Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial - UE5 Starter Course

hello everyone if you are completely new to unreal engine 5 then this tutorial was made for you in this tutorial you will go from knowing nothing about unreal engine 5 to creating this beautiful world you see right here now i know this might look intimidating but do not worry every step in this process from sculpting the landscape to creating the castle will be shown in detail this video is pretty long but that's because unreal engine 5 is a big program and we have a lot to cover to help navigate this video i divided it up into individual chapters you can find links to all the chapters in the description below in this tutorial you will learn how to install unreal engine 5 and create a project how to navigate and move objects in your 3d world create materials and import 3d models go over unreal's amazing new dynamic lighting system called lumen sculpt landscapes and paint foliage download free nanite objects from the mega scans library and finally we will briefly go over how to program a game using blueprints and at the end create the fantasy environment you see right here i know learning unreal legend 5 can be tough at first which is why each chapter in this video can be treated as its own self-contained lesson so if you're ever stuck on something you can always go back in the video and re-watch that chapter also all the assets i use in this video are completely free so you can follow along with me now with all that being said let's jump into ue5 to begin before we can use unreal engine 5 of course we have to download unreal engine 5. to do so you need the epic games launcher you can get it from their website and come all the way down here to the unreal engine tab now with the tabs up here you want to click on library and if you don't see on launcher 5 then you don't have it downloaded to download it you want to click on the plus icon next to engine versions and make sure you have five selected and then click on install now it's going to ask for an install location you can just leave out the default place but if you do want to bring it somewhere else then you can click on browse and select a new location but i'm just going to leave that default and click install once unreal engine 5 is done downloading all you have to do to open up is to click launch or you can click launch up here but unreal engine 5 isn't set as the default engine you can set as a default engine by clicking on the drop down and selecting unrun to 5. alternatively if you don't want to go through the epic games launcher you can click on the drop down right here and create a shortcut on your desktop now that shortcut has been created let's open up unreal engine 5 by just double clicking on the application the unreal project browser will pop up when you open up on real engine essentially this is where we open up recent projects or we create a project completely from scratch which is what we're going to be doing now you can create your project from a template which essentially is a pre-made project to help point you in the right direction with a lot of stuff already done for you for example if you're in the car industry and you want to render out a car then possibly going into the automotive tab and selecting photo studio will be a good template from where you will start but for our cases i want to start from complete scratch so i'm going to come to games and make sure i select blank now down here is the project location where our project is going to be saved i just want to save this on the desktop if you do want to save it somewhere else then you click on the file icon right here and browse to a different folder now right here is the project name so let's call this one first project and up here are some project settings now i'm going to leave it at blueprint since we're not going to be going over c plus plus coding in this video and down here i want to make sure starter content is enabled starter content will give us some nice assets that we can play with to help us learn unreal legend 5. below that is ray tracing we're not going to go over ray tracing just yet and of course to create this project let's click on create so this is what you should see when opening up unreal engine for the first time don't worry we're going to go over what all these different windows and buttons do in just a second but before that i want to go over how unreal engine stores projects so let's exit out this project and we can see that a brand new folder was created on our desktop remember i selected my desktop as a place to save our project essentially this folder contains all the data that makes up our project so whenever we make a change in our project or we create something in the project it's going to be stored right here now to open up a project again all you have to do is double click on the dot u project asset right there and that will open up your project from where you last saved it to begin let's briefly go over how to navigate the user interface and what all these different windows do so probably the widow that sticks out the most is the viewport right here or the viewport is essentially just a view into our 3d world that we're creating so for example we can fly around and look at our world we can even grab objects and manipulate them all within the 3d viewport now don't worry we are going to go over camera controls and how to move objects in just a bit but i first want to go over what the different windows do right above the viewport is the toolbar the toolbar is pretty important because it's where we get all of our tools and a lot of different buttons we're going to be continually pressing for example what if i want to add an object into our world then i can click on the plus icon and scroll down to shapes and maybe i add in a sphere and place it in the world to move it around i can also switch modes so right now i'm in select mode which is the main mode where we can move objects around let's say if i'm making a landscape i go into landscaping mode and create a landscape or i can go into foliage mode and start to paint foliage if i do have those assets if you are curious we are going to go over both modes later in the video now to the right of that we have the outliner the outliner is essentially a list of all the objects that make up my current world so for example if i want to select a chair but the chair isn't in my view right now within the outliner i can select a chair right there like that i can also select multiple objects by holding down control so maybe i want to select both chairs just hold on control like that and maybe also the statue right there the outliner is also a great place to organize your world for example we see we have all these folders real quickly if you want to create a folder all you have to do is right click create folder let's call this one my folder and hold down control let's select both chairs and simply drag them into there just like this we can also hide and unhide objects for example maybe i want to edit something that's behind the table but the table is in the way right now i could come here and temporarily click on the eye icon to hide the table and i click on the eye icon again to unhide it and right below the world outliner we have the details panel the details panel is essentially where we can edit all the properties of an object that we have selected for example maybe if i don't like the scale of this chair right here i can select a chair and come to scale and maybe increase it by two in the z axis which is the vertical axis and see that we have a really long and tall chair now i don't like that edit it looks kind of weird so you can always press control and z in unreal engine to undo anything now we do have one more default window that's arguably the most important window since it stores everything we're doing it stores information on the chairs the table even the entire world and that is the content drawer you can get the content drawer by going all the way down here to the bottom left hand corner and clicking on content drawer like that to bring it up alternatively since this window is pretty important you can press ctrl and space at the same time to bring it up and close it so if you press ctrl space it's going to bring up the content drawer and this gives us a folder view of all the assets that make up our project so for example if we want to see where this chair is being stored and maybe we want to edit the chair then we can come under starter content props and right there we have sm underscore share if i double click on it we can see the chair assets and make any adjustments if we do need to now we're going to go over the static mesh editor later so i can exit out of this window by clicking on the x icon i'm going to press control and space again to bring back my content drawer and probably the best example i have for the content drawer is that it's like your computer's file explorer so just like on your computer where you have folders and then those folders you have subfolders and those subfolders contain assets like text files or word documents same exact thing with the content drawer in unreal so you have folders and in those folders you have subfolders and finally you have all those assets that make up your project so for example here we have the starter content folder and i could go into it by double clicking like this or i can click on it right here within the folder window now i could go into any of these different folders for example the maps folder contains the map we're currently editing so we can see up here that this map is called minimal underscore default right there's minimal underscore default we can double check that we are editing this map by double clicking on it to open it up let's go save and we can see that it did open up the exact same map now if i ever want to go up a folder i can always click on here so right now we're in the maps folder if i want to get out of that i can click on starter content and if i want to get out of that we can even go to content right there now don't worry if you don't have starter content you can click on add and then add feature or content pack and then go to content and simply select starter content and add a project i'm not going to do that since we did add it when we were creating our project as you can guess the content drawer is a pretty big deal and maybe you don't want to press control and space all the time to bring it up you always want it docked in your layout well all you have to do is click on docked and layout like this and now your content drawer will be right here at the bottom and notice how it's called content browser right now not called content jor so whenever i say content browser and content drawer just know that i'm talking about the same exact thing now this is great but this tab right here is taking up a little bit of real estate if you ever want to get rid of a tab all you have to do is right click and click on hide tabs if you want to get back that tab then you can click on the very small blue triangle and that will bring back your tab also tabs are great because if you left mouse button and hold you're able to move this around and dock it somewhere else so maybe if i don't want content browser at the bottom right here i can dock it to the side or i can even dock it to one of the tabs right here and now i'm able to switch in between details and the content browser also if you ever want to move windows around you can hover in between the windows and then you're able to move it down just like this to adjust exactly how you want your user interface now another neat trick is that if i dock my content browser right here and let's go make it a little bit smaller and maybe i don't want it always visible i can right click and go dock to sidebar now whenever i want my content browser or any other window i can just click right here and it will show now if i don't want to dock to sidebar i can right-click and unlock from sidebar just like that now i'm going to click on the x icon to get rid of that content browser alternatively if i want to automatically dock all my windows in a sidebar except the viewport i can click on f10 which will go into full screen mode and now we can see that my outliner and details window and any other windows i have on the side will go into docked mode and then i can click on f10 again to bring those windows back so f10 is a neat shortcut to automatically dock all your windows now these are just the default windows if you want to see all the windows that are available to us we come up to windows and select any of these now one window that we are going to be using a lot is the world settings so world settings as you can guess just has a bunch of different properties and settings that we can play with to edit the map we currently have opened now for example what if we really mess up our user interface it's basically unreadable we have no idea what is happening don't worry we can always come up to window and all the way down here go to load layouts and click on default editor layouts which will just reset all of our windows now that we have the very basics of the user interface out of the way we can move on to the fun stuff and that is camera navigation so how to navigate our camera around our 3d world so we can view it at all different angles to navigate is actually easier than you think so you want your cursor inside the viewport and then you want to hold down the right mouse button if you now move your mouse with the right mouse button held down you're able to look around your scene and still with the right mouse button held down you're able to use the wasd keys to move around you can also use e and q to go up and down so that's e to go up q to go down w to move forward s move backwards and a and d to move left and right all the while holding down the right mouse button if you are not holding down the right mouse button and you try to use wasd then nothing will happen so make sure you do hold that down now we can also control our camera speed so let's say for example there's an object that's really far away and you want to go towards that object but your camera is moving too slow well if you come up here to the top right hand corner and select the camera icon you're now able to control that speed so right now we're at four we can also bring this up to six and now we are a lot faster and we can bring this all the way down to one and we can see that we are pretty slow so let's leave it at four and a shortcut to access camera speed is to of course hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel so scroll wheel up we'll move faster and scroll wheel down will move slower so that's a shortcut that's why you don't have to come up here and continually play with the camera speed if you do want to move faster or slower here's a really good tip let's say if you scroll really far away so you fly really far away from where the bulk of your geometry where your world is and then you look around and you can't find your objects anymore what you can do is come up to any of the objects right here let's say for example the chair select that and then press the f key to focus on that object so if you select an object you can press f to then snap to that object just like this so that's how you're never lost in your world so if you ever played any first person games you should be right at home since the muscle memory is there for wasd keys and rotating your camera by moving your mouse now if we press f again to then zoom in onto an object we can rotate around that object by holding down alt and the left mouse button so alt left mouse button allows us to rotate around a pivot object and if we hold down alt and hold down the right mouse button we can zoom in and out so right mouse button zoom in and out left mouse button to pivot around that object and to focus on object of course we want to select it and press the f key just like beforehand before we move on let's briefly go over the viewport controls so we know the different ways that we can view our world so up here we have perspective let's say if you want a top-down bird's-eye view then we can click on the perspective button and select top like this so to control in orthographic view mode you want to hold down the right mouse button to pan and of course use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out so right mouse button pan scroll wheel to zoom in and out we can also view it from the side like maybe the left side same controls and of course if we want to go back into perspective we come up here select the button and click on perspective notice how a lot of the buttons in unreal have a shortcut right next to it for example perspective shortcut is alt n g so instead of coming all the way up here and selecting perspective in the drop down i can just press the alt and g key at the same time to go back into perspective so right next to perspective is our view modes so view modes are pretty great because they allow us to see our world in different ways for example maybe we don't want to see all the lights and we just want to see the colors of our world instead of coming up to lit i can select unlit right there or i can even select wireframe to see our world's edges and vertices we will be changing our view modes a lot since it's a great way to debug our scene and see if there's anything wrong so i'm going to come back up here to lit or the shortcuts are alt 4 for lit alt 3 for unlit and all 2 for wireframe so let's jump back with alt 4 to get our default view and right next to our view modes is the show flags so show flags allow us to turn on and off different object types for example what if i don't want this grid right here at the bottom then i can come to show let's go find where grid is and uncheck that to hide the grid now maybe for some reason you don't want to show our static meshes anticentric static meshes are all the objects you see right here then with the show flags we can uncheck static meshes and we no longer see those static meshes now obviously we don't want that and if you ever mess up your show flags you can bring back the default flags by clicking on use defaults and keep in mind that we aren't deleting anything with show flags they just help us see what we want in the viewport and finally this is my favorite viewport option and that is game view so if you come up here and click on the button with the three lines we have game view all the way down here and we can see that the shortcut is g now if i enable game view we're gonna see exactly what the player will see in game so if i press g to untoggle game view we can see that we have all these different widgets and we have the grid right here and of course the player won't see the sun widget right here which controls the sun's rotation instead if we want to see exactly what the game will see we click on g to hide all those widgets and features that are here for us the editor so just know that throughout this tutorial when you see a bunch of widgets and these widgets just disappear that's because i toggled on game view with the g key now that we know how to navigate around our world it's time to go over how to create new objects and move them around so we're gonna go over moving scaling and rotating objects to begin let's go over simple movement i'm gonna press a g key to get rid of our editor widgets and now all we see is our world so to move an object simply select it and by default we get the translation or the movement gizmo to move an object hover over any of these arrows and hold down the left mouse button so i'm able to move this chair around but notice how moving the chair isn't smooth that's because by default snapping is turned on now you could turn off snapping by coming up here and unchecking the grid icon like that so now we can smoothly move our objects around now i'm going to turn it back on because it's important to know that unreal uses centimeters so right now since there's a 10 right next to the icon it's snapping every 10 centimeters we can change this by selecting the number and in the drop down let's select 100 so now it's moving every 100 centimeters which is one meter so every time this chair moves it moves one meter so that's pretty important to know now i'm going to uncheck it because i do want smooth movement next up is rotation so to rotate your object you want to change its gizmo to change the gizmo you want to select one of the buttons up here so right now it's on translation right next to it is rotation now i can rotate this chair in all these different axes we can see that rotation snapping is turned on if i want to turn that off then right next to translation snapping we have this icon right here make sure it's not blue and now we're no longer snapping every 10 degrees i can press ctrl z to undo all those changes and let's go over scaling so right next to rotation we have scaling and scaling works pretty similar to the rest of the gizmos all you have to do is hover over any of these squares hold down the left mouse button and now we're going to scale in that exact direction so if we want to turn off scale snapping of course just uncheck the icon right there and now we can smoothly scale i press ctrl z a bit because it's important to point out that if i hover my mouse not over one of the individual squares but the one square that's connecting all of them so the one in the middle hold down the left mouse button i can move my chair and scale it uniformly up and down so not in any particular axis so i press ctrl z to undo all those and if we hover over all these buttons we see that there's shortcuts so movement is w rotation is e and scaling is r so that means it's w to move e to rotate and r to scale so those are some of the most common shortcuts that we're going to be using consistently throughout our time in unreal engine so again one last time it is w to move e to rotate and r to scale i also want to point out that if we want to move our object in the direction of our object then come up to this little globe icon select it that's how it's now a square and we can see that we're now able to move the object in that object's direction so move it locally instead of globally if we want to switch it back to global then click the square icon again to make it a globe and now we're moving it in the direction of the world and not that individual object it's also important to point out that if i press w to get our translation widget and if i hover over the square that's in between the different axes i'm able to lock it and move it only in those two axes so if i hover in between the y and x-axis i'm just moving it in between those and not in the z-axis i can also lock it in between the z and y-axis just like this so let's press ctrl and z to undo those changes now you're probably wondering how do we create an object in our world well there's a couple ways number one is that we can duplicate an object so with any object selected for example this statue if i press control and d then we just duplicate that object now we didn't notice a change that's because it duplicated it in the same spot as the original object so if i hold down the left mouse button and move it out of the way we can see that we did duplicate that object and within the outliner there's now a new object called statue2 which is a copy of the original statue so let's delete statue2 and there is an easier way to duplicate this is the way i duplicate and that is hovering over an arrow with a translation widget selected and holding down alt and left mouse button so hold down both of those and simply drag and now we're able to easily duplicate and drag an object away so let's press ctrl z to undo all those changes now another way to create an object is by using the add tool up here in the toolbar so for example let's click on add and let's come all the way down here to shapes and maybe we want to drag in a sphere simply drag it in like this or we can even add in a light like a point light and we're able to drag it around in our scene so let's go delete those and finally the last way to add an object is through the content browser so let's bring up the browser by holding down control and space at the same time pressing both of those and let's go into props and add an object into the content browser hold down the left mouse button and drag it into your world for example this couch so let's go move it down just like this and now we have a brand new object so by holding down shift you can select multiple objects so for example if i have my chair on the left selected and i want to select the chair on the right if i hold down shift now i have them both selected if i hold down shift again i can add in the table and the statue now if i want to deselect an item all i have to do is hold down control and click on any items to deselect them now all we have is the statue and the left jar selected and here's another tip if i have the chair selected hold down alt and the left mouse button to drag out a new chair let's say if i want to drag this chair all the way over there then i'm going to have to drag it across the screen move my camera drag it across my screen again and it's just a huge hassle another way i can do it is by holding down the shift while i'm dragging so if i'm going to hold down the left mouse button on one of these arrows and i want to lock my camera to the object simply hold down shift and you're able to lock a camera to an object which can save on a lot of time so i'm going to press delete and let's create a very very simple scene just to get a hang of all the controls so to begin i want to hold down shift and let's select these two chairs hold down alt and duplicate them out so let go hold down alt and left mouse button again alt and left mouse button again now let's go rotate some of these chairs that's how they're facing inwards so select a chair press e to get the rotation gizmo up and have them all face inside just like this again it doesn't have to be pretty perfect because we're just trying to get used to controls at this point and then i'm going to select the table press r to scale it and i want to elongate the table just a little bit maybe even its x-axis press e again let's rotate this press w move it into the middle right there select the chair hold down shift let's select the other chair and move them all in let's select the statue move it into the middle press r scale this up and maybe add some lamps on both sides of the table so press control and space within our content starter content and props we have this sm underscore lamp ceiling if i drag it in this is exactly what i want but right now it's in the opposite direction so i want this to be placed on the ground i can press e rotate this and try to get to 180 degrees or i can press ctrl z and re-enable snapping for rotation right here and rotate it exactly negative 180 degrees which is what i want so press w and let's move it that's how it's directly placed against the ground like right here so i could try to guess exactly where it is or i could snap any object i have selected to the object that's directly below it by pressing the end key so that's end not the end letter so press end end and snap it there just like that so press r again scale this up in the z axis hold down alt and drag it and both the y and x axis right there like this let's hold down shift again and drag a both of those across our world just like that and i would say congratulations you now have a very very simple level this is definitely not the best map but it is pretty good as a first level now that you've finished your first level it's time to move on to the post process volume so we're going to go over how we can change the settings of our viewport camera specifically exposure while in the process of creating our first level you might have noticed that if we zoom into the shadows we see our screen gets brighter and brighter and brighter and then when we zoom out our screen gets darker so that is auto exposure and what exposure is trying to do is it's trying to mimic the way our eyes work so for example if you've ever been in a very dark room and you decided to jump out into the daylight you could feel your eyes start to hurt and everything is really bright but slowly over time your eyes start to adjust until everything comes into focus and that is exactly what unreal engine is trying to mimic by brightening our screen and darkening our screen so i think we can create a better example by duplicating this map and creating a little house so to do so let's press ctrl and space to go into our content drawer and i want to duplicate minimal underscore default which is right now located in starter content and maps so right here is the current level that we have there's a little asterisk right next to it and that tells us that it needs to be saved so press ctrl s to save the level and to duplicate the level simply press ctrl and d to duplicate now let's go rename this to post process example and let's go save it so if i double click on minimal underscore default this is the current map that we've been on and then if i double click on post process example this is the new map that we're about to edit now notice that our grid is pretty large right now that's because we have our snapping sent to 100 we can make the grid squares smaller by saying this back to 10 as is default so now our grid is a little bit smaller or you could press g to hide all those editor widgets now i want to start deleting all these objects so simply select an object and delete it to get rid of it and here is a little tip if i go into the outliner since i do want to delete all these chairs i could hold down control and select each chair individually or i can select the first chair at the very top of the list hold down shift and select the last one and then it will select everything in between so control is to select individual objects and hold down shift is to select a row of objects and press delete now let's create a little hut so i'm going to come up to add and hold down the left mouse button on cube to add in a very simple cube keep in mind that this is just for demonstrations to show exposure so this won't be the best hold down alt let's go duplicate this wall and hold down alt again press e and i want to make sure snapping is turned on so i can rotate this exactly 90 degrees right there hold down alt again and drag it out just like this so hold on alt rotate this as a roof and i do want a slight opening so that the sun can come through and illuminate the inside of this hut right here like that so now notice that if i zoom in on this and go inside the hut we can see our screen get brighter and brighter and brighter and then as soon as i fly out our screen gets darker so when i go inside our eyes adjust it gets lighter so that we can see exactly what is inside the hut and then if i zoom outside our eyes get darker now this can be annoying if you are building out worlds so to turn it off and to lock your screen to a certain brightness we could come up to lit and all the way down here under exposure uncheck game settings now we have a constant brightness that even if i go inside the hut we see that our screen isn't getting darker now right underneath game settings we have eb 100 if i bring this down our screen gets brighter and if i bring this up our screen gets darker so we can leave it at zero for now now there is just one issue and that is this change doesn't apply to gameplay to play the game come up to the toolbar and click on the play icon now we are currently in game but if we let's say go into the hut we see auto exposure is turned on since our screen gets brighter and when i leave the screen gets darker on a side note if you want to stop playing the game press the escape key to exit out maybe this is what you want when you're building out your world you have a constant exposure and then when you're in game you have auto exposure turned on but if you do want to edit the exposure directly in game this is where post process volumes come in handy now we won't be able to see the exposure changes with the post process volume with game settings turned off so come to lit and make sure game settings is turned on again and within the outliner by default we will have a global post process volume for this map so with the post process volume selected within the outliner we see that we have a drop down called exposure and we have exposure compensation now in order to edit any of these properties you want to make sure that they are turned on first and then we're able to adjust the exposure but auto exposure is still turned on right now so what we can do is select metering mode and instead of auto exposure histogram select manual now we control exactly what our exposure is with the exposure compensation so if we leave it at nine press play again we see that we don't have any auto exposure in game so you might be wondering exactly what the post process volume is well the post process volume is a great way to add some effects after everything has been rendered so the post process volume only affects our camera for example maybe we want some more bloom so we select bloom and write out intensities at 0.675 i can boost this up all the way to let's say 8 and maybe if i want the default values back instead of trying to guess what the default values are i could come over here and select that backwards arrow which will set everything back to its default value we also have a bunch of other settings for example under image effects we can add a very strong vignette so right now it says 0.4 we can bring this up all the way to one so there's a lot of darkening around the size of the camera or we can completely turn off vignettes by bringing it down to zero so by default unreal does have a little bit of vignettes with it being at 0.4 we can also go down here and change some of the color grading so maybe if i select saturation i can move the wheel around and we see just a little bit of changes i can even boost the saturation down here so instead of one drag this up and now we have a really vibrant and saturated scene and of course i can uncheck this to get rid of that change so if you want there are a ton of different settings you can go through and see what all of them are but you might be wondering how do i create a post-process volume if i don't have it inside of our world so to begin i'm going to press g key to bring back all of our editor widgets select the post process volume and let's delete it so we can go over how to create a post-process volume from scratch of course we're going to select the add button it's going to be under volumes down here we have post process volume so simply drag this into our world and we see that we have a little square so let's make a very quick change so the change i want to make is down here within globals and saturation instead of one i'm going to change this to zero but we notice that there are no changes to our camera right now that's because the post-process volume by default only affects whatever is inside the post-process volume so if we move into the cube we can see those changes taken into effect and right now by changing global saturation bringing down all the way to zero it gives us a black and white world now what if i want this post process volume to affect our entire world well scroll all the way down here and under infinite extent unbound make sure that's turned on so that's how we don't have to be within the post-process volume for that post-process volume to take effect now it's time to go over materials but do keep in mind that materials can be a little bit complicated especially if you're brand new to 3d arts so if you do find yourself a little bit lost throughout this course do keep in mind that you can always go back in a section and re-watch it to demonstrate materials i want to create a brand new map so to do so let's create a folder where we're going to store all the assets we create so i want this folder to be under content right next to the starter content folder right click and select a new folder i'm going to call this folder my stuff and double click to go inside of it now to create a level i could right click and under create basic assets select level but i want to use a level template since this will just create a completely blank level so to use level templates you want to come up to file new level and you can select open world or basic i'm going to select basic and now we have a pretty basic level it's just the floor right here and the sky now in order to save this level in a specific location or a content browser you need press control and s and it's going to ask us where we want to save this level select my stuff and let's call this one material example level and then select save now pressing ctrl space to bring up my content drawer we can see that under my stuff our level is saved so if we ever want to go back into this level i just have to double click and we will open up that level now i do want to make some adjustments if we zoom in on the floor we can see that our grid is showing through and it's right on top of the floor now this grid will be distracting when we're showing off materials so i'm going to come up to show and uncheck the grid to hide it that's all we see is the floor material also i think this floor is a little bit too big for our purposes so i could use r and hover in between the y and x axis to then scale it down like this or alternatively within the details panel of this floor i can set it to 1 and the x-axis one in the y-axis and one in the z-axis just to give us a smaller floor i also want to add an object to place our materials on top of and we can do so by pressing ctrl space and unreal actually comes with a bunch of assets and objects by default so this is content that is not located in starter content instead it's located in the engine folder and if you don't see your engine folder right here that's because you need to come to settings and make sure show engine content is enabled now we get access to all of unreal's default content that is contained in every single project so let's go into content and i believe it is under engine meshes and it's specifically sm underscore map preview mesh now we can also select engine and type in sm underscore mat to bring up that asset so i'm going to drag it into our world and let's rotate it in 90 degrees and we can rotate it 90 degrees exactly by making sure snapping is enabled up here now i also want to control the exposure since if we zoom in on the shadows and zoom out we can see that auto exposure is enabled right now so let's create a post process volume by going to volumes post process simply dragging it out i want this to affect the entire world not just whatever is inside this box so scroll down and make sure infinite extend bound is turned on now if we go up here under exposure make sure metering mode is set to manual instead of auto and exposure compensation we can bring this up i found a value of 11 to be pretty good now as a reminder if your exposure isn't changing from your post process volume you need to make sure that in lit game setting is turned on because otherwise it's going to default to ev100 setting right here as the exposure amount so make sure game view is turned on that's how we're using post process volume and since i do like my scene right now you want to make sure to save everything with control and s and actually i think i'm going to bring down my exposure to let's leave it at 10.5 so now it's finally time to go over materials and adding a material to your world is actually pretty simple so press control space and luckily starter content comes with a bunch of materials by default under the materials folder so let's double click into materials and we see we have a bunch of materials that we can use so to add a material to our world you want to simply hold down the left mouse button and drag it until you're hovering over whatever object you want this material to be placed on and let go it is that simple so now we have a brick floor or for example to make this object steel i can drag a steel material onto the object and let go we can even add grass right there like this and we can see the reflections updates on the metal right there whenever we are switching our different materials which is pretty cool so let's select the grass and i do actually want to make this just a little bit bigger so let's scale it in x and y axis like this and i think the screen is too bright so i'm going to bring its exposure conversation down to 10.25 so that's the basics of adding a material to our world what if we want to create or edit a material well to create a material is also pretty simple it's just like creating a level press control and space and come into my stuff where we're going to create our material right click and under create basic asset select material and let's call this first material and press enter and double click on it to open up the material editor first off before we go over any of these settings you'll notice that my window is right now floating so something i like to do with all my editor windows is to hold down the left mouse button on the tab and then dock it up here just like this that's how really quickly i could switch in between my main level view and any of my editor views so in the middle we have the material graph essentially what the material graph does is basically we have a bunch of nodes that connect to each other and their end goal is to eventually be outputted into one of these outputs right here which will create the actual material now the controls are pretty similar to the controls of our viewport when in orthographic view mode so hold down the right mouse button to pan and then use a scroll wheel to zoom in and out so right mouse by the pan scroll wheel zoom in and out you can select nodes by just clicking on them or holding down the left mouse button to marquee select now to the left right here is the viewport if you hold down the left mouse button you can pan around this preview mesh right here which helps us see our material when we're editing it now we can change the preview mesh down here so maybe you want to use a cylinder or a flat plane a square but for now i'm just going to keep it at a sphere and right below that is the details panel so if we select a node we're able to edit that node's properties right here in the details panel so how do we create a node well we come all the way over here to the palette click on it and now we have a selection of all the different nodes we can use to create a material we can also right click anywhere to get that same palette so under palettes i want a constant 3 vector under constant the reason why is because the constant 3 vector is essentially unreal's version of color it's r g and b for red green and blue right now this note is set to black i could edit it by coming to the details panel and double clicking on the color to get a color picker or i could double click on the note itself to get that color wheel so notice how when i do change the color right here there are no changes that's because its value is set to zero i could bring up its value by clicking onto this rectangle right here so now when i change this color we notice that color changing and when i do like a color i want to confirm that this note is going to stay that color by clicking ok so now we have our first node with a new color essentially if i hover over this pin right here and hold down the left mouse button i'm able to drag out a wire and i can choose where i want to place his wires in any of the inputs right here now of course because this is a color it should probably go into base color so with my left mouse button still held down i'm going to hover over the base color pin and let go to connect it now we can see that our color is affecting our material so let's see what this looks like in our level so press ctrl space and let's drag first material onto the sphere and notice that there are no changes right now this looks like the default material and that's because we first need to compile our material after we make any changes to see the change in our level so go to first material and to compile material you want to click on the apply button and also while we're at it let's save it so if unreal crashes we don't lose our progress now if we come back to our level we can see that change took effect now jumping back into first material if we let's say change the color to a light blue jump back into our level we see that there were no changes because we need to make sure after we edit a material that we compile it with the apply button and now we see that light blue that's how you add color now what if you want to edit how shiny or reflective the material is well on our first material instead of editing the base color we're now going to edit the roughness channel right here and roughness doesn't take a color value of course instead it takes a scalar value in between zero and one so zero means it's really smooth and one means it's really rough to get a scalar value you wanna come up to palette and under constant select the constant one value left mouse button hold and drag it out and now we get a node that is simply a number so zero will be smooth one will be rough let's make this really smooth by giving it a value of 0.1 and simply left mouse button hold and drag it into roughness if for some reason you ever want to break a wire all you have to do is hold down alt and hover over any of these pins and left click so alt and left click to break any pins and we will not see this change in our level unless we press apply so jumping back into materials i'm going to press f and hold down alt and left mouse button to then pivot around my material all its nice reflective values notice how we can see all the different clouds in the sky being reflected off the material now so that's roughness but what if we want to make our material metallic well go back into first material and this is where the metallic input comes in really handy so we need another constant vector and we could get it by selecting that node and pressing ctrl and d to duplicate it or i can get it from the palette and of course i can right click and simply type in constant so normally when i am getting nodes in i just right click and type in the name of the node and press enter to bring it in so i'm going to give this a value right now of one since by default there is no metallic value it's set to zero so send it to 1 and plugging it into metallic we'll make this blue pretty metallic and in fact let's go change the color to something orangey press apply and now we made a gold material it's very important to point out that unreal engine's material system is based off of physically based rendering or pbr for short for example right now i have a project open up to demonstrate pbr values and the two main ones to know about are metallic and roughness we've already played with them and essentially both of them are on a scale from zero to one now by default metallic is set to zero so there is no metallicness on the material and our roughness is set to 0.5 now as i bring down the roughness we see our material gets shinier and shinier and then if i bring it up our material gets rougher and rougher so if i bring it all the way down to zero and play with the metallic value which is right now as default value of zero so it's not metallic but slowly we can see it goes from a plastic material all the way to a very shiny gold material and if we play with a roughness value we can really see those changes taking effect now both these values are clamped from zero to one so let's say if we input a roughness value of negative one then it'll be clamped to zero or if we go above one then it's going to clamp it down to just one so keep that in mind that if you do try to input a value that's outside the zero to one range you won't see any changes and it's important to point out that generally for metallic values we never go in between zero and one you won't really see a material that's 0.5 metallic instead materials are either all the way zero or all the way one here i am back in our original project and you notice that we no longer have our material opened up here well that's fine you can always open up the material on any object by clicking on that object and then in the details panel we see all the materials are currently on top of that object so just double click to open up our original material we created alternatively you'll see a little magnifying icon right there if i select that then it's automatically going to jump to that materials location in our content drawer and we can double click to open it up right there like that so the pbr sliders we were just playing with are the metallic and roughness values right here so those sliders correspond with these values so hopefully you understand exactly what they do now now i'm going to make a slight edit so for metallic let's bring it from one to its default value of zero so that's how it's kind of like a plastic material right now and also i think it's a little bit too bright so double clicking on the color i'm able to decrease the brightness by playing with its value so bring it down a little bit press ok press apply and now i do think we have a nice material but normally when you have plastic outside it wouldn't be this uniformly shiny you would expect dirt to pile on this material and make some areas of the material rougher than others so let's jump into first material and to add a texture press control and space let's go in a starter content since starter content comes with a bunch of textures under the textures folder and the texture i want to use is specifically t underscore purlin noise so to get a texture into your material simply left mouse button and hold drag it in and let go like that alternatively you can right click type in texture sample select that and then within the details panel and the drop down of texture go ahead and find whatever texture you want to use and select it so that's alternative way to add in a texture and now that we have a t underscore purlin noise if we open it up we can see that it's just black and white all the pixels of the texture represent a value in between zero and one so they are perfect to plug into either metallic or roughness plug our texture into roughness since i wanted to drive the roughness value of our material and delete the old node since i no longer need it press apply drop it back into our material example and now if i angle it with the sun and here's a nice tip if i hold down control and l at the same time i'm able to rotate that sun so i'm able to bring it down like move it around and see what our material looks like in different lighting scenarios and right now our material is looking a lot more realistic we can see that because of our material all the black spots represent shiny areas and all the white spots represent rough areas which gives our material a nice smudgy look to it to just break up that uniform shininess at this point let's switch up the colors since if i go into color mode by going alt 3 for unlit we can see that's still all one uniform color pressing alt 4 to go back into lip mode i want it where all the smudges are a different color that's a little bit more brown than orange to represent dirt so let's go back into first material and we can duplicate this by pressing ctrl and d or we can right click and type in constant three vector and select that so double click on this i'm going to give it a brownish color maybe like right here press ok and now i want to lerp in between the orange color and the brown color depending on our alpha texture so wherever there's white i wanted to pick brown and whenever there's black i wanted to pick orange and we could do this through a linear interpolate node so right click type in linear and then interpolate select that or a shortcut is to hold down the l key and left click so l left click brings in the lerp node since we are going to be using that node a lot and on the subject of hotkeys if i hold down three and left click that gives us a constant three vector for color or if i hold down one and left click that gives us a basic scalar value like for metallic and roughness so one and left click or scalar value three left click for color so let's plug this up to a plug the brown one a b and for alpha texture i want it to learn depending on our original mask that's right now driving our roughness so drag rgb into alpha and drag that all into base color and now we can see that where our object is in shiny the color changes to a dirty brown pressing apply jumping back in here we notice that our material is definitely a lot more realistic you can imagine that this was once plastic or really shiny paint and over time dirt has slowly started to build up on the material making it pretty dirty now we can make this even better by instead of lurping in between two colors we're lurping in between a color and another texture so there's a very good texture under starter content textures and it is right here so it's t underscore metal rust open this up we can see what it is but right now we don't notice anything that's because the alpha channel is turned on and the alpha channel handles opacity so if you ever open up a texture and you don't see anything make sure you come up to a and uncheck that so now we can see it and while this is rust i do think it functions well as dirt especially for a very small detail like on this material it's gonna be hard to tell that this is rust instead of dirt so let's drag this onto our material graph and plug it up right there instead of the original dirt and press apply so congratulations you just made your first material in unreal engine 5. while it's not the best it definitely is a good introduction to the power of the material graph before we continue we first have to download some free assets i created for this tutorial to help us learn unreal engine you can find a link to download the free assets in the description of this video the reason why is because in this section we're going to go over how we can take a texture and import that texture into unreal engine and use it in one of our materials so to begin i've already downloaded the assets for this tutorial right here intro double-click to go inside of it and double-click to go into intro unreal 5. so i want to make sure that i do unzip some of these assets specifically the beginner assets folder to unzip it simply drag it onto our desktop we are going to go over castle assets and intro unreal project in just a bit but for now we don't need these so i'm going to exit out my zip folder and now we have a brand new folder with a bunch of assets we're going to import into unreal engine 5. so to begin we're going to create a very simple material using these three textures right here you can probably guess that spanish pavement color handles the color of the texture spanish pavement roughness handles how rough the texture is and the normal map which is this purple texture well it does look pretty weird don't worry we are gonna go over what a normal map is in just a second but for now let's go import all three of these into unreal engine five so let's open up content drawer and go into my stuff because you remember we created a folder called my stuff to hold all our assets and i'm going to hold down my left mouse button and drag all these assets into my content drawer so you want to make sure that your content drawer is open so you are able to drag it in let go and automatically these three textures have imported so we'll notice that all three of these textures have little asterisks right there that tells us that these textures need to be saved so select all them and press ctrl s or we could have clicked on save all so if i double click on spanish base color we can see that the texture has successfully been imported into unreal engine 5 and srgb is turned on for color textures we want to make sure srgb is turned on for everything else such as masks and normal maps we want srgb turned off for spanish paper roughness we see that's turned on i'm going to check this to false and save it now for our normal map if i double click on the normal map unreal is smart enough to know that this is a normal map so it already automatically sets some of the parameters srgb is turned off which is what we want and compression setting is set to normal map now if you do import a normal map and unreal doesn't know it's a normal map then you want to make sure that you set compression settings to normal map and srgb turned off so let's go create our material by right clicking go to materials cos1m underscore spanish payment now you do not have to add the m underscore in front of our name but just for a convention i like to add an underscore over all of my materials to tell me just by quickly reading the name of the assets that this is a material so double click to go into m underscore spanish payment and let's dock it up here so we can switch in between our level and our material graph now i'm going to press control and space and i could drag in each texture individually or i can hold down shift and select all of them and drag in all of them at once so i'm going to leave my normal map off to the side since we are going to go over this in a bit but let's just handle our roughness and our base color so base color will go into of course base color and roughness will go into roughness now we don't have to play with the metallic value because metallic by default is set to zero because our material is a metallic we can leave the metallic input empty since it'll just default to zero and within material example level let's apply this brand new material to our floor right away i noticed that there are two issues with a material number one our material is tiling way too much it's too small and number two there is no depth there is no shadows given by the crevices of our spanish pavements it's almost as if someone got wallpaper and plastered it onto the floor trying to pretend like it's real flooring so to fix this we use normal maps so essentially what normal maps do is that they fake bumps so they fake depth and they make it look like our texture actually has height when in reality it doesn't it's just a material so to add a normal map it's pretty simple as you can probably guess we grab the normal map and simply drag it into normal so let's press apply and immediately we'll see that our texture looks a lot better there's actual depth and if we come to the shadow right here and add in a basic light we can see that as i move this light around the material itself is casting shadow so since the light is right here now the crevices have a little bit of a shadow so normal maps really go a long way to make our material look really realistic now let's fix our tiling because in my opinion i think it's tiling way too much right now and to fix tiling let's go into m underscore spanish payment and we're going to use a brand new node so right click type in texture coordinates so let's grab that essentially texture coordinates will allow us to change the scale of our textures so if we just drag it into uvs nothing will happen that's because we need to hold down m and left click to add in a multiply node or we can right click and type in multiply since we are going to be multiplying the value that comes out of texture coordinates and on a side note if you ever want to break wires hold down alt and left mouse button to break it so let's move multiply up here like this hold down the left mouse button and drag it into a and then drag this out into the uvs just like this we can multiply this by a number which is a constant scalar so as you can guess we're going to type in constant and grab one constant so plug this into b and let's give this a value of instead of 1 something smaller like 0.5 and this will increase the size of our texture to make our spanish payment bigger and we can see immediately that it did make the texture bigger we can maybe even make this a little bit bigger let's try 0.35 and press apply and now i do like to scale up our payments we can also add in a little bit of customization so maybe i don't like the tint of this i want to make our payment a little bit more red or a little bit more green well i can marquee select by holding down the left mouse button anywhere in my graph select all my nodes move it back a bit since we're going to be adding some nodes right here so i'm going to hold down m and left click again to add in the multiply node and drag rgb into it like this and then drag it out into base color i actually want this rgb to go into b not a so i could hold down control and hold down my left mouse button to then grab this wire and place it into b to just switch it from a to b now i'm going to hold down three and left click to add in a constant three vector and i'm gonna says default value to white and plug this into a so since r g and b are all one one one there's going to be no changes right now with a spanish payment but if i want to make our spanish payment a little bit more red instead of it being white i'm going to move it into the red direction and press apply we can already see a change right there and now our spanish payment is really red so generally you don't want the tint to be that intense so just a little bit red kind of like an off-white and then press apply now we do have a more reddish payment or we can even add some greenish blue and we subtract a lot of red from our spanish pavement and maybe you do like the look of this better right now our material looks nice but there is one big issue and that is it is not real time so whenever we make a slight adjustment we have to press apply and wait for it to compile in order to see changes in our world and as you can imagine if we have a really complex material and we make a slight change the compile time can take a while so we're able to get around this with parameters so parameters allow us to make real-time adjustments without any compile time whatsoever so let's jump into it to show how to use them before we create a parameter we first need to create a material instance and this material instance will hold all of our parameters so to create a material instance is pretty easy first you want to find the material you want to create an instance of in our case it's a spanish payment we already have the location open up within our content drawer but just as a reminder if you want to find exactly where this material is select object with the material on it and within the details panel select the little magnifying glass to jump to that location in your content drawer so here we have m underscore spanish payment and to create a material instance simply right click on your material and go create material instance now instead of calling it m underscore spanish payments i'm going to call it mi underscore spanish payments so i like to use an m to tell me that this asset is a material and i like to use mi to tell me that this asset is a material instance so let's double click to go into the material instance and we'll see that we don't have any parameters right now a parameter is essentially a setting that allows us to change our material and that's because i need to tell unreal exactly what settings within our material i want to make a parameter what variables i want exposed to the material instance so for example if i want to make this value right here a parameter right click and go to convert to parameter it's that easy now it's going to ask for a name let's call this one size and now within our material instance we notice that there was no change because i have to press apply and now we get a brand new parameter within our material instance called size now before we can play with this let's go add our material instance to our world since the spanish payment is not our material instance instead it's m underscore spanish payment so let's go grab our material instance and drag it on there to make it the instance and not the main material now with our material instance opened i'm going to check size and let's go play with this value so i can see that as i increase it it's all updating in real time and as i decrease it i'm able to see exactly the size that i want so trying to pick a size this way instead of having to jump into our material manually edit something and then click apply and jump back by just exposing it as a parameter for our material instance it makes creating materials a lot easier and in my opinion a lot more fun now we're not just limited to creating parameters for scalar values we can even go into m underscore spanish payment and let's turn this color into a parameter so call this one color tint and let's go back into material example and we do not have anything because i forgot to press apply and this color tint is available to us so maybe i don't want it to be this kind of greenish i just want to bring it over to let's do actually let's make it even more green like this i can even bring down the value to make it pretty much no color just pure black so we can even give ourselves more control for example right now our normal map is doing a pretty good job but what if we want to decrease the effect of the normal map or we want to make this normal map even more intense so that the shadows are more pronounced well if we jump into m underscore spanish payment we can control the intensity of a normal map with the flattened normal node so let's go hook up the normal map to normal right there and the result to normal now it's asking for a flatness value if i hover my mouse over it it says the default value is zero so i'm going to roll down one and left click to create a constant scalar value and hook it up right there now i'm going to right click and go convert to parameter and let's call this one normal flatness just like that so 0 won't do anything press apply jump back into our world and check normal flatness 0 is as default there are no changes but if i increase normal flatness our normal strength decreases because it's getting more and more flat but if i make this value go below zero so into the negative ranges like negative one then we have some really intense normal maps maybe even let's go negative five now this is almost like it's from a war zone we can even add some more adjustments so let's jump back into mr spanish payment and i want to control the intensity of this normal map with just a simple multiply node so i could select this multiply press ctrl and d to duplicate it or i could hold down m and a left click to bring in a multiply node and hook it up like this now i want to bring in a parameter scalar value for b so i could hold down one and left click then right click to convert to parameter or a shortcut is to hold down the s key and left click to create a constant parameter and it's going to automatically ask us for a name called swan roughness strength and plug it up like this and this will immediately get rid of any roughness make it pure glossy we don't want that so let's go increase the strength from 0 to 1 which won't do anything by default but this gives us the ability within our material instance to then let's say increase this roughness strength to make our payment even more rough so maybe beforehand it was at one you think that this is a little bit too shiny well you can just increase it and get the exact roughness amount you want so with just a couple of controls within our parameter value we're able to in real time completely change the way our material looks which is pretty amazing now i prefer the way this material looked like originally so i can reset all the values to its default value by clicking on the arrow icon so set that to 0 1 0.35 and set it back to a little bit off green now that we know how to create material instances it's now time to go over master materials essentially a master material is one material to rule them all so imagine we have a single material and from this material a bunch of material instances are created that are very different from each other these instances can be anything from paint concrete wood pretty much anything you can imagine and they all share the exact same master material so i know what he just said sounded a little bit complicated but it's best to show with an example we've already done a lot of the work created in master material and it's actually m underscore spanish payments so we're going to turn this into a generic material from which we can create multiple materials from so let's jump back into our map and within the content drawer instead of calling this m underscore spanish payment let's right click and go rename and cost 1 m underscore master material just like that so let's double click on it and i want to make this master material pretty generic so i want all my parameters to have the default values where if i didn't edit any of them it would basically be the same as if we plugged in all three of these textures without any of those edits so down here normal flatness won't make any edits or changes to the normal map which is what we want normal strength is right now set to 1 which will not change the roughness map or make it more rough or more shiny also i noticed i misspelled strength so let's go fix that and up here color tint isn't pure white if it was pure white then it wouldn't edit the base color but it's an off green right now so i want to make this pure white let's double click on this and i can do so by grabbing the saturation and bringing it all the way down like that so now we have one one one and make sure your value right here is all the way up to the top like that now we have pure white which isn't making any edits to the base color now we are making an edit to the multiply node right here so this is a size of 0.35 so it's going to decrease the tiling and make our texture a lot bigger than what it would be by default so i need to set this to its default of one right there so let's press apply and as a reminder if i open up my underscore spanish payments essentially by changing the values within the master material in a material instance we see size right here is 0.35 to change it to its default all you have to do is click on the arrow like that so for color tint it's right now green which is what it was originally if i click on the arrow now it's pure white so let's go back and i also want to expose the textures right here so i want to be able to swap out each of these textures on the material instance to do so you can probably guess of course we're going to right click and go to convert to parameter call this one a color right click right here roughness and right-click convert to parameter normal so let's press apply and now we get access to all those textures right here so if i just turn and activate all of these i can switch out any of these textures for something else for example i can switch it out with grass and now we have grass as our base color but our roughness is still using the spanish payment and the normal map so i'm going to press ctrl and z to get rid of that but you can imagine that if we did have a normal map for grass and a roughness for grass that i could just swap it out really quickly and instead of it being a spanish payment it is now grass but our master material isn't complete yet it is missing one function and that is allowing for metallic maps since our spanish pavement right now isn't metallic but what if we did have a metallic material and we want to use our master material unfortunately there is no place that we can put a metallic map so let's jump into my square master material and let's add that right here so we're just going to duplicate the roughness map so press ctrl c ctrl v because just like the roughness map the metallic map is a mask that shows where in the texture the material should be metallic and instead of corner roughness call this one metallic drag it up right here that's those using the same uvs and simply plug this into metallic now we do have the issue and that is now even a material like our spanish payments which isn't metallic we'll have metallic values by default which is something we don't want so we want the ability to be able to turn on and off this metallic map right here so let's jump into m underscore master material and we could give ourselves a toggle for this with the static switch parameter and select it right there so let's call this one is metallic and then if it is then we're gonna use the metallic map but if it's not we're gonna use the default value of italic which is just zero so hold down one and left-click to bring in a constant scalar value and by default it is zero so plug it up like this and now we have a nice switch where let's say for example if we do have a metallic material all we have to do in the material instance is check is metallica true and drag in that metallic map right here but if i turn it off then it gets rid of that metallic map so let me go make some adjustments to your spanish payments bring down the size also it's a little bit too reflective right now so i'm going to increase the roughness strength just a little bit to make it a little bit less shiny and now we have a pretty versatile master material that we can use for a whole range of different scenarios and we're going to use this master material in the next chapter now that we can import textures and have a master material let's go over how we can import 3d objects and bring them into unreal engine and it's very important to know that in unreal engine 3d objects are called static meshes and static meshes by itself are just a collection of vertices and faces in space if you want to change the way that object looks then we need to add on a material and generally this material is comprised of multiple textures so to break down how a 3d asset is constructed in unreal engine first we have our static mesh which is a plain 3d object and then to change the way that static mesh looks we need to add a material and this material can be comprised of multiple textures so to better get a sense of how 3d assets are made let's create our own 3d asset in unreal engine the 3d object we're going to be importing into unreal engine right now is included within the beginner assets so double click to open this up and it's the woodcrate.fbx so we're going to import this into unreal engine if i double click on it to see what this 3d model is we can see that it's just a very simple crate so nothing too fancy but it will get the point across on how we create 3d assets in unreal engine so let's go into content drawer and under my stuff i'm going to save everything right click let's create a brand new folder call this one wooden crate let's double click to go inside of it so wooden crate will have all our assets that combine to create the wooden crate asset so first let's import the 3d model so hold down left mouse button drag it and simply let go now we have a bunch of fbx import options generally i keep it at default if you do see something is different click on reset the default to get those default values back now generally under materials for create new materials i do not create a material since we are not going to be starting from scratch we are going to be using the master material on this and for import textures uncheck that to false since we aren't going to be importing any textures since i rather import those textures manually and click on import so we might get this warning that's fine you can ignore that and now if i double click on the wood crates we can see that our wooden crate has been successfully imported into unreal engine 5. i can drag this out into my scene scale it rotate it move it around pretty much it has all the same functionalities as any of the objects that unreal engine comes with so that's how you import it through the object let's go over how we can create a material for this 3d object now luckily for us we've already done most of the work and that is our master material so m underscore master material has everything that we need to create a material for this object except the textures so let's import the textures real quickly press ctrl and space to bring up the content drawer select all of them with shift and drag them into the content drawer so let's double check that all our maps are correct starting with the base color and srgb is turned on which is exactly what we want would create underscore metallic should have srgb turned off since this is a mask and this fancy texture right here we are going to ignore but i will go over it in just a bit and right there is wood crate underscore normal let's double click make sure that it was imported as a normal map srgb is turned off and compression settings is set to normal map which is exactly what we want amper roughness of course since this is a roughness mask make sure srgb is turned off so let's go save everything and create a material instance of our master material so let's right click create material instance and call this one mi underscore wooden crates so drag this into our wooden crate folder and move here so double click and we have our material instance so i'm going to apply this to our crate and obviously it's using the wrong textures so let's open up our material instance for wooden crates and activate color normal and roughness so let's drag those textures that we want specifically color into base color roughness in a roughness and normal into normal our material is almost complete but we are missing one last thing and that is the metallic map to make our nails metallic so to do so this is why we added the is metallic switch right here and now we get the metallic texture let's turn this on find where our metallic map is and simply drag it onto texture and let go like that and now our nails are metallic we can see it successfully reflecting the sun so that's pretty amazing how very quickly we were able to automate the process of creating a material by using our master material so we could create a material without ever even touching the material graph by just creating an instance of that master material and what's amazing is that we still have access to all the parameters right here so i can change the normal flatness of negative 5 to increase the normals or i can go into roughness strength and decrease the roughness value to make our box even shinier i can even go in the color tint and give it a slightly orangey reddish tint now it is important that if you do drag a texture onto an object and the texture looks like this so it looks completely out of sync that's because the size value most likely is not one so come into size and make sure that it's set to 1 as its default value so now we have a nice box asset i can hold on alt duplicate this maybe scale it up and even drag it from the content browser but now we do have an issue and that is when we drag a box from the content browser it does not have the material we just created so to set our boxes default material we need to open up the asset static mesh editor and within here we see that we have a default material slot right now it's using the world grid material we're going to set this to mi underscore wooden like that press save and now that material is applied to all our boxes even when we drag out a brand new box before we move on to the next chapter i think it's important to point out what this texture right here does so i'm going to double click on it and this texture does look a little bit weird but essentially what it is is that it combines several different masks into one texture using the rgb channels i know that might sound confusing but essentially in computer graphics color is made up of a red channel a green channel and a blue channel so what developers realize is that they can take these individual channels and then hide masks inside of them so for example if we uncheck the blue channel and the green channel we see that the red channel of this texture is our metallic mask uncheck red check green our green channel's roughness uncheck green and check blue our blue channel is ambient occlusion although we won't use ambient occlusion i included it within a texture to show that we can hide three different masks inside a single texture and because even though this is a color texture it's actually going to be used as mass we want to uncheck srgb right there so the way we would use this in a material is let's create a brand new material called this one mask example and double click to go inside of it so if we were to create a material from this mask i'm going to drag out our base color in our normal map because of course we still need them and instead of using our metallic or our roughness texture we combine those into one individual texture right here so we don't need those since they're combined into this one and our red channel is metallic so i'm going to grab from the r pen into metallic and our green channel is roughness now roughness didn't have to be the green channel it could have been blue or red just i decided to use the green channel and if i press apply inside of our map let's apply the new material to this crate and right now there is a slight difference between the two since in the material instance i am using color tint so reset that back to white and jumping back here we can see that there's virtually no difference in between combining the textures or using the textures separately so i included it within this course because it's pretty important to know why unreal developers use this since you will be seeing this a lot also it's good to know exactly what these r g and b pins are used for that is how you create unreal assets but you're probably wondering now how do i move on real assets in between different unreal projects because it would be a real shame if every time we create a new project we have to remake all the assets and we can move assets in between projects through an easy process called migration so to migrate assets in between two unreal projects of course we need a new unreal project included within the downloadable content link in description below is a project that contains some assets i want to bring into our first project that we've been working on so within the zip file go into it and it's specifically intro unreal project so just drag it onto our desktop to unzip it and double click to go inside of the project folder to open up an unreal project double click on the dot u project now that i have the downloaded project open up if i press control and space we can see all the content that's currently inside of it now if your content folder is empty then that means you didn't unzip the project so make sure you do unzip the project before opening it up so i have a folder called line and examples with some maps materials meshes and textures they're going to help us demonstrate unreal's lighting capabilities i want to bring all these assets into our original project called first project so to do so i'm going to dock them to the sides of my screen and let's go open up our content drawer so what i'm going to do is copy our lighting examples folder which is right here and bring it into another project to do so we use a process called migration and migration is really simple simply hover over the assets you want to bring into another unreal project right click and select migrate now it's going to give us a list of all the assets that are going to be migrated and this all looks correct so i'm going to click on ok and now it's asking for a location to migrate them to we specifically want to migrate them into the content folder of the destination project and you can find out where the content folder is by double clicking on the original project file so right here is first project which is where this project is stored and if i go into its project file we see that there's a content folder and this is the location that i want to migrate all these assets to so i could go through and manually navigate to this location or i can copy its destination with control c and control v it right here so now i have the content folder of our original project selected i'm telling a real that i want to move the files from intro and real project to first project and click on select folder so now we can see content migration successful and if i go into first project now press control and space under content we now have lighting examples which are all the same assets from our downloaded project now an alternative that's how we don't have to go and find where our project file is located in order to get the content folder's location i could press control and space to go into the content drawer and right click on our content folder and go show in explorer this will automatically bring up the content folder from our project finally let's talk about unreal engine 5's a brand new lighting system called lumen and lumen is revolutionary because it gives us real-time global illumination and essentially global illumination is just a very fancy term for light bounce because in real life light doesn't just hit an object and stop instead it hits an object bounces off that object and after each bounce it illuminates the world it also takes a little bit of that object's color and projects it onto the next object for example it might be a little bit hard to see because the video is being streamed but here we have a red mouse and lights is hitting this mouse taking a little bit of its color and then projecting it onto any nearby objects so if i move the mouse to the table around the table there's a little bit of a reddish tint that's coming from the bounce lighting so global illumination is important because it's the secret to realistic rendering but there's one large problem and that is global illumination is very expensive to calculate real-time global illumination isn't possible without a super powerful gpu and this is where lumen comes in handy lumen is a brand new way to render global illumination at the fraction of a cost compared to traditional ways to get global illumination like hardware ray tracing so to show luminant action let's jump back into unreal and to do so we need the content that we just migrated over so if you haven't already make sure you download the lighting examples link in the description below and migrated into our project from the previous chapter so to begin let's go to maps and light bounce so as we can see this is an insanely simple room all we have is four walls and two objects and a light source i've also gone ahead and added in a post-process volume since my default lumen is turned on i want to turn off lumen to demonstrate how we used to get global illumination back in the unreal engine 4 day so as we can see global illumination method is set to none now let's just pretend that we're in unrelated four and i want some global illumination since obviously shadows are never this dark normally you would see some light bouncing around to illuminate the shadow areas right here so the first thing i would do is number one make sure my light sources are set to static not movable and number two i need to build my level and to build you want to come up to the build tab all the way up here select it and within the drop down simply select build all levels right now behind the scenes unreal is ray tracing our entire level and creating a light map this light map contains all the lighting data which then overlays onto our world as a texture now we are done building our lighting it should have been pretty quick because this is a very small level and if we look at our level we can see that we do have global illumination notice how the sphere is no longer pitch black in the shadow areas there's now light filling up the shadows making it look a lot more realistic than beforehand we can even see that there's some red on the sphere that's bouncing from the red wall same thing over here the entire room has a little bit of a greenish tint since this green wall is also bouncing light off so this is how we used to get global illumination on religion 4 and while this is great there are some major issues mostly that our lighting and all our shadows are static so if i select my sphere and move it around we can see that the lighting breaks press ctrl z to undo that then even if i select my light source and move it around the lighting also breaks notice how if i move my light away we now have two shadows so there's one shadow that's coming from the light source and another shadow that's coming from our light map which is no good so i press ctrl and z to put our lighting back at the original spots and this is where lumen comes in really handy because it allows us to have dynamic global illumination so i can move my light around and move my sphere with no issues whatsoever but first we have to get rid of our light map since we did bake our world to do so you need the world settings tab now by default there is no world settings tab we can get that by coming up to windows and selecting world settings all the way down here and now we have our world settings as you can guess world settings is simply the settings of our world so this is where we would control our like baking and we will go over like bacon settings in just a bit but for now i want to get rid of our light maps by selecting force no pre-computed lighting which will tell unreal that i don't want to use any light maps and i don't want to build our lighting and then after i set that to true make sure you press build now that didn't build our lighting instead it went through and it got rid of all of our light map textures so let's come back to details and now i'm going to set my light source to movable so now that's set to movable we still aren't getting any global illumination because if you remember in the post-process volume i turned off lumen so let me zoom in a little bit so that we can see this better here is unreal engine 5 without lumen and here is on relative 5 with lumen so this is without and this is width and what's amazing is that i can move this light around and there are no issues i can even move this sphere and make it bigger smaller and unreal is calculating all this global illumination at a very smooth frame rate which is absolutely amazing this is not possible in unreal engine 4. so if i grab this light and even if i move it all the way over here we can see that there's bounce lighting coming from the light hitting the wall and then bouncing and hitting the sphere giving our entire sphere a little bit of a reddish tint on the right side which is very realistic we could even come into the point light settings and give ourselves a softer shadow by increasing the source radius so if i increase this notice that the shadows get softer and softer global illumination used to be pretty expensive since you'd have to use hardware ray tracing but now thanks illumine it's accessible to everyone while running at a smooth frame rate depending on your computer and something that was not possible in ue4 even with hardware ray tracing is that if i come into lighting examples materials and use m underscore emissive material our emissive materials give off light so i'm able to light up a scene by just using our materials which is really amazing so i'm going to press ctrl and z to undo those since now it's time to go over all the different light sources that on religion has to offer so to begin let's talk about the point light so i'm going to delete it and to get a point light you want to come up to the add button of course and under lights drag in a point light so point light is the most basic of lights it's just a point that emits light in all directions so let's go over the most important settings in the details panel and probably the most important one right now is intensity so it's at eight candelas i can bring this down to one two or even something insanely large like 100 to change the power of the light source but for now i'm going to leave this at 4. we also have a source radius which i just went over but if we increase it and make sure that you do have game view turned off up here you can see that there is a and hopefully you can see this a little bit better with the red background we have the outline of a yellow sphere and this sphere basically tells us the size of our light emission and the larger our yellow sphere is then the more soft our shadows will be and as i decrease this all the way back down to its default zero we get some really harsh shadows so if you want to soften that up bring up the source radius now right below that we have temperature so temperature allows us to change how warm or cold our light source is if it beat us down our light source gets warmer and warmer and if i bring this up it gets colder and colder and i can disable temperature by clicking on the temperature button and all the way down here we have light color so as you can guess light color just changes the color of our light the controls are exactly the same as our materials and above all these is the indirect lighting intensity so right now it's set at one when i set to zero we're gonna have very little bounce light and our shadows end up like beforehand where they're pretty dark not much bounce lighting is happening or instead of one which is its default i could beat up to 10 and now we have a lot of bounce lighting so i'm just gonna leave it at one for now so those were all the main settings for point lights i'm gonna delete that and let's go over the next light right now and that is the spotlight the spotlight is very similar to the point light although unlike the point light the spotlight is just illuminating one direction and you could change the direction the light is pointing by of course rotating it the settings are the exact same as the point light except we have an inner and outer cone angle so the outer cone angle will control the size of our spotlight and the inner cone angle will control the falloff of our light so i'm going to go to game view mode so we can better see this and as i increase the inner cone angle we can see that our lighting gets sharper and sharper and sharper and if i decrease it all the way to zero there's a very soft fall off so those are the controls for the spotlight i'm gonna delete that and go into the next one and that is the rectangle light so rectangle light is pretty similar to the spotlight and directional light except now we're emitting from a rectangle pointing in a specific direction hopefully you can see the outline of the light when it's against the wall and i control the size of the rectangle by going into source width and increasing the width or i can increase the height i can even just like beforehand play with the fall off by decreasing the barn door angle from 88 all the way to zero and hopefully you can better see it from this angle what the barn door is or i can increase the length so we have a lot of control over the specific falloff of that rectangle light other than that the controls are the same so let's delete that and next up is probably the light you're going to be using the most the directional light so we don't see anything with the directional light right now because i have to rotate it to see what it does and as you can guess this is the sunlight so the sunlight is pointing in a specific direction infinitely and just like the spotlight if i rotate this around i'm able to control the direction of our sun the directional light has pretty much the same exact controls as our point light except if i zoom in on the shadows we get source angle bringing up the source angle makes the shadow smoother and bringing down the source angle makes the shadows sharper so i'm going to reset value by clicking on the arrow icon and i'm going to delete our directional light since there's one last light i want to show and that is the skylight so let's drag in the skylight and you'll notice nothing is happening and the reason why is because the skylight is pretty unique essentially what it does is that it captures our sky and then it projects it onto our world and right now our skylight isn't doing anything because obviously our world doesn't have any sky so the way we can add sky is pretty simple in unreal engine 5. you just want to come up to the add button come all the way down to visual effects and drag in a sky in atmosphere simply place it right there and again if i look up we don't have any sky since the sky requires a directional light which is the sunlight so let's also come up to add down to lights and drag in a directional light for our sky now if our skylight isn't working then it has to be refreshed by going into the details panel and turning on and off effects world now the reason why i know the lighting in our room right now is from the sky and not from the directional light is because the directional light is not hitting the inside of our room so if i move it around then we can see that our directional light is illuminating our room but if i move it that's how it's coming from the back the lighting is entirely coming from the skylight and we can see this better by hiding and unhiding the skylights by using the effects world right there so here the skylight is being used and here the skylight isn't so this is without skylight and this is with skylights and something that's pretty cool about the skylight is that if i add in a cube so let's come up to shapes cube drag that in scale that up we can make a makeshift door and now notice how as i move my cube the skylight slowly starts to illuminate our room so that's why the skylight is a pretty big deal since it allows us to capture our sky and project it onto a world as lumen lighting and finally it's time to go over lumen settings so these are settings that affect all of our lumen lighting before we move on to lighting and environment completely from scratch so i'm going to delete everything and i'm just going to add in a simple point light once again because i want to show and also decrease the intensity of four and this is probably something you've noticed is that there is a lot of noise especially in the shadows now i don't know if it shows up due to the youtube compression but if you are following along with the tutorial you can see a lot of that noise and to get rid of that noise we need to play with the lumen settings which are located in our post process volume so find out where your post process volume is as a reminder you can create a post process volume by coming up to add volumes and post process volume and make sure in your post-process volume that infinite extent unbound is turned on because otherwise our post-process volume will not be affecting our entire world so you want to come down all the way inside the post-process volume to global illumination and by default lumen is turned on and we get a bunch of lumen settings under lumen global illumination so first off to get rid of that noise check final gather quality and increase it from one to four now we can see that noise slowly start to disappear and there is a lot less noise we can even increase this to ten and now our scene definitely looks a lot better so if we hover over any of these settings it gives us a very quick description while final gather quality does get rid of the noise it also comes at the cost of gpu so just keep that in mind that if you do increase final gather quality you might lose on some performance there are also some other settings which i'm going to go over in the next chapter that's the basics of lighting in ue5 now we're going to take the knowledge that we just learned and apply to lighting an architectural visualization scene first we're going to light the environment by using lumen and movable lights then we're gonna light the same exact environment but with static and baked lighting so we're gonna compare the two methods of getting global illuminations and see their pros and cons the specific architectural environment is already included within our lighting examples that we migrated into our first project we can see under lighting examples maps it's the map that's right next to the map that we've been editing which is light bounce so let's double click on arcviz room and we won't see anything because there are no lights if i press alt m3 or if i click on unlit from the view mode now this environment is just a simple room with some furniture and a window from which all our light is going to come from so very simple room which will help us learn and get the gist of how to light a scene in unreal engine i'm gonna press alt n4 as a shortcut to go back into our default view mode now the first light i'm gonna add in is the main light which is the sun so let's add in a directional light and i'm going to rotate it so that the sun is coming through the window and already especially right here we can see global illumination and lumen at work so i want to find a nice angle i think right there is pretty good but if we look outside there is no sky it kind of looks scary just seeing an endless black void so let's add in a sky by coming back up here to visual effects and the sky and atmosphere so drag that in but half of our world the bottom half is still a black void we can hide that black void with fog so come back up to add visual effects and below sky atmosphere we have exponential high fog simply drag that in and now if we look outside the window all we see is sky which is what i want but there is a little bit of an issue and that is if we hide and unhide the exponential height fog we can see that there is a little bit of fog inside of our room and we don't want that so within the exponential height fog one of the settings we're going to change is right here start distance i'm going to drag this all the way up to its max of 5000 so essentially start distance is saying do not use fog until we're 5 000 centimeters away from our camera so now if i hide and unhide it we don't have any fog inside a room there is one more light that i want to add to our room and that is the skylight so let's come to lights skylight and drag it in so we can already see that our room got a little bit of a bluish tint from our sky i can hide and unhide it right here so effects will turn it off and turn it back on so we can see that it does make a little bit of a difference so i'm going to set the skylight to movable and also set the sun to movable since both of these lights are being used with lumen we aren't making any lights and another thing i'm going to do is add in a post-process volume since if we come over here and i don't know if it's noticeable in the youtube video but there is a little bit of noise so we can get rid of that by adding in the post process volume simply drag it in and make sure you scroll down and infinite extent unbound is turned on so we don't have to be in the post-process volume for it to take effect now let's zoom all the way up to looming global illumination and right here for final gather quality instead of one i'm going to set that to 10 and a lot of that noise just disappeared also i want to add some soft shadows to the really small objects since right now there is no soft shadow that's being given off from the phone the clock or the coffee mug so the reason why is because i have to increase the lumen scene detail right here from one two four so this was beforehand at one and now this is four so by default to save on processing power lumen excludes a lot of small objects from its calculations so you need to tell in real that you want them within the lumen calculation by increasing it from 1 to 4 or even higher if you do have smaller objects and one last edit i'm going to make to the post-process volume is setting it for a manual exposure so under exposure metering mode set to manual marine up the exposure compensation to [Music] 13.25 it's pretty good and also this is an artistic choice if we increase it we can see that we get more bloom in our world so maybe a value of two so this is without bloom and with blue i do think it makes the scene look a little bit nicer and that is the basics of lighting an environments in unreal engine 5. specifically for architectural visualization and since we're using lumen that gives us the ability with control and l as a shortcut to rotate our sun watch our world be updated in real time based off of our sun's lighting which is pretty insane now while lumen is amazing we do get some trade-offs in quality just because we are able to use real-time global illumination doesn't mean that it's the best case for certain scenarios specifically a scenario like this where there isn't going to be any moving parts since it's just an architectural visualization scene we might as well bake our lighting because number one big lighting is always more performance friendly than using lumen because lumen does do a lot of gpu calculations behind the scenes while big lighting is just overlaying a texture and number two if you properly bake your lights into a good light map then the quality will be better than lumen so let's convert our lumen environment into a baked lighting environment so i want to make a copy of our current level which is arcviz room by selecting it in our content drawer and pressing ctrl and d to duplicate it so let's call this one arcviz room baked and double click to go inside of it make sure we save selected all right great so first thing i'm going to do is select all my lights and set my directional light to static and set my skylight also to static now i'm going to go into my post process volume and disable lumen for reflections and global illumination so set this to none and under reflections also set this to none so we can see immediately we aren't getting any global illumination that's because i should come up to build and build all levels to start ray tracing in the background all right great so here we have our baked lighting this is really bad since we need to increase the quality of our light bakes by going into the world settings and if i scroll up we can see that under light maps we have light mass settings and in the drop down we have a bunch of settings that will change the quality of our like baking so first thing i want to increase the number of bounces which will just illuminate our scene a little bit more so the number of indirect lighting bounces is right now set to three let's set that to 10 and also for skylighting bounces set this from 1 to 10. number 2 for static lighting level scale if we bring this below 1 for example 0.5 then we're going to get a lot more quality out of our bakes so i'm going to set this instead of 0.5 let's set this to 0.1 and to compensate for the static lighting level scale you want to increase the indirect lighting quality to 10. so specifically i want to increase the indirect lighting quality to 10 because the static lighting level scale right now set to 0.1 and generally you want your static lighting level scale times your indirect lighting quality to equal one so for example if instead of static line level scale being 0.1 i change it to 0.5 then the indirect line quality should be set to 2 since 0.5 times 2 equals 1. but i'm going to leave it as 0.1 so that does give us a better value at the cost of waiting a little bit more for the ray trace calculations to happen and now that i like my settings come to build and click on build all levels so this build will take longer than beforehand because we increase the quality of our like bakes so now this is our scene and we didn't really notice that much of a difference since i also want to come up to build and under lighting quality make sure that it's not set to preview instead it's set to either medium higher production i'm just going to set to medium and also while i'm at it i'm going to select my post process volume and let's bring down the bloom since i think the bloom is too intense two one and four exposure compensation i'm gonna leave it at let's go 12.7 and now if i press build to build all levels keep in mind that if you are following along exactly with this tutorial you do not have to press build whenever i press build since i'm building my lights a lot more frequently than i would so just demonstrate what some of these settings do so if you want to save time and not have to wait for each build then i would wait for the very end and copy those settings we can see that the quality is still not the best because if you remember light maps are being baked into a texture and if that texture has a low resolution then we're going to get low resolution shadows and lighting so we need to raise resolution on each of our static meshes and to see the resolution of our static mesh visually you can come up to lit down to optimization view modes and select light map density with the shortcut alt n0 so right now our entire room is pretty much blue this is not what we want we want our scene to be in the greenish to reddish range so to increase the lightmap resolution of a static mesh you want to select the object and within the details panel scroll down until you see lighting and overridden light map resolution it's at 64. turn that on and increase that to let's try 128 or 256 and okay that looks a little bit better but since this is the floor and it will have some of the shadow i want to increase that to 512. so make the floor pretty dense i think the walls around it should also be let's go 512 and the roof can also be 512. so for the baseboard i'm going to select that and make this let's try 256. the door needs to increase it from 64 to 128. the chair is a pretty big deal since it's our focal element so let's go 256 right there and for the wall is that 256 i'm going to try 512. the table is at 128. actually let's make this 512. the wall right here 512 and the floor actually when it increases to 124 so i think this looks good now if we bake our lights let's see what this gives us so at this point it is going to take a little while for our lights to bake since there's a lot more detail it needs to calculate and probably by now you understand why lumen is a pretty big deal since it gets rid of this repetitive process of having to wait for a lighting to bake and then if we don't like the bake we have to change something and change some settings and then bake our lighting again and then if we don't like that we have to go back and it's an entire process while lumen just works immediately but in this case it is worth it since the quality is going to be better than lumen okay now that we're done baking let's see what our world looks like and okay that's a lot better but the shadows especially in between objects are a little bit too intense since by default unreal is calculating ambient occlusion i want to disable ambient occlusion since i'm just relying on our baked light map to simulate all of our shadows and lighting so within our post-process volume let's go find where ambient occlusion is which is right here under rendering features under ambient occlusion intensity let's turn that to zero to turn it all off and increase our exposure compensation to 13. okay now our scene is baked but we are missing one last thing and that is we don't have any reflections whatsoever our world looks pretty bad since we don't have those reflections and the reason why is because illumine calculates reflections automatically when we bake our lighting we have to specify where we want our reflections to be and we do that through a sphere reflection capture so to add a sphere reflection capture come up to the add button down to visual effects and drag in a sphere reflection capture essentially what the sphere reflection capture does is that it takes a 360 degree snapshot from the sphere of our world and that it uses that as the projection of our reflections and to get a better snapshot of our world come up to build and select build reflection captures so right now we have one reflection capture but we can have multiple reflection captures since obviously it doesn't make sense for all reflections to grab from the same location so if i duplicate this with alt and then if i decrease the influence radius within the details panel to let's go 500 and place it on top of my small objects right here and once again come up to build and build reflection captures we can see that these objects instead of grappling from this sphere reflection capture they're grabbing from the smaller one which is overriding the larger one since the reflection capture on the table is smaller unreal knows to pick this sphere reflection capture for all the objects within its radius of 500 centimeters so this is essentially how you bake lighting in unreal engine now i know that the setup took a lot longer than using lumen also we have to wait a while for each like baking to happen and for all the light maps to be created and the ray tracing to happen but in the end in my opinion the quality especially right here if i select a chair and hide it you can see how detailed those soft shadows are and if i unhide it take a good look at this baked lighting scene jump back into our arcviz room which is using lumen obviously the big lighting looks a lot better so hopefully you understand the difference between big lighting and lumen their pros and cons and why you would use fake lighting over lumen even though lumen is real time that is the very basics of lighting an unreal engine of course you can get even more complicated because the lighting is an entire art form by itself but hopefully you do have a good foundation to learn more now we're going to go over landscapes so landscapes and unreal are pretty important because odds are you will always be seen a landscape or your character is on top of a landscape so in this section we're going to go over how we can create a landscape sculpt it and finally at the end go over how to add foliage to demonstrate how to make landscapes let's create an entirely new map so press ctrl space and let's go into my stuff and right here let's create a brand new folder called maps which will hold all of our maps so i'm going to select both my map and my build data and drag it into maps let go and move here so let's jump into there and right click create a brand new level so by right clicking and creating a level instead of coming up to file and new we don't get access to the templates which is fine i do want to create a brand new level completely from scratch so let's call this one landscape example and jump in so let's save everything the reason why we're starting from a blank level is because i want to show how to light an outdoor environment from scratch okay to begin let's create a landscape to create a landscape you need going to landscape editing mode to do so come up to select mode and then select landscape finally we're going to go over what some of these modes do so you can press landscape or the shortcut is shift and 2. so throughout this tutorial so far we've been in select with a shortcut shift in one now we're going to go into shift and 2 to edit our landscape we don't have a landscape so unreal is going to ask us if we want to create a landscape we see that we get a bunch of different settings that we can pick from generally i don't play with these settings i just leave it as default but if you are going to play with those settings i recommend you use the templates provided to you from the unreal documentation type in unreal docs and then type in the landscape technical guide so if you are going to change any of these settings i recommend you use the presets for now i'm going to use the default settings and press create okay great now we have a landscape but before we start editing our landscape it's best to lighter scene so we know exactly what is happening first off let's add in a directional light so add light directional light simply drag that in we can leave all the settings at default except i'm going to set to movable since i want to use completely dynamic lighting to help us know the direction of the light and how the shadows will look like i'm going to add in a cube temporarily to help us when we're lighting our scene just like that now obviously we don't want an endless black void we want a sky so come up to create visual effects and select the sky and atmosphere to drag it in and automatically it's working if i hold down control and l as a shortcut to rotate my sun notice that the sky updates in real time so as i lower my sun the sky changes colors to represent a morning time or a dust time and i can raise it up to get a more bluish sky which is pretty amazing that unreal automatically updates your sky depending on your sun's angle now there are two issues we still have a black void in the lower half of our world and zooming in on the shadow it's pretty dark we're getting a little bit of global illumination and bounce lighting from our sun but we need lighting from our sky as a whole so to fix that come up to add lights and drag in a skylight now it's recommended for skylights that under real time capture make sure it's turned on if you are gonna use a skylight with the sky and atmosphere and also while we're at it set it to movable since we're only using lumen lighting also let's go fix our black void by adding in some fog to cover that so come in a visual effects and exposure high fog simply drag it out like this and we can control where the exponential hype fog starts by moving the widget so if we move it up we get more fog and if i move it down we get less fog so hopefully you can see what's happening for now i'm going to leave it in the middle right here and with that a directional lights sky and atmosphere skylights and fog is pretty much how you light 90 of open world scenes in unreal engine 5. it is literally that easy and what's amazing is that all these objects interact with each other successfully so i can move my sun around lower it create a really dark area lower it to the point where it's night and then raise it slowly the sun comes above the fog and starts to illuminate our world so it's completely real time time of day lighting now that we set the lighting we're able to see any edits we make to our landscape so let's finally go over the landscape editing mode and to do so i need to come up to my mode selector and select landscape from select or i can press shift n2 as the shortcut so by default it's going to give us this brush right here and as you could probably guess hold down the left mouse button i'm able to sculpt and raise the terrain so left mouse button is to raise a train if i hold down shift and left mouse button then i lower the terrain and by default we are using the basic sculpt brush i can even increase the tool strength so right now it's at 0.3 of course if i bring it up to 1 then our scopes will be a lot more intense even holding down shift i can really lower the landscape's terrain if i want to i can control the fall off of this brush with the brush fall off so bringing to zero will mean there is no fall off so i get some insanely harsh sculpts happening or i can bring it all the way up to one which makes the fall off non-existent giving us the smoothest brush as possible four really faint changes to our landscape now a shortcut to increasing the brush size is to use the right bracket key on my keyboard so right bracket key will increase my brush size and left bracket key will decrease it very similar to photoshop shortcuts so that's the basics of the sculpt brush as a reminder if you ever want to get back the default values of any property in unreal engine go to that property and select the arrow right next to it to reset it back to its default value now let's go over the smoothing brush and as you can guess if you have some really harsh landscapes and you want to be smoother like right here it was really harsh since our fall off was non-existent using the smooth brush i can smooth away those bumps in the landscape so pretty great and the next brush after that is the flattening brush so flatten brush is great for terracing or maybe you're creating a game for example and let's say right here you need a flat area for your gameplay well to get a flat area of course we need to use the flatten brush which will just flatten our landscape it's also great for creating terraces so if i start my flower brush off right here notice how we have a higher terrace and a lower one and right below that another one so we're very quickly it will create some complicated landscapes with just these three brushes and these three brushes are the main brushes generally i don't really touch any of the other brushes except for very specific circumstances which we aren't going to be going over in this video now that's how you sculpt the landscape but how do i paint a landscape since right now we're using unreal's default material of course landscapes in real life are not made out of squares instead they're made up of grass dirt sand rocks and pretty much anything you would expect outside now i'm going to briefly go over how to create a very basic landscape material create the material under my stuff and call this one m underscore landscape double click to open it up and i'm gonna dock it up here so i can switch in between my level and landscape now the difference between a normal material and a landscape material is one node and that is landscape layer blend so select it and here we have the layer blend notice how we don't have any inputs that's because we need to specify inputs in the details panel right here so the inputs are essentially going to be layers so you could have a grass layer a dirt layer a sand layer and then within your landscape editing mode we'll be able to paint on those individual layers on our landscape so to add in a layer select your layer blend and under layers click on the add button and make sure you click on the triangles to see the drop down now for the first layer call this one grass and the second layer call this one dirt now this is just for demonstration so it's not going to look very good but to get the point across let's go find a grass texture and a dirt texture under starter content textures and i'm going to use t underscore ground also for dirt looks like we don't have a dirt so i'm just going to use the metal rust texture because that does look like dirt and it will get the point across so drag in metal rust as our dirt now hook up grass right there and dirt and i'll put these into base color and let's press apply save everything jump back into landscape examples and now to apply the landscape material to our landscape we can't just drag our material onto the landscape like that instead in the details panel scroll down and get landscape material and drag on the landscape material to the slot right there and let go but we get a really weird black texture since we need to specify where these layers are right now unreal isn't picking any layers so it's just defaulting to black hop back into your landscape mode by pressing shift n2 and within paint we have our layer so we need to create our layers and store them somewhere within our content drawer so to create a layer click on the add button and you want to select weight blended layer normal so select that it's going to ask us to create a new landscape layer info and it's going automatically create a new folder for us where our map is located called our map name and shared assets now we could also create a new folder by right-clicking and go a new folder or we could pretty much save this anywhere else in our project but i'm just gonna leave it as default value and also leave it at the default name it's generating which is grass underscore layer info click save now we have our layer right there and we can see our grass has been applied to our landscape let's do the same thing for dirt by clicking on the plus button and going wait blended layer normal select that and for dirt underscore layer also click on save at the same location so now we have two layers in a folder that's right next to our maps and go to save all now obviously this landscape is too shiny so jump back in a minuscule landscape hold down one and left click to bring a constant scalar parameter and give a value of one so we have complete roughness to get rid of that shine press apply and our landscape is looking better but i also think we should add in normal maps to give the texture a little bit of bump to it so come back into our landscape material and press control and space under textures so starter content textures let's find where the grass is which is right here drag out a normal map and let's find where the normal map is for rust and that is right there and drag that out so i want to blend between our normal maps just like how we're blending between the base colors and i could do that by copying and pasting my layer blend which i can do with ctrl and d to duplicate and plug up the normal map right there and plug up the rust normal map right there and put those both into normal so now we have two layer blends which are sampling from the same exact layers that we just created in our landscape editing mode and press apply now let's jump into dirt and lower the brush size just a little bit see the tool strength is at 0.3 holding that left mouse button i'm now able to blend in between dirt and grass one thing i like to do whenever i'm creating my landscape is to get a human reference that's why i'm able to compare the size of my landscape next to human and this is especially helpful since one thing i want to do with m underscore landscape is add in texture tiling but it's hard to know how much i should tile this texture when there isn't a human reference so to get a human reference you want to come up to add and add feature or content pack and select the third person we can see that there's a mannequin right here which we're going to be using as our reference and select add to project so this will add a bunch of new assets to our project and specifically i want to use the assets in character mannequins meshes and we can do skm underscore manny so drag that out to get a human size reference to compare our landscape textures to and we can place them right there so this human if i zoom in on the grass you can see that probably the grass is a little bit too small so let's fix that jump back into our landscape material and the way we change the tiling of any textures is the exact same way we did with m underscore master material so we grabbed the texture coordinates and we multiplied it by a parameter value so we were able to edit it in the instance of this material now i could recreate this from scratch for m underscore landscape or i can highlight all that press ctrl and c go back into m underscore landscape and control and v it now i could plug this up to grass and also i want to plug this up to the normal map of grass which is right here so if you remember both this texture and this texture handle grass since they're both being fed into the grass layers of the layer blend node so press apply and we won't notice any changes since we have to create a material instance of our landscape and apply to the landscape so right click go create material instance and drag this material instance onto our landscapes with the landscape selected so just do that and double click on our instance let's undock it and bring it into the maps right there click on size and i want to increase the size of my texture by decreasing the tiline so instead of one let's try 0.5 okay that looks better maybe even 0.3 okay i really like 0.3 so this was beforehand at 1. and now this is the tiling at 0.3 which makes the landscape look better now i also want to add in tiling features for our dirt so i can highlight this press ctrl c ctrl v and paste it right there and plug this up to dirt and plug this up to normal map but if i press apply and go back into our material instance we have a pretty big issue right here and that is now our size controls both and let's come over to the dirt controls both are grass and dirt and we want to control those independently and the issue is in unreal for material parameters if you have two parameters with the same exact name then they're going to be treated the same within the material instance so the way you fix this is that you have to give each of these parameters a different name so call this one size grass and then call this one down here size dirt and press apply and now that should be different so we also get the dirt parameter within our instance so let's jump back into landscape example and press shift n2 to go into landscape mode select dirt because i want to paint a little bit of dirt right next to the mannequin so we can see what grass and dirt look like in relationship to our human scale reference now with dirt right there let's go increase it to 0.3 maybe even zero point actually i think 1.2 looks good so just a little bit more tiling with our dirt if you are curious how to make a really good landscape material i do have a landscape tutorial series on my youtube channel while it is for unreal engine 4 pretty much all of it still applies to unreal engine 5. that was the very basics of landscapes now we're going to go over how we can get assets from the mega scans library so in case you don't know unreal already comes with thousands of free high quality assets ready to be used immediately in unreal engine we can get these assets through the quixo bridge plugin which is already installed in unreal before we jump into mega scans let's make some edits to our world so first off i'm going to get rid of my landscape material since i think it's a little bit distracting and i just want to focus on the mega scan assets so select my landscape scroll down to the landscape material slot and let's reset it back to the world grid by selecting the arrow right there there we go and i also want to lock my exposure with the post process volume so come into volumes post process drag it out and scroll up to exposure let's set to manual and exposure compensation notice that there is no change right now because i need to make sure that infinite extend unbound is turned on now i can increase the exposure compensation i found a value of 12 to be pretty good and i'm also going to raise the position of my sun so we get more light in the world okay so now that the sun was raised notice that the brightness of the sun also increased so exposure compensation i'm going to lower it to 11 or 11.5 all right great so let's go over how we can get access to the qixel bridge library and getting access is pretty simple you just want to come up to the add button and then select quicksilver bridge now if this is your first time logging into a quick so bridge it might ask you to log into your epic games account don't worry it's the same exact account that you created when downloading unreal engine so just go into that and then you get access to right now at the time recording 16 688 assets which is absolutely amazing now for some reason you don't have quicksilver bridge installed in a real engine then you want to go to the epic games launcher and come to unreal engine library scroll all the way down to vault and find the qixel bridge plugin once you've found the quicksilbridge plugin click on install to engine and select unreal engine 5. although by default this plugin should be installed so you shouldn't have this issue but it's important to bring up just in case you don't see quixo bridge now let's open up qxel bridge and let's go over a simple example of bringing in a 3d object so to bring in a 3d object it's pretty simple number one you want to find a 3d object that you like so maybe this rock right here then all i have to do is select this rock and let me make my screen window just a little bit smaller hold down the left mouse button and drag it into your world just like if it's an asset from the content browser and now we have a rock in our world importing realistic assets into unreal engine have never been this easy and if i press control and space we can see in our content folder that two new folders were created specifically mega scans and ms presets so mega scans contains all our mega scan assets that we get from bridge for example we have a folder called 3d assets and inside 3d assets we have another folder called mossy force rock and right here are all the assets that make up specifically this rock right here now the other folder if we go back to content right next to megascans is ms presets so ms presets contains all the master materials that quixo bridge uses so if we go out into content back to mega scans 3d assets mossy force rock we'll see that the material that's using is a material instance so it's not a material by itself if i scroll down to the material instance we can see what its master material is and it's using m underscore ms default fuzz material and if i click on the magnifying glass it's going to jump to its location which is of course under ms presets which contains all those master materials and you also notice that we do get a bunch of parameters so we're going to go over all the main material parameters that quixo bridge provides to us which we will use consistently so to begin let's go over albedo controls and i'm going to move my window off this side so we can better see our assets so albedo tint does exactly what the cloudtent does that we just created for our own master material so i can completely change the color of my asset i'm going to press cancel since i don't want to make any changes to my color right now and below that is albedo controls now we don't see any albedo controls right now since i need to click on the triangle icon to get a drop down so right here we have saturation brightness and contrast and they all do exactly as you would expect saturation increases the saturation of our asset bring it back to its default value of one brightness controls how bright the asset is and this is probably the parameter i use the most with mega scan assets especially if i'm trying to get a lot of different assets to blend together well i'm going to try to control the brightness to make sure they all have a similar value to each other and below that is contrast and all these have a default value of one now below that is metallic generally i don't have to play with it because this asset isn't metallic but if you do want to override one of the metallic behaviors for example increase the base metallic from zero which is what it should be since this asset is a metallic to one and then bring metallic map override to zero now we can see that the asset is metallic although i wouldn't recommend you to do it but it is good to know that those options are there so i'm going to reset them to their default value and then below that is roughness so roughness controls how shiny the asset is exactly what we learned about during the pbr section of the material chapter so max roughness is at one if i bring this to zero then the rocks have no roughness and are really shiny i'm gonna bring back the roughness by setting it back to one below that is normal strength which is like the flat of normal although now if we increase normal strength the normal increases and then if we decrease this to zero then the normal map has no effect on our assets so obviously we do want to leave this at one so the normal map has a little bit of an effect so there's still a bunch of other parameters that we could play with but these are all the main ones that are needed for props just like this now let's go over how we import a surface material which is different from a prop since surfaces are good for a floor like this cube and not necessarily meant for specific props so let's go into quicksilver bridge and let's find a nice surface for example brick decorative brick wall and we could click download although i do want to go over the different quality options so right now it's at the highest quality we have low medium high and highest low quality is 1k textures medium quality is 2k high quality is 4k and highest quality is 8k so i think generally unless you're really trying to go for the best looking render as possible i want to go with ak textures the highest i would go with is 4k and click download so you're going to have to wait for this to download and once it is done downloading simply click the add button immediately we will see that our content browser opens up and we get our material right there the material functions like any other material you can drag it and let go to place it on an object so now we have our brick in our world i can select this brick and open up its material instance to see what parameters we have and the parameters are pretty much exactly the same as beforehand except i want to point out what global does so global controls are tiling if i click on tiling offset and then click on the drop down we see tiling x entitling y if i want to title it more on the x direction i can increase this for one tile it more on the y direction i can increase this or i can decrease the tiling in the x and y to make our texture larger i can even offset it so move this texture in the x or y-axis of our object's texture uvs and if you really want to we even have the ability to rotate this although i'm just going to leave it at zero if you ever want to reset all the values at once then click on the top arrow and here is a neat trick that i do want to point out let's say you want to go to the folder that this asset is located in but you don't want to have to navigate to that folder manually go through all your content folders and try to find where this asset is located well what you could do is in the details panel click on the magnifying glass right next to that object which will jump to that location or the shortcut is to press control and b at the same time to jump to that object's location so if you select any object for example the human reference press control b it's going to jump to that location so that is a shortcut that we will be using a lot especially when we're creating our medieval village now i think is a good time to go over the foliage mode and to go into folge mode simply switch from select mode below landscape to foliage so folger mode is great because it allows us to paint foliage around our world very quickly and populate our world with grass trees rocks and pretty much all the small assets you would expect to be in an environment now i'm going to press shift 1 to get out of fold mode because we first need foliage and where are we going to get our foliage hopefully you can guess qixel bridge so in quick start bridge come to 3d plants and we have a bunch of plants to select from i specifically want to find fern just as an example although you could pick any of the plants that are available to us and i'm going to select common fern now just like when we were downloading the materials we have different quality options so i could use low quality which is 1k medium quality 2k or high quality which is 4k and i'm going to stick to high quality right now let's download it and once it's done downloading add to your project with the add button and now this fern plant is successfully inside of our project i can drag this out see exactly what assets were made available to us unlike other mega scan assets bullish can have multiple objects so here we have three different ferns and let's open up the material instance to see what options are available to us we have a couple ways to open up our foliage's material instance number one i could go into the details panel with any of these selected and select the first material available to us or i can press ctrl b to jump to that object's location which is our fern folder and select the material right here i want to make sure that i select the material that doesn't have billboard inside of it so select the non-billboard one and this will be our main material instance so i'm going to go over all the main parameters of foliage so first off we have color overlay which is essentially functions just like our color tints so if i want to make my foliage a little bit blue or red this is where i make that change and when i do make it red it kind of gives it a fall feel which is pretty neat press cancel since i don't want to make those changes and right above that is color variation because you wouldn't expect each fern to be the same exact color there would be a little bit of variation between all the different burns and that's exactly what color variation does if i bring this up to something large like 0.5 notice how each fern has its own individual tint now normally you don't want it to be this intense you'd want to be just a little bit like 0.1 or even 0.05 so that there's just a little bit of variation between all the objects and below that is roughness intensity so roughness intensity is just like our master materials roughness strength so bring it down to zero means our object is very shiny and bring it up to let's go five we'll make our ferns pretty rough let's leave it as default value of one and below that is normal intensity which functions like normal strength bringing it to 0 gets rid of the normal maps so this is with the normal maps and this is without or bringing it to 5 gives ourselves really intense normal maps but i'm going to leave it at 1 for now which is its default and after that we have translucency strength and desaturation so light doesn't just stop when it hits a leaf instead of light goes into the leaf it bounces around a little bit and then it leaves a leaf so that is where translucency comes in translucency is how much light should bounce around inside the leaf it's at a value of seven if i bring this to zero then we have no light bouncing within the leaf if i breed up to one then a little bit two a little bit more five and finally the default of seven and below that is translucency desaturation notice how if i bring down to zero then it becomes completely desaturated now the light inside the leaf is white or if i ran to one then there was no desaturation when the light was bouncing in the leaf so i'm going to leave it at the default value of 0.95 and finally we have probably the most important parameter and that is a naval grass wind so turn this on and then set it to true so now our plants have wind which adds a whole other level of realism we can control the wind intensity by of course playing with it right here so if i bring it to zero then there is no wind and its default is 0.15 maybe if we're inside a hurricane make this 0.5 and now it's super intense so i think 0.15 is a little bit too intense by default so i'm going to bring this down to 0.05 for just some really faint movements now you probably noticed throughout this entire time is that the foliage pops a little bit as i go further away or closer up to it and this popping is a level of detail so we can better see level detail by opening up the foliage in its static mesh editor and right here we have lod lod 0 is what the foliage will look like when you're really up close to it and actually let me go uncheck the grid so we can better see this led1 is what it will look like when we get a little bit further away when the camera gets even further we go lod 2 further lod 3 and finally we go to led4 and as we increase lods as the camera gets further and further away we lose more and more geometry until we get this weird thing right here which is essentially just a picture of the fern which is pointing at the camera so this material right here is what the billboard is so that's why we weren't editing this material since this material is completely different from our main material instance if we did edit this then we wouldn't see any changes right now in our world since we're zoomed up pretty close to our ferns we would notice a change if we're far away and hopefully you can see it in youtube all of our firms just transitioned to a billboard which is the furthest lod possible so that's important to point out that if you do make a major change to these ferns for example let's give them a color tint of blue we have blue ferns but if we go away our billboards are green so we also have to go into the billboard material instance which is the second material and change this color to blue to match the main material instance so we get a better transition now that looks terrible so i'm going to change it back to its default value of gray and right here change it also back to gray and i can exit out of all of these and save everything because now that we've gone over the material parameters for foliage we can talk about the foliage mode editor which we can open with the shortcut shift 3. right here is where we get all the assets that i want to paint onto our landscape we can see that it was already auto populated by the foliage that we downloaded from mega scans the reason why is because unreal is smart enough and mega scans is smart enough to know that if we're downloading foliage odds are we want to paint it now if we don't have anything right here then we could drag any 3d object into the folder editor by just selecting them in the content drawer hovering over and adding them as a foliage type now i'm not going to add them as a folger type because they're already added right here so if i select any of them we see that i get a details panel down here with a bunch of options for how i want to paint this specific object now if you do not see these options that's because you have to come up here and make sure this button is blue so to start painting make sure you have paint selected and you'll notice that nothing is happening that's because i need to activate right here what foliage i want to paint down so i need to tell unreal exactly what assets i want to paint so for example if i just want to paint this asset right here then hover over the assets icon and in the top left hand corner make sure it's turned on so now this is going to glow while all the other ones are a little bit darker and that tells me that i can paint it so go to paint and now hold down left mouse button and i'm painting this foliage around and wait a little bit for the shaders to compile i want to paint all three then make sure all three of them are activated so now i'm painting a lot of them down if i ever want to get rid of these or erase a specific foliage type make sure that fold type is selected and hold down shift to erase them so it is pretty simple i can decrease the brush size by coming up here or i can use the shortcuts from the landscape mode which are the left bracket key to decrease brush size and right bracket key to increase the brush size i even have access to paint density so right now it's at 0.5 if i want to paint down more foliage then i can increase this to one and i'm paying a lot more or if i don't really want to paint that much down then set to 0.1 i'm just going to paint a little bit hold down shift and i can always erase everything that i've already done and of course if you don't want to paint a specific fold type just make sure you have that unchecked and now we're only going to paint this one and this one so if you want to quickly select all the foliage types then you can press ctrl n a to select all so in unreal engine control a is select all and then in the top left hand corner you can uncheck it to uncheck them all and then check it again to check them all so that's a nice shortcuts and you can also hold down control to select multiple objects or you can hold shift to select objects in a row so now that i have them all selected i want to edit the properties down here but i want to edit the properties all at once so i'm going to press ctrl a to select all of them and we have density down here green paint density all the way up to one we can see that yeah this is pretty dense but what if i want this to be even more dense well down here for density i can increase this from 100 to 200 so this should be twice as dense i can see that's already pretty dense even take this up another notch to 500 and now we are going to be painting in a lot of ferns but these fronts still look a little bit unrealistic there's two reasons number one i think the variation of our ferns is a bit too much so let's jump back into our material instance and for color variation i'm going to lower that from 0.05 to 0.01 okay so that's better but all the ferns have the same exact size and plants never have the same exact size normally they have different sizes depending on where they're placed or how old they are in their lifespan so let's jump back into foliage mode with shift in three and select all of them now i'm going to delete them all scroll down and for scale x let's have a random range for each time we paint the foliage from 0.5 to a max of two so now if i paint and actually hold down shift decrease the density from 500 to 100 so we can better see each individual fern we will see that we have a very wide range of sizes so some ferns are small and some ferns are larger than the other ones also if you enjoy placing assets by painting them but let's say for example there's one asset and you don't like where it's placed but you don't want to delete all the assets that are around it well instead of using paint you can use select and then you can grab that individually and move it away so you can still move individual objects and even scale them and rotate them despite using the paint mode so just keep that in mind that you still have a lot of control over the placement of your objects and it's also important to point out that let's say for example i'm painting and i only want to paint on my landscape and then i go on top of a mesh and then i start painting on top of my mesh by default also when i now move this mesh around we can see that that foliage is stuck to that mesh so if you do not want that to happen i'm going to press ctrl z to get rid of that press shift 3 make sure under filters that static meshes is turned off so now when i'm painting i'm only painting on top of my landscapes and not on top of the static meshes so that's the very basics of foliage in unreal engine 5. we're going to be painting a lot of foliage when it comes to our final environment build towards the end of this video now it's time to talk about one of the main features of uv5 and that is nanite geometry so nanite geometry is a brand new way of rendering geometry that allows for a near infinite amount of source polygons on our screen at any time so this means we could get high quality movie assets rendering in real time which was impossible beforehand and now i know that might sound a little bit too good to be true so i have two examples we're going to jump into to demonstrate the power of nanites right now i have the unreal engine 5 demo project downloaded you can download this project within the epic games launcher under samples and it's called valley of the ancients so if you want to check this out then you can download it right now although do keep in mind that this project is a hundred gigabytes large since we're using really dense models because nanite allows us to do that so this entire desert is made possible with nanite and we can see nanite in action by coming up to lit down here to nanite visualization and selecting triangles so every color you see is an individual triangle is an individual polygon and notice how when i zoom in on any of these rocks or cliffs our triangles get denser denser as i zoom in and when i zoom out the triangles get larger and larger so this is all possible due to nanites beforehand in unreal engine 4 using geometry that is this dense was not possible now do keep in mind that at the time of recording this video nanite only works for solid static meshes that do not deform so for example it works for rocks or for clips but it doesn't work for foliage epic games is aware of this issue and they're right now working on it so maybe if you're watching this in the future then nanite works for grass and trees but for now it only works for solid static meshes and another cool feature of nanites specifically for this sample project is that and if i increase my camera speed there is no landscapes whatsoever everything you see right here is a nanite static mesh so the ground is not a landscape it's a collection of static meshes that are layered on top of each other to make it look like the ground is one landscape so here's another example demonstrating nanites so right in front of you is a donut i made in unreal engine and this donut is made up of about 30 000 different polygons here we have that same donuts but copy and pasted over 100 000 times and as we can see my frame rate is about 5 to 10 frames per second which is obviously unplayable and the reason why is because these donuts aren't making use of nanites so to enable nanite on any static mesh simply find where that static mesh is within the content drawer as a reminder a shortcut is to select that static mesh and press control and b to jump to its location and to activate nanites right click on the static mesh come up to nanite and select enabled so it is that easy to enable nanite and now here's that same environment but all the donuts are nanites and we're hovering around 40 to 60 frames per second so we went from 10 all the way up to 60 frames per second which is amazing we can even come up to lit nanite visualization and select triangles to double check that this is all using nanite geometry so i finally jump back into our first project and as a reminder to enable nanites all you have to do is select the static mesh press control and b to find out where that static mesh is within your content drawer and right click and select enabled now nanite is enabled for this asset here's a tip we can see what assets have nanite enabled by coming up to lit nanite visualization and instead of clicking on triangles which has been showing us how many polys are on a mesh we can select mask so everything that's green is using nanite and everything that is red is not using anite as a reminder at the time of recording this video nanite only works for solid static meshes like the rock right here it doesn't work for foliage although that will be changing so maybe in the future you can enable nanite not foliage and make that a lot more performant than what it is right now we can even download a nanite version of this object so nanite will automatically be enabled from mega scans to do so let's hop back into qixel bridge and i specifically want to download let's go nordic ormation type that in and i think it is this mesh right here so nordic beach formation and instead of selecting high quality medium quad or low quality we will select nani quality and click on download now this will take a while since nanite quality is downloading the best quality possible which is a very very high resolution mesh and now that's downloaded click on add so a new window will pop up with your mesh so i'm going to exit a bridge and drag this out into my world it might take a while for all the shaders to compile and we have a nanite mesh we can see how dense this meshes by going into wireframe view mode with alt n2 so this is how dense a nanite meshes compare this to downloading a mesh at medium quality like these rocks right here compared to nanite quality obviously nanite is a lot better we get all this small detail within the rocks which really helps make it realistic the only issue is since we're downloading ak textures and a high resolution mesh it's going to take up a lot of disk space but if you're not worried about large project files then i would download everything as nanite since there is no performance cost and in a lot of cases it's actually more performant to use nanite meshes than non-anime meshes so here's what we're going to do is that i want to compare all the different quality types that we're able to download from mega scans so i'm going to jump back into quixote bridge and download this same asset but download the low quality medium quality and high quality to compare them all so here are all the different qualities for this asset and to better see the difference between them i'm going to press alt n2 to go into wireframe view mode and our landscape is right now interfering with us analyzing the wireframes of our assets so i can select the landscape and hide it with h so h is a shortcut to hide an asset without having to navigate to it within the world outliner and selecting the eye icon i can also press ctrl h to unhide an asset so click on it press h to hide it and ctrl h to unhide it so i'm going to leave that hidden and over here we have the lowest quality it's pretty noticeable that there's not that many polygons on this asset and the shadows from our directional lights make it very noticeable that this asset is pretty low poly now right next to it is medium quality so medium quality has a little bit more polys and it's at 2k while low quality was at 1k and next to that is high quality so high quality obviously has a lot more polys and the textures are also at 4k and finally we get nanite with 8k textures and the highest poly count possible so this is the source poly counts that are directly from the scan these are the kind of assets you would see in movies not in video games but because nanite is enabled we are able to use them in our project so those are the different quality selectors one thing i do want to point out is that notice if we pay attention to our high quality asset as i zoom out the polygons shift until i'm so far out that basically these three assets are using the same amount of polygons that's because mega scan assets when not using nanite use a level of detail so press ctrl h to unhide the landscape and i can open up my asset by pressing ctrl and b to jump to that assets location in the content drawer and then double clicking on the asset to open up the static mesh editor or as a shortcut instead of having to navigate to the asus location in the content browser i can press ctrl and e to open it up so make sure you have any assets selected for example the medium quality one and press ctrl e to open up that specific asset now i'm going to dock it up here so i get a better look at my static mesh if i press alt 2 to go into wireframe view mode zoom in we see that this is the asset's highest poly version and as the camera zooms away it slowly starts to transition into lower and lower lods and we can see each of these individual lods up here so lod zero is the highest one one is lower two is even lower and finally three is the lowest so this is how we used to make our assets more performant back before nanite but since nanite does exist there really is no reason why i can select all three of my static meshes press control and b to select all of them in the content drawer right click and enable nanites so save everything and pressing alt 2 you see that we no longer get level of detail but what we do have is automatic level of detail that's being generated from nanite so even when you have very low poly meshes it's still recommended that you enable nanites now it's time to start programming ue5 and in case you forgot unrule engine is a video game engine so of course programming is going to be a pretty big part of it but unreal engine handles programming a little bit differently compared to other video game engines instead of having lines of code we write to tell the engine what to do we instead have blocks of nodes and we connect these nodes to each other to create logic these nodes in unreal engine are called blueprints and blueprints is unreal's visual scripting language now in my opinion blueprints are a lot easier and a lot faster than traditional ways of coding like an unreal engine where we would have to type everything out using c plus even if you don't plan on programming anything i still highly recommend that you learn blueprints because blueprints is literally everywhere inside the engine it's what we use to connect the different parts of the engine to each other so it's an essential skill to know if you do want to learn unreal engine and with all that being said let's learn blueprints by creating our first video game in ue5 to begin before we do anything let's duplicate the current level we have open and create our game within our new duplicator level so if we come up to the top left hand corner we can see the name of our level which is called landscape example if you remember we created it within my stuff and maps so since landscape example and landscape example up there have the same exact name that means that this level is the level we currently have opened so i'm going to select that level and press ctrl and d at the same time to duplicate now it's going to ask for a new name i'm going to call this one game map now we can rename any assets within the content drawer by right-clicking and going to rename also the shortcut is fn2 but i like the current name so i'm not going to do that now i'm going to double-click and save selected to open up our new level and here we have the map we will be editing to create our very first game so to play a game in unreal engine click the play button up here in the toolbar so pressing it we'll start playing our game but we can't control our game right now since i need to click into the viewport and now i get full control over the game so i can press the escape key to stop playing my game so to play a game click the play icon and to control the game click into the viewport we don't have our mouse anymore and that's because to stop playing you need to click on the escape key so you probably noticed that our controls for our game were pretty basic since it's just the wasd keys just like the viewport controls and that's because we don't have any characters or gameplay elements set up yet so in order to set up a gameplay element we first need access to the world settings right now we don't have any world settings tab as a reminder to get the world settings window come up to windows and select world settings and now we're going to get a brand new window right here which we can switch in between details and world settings so right here we have game mode override this is where we set exactly what game we want to play and the drop down we should have bp underscore third person game mode now if you don't have bp underscore third person game mode that's because you didn't add the third person content yet which is the content that includes this character right here so if you want to get our character and our game mode press control space go to add and add feature or content pack and select third person then click on add to project now i've already done that which is why i get bp underscore third person game mode which is located under one of the files that were created when i added in the third person content under third person and blueprints so it's this one right here alternatively instead of selecting from the drop down i can also hold down the left mouse button and drag it onto it and let go so now if i press play we see that we get a third person character i could use the wasd keys to move around space to jump and the mouse to rotate my camera around my character and as a reminder i can press the escape key to get out alternatively as a shortcut instead of coming up to my toolbar and pressing the play button i can press alt and p to automatically play my game so that's alt and p to start playing my game without having to come up to the toolbar and also notice how when i do click into my viewport i no longer get access to the mouse cursor if i ever want to get back the mouse cursor while playing my game i could press shift and f1 at the same time so that's shift f1 to bring back my mouse cursor and instead of pressing the escape key i could come up to the stop button and press that right there to escape my game so let's open up our first blueprint and specifically the blueprint we're going to open up is the character blueprint we're right now controlling so you can find the character blueprint by coming into third person and selecting blueprints so it's right next to bp underscore third person game mode it's bp underscore third person character so double click on it to open up our first blueprint now we're currently on the event graph don't worry we're going to go over what the event graph does in just a bit but to see all the objects that make up our blueprint select the viewport now the objects that make up a blueprint are called components and i can select a component just like on the level editor also just like the level editor we have the same exact controls so i hold down the right mouse button to look around and move and i can select any of the objects press the f key to focus on it hold down the alt and left mouse button to rotate and alt and right mouse button to zoom in and out so this is basically just like our level editor but for our blueprints also we have the equivalent of a world outliner so on the top left-hand corner is the components tab which contains all the components inside of our blueprints just like an object in our world i can select a component and change its properties in the details panel for example right now we're using skm underscore quinn as our skeletal mesh which is the female mesh if i want to change it i can select sk model score quinn and then select s cam underscore manny to change it to the male 1 so now if i play my game we can see that we have a different body so now let's jump into the event graph so the event graph contains all the nodes and blueprints which makes up the programming or logic behind our third person character now if you don't see an event graph for example if it's closed then you could come into my blueprints and double click on event graph to bring it back also we can move any of the windows just like in the level editor and change things to our liking now if you mess up the user interface to the point of no return then come up to window load layout and default editor layout to reset the windows to what unreal has by default we get an extra window under our event graph called compiler results i don't need this so i could click on the x icon or as a shortcut hover over the tab and press the middle mouse button to close it so let's go over exactly what some of these blueprints do right here so if i zoom in for example on the jump input we can see exactly the logic that's behind jumping so the logic is pretty simple we have an event which is essentially at least in this case functions as a keyboard press so input action is jump right now it's set to the spacebar so when i press the spacebar our character jumps and when i release the space bar our character stops jumping and we can see this in action by clicking on the play button and pressing space now notice that i did spawn all the way over here and that's because we don't have a player start within our world so to add a player starts come up to the add button go down to basics and drag in a player start so here we have a new object in our world if i press play our player starts from this location and also points in the direction of the arrow so if i rotate this for example it's facing the rocks and press play now our player starts and spawns right there pointing at these rocks so if i jump back into bp underscore third person character and player game we start from this location now i'm going to press shift and f1 at the exact same time to get back my mouse cursor and i'm going to move the window to the top right hand corner so we can see exactly what is happening so if i press space we don't see visually what is happening within our event graph so to see the blueprints running in real time i could come up to no debug object selected and then select bp underscore third person character spawned now if i zoom out on my event graph notice how some of the wires turn from white to orange these orange wires tell us that these nodes are currently being activated if i zoom back into input action jump and let's get back our character if i press the space bar we can see that i jump and then when i let go we stop jumping so jump and stop jumping so this is a great way to debug and watch our logic running in real time which is amazing and it really speeds up the process of programming in unreal so let's create our first sequence of nodes we're going to add in new functionality specifically i want to add in the ability where when i press the f key our character drops and it ragdolls so we no longer have control over our mesh instead we let the physics take control and watch his body fall over similar to gta or other games so to do so we first need to add in an event specifically to add in any node to our graph right click and we're able to type in the name of the node or manually scroll to that node's location right here but obviously there are a lot of nodes since we're able to program an entire game through blueprints so something like to do is type in the name i'm going to type in keyboard because it's under keyboard events and f since it's the f key and select it so now we get a new event that will be fired whenever i press the f key to double check that this event is working i'm going to add in another node by right clicking and typing in print stream so to hook up two nodes and connect them to each other hover over the output hold down the left mouse button drag into the input and let go to connect them up to break hold down the alt key and left mouse button in either the output or the input so the controls are very similar to our material graph and now within print stream we see that the screen is going to be hello instead i want to say event was fired exclamation points and we can get more options for this node by clicking on the drop down at the bottom of the node and for text color instead of blue make this orange so now if i press the play button click into my window to start playing my game when i press the f key the event is fired and print stream is activated so when i press f then we get text onto my screen that says event was fired which is what we just programmed so i'm going to escape my game and delete print stream since that was just an example that i want to show which proves that my event right now is working so whenever i press the event key all the nodes that are connected to pressed will be activated so specifically i want a new node now i could right click and type in the name of the node which is sets collision enabled mesh and then hook it up like that or as a shortcut i'm going to delete those and drag from pressed let go and it will automatically bring up my notes now i can type in set collision enabled select mesh and they will automatically be connected so that's another way to bring in nodes and notice how this is two nodes we have set collision enabled and for target we have mesh mesh is a reference to the mesh component of our blueprints so it's specifically referencing our character right there jump back into event graph and if it's for some reason not hooked up by default then i can drag mesh from the components window into my event graph let go and plug it up like that but unreal smart enough to know that if we do want to set collision enabled we probably want to do it to the skeletal mesh right here now for new type instead of no collision select collision enabled query and physics don't worry exactly what this node does i'm going to show what it does in just a moment now i want to connect another node from set collision enabled which is sets simulates physics and specifically choose mesh which will automatically connect our mesh to this new node make sure it says similarly physics is turned on drag from here again and go set physics blend weight and then select mesh and for the blend weight change it from zero to one so as you can probably guess these three nodes will essentially rag dollar character pressing play again i can run around my world and then as soon as i press the f key our character ragdolls and the physics take control so let's do that again i can run around jump and press the f key to ragdoll we can better organize our graph because notice that the target for all three of my nodes is mesh so we don't have to drag from an individual reference to mesh we only need one reference to mesh so i'm going to select these two delete them and drag out mesh into sets and like physics and drag from the same one to set physics blend weights i can also better organize my graph by hovering over any wires and double clicking to add in a reroute node so simply hover over a wire double click to bring in a reroute node which doesn't change any of the logic it just helps better organize our graph and hold down alt so i'm going to break this connection and then drag from the reroute node into set physics blend weight hover over the wire double click and bring that down like that to just better organize my graph now i can watch all three of them be enabled by clicking the play button and let me go make my window just a little bit smaller make sure that bp underscore third person character is selected as a debug option and when i press f we can see all three of those notes are activated and it gives us this ragdoll effect okay so let's create a little obstacle course for our character jump back into game map and i want to create an elevated area where the obstacle course will be so press shift and 2 to go to landscape mode have sculpt selected and it's not that intense so bring tool strength up to 1 and i'm going to keep sculpting until i find a height that i like for example right here is pretty good go into the flatten brush then hover over the exact height that you want hold down the left mouse button to flatten that so now i can create a little obstacle course area right here like that and i think the edges are too sharp so i can also go into smooth bring down the tool strength and slightly smooth out the area so maybe even a little bit less strong just so that we don't get any artifacts from those sharp angles and i could select my player start and drag it all the way up here or i can delete it and let's add in a brand new one come up to add basics player start drag it in and make sure it's pointing in the x direction so now if i press play our player starts right here and they're going to have to navigate some obstacles until they get to the very end and they win the game so this is going to be the quickest and worst game made in history so let's create our obstacle and this obstacle is specifically going to be a blueprint so press control space and let's create the blueprint under third person blueprints right click and under create basic assets select blueprint and i want it to be an actor so this name is going to be vp underscore obstacle and you might be wondering why do i use bp underscore well bp stands for blueprint and it's just naming convention you could name this obstacle without the bp but i like to include it so double click to go inside of our blueprint and this is what a completely empty blueprint looks like so let's actually add in a new component which will be our obstacle so come to add and down to here select cylinder i want to decrease its width just a little bit and also increase it a lot in the z-axis so i'm going to move this up so the bottom is touching the grid floor and come back into game map let's go find where the obstacle is and drag it into our world also it's recommended that you do press compile which will set all the changes we made in the blueprint but all blueprints will automatically be compiled when we press play so come back in a game map press play and here we have our first obstacle and i want it where when the player touches it he ragdolls and we essentially die so let's come back into our obstacle and i need to add in a collision volume so type in collision and it's going to be a capsule collision so select that right there and i'm going to scale up this collision so let's scale it up and make sure that the collision is larger than the cylinder because otherwise if the collision is too small for example if it's smaller than a cylinder then our character will collide with the cylinder first and never collide with the actual collision volume so make sure that is a little bit larger than it is and then in the details panel with collision selected you want to select on component begin overlap so this will be called whenever our collision comes into contact with an object but right now this event will be fired whenever it comes into contact with anything so if it touches a plant or maybe if we have birds in a game it touches a bird then this event will be fired which is something that we don't want to happen so we can get around that by dragging from overlapped other actor and doing a cast to bp underscore third person character and select that so essentially what this casting is doing is that it's going to check if the overlapped object is the third person character and then if it is let's print screen to double check that this is working and for the strings say collided with character so let's jump back to the game map press play and now if i come up to it we see top left hand corner right here that we are colliding with the character which is something we want now i want it where when we do collide our player ragdolls and dies so jump back into bp underscore obstacle let's delete that and casting also has a benefit that we get access to a lot of the properties that are within bp underscore third person character so if we jump back into our character i want to create a custom event right here so this custom event will allow us to call all the nodes that we've already set up so right click type in a custom event and call this one death just like that and drag it into the start so make sure you compile because otherwise you will not see it but if we jump into bp underscore obstacle and drag from our third person character we now get access to the death event so select it we can now control when our player dies from another blueprint which isn't our third person character f was just being used as a debug event i'm going to delete it because all we need is the death function so if i press play now if the player now collides with the obstacle we see that as soon as i touch it our player die so let's go do that again come to the obstacle touch it and he dies so what's happening right now is that mbp underscore obstacle as soon as the object touches the capsule collision it's going to check if that object is a third person character if it is a third person character then we're going to call the custom event called death double click on the event to jump to where it's being created which is in our third person character and all these nodes ragdoll our character right now our obstacle isn't much of an obstacle if i press play it's very easy to avoid this pillar since this pillar isn't moving now we can make this a little bit harder by adding rotation to the pillar so let's jump back into bp underscore obstacle and i'm going to specifically use the event tick now by default every new blueprint does include an event tick right here but in case you deleted the default events you can always get back the event tick by right clicking and typing in event tick and selecting it so the event tick is pretty unique compared to other events in that it runs every single frame so we can see this running in action by adding a print screen and for the stream call this one activated so now if i press play we can see that every single frame activated is being called so let's go delete that and i want to use the node called add actor local rotation and select it right there so plug it up like this and we're not going to notice anything happening since we need to add a new local rotation and i specifically want to increase let's go the x-axis five degrees so now if i press play we see that every single frame my obstacle is rotating five degrees and while this is great there's one issue and that is it's frame dependent so right now we're running at probably a smooth 120 frames per second but what if this game was running on a computer that's not as powerful and it's running every 30 frames per second well we can see what it's like to simulate that by pressing the backtick key to bring up the command line and type in dot max fps and type in 30 to lock it to 30 frames per second it's still rotating 5 degrees every frame but we have less frame so it's going to be rotating slower so we need to make this frame independent i can bring back my original frame rate by clicking on the backtick key again typing in t.max fps and put in zero to uncap the frame rate and to do so we need to use the delta seconds so i'm going to drag from delta rotation and type in make rotator down here so select that and essentially the make rotator will break our rotation so we get access to x y and z independently as inputs so i'm going to drag from delta seconds and type in multiply like that and select it so now the output will go into the x and for rotation we're going to set it back to 5. so if i press play again and now we're going pretty slow so i'm going to increase this from 5 to 100 press play again and our obstacle is rotating i can lock this frame rate by clicking on the backtick key and type in t.max fps let's lock it to 30 and notice that despite it being 30 seconds we're still rotating at the same exact speed as beforehand i can even try t.max fps 120 frames per second and we have the same speed so our gameplay is no longer tied to our frame rate which is exactly what we want right now all we have is one obstacle blueprint in our world if i want multiple of them i could select this blueprint and hold down alt to duplicate it or i can drag it out from our content drawer now if i press play we do have the issue and that is they're rotating in the exact same direction i can rotate each of these blueprints in a random direction on the z-axis to give our rotations a little bit of variety now if i press play we're rotating in different directions but it's pretty hard to tell exactly what direction it's going to be rotating on when editing our game in viewport to help us know the direction that we're rotating jump back into bp underscore obstacle let's go to viewport and click on add and we're going to add in an arrow components so this arrow components and i can zoom in to see exactly what it is it will not be visible when we're playing our game which is exactly what we want so for arrow color i'm going to set this to blue and also rotate this let's go 90 degrees in the z-axis and lift this up so now if i compile jump back into game map we can see that i have a blue arrow that's pointing in the direction that my obstacle will rotate so pressing play i'm able to tell exactly where this object will rotate to now that i do have some obstacles there's just one issue and that is they're all going the same exact speed i want some obstacles to be slower than others so i want to be able to edit that property in the details panel of the blueprint so to do so i need to make a variable and variables are pretty similar to a materials parameters so let's jump back into event graph and under variables i can create a new one by clicking on the plus icon so call this one rotation speed and instead of boolean i can change it up here to a float so i float as a number with decimal points now i can hold down the left mouse button and drag out rotation speed let go inside of my event graph and it's going to ask me whether i want to get it or set it i want to get the rotation speed and plug it up right there so instead of 100 we're going to be using whatever value is stored within rotation speed so you can essentially think of variables as containers of data now when we do have rotation speed selected we're unable to change that value because our blueprint needs to be compiled so as soon as i press compile i now get access to that value it's set at zero so if i do play my game we aren't rotating now i can bring this back to 100 and if i play my game we have the same exact speed but that's not the point of variables variables are great because they allow us to change the default value so i want to expose this variable that's how i'm able to edit it within the details panel of my object make sure that you have rotation selected and in the details panel check instance edible and expose on spawn now if i press compile jump back into game map we can see that when i do have an obstacle blueprint selected rotation speed is made available so i can make this obstacle right here have a speed of 50 this one a speed of 200 and right there let's go 300 now if i press play they all have different speeds so it makes it a lot harder to try and navigate this obstacle course we are right now missing a very crucial element to our game and that is an end goal so the goal that i want the player to try to reach is specifically under starter content props sm underscore statue so the player is trying to make it to the statue and i'm going to change the material from glass to gold so starter content materials and drag metal gold onto the glass like that now when the player and i'm aware that you can just walk around the obstacle course i want to add in the feature where when the player is by the statue we get a windscreen telling us that we did beat the game to begin let's add in a trigger volume which will trigger whenever the player is near the statue so to do so come up to add and under volumes select the trigger volume so i'm going to drag it out and place it so that it's around the statue we want to program it where whenever the player collides with this trigger volume then a windscreen will pop up we're going to program this logic through the level blueprints so every level in a real engine has its very own blueprint where we're able to script logic that is very specific to the level so to open up your level blueprint come up to the blueprint icon right here select that and then select open level blueprint now this is the event graph that is specific for game map we can even see that the name of this blueprint is game map which is different from bp underscore obstacle or a third person character since it's not an individual object instead it's the level as a whole now i'm going to delete our default custom events and i want to make sure that in my level editor i have the trigger volume selected so with it selected i'm able to get a bunch of different properties and events that are related to the trigger volume for example if i right click we can see that add event for trigger volume 3 and under collision we get the event that i want which is add on actor begin overlap if you do not see any of these options then you want to make sure that you do have your trigger volume selected in the map so right click add event for trigger volume collisions and add on actor begin overlap which is essentially a very similar event to our on component begin overlap so we want to do the exact same thing we did right here and that is make sure that we are overlapping with the third person character so drag from other actor and cast to third person character and select it right there now i want to make sure that this event is working by dragging from this node and printing string so the sentence that i want to come up is you won the game exclamation point so ideally pressing play i'm going to walk around my obstacle course we will fix that in a bit and as soon as i come into contact with the trigger volume we see in top left right corner we get the stream u1 the game now let's create a windscreen so to create a user interface let's press control and space and i'm going to create it under third person blueprints right click on our user interface select widget so user interfaces in a real are called widgets and i'm going to select user widget under common now it's going to ask me to name this widgets i'm going to call this one win screen widget and then double click to go inside of it so this will be very brief it's not a proper introduction to the widget editor since all i want is a little bit of text that will come up once we do beat the game so to begin in the palette i'm going to type in canvas and drag in canvas into my graph let go the green outline is essentially our window now i'm going to type in text and drag in text into my graph so i want to center my text that's how it's in the middle of my screen and then in the details panel let's go change the text to you one of the game exclamation points also under appearance click on the font drop down and increase the size so the text is very noticeable i'm actually going to decrease it just a little bit more and i want to move this flower icon into the middle of the screen that's all my text is anchored so my text will always be in the middle of the screen no matter the size of my window so press compile and let's save everything now jump back into game map and i'm going to delete this print screen since now we have a proper windscreen drag from here and create a widget of course the widget we're going to create is the one that we just made so windscreen widget and drag from here then add to viewport since by default it will be hidden we need to show it so now if i play my game go around my obstacle course and i collide with the collision of my statue we see that i just won the game and congratulations you just made your first video game in unreal engine 5. while it's not the best hopefully you did learn the very basics to programming using blueprints real quickly let's fix the game so our player can't run around the obstacle course so press shift 2 to go back into landscape edit mode select flatten and flatten it out so the player only has one direction or one way to go to get to the statue and also select all the obstacles hold down alt and i'm going to rotate them around and move them like this so there are multiple objects the player has to dodge and i'm going to delete one of the obstacles in the middle to make our game a little bit easier and move the player start since if i press play i just get dropped from the play space move the player start so it's resting on top of the landscape press play and now the goal is to try to make it past all the obstacles and not get hit and at the very end we see you won the game when i get to the statue now at this point we have all the knowledge needed to create this beautiful castle environment you see right here in this last chapter i will walk through the entire process we will start off by sculpting and painting the landscape and then we will move on to creating the castle using modular assets finally we'll paint trees and foliage and at the end add a third person character to our world so the player can walk around our finished environment while you can follow this tutorial exactly i highly encourage you to experiment and create your own unique environment use this video as a reference and veer off the path to make this world your own since after all you are not creating my environment you're creating your own one but before we can do that a quick word from our sponsor just kidding we don't have a sponsor but if you do want to support the channel then you can check out the unreal master class the master class is an expanding collection of exclusive tutorials and lessons for unreal engine 5. in it we take an even deeper dive into unreal going over animation architectural visualization advanced blueprints how to create a game completely from scratch and much more another way to support this channel is by subscribing and sharing this video because i have a lot more free tutorials and assets planned for the future so with all that being said let's create our castle okay before we get started of course we need to create a brand new project since i want to show the process completely from scratch which means we start off with a new project so double click to open up unreal engine and in the project browser let's select games and for a template i'm going to select third person so third person will have a bunch of assets already loaded up in our project the reason why is because i want to use the mannequin right here as a human reference to help us with scale and to make sure that our environment isn't too big or too small now for project location that's correct i just want to save this on my desktop and for the name let's call this one castle environment now i don't need the starter content and i don't need ray tracing so let's press create the reason why is because we already have some content we're going to use in the starter assets we downloaded so if you haven't downloaded the assets already there's a link in the description below this is what you will see in a brand new project with a third person template down here it says new plugins are available we can dismiss that and select update so this is a very simple map if i press play we automatically spawn in as our character reminder to move around it's the wasd keys and you can press space to jump so pretty simple now i don't want to use a third person template map right here i want to create a new map completely from scratch so we're not going to go to file and select new level and then use a template instead i'm going to create a map to the content browser so right click on content and create a brand new folder call this folder maps and within here right click new level and this one will be as you can probably guess castle environment so double click to go inside of here and now we're inside a completely blank unreal level so before we do anything let's create a landscape come up to select landscape and it's going to automatically use the new tool i'm going to keep everything as default and press create now we can't see the landscape because we need to add in a directional light go to lights directional light drag it in and now we need a sky so let's go to visual effects sky and atmosphere drag that in and add in a cube so let's add in a cube right there and i think right now is a good time to bring in a human reference i like to bring in a human reference as soon as possible to make sure everything is scaled correctly so go into characters mannequins meshes and we can drag in any of these i'm going to drag in skm underscore manny for our human reference now if we zoom in on the shadows obviously we need a little bit of a bluish tint from our sky and that is where the skylight will come in so hopefully by now if you have watched the tutorial then you are pretty familiar with this lighting setup so select the skylight and because we're using a sky and atmosphere i want the skylight to have real time capture turn on and set to movable and have our directional light also be set to movable and congratulations you are basically done with lighting and outdoor scene there is one last step we can do and that is to get rid of this black void that's in the bottom half of my world we're going to hide that by adding in exponential high fog like that so lighting in a real engine has pretty much never been easier another thing i'm going to do to prevent my camera from getting brighter and darker is to of course add in a post process volume so go to volumes post process volume add that in go to exposure and we're going to set that to manual it's not making effect right now because if i go into my post process volume it affects my camera but if i go out it doesn't so i need to make sure that my post process volume has infinite extent unbound turned on and with exposure compensation bring this up from 1 to 11 or we can even leave it at 10.5 for now but we will be changing the exposure conversation throughout the rest of this video since i think it's very helpful to see what our world looks like using different post-process settings and one last thing we could do that i personally like to add to all my worlds but it's entirely up to you is to add in clouds so come to add visual effects and drag in volumetric clouds just like that and at this point we are pretty much done with the lighting portion i'd say about 80 percent of outdoor scenes are simply lit this way so you have your sunlight skylight and exponential height fog of course you need your skylight that's how we get our blue sky and maybe optionally we get clouds so with all that you're able to quickly light an outdoor scene very easily and a post-process volume which we will be controlling our exposure compensation now as a reminder you can move the directional light by clicking on it and rotating it around or as a shortcut you can hold down control and l to rotate it that way so by no means is the lighting of our world final we're going to continually jump back to these actors and change their properties to see what settings and options look nice i think it's time now to handle the landscape since obviously landscapes won't look like this there'll be grass dirt cliffs and so on so we can get a nice landscape material i've already created from the downloadable asset pack so let's move this to the side and here is the downloadable content so make sure you do download this because you will need the assets to follow along with the rest of the tutorial so double click to open it up go intro unreal 5 and it's the castle assets so i'm going to drag it onto my desktop to unzip it this folder is an unreal project that contains all the assets we want to use so of course we need to migrate those assets into my main project so let's open up castle asset and here we have some assets we're going to use to create our castles so of course we have all of our castle static meshes we even have some mountain meshes that we're going to place in the background but we're not going to go over these static meshes just yet since what i want to use is the landscape material so jump into castle assets landscapes and its m underscore landscape instance so let's migrate all these assets into our main project so press control space and right click on castle assets select migrate and make sure everything is selected so everything's okay correct and then select ok now it's going to ask for a destination folder we can find the destination folder by manually going to our desktop and into our projects content folder or i can press ctrl space in our main project right click on content go to show and explore and then copy the location of the content folder and paste its location right there like that and select it so all these assets have been copied over to castle environment now we no longer need this project i can exit out and in castle assets we have everything so jump into maps overview and here was that exact map we were just on but now it's in our main project also whenever we exit out of our project and open it back up i want let's go into maps our main environment right here castle environment to be the map that's opened so to help us save time so we don't always have to navigate to castle environment to open it up i can go to project settings and within maps and modes under editor startup map select castle environment so now whenever we open up our project our main map will be the one that's opened so let's jump back into castle environment and add m underscore landscape instance to our landscape now i can't just drag it onto our landscape instead i'm going to select the landscape and make sure landscape material slot is visible right there and then drag m underscore landscape instance onto it like that now our landscape is completely black but that's expected jump into landscape mode and select paint and i want to assign auto material to my entire landscape so click on the plus icon and select weight blended layer normal now it's going to create a landscape layer we can save it at the default folder that they have click save and save everything so now we have grass on our landscape and what's neat about this material is that if we start sculpting we can see that as i sculpt our materials naturally transition so we go from grass at the top to cliff at very sharp angles and then back to grass so it just adds an extra layer of realism this material is very similar to the auto material that you can see on my channel i have an entire video that takes a deep dive into all the settings of this material but really quickly i'm going to go over them that's so you know exactly how to use this material so let's go open up this material instance and we can see that we have just a bunch of different settings so i'm going to undock the details panel to make it easier for us and move it off to the right side now to begin you'll notice that a lot of these parameters are actually repeating that's because each of these different materials so d underscore material c b and a all share basically the exact same parameters which control the look of specific layers so a material is a grass layer b is the cliff c is mud and d is basically dry soil which we're going to use as a trail and e is something customizable where if you really want let's say snow then you could go into bridge and then plug those textures up right here we're not just limited to the auto material we can manually paint in grass or cliff wherever we want so jumping back to landscape mode paint let's say maybe i don't want a cliff right here then i could paint in grass so let me create weight blended layer normals for all the material layers right here up to d since we don't need e and no height map and then select a so i could paint away the cliff right there then manually tell unreal where i want my cliff and grass textures i can also go in with mud and we're going to use this when we add water into my landscape in just a bit also we have material d which we're going to use as a trail so again this material is insanely customizable so if you don't like these textures or you want a new material then you can go in and edit them so let's begin with what albedo controls do so albedo controls function the exact same way that they do for our quiksil bridge assets so we could boost the saturation up and make the landscape grass really saturated or we can boost the brightness or decrease the brightness right there we can also increase and decrease the contrast of the texture below that is tint it's just to give a different colored overlay so if i want to make my grass a little bit reddish i can add the tint right there and then we have normal strength of course this controls the normal map so let me find a good angle increase it have a much more intense normals so there's more depth and shadows or decrease it and we have no shadows so i'm just gonna leave it at its default of one that roughness as you can guess controls how rough the landscape is and then spec strength controls the specularity now generally i like to keep this really low because if we do have a very specular landscape for example let's make this three then our landscape looks more like plastic than something you would stand on so we'll leave that at 0.1 and then we have distance blending so right now maybe you can see it but when we're up close to the landscape we have a certain tiling amount so this is what the size looks like when the camera is up close to it but if we go away then we transition to a lot less tiling where the texture size is a lot larger so zooming in we get smaller and far away it's a lot larger that is just one method we're going to use to hide the texture repetition and we can turn it on and off right here so here is what it looks like with distance blending turned on and then here's what it looks like without distance blending so this is with and without so distance blending is a great way to hide texture repetition and we have mask so mask if i turn that on basically switches out our texture right here so if i have this unchecked then we're using a roughness or if i want to use a mask texture then i'm going to select it right there but since all my textures are just using roughness i'm going to have that unchecked and then we have size and size far so size far as you can guess controls the tiling for the far away map and size a controls the tie lane for something up close like right here and we have start offset and blend falloff which control where the distance blending starts so maybe you want the distance plane to start a lot closer up to the camera then we can change start offset from 3800 to 380 centimeters so now it's a lot closer but i'm going to leave that where it's pretty far away and these same parameters function exactly alike for the rest of my material so b material c material and d material although b material does have something a little bit different and that is down here we have b underscore material tri-planar so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to create a very steep slope go to flatten increase the brush right there and create a steep slope also maybe add just a little bit of smoothing to smooth it out i'm going to press alt and 3 to go into unlit mode and here is what our clip looks like with tri-planer and here's what it looks like without tri planar so especially right here our texture is very stretched but then if we add track planar then the texture is fixed and it looks normal so that's why we're using tri planar on b material because odds are it's this material right here that's going to be on really sharp edges since it's the cliff material so hopefully with all that knowledge you're able to control and create your landscape exactly the way that you want again on my channel there's an entire video that takes a deeper dive into all these settings so i'm going to exit out of my material instance and paint our first pass on our landscape so the way i recommend that you create environments is that you first handle the really large detail first for example your landscapes and your mountains and then once you get the correct form down then you can move on to your medium detail which is the trees and the castle and finally when you like how those look move down to the really really small detail like your grass pebbles and shrubs that's the best way to create large environments in unreal because let's say for example you spend a lot of time sculpting a mountain and then you also spend a lot of time adding meshes trees houses to that mountain but then you decide that you don't like the fundamental way that the mountain looks then you have to go all the way back to the beginning which is sculpting it so it's best to make sure that you like your environment before adding in small details so it's going to sculpt and increase the brush size with the right bracket key until it's pretty large and what i'm going to do is go around the perimeter of my landscape and then just add in random hills so some perimeters like this hills and this is a reminder you're not limited to the current size of your landscape so if you want to increase the size then go to manage and select add now i can click or hold down the left mouse button to add on new components to make my landscape even bigger before we continue sculpting our landscape it's very essential that we first go over bookmarks because when creating our environment i recommend that you have one central location so one point that you're always referencing back to to look at your environment that's how you're able to keep track of all the changes you made and this is basically going to be our main cinematic shot so i think right here is a good spot for our main shot our main camera location but now there's an issue that is whenever i do make an edit i have to fly all the way over there and then try to eyeball where my camera was originally and this is where bookmarks come in really handy so first you want to find a spot that you like then come up here and click on the three line button and all the way down here under bookmarks go to set bookmark and i'm gonna set this as a bookmark one also the shortcut is wherever you are in your environments press control and one now i can fly around anywhere and then press the one key on my keyboard to snap to that original location so that's control n1 to set a bookmark and then it's one to snap to that bookmarks location and we're not just limited to one bookmark we have 10 different bookmarks so for example i could do ctrl 2 right here and all the way over here i have control and three so now one two and three keys will then snap to the different bookmark locations and if i ever want to override a bookmark for example i don't like the angle or the location of two then i can find a new location press control 2 and now we have the new bookmark so let's click on one and this is going to be my main shot right here so press ctrl 1 to set that bookmark so what i want to do is jump back into landscape sculpt and on the right side of my main cinematic shot i want a really tall mountain which will essentially be where our main castle is located and then to the left of that will be a little bit smaller hillside where some castle ruins will be located so go to flatten and decrease the brush size move this out then go to smooth and smooth all of this out so same thing right here going to flatten this entire location and make this terrace just a little bit taller also give it a sharper slope with the flat end and that's too sharp so then smooth it out with a smooth brush so the vast majority of sculpting in unreal engine is alternating between the sculpt brush smooth brush and the flattening brush so that's pretty much all we're going to be doing when sculpting it unreal so let's press one again and i'm actually going to angle it let's go right here and press control and one so behind me i'm also going to elevate right here and i'm going to get rid of this example sculpt so i've got a flattened brush and flatten all that out also go into paint auto material and paint over those paint layers because i was just using that as an example so i want several hillsides so we have one layer of hills in the back and then another layer of hills all the way back here so just add depth to my environment that's how our environment looks like it's a lot larger than just right here and another thing i'm going to do is to handle the really really large details is to go into castle assets meshes and drag out these meshes right here which are our mountains so by default i think the mountains are way too large so the details panel i'm going to decrease it by 0.5 so i need type 0.5 and x 0.5 and y and then 0.5 again in z or a shortcut i'm going to press ctrl z to undo all that is to select this lock icon so now whenever i make a change in the x y or z axis the change is going to be shared between them so now if i press 0.5 they all get 0.5 so that's a nice shortcut let's go move all of them right here bring this down and try to find some good angles or these meshes so these are just background meshes of course the player would probably never be on top of the mountains it's just a good way to add scale to the environment without actually creating an entirely new landscape and then going through and having to sculpt that landscape keep in mind that at some points when creating this environment i'll speed up the video because honestly there will be a lot of repetition since the majority of crane environment is just sculpting the landscape painting foliage and moving objects around and notice how i'm continually pressing one and jumping back to my main shot to see how the mountainscape looks and i think hold on alt again move that right there and i think our mountains are looking pretty nice and now it's also a good time to change some of the settings on the exponential height fog since i think our world is a little bit too foggy to begin with so if you remember i'm going to select that special high fog if you can't find where it is in our world then within the outliner type in exponential and then it will show up right here if i grab that special high fog and move it up we move the fog up or if i move it down it goes down so we're able to control where the fog starts by playing with that object and for fog height falloff increase that to 0.3 fog density also slightly decrease that and move that down i don't like the angle of my sun so hold down control and l and rotate it that's how the shadows are coming across the screen so we're going from left to right like here and another thing i noticed is that it's pretty hard to see how big this hill is so i'm going to add a character to make sure the scale is correct so skm underscore manny and this is way too small i thought it was a lot bigger so jump into landscape mode again sculpt this up a little bit and i think we're almost there flatten it give it a sharper edge decrease the brush and also flatten it over here let's see what our main shot looks like and i'm going to change the angle a little bit also bring down my camera speed that's just more up and press ctrl 1. so i think this looks good for now now let's create a lake so we're going to create a little bit of a lake right here and a river that goes in between these two hills that make a little valley so go to sculpt and hold down shift to decrease the space right here so we carve out an area for our lake right there and i'm actually going to flatten out this entire area over here too going smooth smooth all that out and now for this location let's add in the water by going to castle assets meshes and it is sm underscore water plane so simply drag that out and increase the size to get a lake so very simple to get water now i know that unreal j5 technically does have water built in but as of this unreal engine version which is the first version of ue5 the official water plug-in is in beta and it is pretty glitchy so instead we're going to use the traditional way of creating water and that is with a simple flat plane that's using a water material also if you don't like the way the water looks you can open up its material instance and change some of the settings so i'm going to undock the details panel now so i can briefly go over what some of these parameters do so first off of course we have deep water and shore color so short color is going to change the color of the shore and then deep water is going to change the main color so maybe you want two different colors for the shore and the deep water right here we have opacity and this controls how opaque the water is so notice i wanted to decrease it our water is much more faint and then notice how we have a little bit of ripples and these ripples are being driven by the normal map that's right here so maybe you don't like the ripples you want to get rid of them then you could go into ripple normal intensity and bring that from 0.5 to zero so now we have perfectly still water but i do like a little bit of ripples in there so i'm going to leave it at 0.5 we can also control how large the ripples are with ripple tiles so right now sent to 900 set to 100 for really really small ripples or set that as something even larger for basically waves but i think the value that i left it right here is pretty good we could even control how chaotic the ripples are since right now they're pretty slow i want them to be slow because i want this scene to be pretty peaceful but you can increase the speed to one now it is very fast personally i'm not going to change anything because i like the settings as they are right now so just know that you do have the options to change the way your water looks if you don't like it we need to make some edits to our landscape right now because our water isn't making that much sense our grass is growing underneath the water when it should be muddy let's go into landscape paint and finally use the mud layer right there so where there's water i'm gonna paint in mud to help the transition in between the grass and the water also use the flatten brush in sculpt decrease my brush size with the left bracket key and i'm going to paint a river in between the two hills so hold on the left mouse button and paint it like that the plane isn't big enough so let's increase that size and also go to landscape mode increase the size of my brush that's why i can make the lake bigger even longer like that let's make room for the lake over here smooth it out decrease the brush size of the flattened brush and create another river we have a river going into a lake and then it continues down that way so increase that size and then smooth it all out right here on the sides at this point i'm fast forwarding just a little bit since all i'm doing is sculpting and painting layers so i'm making sure that i'm painting mud wherever there's water and i'm also smoothing out the shoreline so there isn't as harsh of a transition in between the water and the landscape i'm also moving this hill a little further back to make more room for the valley and smoothing out my hills so we don't have a sharp of a 90 degree angle on the landscapes and to keep everything smooth and since we have made a lot of progress maybe in the future i might make a really large change and i don't like that change so i want to come back to this state of our level something i like to do with my environments is press control and space let's go find out where this map is here we have our map castle environment same map that we currently have open up here castle environment let's save everything and then select castle environment press control c and control v to duplicate that and i'm going to call this one castle backup001 so whenever i make large changes i like to duplicate the map i'm currently editing just to create a backup in case i make some really big error i can always go back to a previous version of this level so so far i like my large details the landscape looks good for now and the mountains look great so does the river but there is one last large detail we need to add and that is some mini mountains or some more hills that's other tradition in between the sculpted landscape and the mountain isn't as harsh since there is no mesh in between our main space and the background mountains so we're going to do this with a very specific mega scan asset that i like so let's go to add quick so bridge there's only one asset i want to download right now and that's under 3d assets and type in icelandic volcano and click enter so it's specifically this one right here so icelandic volcano terrain and this is one of my favorite meshes because i think it's very versatile since it's huge it's large it can be used as mountains hills just large terrain in general it adds a lot of detail to the background so we could download medium quality but since this mesh is going to be very large i'm going to download this as nanite quality so do keep in mind that if you are going to download this as nanites the textures are going to be 8k and there will be a lot of polys so it's going to take up a lot of space in your project but since it's already downloaded for me i must select the add button and now this mesh if i double click on it to open it up here we have the icelandic volcano terrain so let's exit out of both of these press control and space go to mega scans 3d assets volcano terrain and drag it out now i'm going to scale it up that's how it's pretty large and move it off to the side so let me go scale this up even again and move it that's how it's somewhere like right there just like that and maybe even scale it down so let me copy and paste multiple of these just with different sizes within the middle right here so that we have even more background meshes to help blend in between our landscape and mountains so this is why i really like this mesh is because there's so much detail on it that you're able to copy and paste it multiple times and use it just like how i am using it right here also i think it's a little bit too dark so let's open up the material instance right here grab the details panel and for albedo tint make it a little bit more green that's how it blends in with the landscape and then increase the saturation just a little bit and right here is the time lapse for the finishing touches of our large detail so this is everything i did before we moved on to the medium detail which will be our trees and the actual castle all i'm doing right now is copying and pasting moving the same assets we've been using which are the mountains and the volcanic terrain around my entire landscape that's how from all angles we are surrounded by mountains so it really feels like that our castle is in the middle of the alps or somewhere mountainous like that now that i'm done with the mountains i'm going through my landscape and adding some finishing touches just trying to make my landscape flow a lot more natural by going through the smooth brush and removing a lot of the sharp edges don't forget to compare your landscape to the human reference since we don't have any buildings or trees to give us a visual representation of the size of our sculpts right now i'm adding more hills and variation just to randomize my terrain and make it more realistic also just because we're done with the large detail doesn't mean we're done sculpting if you do want to make a change and this is great but unreal engine even if you added a bunch of meshes you can still sculpt your terrain again and just move the meshes around to make sure that they're on top of the train so just because we're done with large details doesn't mean we're done sculpting now it's on to the medium to large detail specifically cliff meshes because right now our cliffs look pretty plain it's just a little bit of a slope with a plain texture that's repeating so it's not very visually pleasing and it doesn't really feel like cliffs and we can fix this by replacing the landscape with static meshes so we're going to overlay static meshes which will represent our cliffs to do so of course you could probably guess where we're going to get these meshes and that is quicksilver bridge static meshes i want to use are called nordic cliff so press enter and it's these really large ones all the way down here so these meshes we're going to use to represent our cliffs now i've already gone ahead and i favored it a lot of the meshes right here so just go through find some of the static meshes that you like download them and import them now it's important to know that i decided to download all these static meshes at high quality which is not nice quality so it doesn't have the detail of nanite it's also in 4k and on 8k the reason why i decided to use high quality is simply put memory space because if we were to use nanites then very quickly your project can balloon to over 50 gigabytes large and i just want to keep my project pretty lightweight but if you do want the best quality possible and that is nanites then nothing stopping you from using nanites except memory space so i've already gone ahead and i downloaded a lot of these objects i'm just going to go through and add all the large cliff meshes so we're not adding foliage and small rocks just yet i'm only adding the very large cliffs to my project and now that i've added all of these clips we can see that we have a lot of new folders under mega scans 3d assets as a reminder if you want to filter for a specific object or asset type within a folder structure you want to select the folder and click on this button right here and let's filter for static meshes so we can see all the meshes we're about to use i'm going to exit bridge whenever i download a lot of assets i like to fly off to the side of my world and drag them out just so i see exactly what meshes we have access to so go to mega scans through the assets and let's filter for the static meshes to see all of them and drag them out into my world so we have this really large one i'm going to move to the side and scale down so that's a little bit too large and we have a bunch of other lift static meshes now just because these aren't bandai meshes doesn't mean we can't use nanites and i recommend for your majority of meshes if you are able to use nandite use nanite since it gives us more detail and it's just much more performant than using traditional levels of detail so select all of them right click and let's enable nanites like that and press control s to save so now that i see all the different meshes i have what i'm going to do is select the large ones hold down alt and duplicate them over here to start placing them on my cliff so we have this one right here that i could scale up and simply place it that's how it's hovering over the cliff like that essentially what i'm doing right now is that i'm combining all the different cliff meshes that's how it makes it look like they're all one cliff mesh and that it's part of the landscape do keep in mind that when i'm placing my static meshes we want to look out for the bottoms of the static meshes for example right here since when they did scan these objects it took a little bit of the bottom with them so for example right here we can see that the bottom of the static mesh which is the mesh's ground floor is showing so i can hide that by just increasing the elevation of the landscape a little bit like that and also to hide the ground floor for this mesh i can scale it in the y-axis a little bit and position the mesh that's how the clip that's at the bottom is covering the static meshes holes fortunately the bottom cliff mesh isn't big enough to cover the holes here's an example of what i mean obviously this is very unnatural cliffs don't do this in real life so this is why we downloaded the boulders over here so hold on alt and let's duplicate all of them move them over to my clip area and with the boulder selected i can smash them into the wall right here to hide the holes in my cliff now i'm repeating the exact same process but for the rest of the cliff so wherever there's a slope i'm going to add the static mesh to that area also keep in mind that because all our meshes are nanites we pretty much have infinite detail so that means you can copy and paste as many of these clips as you want without having to worry about performance also of course the landscape isn't perfectly deforming to the static meshes so we have to go into landscape editing mode and make some adjustments specifically i'm going to make heavy use of the flattener brush just to flatten the landscape areas so the landscape isn't going above the cliffs it says i want there to be cliffs and then flat landscape after that now i'm going to do the same exact process but for the smaller cliffs to the left of my river so copy and paste some of the static meshes we've already added to our world and place them onto the smaller ones now do keep in mind that i'm not going over the entire cliff specifically the back area i'm only filling in the areas that are seen in my main shots if you want you can also add clips to the back of the hills but to save time i'm only going to be detailing the areas that we see we're really not doing anything new at this point again the vast majority of environment creation is just copying and pasting meshes around and since these meshes are already pretty randomized and natural there isn't anything too technical about this process i'm just moving objects around so i think they're in a good position i think the landscape transitions in between the cliff objects like right here and the grass is way too jarring if we have a character then he just comes up to this location and then immediately goes from grass to cliff so not very realistic we could hide this transition by manually adding in and painting in the cliff material so i'm going to go around my cliff areas and paint in the cliff layer where our mega scan assets meet the grass to just give it a more natural transition so it's not as noticeable also as a reminder when painting a layer you can hold down shift to remove that layer okay great i would say at this point we are pretty much done to the medium to large details now it's time to move on to the medium details which is our trees and the actual castle environment and castle ruins so this is going to be pretty fun but before we make any changes let's make sure to save our world because we've done a lot of work so far and it'd be shame if we lost our progress and let's also make a backup of castle environments so ctrl c ctrl v and let's call this one castle backup o2 and in case you don't know to rename assets in unreal right click and select rename or you could press fn2 on the keyboard as a shortcut so let's make sure that we're editing castle environment and we are up here or i can double click on it to make sure that i am inside of the level now there are three ways that we're going to get assets for this build so number one we're getting assets from quick so bridge number two we got them from the downloadable content that was already created for us and number three we're gonna get free assets from the epic games marketplace so make sure you have the epic games launcher pulled up and the specific product i want is the mega scans trees so type that in and it's mega scans tree european black now currently it's in early access so there might be some changes in the future also in the future these trees are going to be added to quixote bridge so you don't have to go through the epic games launcher in order to get them but let's go add to project and make sure show all projects is selected because the trees right now aren't created for ue5 so we need to download the ue4 versions so make sure projects is selected to see my unreal engine 5 products and then find our project which is called castle environment select it and it says asset not compatible with version 5. that's fine for the version select 4.27 and then add to project wait for it to download and be added to your project and we have one more asset pack i want to download from the marketplace because you'll notice that while these trees are great it doesn't come with pine trees so type in interactive spruce forest and it is specifically this one right here so add to project show all projects let's find castle environment select that and then add we can verify that those assets have been added to our project by opening up the content browser now we have a new folder called black alder and another new folder called pn underscore interactive bruce forest so that tells me everything has successfully been downloaded now just like what we did with our clips i want to drag out all the meshes i'm going to use into my project so let's come over here and let's first go over how to use the mega scans trees under the black alder folder jump into geometry and there are two different versions of each tree you have pivot painter and then you have simple wind i recommend we're going with simple win since it's a lot more performant and let's select everything and then drag it out to into my world and organize everything so we can see what assets we have available to us i'm also going to drag out a human reference to get a good sense of how large and tall the trees are now let's go over some of the properties of mega scan trees so you notice that as i zoom in we get more detail and as i zoom away we get less and less detail until it's just a flat plane geometry very little detail and that's because of level of detail now normally i would recommend we don't use level detail i recommend we use nanites but unfortunately as of this version of unreal engine 5 which is the first version nanite does not support trees and foliage but if you are watching the future then congratulations nanai probably supports trees i would go through all of my trees right click and then enable nanites but since it doesn't work right now i'm not going to do that now we can view all my level details by opening up its static mesh editor and right here for lods we have lod zero which is the most dense this tree can be then we have one which is less dense three less four five which barely has any leaves and finally six which looks pretty bad up close but when you're far away it's kind of hard to tell that's just a flat plain or real geometry so if you're watching the future congratulations you don't have to worry about these lods if you make your tree nanites now what if you don't care about performance and you want to turn off lods well you can do so by coming down here into the console commands and type in r dot force lod and to select the most dense lod type zero so that will force all the static meshes in your world to use the most dense led which is zero so even if we're far away it's still gonna use the really dense mesh but i wouldn't recommend doing so since if you do have thousands of trees in your world then your frame rate will dramatically drop now if you want to bring back leds and console commands instead of typing r dot force lod zero or one type in negative one to bring back the default lod switching just like that also if you do add your trees in through the foliage mode then the console command is going to be a little bit different so r dot force lod doesn't work for meshes painted with the foliage mode instead you want to use footage dot force lod so foliage drop force led is the same thing as r dot force led except for bullish meshes so now that we've gotten that out of the way let's go over how we can control the look and the wind speed of our trees and we can do so by jumping into m underscore ms presets and going all the way over here to ms underscore bullish material go into the folder called global foliage actor and drag this in so this actor right here and all of its settings control all the mega scans trees and if i press play right now we will get a bunch of errors and that's because there is no directional light set right here so within the drop down you want to select directional lights which is the light we created all the way at the beginning of this chapter now if i press play we don't get any errors so right here within the details panel over global full ejector we get a bunch of different options so right here we can control wind if you want to increase the strength right now it's two i can set this to 10 and now our trees are very windy and you'll probably notice an issue and that is if i zoom in on the trees let's say right here there's a lot of motion blurring going on and that's a glitch with the current version of uv5 so you might not have this but if you are using the first version of unreal engine 5 to fix this weird motion blurring glitching select the tree and then for mobility set it to movable and i'll get rid of it and now we can view our tree like normal so i'm going to select all the trees and select movable for mobility to get rid of that issue so that's one glitch i need to be aware of and then if i select my full ejector again go down to season strength i'm able to control what season our trees are using and this wind strength is pretty annoying so i'm going to set it back to 2 as its default so if i raise season strength we get more and more orange and yellow until we get a fall color so i'm going to leave it at a value of 500 or 800 for now now we have season brightness and season saturation i think the color is a little bit too brown i want to be really saturated that's how it feels like we're in a fantasy world so bring up the brightness and the saturation right there like this until you find a value that you like and we can always jump back to the full jacketer to make any edits if we don't like the edits we already have so do keep in mind that we don't edit a material instance although you can if you want precise controls for your mega scan trees instead you're going to use this full reactor right here which is located in ms presets folger material and global full tractor so simply drag one out into your world and that will control all your trees all right so that's how you control mega scan assets now let's go over how we control the spruce forest specifically the pine trees so pine trees are located in pn underscore interactive spruce forest jump into there and then go into meshes and we need a filter for static meshes so we can see all the static meshes we have available to ourselves so i'm going to select all the really large ones at first but you notice that some of these meshes are duplicated again so i'm hold down control and select all the large meshes without underscore low so select these right here skip over all those and then drag it out like this unfortunately for us there's a glitch on some of these meshes level of details we'll see that when i zoom out there's a completely different material on their level details so that is wrong now the way we fix this is to entirely delete that level of detail so i'm going to select this mesh right here and i could press control b double click on it to open up the static mesh editor or press ctrl and e as a shortcut so let's go through all my leds ld0 looks good ld1 good two good three and we are completely using the wrong material so i'm going to remove lod 3 from its led stack by making sure lod 3 is selected right here and under led 3 select remove just like that so now all we have is 0 1 2 and 3 and we don't get that wrong one so let's do the same thing right here press ctrl e and this one's also ld 3 and then select remove lod now what i'm doing is going through the rest of the meshes and making sure they don't have that issue in the future we probably won't have these issues since nanite will support foliage so if you are watching the future congratulations you don't have to go through this process you just have to enable nanite on the pine trees all right one more change if you come up to any foliage with wind you'll see that there is a lot of motion blurring of course that's the same glitch that we have with the black alder trees so select all of them and set it to movable now there's one last change that is i want to change the color of my bark since my bark is pretty white i'd rather have that be reddish brownish so what i can do is open up the bark material instance to change it and we can see that this mesh has a lot of different materials and one of them is the trunk material now if you don't know which one is the trunk material you can always open up a static mesh and right here in material slots select highlight to know exactly what material is affecting what part of the static mesh and we'll see that the material called trunk is of course in charge of the trunk material so let's open up that material instance that i have open right here and undock the details panel so we can play with the colors so for all the way down here we have bark tint let's change it so that's how it's more brown i like that color so i'm going to keep it and we can even make some changes all the way up here under bark parameters bring this down so that's why my trunk is a little bit darker to 0.5 i can also play with the wind so let's say if i don't like how my bark is swaying back and forth if i come up here it's more noticeable you can see how it's going back and forth then i can uncheck level one wind two wind and three wind but then you'll notice that the rest of the tree is disconnected since it's still relying on the wind now i can fix that by jumping into the leaves here or the branches and you'll see that the branch parameters are the exact same as the trunk since they're all sharing the same exact master material so go through here and uncheck level 1 wind 2 wind and 3 wind to get rid of wind and i would do the same thing for the leafs but i do like the wind so i'm going to bring them all back i'm just using that as example where if you don't want the wind you have to remove them from all the materials so you make sure that you do uncheck them if you are trying to get rid of wind and i'm going to do the same thing right here so open up this materials trunk instance and bring down brightness to 0.5 and give bark tint a reddish dark reddish tint like that now i'm going to do the same process of changing the color for the rest of the trees with exposed trunks don't forget to save everything now that we have all our trees set up let's add them to the foliage mode so to begin i'm going to start with the pine trees so let's go select all of these with shift press control b to find out where they are in the content browser and with those selected i can drag them right here into the foliage editing mode so now i can paint them on my landscape but obviously we're gonna have an issue since we paint way too many trees obviously we don't want our trees being that dense so we need to edit a lot of the settings of the foliage and keep in mind if you don't see any parameters right here make sure this button is turned on so it's blue now for density bring this from 100 down to one also paint density up to one so let's see what that looks like and that is still way too strong so try 0.25 and okay we're getting closer but that's also still too many trees i don't want that many trees so 0.01 okay there we go so that looks like it's good but you'll see that my trees angle to the slope of the landscape and obviously trees don't grow like this even if a tree is on a sleep steep slope it's going to grow straight up so within the settings right here and actually i'm going to increase this to 0.05 within the settings aligned to normal make sure that's unchecked so now my trees will always grow straight up they won't be dependent on the slope of the landscape another thing i need to do is that if i zoom in on the wind we still get that little motion blurring glitch so with all these selected set its mobility to movable to get rid of that okay and i also want to make sure that our size is correct so let me add in a character go into mannequins meshes and drag out skm underscore mandy to compare the size differences so i think the trees with their bark exposed are too big so select these trees right here and for scale x bring it down to let's go 0.7 to 0.8 so now all these trees i have selected will be scaled to 70 to 80 their original size okay that's starting to feel a lot better and for these really tall trees i want there to be less of them than the thick ones so this density will be 0.01 while the thick trees have the density of 0.05 great so now we're going to add some new trees the black older ones to our foliage mode so i'm going to select all the black alder trees that i want we're handling the medium detail so i'm going to ignore the really small trees for now we are going to add them after we handle the really big trees so select all the big ones press control b to find out where they are in my content browser and jump back into foliage mode with shift n3 and drag them all in there now i only want to focus on our mega scan trees so hold down shift and select all of our pine trees and uncheck them so we don't paint them now we're gonna start off with the same exact issue that we had beforehand and that is painted down and okay hopefully unreal doesn't crash because i just added in a lot of trees right there so bring these trees down to a density of 0.01 okay that's better and we also have that angle problem so go into align to normal uncheck that and we have motion blurring once again so with all those trees selected sets mobility to movable and that will get rid of it so now we hold down shift and this feels a lot better so let's see what my paint looks like when i have everything so press ctrl a to select all and make sure they're all checked so when i'm painting i paint both versions of the trees i'm testing my paint settings to see if we need to make any last changes i think i could bring down the amount of thick trees from 0.05 to 0.02 and again there is no rhyme or reason to these values that i'm setting these are just settings that i think look nice so it's entirely up to you since this is your world whether or not you want a lot of trees or not that many trees and because we're using a level of detail really performance isn't really a concern would pay down a lot trees especially in the future once we have nanite trees so those selected also let's do 0.005 so even smaller than beforehand and uncheck all these just have these checked and i think these really tall trees are way too tall so let's see which one is the really tall one okay these these two trees right here so select both of them and for scale bring that down to 0.6 to 0.7 so 60 to 70 their original height and now i think that's a lot more reasonable especially when we compare it and we can't see the characters so let's go select all the folds and remove it especially when we compare the height to the mannequin those trees are really really tall so let's go increase the brush size get rid of all that foliage and paint foliage again to see and okay i think at this point it's a good base to go through my landscape and start painting in foliage this portion of the environment build is pretty fun just hold down left mouse button and paint in trees where i want to place them and okay one last change we need to make the orange trees the black alders are too big in my opinion compared to the pine tree so hold down shift erase all those let's select these black holders right here the first three and bring down the size to 0.6 to 0.72 or 0.75 and okay in my opinion that looks a lot better especially if we compare the height to the mannequin so i think that is pretty reasonable size for trees now let's go through with the paintbrush and start to paint in my trees so you could use the paint brush or if you want to get very specific i can use the single button right there single instance mode instead of selecting all selected choose cycle through selected now wherever i press it's going to pick a random tree to place there if i want to get very specific with my tree placements so that's another option or i can stick with paint so let's decrease our brush size and add the trees right here and this is a reminder just because we paint our foliage with the foliage mode doesn't mean we're limited to changing the exact position of a mesh so i can use select mode and make sure that whatever mesh i want selected has a check mark right next to its icon and select a tree move it around scale it and rotate it as if it's a normal mesh so we get a lot of control over our foliage and paint down trees especially on spots that are noticeable like the tops of hills and if i ever don't like the placement of a very specific tree i could use the select mode and move that tree around or if i don't like it completely delete it now i'm going to repeat that exact same process for the rest of my landscape so i first use the paintbrush to paint in a bunch of trees or i use the single brush if i do want precise placement for each of my trees and then i go through again with a select tool to move scale and rotate my trees around until i get perfect positioning it is that simple and here's a tip in case i do want to see what my world will look like without level of detail since if you do decide to render out this world as animation then it's gonna use the most dense level detail possible select the console command and once again type in foliage dot force lod and zero now keep in mind that your frame rate will exponentially drop because now we are using the densest mesh possible so we no longer have lods which makes our world look a lot nicer but now our frame rate is about 5 to 10. again in the future you won't have this issue your trees will look really nice with the most detail possible since they'll be nanites but for now this is our limitations as a reminder to re-enable level of detail go right here and type in dot force led and negative one to re-enable level of detail for smooth freight rates so i want to point that out because in case if you want a really nice shot and you don't care about fps then you can set your foliage to zero that way i think the placement of my trees are pretty good so we're going to take a quick break from painting trees and there's one change that's not really related foliage i do want to add and that is to increase the saturation and contrast of my world to make my trees feel more lively so i need to select the post process volume over here and let's go see what our main shot looks like by jumping to our bookmark with one go into global saturation and contrast for contrast change this to 1.02 let's try 1.05 turn it on and off to see what difference it makes okay that makes it look better and then for saturation increase this to also let's try 1.05 let's see what our world looks like without lod so use full drop force ld0 and in case you want to use a console command that you used in the past you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to use previously used console commands so select for cell d0 and okay everything is starting to look pretty nice so bring back level detail with negative one also let's jump back into foliage move this off to the side and and continue to paint in more trees especially on the tops of the hills since any trees that are in between hills these trees won't really be noticed so it's important that we add trees at the very top of the hills where the player can actually see something since i want the play space to be this area right here and our main cinematic shot is this angle so i'm going to prioritize for time the area around the lake for extra detail this is just what i'm doing if you're doing a completely different shot or if you want your entire world to be playable then of course you'll add more trees that way then of course where you're going to paint trees and add details will be different right now i'm using the select tool and moving the trees around i especially want to move this tree that's on top of the river and notice that we have the world grid right here i don't like seeing the world grid i don't need it so go to show and uncheck and show flag to get rid of it also using the folder select tool i can hold down alt to duplicate foliage the only thing i'm doing is painting foliage specifically the trees and moving them around there's nothing special or anything too technical about this process and it's almost entirely artistic the majority of environment builds in unreal engine is literally just moving objects around until you find something that you think looks nice at this point to get a better sense of how the world will feel like in game i think it's a good idea to play the game i could play my game with alt and p as a shortcut and explore my world as a third person character as a reminder if you play your game and you don't get the player character that's because you need to go into world settings if you don't have world settings come up to windows and select world settings and then under game mode game mode override make sure you select bp underscore third person game mode now third person game mode is right now the default game mode because we did start off our project as a third person template now if you don't have the third person character then you can always go to add add feature content packs and select third person right there so that's just a reminder if you aren't getting the third person character as our default game mode also if you see in the top left hand corner this red warning that says texture streaming pool over budget then you can fix that by exiting out the game coming down here into console commands and then typing r dot streaming dot pool size and then set it to a large number like 10 000. so now if i play my game we no longer get that warning so whenever you do see that warning go into the console commands and then change the pool size to something large i tend to just go with 10 000. okay i need to fix these trees right here but i do like the scale of the environment so far so let me fix these by selecting both of them and bringing them down also i need to flatten out this area just a little bit within the landscape sculpting mode and then paint mud right here because it looks like we don't have a good transition between the grass and water so go to smooth for sculpt increase the brush and smooth all this out also go into paint now and add in the little mud right there just like that another thing i'm going to do use layer d which is our dirt material and create a trail so it's almost like there's a trail going in between this little valley around like this all the way into the horizon so that's what i'm gonna do let's paint in a trail and grab the character to see the scale of it i'm painting the trail right now trying to make sure it's the right size relative to our player character and then i'm going to have to move the trees out of the way and then i notice that the little valley is a little bit too small so i'm going to use a sculpt brush and make the valley even bigger just because we're done with large details doesn't mean i'm done sculpting the landscape there can always be small improvements or entirely new details i can add all right so our environment is starting to come along really nicely as a reminder i can click on fn 10 to get a full screen view of my world with all my windows now docked right here so while my environment looks nice it is missing one big focal point arguably the most important part of the environment since it's where our eyes will be drawn to and that is the castle so we're going to create a castle right here on top of this hill and we're also going to add castle ruins over here too to just add some more interesting visual elements to our world and we can see all the assets we're going to use to create our castle within the castle asset pack that we downloaded go into maps and then select overview so here are all the assets we're going to put together to make the castle and as you can probably guess right now by just looking at all the pieces our castle isn't one large single mesh instead it's a bunch of different smaller meshes that we put together to make a larger object as a whole so you can essentially think of all these different pieces as lego blocks and we're going to stick all the lego blocks together to create an entire lego set and this is actually a very common workflow in unreal engine 5 it's called modular design so for example we can take all of these different pieces and put them together to create many different castle variations that we can see in example castles so here are just some ideas that you can pick from when creating your castles while all these castles are extremely different from each other they are all using the same exact assets thanks to modular design we can see that if i click on this castle that they're made up of the same objects just positioned differently and that's the power of modular design it's going to give you the viewer the ability to create your own castle completely from scratch so i wouldn't recommend that you follow one of these blueprints exactly how is try and experiment and create your own castle when you are building it out or and then this is an option you can completely just steal one of the castles already built for you so if we go into the outliner tab and actually let's right click and select undock from sidebar scroll up we can see that each of these different castles are contained within their own folder so right here is our main castle then castle ruins is right here small castle is all the way over here and tower castle is this one so let's say for example if i want the main castle i can right click on the folder and then go to select and check immediate children it's going to select all the static meshes that makes up the main castle we can even double check that this is the main castle by turning on and off the eye icon with all the static meshes selected press control and c and then jump into our main environment under maps castle environment save selected and right here ctrl v to paste the castle into our main environment right here now we can move this into position on top of the hill and simply get it into position like this so we don't have to create a castle completely from scratch we could grab one of the pre-built ones but for the sake of this tutorial i'm gonna go through the process of creating an original castle completely from scratch so i'm going to delete this and create a castle is pretty easy so let's jump into castle assets and meshes and here are all the meshes we're going to use so first off we need the base of our castle so the front of it which is a wall we can use this wall right here so sm underscore wall 01 is the most simple of assets it is simply just one tiled wall that we can use and before we continue building out my castle we need a human reference to help us with scale so jump into characters mannequins meshes and we're going to use skm underscore manny to make sure our castle does have the correct scale we also have an alternative to this wall so press control mb and this wall i slightly like better and that is sm underscore wall 07 so this one right here is basically just the same wall as this one except it has some extra geometry and stones to make it feel more three-dimensional so you just place them next to each other like this that one up a little bit and then select both of them hold on alt duplicate them to move them up i'm going to delete that one and then copy this and so we have wall 07 just like that so that is basically the process we're going to be doing so we don't have to be super specific we're trying to line up our walls especially since this is a medieval castle and medieval castles are never perfect it can always be a little bit off centered like right here it doesn't have to be completely perfect also to prevent repetition i could rotate this 90 degrees that's how we're using the other side of the wall and we're not always using the front so select these three hold on alt and move it up like this so i'm just building a pretty big wall right now and if i want a wall with a window then i could come into here and use sm underscore wall 09 so drag this out and let's delete that wall add this wall right there and try to rotate it and move it into place just like that now you will notice that this wall right here has a separate material that's a little bit different so it does stand out from the rest we could change that so select this wall and actually let me go undock the details panel and the world settings so with this selected the details panel i want to select this material right here so click on the magnifying glass and then drag this material onto that wall but if you do want to use the original material of this wall then you can go into castle assets material and use mi underscore wall stones blend so this is an alternative material that you can use to just change the way that it looks that's why we're not always using the same material we can add some color variation to the castle also while we're on a subject of materials if we open up any of these materials you will see that in the details panel we have access to albedo tint and albedo control which function the exact same way that they do with mega scan assets so these are the same parameters if you do want to change the way it looks like right now but i'm going to uncheck that since i want to leave the materials as is another wall mesh that i like to use press control and b to jump to our castle asset meshes is sm underscore wall 08 so drag that out and this will be the top of the wall so place that right there duplicate that move it there and do keep in mind in order to move our modular assets around and to make it easier for us you want to make sure global is unchecked because then we're moving the asset relative to the world we can't move the object back and forth or side to side depending on its rotation we need to click this button up here to get its local rotation so that will help when using modular assets hold down alt and move that and put all of these into place just like that and another wall mesh we can use i'm going to select this wall mesh and move it back is these walls right here so wall 02 three and o five which is good to add destroyed elements to our world for example right here i can add in wall o2 like this so that's how it looks like this part of the wall has been destroyed a little bit so scale that up and then to cover the top right there i can use this piece and then move it like this just like that so it's almost like someone took a chunk off of this wall maybe the wall fell off or this fortress was attacked and a cannon hit it so let's go work on the sides right now and we can do that with entrance large pillar o5 which is our traditional castle pillar or o3 which is a similar mesh but slightly more destroyed so with this i can stick this to the side right here and then i need to extend this down so i can use sm underscore entrance large pillar 01 which is just a simple cylinder and a texture so bring that down like this and then down again and as a reminder if you don't like the material that's currently on this pillar then we can select mi underscore wall stones o3 and replace them right there like this so another thing we're going to do is let's select any of our matches press control b and alternative is this one so sm underscore entrance large pillar 07. so this is a great one to add to the sides and give some thick weight to our fortress right there like that and below that is sm underscore entrance pillar o2 that we need to add there to extend this piece going down right there like this and let's also make sure that we give the top one right here the same material so you can see very quickly by using a bunch of modular meshes we could create a brand new fort that wasn't just provided to us and this is why i love using modular assets is because it's literally just like playing with legos where we get a bunch of different blocks and from those blocks we have a near infinite amount of combinations to create whatever we want so let's also add a flag right here go back into meshes and we have this flag i can add to the side also i have sm underscore flag o2 which will be stuck to the walls or we have this insanely large flag that you could put at the front of your castles let's say right there but now that is covering that detail so i'm going to move this off to the side right there so that we can still see our window after we add the flag to the front of the castle just like that i can even add these sm underscore round stones right there like this to the corners of my castle before we continue building out my castle and keep in mind this is completely optional but we can organize our castle into a folder so to create a folder go into your outliner tab and at the very top right here right click on castle environment or the name of your level and go create folder now i'm going to call this one my castle or you could call it whatever you want if you ever want to change the name of a folder right click go down to edit and then select rename now to get assets into a folder you can select any of the assets in the outliner hold down the left mouse button and drag it into the folder or you can hold down shift and select multiple assets and drag those into the folder like that i'm going to press ctrl z since that isn't necessary now what i want to do is add all these static meshes to my castle so go through and select all the static meshes that make up the castle just like that so i'm going to move it around temporarily to make sure that i do have all the assets selected and i do so now with all them selected i could hold down the left mouse button and then try to drag it up into the folder but the folder is all the way at the top of the outliner so it might be a little bit hard or within the outliner i can right click on any of the selected meshes go to move to and select my castle to move those assets into that folder and now all my assets that make up my castle are within this folder so that's just one option to organize your world of course that is completely optional the benefits are that you know what assets make up your castle and also you can hide and unhide the castle as a whole or you can right click select immediate children to select all the meshes in that folder but that is optional and one last thing i'm going to do before we go into this build and that is i do really like our world right now i like the way it looks where all the trees are placed the water and the beginning of this castle i don't want to lose anything so of course we're gonna jump into our maps and let's duplicate this call this one right here castlebackup 03 just like that and let's also save everything so we don't lose our progress and now let's start to build for this portion of the tutorial the video is going to be sped up because if i didn't time-lapse this portion then that would add an extra 30 minutes to this video and this tutorial is already pretty long now we're not introducing any new concepts whatsoever the only thing i'm doing is adding new objects into my world moving them around rotating scaling maybe even duplicating and trying to find combinations of pieces that look good together if we want to use the lego analogy again i'm just putting bricks together to try to create a larger set as a whole honestly it's this portion of the environment build and unreal engine that i find to be the most fun where i don't have to think of anything technical whatsoever i just have to think of what looks cool in my environment if there wasn't a time constraint i can spend hours moving objects around and try to find new compositions and looks for the castle notice how i'm also changing the lighting just a bit to see what my world would look like at different times of the day again and this is a reminder i highly recommend that you don't mirror or copy every single mesh placement that i'm doing i recommend that you experiment with all the assets given and you try to create your own asset that's unique to your environment if there's any portion of this environment build where i would suggest that you do something different from me it would be right now because there's a reason why i chose modular assets for this build and that's because modular assets allow for an infinite number of customizations so everyone that follows this tutorial will have a different castle from each other right now i'm adding some of the smaller details like flags and green ivy because i really like the way that the iv looks because it helps blend the castle in with the environment just a little bit more at this point i am completely done with my main castle it looks really nice it stands out and it's different from the example castles now hopefully you didn't follow along with me exactly but you created your own version of this castle that reflects whatever you were trying to go for because again i highly recommend that you create a castle since it's really good practice now i'm going to press fn 10 that's so i can see what my road looks like in full screen and i do want to make some quick edits to my post process volume so select it and then go into the details panel i think it might be a little bit too saturated so bring this down to 1.01 and for contrast bring that down to 1.045 so very actually 1.04 so very very small changes and exposure it could be a little bit brighter not like that let's try 10.2 yeah i'm gonna leave it at 10.2 for now so we still haven't built my castle ruins so i want to add some ruins of a castle or fortress over to the left side of my view to add some more detail and i highly recommend that you go through all the assets we just use maybe even go through quicksilbridge and find some castle ruin assets there and create your own castle ruins because it's really good practice now what i'm gonna do is cheat right now and go into castle asset maps example castles and still the castle ruins right here so go to outliner and select castle ruins right click select immediate children ctrl c all of these to copy and then jump into your maps castle environments and then ctrl v to paste it in so all of them are right here i'm gonna move it to this location to the left now i wouldn't recommend that you do that instead as practice create your own castle i just decided to cheat to save time now we've handled the really large details which is our mountains and the landscape then we head on to medium details which is the cliffs trees and the castles and finally it's on to the super small details which is our pebbles rocks twigs and shrubs so where are we going to get these assets you probably guessed right and that is within quicksole bridge i've already gone ahead and downloaded a lot of the assets i want to use under favorites so i want to use this tree stump that's my project this rock right here and also this rock and scroll down of course we want vegetation so violet wood use that and this is my favorite grass grass clumps add that to your project ferns white flowers and i really like icelandic terrain it's one of my favorite meshes in quiksil bridge so of course i want to add that the forest roots pebbles and common fern and some more branches and broken trees so that's basically all the assets i'm going to use for this tutorial of course there is 14 000 assets with a quick so bridge feel free to find your own meshes that you like and add to your project but these are the meshes i'm going to use for now and here we have a bunch of new static meshes in the mega scans folder so i'm going to start off by placing some of the large assets like the wood rocks and boulders to help vary up the landscape because otherwise it'll just be a flat landscape i want to add some small height variation to it since the landscapes of real life are normally never this smooth it's also never too late to add in new trees and shrubs now that we handled the boulders let's start painting down our foliage and sometimes when you import assets from quixo bridge they will automatically be added to our foliage so we didn't have to go where grass clumps are and then select them and drag them in they were automatically added because qixel bridge is smart enough but we're still missing some assets that we want to use and that is the small meshes from our interactive spruce forest so go there into meshes small and let's use the last four and drag that on like that whenever i have new static meshes in the folds tool i first do a couple of test paints to make sure that the settings are correct before i paint it like normal all right so now that those are painted let's start painting our grass and we'll see that our grass is way too bright so let's go find regress is and open up its material instance so we have this material instance right here and or color overlay bring it down to something darker and also decreases translucency strength to four okay so there we go so that is a lot better maybe even five so we're going to leave it like that but when i go away we still transition into the lowest lod which looks different and that's because it's using a different material which is right here so this material controls the lowest led we need to make the same changes so that is bring down its color to something a lot darker and then bring down translucency to four so there we go so now the transition is much more natural in between the lods so let's start painting down our grass now i'm only going to paint foliage and detail this specific area that is next to the trail the reason why is because this is going to be our main playable space now if the player character can walk around our entire map then i would go through the entire map and detail the landscape and paint foliage but obviously that would take up a lot of time and it's the same exact process as what i'm doing right now notice how for a lot of foliage i'm doing the same exact thing we did for the grass and that is decrease its color because by default i think mega scan foliage is a little bit too bright i want to point out that just because we have folder static meshes like grass doesn't mean we have to place it through the folger mode i can still like any static mesh simply drag the grass out from the content browser and place it like normal and finally at the end right here i'm adding rocks to the shore and twigs to the path and as a reminder for those assets you can also enable nanites to increase performance i'm also adding ferns to the top of my cliffs because it doesn't make sense that there wouldn't be any folds growing there all right i am almost done with this environment there's just one last change i want to make and that is these trees in my opinion are way too brown i want to make them yellow so since our mega scan trees we can control them with the global full ejector so select that and then within the details panel let's open that up and increase the season strength and the season brightness to some around 1.5 and saturation decrease that just a little bit since i think it was too saturated and it was making the trees more red than yellow and they want to leave them at yellow and with that i'd say we are pretty much done with the environment so if you have followed along throughout this entire tutorial pat yourself on the back since this was a lot of work now i can press alt np and then run around my world as my character it is a very satisfying a fun feeling to finally be able to play your environment and world as if it's an actual game and explore everything you created well i guess now this is the end of the video i hope you got something out of it and if you did make sure to subscribe because i have a lot more free assets and tutorials planned for this channel also if you did follow along and you create an environment i would love to see what you made so make sure to share it in the comment sections below now with all that being said i guess this is goodbye

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 1,931,542

Keywords: ue5, beginner, tutorial, unreal, engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 beginner, course, free, 3d, game, nanite, lumen

Id: k-zMkzmduqI

Length: 300min 0sec (18000 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022