Unreal Engine 5 Falling Leaves Tutorial

in this video I'm going to go over how to set up this fallen leaves effect for the environmental effects series please let me know if you have any comment questions or any requests and I will try to get to it as soon as I can [Applause] alright let's get started so for this type of effect usually what I would do is try and prototype it a little bit so if I have the time I would go in and make the textures and slowly bring them in and then make the effect but let's say I'm impressed for time and I want to do it pretty quickly and I don't have the time to do a texture this is one technique that I've learned a long time ago which depends on your vegetation artist and how they set up their trees so for an effect like this for example part of the reason that we do something like this it would be for immersion so let's say the the players walk in in a forest or it's a cutscene or whatever and there's a lot of wind but there is no leaves falling or there is nothing in the world to see to show that is actually alive so adding these type of effects is what gives it that immersion so like I said depending on your vegetation artist uh usually you would get in the materials you would get a texture that comes like this so what I usually do is I take it I okay I take a shortcut which I use the alpha cut this out and then basically just copy the individual leaves or whatever leaves I like here and there and then do an atlas with a 2x2 so what I mean by that is I will take this texture export it so it would be for example something like this uh all right so I'm gonna go to asset actions export and I want to export this into a TGA so after that I'm just gonna open Photoshop and slowly just make the texture come together right I'm gonna go open and texture so now as you can see I have all of my leaves here so what I'm going to do is go to the channel Tab and go to the alpha here basically I have all the outlines of any leaf that I want so I can just copy that and just take it into a different texture so what I'm going to do is go to new and custom basically you want I would do this in 256 you can do it at 1024 if you want uh it's up to you okay next up oh this is in Gray for the channels to change that just go to mode and change it to RGB and you want to add another Channel which is going to be the alpha after that after that I want to do this so I can actually divide my Atlas into four different textures so by doing that I can come into here and just use the magic wand and literally just select whatever uh leave that I want and copy and paste it over there so for this one I just want to see like how they look like I think this one should be nice so I'm gonna highlight the alpha and basically just click it then to copy it you need to have everything selected not just the alpha because if you just copy whatever is highlighted here you're just gonna copy the alpha so you're going to shift click and control C and over here you're going to control V so now as you can see you have your Alpha r g RGB basically so that way you can control this however you like uh let's see I don't want this to be okay yep uh just gonna paste it again yeah and just move it around just wanted to find like a good angle for it I think this should be nice okay I'm gonna go back here and just pick another one you select the alpha I'm gonna select this one control sorry uh shift click Ctrl C and Ctrl V so now you're basically just copying over everything with the alphas and everything that's attached to the texture itself okay save this one hmm I'm just trying to find another one that looks a bit better I think that one looks good okay what I'm trying to do is just not have them intersect here so the actual uh Atlas for the texture wouldn't really have a seam or anything in there uh let me see I'm gonna take this one all right so technically the texture is done take a look at it here I mean if you want to you can change the background to Black I'm just going to keep it the same uh because it really doesn't matter I already have the my Alpha and everything so I'm gonna go file save our copy and do it in Targa which is TGA ifs and Save that's basically it I'm gonna close this because I don't need it I've already set up a folder here which it's basically in the sample map thing I'm gonna go to VFX texture I'm just gonna import it so as you can see RGB and the alpha for this one I decided to keep the color because it actually just matches the color from here so I shouldn't change that because it will look a bit off but if I want to do that I can do it in the um in the material by adding by using the green channel for this so I would use this for example and then add a particle color to it if I want to change it over time or so on for this one I'm just gonna make a material I'm gonna add a texture to add a texture sample it's a t and click you hold down T and then you left click the mouse button and you'll get the texture I'm just gonna do this add a particle color and basically just multiply it for the multiplication you hold M and then you left click and you should have that this is the shortcut for it so I'm going to add the alphas in here listen to the emissive and the color should be here technically it doesn't need me to add the color in here but it's fine oh and but what I meant by changing the color here is what you can do to if you want it to be uh if you want to change the color and the particle itself you can do it by just using the green Channel because it's the one of the highest quality and also it is basically a grayscale so yeah change this into translucent and on lit and suicide it okay that's good I'm Gonna Save this I'm gonna go to the effects aggress system it's an empty one and call this falling leaves so I'm gonna add the actual material in here okay so under the emitter update you might you want to get a spawn right which is the third one and let's try one five so this is the material that you're gonna get and now to actually get the sub UVS divided you go to sprout renderer and you do two by two so that way you will get basically the first uh frame to actually get the different frames to play or to randomize you go to the particle spawn do SUB UV animation and you set this to random so now under this part renderer now every time a particle is going to spawn you're going to have basically your uh particle spot in a different in a random uh frame so that way it doesn't just uh spawn one particle and place through the four of them okay next I want to actually put it in a shape where like for example I have a let's say for example I have these right now like this but I would have them in more of a spherical shape so there is a shape location and of course here you can choose which one you want I would generally just go with the sphere because that's you're gonna basically add it into your scene and it would be depending on how big the tree is and how you actually want it to look like so for me I'm just gonna do it this way or actually just so I can see it I'm just gonna take it to here yeah so I'm Gonna Keep like that for now so the first thing I'm gonna do actually is change the size and the actual rotation and part of the reason that you would do that is to actually have a bit of um random uh random C I guess that's what it's called uh to not have something look the same thing like the same thing every time it spawns so that way it doesn't break the immersion of it because human eye picks up a lot on the uh on patterns so you want to make it uh unrecognizable as much as you can so under the rotation model uh unto sorry mode uh set that to random so that way every time it spawns it will spawn in a different rotation so that way no matter how it spawns and you have it rotating uh with a rotation rate uh would look good I'm gonna set the size uh into a random uniform uh 20 to let's say 40. yeah yeah looks about right so that way um when this starts falling for example it would look at least from the size perspective to look better or it looks matching sorry uh okay next thing I want to do is add rotation this is going to be the rotation rate so the difference between the rotation uh mode and rotation rate is under the update when you do a rotation rate this will actually make them spin so let's say I do it at like five thousand so they would spend basically if I do it on the particle spawn like I did with uh here this is gonna be only active when it spawns like it's not going to change over its time only under the particle update this is going to be over its lifetime so for this one let's do 50 . okay actually I'm gonna change this into a uniform float which is it's gonna be one in the negative 50. and one and positive oh wait no not this one uh okay random range float so you would basically have it for example at 80 I know 50 at the minimum and 80 on the maximum for example so they would have different rotation rate and it wouldn't look the same okay so for that I'm going to save this okay next I want to add a little bit of gravity I'm gonna add a gravity for us uh for this one it's basically just asking for the uh solve forces and velocities uh module so just hit fix issues and it should be fine so for this one it is a consistent uh fall and that's a bit heavy because you don't want something like that leaves are like basically even uh less weight than a piece of paper basically okay so for this one uh I'm gonna add two things here so a drag so I would slow it down so let's say I put 10 drag so now it slowly Falls instead of it just going uh fast next I'm gonna add a wind Force because I I do want it to go in the direction of the wind if uh if there's wind in the level usually you'll attach it to a parameter and the blueprints or a parameter or depending on what engine you're working with there would be a parameter allows you to hook this up to wind so the stronger the wind is either it gives you more like you spawn more based off of the strength or less so it depends so for this one it looks a bit weird so let's play a little bit with the uh let's see let's play a little bit with gravity so I'm gonna actually try and do it as a curve I don't need the X and Y the only thing I'm going to need is the Z for now I'm gonna do it at 9 80. I think I was so it's gonna be from one to zero so it starts off really uh big like a start off like for example at negative 980. and then by the time it gets to here it'll be zero so it looks something like this see like it starts really uh starts the gravity and then over time it just lets it die uh let's try actually an auto okay actually also adding to this would be um vertex Force uh Vortex Force sorry or if you don't want Vortex Force you can do turbulence I think uh I guess not so just stick with this one then so this adds a bit of randomization to it when it falls and it gives it a little bit of uh uh a little bit of turbulence basically if I turn this off right now that will all fall into the same direction and it wouldn't have any randomization but with this it gives it a bit of of that randomization okay so the next thing that I want to look into is how they are spawning because right now they're spawning like just popping into existence so what I want to do is actually ease them in so I'm going to use the alpha to actually do that so in the alpha you do a curve and then you would have it uh the beginning one the beginning key Point as zero and then you would have the last one at one so this basically will have you uh fade in the particles but what you want to have is added another key here like have it like slow not slowly but like quickly uh fade in so that way it wouldn't really um feel like it's popping into the world and even if the player looks at this tree for example so if I take this here the system itself even if they looked at it from the bottom for example looked up they wouldn't see that it's actually Fading Into existent or anything because if you actually have it pop into exist then it might actually look look more uh weird and it might break still break the illusion okay I think that's it so the other thing is is basically just trying to get it to look right with the tree and how it spawns from there and how much you would want it to spawn because you don't want you don't want it to spawn a lot because that would kind of break the purpose of the effect because imagine if you have um a spawn rate of like 20. that's a lot of leaves falling and basically it would mean that the tree should be basically uh leafless in like two three maybe five seconds so it depends uh I'm gonna go into this the drag set that to five spawn right I'm gonna set it back to two and for the shape I am gonna actually increase it because I want more in there so let's see how that looks like actually even if you want to you can actually go in to the um spawn rate and do something like really crazy like 500 just to see like how big your shape is like with this actually work or not so that is not bad but I'm gonna actually make it even bigger shape say 500. you also don't want it to basically fade in from see like this this is not good because it's fading it from the outside of the tree and you don't want that let's see let's do 400 then okay that should be fine it's gonna actually increase its lifetime to eight take this Pawn down to like two or four now when you look at it it looks more like falling leaves and not just uh basically them it looked more like fun leaves than not heavy like stones or anything but anytime you're trying to um do an effect like this make sure that the environment around you like it gives a feeling of life like uh of life not lifeless environment but yeah the only thing that I would basically do here is just mess with my um at it like the particle in the world and take it up a little bit more to the top like I said this is basically a template for you to do whatever you'd like with it I personally just do this for games and if you want to have like uh usually actually you would collaborate with tuck artists where you would have your leaves uh falling from the trees and then they would have like a system a blueprint system or just a system in general for leaves on the floor that would basically act as the continuation to this effect where it would basically just hit the floor collides and like disappears after a second but yeah I hope you enjoyed the video and thank you so much for watching

Channel: Mad VFX

Views: 3,350

Keywords: Falling leaves, UE4, UE5, Ue5, Unreal Engine 5 Falling Leaves, Unreal Engine 5 falling leaves, VFX in unrea 5, creating vfx in unreal engine 5, flipbook, how to amke falling leaves in unreal engine 5, how to make falling leaves in unreal engine 5, how to make falling leaves unreal 4, ue4 tutorial, ue4 vs ue5, ue5 particles, unreal 5, unreal 5 animation, unreal 5 foliage, unreal 5 games, unreal 5 tutorial, unreal 5.3, unreal5, vfx unreal 5

Id: E_onMUsdKtw

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023