Unreal Engine for Filmmakers - Cinematic VFX for FREE - UE5 [PART 2]

what's going on guys sam here and in today's video we're gonna be going into part two of our niagara fluid simulation tutorial so in the first part i kind of walked through the basics uh and the setup of how you can get a niagara fluid simulation working in real time in your scene but in this video i'm going to go into more detail about how you can actually tweak the settings and modify the look of your niagara actor in your scene and then at the end we're going to go into how to actually light that so that it's looking like it actually belongs in your scene so if you haven't seen part one of this video check that out in the upper right hand corner of the screen and let's go ahead and get started into this video so before we get into the main part of this video i want to do two really quick plugs the first one is for my new film called gemini which i've just finished and i released the trailer a couple weeks ago so if you haven't seen that i'm gonna go ahead and roll the trailer right now so you guys can check that out i can't remember anything before that day it was like being reborn [Music] resurrected into this hell it was a nightmare [Music] [Music] alright [Music] [Applause] [Music] so gemini is the main source for most of the content that you see on my youtube channel and i've also created two online video courses that go really in depth into how we created some of the vfx that you see in this trailer so we go over from start to finish building the scene from the ground up from scratch all the way through rendering with render passes and getting the best render settings for the most cinematic results out of your renders all the way through using those tools to composite in adobe after effects and blackmagic design fusion and it basically teaches you the full process full pipeline of creating a visual effects shot in unreal engine and using it with pretty much any compositor so it's a really valuable training i highly recommend it and you can pick that up on boundless resource.com i'll leave a link in the description so with that being said what i actually am going to get into first here is if we zoom in and we click on our emitter summary what's really nice about this new version of niagara is that they've kind of organized things into tabs here and these are common parameters you can expand this menu and have a full list uh to see exactly what's going on here and access all of your controls but for the most part most of your controls are going to be right here in your emitter summary uh you can see that we have our simulation render debug scalability source and all most of this stuff should be set up by default but if you're having trouble if for some reason your mesh is not colliding with your simulation just make sure when you go in here into your emitter summary and go to simulation make sure that static mesh here is checked you can also turn on these other parameters but the main one is going to be our static mesh especially for what we're doing so just make sure that's checked if we go into our simulation now we actually have a lot of great parameters in here and this is going to mainly be where you control the look of your fluid simulation so if we go in here to vorticity confinement basically it's going to add a lot of detail into your render i'll show you guys what that means here if i just increase this to say like 20 now you can see that we're getting a lot more kind of tails and folds and stuff in the fire and smoke of our simulation if i turn this down to say five now you can see everything's looking very smooth it doesn't really look as realistic and there's not nearly as much detail so turning this up is obviously with most things in unreal it's going to be a trade-off between performance and the look just keep that in mind you can't turn this up to some insane value and also crank up your resolution and expect to have a smooth running simulation so somewhere around like 30 is going to look good and what you're going to want to do is set your resolution before you get into this so if i go in here and we look at my niagara actor if we find our resolution currently set at 290 i can increase this or decrease this according to the performance and what i'm going to be setting my vorticity confinement at so we want to get that set and now we can go in here and we can start playing more with this so setting this up to 30 looks pretty good for our pressure solve iterations this is essentially going to kind of define the resolution of when objects collide with your smoke or with your fluid simulation so if you kind of increase this value it's going to give a better looking reaction when objects you know collide with your your simulation so you know once again this is going to cost you some performance so you know be sparing with this if you can but if you are going to have objects colliding with your fluid simulation it might be a good idea to maybe increase this value a bit so we're gonna go up to like 15 maybe and this kind of all also depends on your computer so going down here your density dissipation controls how much and how long the smoke will hang around after it's been emitted so if we turn this down to zero your smoke is gonna actually hang around forever but if we turn this to like 10 you can see it's going to dissipate almost immediately and we are left with mostly just fire for our simulation that's kind of just up to you with the look of what you want i'm going to reset this and you know maybe we'll go with somewhere around like one or so so anything to do with density parameters in niagara is going to deal with the smoke and anything to do with the temperature is going to deal with the fire so temperature dissipation controls the same parameter just with the fire so if we turn our dissipation up to 10 now we're going to see the fire peters out almost immediately and we're left with smoke primarily and if we turn this down to like 0.5 you can see that you know fire is going to linger way longer and it's going to stay up here in the top of our simulation you know i'm going to turn this to maybe like 1.8 i'd like my fire to dissipate a little bit more quickly so it looks pretty good and our velocity dissipation you know our particles are shooting out at a certain velocity and once this fluid simulation takes over how quickly is that velocity going to dissipate so basically if we're shooting out really hard this way and we turn our velocity dissipation up to you know 10 it's basically just gonna stop immediately and just kind of start swelling into this cloud if we turn this way down to zero now we can see that our smoke is going to keep shooting out that direction and it's going to maintain that velocity that initially was applied to it so if we turn this up to maybe like point five we can see what happens there and you know that something like that looks pretty pretty decent uh we can even go down to like point three uh so our density buoyancy these are all very logical parameters our density buoyancy is going to control essentially it's what looks like the weight of the particles or the fluid so if we turn this up to like 10 now our our fluid simulation is going to shoot into the ground if we were to only use the smoke aspect of this you know it would probably look kind of like dust or you know something uh that's your density buoyancy and then your temperature buoyancy same thing now if we turn this up to like 15 you can see that the temperature buoyancy is essentially the inverse of our density buoyancy so if we turn our temperature buoyancy way up uh our fire is going to kind of shoot up as if it's very light and there's like a lot of force coming upwards and if we turn it uh you know way down it's to just kind of be neutral and just kind of fall off into the ground here so we'll just kind of reset these values because you know this looks pretty realistic how this is behaving we can even set this down a little bit to like 0.7 just so that kind of dissipates out into uh into the distance here and you can mess with your gravity settings i'm going to leave this because you know there's not really a reason to necessarily so so you have really a lot of control over the look of your simulation here and then if you go into your render settings and a notable one is the render temperature curve and if we go into our gradient here and we bring our curve down you actually have control over the color so if you wish you can modify these values you can change the color of your fire here the last thing that i'm going to go into here is we go into our scalability tab we have our quality here and we can set this to cinematic for the best quality but if we go into our resolution max axis we can actually override the resolution so this allows you to work at a lower resolution to save computer resources and not slow down your engine but then when you render you'll be rendering at a higher resolution with more voxels so your simulation looks better and this works well because it doesn't need to render in real time when you're using the movie render queue so you get a lot better quality out of it that kind of goes over how to control the look basically of of your fire and your smoke and and all that stuff but what we want to work on now is actually controlling the source emitter that's going to control kind of how our particles shoot out uh into our scene the first thing that you're going to want to keep in mind is that if you want to use a particle system as a fluid source you're going to have to specify that down here where it says set fluid source attributes this is where you're going to be able to set uh the amount of smoke and fire in your fluid simulation you also have some control over the velocity scale and a couple other things but you're going to need this parameter in your particle source emitter in order for it to properly pass the information to your gas controls emitter and we're also going to show you i'm going to show you in a second how you can make sure that that's receiving the information properly so so uh we're just going to modify this setting a little bit so if we turn up our density to like one now we're going to have a lot more smoke and it's going to be much more dense if we turn this back down to 0.2 and then we actually let's turn this to zero now we're only going to have fire so we have just the very minimal amount of smoke and we can also do the same thing we can turn this down to zero and now we're gonna have nothing we turn this up to one and now we have very dense smoke just shooting out into our scene and you know you can see the smoke looks pretty good so that's the basics of that if we turn this down to like point two for our velocity scale now it's going to shoot out of there much slower and you can see that it's just more kind of like a fire that's that's just going directly up into the sky rather than looking like a you know a flamethrower so if we turn this up to like 0.8 something like that that's going to look pretty good and we can always modify that later so now in order to properly make sure that our gas controls emitter is receiving the information from our particle source emitter so if we go in here and we just search for particle read we can find our particle read under our particle source here and uh we have our emitter name and we're just going to need to make sure that we enter whatever emitter we're using so if you have a different emitter if you or if you create a different emitter and you want to use that instead of this one you're going to need to enter the name with the proper caps and proper spelling into your emitter name here so that's important to know that is going to just make sure that you're passing the information from this particle source emitter to the gas controls emitter and the last important thing to keep in mind here is that the voxel system only works with gpu emitters and what that means is that unreal is going to use your gpu instead of your cpu to simulate the particles and the reason for that is that the gpu emitters require a bounding box so your simulation will be contained to a certain specific area whereas cpu simulations do not so if you try to perform a cpu simulation with your fluid simulation with infinite bounds your editor would probably crash and you wouldn't be able to complete the action because there would be essentially an infinite number of calculations going on and obviously that's impossible so if you go under your particle system settings and you go to your emitter uh right here and you find where it says sim target you're just gonna wanna make sure that this is set to gpu compute sim same thing over here you're gonna wanna make sure that you have this set to gpu compute sim otherwise it's not going to work so if you create a new particle source emitter it might be set to cpu sim automatically by default so you're just going to make sure that you set it to gpu compute sim otherwise your fluid simulation just won't work so then you're also going to need to turn on fixed bounds and you know you can set those bounds here so we can always add an emitter and we can do it based on one of these templates or parent emitters so maybe we'll try an explosion with spikes particle sociometer and we're just gonna move this down here and what i'm gonna do is i'll turn this one off you know like i said before if we go into our particle read uh and we just change our name here to explosion with spike's particle source emitter now you can see that if we play it back now you can see we actually we have our little uh particle explosion so it's basically that simple to add a new emitter we'll just get rid of that one and we will reset it to this and then we can actually just go in here and start controlling uh the physics of our particle simulation so you know we can control our spawn rate in here so if we do like 500 it's going to be much less particles much less density you know we'll leave this around 10 000 which was the initial value and you can just you know modify uh your your particle emitter settings as you would with any niagara system so uh once we're happy with that we can always just save it and get out of this all right so all i've done here is just kind of you know move this around a little bit and i scaled it up using the world space size parameter here on our nsfire asset and uh so now if i go into my camera view if we play through this you can see that now our ship is actually impacting our fog here or our niagara actor unfortunately one of the drawbacks to using niagara at this point is that it doesn't seem to be able to accept the lighting in your scene inherently so you actually have to kind of set that up the way you can do that is if you go down here to where you have your directional light settings in your niagara actor so i have my niagara actor selected and we have directional light 1 directional light 2 so it comes with two directional lights automatically applied to it these are just kind of default the default lighting settings what we can do is pick a an actor in our scene or we can just find it on the list here so if i type in directional light we can uh select our directional light for our scene and as you can see since i picked the light that we have actually lighting our scene here unfortunately it doesn't take into account the fact that it's shadowed by an object here so you're getting the lighting as if this object wasn't here a way that you can kind of fix that and what i've done here is i've just gone in here and made a new directional light and just bring it out into our scene here we can just modify kind of the direction of our light so that you know maybe it's coming more from behind our niagara actor and we can kind of match the angle somewhat but if we go into our ns fire and then we go down here into our directional lights if we reset this and then i go in here and search for directional light we can see this is the new one that i've created so if i set it to this one now you can see it's a little bit more from behind our diagractor and when we modify this you can see that the lighting is changing on our actor and then what we can do because we don't want multiple directional lights rendering in our scene so maybe we'll you know maybe we like this lighting here we can go into our directional light settings here because we have it selected and we can just go into if we search our settings here just type in render and we can turn off visible and we can also turn on actor hidden in game it doesn't really matter for us but you can just turn off visible so that now it will not render so if we you can see we're turning it off there but it still is referenced by our niagara actor and that way you can have complete control over the lighting for your niagara actor without affecting the lighting in your scene that's kind of a workaround that i found for this you can also modify the other light source so you could make another light source if you wanted to add some fill or something like that to this niagara actor that's basically all the control that you have over the lighting of niagara actors to my knowledge at least in terms of the fluid simulations that's pretty much what you have access to in terms of the lighting so hopefully that will come in the future but if i had to guess that's probably because you know it's rendering this fluid simulation in real time and if you had real-time interactive lighting with all the elements in your scene that had to be calculated on our niagara actor that would be pretty difficult i'm sure for any computer to render so i'm going to go into my directional light here and i'm just going to reduce the intensity of this so if i bring this down now you can see we're affecting that and you know something like that is going to look pretty good for us that's uh that's how you can modify the lighting of your niagara actor and if we play through this now you can see we have our nice interactive smoke here we have our ship flying through and we have some pretty realistic lighting on our niagara actor so that's about it for this video guys if you are interested in learning how to build this scene uh you see here from the ground up from scratch make sure you go over to boundlessdashresource.com and check out that course i'll put the link in the description i'm also offering a bundle which includes the original unreal engine for filmmakers advanced course and this new course at a huge discount i think the total is like 70 or 100 discount total so make sure you guys go over and check that out as well subscribe and also comment any new videos or courses that you guys would like to see so i just kind of wanted to introduce you guys to the world of niagara fluid simulations obviously there's a lot more to go into on this but i just want to kind of introduce this to you and you know get this in your head so you can start playing with it so thanks for watching guys and have a good one

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 10,974

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal, ue5, ue4, ue, cinematic, cinematics, game, game engine, gaming, level design, fluid simulation, fumefx, how to, tutorial, niagara, niagara tutorial, vfx, visual effects, explosion, car explosion, after effects, adobe after effects, lighting, cinematic lighting, unreal engine for filmmakers, film, filmmaking, filmmaker, post production, sci fi, space ship, post apocalyptic

Id: 5zJktaYwK-I

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022