Unreal Engine 5.4 and Gaea - Landscape Materials Workflow

hello guys and welcome as you can see we're going through some Renovations over here so sorry about the mess in my background and today's video we going to talk about the Gaia and the real engine workflow where you use the Gaia generated masks like the slope mask sfall and so on together with the landscape layer blend inside of for Real uh for those who doesn't know it might seem like rocket science but it's really simple guy is a free software that you can generate Landscapes really fast and the landscape layer blend it's a really simple uh node inside of for whe and you can generate environments believable environments really fast using this workflow uh enough of talking guys so let's go to the videos and let's start creating our Landscaping Gaia and then move to on real engine let's get started so guys I'm here in the the landing page of K and we're going to create a blank project we don't need to use any templates from guia however it's nice if you're a beginner in Gia take a look on those uh different templates they might be helpful to you to understand better how Gaia works but let's create this blank project so here we have our blank project the the interface of guy is pretty straightforward my opinion because you have the view Port over here and we're going to have all the notes that we can use to create our terrains we have a bunch of these over here we're going to over a few a few of those in this video especially the DU Primitives and The Primitives probably and a few other nodes here we have our graph the graph is is like our blueprint graph or our material graph inside of a real so it's pretty much the same thing and here we have a properties bar that properties will change depending the node that you are using and to create a node inside of Gaia you can right click with your mouse and type the node that we're looking for or you can search the node that you want in in the tool box and drag and drop so for instance I'm going to start with a few G Primitives and I believe that I'm going to use a wrange let's see a range over here so the range is kind of a Moun landscape it's pretty nice maybe a reach let me take a look our R might be nice as well I think I going for our R so instead of the r we can change that afterwards and see if I click in the range you have a few properties of the range and the same thing uh with the reach however we have different properties in each of these nodes and that because the nodes behave differently so the re have different properties so if I go here um we can change the seed so the guy are going to create a different set of landscape for us so we can keep it going doing that also here you can increase the scale or decrease the scale you can increase decrease the scale and that's nice and here we have the height the definitions and so one and I'm going to create a more random landscape and I'm going to try use a vono so as you see here we have the mask so we going to use the vorono for those who are familiar with Photoshop and texture the vorono is a pattern so you might already see in textures and things like that they are using to create some randomness in textures and so on so we're going to use this vono as you can see have uh different properties so we're going to maybe increase it like this one I think it's nice maybe some noisy edges yeah then I'm going to use as a mask to our Ridge so the using as a mask the you project vono with our reach and then we're going to have a blend off this pattern and you have a more random surface a more random landscape and that is what I'm going for uh also besides the reach maybe I want to uh use some mountains so the mountains over here and to combine both of of these nodes there is a note called combine we're going to use a lot this note go here and then the combine note as you can see in the node you have uh the combined node have different properties and the most important it's the method uh because here you have the blend so the blend is blending the two and the rid and the mountain together until they combine and the ratio is if I decrease the ratio I'm going to have more of the first node which is the rid and if I do the opposite I I'm going to have have more of the second note which is the mountain but I don't like this mountain very much I'm going to change a little bit trying to search for another seed I think this one is good also if you want to change the position of your Mountain you can do that uh there is a note called transform and then I can go here and transform the mountain so we can go here and change the position so as you can see now the mountings changing and then I'm going to go here in the combine and I hit F so I lock my view in this note and then I can use the transform node to move on my mouth and see the effect with the Bri together so I definitely can do that it's really handy so go here maybe the mountain is more here where you have a more flat surface and also instead of the blend method I can use the max method because you're going to have the max of the both of these notes and here as you can see have more reach and also more mountain increase The Rao a little bit yeah and also the mountain maybe I can scale the mountain a little bit as well to make it more bigger and yeah you already have uh kind of a landscape and I'm not intend to be too much complex over here it's much it's more like a a crash course about Gaia to understand how Gaia works and also the workflow together with L real but let's keep moving so we already have uh landscape and one of the notes that creates more realism to to Gaia is the erosion node so we're going to use the erosion node all the time but because erosion node it's a quite heavy node every time that you make some changes you need to apply the changes or you can click in this how to apply over here and then you're going to apply and with the erosion as you can see with the erosion we have a a more natural SC blend between the two nodes the or and the mountain and we can play with this so we're going to make the the Rocks more soft I can increase the duration to make the landscape really fall apart I think it's nice increase the D cutting which is the water the water paths and then I can play with those actas and and now I can play with those properties and if you keep playing with those the erosion gets stronger and stronger and you have a really nice blend between the two of the notes that we are using and with that guys uh we already have a high map to export to one real so we're going to use this uh High map over here so let's go to un real to import this High map and then you're going to go back to Gaia afterwards to generate the some basic masks to use with the landscape layer blend note so let's go to on real engine here we going to create a third person project uh I I like to do that because you already have some building functions and you have some some models and animations and so on I'm going to enable P tracing and also going to use the started content because you never know when you're going to use uh some of the the features that the certain content has and I'm going to call this guy to real and create our project uh I'm using the version 5.4.1 but I believe any version that you use you'll be fine uh at least five or above maybe if you are using some on real 4 version you can have uh some difference and some problems but yeah I I believe you'll be fine so here going to create a new level I'm going to use the basic just because we already have some light set up and I don't I don't want to worry about that right now I'm going to delete this one and then I'm going to change here to landscape and here is where we can uh use our Gaia hype app uh if I go here and import from file the Unreal Engine is going to ask me for a hyp map file and you can generate this High map file in the the guy so if I go here in our erosion node and right click you're going to find Mark for export or you can hit F3 as well and if you go in the build tab you can see that you have all the the files that are going to be built now right now we just have the erosion because it's the only one thata Mark for export and then I need to change from th to PNG and I'm using the community version which is a free version of Gaia and because of that we have some limitations and the LI the limitation is the resolution so we need to change here from from 2048 to on real on real down here and I need to change to 1009 it's the the limit of res resolution for the free version but this this resolution will be fine you can generate really good Landscapes uh even with this resolution okay here it's fine and let me see if we have a more options to change range is proportional I'm going to change that from raw because I want to control the the scale of this landscape directly inside of on Real uh I'm doing that because I right now by default the guy has a 5 km to 5 km terrain but it's just a number I can't create I can create a high map the size that I want inside of if I want to create a 50 kilm terrain I can do that I'm just need to scale the the terrain and also I can do the opposite and create like a 100 m uh terrain with this landscape no problem so I want to have this control inside of on real that's why I'm changing to raw and here in the build destination we just need to use to choose a folder to save our build then I'm going to hit save and in a few seconds they are going to generate our Hy map nice they uh gu already export our high map so we can go back to on real and import from file over here in the landscape and choose the height map so I need to go where I save my hype map and here we have a few uh a few erosion types and we're going to use this one this one will be our high map but definitely can use the erosion deposit and the flow and the wire to create more complex materials but the erosion uh it's the map that we are looking for right now so we're going to click over here uh as you can see they they recognize the resolution that we put in the Gaia so always need to look for this one because otherwise you're going to have problems and in this scale is 100 200 200 uh that means that we're going to generate a Terrain uh for 1 kilm to 1 kilm and if I want to change uh to make a ter a little bit bigger or smaller I just need to change this scale and the height will be proportional so if I increase the scale so going to increase the Z scale as well so you also can generate a hype map Which is higher than the proportion inside of guia if you want we just need to change the the Z scale so it's up to you uh do wherever you want to with the scale inside of guy now so doing that I'm going to hit import and we already have our landscape imported inside of a real really easy right so I'm going to go back to selection mode I'm going to click in the in our landscape to to bring it up a little bit higher to be more close to zero I believe in this way it's fine and we already have our H map uh imported inide of that's a good step in the right reaction and now we need to start creating our materal so we're going to create a folder over here material material create a new material let's material also going to need a few textur so we're going to I need to search for a few textures inside of a k Bridge uh I need to search for some grass I'm going to speed up the video guys because you don't uh have to see me choose textures choose the texture that makes sense to you so I'm going to create a blend of grass Rock and snow in this landscape although I need to save my level first going to go landscape then I'm going to hit safe nice now let's go to our landscape material I need to search for the texture that I just loaded go to mag scan surface I'm going to start with the [Music] grass going to drag and drop and the first thing that we need to do uh to not needing uh too much refractor as you can see by the the material output inside of for real you Cann out put just one material and because you are using this node we're going to use this node over here which is the landscape layer Bland the landscape layer Bland uh you're going to generate different materials so we can I cannot use this landscape material over here because we need to use more materials and we need to interact with the lscape layer blend so to do that I need to change a few settings in this material at first so the first thing that I need to do is click in the landscape material here and use material attributes so we're going to see just one node and I need to use another node called set material attributes so as you can see you're going to use the set material attribute so we're going to choose the elements that I want to use and then we're going to create uh list of materials in the landscape layer blend and then you're going to use the landscape layer blend directing our landscape Mater material so that's the way you can use several different uh materials in the same material and okay so the first thing I'm going to kind of start backwards so in the landscape layer blend uh you have the layers over here and I'm going to create three layers so I'm creating three layers because you are using three different materials because we're going to use the grass right and and we're going to use I'm going to use the grass I'm going to use the Rock and then you're going to use the a noow as well so nice now you have the three the three materials that we're going to use and then we need to have three different set materials attributes each one of for each material but we're going to start uh the first one will be our gra grass so because once you do one it's much easier to do the other two so in the layer glass and if you set material attributes the material attributes you also have array but the array is not to create different materials but to create different properties of each material so if I go here and create elements going to see that you have different properties of the material so we're going to use our our base color so we have already have here our base color uh we don't use metallic in landscape materials won't make any sense but you're going to use the normals it's a really important part part use the normals uh we're going to use this specular because it'll be nice to decrease that plastic feeli that we we have and also we're going to use the roughness so the roughness it's the it's the alpha channel of the base color or you can use the green channel of the the already map so depending from where you getting the your textures you're going to have a different channel for roughness but for me I can use the alpha Channel or the green channel of the the or app because I'm downloading these textures from the Kix Bridge so we need to see uh from where you are you download your textures and okay so we have uh roughly the first setup of the first material we're going to hit apply and I'm going to go here in our landscape let me search for the landscape I'm going to change really quick here the layout for the u4 because you can you can see more things at once and I'm going to go back in the landscape in the landscape if I scroll down in the details panel over here um we have the landscape material and the landscape material is the material that we just created so I'm going to drag and drop and apply this material to our landscape so right now every everything is dark because you need to do some configuration and we're going to do that uh right now so if I change to landscape mode and go to and go to paint have a few options over here but if you scroll to down have our our threee materials so we have the rock the know the grass so far we just have some configuration the grass so I need to go here and create our lay layer info they're going to ask you to generate a folder inside of your project landscape Char assets going to hit save and once I do that uh we already applied our grass in our in our landscape uh I'm going to change this specular a little uh we don't need to we cannot use a zero as a specular won't be physically accurate but definitely you can decrease a little bit because to to now we don't have that plastic feel anymore of course you can do much more things with these materials but I'm going to focus to doesn't make this video too long I'm just in using the blend materials and also I'm creating a course in yudy about that where I going to go in much more details about how this workflow Works yes we create our grass and then we need to do uh the exactly same thing for the Rock and the snow so I'm going to go here actually I can go and duplicate the set material attributes because you you're going to use exactly the same materials properties and now I need to search for the other textures uh I'm going to go the The Rock drag and drop our Rock so we're going to have the base color over here the normal and also our or roughness I believe I'm going to keep the specular at the same value as the grass and you always can tweak this value later to a value that makes sense to you I just I just don't like that uh plastic look that we have when you have a high specular and okay we did that with the rock so we need to go here and use layer Rock and we need to do one more time exactly same thing with the noow so we're going to go here and search for the S where is the sow it's here light base color normal and roughness I believe if they specular won't be a problem there sow and then I need to go here connect this sow and now you have our B basic setup of our materials and as you can see we already updated the the layers in the landscape mode so we have our Rock and our is no and now how can you use uh the masks that you can generate in Gaia to apply the Rock and there's no automatically so let's go back to our Gaia file and now we need to generate a few maps and I'm going to use the erosion map as a starting point and there's a node called snowfall and when you use your snowfall as you can see everything turn with the snow but you have a bunch of properties here so we can decrease the snow a little bit if I want I can decrease the intensity so I have a bunch of parameters but I believe the the parameter that I use the most is the Snow Line because you can clamp where the the snow goes based on the height of your landscape that's really handy I'm going to increase the intensity to have more snow would be nice also the duration and we can go here and Mark for export so you can use this map and also there is a call with [Music] slope in this note uh generates I slope mask here can uh choose which angle you want your slope to be so you're going to go Max like 90° should be the Max and the minan slope would be don't know maybe yeah I think here makes sense and I'm going to decrease the fall off because I want a a really Mark way where the Rocks begins otherwise the the rock you you'll be blending with the other materials and that can have uh not realistic results so here we have this slope and I'm going to Mark to here for sport as well uh I don't need to export the Rion anymore so we're going to go and don't have the build and then I'm going to go to build and I need to change to PNG uh all the setup is okay and then I'm going to start [Music] building so I generate the maps I'm going to go back to un real in here in real you need to first we need to create the layer info nice I created the layer info then we can go back here to manage and search for our layers and as you can see because we create our layer info have layer info for all the materials but I want to use uh right now going to use the Rock and here is ask me for a file so if I click here I can go in our G exports and search for our slope mask and heating port and now uh on real engine is using our mask on the slope mask inside of Gaia to apply our our Rock in our in our landscape and you can do exactly the same thing with the snowfall and hitting part as well now you're going to have the snow together with our Rock and our grass and in this way you can go even further create more and more layers and place those layers uh inside of real and you can generate uh landscape really fast of course here uh I cannot look for this rock is like hies right now we need to use some triplan projection or maybe some texture variation or anything like that to break up the tiling we need to tweak the normals and so on but yeah uh we can do that and tweak all your materials and in this way you can generate really fast uh landcape inside of f real I hope this video is useful to you guys and that's it for today and thank you for watching see you in the next video

Channel: Unrealverse Labs

Views: 971

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Id: IPWlszd7b50

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024