Volumetric Cloud Secrets [Unreal Engine 4 & 5] Works in UE5!

hey everyone it's great to have you back the topic of today's video is going to concern how to art direct your volumetric cloud now anyone who's ever used volumetric clouds out of under a 4.26 knows that you know they're kind of limited in what you can do there's not much documentation on how to set these up to have a bit more control but fortunately chris murphy over at twitter kind of put me on the right track and made me aware that having full control over the placement of your clouds is even a thing so i gotta get credit where credit is due thank you so much chris you're the best now with that being said i'm going to take this to the next level and show you how you can set up your scene correctly and have full control over the art direction of your clouds no not not you the creepy clown behind you and so why wait let's go okay so before we get started there's two things we need to do here so the first of which is going to the settings tab up top click on this and make sure to click on the plugins window open up the plugins and here we'll search for volume metrics make sure that the volumetric plug-in is enabled if it's not there you're not going to be able to play the volumetric clouds so make sure that's enabled restart the engine and we're ready to go and before we get started there's still one last thing we need to do and that is paying attention to right here so notice in my content browser here i've got just my content folder there is still one thing we need to enable to access all the settings that we need for this tutorial and you'll notice at the bottom right here we've got view options we're going to click on this and make sure that show engine content is selected and now notice on the left hand side here we've got a whole crapload of other folders you're going to see why we need to enable this real soon so hang tight now we're ready to get started and have a little bit of fun with our clouds so the first thing we want to do is we're going to create a volumetric cloud system so you click on visual effects here volumetric clouds we're gonna click on this bring them in and you'll notice right away like okay cool we've got clouds but by default they don't look very good right yes in the details panel here there's a few settings we can tweak but you know ultimately you don't have that much control over the art direction of your clouds now with that being said we can edit the material that is in the volumetric clouds right here and you know we can play around with these settings like this but we don't really have control over you know the position of the clouds and that is what this tutorial is about so i'm going to close this and let's get to the juicy parts of this tutorial so with our new engine content folders here let's scroll all the way down to v where it says volumetrics content we're going to click on this folder and we're going to click on the tools folder right here cloud compositing blueprints and we have two blueprints right here one called bp cloud mask object and the other one called bp cloud mask generator i'm going to collect both of these and i'm going to drag these into the scene so you'll see one of the actors the cloud mask object is freakishly huge it is massive i'm gonna move this guy away way way way over here now you'll notice nothing really happened what's happening right what do we want to do here so the next step involves changing the material that's on the volumetric clouds actor so we're going to select a volumetric cloud vector here and in the volumetric content we're going to go to content sky materials and you'll see we have a whole bunch of new materials here a whole lot so for the sake of this tutorial i'm going to use volumetric cloud 03 profiles underscore billowy drag this into the material slot of our volumetric cloud actor and now cool we lost our clouds what's next so what we're going to do here we're going to select this um bp cloud mask object here and we're going to scale it up by a lot okay so i'm going to scale this bad boy up to like you know 24 25 or something and move him way further away but now notice how the position of our bp cloud mask object it has gives us full control over the position of the clouds so let me get a bird's eye view here so you can get a better idea of what's happening okay so now now we're way high up in the sky we can see that hey our cloud is moving around if i duplicate this i can have as many classes i want now obviously the shape of this cloud is garbage it looks like a hot steaming pile of crap how do we fix this so we're going to select the first one here that i created in the details panel i'm going to go ahead and you'll notice that there's noise settings i'm going to also click the show debug button right here and you'll notice we've got a uh kind of a red marker showing up around where our actor is right so this debug plane here is going to show us what the shape of our cloud is going to be like okay so in the noise settings i'm going to increase the noise intensity by one and now you'll notice hey something the shape of change totally and now we're getting a more interesting shape right now see how this looks just way way way better i'm going to do the same for the other two here set this noise intensity to 1 and now we're getting some more interesting shapes so right now just like that in just a few steps we have some much more interesting clouds already i'm going to break change the tiling or the seed rather right here and let's go back to the ground level and see how this looks so now i'm gonna uncheck the uh show debug and now we have full control over the very position of all our clouds in our scene now let's say for example you know it's cool that we can play the cloud but we still want to have a bit more control over the look of d cloud we want to push it even further so there's two things you can do we can go back to our volumetric cloud actor here and play around with the the height of our clouds you know the bottom layer the the height of them how tall the clouds are like this um you can chew there's no right or wrong setting here you can do whatever you think looks best but what we're going to do here is we're going to select the volumetric cloud actor again and edit this material okay so again like i showed you earlier we can kind of choose like the density of this material we can affect shade the detail of it how much detail there is there's a whole plethora of different settings again there's no right or wrong answer you're going to have to be the judge and just choose what you think looks best okay now just keep in mind the cloud mask object blueprint here decides that this directly affects how your clouds look right so i'm scaling these up or down moving around this has a huge tremendous impact on the look of your scene so you'll notice there's a whole bunch more materials here let's go ahead and see the name of some of them you'll notice that what some of them are called for example profiles underscore paint clouds okay so any of the materials that have underscore paint clouds in the material name they're not going to work by default you're going to need to tweak the master material for this to work with the cloud mask objects okay and the reason for that is because these paint cloud materials are made for you know another type of cloud painting which is outside the scope of this tutorial so let's see what happens if i you know drag this paint cloud material onto our volumetric cloud material okay i gotta drag drag and drop this here and okay our claws look different but you'll notice if i move the cloud mask object around we're not affecting the look of our sky anymore it doesn't have any effect on the position of our cloud we've lost that ability how do we fix this i'm going to show you how to change this material so that this works with the cloud mask object okay so what we're going to do you can feel free to duplicate this material so that you don't overwrite the original i'm just going to show you guys what you need to change in order to get the cloud mask objects to work with these materials so i'm going to open up this master material here and you'll notice that it is a cluster it is such a mess of spaghetti noodles but don't worry there's only one thing we need to change and let's go here you'll see there's a texture object right here called t underscore cloud mask storm okay right up here zoom in right here this is the texture we need to change you're going to find that in volumetric content we're going to go to tools cloud compositing render targets and why is that because what these blueprints are doing the cloud mask blueprint is that they're creating a render target basically this is what drives the position of the cloud so you'll see right here we've got rt underscore cloud mask underscore 0 1 let's drag and drop this in here we're going to replace that texture and hit save in the master material i'm going to close this and now finally now we can move our clouds around now you'll notice they kind of look pretty bad don't worry we can tweak this there's lots that we can change again so i'm going to open up that material again by going to my volumetric cloud but i'm going to make a material instance of the paint clouds so that we just changed right so right click create material instance and drag the material instance into our volumetric cloud material i'm going to open up this instance so we have a much simpler you know menu to work with and now i'm going to tweet the bias bottom noise again guys there's no right or wrong answer there's no right or wrong settings to use it all depends on what you want in your scene okay i just want to show you guys how we can tweak these materials how we can affect the look of our clouds um so you know don't bother with trying to get the exact settings here because they're kind of irrelevant you're you're gonna have to go around and play with this to get the look that you want now we have full control over the position of our clouds again and you'll notice they look they look pretty different and i think these look pretty cool so again if you i'm noticing that they feel a little bit too tall too stretched uh vertically so what i'm going to do is i'm going to change the layer height and kind of bringing it down to a more reasonable level and in our cloud mask object i'm going to play around with the noise seed again changing noise tiling something like that and just like that we're trying to get a bit more control over the look of our scene i gotta duplicate this and maybe even scale this guy even way bigger and you'll notice that just like that it is easier than ever to really art direct your clouds or your skies the way that you want them to look i hope this is making a little bit of sense i know it's a lot of information to take in but i'm going to delete all this and redo it from scratch just so you guys can get a just a quick recap of what you need to do so i'm going to select everything here and delete that and delete my volumetric clouds done start from scratch one more time so we're going to add another volumetric clouds here and again we need to go back and place our new blueprints which is going to be in volumetric content if you don't have the this folder here don't forget to go enable show engine content and then we're going to go to the tools cloud compositing blueprints cloudmask object cloud map generator cloudbox object i'm going to move this guy way head the heck back and the last thing we need to do now i set the scale like 25 or something and now we just need to change the material on our volumetric cloud actor so i'm going to go find that in volumetric content content sky materials and i'm going to use profiles billowy drag this here and just like that now we're starting to get something a bit more interesting it's really as simple as that it works out of the box there's not that much to change there's no master materials or complex materials to set up this works pretty darn well out of the box you can get the very stylized looks too and again let's go into bird's eye view just get a better look at what we're doing here something like that and i'm going to change of course the noise intensity of my cloud mask object to something one to break this up even further same with this thing head to one break it up further and now now we have better even better control over the look of our material now i don't again i don't like how tall these are so i'm going to go into volumetric cloud and change the layer height to kind of bring them down to a more reasonable level and we're starting to get some pretty nice looking clouds here so i hope this kind of makes sense i know it's like i said i know it's a lot to take in but now getting the exact look that you want is easier than ever um having the ability to position clouds the way you want makes such a big impact and when you're really trying to get a shot to look really good you got your camera all set up you just want the cloud to look perfect this is the way to do it now just one last bonus tip for you guys in the event that you want to delete your clouds what you need to do is select your cloud mask objects delete them but you'll see hey my clouds are still there how do i get rid of them you just need to go to your cloud map generator in your outliner right here and you'll see right here where it says render clouds and by clicking that it's going to update your render targets and all the clouds that you deleted will be gone it's really as simple as that and that concludes yet another video thank you so much for watching guys again if you have any questions or something's not working leave a comment down below and i'll try to get back to you if possible i can't make any promises but don't take it personally if i don't it's not because i'm ignoring you i promise so as always guys don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys next week

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 68,276

Keywords: UE4, Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Cinematics, 4.26, UE4 4.26, UE5, Realtime, realtime rendering, rendering, CGI, 3D, 3D Artist, volumetric clouds, volumetrics, blueprints, unreal engine 5, ue5, clouds ue5, clouds unreal engine 5

Id: yolGEIrhu0s

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021