Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial Part 10: Post Process Volume

by the end of this video you're going to learn how to use the postprocess volume to turn your boring looking scenes from this to this and guess what we're also going to teach you how to use the path tracing rendering engine to get the most physically accurate scene what is up beautiful people welcome to chapter 10 of our Unreal Engine beginner tutorial Series today we are going to talk about post process volume wow you made it until chapter 10 it's amazing you are good you are good great job great job now today's video this one right here is going to be one of the easiest honestly it's going to be a breeze and it's going to be also one of the best because what we're actually going to do is bring in something into our scene called the post-process volume now the post-process volume acts as an extra final filter on top of all of your renders which makes them look beautiful this is where you can add glow and Bloom add Vette to your screen even film grain things of that sort control the exposure usually postprocess volume is added in the beginning of our projects like right in the beginning right in the start so you can control the look of your scene it just didn't make sense to do it this time around because we had to go through the paces go from materials you know modeling and all that but you want to do this in the very beginning we always do it in the start so this is how you can go and bring it into your scene you'll just go to the top left where you can add things and then either just search so while your mouse is still on the Square Cube button you just search for post process while volume now it's showing it under three different categories all of them are the same right it's because it's under visual effects and volumes and also under all classes just drag any of them to your scene and it should look like the frame if you hit F and find it it will look like oh we have g off which is our overlay so hit G make sure you have your overlays back on and then it looks like this empty Cube that's what the postprocess volume looks like so basically all you have to do is control it it details right here it has a lot of options and we're going to go through some of the most important options so now that we have the post-process volume in the scene we're just going to go inside it and start playing around with some of the parameters so hit postprocess volume and let's start at Bloom okay this is my favorite we're going to turn them on just like our material instances just to enable them and activate them let's turn on method and intensity and already if we go Ahad and increase the slider let's look at what happens to our light magical you see that it's adding a glow around our lights if we look around you'll see it as well what what's going to happen if you go outside the cube so if I walk outside the cube let's see what happens boom gone see what if I don't want it to be only in the cube I want it to be active all the time so there's a way you can do that and the way you do that is by looking for by searching for unb that's a short term but it's called Unbound so unb infinite Unbound infinite extent Unbound by checking this it says hey this postprocess volume will work anywhere in the scene so now that I'm outside I'm still seeing the impacts of the bloom but I can have multiple post process volume for a scene right that's absolutely the case here so if you were to uncheck this imagine if you have a game right and you want to go ahead and place a postprocess volume and then maybe scale it you can absolutely change its size and say okay if I have a player and he's walking into this area I want to increase the bloom and Max it out because I have a fire in this location and then when he walks out of this bounding box I want to bring down the bloom so you can have another hold alt another post-process volume so I have two now and this one can have absolutely different settings and that's fine when the camera or the player walks into the other post-process volume and we can we can check this right now actually the second postprocess volume let's go ahead and change it intensity to maybe like eight so right now we're in the first one and then if you go to the next one you see the bloom see the difference this one is four this one is eight makes sense so that's the whole reason why you have multiple post-process volumes but usually for cinematics where you're changing the levels based on every scene usually we only have one we've only created one per scene so far but you know what it's good to know that you can have more than one so in our first postprocess volume let's first go ahead and click unb search for unb and turn it on so that it affects our entire scene so we don't have to be inside the postprocess volume then we can go and actually hide this one we can just drag it anywhere in our scene so we don't see it anymore now starting with our we don't need mobile depth field our Bloom there is the standard function and there is convolution so convolution is more expensive but it also works specifically with the lights so you don't see Bloom applied to the entire scene it only works on top of the lights if you look closely if I increase convolution you see it only affects our lights which is why it's more realistic more realistic but also more EXP expensive but you might want to go for standard let's just keep standard for now it's fine so let's go I don't know why all of them are open I don't like the fact that all drop downs are open I want to now go directly to lens flare you see how we have lens flare I don't like it and that comes with our postprocess volume so if I open it up by default it's on one so all I have to do is either increase the intensity of my lens flare or decrease it to zero I don't want to have any so I'm going to disable it by decreasing it to zero now the next thing and also super important setting is exposure so you can have Auto exposure which by default is on in Unreal Engine and what that does is for example if you're in an absolutely dark environment and suddenly go to a light environment your eyes your pupils change size to adjust to the lighting unal engine does the same thing but sometimes you want to make sure it stays the same so when you're going to different parts of your scene your light is not changing so to do that you have two choices one you can change this Auto exposure to manual and by default it's on one so you can increase it and then now everything in your scene will be sticking to this specific exposure or another way to do it is instead of going to manual we like to do it this way changing your Min and Max EV to just zero so this is now our default the same exposure that we had and it's not going to change anymore this is your exposure chromatic aberation if you played with After Effects and Premier Pro and D Vinci you will know this effect it's basically changing the RGB and and taking the RGB planes and just moving them a lot of people like to like use this for an artistic effect i' like to keep it either at a very minimal value like 0.2 to help sell more of the photo realism CU some cameras actually have the chromatic aberation which is why it exists as an effect but you can also add it in post if you don't want to use it here so you can just turn it off how we can add vignette so vignette is going to be under your image effects right here so if you turn it on by default it's on 0.4 by just increasing the value it just makes your scene more cinematic cuz it puts all the focus in the middle of the scene and the vignette around the darker circles around your image is going to make it more cinematic so maybe we can keep this at a value of 0.4 five what do you say yeah I think that looks good I like that yeah one more thing I like to say is dirt mask so dirt mask is basically the dirt you're going to have on your lens to sell the realism and that one is a texture that you have to bring in we don't have it right now so we're not going to add anything but you can go ahead and bring in a dirt MK texture and add it over there the camera settings we're not going to touch cuz we're going to change that within the camera we're going to skip everything else like depth of field again everything can be done within the camera itself next up is color grading right again you do that in D Vinci right I exactly I like to do it in post in Da Vinci resolve that's where I'm used to all the settings but you're more than welcome to change the settings here you have access to global sh Shadow Global for everything or separately the Shadows the midtones the highlights and also maybe we'll just change one of the settings here how about we just play with the temperature since we know this scene is going to be dark and cold because it's the hanger for the bad guys the Sith Lords so we're going to reduce this number see what happens oh you see have you come to destroy me ob1 you know yesterday we saw the Japanese of Darth vad I want to watch Star Wars in Japanese now the only thing that works in a dub I would say that doesn't make it cringey is if you change English to Japanese but if you change Japanese to English sometimes it becomes really cringey like if you watch Animes in dub but yeah so we just made it slightly colder just a little bit we don't have to we can always changes but now you see it's more of a filter right that's what postprocess volume does so these are your color gradings now the next thing we want to talk about again film does the same thing you can change all of these settings the next one we're going to talk about which is really important is your rendering settings right and this comes in really handy because technically you can directly access these settings either through your settings right here the project settings which we're going to touch on in a moment or through your console commands which we're going to touch on as well later in this tutorial series but they have a shortcut for you in the post-process volume so you have access to some of the render settings so let's see what they are first of all we have to look at I'm I'm going to close all these drop downs cuz they're really annoying because by default they should be like this now the next thing we're going to cover is the rendering settings that we can access within the postprocess volume now these are not all of your rendering settings but some shortcuts that will help you quickly change some of those qualities in your renders now by default Unreal Engine 5 is using Lumen so if you take a closer look here for our GI Global illumination and Reflections we're using Lumen far what is Lumen can I cheat yes please Lumen is under engine's fully dynamic Global illumination and reflection system absolutely so the reason why Lumen works really well with Unreal Engine 5 is because of how realistic it looks at the same time because of how real time it is which means we can work and move around scenes really quickly and have multiple different materials multiple different assets and have almost no noise almost no noise what is the other option that we have beside l so beside Lumen we have another option which is path tracing right and if come from blender or other 3D softwares the Cycles Render for instance is a path tracing renderer that's a method of rendering and if you have no knowledge of 3D rendering then you should know this so for us to be able to see and view these objects the computer the hardware has to work with the software to create this look for you how does it know what the metals should look like how does it know how the metals should reflect like so that it looks like real metal well there's different rendering enges and they work differently but path tracing renders are actually the most physically accurate because they're actually bouncing out hundreds of different rays of light and then see how they will bounce off different materials and then come back to the camera which is your eyes and then make it as realistic as possible now inside Unreal Engine we actually have access to a path tracing render which is the most realistic and we'll show you exactly how to access it so right now we're in Lumen which is why we can move around the scene really quickly there's no noise almost noise and things are super smooth but if you go to our lit View at the top left here and then actually change this to path tracing now if you don't have a strong computer be careful with this make sure you save before you do this because you might crash again depending on your computer if you change it to path tracing pay close attention to what happens to our materials do you see the difference this looks a lot more realistic look at the roof look at the ceiling sorry and you can actually see if you pay close attention the edges the normal maps that we created if you go back to Lumen look at how light is being reflected first of all we lose detail in the top area like right right here because it's trying to cancel out the noise and make this work in real time but if you go back to the path tracing renderer and try to move around the scene do you see the noise yep if you come from blender or other 3D software this is what you're used to right this is why Lumen is so freaking good because it looks almost as closed as possible possible that it can to a path racing renderer it's not there yet but it's close but it can work in real time with 80 FPS right now with all these things in our scene so if you go to our postprocess volume we have Lumen as our rendering method now we can go ahead and change some of its settings like for instance for the global illumination which is how you know it's Illuminating our scene we can go ahead and enable all these settings and sometimes they're going to make a huge difference depending on what materials you you have what items you have let's say you have a forest but sometimes they not they might not make that big of a difference so if you goe and change for example our scene detail from 1 to zero do you see what happens to our light here and then change it to back to one do you see the reflections exactly and also here seen lighting doesn't make that much of a difference right final gather quality not much of a difference right now but the more items you add you can keep playing with these values ready to go and then see what difference it makes to your scene for us it doesn't make that much of a difference so we're not going to touch it default is great the next thing is Reflections now I'm going to enable these and let's just talk about quality so right now it's at one reflection quality look at the top here look at what happens far if I change this back to 0.25 noisy do you see the noise yeah because the reflection quality is low and then bring it back to one see the difference we can take this number to something like 40 right and there's a difference right one to 40 there's a slight difference it's slightly brighter at the top but it's not so noticeable and remember when you increase these sliders your FPS is going to take a hit now the biggest difference is actually outside of the post-process volume and since we're talking about rendering fire should we go and talk about the settings let's go to Project setting and then let's look at them I think that's a great idea because the problem right now is if you look at the reflections here on this Cube you don't even see the lights you do not oh yes I just noticed that yeah where are these lights why are they not reflecting from this Cube and also if I use right click and C to zoom in look at the the the weirdness in the shapes they're they're just so unclear and I don't like it so let's go to our rendering settings outside of the postprocess volume so we go to setting we go to Project settings and then we're going to go all the way down to rendering rendering right here and you're going to be doing this this almost every project by the way so make sure you get used to doing this you're going to go down here and depending on your computer if you have an RTX enabled graphics card like we do a 4090 you can go ahead and use something called software and Hardware rate tracing and rate Tred Shadows to increase the quality and the realism of your scene so in order to change and enable those effects one under Lumen we can enable Hardware rate tracing when available so pay close attention to the difference this is going to make okay look at the reflections here and look at what happens Hardware rracing enabled boom boom lights are here congratulations so right now it's actually using our graphics cards R tracing capabilities to be able to bounce off and we can even see our aial lights reflecting off of this Cube which is great right so the quality is better it's not perfect yet now the next thing we're going to change is our Ray lighting mode from surface cache to hit lighting for reflection I don't even know if this is going to make a huge difference for our scene but just looking at what the description is talking about the hit lighting for reflection has better quality so that's what we're going to do and even if you don't do it oh it did it did actually make a difference right but guess what farad we can actually change this one this one already has a shortcut in our postprocess volume let's quickly go back here check this out project default or no let's go to surface cache see we don't see half of our lights hit lighting for reflection boom now the reflections are perfect yes it's freaking perfect okay so again some of these settings are in our postprocess volume some of them are not wait listen did you know that you can create highly photo realistic scenes with photogrammetry by taking in what exists in the real world into 3D we've been using polycam to do exactly that using our phone and drone yes that's right and guess what they sponsor this video to give you guys 30% off their Pro Plan so you guys can go ahead and try it for yourself use the code bad decisions in the link in the description back to the course so the last thing we're going to do is turn on Ray Trace Shadows now currently in our scene because of our lighting setup we're not going to see a big difference but this is actually going to make your shadows a lot more realistic let us maybe see if it makes a difference here hold on yes perfect see that so right now this cube is creating this Shadow which is not realistic but you don't notice it because you don't know better but check this out R Shadows boom that is what Shadows are supposed to look like so change your settings and make sure that your computer can handle it though before you do that but if it can changing settings and your scene is going to look a lot better I still have a question about postp paress volume what is that fum grain can we add that absolutely we're going to do that so let's go ahead and close the project settings let's go and save make sure we have everything saved and then we are going to close Global illumination and fart right before getting to film grain do you want to just test the quality and Max refle reflection bounces here just just I just want to see if it's going to make any difference so zero no one so in Reflections nothing and then Max reflection bounces oh yes did you see that yes so this was at one but because the lights will be reflecting multiple times if we change it to two we're actually seeing these Reflections on the on the wall inside this Cube as well if you change to three you'll see yes we'll see even more but look at our FPS oh dropping look at our FPS from 70 to 60 so be very careful I want to keep it at three I want to keep it high or two I think two is good for us right we're going to find the the middle ground and now we're going to go to fire Hud's request of film grain film grain which is right here so film grain is just going to emulate some film grain that you usually add in post and we're going to in enable it right here and increase it all the way to one so you see the difference look at a cube do you see the film grain yep yep and then decrease it you can put you can add it in div result too so absolutely I always like to add just a little bit here like 0.3 because the more imperfection you add here a small amount and then later when you add a little bit more in post it's going to make everything look less CG and that is always our goal because we want to make it as photo realistic as possible so I would say 0.3 is perfect okay so faras you showed us the Lumen settings how we can change the path tracing settings okay that's actually a good question because the setting are here as well under path racing let's go ahead this is for the path racer nerds let's go change lit to path racing right now and we can go ahead and enable all of these options okay and then change the settings here so you can go ahead and change the samples right now look at this loading bar it's loading in yeah 248 samples so we have to decrease that number so that it doesn't take ages something like maybe 150 and you see how much faster that loading is and then we can change a Max bounces to a lower number like three is fine okay it's going to be enough and then Max path exposure to 13 this is usually my sweet spot and then now we can go around the scene and then look at all these beautiful Reflections this is the most realistic way you can look at your scene if you're nerding out with path racing but for the continuation of this series we're going to go back to Lumen okay perfect and farro I think we are done with our post-process volume guys we are 10 chapters in next chapter we are going to talk about hdri and how you can add your own custom hdri so see you guys in the next video

Channel: Bad Decisions Studio

Views: 16,874

Keywords: unrealengine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue, ue5, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Unreal engine for beginners

Id: P5z6vRGGl8g

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024