Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial for Beginners - Create a Snow Storm VFX with Niagara

have you ever wondered what you needed to do to take your environments to the next level are you a beginner in unreal and after doing your landscapes you find that they look empty or lifeless look no further i'll be showing you how to do environmental vfx for your maps without any knowledge required in bfx the goal of this tutorial is to grab a previous environment made by mao and from scratch make it into an impressive snowstorm you will learn materials and particle systems inside of unreal engine really simple textures inside of substance and at the end we will be adding post process to make the scene look amazing remember that the product files will be inside of our unf store on free training and if you want access to all of our premium tutorials please don't hesitate to become a patron so what are you waiting for this is going to be lots of fun i hope to see you there all right so before we start you must know that we're using a map that mao made some time before and to get it we'll give you the link for the onedrive or you can also go to his tutorial and make it with him right so what we're trying to do is make some environmental effects to make it look more cinematic right maybe we're thinking about uh creating a snowstorm maybe we turn this into night and we get rid of that dragon and this spotlight uh so let's start with that then so what we want to do now is find an angle uh that works the best for our scene um because we just wanna or at least in this tutorial we just wanna do a small area that is worked properly and then you can on your own replicate it everywhere that you want uh but for now uh we just do a small one so if we're doing a small one we need to find a good angle to work with so maybe this one is good uh you need to hold ctrl and press one and that way you uh save the location of your camera in case you just move it around and then you just miss the the camera angle that you like you just press one again and you snap back to it right and but maybe a little bit more on the right side maybe like that maybe maybe this looks good so again hold ctrl and one now what we want to do next is um probably just change the the the light the directional light so we make it be at night and maybe change some colors and probably just change the post process once we are almost done with with everything right with the knees with the snow uh so there's no light let's just locate it and i want to move it here so when i press one it's in front of me and i can just modify it here so let's see maybe like that probably i i i want the sun behind that thing and then we just right there hold on we almost forget it what if here we just we get a little bit bluish and then make it fade away like this i think that could work although maybe a little bit more to the to here and maybe a little bit more like that i think this is getting there let's get rid of this dragon let's get rid of this spotlight too which is this green light here okay that gives it a little bit better look uh intensity perhaps we can modify it let's see or yeah this looks good now let's go to the atmosphere here skype atmosphere and on the right leg scattering perhaps we can make it a little bit darker a little bit bluish now the next step is uh clearly just making uh this mooc or well the mist for our map and for that we're gonna use one of the textures inside of the starter content and we're also gonna go to substance and make a really extremely simple cloud texture that you can also make on photoshop and of course it's going to be under teachable too right so you can download everything so on the started content just type smoke if i'm not wrong yeah smoke it's this one uh smoke uv although we can also use this smoke oh this one is way too small this one is not it's not gonna work and how is this smoke superv okay 2k that's fine all right so we want to go to our maps no environment and here let's just create a new folder let's say it's same vfx and inside here materials by the way i'm creating folders with ctrl shift n and here textures and one more for particles now that we have these three folders we can again go here and type smoke smoke and just this one just drag it here and say copy now we have it here now we need another one and for that one we'll go to substance remember that you can also make this texture on on photoshop just go a new substance and go for a 2k texture and again this is really simple just type space oh press spacebar to open this uh this slider is this layer well just open this and just type cloud 2 you think yeah it's called 2. i just give it some disorder you just don't don't don't want really dark areas i think so maybe like that is fine and just in case we want to also add levels and uh i just drag this and let go to create it and then just probably something with some contrast just in case i'm not sure if we will use this one but again just in case so save uh the first one and i already have my folder here environmentfx cloud and this is gonna be t cloud and we want a png here so here png and save and for the other one we want the cloud contrast also png and save it and that's all we need for this so we go back to this notes to this new project and we click on import and let's bring up our where is this okay there we go our textures so these two open them let it load oh it doesn't appear because we are searching still for smoke so okay there we go and we should start making our material now so right click material and underscore let's say it's named cloud and let's enter it all right for this material we want this to be unlit and also we want it to be translucent let's hold ctrl and spacebar to return the content drawer and just gather all of your textures and bring them here yeah we want this here this here and this here so our main texture is going to be this one on the middle you can preview it here and what we want to do is we want to use this top texture to give some noise inside of each one of these little smokes and right now if we just add them together first of course just uh stop the previewing if we add them together and we just hook this here you can see that the the noise is on just just on some right because this texture is just way too big so in order to fix that we just want to create that texture coordinate and just plug this here and this probably is eight by eight because this one here is just eight clouds by eight clouds right so just make it eight by eight and now if you just check it you can see that each one of them has the same noise but this is not looking so well because they are also the same right uh so we need to find a way to modify the uv um yeah to modify the uvs of this noise maybe just move them to the right or something like that right so let's find a way to do that let's put this here bring up an app we want to bring up two constants we want to append them so they are directions and just put this here on the ad then we need to make a multiply oh sorry we plug this here and here on the bottom one more constant we want the floor and just plug this here all right if we start moving the constants here you probably won't see much because whenever you move it it just loads right so we probably just want to make a material instance so it is easier to visualize so just right click material instance and it's enter if you see nothing it's because we didn't make a parameter of each one so let's convert the parameter let's say direction one let's name this parameter again okay and this one is gonna be opacity okay now we can apply and go to the instance and if we don't change the opacity it doesn't matter what we do here we won't see anything so probably for the opacity we just want what 1.1 like this you can see something now and now if you start moving this you can see how this is working now right this has the directions that we need so for this one 1.25 all right that's fine and for the later one the 2.9 okay maybe this is what we need it's still looking a little bit like the same but perhaps we're gonna work more on it later let's see how the material turns out so back down is let's put the default values here so 1.25 and this one was 2.9 i think 2.9 this one was 1.125 all right this is the first part now we probably should start making the the opacity before we go on the opacity we should probably just add a particle color vertical color so it is able to communicate with our particle system right so we can make it fade away or change color inside of niagara so hold m and left click for bringing up a multiply click this here and hook this here and plug it on the emissive color now we can start working on the opacity so for this one for now just hold m left click or multiply grab the alpha sorry grab the alpha and grab this one and just plug it in the opacity and this is going to bring up a couple of issues and let's check them right now so just click on apply let's come back to our map and you don't need to do this this part just just watch it but you can do it if you want so i'm bringing up a plane i'm rotating it and i'm making it way bigger way bigger okay and let's add our material to to this shape okay so there are a couple of uses now you can see that whenever this material or whenever this shape is crossing another geometry you can see this sharp line and our mist is going to be everywhere right and it it's going to be colliding with other objects so we cannot have this this really sharp line and the other one is that if they miss this on your face and you keep advancing it just never goes away right and it just looks really low quality it just looks really bad so we need to modify those two things inside the material sorry let's save for now okay let's go on the cloud and first let's make it fade away once you uh once you approach and this one is fairly simple so let's uh let's modify this before these two are linked together so just bring up a multiply put this here and this and then hook this here see so we're just modifying these two and then it's been multiplied by the particle opacity so in here we want a pixel depth we want a constant and we also want a sphere mask okay hook them both here and now we need the opposite of this so um what this does let's just plug it in is that you will only be able to see whatever is inside this uh this rectangle once you get close close enough right once you get far it just disappears we need the contrary of that so we need to bring a one minus and plug this here and we also will need to modify whatever is inside of this sphere mask so the hardness is just way too strong probably a 10 is fine and the radius just for this demonstration probably okay and we click on apply now we can see it from far away if we get close you see that it starts fading away right and then the transition is really soft and we can just crank this up more if you want but this is just an example right we should check it again once we are on with the part with the actual particle right not this rectangle so we can just leave it this at the base 230 for now this is okay now we need to deal with this sharp line here and this is even more simple than uh than this fade so in here we just wanna here multiply it in here we want a depth fade and just click it here and just click on apply so now you can see that there is this really soft fade between uh this rectangle and the floor and we can continue cranking it up sure we can do it um but uh again we should try it once we have the particle running right not with this rectangle but there is still a couple or well one more thing that i would like to make on this material we probably want to make each one of these smokes have a little uh highlight or or variation and uh that you can see once these clouds inst intersect geometry right because if we just apply this if we look at this this way you can see that yeah there is now this this fade in the cloud but they all seem a little bit too uh equal right you can see a line here right and uh if we just keep squaring them like this you can see a line so on this fade node that we put maybe we can put some configuration to have a different noise in here right so we need to modify the fade distance and that's why we have this texture here so let's multiply the red channel and we just want to hook this here and let's say that on the opacity probably just one and click on apply let's see how that looks so so far nothing in much is showing we still can see the line and actually there is no more fade so we probably want to crank this up in here what about 400 will this maybe work well now the fade is stronger but we can see that maybe the effect is a little bit stronger here rather than here and the issue is that this noise is affecting the whole texture right it is not affecting each one of these and remember to affect each one of these we need to make it an eight by eight which is what we did here so just simply just put this here and now let's click on apply and let's test how that looks and now you can see how as it goes down it starts to change right now it is not just a straight line that is just devouring everything although of course as you can see that there is still a line now there is difference now there is a different noise going on right okay we can still tweak this a little bit more though like for example probably just put in a clamp here and they clamp just zero to one and that is fine but uh but uh in here probably we just add a power to intensify it a little bit more maybe a power of two is is fine let's see how that looks yeah i'm quite liking this i think we are done with the smoke now and we can start making the the particle system uh we probably just start by adding this subuvs and then making a believable mist so let's go on particles oh of course let's save first all right and let's create right click and just go for niagara system new system from selected dimeters and we probably should choose the hanging particulates although maybe we could also do a simple sprite burst for now just hanging click on the plus and then go and finish and this will name it ns let's say this is named mist 01 because we'll have plenty on different directions and probably also velocities well maybe not plenty of maybe three at least or two we'll see so double click to open it and this is our system here and well first let's uh set up this subuebs and in order to be able to see this properly let's make uh lesser spawns like at about five and let's make them bigger for sure so what about something like that sorry like that and something like that maybe maybe we could leave it at that uh maybe we could make it even bigger some maybe like that and like that okay we now probably want to give this a little bit more velocity uh you know for now spawn rate one you can see this big sprite here okay fine and now it's leaving a little bit too less i think okay let's put our material that we made the cloud so let's select it and let's place it here and when this spawns you can see that it is still eight by eight so we need to modify the sub ub we go here on again sprite renderer and sub uv we need to put eight by eight and you see that now it's working but you're only seeing one sprite it is not moving it has no animation so here are the particles found or well no on the particle update because we need it to be constant we just type sub db and we pick up the subdued animation and that should be it now it is live although we see it a little bit choppy right like it's a little bit on on on slo-mo we probably want it to leave a little bit less so probably about a three and a five is better yep this is slightly better and since we're barely going to be able to see this we don't really need to uh put that much detail into this right oh one thing that we need uh here on the sprite renderer on the subuse we need to click on the blending enabled that's gonna make it a little bit smoother and that's good okay now let's try placing it on our map so [Music] we just drag it here this first mist we want it on our face something that is gonna a little bit cloud orbition so around here maybe oh let's just get rid of this transparency here so let's press one okay and probably right now you're scared this is not looking good it's way too strong and indeed it is really so strong so let's get here on the values on the scale sprite size we don't want it to shrink we want it to go from big to bigger so probably let's say maybe this is fine here on point one and then 1.7 it can still be a little bit bigger and at the end at the end here let's expand it a little bit it just grows like 1.5 if you press f we center the curves maybe this is good let's select them all right click and go on auto okay so it it it doesn't shrink because that's not how it how uh this smoke behaves right or the misbehaves okay so this is here on the map and we can already see a couple of things like for example here on the bottom there are some really hard [Music] grey spots we need to get rid of that we need to modify the material um but first let's get rid of the of this really strong color so let's go and scale color and then in this point we probably want it on 0.1 we can test how that looks this is still way too strong you probably want to tint it a little bit blue too so here let's just do a little bit of blue and let's scroll it down yeah this is very subtle this could be i'm still not fully convinced though it's it's way too bright and again this bottom is looking really bad we need to fix that so [Music] maybe a little bit like this and a little bit darker we again need to probably modify the the uh the material a little bit more so let's try and do that right now we're here on the material and uh this trick that we were doing here is not looking that great so we probably will have to blend it a little bit did this power it's probably too strong a 1.2 it's fine let's see how it looks and yeah now it is a little bit better but it's it's still really not good so let's uh probably here just multiply this threshold by another depth fade that uses the same opacity and oh wait before doing this uh this constant of the opacity let's lower it to 1.3 let's apply it and let's see how that looks that is starting to look a little bit better right slowly slowly and actually i think the bottom part oh yes so sometimes you can see the little holes so let's continue modifying it so we are multiplying this this color depth fade we are sharing this opacity but this fade distance we probably want this one problem and let's move this a little bit to the side so this result we just hook it here and we go and apply let's see how it looks now okay it is incredibly subtle maybe we don't need it to be this subtle but i think that the bottom part is almost sold let's make it a little bit stronger 0.6 or maybe this point five but let's try it yeah that's that's way too strong but now when this smoke crosses the d mesh it it does not uh saturate in that way it feels more organic that way okay now we probably uh well we need to make it a little bit uh slower here uh softer so 0.5 at the end i think it was the the way to go let's see yep i think this is really really good now we should add some kind of uh speed because oh i press delete ctrl c sorry so i'm thinking this is a our main screen yeah that's good but we don't want this mist to be constantly on your face right we want some some speed so what is going through my mind right now is we we're gonna have this this main mist just go across okay fine then we'll have another mist over here that you can clearly see it's going here maybe we can have another mist like going up here you know or more going up here and then of course we're gonna have a a snowstorm right but for now we're just handling with the with the mist maybe these three variations are fine we'll have to see how everything looks once we have our snowstorm so all of our material is fine now i think and we should really save and let's try to put some speed on the on the emitter on the system now taking a look at our mist right now you see that it is kind of whitish at the middle we're not seeing any shape from the sub-uv animation and that is because right now it has no speed so they are spawning on top of each other right and they are just becoming really wide we need to have some kind of uh some kind of speed going so okay so this is our main point maybe we just move it a little bit here yeah maybe that's good a little bit here and now let's just go a little bit far away and let's add some some speed so let's go here on the mist i'm going to put this on this side let's close this cloud material play whatever it it tells you to okay oh small lag all right and this we want to give it some speed for sure so on particle spawn should we find type velocity i'm not seeing much here there we go type velocity and clearly this is um you know we need to make it big there are way too many options that we cannot see if we do that so um here on velocity we want some range of uh of of speeds so here on the on the little arrow just type uniform and it's going to give us a random range vector so probably minimum is like what 1k and maximum like this okay so that's not the right direction right we don't we want it to go left so we put zero here or actually like 120 and minus minus 120 and this we can define now okay and one okay so how does that look okay now you can see that we are seeing more shapes but this is probably still not as fast as it should be so let's continue cranking up that speed and seeing what works and what doesn't uh what about like this and like this maybe okay that is faster now but it's good um maybe the particle is just leaving way too little now so let's go on this boundary and before we find the the lifetime me we just want more than one or or maybe okay maybe we can on the spawn probability we can just put 0.5 sometimes it's found sometimes it doesn't the emitter state the loop duration is just going to be one second so it loops faster let's see oh and it just stops okay maybe probably the probability is not that high then or maybe we just don't put any let's say 0.9 does it look okay that is looking better we maybe need to add some drag and of course increase the lifetime so here on the initialized particle what else is 6.5 what about 4.2 okay the drag that came with this default is probably way too high 1.2 maybe we just leave it at 0.5 and 0.7 how is it looking i'm lagging it i'm liking it so we've done this before and right now again our mist is going this way and i see a couple of issues with this mist mainly uh it is not going fast enough this does not look violent it does not look like a snowstorm at all it looks like something really calm so we need to make these faster and apart from that i would like to have a couple more mists going on this pathway maybe smaller ones and in here we could have a different kind of mist maybe some really small sprites just going here on top really fast like crashing into this thing and then going up something that that looks nice something like a detail missed if you will so for now let's focus on uh fixing this this mist again although it looks nice it's going by way too slow way way way too slow so let's go to our mist and let's see what we can do to actually fix this so first of all we want to change here we don't we can't see much right because it is almost invisible so i'm just going to hold alt and with my left click just drag it drag this scale color to duplicate it i'm just going to hide this and in here i just want this point to go to 10. and then on initialised particle if we can see well we don't really need to change the color we can really see it quite nicely all right so let me think we should probably uh reduce the initial velocity what about like 800 and 600 let me see how that looks right now so you see that it it stays more on its place okay now let's add it some acceleration acceleration force and this is going on y on positive so let's also go on positive like 2k maybe is that too much this feels like a step-forward but there are way too few of them way too few so we can crank up the this pound rate and also it um it feels like the acceleration may be too much it it just may be way too much so back to oscillation force let's say it's what 800 maybe okay this does not look bad i would like to have a little bit more variation on the where is it on the x so maybe minus 300 oh sorry minus 300 and 300 positive and i think yeah let's add more on this pound rate so we probably raise this pump probability and see how that looks okay let's say it's two then if you go back to our main camera this could work this could work let's see the well if if i could use my two screens then i wouldn't really do this uh this skill color cranking up because i can just modify dna around the right and then just see it on the map right so here how does that look now so it is definitely faster i think it's going in the right direction it could even go faster now yeah definitely it could go faster but we should start seeing it with these snow particles and then decide right now we're seeing it this way i don't think this looks bad uh we need to have a couple more in the background now and see how that works let's open our content browser and thinking about this inside of this particle system there's gonna be our mist and also our gpus no particles so it makes no sense that this is called mist this should be um the combination of everything right so this is a wrong name this doesn't say anything to us this should be named something like snow storm main this sounds better and now let's make the little snow details on the map probably something on the road so let's right click and duplicate this and this is gonna be named snow storm storm details let's enter this and probably well first let's put this in the map let's bring it here let's place it probably around here a little bit on top fairly late that is fine so right now obviously it is the same as our old mist and we need something definitely smaller so let's just go for something smaller then let's go and initialize particle we probably just want something that is 700 and what 900 we probably want something that dies way quicker too though so let's see oh okay this is smaller for sure i think this is the right amount because if we snap back to our old view yeah i think this is the right size now of course besides this we also need to be spawning wayward particles so let's say it's 10 oh small lag for some reason there we go okay now we just need to adjust the lifetime most likely the lifetime and also the speed on we want to make something random and wants to give some variation at the start of every particle which i think it's best let's close this notes from main so it doesn't get any way please and here what 1 and 1.5 let's see okay yeah this may be a good start we need to add the variation on the noise now and we need to add a a couple of uh a couple of modules here first on the update particle let's select earth or type wind wind force and this if we put 900 here let's see how it reacts okay nothing much is happening that is that is because of our wind scale i think my computer is acting up a little bit okay um so let's start modifying this then let's make this a uniform or random sorry type random random range float and maybe variation between 1 and 10 i think and at spawn we only want the variation to happen at spawn and we also need to modify the air resistance i'm pretty sure okay this is way faster sure it has more variation that's nice but this still does not feel so organic right let's snap to one yeah i don't i don't really like how that looks at all let's go back here to snowstorm and let's modify the air resistance so let's say again random and this is going to be or actually not random but uniform yep let's leave this at minus one and one probably that's good okay that's an improvement now we need to add probably another force in the mix what if we have some vortex force all right and for this one maybe let's see how that behaves that's already making it a little bit more random i think but it's not notorious at all so the the force amount we want it to be random too or well uniform and this let's say it's 100 and 300 here probably the vertex axis we just don't want it on c we want it on one and why we leave it as a simulation it is already creating some different velocities which is nice but this is still lacking some things mainly i think let's make it have a wider angle or well make this pawn be wider so on the shape location on the box and plane we can probably just make it really big like 2k and we can now watch how that is looking alright maybe we can just put it a little bit higher like this it is starting to look good but i think we have way too many velocities so we have the vortex force and we also have the wind pores this alone should be enough to drive our our mist but i don't think that we really need an acceleration force let's just uncheck it or erase it and also this velocity don't really need it so let's get rid of those two and let's see how this looks i think this is really looking way better we should we should uh duplicate this though maybe when we're here i just used alt and and uh left click to just duplicate it and this one let's just move it over here i think over there or to this side a little bit okay let's press one this is already taking shape i don't like how it's forming here on the on the right side so let's keep going here maybe a little bit here okay this is very nice there is a hole here though that we really need to build let's let's just put this one a little bit a little bit closer because if we look at the main picture this is looking nice okay now i will want to here maybe make some some smoke that goes well missed that goes this way or maybe just straight into us right um and we're gonna have a couple of problems here because uh first let's save of course and our problem is that if we just select this and hold alt to duplicate this let's just place this what here to this side we want this to blow from this side to our face right so okay let's rotate it right you can see that it is not following the direction you're putting let's ctrl c to erase that and the issue is that we need to go here on properties and check local space that way it's gonna follow us okay nice we probably want this in this direction and also hold on i'm so sorry we want this clearly to blow from here i think so let's just maybe this height is fine you want this around here maybe like that and we want to pull it a little back this seems good but um let's turn it a little bit just a little bit okay so now sure fine it is blowing towards here right maybe we could even put it a little bit like that sure but it is not following the same pattern as as this and it will make sense that if they are so close it should happen so let's go um we need to add some some curve to this noise right so we need to make another particle on details just right click duplicate and this one is going to be named curved details let's enter this it is here oh but first of course let's just select this curved details and let's replace this here right so our particles here and let's erase this one in here it should be fairly simple we just want the wind force to blow curly in this direction oh it's on the other direction minus there we go okay how is it looking there i'm liking it i don't particularly enjoy that there is no mist in this direction though so what if we just duplicate what we have done on top and of course we need to make sure that they are not intersecting right so let's go here to our snow duplicate this and make this one sit right here we should probably turn this a little bit as well and make it have less lifetime because right now potentially or let's just pull it way back here yeah this looks way better better okay now to end with the mist because it it's already looking pretty nice let's put some here some detail around here let's save once again and this is for me because i crash sometimes and let's see let's make something different so let's let's grab one of these and the same right just alt and drag just duplicate we're gonna bring this guy here okay and now we wanna duplicate these uh these details so just here duplicate and let's name this storm snow storm sorry storm down let's enter it and remember to replace it otherwise we're gonna we're not gonna see it so yep snowstorm down okay now on the initialized particle uh let's no no sorry on the shape location let's just disable the sphere we just want a huge plane so okay and this one one k and one k maybe let's see how it looks okay it is certainly white but since we have so few particles we can't really see much so let's pump that up to hundreds okay we can definitely see it now and we want this to turn 90 sure let's just put this on the very edge of this so how does that look from our point of view okay maybe a little bit lower like that so we wanted to go uh down and then to the left right now this is not looking good really so what about this size should we do anything about this size right now this is let's pump it up 1k and like that okay bigger that that's that's certainly an improvement now i think we will have to enable both of these again so we can toy with the different velocities because we didn't really need those for the ones that we made we just need wind but here i think to make the animation of going down and left we we need something else so at velocity this one probably just zero here and zero here and also you know only 0 here too we don't want it to modify anything that the wind is doing we just want it to go downwards so let's say what minus 1k and minus okay how is it looking ok it is going down let me make sure that it is actually going down because sometimes it could be hard to tell oh like spike there we go so let's uh let's say this is minus 9k okay it is definitely worth all right so minus 1k is fine okay now probably we also want to enable the acceleration force and we don't wanna do much here again we don't really want to toy with the direction of the wind so zero there what about 2k here how does it look okay all right that i think it's not bad it's fine that it is a world minus 50 here i don't really enjoy it i don't find it that that believable for some reason so let's keep tweaking it right now i feel that the wind may be a little bit too strong right uh and let's position this a little bit better so like this and a little bit on top okay the wind may be a little bit too strong so 500 maybe okay that's a little bit better but i still want this to go down so let's push it down what if wind just says we go down now that could be a little bit more though there's 100 now this is way too strong compared to our other currents and this is not really enjoyable to watch it's way too strong way too fast as well so minus 300 is fine that minus 1k maybe too much or you know what we can also do is just turn this like this and then the problem should be sold yep i think that's looking quite nice and i lied this is not the last step for the mist i'm thinking what if we also have some mist just very softly just going from here to here to the bottom because it makes no sense that the whole map is with this mist and there is nothing here right it should get stuck within these cracks and then just let go right so let's let's make that last detail and then we should be finally done with this okay we're gonna do something really simple probably just grab a detail and duplicate it and let's see let's see if it's gonna be good enough so we put this here let's move this around here rotate a little bit like this that's the direction let's make it go down how does it look okay a little bit too high um i feel like this should be bigger it's way it's way too small so i guess that we will have to create another system at the end so [Music] this is snowstorm details let's duplicate it let's name this videos big details really big details erase this one let's replace this here okay and let's make this we what the biggest maybe i wonder if that's good yeah i think this is good i just wouldn't want it right here it's making an overdraw so i i don't don't want that well more than we already have it right so this here falling like this we won't see we just want this small part so maybe we just make the particle die way earlier so what point six and 0.5 well if we do that that messes up our speeds and our timings and this happens and we really do not want that at all so ctrl c to both and we need we need to stop this here so spawn rate probably just make it a two and that should be good enough let's see you press one yeah i think that's believable enough yeah that that kind of solves it too let's put it around here from here it does not look believable but from here it looks good enough you know i see some flying on front weight this is not good though i need to spin it like that okay that's good now let's do the same for the other side from this edge here okay i use that sleeve fine yep i like it this looks nice so now that we're finally done with all of these we should start doing this now finally the last step that doesn't mean that it's not going to be complicated but or long we shall see [Music] but let's start making the material then let's save once again and let's create our new material right click material let's name this m underscore snow and for this material it is it's going to be rather complex so we're going to do it slowly together so you don't get lost so the properties this one needs to be translucent and you can leave it on default lit and we really just want to make something basic right now so we can create the behavior of the particle system and then we can finish the material otherwise it's going to be a little bit hard to visualize what exactly we're doing with the particle or we i mean with the material so just hold tree left click hook this on emissive and let's give it a color maybe like that and now right click and radial gray gradient there we go and just plug in opacity and you can see this is some something incredibly basic okay now let's go on the particle and again now that i'm thinking about it maybe it is not the greatest idea to have a snow on each one of these systems maybe we could do with just one system overall that is affecting uh our front camera or something along those lines so let's uh i mean we could try both but for now let's try creating a single one and if it doesn't look nice we can start adding different motions and and on different systems right so now you're a system next we want a simple sprite burst and click on finish let's name this ns snow gpu and let's enter this let's make sure that we put our material which is going to be looking very similar to this let it load there we go it is incredibly similar and we do not want this particle to just repeat once so first we want this to be infinite and well probably the loop duration is fine we'll have to see that we do not want a spawn burst instantaneous we want to erase this we want here spawn we want spawn rate and for now let's say that this is 300. they are overlapping each other and we do not want that so we go on initialized particle well first an initialized particle and on lifetime we do not want a static light time we want uniform oh sorry random and in this random we just want probably 0.5 and 0.75 so they have a little different lifetime so they die on different motions okay now this sprite size also needs to be different like right now it is way too big so let's just say it's eight we don't give it any randomness just plain eight now we need to go for the shape location and this shape now you can see it working here this shape is really just a sphere a really big sphere actually so what about 4k it's huge and you know now that we have this this huge sphere let's just crank up this boundary let's just add one more zero here okay we can barely see them right now huh maybe we will end up making something as big as this shape but for now let's just say it's one case we can visualize them better so you can understand this a little bit better okay so now we're gonna want to give this uh a different force right so we probably want here a vortex force and this is gonna help us move the the particle in a more uh erratic behavior if you will so probably the force amount is just hundreds we just put one here maybe minus one here okay this is not exactly doing what we want and i think it's because we need one more force involved in this like this is gonna spin our particles fine it's gonna give it a a different motion but we probably want something like curl noises yeah let's try curl noise or noise force you probably just want to leave it at at medium otherwise it's going to be way too heavy but uh nice strength let's just go for something really strong like 10k you can already see them really wild like a snowstorm maybe but these are just going in circles right what about 1k here that's a little bit better just a little bit better and maybe around here we can make some modifications too so pan noise field we probably want to move this as well what about 10k here too all right it's it's still kind of sketchy right so probably just one here we leave this as it is and let's add it some normal velocity now now i think we just need some initial velocity hero on the on the spawn that gives it a direction and then i think it's gonna look pretty nice so for the velocity let's just hear velocity sorry velocity okay at velocity it's fine if it's linear but we want some random range here so here type random and something really strong so something like this and probably something like this here now you can see it coming to life right so the particles are really random and they are flying on the direction that we we probably want this direction on our map let's just put this in and see how this looks so our particles here snow gpu let's put it here now you see how this is working right this is looking very nice and this is the motion that we want but probably we want a little bit different [Music] movement here at least a little bit minus 250 and 250 and what if we just put 1k here okay that is looking very nice i like this a lot but now you can see that the snow particle is like a sphere right it is really round and i would like this particle to have like a size by life something that um something that modifies the the particle size right because right now it is a little well if you see it from from a afar it's looking really nice right but it could look a lot nicer than this and a lot nicer so let's check a few things before we enter our material let's erase this old particle system and here on the sprite renderer if we want our particles to be affected oh please let's say i'm going to get in trouble otherwise if we want our particles to change size with speed we could hear adjust size by speed sure but it's not going to get modified we first need to tell the particle alignment that it's gonna be modified by velocity and we probably don't wanna oh the sorting mode we also wanna change it we wanna see the new particles in front of us rather on the other rather than the old ones so custom descending is fine and now we can add the size by speed where is it scale sprite size by speed okay and now for this the minimum factor is one find the maximum or and on y is where we need to really modify it so probably 10. now you see how they change well they're certainly way too big right now for sure but we could just increase the shape size to the amount that we previously agreed on and you can see that it is already way smaller so let's now change the position of this like we could turn it to let's say or here that looks nice and let's move it purely but here maybe and let's make it a little bit higher around here could be and in here really just bring it yeah i think this looks good so if you press one you can see this snow going towards the direction of the of the mist this looks nice i like it and now we should modify the material and of course there are a couple of things that i'm seeing like for example um i don't think there's enough mist if we just cancel this now this looks a little uh too less mist for the amount of uh snow that we have and of course uh it's easier to just modify the snow right but remember that this is uh uh i mean it's easier to monetize this no rather than the mist since we have so many missed particles but this is no sore material so i think that we need to add a couple of more mists on top right but i think that this behavior right now looks really nice and now we should just go and modify the material again we're gonna go really slow so just erase these two we do not need them anymore and we are going to divide the material in in a couple of parts first we want to make the material emissive as we get closer so we should just do pixel depth just hold one left click for a constant let's bring up a sphere max let's hook them both here now let's bring let's hold l and left click for a layer plug it on the alpha and then plug this on the emissive color so right now we have a little issue and that is the sphere mask let's just increase it to 1k and the hardness to 10. okay so now if it if this is far uh well if if you see this snow from afar it's not going to lit up but if you get closer as you get closer it gets brighter right this is really simple and it looks nice it's just some nice detail okay we can just order this a little bit and put it really far now the second part we need to make the base color so we want to hold three and left click two times this top one we want to convert it to parameter and this is going to be color edge and the bottom one again parameter and this is going to be color core for the color edge we want it to be like a soft soft blue something like this well light blue and for the color core something like yellowish not so bright maybe that is nice now we want a lurp we want to plug this on a plug this on b oops sorry plug this on b and also hold one for a constant and bring it to another and we want this on 0.7 just to keep things ordered let's just put this here so it doesn't get in the way of anything and this should be going on the base color but we're gonna make uh we're gonna be mixing it more so we should just leave it as here we probably just pull it back a little bit let's hold m for a multiply and let's plug this here and now to this multiply we need another alert probably around here so hold l and we need to bring a particle speed draw a little bit a little bit of power we want to hold s to bring up a constant and name this also vertical speed we want this to have a base of 700. let's put them a little bit closer now we want to divide so hold d left click plug them both and now from this divide we want a clamp nice now this clamp is what is gonna be helping us on our larp so just put it on the alpha this lerp is gonna be hooked over here you can just put this a little bit like this so we don't mix and it's a little bit ordered okay and we now need to solve the a and the v of the dealer so we go a little bit back we need to make two radiant two radial gradients one we copy it we paste it and each one of these we need to hold one so two constants for each radius density radius and density for the top one 0.5 for the bottom one also 0.5 or at least right now i think now this one point trick and this one probably a five now let me check if this is working though so just plug this under multiply and let's see the preview okay yeah we wanted the top one to be stopped and the bottom one to be hard so this is this is fine the density 5 did it okay so we wanted the the really hard one to go on a and the soft one to omb let's just plug this right here and see how this is looking so far yeah i guess we can't really preview it so much right now but it's coming along nicely we should unhook this now that we have this part ready let's probably put it a little bit here so it is a little bit more ordered and we want this this whole small system that we made here to be multiplied here and we want to do almost the same trick that we did here so again pixel depth we want to hold 1 for the constant we want the sphere mask we want to plug this on b and we want now the opposite of the sphere mass so just go one minus and this sphere mass we can say it's five it's ten we don't want it so so strong and we just plug it here so what is this doing this as we oh i guess it's not working just yet okay that is fine that is no issue but now this multiplication we need to do another one multiply click this here and right click and they then say particle paid so particle motion blur fade now okay i know that it's getting a little a little little bit complex but we're not that far from our end result really now this whole thing here we want to multiply it again and we're going to move this a little bit to the side now we want to give this whole system a little bit of noise so hold d texture sample and as texture let's just type snow [Music] maybe smoke then smoke tile d okay now the setup for this is really simple we just want the particle position and from this one we want a component mask so type component we just want the channel r here we want to multiply this by 0.5 okay 0.5 and then we want to append so hold a hold on that's that so just type append we want it on db though not on the a and here a texture coordinate and this one goes on the a and now finally another component mask but this one yeah i think it's just on rng and now on the uis now let's plug this here and we need i think two more lerps so one uh our our first left just here on b the alpha we want the constant this is probably 0.65 although we may change it later and for the a we just want to plug this here and node is fine now we need another verb we plug this on b again a is this result here and our alpha is the clamp that we used here for our particle speed okay now last we need our particle to interact with uh in our system so one multiply and in here probably particle particle color we want the opacity here okay and last to be finally done with the opacity just put up an amp and look this here and you can kind of now see what is going on this is the the noise that we made and these two you're going to have to see them in action once the particle is moving at really high speeds so we now need the base color and that is the last thing but uh quite honestly we just need to mix these two so hold m for multiply and multiply this with the color and just plug this on base color and that should be it we are finally done with our particle with our material sorry and now we can preview how this is looking oh of course we need to modify the color still but there are some things wrong with the material and also the system let's first go to the material though and even though we are spawning many particles we don't see many we just see few and if you notice you can only see particles that are near you and i think the elty one is it's this little system here because if we zoom in and we zoom out we can see how the particle disappears when we are out and appears when we are in and we want the contrary so we swap these numbers and then it should be fine now you can finally see them nice okay nice nice finally and there are still a couple of things wrong with this right but um i think with the material we're fine and now we need to act on the gpu so first our our system is named snow gpu but this is a cpu emitter um system so let's change it gpu oh what happened okay so gpu and fixed bounds we need to put minus 2k minus 2k minus 2k and 2k 2k and nice that's one step now about the color because we see that they are not being solved they need to be way softer so here on the particle spawn just type color and in here for this click on the arrow and we need to type linear color from backstory and float nice now this needs to use 3.1.1 and 0.1 and for the alpha we just need to type clamp and this is just going to be 0.1 and that should be the configuration how is it looking now it is way softer i like it a lot this is looking very gentle too now one last thing on the update just type drag and just leave it like this i think this is good i'm i'm enjoying this this is looking nice uh maybe we could add more particles even not too many but what about this okay i'm enjoying that now last thing before we go and modify the depos process we can add a couple more mist right on on top perhaps just flying around and to do that we can just grab one that we already created maybe maybe this one even so let's clone it yeah just like that this is looking very nice i think our scene is almost complete after saving let's now play with the post process and give it a more cinematic feeling so let's see bloom we're fine image effects oh big net let's increase it okay that that's perhaps too dramatic and you like that it's very nice depth of field we are fine the color grading temperature is good the global is fine but probably the midtones and the highlights we will change so saturation for this let's open it up and this one will probably increase it a little bit 1.6 okay that's looking more like it now highlights we also want to saturate it a little bit and this probably just reduce it to 0.5 2.4 i'm liking that that's fine sinclair tint hmm let's see i really want something like 0.6 0.9 a little bit only a little bit something like what 0.6.9 could be that is too dramatic isn't it like way too dramatic okay maybe that and let's just leave it that way so with the film i don't think we should mess with this at all so ctrl c so now clearly illumination no where it raising no reflections materials no the ambient boot map motion blur film grain i don't think so either now what we'll see for that i wonder maybe we want uh maybe we want a dirt mask i don't find it so let's type it dirt maybe let's try it maybe a cloud maybe this one the intensity let's just crank it up if you look away we can see it right on our screen it's something really faint and i'm just doing this for this scene right but let's just make something red and now combine everything oh sorry dirt why is it not showing anymore let's see third what happened oh i i changed my selection okay i wonder there's masks okay yeah i think that is making it very interesting you could add plenty of things right and we we should probably add a proper mask not this one but i think it's something very nice so guys i hope that you enjoyed the tutorial and i hope that you can probably practice with this scene maybe you can put some collisions or maybe you can even make it prettier um put in the this known better places but i hope that this gave you pretty good base to understand right more when you do environment effects on our scenes and uh remember that we have plenty of more tutorials on our youtube that are free and we have also plenty that are on our teachable like the kenshin impact that we just made well we made it a couple of weeks ago but [Music] it's a discount

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 26,487

Keywords: unfgames, unreal engine beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial

Id: ZOJ_AHlldfw

Length: 92min 24sec (5544 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022