VDBs Look INCREDIBLE In Unreal Engine

if you've ever wanted better looking fog smoke or explosions in your Unreal Engine project then you might need VDB now VDB is a file more widely associated with film and TV and you can tell because they look really good I'm going to show you right now how you can use them in Unreal Engine and put them through their Paces I downloaded a whole load of these vdps and at the end of the video I'm going to be showing you so many really tasty renders so stay tuned for that now because they don't work natively and unreal we need to grab a third-party plugin developed by Theobald Lambert I've linked to it in the description so you can go there now and follow along as I do the installation the link will take you to this GitHub page and by the way if you have any trouble with the installation or the plugin itself dollars to Donuts the answer is on this page because it is packed with information but for the moment we're only really interested in one thing and that's on the right hand side where it says releases just click on the link for that amazingly this has been updated as of recording two weeks ago for 5.2 that's so quick so if you're working in 5.2 you can actually do this in that new engine version my scene is in 5.1.1 so I'm going to download this version 0.6.6 once you click on the engine version you want to use just scroll down and download sparse volumetrics zip I'm just going to extract that immediately here and once that's extracted we then take that folder and copy it over into the engine plugins folder program files epic games 5.1 for me just choose the engine version that you're using engine plugins and simply drag sparse volumetrics into there let's launch the engine so I'm loading my project LED wall crash site which is exciting because we've been building this specifically to take to a huge virtual Production Studio in Scotland so subscribe to the channel if you want to see us take it in real engine scene and put it on a massive LED wall there's my crashed ship in the woods what we need to do is we need to go to settings plugins I'm going to find sparse volumetrics there it is simply enable the plugin click yes and restart so now we need to get some vdbs and I'm going to get them from VFX Hut because they have partnered with me for this episode they've provided me with free access to their quite extensive library of assets on their site there are photo scans surface imperfections lens dirt loads of materials but most importantly vdbs and there are a ton so there's a Hollywood explosion 5 and right so there's two Hollywood explosion fives but one of them is hq2 and one is medium quality industrial chimney smoke I'm a big fan of actually thrusters are cool we like thrusters now if you like the look of the assets on VFX you can get 20 off with the curse CG discount code that's just below so the vdbs I've just downloaded have come down as zip files which I've just unzipped onto my D drive and now in unreal we should now be able to just import them with the plugin active create a new folder and then import a VDB sequence you don't need to select all the folders from your zip file you just need to select the first one you'll get multiple VDB files out of one ZIP but they are essentially just frames in a sequence so now that we've selected the first one in our VDB import options you'll see we've got temperature density and emission they're all coming in and we're going to select a quantization type which is a compression amount because if you have no compression and you want to see things play back in real time you may have trouble so we're going to select eight for that and we're also importing it as a sequence the first frame zero last frame 319. import and it's imported so let's get this explosion into our scene now the plugin has some special actors depending on whether you're using Lumen or path racing so let's go to the add menu if you go to all classes and type in VDB and you'll see that there are a few options here one of them is material actor and principled actor material actors are used with Lumen principled are for path tracing now I'm going to be using Lumen for this scene let's click the material actor and shows up in our outliner and then all we need to do is link up the density and temperature in the details panel so I'm just going to drag them over from the content browser there's the density and there's the temperature but where's the VDB well of course it is an animated explosion and we're at frame Zero by default so we need to create a level sequence first add level sequence and I'm going to call this VDB underscore sequence so now just drag the VDB material actor into your sequencer and track VDB sequence so now when we play through it should just show up there it is now of course there is a bit of work ahead of us to make this look good first thing to note is that this is a very very small VDB at the moment it's uh it's incredibly small we don't want our nuclear size explosion to be miniature so let's select the material actor and quite simply scale that up I'm going to set a factor of 10 for that we're just going to drag it in the viewport into position okay so I've popped my camera down at a place where I think we're going to be able to see the whole explosion let's go through some settings to try and make this look like it's part of the environment because it quite clearly doesn't right now I do want improved Skylight sampling which is slow it's marked as slow it's already slow we also can set the density so I want to set the density a bit higher something like 100 ah now with the density set you can start to see some of those clouds there why don't we push the density even higher perhaps to 200 according to the documentation on GitHub the most important settings initially for quality would be your density and the local step size which is currently set to four so I'm going to set that to one and that's definitely helped we don't need the settings cranked up like this at this stage when we're still just messing with the look of this so I'm going to set those back for the moment so I like the shape of this thing but of course it just doesn't look like it's part of the environment it's white washed out what's going on there's a limitation with some of these vdbs they only accept the first directional light that you add to your scene and the Skylight so my VDB is of course taking on light from a directional light and Skylight it's taking on quite a lot of light and that's why it's so bright but it should be a lot darker because it's in a canyon in the woods and that's the problem it's not receiving Shadows they don't receive Shadows from anything so unfortunately we need to do a few things to tweak that otherwise it's going to look very odd so the Albedo is set to one which is high in any instance I'm going to set that really low to 0.1 and the other thing that's going on is the temperature is set far too high what I want from this explosion is oranges I don't want it to be crazy blue so I'm going to actually set the black body temperature to one so that's dropped right down which is good and of course we need to now adjust the intensity of the black body and I'm going to set that to about 10. starting to see some Flames around the base if I take the density down what we're going to do is probably see some of those flames if I set it to 50 there you go so you can see early on we're getting some of those big hot orangey flames and then it just dissipates which is lovely the smoke is probably still too bright actually because what we're looking at is the Shadow level in the woods and this smoke is just quite a bit uh well lighter gray so let's set the Albedo lower even more to 0.05 and that is definitely better and you can see this is a hacky work around because it's not real Shadows we're just trying to match the environment light correctly so that it looks like it knits together so now that we've done that I think I want to put the density a little bit higher to about 100 and I'm going to set the black body intensity a bit higher as well because I want it to be really hot it doesn't feel hot it seems kind of a bit tepid 150 maybe for the intensity boom okay I like that now so it's worth mentioning as well that this plugin is under development and you can see from Theobald Lambert's Twitter that there are some amazing developments happening for instance he's able to get some of these volumetric effects working some of them are reacting now to point lights but only on his local version not this pre-built plug-in as far as I understand people are just waiting for epic to approve the changes so fingers crossed that happens because some of the changes that I'm seeing some of the videos that are being posted are incredible I am going to be keeping my ear to the ground to see when we actually have this new plug-in version available to us now as you know I've been downloading quite a few vdbs from the FX Hut and testing them out within this scene so I've got some really tasty renders to show you right now here they are thank you [Music] foreign [Music] Lambert incredible work thanks for joining me I really hope this was useful if you've got any questions at all just pop them in the comments I'm always active in the comments and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 27,818

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 ultra realistic, unreal engine 5.1, unreal engine 5 video, unreal engine tutorial, vdb unreal engine 5, vdb plugin, thibault lambert, add vdbs to unreal, explosion in unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 vdb, unreal eidos vdb, vdb cloud unreal, unreal engine, ue4, unreal engine explosion tutorial, UE5, unreal engine cinematic, unreal engine cinematic animation, unreal engine cinematic scene

Id: M5TJmN3jI1U

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023