whole world so i'm just going to click here and boom that's how we get our exposure to be one the same whatever we are now you can see that the light is no longer changing and i have something a little bit more correct so we have our subject we have our base and now i need the other things that go on my scene and one of those things was the giant pillars and again i'm just going to show the scene right here just so you can see what i mean but i did have some giant pillars and those were my huge visual targets and i want to bring them here however i don't need to bring them right now i can just use geometry to block where they're going to be and we can bring them later so i'm just going to grab this cube let's put it next to our character and those pillars were pretty big all right so i'm just going to do 10 times and let's see right now as you can see it's rescaling uniformly because i have my padlock another tip you can do is you can have your padlock and if you switch to your gizmo right here i'm just using the letter r to switch to scale you can still even though you have the path on the lock position you can still scale it in one direction so i'm just going to scale it this way and let's review our camera actually pretty close so let's see i'm going to go into my camera i'm going to change my focal length to 30 and i'm going to hold right click i'm going to navigate backwards until i can see the first pillar and i think i'm just going to open this in another viewport and i'm just going to move my pillar a little bit back so i click my camera you can see it here there you go so i may want to reduce the size of this something like six so we can have a little bit more of it on scene now let me just add the other one so if you hold the key of alt and you drag into one direction you're pretty much going to copy that object so that's how i'm creating my second pillar i'm going to bring it into the end i'm going to switch to my camera and i'm going to throw it all the way back like this it's going to be all the way back here and this is going to be kind of like the framing of my scene if i were to go into my cinematic viewport go back into my camera and let's test it with the rule of thirds so probably want this guy over here so it looks a little bit better there you go and he's not gonna be on the scene so it doesn't matter he's just for scale so let me just leave this one right here and we pretty much have the blocking of our environment everything else it was in my environment was some mountains right here that we're going to make in another video but like that i just established my shop all right everybody that is it for this video in the next video we're going to start adding more mega scan assets to our scene we're gonna add the static meshes and we're going to flesh out our world so you're not gonna wanna miss that make sure you hit that like button and leave me a comment really helps out with the engagement follow me on twitter subscribe to our discord server and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: MR3D-Dev

Views: 61,672

Keywords: unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 for filmmaking, UE5 tutorial, Ue5 Beginner, mr3d-dev, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, UE5 Landscape tutorial, UE5 landscape material

Id: 5Ipg0Ow5xQI

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021