Best UE5 Beginners Course: Create Your First Project

1. 00 - Course Trailer: Course will take you through everything you need to know to get started with the basics of the unreal engine and experience just a small part of what it has to offer. As Epic continues to grow unreal beyond being just a game engine and making it a multi media tool for animations, automotive and architecture visualization, and, of course, virtual production. There's never been a better time to get started learning this powerful tool set. Be taking you step by step through the process of learning the core features of the Nerl engine with a focus on the best practices and improving your workflows. Together, we'll create this stunning cave environment, explore lighting and atmosphere, create our own materials, implement our own blueprint code, and have these events triggered in our final cinematic animation. My name is Rob, and I have over a decade of experience creating desktop and mobile games, virtual reality, augmented reality, and training experiences in a range of different industries. I'm an authorized instructor, and I've been creating educational content online for years for some of the largest providers, including pleural site, and even working with Epic on their official Unreal learning portal. By using a hands on process to get you creating early and completing challenges to cement what you're learning, I look forward to taking you through the process and getting you comfortable working with the Unreal engine. 2. 01 - About the Class and Projects: Hey, and welcome to this class overview. I just wanted to go through some of the details of what you'll be learning as we go through this class, some of the useful things to keep in mind as you go, and also where you can share the results of the project that you'll be making as we go through. So this class will be focused around creating this final project, which, for myself, was this stunning cave scene stuck in the middle of an ocean somewhere, so we had plenty of opportunity to play around with different features and plug ins in the unreal engine from the terrain, the foliage system, and even the newly added water plug in. Now, one I will suggest as you go through the class yourself, feel free, you are welcome to make a similar kind of scene to what I have here, the cave system. I'll be showing you all of the places that you can easily access assets just like this from the Quixel Mega bridge, a completely free built in plug in with the Unreal engine. But what I would suggest is if you wanted to get even more creative flow on the go. What I tried to teach you is more of a concept and structure to your workflow so that you can take a similar set of assets or completely unique ideally using those concepts that you're being taught and then adding that into your own levels. So essentially, your project could be absolutely anything from a desert scene, and urban sprawl, anything like that. So that would be the first thing that I mentioned is do feel free to remake this if this is easier for you, and you just wanted to get to grips with the Unreal engine and go through step by step as I do. But if you did want to take a side step somewhere and change the environment, the setting, and things like that, then definitely feel free to make your project your own. To get to this stage of the project, this class will be teaching everything from the basics of the Unreal editor, so you know exactly what to press, what's available, and how to use the Unreal engine and the features that it has to provide. We'll take a look at structuring your projects, creating and managing new projects, adding and obtaining assets to various projects and keeping them tidy by using the migration tools and separating out the things that we just want to use, working with the foliage systems, the terrain, creating our own custom materials, particle effects, sound will all be added into this as well, along with some blueprint functionality so that we can have an interactive scene at the end, and you can add your own logic to allow people to jump in and play the experience that you're creating. All of this will be packaged into this one cool takeaway project that you can then re use these features on future projects and ideas that you have. When it comes to sharing your project One thing that you will find with the Unreal engine is that the file sizes do get fairly big. So we won't be sharing the Unreal engine projects around. These will be several gigabytes at least in size when you're working with the Quicksall assets. What we can do, though, is we can take some really cool screenshots. Whichever system you're working on will have a screenshot functionality built in. Just go into your tool set. If you search for things like snipping tool or screenshot, you'll find an option that you can use on your desktop to take a screen grab of the image that you have here. So this will be one way to share things is take a really nice looking screenshot. Share that down below on Skillshare and get some discussions going around that. You could also record something so you can download something like OBS completely free of charge and take a quick video recording of a little bit of kind of a pan through of your level or something, if you want to show up a little bit more of the information and a few tips for you. When you are inside of the unreal engine, you may want to come back here a little bit later as a recap when you're more familiar with the engine. But if you press into the viewport here, and all of this will become more familiar and make sense as you go through this class. But inside of what is called the viewport, we'll press F 11. This will put you in full screen. This immediately gives you a really nice big setting for the capture that you may want to take. And then I'll click into the background here so we don't have anything selected. And then I'm going to press G on the keyboard, so G for golf. And then this will just get rid of what are called the widgets. So now we don't have anything. You can see these little images here, which are telling us where different assets are in the world, so we can hide those. And now if I go into screenshot mode, I can just take a nice big picture of the whole thing. I may need to go into a video editing software to get rid of this top panel up here, but this will give you a nice simple way to share your projects, and when you've got something set dressed and looking really nice like this, we can easily come in and take some nice screenshots of things like this just with a simple snipping tool. Well, like I said, we can even use this snipping tool here, so just another example, we'll say to take a new screenshot, and this will give us the same option here. We can just cut this and we can even see the result that we get then, what our final screenshot would look like. So this would be an ideal way to begin sharing your project work, and again, dropping this in the discussion, letting people give you some feedback, give other people feedback as well, and maybe share some tips and tricks as you go through, because that's another really nice way to reinforce the things that you've been learning is not just to ask the questions, but try and answer other questions of things that you may have seen or tricks that you've picked up along the way. The final thing is if you wanted to share this on your social medias, be sure to act me at the link on the screen here and use the hashtag provided, and we can get a nice thread of all of the project work being shared and put out there. I'll provide these hash tags and links in the description below, so you can easily copy and paste these onto your social media platforms and just share those along with some videos or the screenshots that you've been taking. So just a quick recap really for a quick breakdown of the way that I think you'll make the most of this class. Follow the step by step to get familiar with the unrelenting and the features provided throughout the class as we go, but do try to make the project your own. Add different features, extend past what I've shown, or make something completely new. This is where the learning and that knowledge will really be a foundation which you can build up. And then of course, the final thing, be sure to share the project work as you go. And don't just wait until the end. If you're gray boxing or just mapping things out, before you even get to the final project, begin sharing your projects then as well, just so that we can see the progress as you go through. Again, if you're doing this early, people can provide feedback. You can give that feedback to other people, and you can improve your project before you get to that final shot. You don't need to be precious about the projects that you're working on and only release the images and footage when it's fully complete. If you share and provide some progress shots along the way. People are normally going to be quite happy to give you some feedback or suggestions on how to improve the lighting or the composition and things like that. And the most important thing. Have fun. It's a really, really big system to get used to. There's a huge amount of frameworks and features provided in the unreal engine. But if you're having fun with it as you go, all of this will quickly begin making sense, and you can make something really cool. 3. 02 - Epic Launcher Download: Before we can jump into using the Unreal engine, we first need to download something called the Epic Launcher. This is our entry point and management software for our different versions of the Unreal engine that we can begin installing to our local system, as well as some of the assets, packages, and examples that we can learn from and work with to get our ideal project started. Started, we have a number of different ways that we can access or obtain the Epic launcher. I'm just going to run through the generic approach as this has been changing somewhat frequently over the years. The easiest way, of course, is to use your search engine of choice and simply look for the download of the Epic launcher. The top results will normally take you to the correct place. At the moment, we can find this on the download the Epic launcher site, so it's store Epic Games. Again, this is one of those things which has changed in the somewhat recent months. But what we're looking for is somewhere that we can access here the download to the Epic Games launcher. We click on this. We should be given an option to save or open this somewhere. So save or just directly open that to begin the installation process. Follow the simple steps to install the Epic launcher. And if you haven't already make sure that you sign up for an Epic account, they are completely free, but they will be required to sign in to the software to get started. The other option is to go to the official un ng in.com site, and again, we can see at the top right hand side. We have another place that we can access the download option to find the Epic launcher. We'll get some options here to get the launcher. Follow the installation process if you needed help with this, but it is very, very simple, and we can just install this to our system. When you're getting started, this is another thing which is currently in the midst of changing in how the licensing works, it used to be that there was a flat percentage if you're making over a certain quarterly earnings with your nngin projects. This is about to change where there's going to be a split between whether it is a game project, in which case, that remains with the standard license where you have that earning limit before you begin sharing a 5% royalty fee with Epic. We now have a custom license for non game developers. But again, you can see here that even if you are working in a non game development environment, for educators, students, hobbyists. We can still use the standard license and access the features completely free of charge. It's just one of those things where I don't want to give a blanket statement here because they have been making changes. So it will be worth just to come in check here. And if you ever start making money, and you're worried about what you may owe Epic or need to pay towards a subscription, depending on your use cases with the unreal engine, then just be sure to come back into their official documentation and their sites to keep up to date with any changes that they're making. After you've installed the Epic launcher though, you should be greeted with something that looks a little bit like this. Again, the layout, depending on when you're watching this, can change from version updates, but the general layout will be the same here. You'll notice that you need to sign in, if you haven't ready, you should be greeted immediately with a request to sign into your account. When you have that done, we're ready to go with the next section where we'll be looking at the different parts of the Epic launcher and what we have available to use. 4. 03 - Epic Launcher Overview: Now take a quick look at the different elements provided within the Epic launcher. Generally, as developers, we'll only be using a couple of these more frequently, but it's useful to understand the general layout of what we have. Some of this can be confusing as well. For example, when it comes to the confusing points, on the left hand side, I just wanted to bring the attention over here. Have our store, library and the Unreal engine. Now, by default, you're hopefully selected on the Unreal engine. Again, this is the more relevant part to developers. You may have a different layout though if you were to start on the store or the library section. Now, the epic launcher is a collection of pretty much everything unreal related, and that includes the gaming section of what is provided by Epic unreal or unreal developers. The store that we can see here, this is where you'd be finding things like Fortnight, Rocket League, many other games which have been released through the Epic launcher here. So if you did have a game collection, this is where you'd be able to either find or buy further games. Games that you already own will be stored in your library, and this is one of the first confusing points here because if we then click down to the unrelen tab, this brings us over to the development section, and you can see there's another library here. Now, these two, the library at the top here, and the library on the left hand side here are not the same. So the first two tabs, these are your store, so the games and content that you've purchased through the Epic store. Then everything under the Unreal engine tab down here, the library included are separate to the development specific things to your unreal engine that you will be working on to make content. So one thing just to keep in mind, here, I just wanted to mention really that if your view does look very different, just make sure that you've selected the unreal engine tab on the left hand side at the bottom, which is more relevant for us developers. Then a very brief overview of what is provided within the Epic launcher for developers. The first tab you're normally greeted with is our news tab here. This is great for finding any updates or features, new releases that might be coming out. Any free packs as Epic quite often provide sample projects. For example, we've recently had something called crop out provided. This was a really nice cross platform example of how to set up a project, to deploy to mobile, desktop, console, and so on. So it can definitely be worth keeping up to date and just dropping in here every now and again to see what's been provided again. More featured free under ending content provided every month and we can get information of that just here as well. One tab across, we have our samples page, very similar to what I was just mentioning. All of this is completely free to use. You can download any of these packages. Most of these are projects, again, with working examples so you can have a look through here if there's anything that you wanted to learn more on, for example, With virtual production, we will have a broadcast sample, so we can see exactly how the project would be set up to work with big LED screens. All of the plug ins that would be available, ideal map and level setups, and so on. If you wanted to know more about games, you have different game projects, your content examples is a really good place here to find individual almost working examples acting as documentation, where in the content examples, each feature set, whether that be physics, particles, some blueprint and code, all have their own individual maps. So you can open the map specific to what you wanted to learn about and kind of reverse engineer the content they provide. There's, much more you can go through again. More with cameras, with the new introduction of unreal covering things like virtual production. The automotive features, CVs, and things like that are all included. You can get some really good examples through the sample section. And just to highlight again that all of this is completely free to use. Next up, we have the marketplace. This is one where you may want to check in monthly. The first week of every month, they release a free for the month pack, usually five different packs of different types of assets that you can add to your account for free and keep forever. Will be useful things like we have here a modular medieval town. These are all of the assets that you can see that went into creating this town here. Really good if you wanted to start building up a collection of tools to use for your current or future projects. Beyond that, we can come into the brows option at the top, and this is just where we will look for either feature set, whether that be code features or visual features like asset packs to add to your project. If there's something that you can't do yourself, and needed to buy something like your visual assets, your particle effects, sound effects, code, all of that can be found just here. You can filter by the different types of things that you're looking for. So as I mentioned, code would be things like blueprints, your code plug ins. You can find your two D or three D assets. Props for levels will be one that people will use quite often. So another thing which is worth checking in on from time to time to see what is available here. What you can potentially be making use of. There will be some coverage in the upcoming topics on exactly how we can use the different types of assets and plug ins provided through the marketplace because some of them work in slightly different ways. But this is just a brief overview of what you can find here and why this is going to be useful. And then the final thing that we'll be looking at is our library tab up here, so going over to the library section. This is where we'll be managing all of our unrelenting versions, as well as any projects that you might have currently in progress, and the vault down here, so this section under the vault section is where you can find all of the different assets and plug ins that you've added to your account. I currently have this filtered to show nothing, but I could show just the blueprint assets that I have access to. These are all of the things that I've either purchased or that we're included in the monthly free content at some point that are now bound to my account. Again, if I toggle on everything, this will be everything including the visual assets, the sound, and so on. This will be the core area where we manage most of the important things to our development, such as the projects that we want to work on the engine versions that we're using and the assets that we have available to us. Then we have one final option that you can see at the top here, the twin Motion. We won't be going too much in stepth than this. This requires another piece of software to be installed, so third party software called twin motion, and this allows you to work, as it says here with Bim or CAD models, or things like architectural visualization. So those heavier, higher quality models and get real time back and forth between the Unreal engine and twin motion. A little bit too specific for what we're going to be looking. Potentially useful to know about if that kind of workflow is something that you may be interested in. 5. 04 - Engine Versions: You haven't used the unreal engine before. One of the first things you'll need to do is install a version of the Unreal engine. You can see at the top here. Under the engine versions, I have several different versions, I've got 4.27 all the way up to 5.4 preview. This is just because I work with different clients and do a range of different work where I've needed to keep different projects. Hopefully, you'll often have fewer versions of the unreal engine installed. As we can see here, they do take up a fairly hefty size on your system. If you've been playing around between videos and you're not seeing the same layout anymore and you've forgotten how to get here. Just remember, we need to make sure that we are clicked on the left hand side on the Unreal engine tab, and then specifically the library tab at the top of the page there. You won't see this tab if you're in the library or the store section on the left. If you don't have any engine versions installed at all, the first thing we need to do is we have this small plus button here. We can click to add a new engine version. Will default to the latest version that you don't have installed. So depending on when you're watching this, you may need to watch out that you don't have something called a preview version. We always try to use the most recent stable version of the unrelenum. So at the time of recording, that would be 5.3 that we could see here would be the ideal version to work with as the 5.4 version is in preview, meaning that there's still adding and tweaking features, and some of that could be broken. All you need to do is select from the drop down here so we can go all of the way back to the early version of 4.0. But again, ideally, we're going to work with the most recent stable version. You find the version that you want to work with, we just need to click the Install button here. And before going ahead and choosing the location that we want to store this, I'm just going to show you a very quick tip on a way that we can save some space on the system by removing features that you may not need installed. If we select the options button just here, we have a few things which can be quite useful, especially when you're getting started, just to provide some starting points for your new projects. So I would recommend keeping the templates and feature packs installed. These will be things like the game templates, the first person or third person templates, so we have some mechanics and features to work with straightaway. Similar things are provided for the ACFs, automotive, and VP projects as well. These templates and feature packs can be very useful. Starter content is one that I never used. These have some outdated materials, textures, particles, and sound effects. Quite often, these aren't used. My personal preference is to remove this, but as you're getting started, you may want to keep this ticked just so you can get that experience of at least what is provided for you. If you're intending to work with just blueprint to begin with, we can keep the engine source and the editor symbols for debugging unticked. We won't need this until you go a little bit more heavily into the C plus plus side of things. And then scrolling down. These are the ones which can really help save some space here. Depending on the projects that you have in mind to work with, you can safely untick these and add them again later if your plans for the project change. So for example, I know that I never work on any mobile devices. So we can untick the Android and IOS or IOS to save that sort of ten, 11 gigabytes there. I've also never deployed to Linux, so I can save another 10 gigabytes by removing the Linux option as well. As I mentioned, if you ever do want to come back and add these back in, we can add these at a later date. We can see that we've cut down the required size now by quite a lot. If we hit apply and then press install here, that will be the final steps and you'll have the unreal engine installing in the background. I'd recommend going ahead and doing that now. It can take a while, and you can continue with some of the upcoming topics whilst that is processing in the background. In hit cancel as I don't need that version of the early 5.0 installed, I'm just going to remove this so that we don't have that lingering any longer. And just to very quickly demonstrate what I mean by being able to add in those options that we've currently disabled, if you do decide in the future that you need them back, as an example, I'll go to my 5.32 install here. We can drop this down, find the options setting, and we can see here what I currently have installed for this version of the engine. We'll just scroll down a little bit here, and we can see that I've uninstalled, as I've just mentioned, the Android, Apple, Linux, and TVO S. If I did decide that I needed to package something to the Android platform. Can simply come in here, tick this on, hit, apply, and that will install everything that's needed to work with Android into the Unreal engine. That's what I mean, it's very simple, and we can save space up front by not installing things that we potentially don't need, and we can come back and add those whenever. One final thing is if you're working between versions and you do end up with a bunch of different versions here, you can see we have the option to set the default. The one that I've been using the most at the moment because just most of my projects are in 5.21, we can see is highlighted here with this yellow ring. That means if I create any new project, we have the launch option up here, we can see that this will default launch to 5.21. We can drop this down and we can change the default to 5.3, for example. So now whenever I create a new project, it will use this version just here. But if you wanted to launch in a specific version, we can just click the launch button here, and this is how we can either create or find projects created with these different versions. And the final thing I wanted to mention very quickly is just below in the M project section, if you've worked on a number of projects on a local system, anything that you've worked on locally will appear down here. Had to filter this out just to show a project that I know is safe to demonstrate due to the standard NDA and confidentiality restrictions you get when working with some projects. I can't show some of the names of the things I'm working on. But this is where you would access projects that you've worked on in the past. You would just double click on this, and that will open the project for you to begin working with again. So this is what I meant a little bit earlier, that you'll find yourself working in this environment of the Epic launcher fairly often as a developer, as you can manage everything from your engine versions. You're currently in work projects, and the assets and plug ins and features that you have for the engine can all be found in this one section. 6. 05 - First Project: Now that we're familiar with the core features of the epic launcher, we can begin looking at creating our first project. As with many things inside of the Unreal engine ecosystem, there are a couple of ways that we can do this. So just very quickly make note at the top right hand side of the screen here, again, just to recap in the library section, specifically with the Unrel engine selected here. Top right hand side of the screen here holds our launch button. This will launch a version of the unreal engine in the default engine install that you've selected here. So we can drop this down and we can change this here. We can tell which version. If you have multiple versions, as you can see just here in the engine version section, the one with the yellow outline is the one that you've selected or that is defaulted to be your default engine version. Where possible, it will try to use this for any new projects that you create regardless of where you create them from. We can launch through the top right hand side, or we can launch through the engine version that you want to use here. I'll be using the most up to date stable version, which will be 5.3 at the moment. Just to mention that if you wanted to change your default, we can drop down here, we can set this to current, and now 5.21, you'll see is now the default engine version here. I'm just going to set that back to 5.3, and I'll just chooe to launch this through here. After a moment of processing, this will open a new window here, so this is our unreal project browser by default. I've just needed to make the same change again. I'm filtering to a project that I know that I can safely show off here. If you have more projects already created or in the future, when you've created a few projects, they will all be outlined here in a similar way that they were outlined in the Epic, to be honest, I'm not too sure where we have two different places to take a look at our projects, but if you wanted to load one, you can do it from here as well. Generally, though, the workflow will be that you manage your projects and open them through the Epic launcher, and this will just be a place that will actually use the other options just here to the left hand side to create our new projects that we want. Instead, what we want to use is on the left hand side here. We have a bunch of different categories holding different templates that we can use to have a starting point for any of our new projects. As I briefly mentioned in a previous topic, with the Unreal engine Branching Act to cover many more different industries now from games to film TV, architecture, automotive, and simulation. Different templates are being made for all of these different types of projects. So just to provide a very quick overview. As an example, if we go to games, the classic version of what the null engine would have been used for, we have different templates that we can start with, such as a first person template, third person, top down, and so on. These will come with the assets, some basic code effects, signs and things will be relevant to these projects just to get you started. You can also start from a completely blank project if you already know what you're going to be aiming for, and you don't need to use any of these. Similar way for virtual production, for an example, we have a virtual production template, as well as something showing off how to use end display and things like that. For architecture, we have some arc iz templates. Similar again from automotive showing how to use the new kind of fancy material laying that you can get for different types of reflection and car properties for the materials provided now. Then again, for simulation, we have things here. For virtual reality, handheld, the whole kind of X R situation going on. Example, I'm going to go to game just because it has a nice blank project that I'll be using. Generally, what I'll do is I will create most of my projects from a blank template. Simply because once we have that, if we wanted something like a third person template pack to be brought in later, we can very easily add this as in when that need arises. Starting with a blank project gives you a completely blank slate and you're in full control over the type of assets and the amount of data that your project is holding, just to stop your projects from getting bloated and having things in them that we may never use. So I'd recommend starting with a blank project now. I will show you later how to bring different templates into the project anyway. That's selected on the right hand side, we have a couple of options here. We'll keep this to Blueprint for the moment. If you wanted to get more into the C plus plus side of things, you can have a look at the C plus plus templates as well. They have the same templates here. It's just the way that the character, for example, in the third person project will be structured will be through the C plus plus code rather than the Blueprint code. You can make that change now. Working with C plus plus will require a bunch of extra setup for things like visual studio and other types of SDKs that you'll need to get ready. That may be something that you want to hold off from just for the time being. Go to stick with blueprint, we'll make this a blank project again. Then a couple of other options we have on the right hand side, we have our target platform, we can leave this as desktop. If for example, you know, you want to be deploying to the mobile platforms, we can set this to mobile. I'll just make some changes to the default rendering pipeline to make sure that everything is optimized to be a mobile project out of the box. But we can stick to keeping the higher quality settings here with desktop. Then in a similar way, we have our quality presets, and we can make this scalable, which will lower everything to a much more manageable quality preference. If you're targeting a less powerful piece of hardware, or if you're working on some older or less powerful hardware, then you may want to make this scalable. If you have a newer system, we can leave this at maximum. We just get slightly higher rendering settings, shadows, and so on. Then we have two options below that, we have the starter content, which I will leave unticked for now. As I mentioned. This has some fairly dated assets and using systems that aren't really covered anymore. So often not the kind of best packs to be working with, but we can easily add this later if needed, and then tracing, which is just the lighting option. We can take this on in the project if we wanted, but we'll be looking at things like lumin and Nunite instead. So we probably won't need the tracing to be enabled. Last two things before going. We just want to make sure that we have this in a location on your system, which is going to be accessible and that you'll remember. So for myself, this is going to be in my projects forward slash Unreal, and that will be perfectly fine. And then we want to give the project a name. So by default, this starts as my Project two. I'm just going to change this to be named boot camp. And with that done, we can hit Create. And this may take a few moments, but this will begin creating your project, setting up any shaders, and materials that are needed, and automatically launching the unreal editor for you. Okay, so that almost loaded immediately for me, depending on the engine version that you're working with, that may take more or less time, just because as of 5.3, Epic have included a kind of build what you use system. So it knows that when we launch the editor initially, it only really needs to account for the shaders that visual information related to this terrain piece here, so it built a few shaders and unloaded. In some of the older versions, unfortunately, I would precompile pretty much all of the shaders that it knew the project would hold, even if you're not opening it straight away, which does mean you may be stuck with a window showing you that you've got a few thousand shaders ready to build. You only need to do that usually once the first time you open it. And then in the future, anytime that you make any big changes to the project, you may need to do it again, but the good thing is that once you have that project made initially, you won't have to keep waiting every time you want to reopen the project. Just to say that that could take a little while, you're not frozen if that is taking a while to get that first project open. But once you have that done and you're greeted with something similar to this, that is the first step done. You've now potentially made your first project inside of the unrelenum. 7. 06 - Editor Basics: With our project loaded and open, ready to go. We're going to start taking a look around the key features, the core elements of the unrelenting editor. In future topics, I do have it outlined and planned that we're going to go through tweaking and updating some of the settings and project defaults. Once we're more familiar with the editor and what exactly we're changing. I didn't want to jump into that straightaway, just because we wouldn't even know what we're affecting without looking at the editor for a little while. That in mind though there are a couple of changes that I want to make now very quickly, just because the unreal engine notoriously is somewhat heavy when it comes to performance and specification requirements. I can already hear mine worrying in the background just to have a mostly empty level like this open. So we're going to make some very quick changes here, especially for those of you who may be on systems or hardware, not quite able to keep up. The first thing to be aware of is that when you open the project, even if you aren't doing anything, as we are right now, I just sat here with the editor open, it is trying to run everything happening in the background as a simulation. If we did have things like particle effects, for example, dust or rain that we may want to visualize, it would be trying to run that. For that reason, we're already having quite a big performance hit. We can very easily turn this off. In the left side of this big window here that we're going to, this is called the viewport. If we click into this little settings button here, we just want to turn off real time. This is what is trying to force this to simulate a kind a live update even when we're outside of play mode. It's going to turn that off and I can already hear that my PCs calmed down just a little bit to the side there. That's the first thing. And then to the right hand side of the screen, we have another settings option over here. This is our project and editor settings. If you do have any issues, if it's already quite stuttery, we can see at the top, I've got a frame rate indicator here. If yours is lagging or a little bit stuttery at the moment, then what you can do is we'll just go down to the engine scalability by default because we chose the maximum settings. It will have this set two Epic, which is trying to Keep everything looking as crisp and have the shadows as detailed as possible. Cinematic, we tend to use more for final renders. We often won't put this even in games. You won't often use the cinematic settings. But then if you do need to tone things down a lot, we can make this low medium or high, and you can see here that this will just default set everything for the texture quality, the shadow quality, everything which is going to have a big impact here. We can lower that immediately. Going to keep mine epic because it's actually fine on my system as it is. The main thing is just turning off the real time for me. But I just wanted to let you know that you do have options to change these. I wouldn't play around with them straight away. If your system is fine, changing this, and I will force the system potentially to do a complete recompile, because if you are making these changes, some of them can have big knock on effects to those shaders that I've mentioned, so it may need to recompile a few thousand shaders. So unless you absolutely need to, I would avoid using these right now. Just want to let you know that they are the options just before we start looking through the editor. With that mentioned and out of the way, hopefully everybody can now follow along comfortably with their system not trying to self destruct. We can now look at the core features of the editor that we're currently presented with. The unreal engine notoriously is somewhat cluttered. People do find the interface to be a little bit overwhelming when they first open this. There are a lot of different buttons, a lot of different sections. We'll just go through this step by step to get you comfortable with what we're looking at, and you'll find that it's actually much less intimidating than you might think at first glance. So the first and most obvious thing that we have here is our viewput. So this has our level currently being displayed, which at the moment is just made of a simple terrain. We can move around this, and we will get to the button layouts and things like that a little bit later. But at the moment, just know that this is where we would be building our game. We can come in here. We have live access to drag and drop things in and really start fleshing out our different levels, production set you might be working on, whatever the goal is, you'll have a viewput that you'll be working in, and this is where the core content that you'll be creating will kind of be managed and housed. Above this, we have our main tool bar. So everything up here is class as the main tool bar. The important things that we'll find here, we have a creation mode, so we can quickly add new objects into our viewports through here. For example, if we wanted a cube to start blocking things out, we can select to have a cube created, and we can start placing these objects in the world. And moving them around. On top of that, we also have things like our play and stop mode options here. So if we wanted to come in and play and simulate things, this will give us the option to come test the level, move around, and see exactly what the process would look like during run time. We have different options here that we can drop down regarding how these play, whether we want to play in the viewport that we're currently selected in. We can open up a new window if we wanted to see exactly what the resolution would look like in certain presets, so we can somewhat simulate a packaged game mode or deployment that you may be giving to a client, for example. Then on top of that, we have the option from here as well to package our projects to things like the Android platforms. We can do a windows build here. We'll have some cool options. If you have all of the Android studio and the setup included, we can connect this directly to a device and get this to debug and play through the device from options like this. Some of the other things you'll find in the main tool bar, we have our file options, so your standard creation of new levels, new objects, saving everything, and so on, can be done here. Of the project and editor preferences we'll see through the edit option, and other very similar things that you may come to expect if you're working with even two D software like Photoshop, your Adobe suites, and things like that, or other three D tools where you'll have your application and window specific tools and options available all up here as well. Obviously, we don't need to be aware of and understand all of these when we first getting started, just to let you know that these do exist. That's one of the things I think can make this much less daunting is just try and take things in as and when you start needing them, we can start looking at different parts of what the NRL engine provides for you. Next core thing we have to the right hand side is this box here called the outliner, so we can see we have something called the outliner. There's another tab just below this that we'll get to in a moment, but the outliner is this specific box just here. This is essentially a list of all of the objects in your current level. This allows you to select, hide, delete objects, and make these changes very quickly in real time. And everything is synced essentially from your viewport to the outliner. So what I mean by that is if I select a chunk of terrain just here, the landscape, That chunk of landscape has also been selected in the outliner. Obviously, vice versa, if I select a chunk of landscape here in the outliner. We can come and have a look in the viewpoint, and we can see that that's this section in the distance that I've just selected. So these two, you can work kind of hand in hand with each other. It can especially be very useful in bigger projects. When you have many more objects in this, you may not be able to select something which is included by a bunch of landscape or buildings or something, but you can find it in the outliner. We can set things up to tidy this up for us as well, so the landscape, for example, is all nested under the main landscape object. Then, likewise, we have folders or grouping for things specific to your lighting setup, the levels of detail, and so on. So just another quick example here. We have a directional light, which is responsible for all of the light in this world, which is this object just here, and we can select between these in the outliner, and you can see that the widgets are being changed here depending on what I have selected. Next up, we have the details panel just below the outliner is our details panel. If you're really paying attention there, you may have noticed as I'm switching between these different objects in the outliner, or even in the viewport, that information is being updated in the details panel as well. So this is just another element which kind of works in tandem with the other two. What we have in the viewport, just try and kind of bring this back into context here. In the viewport is a visualization. Of our entire world. All of the objects that are making up our world, level map, whatever you want to call it, are all here for us to work with in real time to quickly make changes and visual updates, and we can tweak things as an example, when I say live updates, we can change light here to completely change the settings of the light properties that we have in our world, and we do that through the viewpt. All of the objects which are in our viewpot, for quick and easy access, we can get these from our outliner. And then the details about the individual objects. So the properties that make up the objects that we're working with can be found in our details panel. And this contains things like information about, let's have look at our sun again. It contains information about where it is in the world. So the location, the entire transform, which is the location, the rotation, and the scale of this object. If I were to move this up in the world, and we can see here, the information, the details about the location is being increased or decreased as I move this through the world. Every different object that we work with will potentially have different properties. Things like our directional light here has information about the intensity of the brightness, and we can change all of that through the details panel here, the color of light that it's casting. And many other things like that. And of course, as you're switching through objects that you're selecting, either through the viewport or the outliner, the information that you're being presented in the details panel will change to reflect the object that you currently are interacting with. And the final core element of the editor that we'll be working with quite often is our content draw. So it's currently actually tucked away in hidden in the bottom left hand side of the screen. Can see here we have something called the content drawer. If we click this, this will pop open, and we can drag this up just here to make this larger or smaller. And this is where we will hold all of the content that we either import have provided through templates or bring into the project ourself. At the moment it's saying that this is empty because we haven't, at this point, created anything or imported anything to our project. Remember that I said, we'll start with a completely blank project. Have a folder just here showing the engine content. This is probably only switched on for me because of changes I've made in other projects. If you are seeing this, it's not something that we need to look at. It's basically a lot of different folders that we have here of all of the stuff that just comes pre packaged with the engine by default. So this always exists, but we don't really need to see it. Do have this shown and you want to get rid of it because it just takes up that extra bit of space and can kind of confuse things, especially when you're getting started. I'm just going to go over to the right hand side of the content drawer here to this settings option. And this is one thing I'll just take a very quick break away here. One thing to be aware of with Unreal engine. They do use the same term and sort of buttons, but it's quite often contextual. The settings button that we have up here is different to the settings button that we have just here. This one is contextual to our project and editor, the overall kind of layout and project that we have going, whereas this one is contextual to this window here, the content drawer that we're in. It can be very useful. Having everything being contextual is obviously going to be very convenient. I just think it can confuse new developers. So do be aware of that. But we'll drop this down. We'll drop down these settings. We're going to go to our show options here. And what we want to do is we want to untick the show engine content. So we just untick that. It keeps everything nice and clean and tidy. We can get rid of those things that we won't be using for now, and we can always turn this back on a little bit later if we do want to make use of the engine content. One thing that I will also mention is if you do have that enabled and you can see these, do not change or make any edits to the objects in here. Don't delete any of these. Don't make any changes because we can come into, for example, what is called a material instance here, and we can make changes to the properties of this. This engine content is shared between every project that you make in this version of Unreal. For me, this was 5.3, and this is going to be what the engine is using as the core properties for all projects made in that same version. So having access to this is very useful to take reference from things or we can make duplicates and copies of these, but we do not want to make any changes the actual content inside of the engine folder here, which is another reason I find it's quite nice just to keep this switched off for now. Just to wrap up the content drawer, this is where we'll be adding all of our content as we go through. As we start bringing in assets to build out our levels, as we start creating our blueprints, to house our code. This is where we'll be finding and storing all of this. One other thing which is really useful here is we have a shortcut to hide or show the content drawer, which is holding control and space. So I've just pressed it there and that will make it go away. And if I press it again, that will pop that up. So control and space will show or hide the content drawer. If you're familiar with the Unreal engine four, or if you're seeing content made with the Unreal engine four, you may be familiar with a view which looks more like this. The content drawer used to be docked, but it just takes up that extra bit of screen space, that real estate, which is otherwise useful for the viewport here. Some people who are more familiar with Unreal Engine four still prefer having this available, so that it's always here ready to work with. So there is that option. I just wanted to mention if you did want to dock that. If you just made that same change, we can just press the x button here and that will get rid of this. And then that just leaves us with the hiding and showing option here. So we've got the option just to do that a little bit more slowly. The option here to dock in layout, if you wanted that to be here permanently, if you decide otherwise, we can remove that, and then we can just toggle this with control in space. Is a useful shortcut to commit to memory early because you will be using that quite a lot. Every time you wanted to access something or create something new, you hit control space, you get to your content drawer and you provide a location or find the location of the object you're looking for. The final takeaway just to mention here is that everything is very customizable as well. So if you're not happy with the layout, if you come from a software package where maybe everything's similar, but inverted, For example, Unity has a lot of these windows on the left hand side of the screen, that's more than possible to achieve. So we can grab the tab here, where you've got the x. This is our tab. We can drag this across, and you see it has a grid formation that it tries to adhere to. So we can drop this on the left part of the grid, and we can make the same changes down here with our details and world settings and things like that. So we can tuck all of these back over with each other. So it's not very similar, but it's just inverted where these are. If you wanted it more along the top for whatever reason, we can do essentially whatever we wanted with hour outliner here. If you're making these changes and the reason I wanted to mention this now is I'd recommend just playing around with some of these seeing the different options you have available between the videos. Just take a break five, 10 minutes to play around with the different outliners. See if you feel more comfortable with the content drawer being dragged up and held open or docked, just kind of get comfortable essentially with the different options available. Make mistakes now, it's fine, we have a completely empty project, very easy to get back to this stage, so this is a good time to make those mistakes, but also it's easy to fix everything. So it can be a little bit easier when you're starting out with something to follow along with the content as is shown in the videos. So if you wanted to get everything back, if you're making these changes, we can just go to Window. We can go to load layout, and we can change this to the default editor layout. Also, just to recap there, like I mentioned, if you do have experience with the Unreal engine before, and you wanted it to look more like it did in the past. We had this place actors option on the side there. Everything looks very similar on the right hand side, and then that constant content browser at the bottom. That was achieved by just going to load layout and the UE four classic. What I'll do those is, I'll just press the default editor layout here because I quite like working with the new unrelentin five layout. So this is the one I'll be storing. But that was just to show you that it's very easy to make these changes, test things, and then if something goes wrong, just revert it to how it was previously. If you're missing windows as well, another thing to keep in mind is we can toggle these on and off in the window setting here. So for example, just a moment ago, I had some information about the world settings. If you want that back, we just need to look for the World settings option here. We'll click this, and it'll create a new tab for us over here. Just to say that if you did something like close the outliner entirely, and you weren't sure how to get that back. To return the outliner, we just go up here, go to O Outliner one, and we'll have one of those docked back up here for us. And that will happen for any of the windows that we can see by default. So we've got the outliner, the details, world settings, and so on. And just like I mentioned a moment ago, if you're not sure what these are and you wanted to see, then just play around, click on the levels, see what that gives you. If you don't need it, you can remove it. If you're not sure how to get everything back to how it was. Just remember, load layout, default editor layout. So that's the basics of the Unreal engine editor. As I said, it can look quite daunting, but it's actually quite easy to work with. There's a lot of information, but we don't need to know all of it right now, and we'll be picking up much much more on exactly what all of the features are, what we have available, and how to use them as we go through. 8. 07 - Navigating The Editor: Now that we've seen the bulk, the main element of the unrelenting editor, we're going to focus in just on the viewpot, because you'll be working in this section quite often when building out your levels or just in general, making tweaks and changes to your experience that you're working with. This is something which will be, very useful if you spend that time to just familiarize yourself and get comfortable working inside of the viewport as soon as possible. So the core features that we have in here at the moment, if we click into the window, so most of this is kind of sensitive or context sensitive to having something your mice clicked into the viewport area. So I'm holding right click, and this is going to be our panning motion to look around the level itself. So the most simple thing here is right click and pan to look around. With the mouse still in the viewport, I'm just scrolling the mouse wheel, so this is how we can zoom in and out. So what you will notice is that whilst we are zooming in this way, it's not always the fastest or most convenient way to move around. So another thing that we can do is if we hold the right mice button and then left click, we get a kind of sideways movement here or up and down, depending on then where we drag the mouse. I'm just dragging the mice forward backwards, left and right, and we can actually control the camera this way. And then the final two things here, just the quick, simple things that we can work with with something selected in the world. So I'm just going to grab a chunk of terrain down here. Any of these will work, so just left clicking to grab something down here, and then press the F, F for focus, and that will focus in on the object you're selecting. Then with the ult key held, if we left mice click and drag the mouse, this will orbit the object that we currently have selected. It's a nice way to come in. We can have a look at something here, and we can orbit around and take a proper look at the elements that we're working with. Looking at something a little bit smaller, if we grab a skylight, which is not really a visual object, but it does have a widget so that we can just visualize where this is, so we can get much closer to this object and see exactly where it is and what it's doing in the world. They're the most basic fundamental options for moving around in the viewport. Are the kinds of things that you may be more familiar with coming from three D packages like Blender or Maya, three D S Max, that type of thing provide very similar key bindings, shortcuts, and things like that. I just thought I'd mention those first of all. Now, the next thing to be aware of, and this is very useful, and this will be a lot more comfortable to gamers is we have a first person fly through mode. It's kind of activated automatically. There's nothing that we need to do to get this mode. We just need to right click into the viewport again. And then when we're looking around, we use W A S&D, so the WASD movement, we can move forward, backward, left and right, or right and left, depending on the keys that we're pressing. So, as I said, very much like a first person movement type of game. If the camera is moving a little bit too fast, we can move up here. Mine's currently set to a camera speed of 8.5, which is quite high, and then we can just move this to be faster or slower. And then when I'm flying around, that will change the speed. Also, with the right mouse button still held, and just moving in a direction, if you scroll the mouse will back or forward, You can see that the camera speed is also being controlled and changed as I move around. So a nice quick way to change the speed of the camera as you're flying through the world. So this is a nice quick way to navigate and move around. It's very much like a ghost cam type thing in first person games. Another thing which can be useful, so W A S and D and holding the right mast button will let you move forward backwards, left and right, Q and E. Will let you move down and up depending on what you're pressing. So in a similar way, we can just just lower the speed here again because I don't want that to be too obnoxious as I'm demonstrating this, but yeah, we can go down, and up with Q, for down, E for up, as long as you're holding the right mouse button. So you'll find that this is quite often how you'll navigate a scene. For example, I'm wanting to look at this landscape piece over here. So I'll select it, I'll press F to focus in. I can orbit around to have a better look at this. Then if I wanted to get up close and have a look at it a slightly different part of the landscape piece here, you'll have your right mist button held down, and then you'll use the fly through mode to just fly around and get a little bit closer. It just gives you a nice level of precision when navigating the viewpot. Next, we can take a look at the transformation tools inside of the viewpot. Kind of alluded to this a moment ago, we have our tool bar section at the top right hand side of the viewport just here. So this first section here is our transform, which is our movement, rotation, and scaling. But I'm just going to go back to one of the objects over here. I'm going to grab our directional light again and just press F to focus in just so that I'm a little bit closer to the ground here. Just using the middle mouse button is another way that we can I think this is called dollying. We can move around the camera, down left or right, depending on the direction at which you move the mouse. Just that I can get quite close to the floor. We're going to come over here and I'll add a basic shape into level again. So this is our object creation tool here. We can grab a shape and just drag the cube onto the floor. One thing to be aware of here is if you're holding this and you click and then drag into the world, you have a kind of a movement mode option here, and this will try to snap to a given surface. So we can just drag these onto the floor just for some quick demonstrations. By default, you can see if we click on something, we get these arrows, which means that we're in move mode. Move mode is indicated by this blue button just here, saying that we're in move mode, and that will give us the option here. With these widgets, we've got up, forward, left and right. So in rail up is classed as the Z axis, which is the blue arrow that we have just here. It's going to go to the details panel. We can see that the Z has this blue pip just here in relation to the blue arrows. As we move this up and down, that value will change. Forward is usually defaulted to x, which is red, so this is our forward back. And then green will be our y, which is left and right. With this widget, we also have a kind of a more free form movement, so you can see that it's highlighting here. It's turning this yellow depending on the arrow that I'm about to select. If I hover over this double line here, this will actually move us in the Z and the x axis. So you can see it's highlighting both of those arrows, which just gives us a little bit of freedom and easy movement here. Likewise, we can do that for the two arrows on the bottom or the two arrows on this side. Then there's also a little bit harder to see a sphere in the middle, which gives us complete free form movement depending on the direction at which the camera is facing. We can move this in any direction whilst holding and dragging. Now, the sphere isn't going to be the best thing to show the next thing off, so I'm just going to delete this one, so I'm just pressing the delete key. I'll now move to the cube. I'll move the cube up a little bit here. And I'm just going to go to our toolbar. I'm going to select and change this to be our rotate mode, and you can see the widget changes. I'm just going to press F to focus in again, and the rotate option, as you would expect, allows you to rotate the object in the given direction. This is classified again in a similar way, we've got the X, Y and Z or the we pitch and roll. In the same way that we can change the values here by moving this around with the widget, we can always come over to our details panel. If you wanted to reset this, you can simply use the arrow here, the back arrow is your undo, or we can set this to be a specific value. We could say a 45 degree rotation here on the x, and we'll get something looking like this. We can plug numbers directly in here as well if we wanted. Then finally, we have the scaling tool, so we'll press the scale option here. And more like with the move option, we've got the center option, which will scale this on all of the axes, the X Y and Z, or we can scale this just in one direction, so we can make this taller or wider on either side. Again, if you wanted to undo all of that, we just press the undo button, and we'll get that back to our uniform one on the X Y and Z. Now one thing which is really useful here is as we hover over these, you may notice that we have an indication of their shortcut buttons, and it's going to become really useful to remember these as quickly as possible. This is another thing you'll find you're probably going to be working with quite often and switching between movement, rotation, and scaling. So remembering these shortcuts will just save you from constantly making a change over here and then coming in clicking these buttons. They're nicely placed at the top side of the keyboard. So we have W, E, and R. And you can see that as I press those keys, it will change which of these options we have selected. Whilst we're looking at the movement, rotation, and scaling options, have three different things here, which are all related to those. So these three options with the blue icons just here are the snapping properties for each of these. So you may have noticed that as I kind of scale things, it does have a snapping property to it. So this is scaling in increments of 0.25. If we rotate it, it's rotating in increments of ten degrees, as we can see here, and if we move it, it's moving in units of ten. So you may or may not want snapping. If you don't want snapping at tool, we just click the buttons here. When they're grade, we don't have snapping. So now we have complete free movement of where the object is moving. If we wanted to increase the distance, we can press the button here. We get a drop down, and we can move it in bigger or smaller increments. So we're now moving in increments of 100. And we can do a similar thing for rotation and scaling by changing the rate or range at which we are allowing the rotation to happen and the scaling, of course. So I just wanted to mention that we do have that option enabled by default. So as I said, if you find that the snapping is not useful, if it's a little bit too restrictive, we can just turn this off altogether, or if you do find it is somewhat useful, but maybe just a little bit too strong, or a bit too weak, we can change the amounts at which these snapping properties are happening. I already mentioned this just a moment ago because the camera movement was a little bit fast. But again, if you want to change how fast the camera is moving when you're in the fly through mode, that's the option that we had just here, so we can increase or decrease the camera movement speed, and you can do this by a scalar parameter as well. So essentially just multiplying the camera speed that we have here. So if you can't quite fine tune it, then we do have the option to increase or decrease the speed by a very high amount, if needed. And then finally, we have these two little buttons here. So we have one which is control over how we snap an object to a surface. So if we enable this and we drag this, you can see we just move in a little bit closer. With that enabled, it is now automatically trying to place the cube when I let go onto a surface. I don't use this very often because as you can see here, it is a little bit finicky, so I'm just going to move this back. I'm going to untick this, bring this back. But you can see that if you accidentally have the mouse selected over a little bit of geometry a bit further away. It won't always put the object where you wanted it. One thing which might be quite useful though, if you just want something to end up on the floor, let's say that we have this cube in the air, we can press the end key usually above the numpad or in that general area on your keyboard, the end key, and that will snap. The object to the surface below it if there's something with a collision just below. The final thing when it comes to snapping, I don't want to overload you at this point, but one other thing that people do find quite useful, I'm just going to click and then drag the move widget here. So I've held the left lt key. I've clicked the move widget and then I've dragged this out, and this will create a duplicate, so this is a nice shortcut to duplicate objects. I'm just going to very quickly give this a different scale. It doesn't really matter what this is. I just need it to have a decent kind of surface area. And then with the smaller cube selected, I'm going to move this over. And then if you hold V, we'll get vertex snapping. So V for vertex. And then if we move the cube here, you can see these little blue dots appearing. This is the vertex. This is trying to snap the cube two. So we don't unfortunately have anything similar to where we press end and snap this to the floor. Don't have anything similar to that for side surfaces, but we can press V, and at least snap it to the nerest vertex on the side like this or on the ground or so on. So just to let you know, we do have a vertex snapping option. Hold V and move this around, and it will try to snap that to the nerest vertex that your mouse is hovering over. Finally, to not let this go unmentioned, we do have this button here. This is a little bit harder to describe. This is our transform gizmo. It changes the coordinate system that we're working in. By default, we are set to world mode. You can see here, we can change that in the tooltip there. We can change that to local mode. World mode at the moment, the world has a context of its transform. The world up down, left and right, for example, X Y and Z. Z in the world is up, which is our blue arrow here, X is forward, and y green is left and right, as I've mentioned. Best way that I can think to describe this is if I give the cube a small rotation on the green axis here. So we're rotating this around the Y mainly here. Then I go back into mood mode. If we move up in the world transform, the world coordinate, regardless of how the cube is rotated, we're still going up on the blue, the Z. Now if we toggle this to local, so this will be local to the object that we have selected, and we'll now see that the widget has changed what it is classing as up for this object. So locally to this object, the up transform or the up direction is relative to how it's rotated. So now if we move it on the z, that will move it diagonally up based on the rotation. I rotate it a little bit more, we can see that up for this is now kind of classed over here. If you envision this is like someone's head on the cube here, if there was a head at the top of the cube, it would kind of be trying to move it more related to where the head is facing the top of the head rather than globally in the world. As a character turns to something, they may be gliding or flying in a different direction, which may be where this will be useful. Having a stream of different objects all move kind of relative to something else can be useful at different times in development. So just to say that if you wanted to move something based kind of on where it's rotated or it's local transform, Then we just want to toggle this here. If we go back to world mode, then we're going to move up and down, left and right forward and backwards, based on the global context of the X, Y and Z axis. So they are the core features, and this is another one. There's a challenge coming up, but also in the topics as we go through, there will be some write ups. So any of those shortcuts that you find will be useful, as well as some that I haven't mentioned in the video, other general, useful shortcuts, I think will be worth knowing will all be written dow. So if you wanted to take notes or read through those or practice them, this is going to be something which is really worthwhile doing early on as you're getting used to the Unreal engine and the editor in general. It's one of those things, as I said, you will potentially spend a lot of time in the viewpot, moving things around, changing the level layout, and customizing things to your requirements. The earlier and faster that you can improve your skills, navigating and working with the viewpot, the better your experience with the Unreal engine will be. So set some time aside, and I would definitely recommend playing around. Now, for me, personally, and this is another thing to mention, I find that shortcuts are really convenient for me. So I've memorized very quickly the W ENR because I was using those all of the time I will automatically switch between those kind of off of muscle memory now. If I wanted to come in and quickly scale this, I'll press R, move this around, W to move this back up, and so on. Now, others, I know that don't get on with shortcuts quite so well. So do spend some time just with those considerations in mind and see what you find most useful. If you find yourself falling back here quite often, and that's just better for you, that's perfectly fine. But just get familiar with the different combinations of looking around, moving around, flying through focusing in, orbiting, and so on. These are the core things that can save you a lot of time, as well as appreciating that sometimes like I've mentioned, you might end up really, really far out in the world. You may be looking at the terrain as a whole, and it's just making sure that you can get that connection that if you wanted to come all the way back down here and look at something, if you didn't have a big cube like that, just remember where some of these other objects are. If you want to be back in the center of the world, for example, we'll grab the Skylight, press F, and that will bring us back down. And it's just this familiarity and comfort with the editor and the viewport and getting that somewhat automated early on in your workflow. We'll just improve how efficiently and quickly you can make the projects and the ideas that you have in mind. 9. 08 - Creating Levels: Now that we've had a look at the unreal interface, you're hopefully getting more familiar and comfortable with the busons, the shortcuts, and just generally navigating the interface that we're presented with. So far, we've been working with this somewhat large example of terrain. It's one of those maps which take a little bit more performance and the slight amount of extra time to load each time we enter the project, if you've been closing down the editor and loading back into the project. The moment, this is an unsaved map. So if you have been trying to make changes, and you're expecting this to be remembered and show the next time that you enter the project, do make note that if we have a map up here, so this is our tab showing the current map that we're in. If that says untitled, that means it's a level, which has been unsaved. This is created by default when we open the project. We haven't told the Unreal engine to do otherwise. And that does mean that your changes will be lost between sessions. So what we're going to do now is we will look to address this. We're going to have a map that we have full control over, and as we make our changes, our new features, and start working with things as we go through. That can be the map that we load by default every time that we enter the project again. Before diving into that, I want to keep a focus throughout the entirety of this course on just general good practices, good naming conventions, good coding standards, keeping things performant and easy to work with and update as we go through. So with that in mind, before we create our new map, we're going to look at our folder structure. This will be done inside of our content drawer, and what I want to do is follow the recommendation of creating a sub folder in our root content here. So the content folder is our root folder. Everything that we have in this project will go in here. What I'll do is I'll create a new folder with the name of our project. The project name you can see at the top right hand side here, minus boot camp. I'm going to create a new folder by pressing Control shift in N is the shortcut, n for new, or we can right click, and we can go new folder and create that here. But just again to get familiar with the shortcuts, Control Shift in N, to create a new folder here, and I'll just name this one boot camp. Now, the reason that we do this is a little bit forward thinking at the moment, especially in the early days, but just to get you into that good practice early on, the main reason is that if you start working with multiple projects and you have some code or materials or assets that could be reused between your different projects, to avoid naming conflicts with things with the same name, but potentially doing different jobs between projects. If we move things across to different versions of our projects nested inside of a project specific naming folder, we won't get any of those collisions. If we have another project called first person shooter, it will do everything by directory, and the base material in first person shooter won't collide with the base material in boot camp folder if we're moving things across. Thus the main reason that we do this. Something that the Unreal engine developers of recommend and do internally. Also when you're submitting things to the Unreal engine marketplace or when you're downloading things from the marketplace as well. You will notice that this is a standard approach which is taken when working with other projects. For exactly that reason, it makes working with these asset packs and plugins and things very easy because there's never any name and convention conflict because the content is then always nested in their subfolders. Then to organize things a little bit further, inside of boot camp, I'm now going to create another folder, so control shift in N again, and this will be our Maps folder. Anytime that we create a new map now or level, we're going to put this into our maps folder. Just to mention that as I go through, if I do switch between the word map and level, they both mean the same thing. They're just holders of data, the objects that create the information that we can see in the background here. Unfortunately, I guess, with different developers going through and working on the Unreal engine over the years, maps and levels are used interchangeably, so it's just something to be aware of. Sometimes the Unreal engine will ask you to load a map or give information about a map. Other times it'll ask you to provide a reference to a level and things like that. Just be aware that they're both the same thing. Example, if we come in here and we right click to create our new map. It's actually called level here. But if we're going to the project settings, which we'll look at later where we set what our default level or map will be, it will tell us to provide a level to be the default map. So it can be a little bit confusing, but just be aware of that. Now, I wanted to show you a different way that we can create a level here. So we can just select to create a level by right clicking, finding this here, and this will create a new object in our folder. I'll show you that quickly, but I will be getting rid of this. The reason for this is that if we take this approach, it doesn't allow us to predefine what type of level or map that we want to create. Instead, if we come in here and we press control in n inside of the viewpot, Control in n again for new, and we're creating a new map. We get a few different options here. By default, every time we open the project so far, we're being provided this open world map. It's a little bit big. The terrain section, you can see has a lot of different chunks that need to be loaded in. What I like to do is start with a slightly more empty level. We do have the option for fully empty levels, so they have absolutely nothing in. Just to get something visualized, but to also save a little bit of time in performance when we're loading the project. I'm just going to go from the basic map here. It comes with a floor, some stuff in the sky. It gives us something to look at with all of the lighting setup, but it's much more empty than the one that we're currently working in, and it's just easier to load. So we'll create one of these. I'm going to say, we don't need to save anything that we've done just here. I'll come back into the content drawer. I'm just going to get rid of New World. We're not going to use this one, so I'll get rid of this, we'll delete and get rid of that entirely. Again, just keep an eye up here on the top left hand side. This currently is still being called untitled. Means that this new map that we've just created our basic map still hasn't been saved. So if we press control in S that standard save shortcut, this will bring up a window here. It will ask us to find a location that we want to store our map that we're currently in, so we're going to go to maps. We change the name from new map, and I'll call this one main. We can hit save on this. We can check inside of our content drawer, and we can see we have a main map is being created here. And the name in the tab just here so this is our map tab indicated by this Orange icon. So if you're ever wondering when you've got multiple tabs opening, which one is related to what, keep an eye on the naming and the icon just here. So this is our map icon. So we now have a map stored that will exist in the project every single time that we close the project and open it back up. It won't be the one which is loaded by default. I'll show you that in just a moment, but it will at least exist between sessions. Now, just to further tidy things and highlight what we have inside of our basic map. Going to go through a few details in the outliner to the right hand side. So inside of the lightings drop down here, that folder that I've mentioned that we can create. The unreal developers have already nested everything related to the environment or lighting in the lighting box. So we've got the directional light, as I mentioned, is responsible for lighting up the level and trying to recreate approximately what the real sun would do. Depending on time of day and things like that, the direction of this can be changed. Have the exponential height fog. If you're ever wondering again, what these things are doing, just as you're getting familiar of things. If we turn this off, we can see that the lighting will be removed if we hide what this is responsible for. So toggle the visibility will also toggle what they're responsible for. If we keep the light on, but we move things I'm just right clicking here to refresh the viewpot. If we now turn off the exponential height fog, we can see that we lose a little bit of the background. It was responsible for some of the data going on down here, the coloring below the horizon is being controlled just there. If we then take off the sky atmosphere, we can see even more information in the background, including above the clouds has been removed, and of course, the volumetric cloud would fully remove the clouds there as well. We could talk back on the sky atmosphere. If you wanted something more simplistic without the somewhat realistic looking clouds, we can get rid of that. The other thing that we have here, which is kind of a leftover remnant from the Unreal engine four days is our sky sphere. So you'll notice that this doesn't look as though it's actually doing anything, and that's because it isn't anymore. This used to be used and provided as quite a flexible blueprint. So if you open any Unreal engine four project, By default, it will have a sky sphere, and it had a blueprint attached to it, which would allow add things like stars and clouds. And everything like that was managed through this one core blueprint. In Unreal engine five, that's mostly been removed because these three objects, or these four, in fact, the height fog, the skylight plays into it and the volumetric cloud all work together to create a more dynamic and interesting and realistic looking background. So what we can do nowadays is I tend to just come in, and I'll just remove the sky sphere. Just one big sphere surrounding the world, and it's another option that we have to change some visuals and update things like that, but you do find that it's not used very often anymore because we have all of the flexibility through these components just here. That's the only thing that'll change. I'll press Control in S, again, we have the asterix and the top left hand side in our map tab just here, meaning that something has been changed and unsaved, so I'll press Control in S to save this, just to make sure that we're tracking all of the changes and updates that we want to maintain as we go through. 10. 09 - Working With Geometric Shapes: Going to start working with some basic geometric shapes to just get some ideas together and again, really focus on getting comfortable with the editor and the input systems in the way that we just interact with the viewport and moving things around the engine. We're not going to be aiming to make anything fancy. It's just a case of repetition until we get more familiar and comfortable with the key mappings. Before jumping into that, I've closed the project between recordings purposely to show what might happen if you've saved your new map, but as I've said, it will not be the default. A really easy way that we can update this and I will be showing you that, but I wanted to make a point of not doing that at the beginning, because this is one of those silly little things that really catches new developers and students I've worked with, I catches them out quite often. I've actually seen people completely remake their projects, thinking they had a glitchy project, because they had a messy folder structure going on. They forgot where they saved their map. They thought that the engine kept losing the maps and the progress they're making. They made multiple projects, not knowing the core features of what Unreal is trying to do for you. So whenever we finish working on a project, we close it down and come back the next day and reopen that project. What it will do is it will create a brand new untitled map unless you tell it to do otherwise. So that's the first thing to keep in mind, and that's exactly what we're seeing here. This big terrain named untitled, and this is what I've seen students do. They're like, Okay, I will lose yesterday's work, and I'll just redo that today. Make their progress again, they'll save this, press control in. I'll ask you where to save the new map. And again, this is where folder structures and naming conventions really come in handy because the reason they weren't able to find their maps is they were just putting them anywhere. Turned out they might have had a couple in the content drawer. They had loads of folders and subfolders and plug ins already installed, and they're just putting maps everywhere. They just couldn't find where they had them, and they thought that they were lost or gone. What they might come in and do is save another new map inside of folder somewhere, hoping that this day's work will be remembered. And then again, Rinse and repeat tomorrow they'll come back, think they've lost their work, redo it, or as I've said, in some cases, just create entirely new projects, thinking that the previous one was bugged out. So this is why I wanted to really hyper focus in on this, and it seems like a really insignificant little thing, but you can get tripped up on this. So if this is something that you're experiencing, just remember, we've created our maps folder. Inside of maps is our main map here. We can just double click on this and this will bring us back in to the map that we created a moment ago. To stop this from ever happening again, we is going to find the project settings. To do this, we're going to go to edit and project settings. We'll click on this. I'm just going to dock this up here. So this tab starts off floating as with any tab in most applications, and now we can grab this, and we can dock this just here. I'm going to dock this to the left of main because this is something we'll be coming back to quite often. This houses all of the settings and information related to the project that we're working in. There's a good chance we'll need this again. I'll keep this just here in the top bar. Side of the project settings, we'll go down to the Maps and Mode section. This is where we changed the information about that start up level that we have created at the moment. So you can see here in the default Maps section, we have something called an editor startup map and a game default map. So the editor startup map is the one that loads as soon as you launch the editor. We're in the Unreal editor. The game default map is the option which will load. If you've packaged the game, if you've got your project working, and you want to ship it, send it off to friends, family, colleagues, or whatever, that will be the map that they first see when they open the project. Quite often, this will be something like a credit map, a main menu map, something to just get them started before entering your main level. So what we want to do is at the moment, we just want to control the editor startup, what we see, every time we launch the project. So from this drop down, we'll choose the only map that we have here, which is main. That's it. It saves everything automatically, so we're now done. So the important thing here is every time that we open the project, now, we can make all of our changes, save whatever we do in the main map. Close the project, come back tomorrow, and would be automatically loaded into the map that we're currently working with. And of course, you can see, hopefully, it makes sense here that if we started working on multiple different levels and you've completely finished up your work in one of the levels, and you need to move on to level two or level three or whatever project you're working on, you can see the use of this, that we may want to change this a little bit later in development so that we don't need to keep switching between them. And every time we load the project, the one that we know that we're most likely going to be working on will be the default one to open. So a fairly long aside, but as I said, I've seen so many people get stuck on this. It seems like such a simple thing, but people really do get stuck here. I just want to make sure that people aren't recreating or losing projects or progress and things like that. With that done, though, we can move back on to the main topic, which is making those geometric shapes. We're just going to start throwing things together. I'm just going to aim to make a really small simple structure just from the different shapes that we have available. Way we don't need to bring in any assets, that will be something that we look at a little bit later, different ways to source assets and plug ins and things like that. But remember that I've mentioned that we have this add object option, a quick add to the project. We've got our geometric shapes just here, and we've got a few different things that we can work with. So I'm just going to get started. I'm going to run through and in my mind, what I have is some kind of Greek colosseum looking or more open exterior structure type of thing. And we can make this with a combination of cubes, cylinders, spheres, and even cones, if you wanted to add them in. So to get started, I'm just going to click and left drag into the world here so that this will snap it to a surface that we already have. We do already have a floor. I'm going to keep this one as the default larger floor. But using this cube, I'm just going to create the floor for the structure that I have in mind. And you don't need to follow along exactly. I just want to run through this at least partly so that I can recap the buttons that I'm using and the shortcuts. This is for you to get creative with and come up with your own ideas, create something that you wanted to put together using geometric shapes into your level. The floor though, the way that I'd approach this is we'll grab our cube over here. I'm going to move into scaling mode, which is R on the keyboard. I'll just scale this down a bit on the Z because I want this to be longer than it is wider, I'll just use the widget just here and just drag the site and then the same just here. And that will be a fairly decent kind of platform for the rest of the structure to sit on. I'm going to press end, which will snap this to the floor. And as I said, the key thing here is just getting familiar with those shortcuts and the options that you have available. This doesn't need to be resting anywhere specific, and then just pressing F to focus in so that I can orbit around this. And just get a good idea of how this will start looking. The next thing is we could probably do with a couple of pillars, so something to have this standing on. So let's go with maybe some cylinders. And again, I'll make this float above the floor just a little bit to begin with, and then in scaling mode. So R for scaling mode and you can see this will be changing up here. Just drag this up on the Z to make this taller and then move this along the x and the y. Using this little part of the widget here to move this on the x and the y, but specifically not the Z. If you do move it on the Z, again, just a recap end to drop this to the ground. And then I'm going to press ult and drag on the widget here to pull this out to the other side. One thing I'm noticing here is based on the height, this is possibly looking a little bit chunky. So I'm just going to grab the widget on the scaling option in the middle here, just to make this a little bit thinner and maybe a little bit taller. In fact, I think I want this to be scaled down on all of the axes. I'll just grab that in the middle again. Make this smaller. Again, just tweaking and playing and if you're not getting the right scale because the snapping might be too high. Just remember that you've got the snapping options up here. You can make this smaller or turn the snapping off altogether. I'm Just going to hit end again to drop this to the floor. Or get rid of this one. Then I'll lt and drag to copy this one out once more. So just that we've got a good starting point here. With that done, I'm going to grab both of these, so just to recap what I've done there. We'll click one, we'll hold shift and click the second, and then I'm going to lt and drag in the direction. I want these to move. I'm going to move these up a little bit. I think I'm going to give this a little bit of a slope on the roof. And then with both of these selected, I'll just press the widget to scale this up on the Z, hit end, and then drop those down. It could be a little bit too much of a slope there, so I'll scale that down a little bit more hit end until that looks around about right. Grabbing the floor. I'm just going to ult and drag up on the D again, and we can give this a little bit of rotation, so we haven't rotated anything yet. And this is one of those things again, I can immediately see the snapping is going to throw that completely off. So I want this to somewhat look like it's resting at the top of both the cylinders. So I'm going into the rotation. We can maybe turn this down to five degree increments, see how this goes, and see if we can get this looking as though they're resting on each other. Don't need this to look perfect. People won't know that this is technically inside of the roof that I've just made here. But the main thing is, we don't want big gaps like this. Obviously, if we pull this down too far, we will see this poking at the top. I want to avoid it poking at the top, and I also want to avoid these gaps here. That does mean, in this case, the increment here is too big. I'm just going to turn off snapping altogether just so that I can get a slightly smaller change to the rotation increment. And you can see that's worked, so it looks as though everything's kind of flush and resting on each other properly. I think just for visual appeal, what I might do as well is we will scale this in sideways, so it's not as wide or as long as the floor. And if you remember the local and global movement space that we had, when we remove mode, One thing I didn't mention before is that whilst we can toggle this in move mode, so we could move this forward a sideways based on the rotation of the object. If we're actually in scaling mode, you'll see that we don't have anything to toggle between here, but the useful thing is that we can scale, and this will be relative to how this is rotated in the world. So we can still get this looking pretty decent in flush here. But what I might want to do is move these arms back a little bit there, which means we will need to change a little bit of the rotation again. If you're doing a lot of this, and you're trying to get this into the viewport. Again, F will focus you in and you can orbit around this quite nicely. If that's still not quite enough, we can change this from perspective mode in the top of the toolbar here, and we can go to a left or right view. In this case, I've actually angled this the other way, we're going to go to the front view, and that will give us a wire frame. We're just going to right click to move around here and then select the object, and this will just give us a better look of how things are lined up. We can see there that's much more flush. As I've mentioned. People won't know that this is slightly inside of the roof here, but it does stop us having some obvious gaps. Just go back to perspective mode, and again, if you find yourself switching between these quite often, it might be useful to start learning that Alt G is perspective. And then we've got top, bottom, left right front back, Shift J, K, shift K. All of these with ult held in front of them will be your shortcuts for these. Okay. So as I said, I'm just going to make sure, again, the main thing is from top of, I think, ideally, we don't want the roof to look as though it's the same size or that close to the floor. Looking here, I doesn't need to be perfect, but they just look a little bit too close, a little bit too far away from the corners. This is the main thing is just play around with things until you start getting something that you like to look of. There's no real goal here. We're not going to be rendering this site. It doesn't need to be a final product. Just come up with an idea that you have in mind that you want to see put as a final result, give yourself half an hour to an hour just to get comfortable. The more that you're repeating the simple procedures of creating an object, grab a shape, drop this in, and then play around with the different transform tools. That's the main goal here. You don't have to make anything super specific. The important thing and the takeaways here are really going to be like I've mentioned. Anything that you use quite often, if you work well with shortcuts, try to start memorizing those. Anything which has a shortcut, if you hover over things, so remember these transform tools up here. They show you the shortcuts just here, so W E and R are highlighted there. Likewise, anything over here that may have a shortcut would be highlighted as well. With the different perspective views. It shows you that to the right hand side, so going between top bottom left as I just said are all shown just here. Then we've got different modes, and again, this is just your time to play around with things. You can't get things wrong. We can always revert back and just get the project back to how it was. So this is that time to make mistakes. So we've got different modes that you can look in as well. Default, we're in lit mode. We can go to unlit, which will just take away the lighting, and we can see the shapes if we had materials. We could give these different colors that we'd see. We can view the wire frame and so on. And again, there's no problem with just looking between these. We can just set it back to lit mode, and if you do start changing things beyond kind of remembering what you've done. And let's say that you've made some changes and you do turn a bunch of things off and you're in the wrong mode, and you forget how you get this back. We just go to windows remember. We can go to load layout, and we can get the default editor layout back. And that would bring us back to where we were. So we haven't lost anything. We just go back to everything as it was before. Another thing you may want to start considering as you're going through this is you can name the individual objects if you want, you will find that gets tedious very quickly, and often we'll be working with specific mesh assets and things to work with from three D artists or asset packs and things. No have their own specific names. Because we could at least group these like with the lighting. So I've got a fairly simple structure here. If I grab all of these, and we can move this here. So I'm just clicking on one of these shift selecting like any other software package to grab a number of them. Right click on any of these that we have selected. We're going to go to Move two, and we can create a new folder. Which I will call structure. So we just need to click on the new folder. We can press F two to rename something, and I'll call this one structure. Just so that I know what this is. It does mean as well that we can hide the whole thing straight away if we wanted to get rid of all of that. But the nice thing is that we can drop these down and it just keeps the outliner nice and tidy. We can't select all of this as one, but it does make it easier to find things at least. So the folder itself doesn't actually have any transform information. We wouldn't be able to move the whole folder and everything within it around the world in one go. But it's more of a visual housekeeping tiding type thing for the outliner here. Then the other thing, when it comes to the outliner, kind of in line with what I've just mentioned, is if you did want everything to move in relation to another specific object, what we could do is I'm going to grab the floor down here I've set as the cube that I've set as the floor. I'll rename this one, so I'm going to rename this one to floor. So it's clear at least which part of these different shapes are the floor. And what we could do is if we shift select a number of these different objects and then move this onto the floor. What I've done is I've just nested all of these objects onto the main object here. So this one does actually have that knock on effect where now because these are classed as child objects of the parent object, it does mean that wherever the parent object goes, the child objects will follow. So with this selected, if I move this around, you can see the entire structure I follows along. If you did want that kind of behavior, you can either choose an object that you have. Some people will make an invisible object is like an origin point if you didn't want the floor specifically here to be the one which is being moved around, but just an example. Likewise, if you wanted to keep it somewhat structural, you could have multiple nestings here, so we could grab a number of the cylinders and we could say that this is the main parent cylinder, which then allows us to also nest the roof. This means that we can move everything on the cylinders or those stands as well as the roof without the floor needing to move. But then of course, if we move the floor as well, because everything is still a child of the floor, we just have these different hierarchies going on. That's something else to play around with until it makes sense and become familiar with what you're doing. This can be quite useful when you are just tweaking things like this, and you may not want to keep grabbing a whole bunch of things, but already know that wherever the stands are going, you want the roof to follow it, and then likewise, wherever the floor goes, you might want everything to follow that in a different way. It doesn't just work with the movement. If we went into rotation mode, everything will rotate with the floor, and likewise, it's going to have a weird kind of scaling thing going on here, but we'll also scale with the floor. But unfortunately, it's relative to the original size of the floor, which is difficult to kind of describe. But because we have a scaling going on here of almost seven, 11, and 0.25, just around those down, it means that these will be kind of scaled relative to that initial offset because everything that doesn't have a base start point of one, which is why you get this weird warping scaling going on where it's much taller or getting much taller than it is longer or wider. So just be aware of that. It's not a process that you'd normally take anyway. This isn't a very standard level design work flow. Where possible, we try to keep fairly uniform scaling. If you imagine you're getting a proper static mesh of a fully modeled, lovely kind of architectural Greek pillar podium going on, you're not going to scale that more on the y axes than you would the X, because it's going to completely throw off the artist's original design. We're only kind of doing that here because we're just working with basic geometric shapes and trying to make them look a certain way just to get a final result. Another thing that just came to mind to have this, we could do something again, just getting more familiar with the scaling and rotation because I've done a lot of movement at the moment. I just thinking we could make this into a Zen oc or a rock can, I think they're called don't they. So just something else that if you wanted to play around with more than just creating a structure. Come up with other little ideas of things that you could potentially do with these different shapes. So we have a sphere, but with a little bit of scaling. And again, this is one of those things. It's immediately making me realize that having the snapping is a little bit restrictive, so I'll just turn the snapping off and just get comfortable working out a good workflow for what you might want to achieve. And you can very quickly throw together something like we have here with a fun little rock structure. We can just drop a few of these on in different places. They normally balance in some interesting ways, don't they? Have that one a little bit wider. And again, I'm already noticing the movement is now a bit restrictive because we're working on such a smaller scale. Things are starting to become a little bit restrictive with how the snapping is coming into play. These are the things I just want you to get familiar and start noticing early on. Again, I'm just going to be forced to turn that off so that we can get a little bit more freedom on there. And from a place of physics and balance, this probably has absolutely no way of working. But I, that's quite often the case when you're looking at these structures, you do wonder how this together anyway. The final thing, as you're playing around that, if you do find all of that's very easy, all of that's become second nature to very quickly. That's perfect. Maybe spend some time playing around with things like the lighting as well. One thing that you could do to just familiarize yourself with getting comfortable with trial in error, which is a core concept of getting into this type of development. Ready know that most of the visual information we're getting from the background here is controlled from all of the content within the lighting. So we can do things like playing around with the directional light. As I've mentioned, the location of this doesn't matter. Wherever this is, we'll get the same level of brightness. Nothing changes based on the location. It's trying to replicate the sun, so its position because it's such a bright light force doesn't actually make any difference here. But what we can do is if we rotate it, we can change the time of day based on the direction of this arrow. So play around of things like that, we can change the brightness, so you might want this to look a little bit darker, more of a kind of a night scene going on here. If you wanted it to be less of a pure white light, we can change the color, so we can make this a little bit warmer, a little bit cooler, and so on. Again, if you're not sure what all of this is, you don't need to remember it straight away. But if you're just curious, this is the type of thing I know that new developers are going to be interested in. It's the visuals, making things look a little bit more custom to what you're aiming for. Just have a hover over these different things, and it will tell you what they do. Some of them not so useful. But for example, we get a lot of information here about the source angle, based on the source angle that we have here. It will change things like the softness of the shadows or the hardness, how clear the shadows are just here. We can do things like using the temperature as well as just controlling the color directly. We can come to the temperature scroll option down here, and again, as we go lower, it gets warmer, higher, it gets a bit cooler, essentially moving between the yellow and blue spectrum of color there and then do other things as well, play around with the exponential height fog. The skylight you don't need to wear about too much that won't make any very obvious changes right now. Sky atmosphere, you can change a lot of information, which will be very clear and give some nice immediate feedback here, and likewise with the clouds as well. Just a case, again, just to emphasize no solid outcome that we're looking for here. Just get comfortable with different elements of the editor and the different features which are coming in. We'll have a whole section a little bit later on lighting and setting up a level using all of these in more specific and structured ways. But I just want you to get familiar with some of the options that you have available. 11. 10 - Challenge Answer: Okay, so we are looking at the first main challenge of the course. As I've mentioned previously, these challenges are really, really important. I think these are one of the most important things that you'll kind of get from these types of structured courses are proper challenges that at least somewhat set you in a direction to source the answer for yourself. A lot of the questions that I've provided are within the content that has already been covered just to allow you to recap and make sure that the topics are making sense and solidify some of that information. So for example, the first challenge that we're looking at now, P one was just creating some new projects. One thing I'd mention is if you have created a bunch of new projects. The goal there was to get you looking at the different templates and other options that you may not have otherwise considered that you have access to. Obviously, be sure to tidy those up if you know that you're never going to use them, do go back and delete them. Find way you've stored them. They can start taking up a fair amount of space as well. But just things like that to get you familiar and comfortable working with the Epic launcher and revising what we've done. Challenge for what we're looking at now is the physics part of the challenge. This is something that I haven't covered in the topics, and again, I've purposely included those just to get you thinking and trying to discover things by yourself. You won't always be given a task or be trying to do something which is documented. Most things unreal, unfortunately not documented, but it might be outside of the remit of tutorials or things like that, you can find and source online. So you will need to get comfortable problem solving certain aspects of what you're looking to create. So the answer to this one, I didn't want to leave people completely stuck if this didn't make sense, though. All I was really saying is that we're going to create either a new structure or a part of the structure or a shape and apply physics to it. Again, this was really to show how simple this is to do in unreal. One of the reasons I wanted to create a curved roof here is this gives us a nice way to test this out. So I'm going to come up here, we'll create a new shape. A nice one to test would be a sphere because we'll be able to see this rolling, and I'm going to move this up a little bit. We'll press end to drop this down. And activating physics inside of Unreal is the core element of what we're looking at here, very, very simple, which is going to scroll down. We can see here, we have something called simulate physics, and this is one of those things. If you don't know where you're looking for something or how to do it, everything is contextual inside of unreal. There's a search bar on any object that you're working with, and we know that we're looking for a couple of things. So we want physics to be enabled. So if I was a new user and I knew that I roughly had an idea of what I wanted to achieve, but I didn't know where it was, we come in here, we'll search for physics, and we can see that we have the simulate physics tick option just here. If true, the body will simulate physics, if not, it's fixed, it's not moving. So everything at the moment, if we come and press play is not moving. So we can see that's exactly what we have to start with. So we want to change that. So if we simulate the physics here, and we press play. We can then see what happens. I can see, I can just make out up there that the ball is indeed rolling down. That's all we needed to do. And we now have a ball which simulates physics. You found out how to do that hopefully by yourself, just to get you comfortable with looking for things. And with that, you may have also found that you can do other things like changing the mass, the linear damping, and things like that so that we can control how it reacts against things in the world. So with more mass, it would look as though it's falling faster as it would be heavier, different damping options, we can change how quickly it comes to a resting point and things like that. We can add locks to this, so we could have it only roll in the Z, which means we wouldn't allow it to move forward, back, left or right, and something to do when you're testing this. So if we allow this only to move in the Z, for example, it will fall down. But obviously, it won't then roll down the roof because we've told it not to move in the x or y location. And if we wanted to view this and we didn't need to keep flying around in view mode, we can press the cssings option just here. We'll go to simulate rather than play So we've got the play and selected viewpoint, which would lock us into playing in here. Play and editor. So this is that new window that pops up. But we do have the option to just simulate, which will play from where we're looking, and it makes it much easier to quickly gauge the changes that we've just made. And we can change things at runt as well, so we can untick these That should, we might need to give this a little bit of a jolt that will then allow it to start rolling in different directions. So just to get used to that. Another thing that new developers can get a little bit stuck with when getting started with Unreal, is if you do press play, and you're wondering why you're not able to move around, you do need to click into the window. It's not very clear. But when we press play, we still have our mouse hovering around. So until we left or right click into the window, we won't have control to have that WSD movement. So just be aware of that. As you can see here, another thing that this has just jogged my memory. This is that playground experimental time that I want you to start figuring out all of these quirks and features of unreal, which will be useful just just to be aware of. So one thing I've done there is I was in play mode. I have turned off, if you remember, I turned off the lock. I'm going to look into this very quickly to demonstrate this again. Just going to press F to focus in on the sphere again. I'm going to come up here and go back into simulate mode. And if you remember that I was in play mode a moment ago, so at runtime, we've got the stop option, which means we're in runtime, and I gave you the option to lock the x and the y. Unticked that, moved this around, and the sphere started moving again. So quite useful to be aware of. Although that works now, do note that as soon as we exit this, I've pressed escape to exit, this lock is reapplied. That's just taught me that if I was new to unreal, that's just taught me that anything that I do at runtime isn't saved when we leave runtime. So if we wanted to unlock the position on the x and the y, we need to do that outside, so in editor mode, go back into play mode, and then that will work again. So just little things like this, I want you to start picking up on and getting familiar with. 12. 11 - Importing Assets: With our first project created. And hopefully we're getting a little bit more comfortable at this point navigating the Unreal engine or the Unreal editor interface. We're now going to want to start looking at bringing in some custom content into the projects for us to work with and begin building out and fleshing out our projects. We'll be looking at the most basic and one of the most common uses in this video, and that will be importing assets directly. This will be the sort of thing that you'll be working with if you create your own assets, if you're working with three D modeling in packages like Mya three DS MAX or Blender, or if you're creating two D images through photoshop or affinity suites and things like that. Need to take the assets, the content that you're creating in those packages and bring them into your unreal project, and that's what we'll be doing now. The next step that we're going to take, I would highly recommend, we're going to create a new project again. This is one of those good practices that's worth getting into in any project. This happens quite often in the development environment. You try not to have all of the assets and the things that you may be working with in your core project because that will bloat things out very quickly. Instead, what we do is we'll have a somewhat throwaway project that we'll create now. This will be a holder for your asset. We can test things out in here, and then we can move the assets that we actually want to keep across to the project that we want to work in and deploy. Keeps your main project much smaller, easier to maintain, and just easier to work with. I'll just run through the process of creating a new project very quickly, just to show you that nothing will be different from previously. So we'll launch the engine version we want to work with. I'll take the same approach I did previously, so I'm going to go to the game section. I'm going to leave this as a blank project. We can leave all of the default properties as they are. We don't need anything in here. This is just a holder for our assets. Make sure that you've provided a project location, and I'll name this one Bootcamp asset holder. Just to indicate exactly what this project is for. We'll quite likely get rid of this later when we've decided what we want to work with. I'll show you how we can take just the select few assets that we want from one project to another. Potentially, this can save you from having tens of gigabytes of data in your core project. If you only wanted, let's say, for example, we're using a HD environment asset pack, and we just want a couple of trees from that. We don't need the whole landscape and all of the foliage and the water details. We can take just that tree and the information related to it into our project, which may be just megabytes opposed to the gigabytes of the rest of the package. So that's why we do this. I'll create this and get the new project loaded. With this loaded, I'm just going to take a very quick approach to get back to a similar place what we have with our other more permanent project. I'll come down to the content draw, create a new folder in here. Call this one boot camp asset Holder. And now any content that I'm responsible for creating or bringing in manually will be placed in here. Any plug ins that we get from the marketplace that we'll look at a little bit later, they will all have their own folder structure. And again, this will just help to visualize and show how naming conventions and folder structures will actually be a very, very useful consideration. In this case, I also want to get back to a similar state that we had previously, mostly empty maps. I'm going to press Control in N. We'll create a new basic map. Then if we press control ins to save this inside of our boot camp holder, I'll create a new folder here, I'm just right clicking, creating a new folder called Maps. We'll double click in here to make sure we're in the right folder, and we'll name this map main. Then a similar thing easy to forget, but we can go to edit project settings, so everything that we've seen before, maps in modes, I'll just dock this over here as well, and we'll go to the editor startup map and make this one main. Very similar to the project we're working with our geometry shapes, and we'll come back to that one later when we know what assets we want to work with. But this is just a nice way to set up a project because again, when we come back in, bring in new assets, close the project later, open it back up, we'll be in our default main map. Okay, so that was a brief aside just to reinforce the importance of keeping your project somewhat separated, if you can, keeping a tidy folder structure and making your projects that you want to work with potentially for months to years, that much more maintainable, easy to dive back in, find what you're working with, and just keep some semblance of control in what can become quite a manic and frantic work environment. Jumping over to a web browser, then. The next thing is we want to actually find a way to source the assets. So on the assumption that you may not be a two D or three D artist, you may not have the skill set to make your own content, and you may not have any colleagues or other developers that you know who are able to provide assets for you. Another option that we can take is to go to websites like it dot IO. We also have options like Sketch Fab or art station. There are many third party asset sites which you can access and download paid or free content to use within your project. Just going to show off it dot IO here. It's a nice easy one to work with. There's some good quality things, and it's very simple to find some free assets just for testing purposes. So let's say that we wanted to work with some three D assets. We can go to browse at the top left hand side here. We'll go to assets, which is our asset location for game development. Obviously IO is known as a game website, so you can download games here is the core feature, but it has started branching out into providing assets and things like that. So if we go to the asset section, the first thing I've just mentioned is that we may want to work with some three D assets, so we can go down to styles. We will search by three D. And also, I don't want to pay for this. It's just a testing ground that we have going at the moment. I just want to see the process of getting these assets into the project. So I'll also go to the free section here, so we'll filter by three D and free. That way, anything that we download now, we won't need to pay for. You may need to sign in and sign up if you don't have an account, but the accounts here are free to use. And then it's just a case of finding something that we want to work with. So we've got things like our character packs here. So vehicle packs, different types of prototype impacts can be very useful. Pretty much anything, just find something that you think looks interesting to work with, and you can download this and just test this in your project. This is the reason that we're making a somewhat throwaway project, is that you may find that a lot of these don't work. They're not created in a usable way for the project that you have in mind, or they just may not look as good in engine or have the features that you expected. So it's very simple to just throw those away or get rid of the project a little bit later when we're done with our prototyping and gaining the asset stage. All you'd need to do here, let's say, for example, the K Kits are pretty good. We can come in here. We would go down to download. Find the pack that you want to use. K does provide a few paid versions as well. But if we go down to the download section, and you can choose your tier just here. If you choose free, we can just say no, thanks. We'll take me to the downloads that will give you the free version, which just provides fewer assets in the pack. We'll download that and store a place to use this. Now, the K kit, they are pretty decent assets, but they're not rigged or set up very well to work with the unrelen. So, for that reason, what I'll do is with this course, I'll package some assets that I know work in a more ideal way for our projects. It is actually provided by K. It's just some of the assets from one of his kits. I've needed to make some changes to the scaling and the object types. I'll give you a zip called assets. Just be sure to unzip that folder, and then inside of here, we'll have some meshes, sound, and a texture just for demonstration purposes. This isn't really meant to be a topic about formatting or updating the assets that you're working with. Hopefully, we're getting something which is usable anyway. This is more about getting this into the unreal engine. So I just wanted to provide this so you can easily follow along. What I'd recommend is if you wanted to try and get things from it or sketch ab or wherever you're comfortable downloading things from, feel free to give that a go. But also consider just using this asset pack that I'm providing just so that you can very quickly follow along and see the core elements of getting this into your project. Back inside of the unreal engine then, this is the main and final step, and this is how simple it can be to get assets into your project. What I'd recommend is with the asset pack that I've curated just to set things up, as I've mentioned, in a way that I know works well with Unreal. I'm going to be in this folder here where we can see the assets folder. And what we can do is if we go to the content drawer, make sure the content drawers open, and then we can just drag the assets folder inside of our boot camp asset Holder folder structure just here. So our custom content that we'll place just here. This will bring in all of the assets. It will also keep them inside of their folder structure that I've set up. All of the meshes will be in a mesh folder, signs will be in assigned folder, and the texture will be in its texture folder. In the background, what you may not have seen is a small pop up window has just appeared, and this is just asking if we wanted to make any changes to the FBX. So these are the three D meshes. We can do things like telling it that they're skeletal meshes, which would be incorrect at this moment because skeletal meshes are essentially meshes, but with a bone structure. We can change the default scaling, the uniform scale, the provide a translation offset. We don't want to do any of this. Generally, I think 99% of the time, unless you have a very good reason and you know what you're doing, we tend to just leave this as default. So what I'll do is I'll say to import everything. I'll just let Unreal handle this, and you can see that it's bringing all of that into our project. We'll get a small pop up window here confirming that's all been successful. We can just close this because it's exactly the same as the content drawer. There were some warnings there just saying that it didn't have smoothing groups and some other issues were off with the three D meshes. They'll still work perfectly fine, but this is one of those things. It's more of an artist's topic to go into their three D package and fix and update those to work properly with a game engine. Not really what we're looking at, but just be aware, those were just warnings, and everything will still work perfectly fine. And then the main thing here, we have a nice folder structure. So inside of our custom project based folder, we have our assets, and then we can easily find our meshes, sounds or textures. That's it, so you can see with that. We now have everything brought into the project. If we shift and select these three, for example, this is a nice dummy that we have here. In fact, I'll grab all of these with the word dummy. They all have the correct transform offset. If I bring this in, it will actually create one single structure. But these are multiple meshes all placed together to make a cool training dummy here. If we double click into any of these, this will open up a static mesh viewer. What I'll do is, I'll always take this tab that appears here, and I'll just dock this at the top part of the view just so that everything is nicely lined across, and this just gives us some information about the static mesh. The material that it holds, the thing which is helping kind of visually represent this object, and then some other information we'll get to a little bit later on things like collision and how this will interact with the world. So this is our static mesh editor. If we go into the signs just to make sure that these work, you'll know that these signs have worked correctly if you can play them and provide a demo of these signs in your editor. So that's all come in correctly as well. And this just allows us to press play here and we can test what this sounds like in engine. And then the texture, this will be the colors and the information which is passed along to the material again to help visually represent the assets. One final thing before wrapping up. If you're using this asset pack that I'd recommend playing around with just because as I've mentioned, everything is set to work properly, and I've tested this to make sure that everything works. I'll give you a very quick sneak peek in two materials. We'll go into this in much more depth later, but we can stop the assets that we bring in from all having this plain boring white color based on them. So can bring in a barrel. We've got our dummy just here. Let's look at this table of detail as well. All of this is looking pretty cool, but it is just currently white. Now, one thing to note is that all of these down here, we can see in the right hand side in the details panel, they are indeed sharing a material, which is great because it means if we update this material to show the correct information, all of the assets will work properly as well. Way that we can do this. I'm just going to double click on this material like on here, and this will bring us into the material editor. If you wanted to know where this is in the content drawer, we can go to meshes. And when we imported this, you can see a prototype texture, which is actually a material, is just the default name they used. This was created and applied to all of the meshes for us because the Unreal engine knows that all of the meshes need at least a basic material to work with to visualize the information. Get a little bit more specific. The reason this is called prototype texture is because in the three D modeling tool that K would have used when creating these. He just simply named his material slot prototype texture there, and that's been brought across to the Unreal enum. Now the way that we can change this at the moment, we have a plain white color here, which is exactly why this is showing white in the examples panel. If we double click into this, we can change this to a different color. If we make this purple, we'll hit apply, we'll go back to Maine, everything is now purple. That's really all the materials are doing. We're providing it some visual information, and it's mapping that across the meshes. Very quick thing that we can do here to make this look as we intend, though, is we want to base the colors from the texture. So we'll go into our texture folder, we'll grab our texture here, and we can just click and drag this into the material editor, and this will be some texture information, which has been mapped again in that three D package across the meshes, and Unrel engine understands how to work with that information to line up the correct part of this visual texture with the three D unwrapping, called a UV map of the meshes that we're working with. Really, all that we want to do at this point is we're going to replace this flat solid color, so we can actually just delete this. We're going to replace it with our texture information. So if we pull from the red green and blue, and we plug this into the base color. This little pin here, we can pull from this and plug this into base color. You can see this sphere now has that texture information, that image wrapped around the sphere, and it'll do that for our meshes that we're working with as well. We can, if we wanted, pull information from the red, the green or the blue channels individually. But in this case, we want the combination of that, which is making up the full texture. We want that to be wrapped across our meshes. So if we hit apply and we'll just save this to make sure that everything's been stored, we'll go back to Maine, and you can see that that information has now been mapped across. And again, we will go more in depth into what textures are doing, the term I used UV mapping and materials and how lot of that comes into play in a later topic, but I just wanted to give you a quick insight there because if you wanted to start working and playing around with these assets, they're now all kind of fully set up to work and look as intended. And it was a very quick change that we can make. 13. Fab: In this topic, we'll be taking a look at the new fab store. So this is the replacement for the Epic unreal marketplace, just for clarity. I wanted to mention that this is being included post the completion of the course. So the course was fully recorded whilst the marketplace was the main and only storefront provided by Epic for the Unreal engine. Most of the content in the upcoming sections will still be relevant. There will be some things where we mention the marketplace. And you'll just need to replace that with navigating over to Fab. In this topic, I'll be showing you how to work with and navigate Fab, showing you some of the differences and how you can still gain assets in a very similar way. I just wanted to mention, as well, some of the assets that were made fully free and available have also unfortunately been stripped back. It doesn't mean you won't be able to follow along with the course content. You may just need to rework your scenes and maybe try to customize them a little bit more. To be honest, though, that is really the way that the course is intended. You'll get much more from this if you are working from your own concepts and trying to create your own ideal outcome for the environment that you're trying to create. Trying to work more from your own inspiration will allow you to do a lot more trial and error and really learn things much, much faster. But I didn't want to leave you in the dark. So we're going to go through fab and I'll show you the new working processes. If you do need to come back to this later, when I'm mentioning things like the marketplace, I'll go into as much depth as possible now, so you can always come back here later and see where the overlaps would have been from the original approach to now working with the Fab storefront. So the first thing is inside of the Epic Launcher. We now have this fab tab at the top. This used to be the marketplace. This was actually where you would have browsed the marketplace in the Epic launcher. The only option that we have now is to actually start exploring, you can see down here, taking us to the webpage, and this will take us to the Fab storefront. So click on this and it will take you to Fab. With the fab page loaded, just a few things which are now slightly different. So we still need to sign in to make sure that you've signed into your account at the top. This will still be with your Epic store account. Some of the things to note down here one of the things that Epic is trying to do is make this a somewhat kind of global marketplace, covering things like Unity, the Unreal Engine, and Fortnite. It will also be including assets from places like Sketchfab directly as they've purchased Sketchfab and ArtStation. So you'll see a lot more generic assets working or available to purchase, as well. You can scroll through this as usual. You have your different categories that we can look through. You can also search specifically based on the engine that you want your assets to work in. Some things which have been mentioned in the past were the monthly free rotations. This has now been limited to a limited time free rotation. I believe this is at the moment every two weeks. So do come here, similar to previous approaches that would have been mentioned in some of the upcoming topics, you simply come into the asset that you want to store on your account permanently for free. So once you've added this to your account, you can use that indefinitely. You'd come to the section on the right hand side, add this to your account, purchase it for $0, essentially, and then that is yours free to keep and use in your projects. So that's just to say, do come back here and check this every couple of weeks to see if there's anything that you may want to use and add to your account. And then beyond that, it's a very simple process. There are a few extra hoops to jump through with the new fab store front approach compared to the marketplace, but it's still relatively simple to work with. So as an example, if I wanted the shrine of free props here, the first thing that we always want to do if we want this to sync directly with the UnreLEngine, we just want to make sure it has this symbol here, so the unreal logo. That will ensure that it's set up and ready to work with our unreal projects immediately. We can come and we can click the add to my library button here. That's now been added and saved to my library, and I can view this in the launcher in the same way that you'll see again in the upcoming content. So this is really the main big change here is that we're storing the assets to our online account, so we now own this, but to make use of it, we're going to want to back on over to the Epic launcher. So back inside of the launcher, we now want to go to library, and we may need to if you don't already see it in your library section down here, so where all of your assets are stored, we may need to click this fab reload button, so allow us to refresh Fab. This is just synching all of the content that we have stored in our account and making sure that it's accessible and available to work with in the epic launcher. So the thing that I've just downloaded or added to my account was the shrine Sci Fi Props. So I'll just see if I can find that here, and we can see it's now synced over. So the Sci fi shrine props is available. And we can add this to the project in the same way that I've shown you with the other processes working with the marketplace. So as an example, we just click the add to project. Find, for example, our boot camp project and then tell it to add this into the project that we want to work and because that has been confirmed to be specifically created to work with the Unreal engine marketplace or the Unreal engine projects, all of the textures and materials and things will already be set up to work as intended. So that's why when we're working from Fab, ideally, we'll be trying to find things with the unreal logo here, just making sure that it's unreal ready. We can, of course, if we go back to discover or search through things we can, of course, add non unreal engine specific projects to our account, which is perfectly fine. It just means that you'll probably have to download this locally to your desktop or somewhere local to your system, and you'll need to go through the process of manually importing the assets or the content into your project. And then you'll probably have to set things up like the textures and the materials by hand. So it's not the end of the world. It's just it'll take a little bit longer, but it does mean the positive that we do have a lot more access to a wider range of assets and features potentially that we can bring into our projects. The final thing that I wanted to mention is what I found to be the best way to work with this is, for example, if I knew I wanted something which was unreal ready, so something I could just download and would work immediately inside of my project. I'm going to click this big Unreal button here. That will automatically add a filter so that it's only going to show me things which are ready to run inside of an unreal project. You'll notice that we can find Quick Assets. So this is another thing which has changed, and I'll go through that in just a moment. But we could go into the Quicksassets, again, add this to library, and it will show in exactly the same way as I've mentioned before. Another thing which may not have been clear from what I've just run through, if you're adding this to your library digitally, so on the fab storefront, if it doesn't have the unreal logo, because it hasn't been made to work with the Unreal engine specifically, it also will not appear in your fab library. So if you're ever wondering why something isn't appearing here in your epic launcher, it's because it probably wasn't built to work with Unreal, just so that that's clear. But to go back to the filtering, the other thing that we could do is we could search for things like unreal specific assets, and we could search for these based on free assets. If you're just looking for something to flesh out a project, and let's say that we're looking for something for the environments. So we can find all of the three environments which are built to work with the Unreal engine directly. So it's still a fairly nice, easy way to look for things. As I mentioned, just potentially a few extra steps to go through, but it's still relatively simple to work with. So that is Fab. That is the Fab marketplace through the web browser and linking that to the epic launch. Just to put things further in context, when I've mentioned that you're adding things to your account to your library, if you go to the M library section up here, this is essentially what I meant. So although you can have all of the assets stored in your library, so they're linked to you and your digital account, as I mentioned, certain things may not be unreal compatible, which means you'll only be able to find them here, and you'll have to download them manually and work with them that way rather than through the epicormchair. Jumping over to the Unreal Engine project, you'll see a lot more of this as you go through the course. So spoilers alert. The main change that you're going to see here, though, is that if we go to Window, I'll be showing you how to use a little bit later on the Quixle Bridge. So this has changed a little bit, too. In certain versions, it seems like this has changed completely. So you can still browse the Quickle bridge here, but it seems to want to take us over to Fab in the end anyway. So you can still find things like certain assets to work with. And you can try and add these to your Quickle account, again, download them and add them to the project, as you'll see in some upcoming content. Depending on the engine version that you're working with, though, this may redirect you to Fab, in which case, it's a very similar process. You can just download it from Fab instead and add it to the project through the launcher. Now, I don't want to go too in depth in these processes right now because this has quite literally been changing on an almost biweekly basis where the workflow is changing quite quickly as Epic are making changes to the store front and how it's all work. So what I would recommend is depending on when you're watching this, it could have changed another three or four times. Just have a lookout for some of Epic's most recent announcements and maybe documentation or tutorals that they're providing on how to use Quick and fab based on when you're watching this. But these are just some of the changes to look out for. Now, another thing you may have noticed is that I have a fab button here. If you don't have that at the moment, what you want to do is come to the Edit tab here and go to plug ins. Search for the Fab plugin. And this is very much how Quickle used to work where we just had a bridge from our project to the Quickle site, and we could get things in automatically. This is kind of like a fab bridge, I suppose. So take the fab plugin on, let the project restart, and then you'll have the same option that I have just here under Window. So we're going to go to Window and open the fab bridge. I'll call it that for now. This is very similar to that web browser version that we saw just a moment ago. The main difference is that we can now kind of bypass the whole epic launcher side of things. So as an example, if I find some of the content that would work with my projects maybe something relatively small, we can go to this drop down section here, go to all of the content inside of my library. And I can find, let's say, those Sci fi shrine props again, just because I already have those and it won't take up too much space. Now what we can do from here is that this will be keeping context of the project you've opened it in. So in this case, it would be my boot camp project. And if I say add to project, this should bring this, you can see here is downloading it and bringing it straight in to my active project. So nice and simple. So again, that somewhat streamlines the process here, as long as you're happy to go through this fab bridge launcher type thing on a per project basis. And what we should see is we're going to have a folder, for the sci fi shrine props hopefully being spawned just in here to the left hand side. There we go. So we can see SF shrineeV five and all of this, just to really reinforce this because it's made to work directly with the NRL engine, as I mentioned, all of the textures and the materials are set up and ready to go. And as soon as I drag this into the world, it's looking as expected. So nice and easy. Depending on how you wanted to approach working with the new fab storefront, it can have more or less. Steps involved to getting this working. But these are the main things. So as I said, you may need to come back here for sort of higher context when we introduce things like the old marketplace and how you may get assets from that into your account and then into your project. So you may need to come back here a little bit later to bring this back into context. And as I said, you may have to kind of rework the assets that I was recommending we work with to build out this cave. Some of those may still be available for free. Some of them may have been removed, unfortunately. It won't mean you can't complete the course, but you may just not end up with the same scene that I have, which, like I've mentioned before, is actually probably the better way to approach these types of courses. It will force you to really consider what you can work with, trying to source the best assets to fit the goal that you have in mind, and just get you much more hands on with some extra trial and which will get you learning and understanding the Unreal engine that much faster. So this is just a very quick rundown on Fab. As I've mentioned, there are some other features that are probably worth knowing, but I'm very conscious that within a week or two, those features may have been removed, moved somewhere else, and the video would be irrelevant and outdated again. So just to say, if any of the interface or buttons are in a different place, try and keep up to date with what Epica announcing on their official pages, the documentation, and things like that for a deeper insight into fab Quixle if that gets moved somewhere else, because it feels like that is moving as well, may be somewhat shifting for the upcoming few months as they're trying to get fab working properly. 14. 12 - Unreal Marketplace: Well now look at another common way that we can bring assets into the projects that we're working with. And that will be using the Unreal engine marketplace. So I'm back inside of the Epic launcher. I'm just going to move over to the marketplace tab here. And as we did previously, we'll get some three D assets just because they're the easiest thing to visualize, but we can do this with pretty much anything, and we'll start with the free content just so that anybody can follow along. So do keep in mind, as I've mentioned, in the introduction section, it's worth checking in here every month, just to see what has been made free for the month that happens in the first week of each month. And if you add these to your account, just remember, you do get to keep these for ever. So even if you don't need them right now, they may be something useful to work with later. I won't use these just because people may be following along at different points, though, and if they exit that free rotation, they will be paid assets again in the future. So if you don't get them when they're free, they will be chargeable in the future. So what we'll do instead is we'll move up to the top of the marketplace window here. We're going to go to the free section, and I'll just navigate down to the permanently free collection. So these are assets that at some point, epic have potentially paid a kind of royalty charge to the creators, and they're now just made freely available forever. So that means that you can come in and you can get these whenever you wanted. As well as showing some examples of the more visual assets here. If we just scroll down a bit, we can also get things like VFX. For example, you can get some realistic starter VFX packs here. We can come in and all we want to do is if you don't already have these, it will just tell you to buy this. It will add this to your account for free, so you're still kind of buying it, but you're gaining access to it for free. And then once you've taken that step, we just tell it to add this to a project. In this case, I've just filed down to asset holder. This is where I'd want to place this. We will click on this and we will just t it to add this to the project that we're working with. Remember, at the moment we're putting this inside of the asset holder. So we'll just had it to add this to the project. I will do that automatically. Then if we jump back on over to our project, what we should see is we'll have a new folder down here called Realistic starter BFX PAC volume two. Way that you tend to work with assets from the marketplace is there's a very strict rule set they have to follow. Again, the naming conventions are brilliant here because if we get used to doing this in our own project, it will be very easy to work with other plug ins or projects that are in development inside of Unreal because a lot of people have adapted these recommendations. For example, we can see here, we have a folder with the name of the asset pack. This gives us a name space specific to the assets we've downloaded. Inside of this, we have a meshes folder, very similar to what we've got here. We have a particle folder, a text folder, it's very easy to navigate because we're getting used to that framework that set up already. Then like we've created with our maps folder as well. We have a maps folder in here, and this is quite often in the plugins or the assets. This is where you can have a look at an overview or the example map of all of the assets, the meshes, audio examples that may be set up, and in this case, the VFX examples which have been set up in a demo level. I'm just going to save the changes that I've made to my main map so that we can keep this if we want to come back a bit later. But we can take a quick look at the overview of the VFX here. This is just a bunch of particles all laid out for us so that we can see at a quick glance exactly what they're doing and how they're working and if we wanted to work with any of these. If we go back over for another quick example, just going to go back one page here, so we'll go back to the free forever. Let's quickly add in some sound effects as well, so I'll add the interface sound effects. We'll just add this to the project in the same way. Again, I've just filtered out so that only one project is showing here, so we'll look for the asset holder, and we'll add this to the project as well. Then if we go back one more time, I'm just going to pick an environment. Now, I know just from trial and error, that this one, although it looks quite nice, doesn't currently work in Unreal engine five. So what I'll do instead is I'm going to take the stylized Egypt just because I know this currently works. All of the materials and the shaders are fully updated and working for 5.3. So again, I'm going to click to add this to the project. Go to the asset holder example here. And then we'll just add this to the project again. All of those changes made, I'm just going to hop back into the project here. We can start closing down the windows if you have these at the top and you're not using them. I'm just middle mouse clicking or clicking the Mouse W to remove these. And just to demonstrate again, what we are left with no very clearly here, we have the folder that we're responsible for named after the project that we're working in, and then we have all of the assets that we've just imported laid out inside of that same folder structure. So inside of stylized Egypt, again, we have a maps folder and inside of the maps folder, we can come in here and we can look at the example of the level laid out and set up and kind of ready to work with. These, of course, are going to be great if you wanted to come in and see how levels like this are built is using what is called a modular approach. So every part of this is mostly made of small chunks of reusable meshes. So rather than having specific structures, which you could only really use once. You can very easily take these because they're modular, duplicate the mit, and have something looking slightly different in different parts of the level. So a nice way to just start familiarizing yourself with how these processes and levels like this may be constructed. Then another thing that we can look at is our sound effects, just to see how these differ a little bit from the more visual options. So, in this case, they haven't provided a map. There's no walk round. Some of them will give you a walk round where you can walk up to spatial audio and things like that to see how they would work at runtime. With these, they're just simple cues or Wab files. And again, we can press the play option here and we'd be able to listen to these playing in the editor if your signs enabled. So that's how we can find the assets. If you don't already have anything added to your account, that's how we can use the marketplace, find some assets, add them to our account, and then add those to our project. I'm just hopping back over to the Epic launcher very quickly for one other demonstration here. So everything that I've found there just happened to be project specific. So you can see here we've been doing things like clicking them and telling it to add it to a specific project. So they're project bound asset packs. And most of these will say add to project as you can see here. Some of them will actually be an example project itself. So for example, this one, the accessible design with Unreal tells you that we're going to actually create a project. So what this will do, if we click this, it will create a brand new project at the location that you specify in the Unreal engine version that you tell it to work with. So this will be a brand new project with a full kind of feature set ready to go. So that is one other option. An option here as well. The UI navigation, for example, is installed to an engine version. So if we click on this, we get a drop down and we can tell it which version we want to install this to. The way that this one works is that you install this once, and then any project that you create, you would have access to make use of that plug in. This one doesn't actually support the version that I'm using. As an example, to show how this would work, I'll add the achievement system instead. This is another install to engine version, so we'll choose 5.3. We'll install this to 5.3. We'll let that do its thing. If that done, we don't really get any other heads up or anything. But if we return back to our project in the same engine version that this is in 5.3, we can go to edit plug ins, and we can see the ones that we've installed here under the installed section. What we should see is the achievement system here. You can see some of the other plugins that I've installed to the engine, and all we need to do is just tick these on restart now, and that would install that to this project. Do that because I think I need to restart the project for that new one to show here. Okay, so I've just restarted the project that we're working on. You can see there that Installed is now showing six, do be aware if you've got your project open and you're installing something to an engine version, you will need to restart the project for that to show, but we can now see that the achievement system is ready for us to use. Lot of the engine based plug ins work in different ways. For example, the one that I've just enabled here, darker Nodes, this will actually change the visuals and how Unreal looks. This is more of a visual update. It is like a theme applied to the general editor and the blueprint notes, whereas the achievement system will give us new functionalities and features that we can access in blueprints and C plus plus. With these, you'd always want to take a moment to read through the documentation, just to see how these different plug ins are working, but that's all we really need to know for now is that we have different types of plugins, some which will be added directly to the project, some which will create a new project for us, and some which are installed to the current version of the engine that we're working in, and we can access these in any project as long as we enable them through the plug in option just here. As with anything, take some time between topics now. You've seen how to bring in assets that you're responsible for, you may be creating these yourself, or you may be getting given them by colleagues or other developers, you know, and you've seen how to source content from the unreled marketplace officially. So have a browse through the marketplace, see what's available and start bringing in different assets, and take some time to get comfortable with working with some of those assets to see what you can make. 15. 13 - Migrating Assets: We I'd be taking a quick look at working with Unreal and migrating content. So this is something that Unreal provides a very useful tool built into the Unreal engine. This is what I alluded to earlier where we can take just the core assets from either an asset pack or a bunch of content we already have inside of our project and move just the important things to another project. As a quick aside, we do have other options on getting things out of a project and storing it somewhere else. But if you know that you want the asset to be moved from one project to another inside of Unreal, then migrating is always the safest option. Just to show you a quick example of the other ways that we do have to get things out of Unreal. Let's say that we really liked our dummy that we have just here. We can find this back in the content drawer. I know this is in meshes. We can go to the dummy, and we can right click on this. We can go to asset actions, and we can export this. This will ask us where we want to export the file. The file is a type of FBX, so we'll end up with an FBX file on our desktop or a selected place on the windows or operating system of your choice, you'll have that file that you can use back inside of Blender, Myer, and so on. And that will work with everything that has initially come from a third party package like Photoshop, via two D images, Blender Myer, three DS 43d, your audio files, all of these standard file types, so we can do the same thing here, we can go to an audio file, assets actions, and then export these, and that would give us a dotWAV file. And then, likewise, if we do the same here for the texture. If we export this, that would give us a tiger file TDA. It won't work with things like blueprints. We're unable to because they're binary information. So when we get to coding a little bit later and we create our first blueprint, anything which is unreal engine specific, so created in and for the Unreal engine, we usually won't have the option to export these because nothing else would know how to use that anyway. When it comes to migrating though which is the core topic here. As I mentioned, the main thing is that we're using this as a testing ground. This is our project to play around with things, see what works, see what we like, and then we can use just the content that we want to work with permanently in our main project. We can move just that across. So as an example I just gave, let's say that we've looked through all of K's content. Everything in the here is looking great, but for whatever reason, we only need or want this test dummy. Rather than bringing over the hundred assets or whatever are currently in here. We don't need all of the tables and things like that again. What we would do is we could grab. So I'm just clicking and then shift selecting all of these, the core elements of the dummy here. We're going to right click on this, and we'll go to asset actions again, and we're going to tell this to migrate the asset. And this is where the magic comes in. It's telling you here that the five static mesh pieces that we want to take across are also linked to a texture. And our material. So Unreal is aware that if we move these across without those two other assets, then our dummy isn't going to look as intended. So this is really handy. But what it does also do is it stops us from needing to bring across all of the other assets. You can see that we're going to get a folder structure. We're going to get the texture, the material, and the five measures that we wanted. So this is the minimal amount of content that we can work with to have everything still looking correct in our other project, which is pretty cool. So what we can do is we do want all of this to be included, so we'll say, here, that will pop up a new explore window here. And what we need to do is navigate to the other project. So this is our original project that we created. Mine was called Boot camp, and remember we're currently in boot camp asset holder. So you need to navigate to the other project that you want these assets to be moved into. And then very important here. You need to remember this. This is very, very important is that this migrate process will be looking for the content folder. So always make sure that you're moving things into the content folder inside of the other project. So at the moment, I'm in the boot camp folder. We want to double click into content, and this is where we want to store the content that we're moving across. Again, very important. If you don't do that, you can potentially have things not being migrated properly. Certain assets might be forgotten or lost because it is looking for that specific folder structure for you. So making sure you're in the content folder, we'll click on select folder here. Then that will do the magic for us. So we saw something pop up very briefly, and that was it migrating the content across. And to check that that's worked, all we want to do is we're going to go back into the Epic launcher and find the other project that we've migrated that content to. O, of course, if you know where that is on your system, you can just click on the U project and open it that way. Just demonstrate that because I don't think I've mentioned that up to this point. So if you know where your project is on your system, mine is in the projects Unreal Ford slash courses. Inside of the root folder of the Boot camp project, you have this dot U project icon here. It's kind of like a dot. It just runs everything. So we double click on this, and this will open the project for you. So if you don't like opening the Epic launcher, it's not the quickest piece of software to open up, you can start managing and finding all of your projects locally on your system, and that will open everything for you. So opening the other project, what we should be expecting is there will be another folder structure, and again, just another kind of recap in reiteration on the importance of folder structures here. It's now very clear what we have. So we have our boot camp folder, which is everything that we want to be working with specifically in this project. And then we have our assets and plugins and things like that they've come externally in this second folder here. In this case, what I would do in a production environment is because we've already confirmed, we've checked that these are good quality assets. These are looking and performing as we want them to in our project. What I'd actually do in this case is I would move this assets folder into my main folder here, so I'm just going to drag and select that. We'll say move here and just move everything across. This is just a nice way again to make sure that everything that we want to be production ready and in the final product will be in our main folder structure here. And then we can start getting rid of the assets and the bundles and things like that that we have either tested or brought in. And we just know exactly what should be packaged in the final version them. But the main thing was just to test that these are working. So with that moved across, we can shift select, all of these again, drag this into the world. And we now have a cool looking dummy s inside of our structure just here. Mentioned that change that we've made to the material, adding the texture. All of that's been brought across successfully as well. This is the the magic with migrating, is it means that we can avoid missing data and errors while still keeping the amount of content being moved from one project to another to a minimum. One thing I'd probably do here as well, if I was being very particular is inside of the assets folder, I'd create another new folder here just because you will have noticed we have a material nested among our meshes. So I'll create a new folder named materials, and then from meshes, I'm just going to drag that prototype texture here. We can see that's of type material at the bottom. We'll just drag that across here. So it's in the correct folder structure. So now we have our meshes in the meshes folder, materials, in the material folder, and textures in the texture folder. Nice and tidy, just easier to find things, and we didn't want the incorrect asset type sneaking away with the other assets here. Okay, and there we go. So that is migrating. We've seen the three main types. We're going to look at Quicksall in the next topic, but we've now seen how to import our own customer assets into a project with the consideration on how we maintain a good kind of folder structure, keeping things tidy and well presented and easy to maintain. We've looked at obtaining things from the unreal engine marketplace, and again, bringing that into a test project so that we don't have everything cluttered in our main project, and then how to migrate just the content that we want from our test project into our main production project. 16. 14 - Quixel: So the final way that we'll be looking at bringing assets into unreal is the use of Quixel megabridge, or megascans, using the mega bridge plug in. So this is something that Epic somewhat recently acquired. So if you have an Epic account, you have free access to a bulk majority of the megascans content, and we can access this directly through our project. So if we go into 5.3, we'll have this installed by default, If for whatever reason you don't, we can go to plug ins and just search for Quiksil and just make sure that you have the bridge plug in enabled. Again, whenever you're enabling or disableling your plug ins, it will give you a heads up down here if you need to restart the project, so do that if needed. But as I said, in most five point something versions, you should have bridge installed by default. So with that enabled and ready to go, we can go to Window, scroll down to Quixel bridge and just click on this. Haven't used this before, it may ask you to sign in. So this is, as I've mentioned, all linked to your Epic account. Because Epic own Quick now, this is why we have access to the majority of all of these really high fidelity mega scans. So if you haven't already signed in, just come up here and sign in using the same account that you've used to sign up to the unrelen in to get access to the Epic launcher and things like that. The way that we use this is we can now start searching for specific things. If you wanted to work with assets individually, we can find piles of bricks. You can search exactly for what you're looking for, so we can find the different wallpieces that we would have access to. And you can start mixing and matching and bringing these into your projects. We also have things allowing us to search by specific genres or categories like a historical category here. And we also have the collections option, which is really useful if you wanted to get a specific environment, and again, you've got things like urban environments, natural environments, so a lot of different things that we can work with here. Bring these into a project, all we need to do is we'll find one that we like the look of. So as someone from the UK, where it's always gray and rainy, Tropical Beach is standing out to me. That one always looks quite appealing. And we just simply come in here and we'll pick the assets that we want from this tropical beach scene, and we can bring that into our own project. As mentioned, if you haven't already, you will need to sign in. So I'll just quickly sign in so that I can demonstrate the process here. And then quick cut two being signed in. So when we are signed in, now you should have a view which looks a little bit more like this. So I'll say download, and we can add this to the project. So let's say that we want to grab what looks cool from here. So we'll grab some chunks of ground, some nice rocks on the ground. So we'd first need to download this. We can change the quality. Medium, I think is fine. I think that's up to like two k. So we'll download this one, and you can see that this will start downloading to your account and your system. And then we'll need to tell this to add it to the project a bit later. In fact, it's done that already, so we'll add this to the project. And you can see that we've got again Nested in a new folder here and mega scans. This is actually from our project. It's not very clear because the windows here in the way. But if we go to the content drawer, we go to mega scans. Just move this out the way again, everything does start floating around and getting a bit cluttered, which is why I like to dock things up here. Otherwise, we just have hundreds of floating windows by the end of a session. We'll go down into the content browser inside of megascans, three D assets. Ti Bach. We now have this wonderful chunk of high fidelity rock setup going on here. Can do the same thing for many other things. If we wanted some details, we can get different starfish, maybe another type of rock, and then some tree stumps to go with it. I'm just going to control and click on the different assets that I've just been downloading. Then we can tell these to add themselves to the project that we're currently working in, and we can see those being added over here. It's a pretty quick, painless way to get these into the project, and these are all now ready to go. They do have a ton of different subfolders, one thing that might be quite useful if you wanted to access just the meshes because they're all put in a single folder. Can go to our three D assets megascans folder here. We've got a filter option just here, so we can drop this down, and we'll filter just by meshes. The other term for them is static mesh, it's actually just in this category at the top up here. In the top section, we'll tack on the static meshes. That means that we can be in the root folder for the megascans here, and we can have access very easily to all of the meshes that we might want to work with. We can shift select all of these, and then just drag this into the level. Then it's just a case of dragging the tree, we'll move this over here, this rock surface over here. Again, this is where getting comfortable with the input systems and just the general navigation will save you a lot of time. We can come in and look at these tiny starfish by focusing in over here. Again, we can move this around, we can play around with the scaling, so we can have some giant starfish down here. And this is how we will then begin mapping out our levels. So we'll have all of these different assets that we can bring in which can be much more kind of catered and tailored to what we want to work with. And just putting all of these things together, you can very quickly get some fairly cool looking results. They don't need to mix and match perfectly. You can see that even though the scaling here is very different, putting these together, They somewhat merge quite nicely, even though we've got a bunch of overlap. They feel like they go together quite well because they've got the same color and texture applied, so you can get away of things like this to make somewhat unique looking assets. Then, likewise, we could do stuff with this one, so we can make this much bigger, make this a little bit like a large rock that these are somewhat combining into. We'll get much more into designing levels and tweaking needs to look correct. But again, at this stage, we're just looking at different ways to bring things into the project. Bridge is very, very handy because this way we don't need to bring in the entire beach scene or an entire several gigabyte asset pack from the marketplace. We can just start sourcing individual assets that we think would look good and be useful for the scenes that we want to work with and start creating. So just at the risk of this map getting a little bit too cluttered, I will come back in here. Start deleting some of these. We don't need everything that we've just been working with. It's probably a starfish somewhere down no as well. So we'll just get rid of the starfish. And for now, I'll just keep it that we have these low poly simple assets to work with, if you wanted, just as a starting point for this level. But that is the core concepts of importing assets. We've the main different ways that we get assets into our project and how to keep these maintainable. You will notice with things like the Quixel bridge, it is unfortunately not quite as tidy as we've been trying to make everything previously. So we have the MS underscored presets as well, which come along with the mega scans. But again, this is going to be another very, very strong argument for having everything in a separate project. Your asset holder project, and then moving that across on migrating it to the main project when you're happy with the content you have. In this example, what we could do is we could move just this rock formation to our main project, so we'll do the asset actions and migrate option again. And you can see here that it cuts down. If we're going to the MS Underscore or the MS presets, we get all of these folders. Not all related to a bunch of the different things here. When we take this approach, at the very least, we can see that we only need this one default material to be brought across, and then different assets related to the rock formation. So again, we're just saving a lot of space and additional kind of folder structures and things that we don't need. So just an example of how we could use that. And just before wrapping up, if you have your filter enabled and you wanted this to go away, we can either click this here, which will remove the static mesh filter, so we can see everything again, but you still have this new window docked here. Want to get rid of that entirely, then we'll just untick the static mesh filter, or we can add or remove the common filters entirely. So that was a filter window that will only appear if you have at least one of these filter options enabled. Then if you want to get rid of that entirely, just make sure that you have all of these unticked. 17. 15 - Materials Overview: So we're going to begin working with materials. Before creating materials of our own, I just have an example in the background here. I'm just going to run through the core concepts, the terminologies that we'll need to know, just to make sense of what we're looking at and what we'll be working with. So a quick rundown of what we have on screen. I've created a brand new material, which I've called M underscore example. I'll be showing you how to recreate something very similar to this in a moment. On the right hand side, this is our output note. So this is all of the information which is being gathered to the left that we're in control of setting up. And providing information on how this material should be rendered. So we have our final output node just here. And then we have the information that we're passing in. In this case, we have information for the color, the metallic, the specular, and the roughness details. And these three are just information on how the material should be presented in this case, to approximate real world lighting and behavior that you'd expect to see on real world objects. Have other things that we can pass in as well. The missive color, for example, would allow us to provide a glow to the material just here, and likewise, we can provide normal information, which would be things like baking dents and cracks without actually adding any of that information to the static mesh. To the left hand side, we have a viewport, which is just demonstrating what the material will look like. And we can visualize this in a few different ways. So we can basically just change the shape here so that we can see what this material would look like wrapped around smooth surfaces and harder surfaces. And just a quick tip here. If we go to the content drawer, find the static mesh that we know that we have to work with, I'll take the head of the dummy, and I'll just select this. And with a static mesh selected in our content drawer, we'll come back on over here. And if we use this brick icon here, this will preview the mesh that I've just selected. So now we can see what this will look like on our dummy head. I'm just pressing the same key mappings that we had in the other viewport, the main viewport over here. If we press F when I was zoomed out, that will focus back into the object. And again, I'm just panning and zooming in pretty much the same way. Then in the details panel, finally, below, we have other similar options here for the material domain, so whether this is going to be on a volume, a post process effect, which is a more technical thing we'll look at later in the course. In this case, we just want this to be wrapped around a surface, and we can provide information on whether this should be masked, translucent, and also whether it should take lighting into account or we can have things like an unlit material, which means it doesn't take any information from the lighting. Instead, what we do is we lose a lot of information about the metallic specular and roughness, but we can just make this a flat, unlit, almost completely missive material this way. A number of different things that we can do. Now, in general, the workflows that we'll be working with will be creating something called a physically based rendering material, a PBR material. This, as I mentioned, is trying to approximate the real world lighting, taking away any reliance on artistic intuition. We want something which is a brushed metal. We can literally look up the properties of a brushed metallic surface. We can see how metallic that property would be, how much specularity it would have, and how much roughness. We can plug that in here, and we can get that information fed back. As an example, if I wanted to make this a completely metallic orangy gold, I would take the metallic value here, we set this to be one, and we will have a metallic property set on this. If I wanted it to have a slightly rough polish to it, I could set the roughness to something like 0.3, and we'd see we get a kind of brushed rough metal. I set the roughness all the way up to one, then we'll have a completely rough surface. So that's all these are doing, and this is how we make a PBR material super simple. It just needs three different properties, which is the metallic specular and roughness, and also the fourth one, which is just driving the base color. But to technically be referred to as a PBR material, we just need these three. And then just to mention, some of these values are clamped 0-1. This isn't applied to all of the values that we can work with. For example, if we make something missive, this can have an emissive strength of ten, 50, 100, whatever you wanted that to be to really bump up the multiplication of that missive property. But when it comes to the metallic specular and roughness, these are clamped 0-1. So for example, if I have the roughness at 0.5, and then make the metallic, let's say, 100 times more metallic, you'll see that nothing actually changes because this is clamped 0-1. So one is as metallic as a property will get. If we turn this back down to zero, then we just set back to a completely rough material. And if I set the specularities to one just to show what this was doing, this provides a kind of plasticy specular sheen. So by default, if we unhook all of these, properties tend to have at least a basic specular property to them. Again, this is just based on what we find most often in the real world. It's fairly unlikely that we see something which is completely rough. By default, you'll see this does come with a bit of specularity because without seeing it here, this does have a specular default value of 0.5, a default value of zero for the metallic, and again, a default roughness of zero, unless we override that with our properties here. So just keep that in mind. 18. 16 - Creating Materials: Now that you've seen the basics of a simple material being put together or at least the outcome of a material that's already been made for demonstration, we'll dive into creating a material of our own. We've already seen the material that comes by default or is automatically generated with our measures when we brought those in. We had the prototype texture, which is a type of material, and I've created a very simple one to demonstrate in the previous topic. To create a new material, though, what I'd do is I'd recommend being in your primary project here, so this isn't the asset project because we can probably build upon the material that we'll be making now as we go through and make it more complex. So I'm inside of my main project, the Boot camp project, inside of the materials folder, I'm just going to right click, and I'll create a new material just here. So it's quite a common asset, so it's in the basic asset category at the top here. So I'll create a new material, and the naming convention is M underscore. And then the thing that it's responsible for. In this case, this will probably just be representing a flat color as in no visual information like the texture that we had here. So what I'll do is I'll just call this M underscore flat color base. Again, it may seem kind of frivolous at this point in your development, but these naming conventions really will come in handy. When you start bringing in a bunch of different assets, and they may all be called very similar things, you'll have a static mesh for your characters, for example, so you may have a mesh character, and then you may have a character material and some character textures. It becomes very useful to have these prefixes to very quickly and easily see and also search for and find the type of asset that you want to work with. You may be jumping from working with the character mesh to the character textures back to the character material. If we can just search for things with these prefixes, so we can just search in the project for all of the M underscore for all of the materials that we might be looking for. So it's kind of a convenience thing, but also, as I've mentioned, if you'll start working with teams or other people's projects, it's a nice thing because you'll find that this recommended workflow is shared in the majority of unreal projects now, so it just makes it easier to integrate and work with existing projects as well. In the background here, I've just double clicked to open the new material that I've made. I'm going to dock this at the top just up here. And inside of this graph, we just right click to move the graph around, and I'm just going to move this output node to the right hand side so we can start working on things. The material by default comes with a 0.5 specularity, so we can see some specular sheen on the material here, and we haven't provided it a color, so it starts with a somewhat gray. I think it's like a 0.5 value on the color spectrum here. That's another thing to mention, the color is also clamped 0-1. So if you're familiar with two D packages like Photoshop, which would have a red green and a blue, and they go 0-255 on the color spectrum. I unreal, we'd change that 0-1 on the red green and blue to get the same results. We can start by giving this a color, and what we want to do to provide a base color is we're going to use a vector three. We can right click in the graph here, and we can search for constant three. Or constant three vector, so this is a variable, a constant variable, unchanging at runtime with three floating values. And that's how we can drive the red, the green, and the blue from this. You see this will provide a pin for the red, the green, and the blue. Even though it's technically a vector, often described in X Y and Z, they line up and provide the same information for us. So if we drag from our pin here, like we did with the texture previously and plug this in, and then we can double click on this to open the color w. Or we can come over here, drop this down, and we can change the properties here. Like I said, this is where it's important to be aware that if you wanted something fully red, it only really goes up to one. I say it only really goes up to because we can drag this as far as we want. But as soon as we get past that value of one, we have the maximum redness we can provide for this material. This will be a red material. We can give this a little bit of green, and then give this a little bit of blue, and you'll see how the stack to provide the colors you'd expect. Obviously, unless you have some specific color properties that you're aiming for, then using the color will may be easier and just faster to work with in these cases. Another way that we can bring these constant variables into the graph is we have a palette window over here, which is currently dropped down, and we can see that the constants, which are often used, so the most common ones, again, will be quite close to the top of any window weight you'd use them. And you can see we have a few options. We have a single constant. A constant two vector, the constant three vector that we've just used for the color and a constant four vector, which is similar to the three vector, but it also has a fourth float value for the Alpha. If we have something like a texture that we want to represent or some transparency, we can provide that through the opacity option just here. We won't be working with that kind of material just yet, but I just wanted you to be aware that is an option. What we tend to work with is our constant one, so I'll drag one of these in, and we can plug one of these into the metallic, and this is all I did earlier. Have a constant float value. A value, again, they're called constants because they're unchanging at runtime, which is an important thing to be aware of, which means we have to set all of this up before applying it to the model that we want to put it on and make sure that we have the final results before we press play and test our results. Then when we're in runtime, we won't be able to change anything. We do have options which will ally that, and that will be a topic for a little bit later. But let's say that we wanted to make this a somewhat metallic blue object here. I'll make this 0.5 on the metallic property, and you can see that starts adding that value here. We can drag on this as well. So if you click and drag on the value with this node selected here, we can click and drag to change and test the different metallic properties. Now, as I mentioned, we want to make this a fully PBR valid material, which requires the metallic specular and roughness properties to be plugged in. So what I'm going to do just to save a bit of time is begin to introduce the shortcut keys here. So you may have noticed with the palette open, on the right hand side, we have one, two, three, and four outlined next to these, and that's because they are the shortcuts, the keyboard shortcuts to quickly create these different constant values. If we move down, we can see some of the other things which are quite often used the textural coordinates, the panor options to move things around, creating material functions. Some of these will also have other shortcuts. Again, always look out for these. If there's a shortcut and you find yourself using this type of node quite often, it's going to be worth trying to learn these. To create a single constant value. I'm just going to hold the one key. On the keyboard and then left click into the graph. I'll do that twice to create one for the roughness and one for the specularity. And then we'll just plug these in to the right hand side on the output node. And there you go. Now that we've overridden the specularity, we can see that this also had a knock on effect of changing how metallic this look. So we now have a nice kind of chrome ball look going on here. And if I add some roughness to this, again, we can completely control this and have a brush messel effect instead. Other thing as with anything inside of unreal. If we select something, press control in D, that will duplicate this for us. This would be useful. If you had three of these single constants, you wanted to duplicate all three of them and reuse them somewhere else, then control in D is another shortcut to get more of these nodes. Something else that I alluded to previously is we have other options. This is now classed as a PBR material. We could use this for a number of different things. I'm going to show you a cool website to play around with different properties in your challenge. But just to give you an idea of one of the other things we have easy access to here, is, as I've mentioned, we can make this a missive if we wanted. If we, for example, press three to get another constant three value here, I'm going to give this a reddish color. And I'll plug this into the missive color. You can see that on top of being a kind of shiny blue ball, it also now has an missive red property to it. If we wanted, we could have just reused this, so I'll drag and pull from the blue and put this into the missive property. So now it's a kind of shiny blue ball with a blue emissive color. Another thing that we can do, if we want this to be much more emissive is we can do some simple maths on these. So I'm going to press M and left click for multiply, and we can multiply this color, so we'll take the red color, and we'll multiply this by a strength. That we'll plug this in here. And at the moment, we already had a strength of one, that was the default, of course, we're just plugging in a color. There was no multiplication going on. But if we increase this to something like ten, we should see this one actually start glowing. That's very very simple to get something glowing and missive inside of Unreal, which is very, very useful. You could use this for things like turning on a light bulb on and off. I'll show you how we can make this editable at runtime a little bit later in the course. And then you can very easily come in and you could have a red light bulb, which when it was off would look like this, it may have a kind of residual glow. Then when the user turns it on, we would just up the emissive strength to get an emissive light bulb. We can get some really cool effects very simply with the unreal engine material system that we have available. The other things are a little bit more complex than what we're going to be going into just for the simple PBR materials, but we could also use things like the anastropy properties here. Adding normals will come in a little bit later when we're working with textures. We can do things like offsetting the world position, so faking where the verts are being shown. Ambient occlusion, again, is another one that we'd need textures for ideally, but we have a lot of different control. Over how we work with our materials. But now, feel free to play around with the emissive properties. I would recommend just ult clicking on the pin if you followed along there. If you click on any of these pins that will unhook them. So if you wanted something to be removed, then it's as simple as doing that. You don't need to delete the nodes. The emissive thing is going to be fun to play with. But for the challenge, the challenge is outlined just to work with PBR materials. So just to get you started at the right position, this is essentially the setup that you'll want a color, your metallic, specular, and roughness properties, and you're pretty much good to go and tackle that challenge. Just before leaving you to go through the challenge material, just wanted to mention, this is the web page I'll be directing you to. There's one tip that I mentioned in the written outline anyway, but just make sure that in the top left hand side here, it's very easy to miss. There's an engine drop down, and make sure that you've selected this to the unreal engine. Different engines will have slightly different property. Setting for how PBR materials are rendered. It's a very common thing nowadays to have that option, but they still process them in somewhat different ways. For the Unreal engine, this will provide the colors, for example, for a standard banana, would be this on the color range. And generally, what I want you to do is just go through create several different materials. This is just getting you comfortable with creating different materials and setting up a few completely unique material outcomes. So the first one, let's say we add a banana, we would take the color. Unfortunately, we will need to manually input this. We unfortunately don't get the correct values if we copy this to the clipboard, but it's easy enough to plug these in. A banana, of course, has no metallic property and a default specularity of 0.5. If the specularity doesn't appear over here, then assume that we need to turn this to zero. So let's look at brass. Instead, what we get with brass is we'll assume that the specularity is zero because it had that line. Indicated there and a metallic property of one. Unfortunately, they never show you the roughness that might be something to play around with and just see what works well, how rough a banana material should be, for example. This is the trial and error process. You can't get this wrong. It's just a cool way to see how this PBR concept can be brought across with some simple replicatable properties and how we can try this. Also, I do note that things like the relative luminant doesn't really have a specific like for like property in unreal. Generally, we're just going to ignore this. We're going to focus on the metallic, the specular, and again, working out the roughness for ourself, and we get the colors provided. I'll make a few of these materials and just see how that comes out. Again, a couple of other things. Working with liquid is going to be a little bit harder because it requires some information which doesn't fully map across to the unreal engine and working at translucency in some pasition, and things like that. The final thing that you can do just before I let you go away and start with the challenge. If you drop down here, you've got the download material x. If we drop this down and copy the unreal engine snippet, Hop back on over to your material and just press control in V, this will provide some basic information. This is probably the quickest way to get the color. As I mentioned, if we copy it from the clipboard. It doesn't account for the fact that we don't have an individual place that we can just plug in the values and we get something that looks like this. So you can see it provides all of this completely unfiltered, and unreal doesn't know how to read that. So it just gives up and provides a transparent color. But we can copy the entire thing here. It gives you an idea of what the metallic would be, the specularity, and the roughness. And here we go, we have a material that shod somewhat represent a banana. I would say that might be a little bit too specular. So maybe we could up that on the roughness. And then if you wanted to apply this to an object, we're just going to hit, apply, and save, go back into the world. And we can just drop this onto a surface here, and we can see exactly what this would look like on some of the objects that we've been working with. Banana, not too interesting there, but you may find some more interesting results with the brass and different types of steel and things like that. A play around and the idea is to create several completely custom and unique materials. It'll be a case for coming in, duplicating the material that you have. We'll just right click on this. Duplicate. Call this the name for whatever other type of material that you wanted to create, and then add those properties here. Try not to make it too cluttered, that was easily getting quite messy. The idea is that we end up with our color, metallic specular and roughness, and each one will have its own individual PBR based property. 19. 17 - Texture Material: Okay, hopefully you had fun with that challenge. It was just a case of making a number of different materials, which I think is a pretty fun way to get involved with the material system inside of Url, especially since we have access to a PBR pipeline out of the box, we can get a lot of different interesting results very easily. Just before jumping into this topic, which is creating a texture based material, I'm just going to make some changes and tidy things up a little bit. Inside of the flat color. I'm just going to remove these. You may notice these were given a name, which is jumping a little bit ahead here. So I'm just going to remove this and get this back to where it was previously with a constant vector three. And then our three constant values here. Plug this into the specular, metallic, and the roughness again, and then likewise for the color. So this is where we essentially wanted to leave off previously with our flat color. Just give this a color and apply this so that we have something working here. And then coming back into the content drawer, again, I'd just like to keep the project somewhat tidy and easy to maintain. I'm going to get rid of that example that I created a moment ago, so I'll delete the second flat color here. We can either create a brand new material inside of the material folder for our texture based material. Or in this case, I'm just going to control D to duplicate this one. I call this one Underscore texture base. And this is going to be our texture based material. And the reason I've duplicated this is we can come into here. We still want the properties for the metallic specular and roughness, and all I need to do is delete the color. So we have a good starting point here. Now, when it comes to working with textures, we had a little bit of a jump ahead earlier when I showed you how to get that working for the example meshes. So we have seen part of this process already, but we can now dive a little bit deeper into this. I don't have any other useful textures to work with at the moment. For testing purposes, to show off things like how to work with normal information, so those fake cavity details that you can bake into a texture. This texture is very, very simple and doesn't have anything like that. What I'll do instead is we'll come back into the material. We'll just start by creating a new texture node. We're looking for something called a texture sample. So if we search for texture sample, we would want this one just here. This provides a visual representation of a texture in our graph. The shortcut for this, you'll probably guess is holding down T the texture and just left clicking into the graph. So again, another very useful shortcut, you'll probably find you using that quite often. And then finally, we just want to plug in this red green and blue into the base color just here. Now we will be provided with an error because we don't have a texture for it to render at the moment. So what we can do is we can drop this down, and because we only have one in the project at the moment, we're going to go onto the settings tab just here. And I'm going to tick on to show the engine content. If you remember, I previously mentioned that quite often, we want to keep this left off, just because it provides a lot of different pre provided assets, which are inside of the unreal engine, they can be useful, but they can also provide a lot of clutter. You can see there's just a lot of different like noise based textures here or gradient offsets and things like that. But in this case, we do have a few examples which will be useful to provide a diffuse texture, which is our albedo or the color representation, essentially, as well as a normal map, which goes along with that same texture. So if we type underscore D, that will be the naming convention for diffuse type textures, and what we're looking for is something like this. So we have our base tile which will be fine to work with for now. So this will provide a texture that we can map around our sphere. So that provides the color for us, which is a great starting point. And then I'm going to just move things around a little bit, just keep things somewhat tidy and easy to work with because we'll need a little bit of space down here in just a moment. I'll press Control and D to duplicate this one. And what I want to do is I'll plug the result of this down here. Into our normal pin. We don't want to work with a diffuse texture for our normal information. So we'll just use this drop down, and we can find the same so we want the base tile, but we can find the normal information for this. No normal texture, and it's actually this one down here that we want, sorry, the base tile underscore normal. Normal textures normally have this blue and purple color. If we double click to just navigate to what this looks like, if you're not familiar with working with three D to two d pipelines where you have your three D model, you quite often take a bunch of more high quality detailed models and bake those into different types of maps, essentially so that we can have a completely flat sphere like we have here. But using some faked normal information, essentially providing the lighter colors and the darker colors will provide fake visual offsets. To our mesh and also allow lighting to work and react more realistically with very flat, simple object. And that's what we're doing here. So you can see it somewhat highlights the darker cracks when we have the normal applied. But we can do things like now controlling the metallic property. Again, this being a rock probably will have some specular properties to it. So if we give this a specular value of 0.5, that actually shows off the normal map and what that's doing much better now because it looks like the rock is somewhat wet around those kind of notched areas. So if we remove the normal You'll see that we don't get any of that information. It just looks like a completely smooth marble. I should have done that earlier, but there you go. That is showing off what the normal map is doing for us. It's providing that somewhat fake information on a completely smooth sphere, and then different properties like our metallic specular and roughness properties can really start doing their work with that extra information that we have access to. If we wanted it to look more like a ball of metal of some sort, Then we can use our texture information here, and then just playing around with the different properties by making this more metallic. It now looks more like a metal ball object, whereas if we remove that, we have something looking like a wet rock. So just a case of playing around with things until you get a result that you're somewhat happy with. Again, no defined outcomes here, just playing around, seeing what these different properties do and getting comfortable with the material editor. So we've already somewhat looked at multiplying a texture against a result. I'm just going to move this down again further so that we can make some changes to our main color here because we can apply that to our diffuse color as well. A couple of the main options that we have available would be to use either addition. So if we hold A and left click, we'll get an addition node or multiplication. M and left click and we'll get a multiplication node. If we use multiplication, we will be multiplying against the saturation here, so we'll get a darker or lower color as an outcome. So what I mean by this is, let's say we wanted to give this rock a reddish hue to it, so we'll move this over. We will plug in a multiplication node here. So we're taking our texture, we're multiplying this by something and then taking this outcome and plugging it into the base color. The thing we want to multiply against, if we just make this 0.5, we're just taking away the color properties essentially, so we can make this zero, we'll get a gray rock. This is going to be easier. I might be easier to work with when we take off our roughness and specula for. So you will need to switch things around a little bit. So if we multiply this by a much lower number, then we're taking away a whole bunch of that saturation, so we'll get a much darker color. If we make this a higher number, then we're going to get a much brighter color coming out here. So we're just multiplying each pixel against this value essentially. Now we can do this with a color, so I'll press three and left click to get that constant vector three, and we'll plug this in instead. If we make this a color of, let's say, a light red, then we're going to get a slightly darker but red tinted rock here. So this is how we can work with changing the color properties of the rocks that we have. And again, if you wanted to come back in and play with the specularity and the roughness and so on, you still have those options as well. So that's how we would multiply a color against our texture. We can do a very similar thing with addition. So I'm just going to plug these two up first. So we're doing the same thing. We're taking our texture. We're adding our texture here to a color or we're adding a color to our texture. And then we want to plug in the result into the base pin, and you can see that we're still getting a blue, but the addition works in the opposite way. So this is taking all of the individual pixels, and it's adding that brightness property, that saturation to the texture that we have. So we end up with a brighter blue rock instead. So in this case, that might be a little bit too strong now. We might want to take this to a much more toned down version of this. Everything's actually looking quite bright in this situation. So just to be aware that you will need to change up the workflow depending on what you're looking to do. But there we go. We can now change the color or we can at least offset the color of our original rock with these detailed properties here. And again, this is just some time to play around with different options and outcomes. One thing that may have come to mind for some of you is that we can make a mix match of different things here. When you're trying to make a banana, for example, in the flat color option of the material that you had, it may have been nice to have some speckled offset to the texture representing the flesh of the banana, which we could very easily do. I'm just going to come in here. I'm going to copy the texture sample, and then I'll paste this over here. Even though we've got a mostly flat colored sphere here, we can still throw an unrelated normal map onto our materials. So that's not really looking like flesh. We'd want something which is maybe more just noise. So the use of noise is actually quite helpful here. If we were to make this yellow again, we could start having something which looks a little bit more like a kind of the flesh of a banana. Another thing that we can do is we would provide an offset to the UV. So this is the texture coordinate. This is how many times this image is being mapped across the surface. We do this with something called a UV coordinate. If you remember, we saw that a little bit earlier. Texture coordinate or the UV coordinate here is U for the shortcut, or we can just drag one of these in. So another one you'll see quite often. And if we plug that in here and then set with this selected, you can see we can set how many times we want this to tile. So the main problem with this is that it definitely looks very obvious, where this is repeating, it's very kind deep and kind of large crevices here. So we might want to make this tile just a lot more often, and we have something which is then spread out because this is being mapped across the sphere that many more times. In fact, maybe it would be a little bit harder than I expected to get something looking like the surface of a banana here, but we can keep trying to tile this. You get to a point where you're tiling too often and it becomes somewhat visible. But we're definitely getting closer than just using the base property here. Maybe from a distance, that might look okay. So we can apply this, we can come in and maybe just put this on one of our meshes, so I'm just going to move down here. We can grab one of these, and we'll just apply that miss. Going to be quite hard to see. There's definitely this might have actually ended up working better as a type of sand, even though banana was in mind. For the Zen Rock thing that I had going, if I made a cylinder around this, because we have this nice ring appearing from the tiling, that could look like some pretty good sand around this. So we can make our own results even in some basic materials which don't have a whole lot of texture information. Just by using things like noise and normal information, merging those together, offsetting necations, and things like that. We can use this same property so we can take our texture coordinate if we press U, and we'll use this again. We can do the same thing for our rock just here. We can make this tile twice as often. So you can see when I displacing some of that information, we will want to do the same thing. I'm just pressing control C control V, and we'll do the same thing for the texture up here. So now that texture is also displaced. So it looks like we have a lot more information inside of this rock. Obviously, we want these two to line up because it's quite useful to have the same normal map and the same texture, obviously offsetting at the same points here to give that level of detail. But just something else that we can do is to use our texture coordinates to provide some extra information and just mix up the level of detail that we're working with. As I mentioned previously, I'm going to keep these as tidy as possible. Since we're not using the multiply, at this point, I'm just going to get rid of the multiply node, and I'll just move things back around a little bit here, just to take up there are an individual space in the graph here. Then the other thing that we want to do, if you're done working with the engine content, just remember to turn the engine content off. We can do that pretty much from any In this case, we can go back to one of the places that we're using a texture. We'll drop this down. We'll go back to the settings option and just untick show engine content. Again, just to keep things a little bit easier to find just the assets that we are purposely trying to work with inside of our project. 20. 18 - Material Instances: The final topic on an introduction to materials then we'll be working with material instances. So I alluded to this a few times in the past where I said that we could make our constant variables. Those things which are unchangeable at runtime, we set them here and then we're unable to edit this once we've placed this on an object and we hit runtime. These are easy to set up, but then harder to work with and would require you to make a material for every different type of surface that you wanted to work with. That was part of the reason that I set that challenge to get you making several different types of materials based on our different PBR based material examples from the web page. It was a somewhat cruel task to get you to see just how tedious working in that type of workflow could be, which will make you appreciate the material instances just that much more, because that's essentially what they'll be doing for us. They will save us time and effort. They allow us to expose a core set of properties, which not only allow us to have these updated and changed at run time, but they just make our life as developers easier as well. Working with a material instance is actually very, very simple. What I'm going to do is I'll start by showing this off on our flat color base. We're going to come into our initial material that we made with just a color sample here, and I'll remove the texture for now. The first step to make this a material instance is we want to change these properties from constant values to something called a parameterized value. For the color, we can do this by simply right clicking on the vector three. And we can convert this to a parameter. And if you remember when we copied in those properties from the web page, I said they had some named properties which were a few steps ahead of where we were looking. That was essentially providing a parameterized value. So for this one, I'm just going to call this one color. So we now have a property called color that we can reuse inside of our material here. Nothing's really changed. It still looks exactly the same, but this is now just the difference of having a parameterized variable to a constant variable. If I apply this, we'll come back and we'll take the rest of this process in just a moment, but I'm going to apply and save this. And then we're going to turn this into our material instance. So if we go back into our content drawer, I'm going to right click, and I'll go to the option just at the top here. Create Material Instance. If we select that, you'll see that a new object is being created down here, and the name and convention for these is generally MI, so material instance, underscore, and then the name of the thing it does. So we'll call this one MI Underscore, flat Color Yellow. So we're indicating that this is going to be an instance of the flat color material, and this one's going to be responsible for being yellow. We can come in here and you can see that this parameter that we've just named color, if we tick this on, we now have full control, and we can get a live update of this. And not only do we see a live update of this here, but if I press okay, we'll come back into the map, and I'm just going to drop our new material instides onto the roof here. The really cool thing about this is that we can drag this window. We'll go back into Maine with a floating window here. If I change this through our editor, we get live information, live feedback. In our map as we're using this as well. So it makes it really handy for prototyping, quickly visualizing things, and you may have noticed one of the tedious things when you are making multiple different materials to work with different types of PBR properties. There is a very small but notable lag from when as an example. We come in, we'll change the color here. One thing is you don't get that immediate update. I'm changing the color will, but nothing is updated until I let go. And then there's a bit of a lag, depending on the system you're working on, it may need to re render something. We also get that initial pause when we're changing things like the textures. It's just a faster workflow working with our instances here. That's the first thing is that anything that we parameterize can be seen inside of our instance. You'll notice that we can see the metallic specular or roughness properties because we haven't yet parameterized those. That's going to be the next step. We're going to take these. We can right click on one of these. We'll convert this to a parameter. This one's hooked up to the metallic pin, so I'll just call this one metallic. To see this in action, I'll hit, apply, save. We'll go back on over to our instance, and we can see we now have a metallic property. So this name is exactly what we're calling it just here. And this will be important to remember later because when it comes to working with code, which will be a little bit later in the course, but with that example of turning on and off a light bulb, we need to know the name of the property that we want to address in code. We could say metallic equals zero here, but metallic equals five now. Also useful for things like making something look wet, we can change the specularity at runtime if it goes through a water volume, for example. But we need to know the name of the property that we want to change in code. We can come back in here. Again, we can make this slightly metallic, and again, we get that immediate feedback. If we go back into the main world, it's a little bit harder to see, but you can see that's now reflecting because it is metallic. If we turn this all the way up to one, That immediately updates here as well. So I'll just keep this as a fairly basic yellow material as the name would suggest here, and we'll do the same thing for the last two properties. Now, rather than right clicking on these and going to convert to parameter, another thing which is useful to be aware of. Remember that we have our one, two, three, and four hot keys when we left click to create our constant variables, like so. These are our constant float vector two, vector three, and vector four. We have a similar thing. We have hot keys for these as well because parameterized variables will also be used quite often. For a parameterized color, we just hold the V key V for vector. And we get a vector four parameterized color here. So this would be the same thing. So let's say that we wanted one for our missive property, we could have a color emissive. We'll plug this in over here, just need to make sure that we give this either a black color if we don't want any emissive property at all, or we can then give this a specific missive color if we did want this to show. And we can do the same thing for our float values. When we turn these into parameterized values, they're then called scalar properties. So if we right click and search for scalar, We have a scalar parameter. This is just a float, which has been turned into a parameterized variable, so you can see it's exactly the same. I'll use this one and call it specular. I'll delete this one because we'll be replacing that, and then we can plug this into our specular property. Then the final way because it is a scalar parameter, we can hold a S, left click, and we'll get a new scalar parameter. So just a few different ways to get to the same result. Essentially, we're just taking a float value, and the reason it's called a scalar value is because we can scale it at runtime. We can change this dynamically when we want to update the look of this during gameplay or the runtime editor. The final one, of course, is going to be called roughness. So we'll provide a roughness value. Again, we'll delete the one that we're not using any longer. And we will just plug this in to the roughness property. We'll here apply and save, and we now have a fairly simple but flexible default material to work from. If we go to the instants, with all of those saved, we can now tick all of these on, and we can change things like the roughness, specular, metallic, and so on, straight away, and we get that immediate feedback. We can also make this missive, so if we change the color here, we can get some missive properties. You can start seeing it's them very simple to come in. We can add a multiply node again, and we'll add another scalar property. This is just multiplying the strength of our emissive value, which is what we did earlier. We'll call this one emissive strength. And we'll plug this in here. And again, the result of our emissive color will be the color that we have multiplied by the strength that we want this to glow, and we'll plug this in here. Here apply and save. And we're perfectly fine to leave this at zero and black. It just means that we don't have any emissive property at all, which is perfectly fine by default, because we can very easily come in here. We'll turn up the emissive strength. We can make this really, really bright, and we can give this a completely different color. And we now have full control over an missive rooftop here, which may be just a little bit strong. So do be aware of what you're changing, but just fun things to play around with and get comfortable with the different options and features that you have available. And there we go. So we now have a roof, which is somewhat yellow with an emissive glow applied to it. In this case, I'm just going to turn this back down to zero. I won't have any emissive strength on this one at all, and we'll just have this left as a somewhat yellow golden ball. And as I said, when it comes to naming things, we just want to make this somewhat representative of what they are responsible for. And again, if I was being really particular in my own project, I would come into this one as well. Prototype texture isn't very good. It's not a texture. I'd call this one M underscore prototype texture just to indicate that the whole reason that this specific material exists is to hold the information of that prototype texture from the example pack. Like so. But of course, we've also been working with textures already, so we could also come in here and start parameterizing some of these values. So you can do the same thing with the properties we already have, so we convert all of these to parameters would be the next step. We can also do that with textures, so we can right click on our texture. We can convert this to a parameter. And I'll just call this one Albedo texture is a normal name for this or diffuse. I think they're used interchangeably. I'll do the same thing for the normal, so we'll right click on normal, convert this to a parameter, and we'll call this one normal texture. And then a small task before getting on to the next challenge view is just to convert all of these two parameters as well. And what we could do is we can then start reducing the number of base materials and instead make use of more material instances. So we could come in here. I can get rid of the prototype texture in a moment by making a material instance of this. Create material instance. We'll call this one MI Underscore prototype texture. And in this case, we would have a problem where we have this normal map, and there's no way to just get rid of this. But I think in this case, it could actually look quite cool to apply this to our model down here, and it would give some sort of fake bumped information to our little guide dine here. So if we apply this material, not quite as cose a had in mind, actually, because of the way that this is wrapped in the three D tool, there's some stretching going on here. Although that will be because we have our UV tiling. So we'd also need to account for things like how we're tiling the UVs here. Just a bunch of the different information that you need to account for. At least we can get the colors back in the right place. I think that wouldn't look great. That's one thing to be aware of is with textures. What I mean is if we clear this entirely, because we have normal information being passed into the texture base. It's going to at least provide this default option because you can't have a texture node plugged in without a texture assigned to it, remember, we need at least some information to pass through. What you might actually do in this case is if you didn't want this normal map applied, you would have two different base materials. This is just a great example of how you consider base materials. We'd have for any textures that wouldn't have any normal information on them a tool, and instead, we'd make this a material instance, and then we could make our changes to that version. Then we'd have one where all of the properties are shared between having these normal maps and the UV offsets and things like that. If we did want to keep the UV wrapping, just another handy tip here just to get you going and playing around to different options, not everything is able to be parameterized. So if we right click on the texture coordinate, which is controlling that UV offset, you can see there's no option to parameterize this, but we can very easily multiply this against a value. So if we multiply this and plug this in here, and let's say that we make this ten, you'll see that this will map a lot more often, or less often depending on the number that you plug in here. We can take a scale of value, so we'll call this one a UV offset. We'll plug this in here, and what we want to do is I'm going to duplicate that over here, so we'll get the same result twice. So we've got our texture coordinates multiplied by our UV offset because it's the same name wherever we update this value, this value will also be updated. So if we make this one, you can see that's applied down here as well. So it's a nice way to control both of these from one single value. But the really useful thing is that we can come back into our instance, and of course, we can see that if we change the offset in here, than that is being applied to the whole material. The normal and the texture offset are both being applied at the same time. So just different ways that you can start thinking about how you can work with these and see what's happening and how to really expand on these. And again, other things you might want to do here is if you like the color offset, promote this to a parameterized variable as well so that you can control the color offset, make sure that these are parameterized. And just to give you a little bit more of a technical insight of why and where we might use a material versus a material instance. So the obvious option for the material instance that I've mentioned already, is anything that we want or need to be updating at run time would need to be an instance because we need these named variables to access in code and make a change. But also, more than that, there is a performance gain from using instances where possible. So generally, what you'll try and do is you'll try and find the biggest number of use cases of all of the assets that may share similar properties. So all of your rocks and bricks and ground pieces, for example, would all have very similar properties. They will all need a texture. They will all need a normal map to show the crevices and things like this here, potentially wanting a color offset, metallic specular and roughness to make them PBR. So that would be a really good use case to have a let's call it a rough surface material base. And then your rough surface material base would have several instances, one for the bricks, one for the rocks, one for the floor pieces, the wall pieces, would all be their own individual instance, and all you're changing then. Through the instance would be the texture which is being applied to it, and they may have slightly different surface properties. Now, the really good thing about this when it comes to a performance impact is the way that the compiler will kind of match these together is all of the core information is held in the base material. So this is kind of compiled and computed once, and then all that the processor needs to check at run time are the small minor changes to the instance. So it's kind of to simplify it to a bit of an extreme You're not quite doing this, but essentially, it's like compiling it once, but using it 100 times. There is more of an overhead than that, but it's much cheaper where possible to try and let the unreal engine batch all of these instances together. Use the core information from the base material just once, and then all it needs to check is it knows that all of these materials have a roughness, they have a metallic, and all it needs to check against is what is the value, which has been assigned to that or the texture, which has been plugged in here. So it's much cheaper to run hundreds of instances than it is hundreds of base materials. So there's a performance gain that we get here as well. But of course, the main thing for us as developers is it's just going to be much faster to iterate and test things and we get that live feedback in the editor when we're working with our instances versus working with the base materials. So the challenge for you no, very similar to the first challenge. I want you to go back to the same web page. So our physically based database of materials here. And if you've made five specific materials in the previous challenge, I will try and recreate those, but instead now using instances. So remember, we want to base this off of a core base material. And then what you have is five material instances instead. And again, the main thing is just to get across how much easier this is to work with, how much quicker it is to test things and update things, and just to get that work flow somewhat ingrained and get you seeing the differences between the base materials and the instance materials and how we can work with these. 21. 19 - Importing Assets: We now have our main project ready to go. As I've mentioned, we're going to be keeping an eye on just good maintainable project structure, as well as general good practices that bigger teams will use in production. And this scales perfectly down to individual or small teams as well. In this case, what we're going to do is create an asset holder project. This will hold the tens of gigabytes worth of assets that will be downloading, and what you tend to find is that you may only use several hundred megabytes worth of the assets or maybe a few gigabytes, but definitely not that ten, 15, 20 gigabytes that you have downloaded. What I'll do is I'll show you a small trick a little bit later that will allow us to create a map inside of our asset holder, discover what we want to use and keep, and we'll migrate just those assets across to our main development project. Before jumping into that, I also wanted to show you the concept art that I'm going from because this is the point where we want to start thinking about the assets that will be downloading, what we want to look out for, and generally the layout of the project that we'll be working with. These are some of the assets that I find. You by no means have to follow this. If you wanted to follow along more directly, if you're getting started and you're completely new to this, then following along with the same assets and the same general goal may help but you can create anything that you wanted. I was looking for something which would be quite contained so that it was just a smaller area or to implement the important key features of a game project with some simple mechanics or logic that we can add to it, whilst also providing a range of visual information and a way to set dress and use all of the features such as the landscape, mega scan assets, and foliage, and things like that. I came up with this. I'm going to go for kind of a cave opening looking out onto the sea, which will allow us to work with the new unreal engine five water features, some foliage in the background, but the cave setting is going to be quite nice and contained or the features and the mechanics that I want to include can all be tucked away in there. I've got a few of these. This is going to be the main one I'll be working from. I find some other things. I like the idea of this hidden garden inside of the cave as well. I was thinking that once you've developed the front part, the external part of the cave and the bit of sea, we might have something tucked away if we wanted to add some interaction between different classes just to show that type of functionality, we could have that leading to maybe like a hidden internal fancy style cave or something like this. This may be a little bit too far out of scope, but these are just the ideas that I have early on before we start developing anything. What I would recommend, as I've mentioned, is you can follow along with the content as I'm providing it if you wanted. But if you wanted to try and get creative, find some concepts looking for things like concept art of the prompts that you're looking for, get some of those stored. Again, this one catches M, that looks pretty cool. A small oasis on an island with a rocky outcrop, it gives you a lot of things to work with. I'd have something like that ready to go. Save some of these either on your system or there's a really useful app called PureRef. Pure RF looks like this. You can download that for free online, and basically all you'll do, let's say that we wanted this is our main image. I will copy the image here. I'm going to go to Pure REF, and we can paste this in. And basically, this is just a really useful holder for different images that we want to work from. So I'll get another couple. The hidden cave would be the other part. I think I'm going to try and recreate this as close as possible. It doesn't need to be one for one, but we'll keep this fairly close. And then I'm just going to have a few random ideas, so things like that one caught my eye, and we'll just paste this into Pure REF. We can scale these down to keep them all somewhat similar in size. But you've got essentially an infinite canvas here. So as we keep adding things, this canvas can expand, and we just kind of scale things. If we press control shift and A, the useful thing, is that will always now be on top. So as I go around, that will stay here, and what we tend to do is just tuck this away in the top corner somewhere, or if you've got a dual monitor on the other screen, so that's always just kind of there so you can look over and get your references. This one, I ought also looked pretty cool. I'll take one of these as well. And this is one of those things where when you're working with concept, especially if it's not a concept that someone's made for you, you may want to get several of them or as many as possible, that all kind of go towards your final goal. In fact, this one keeps standing out to me as well. So we'll get this one. And that way, you're not just kind of sealing one person's idea. It's a case of mix and matching and trying to come up with something that you like the idea of based on a bunch of different reference points and things. In fact, anything with these trees are really standing out to me, I'm going to get a couple of these with the trees, and these can just be rough ideas for the inside where we add maybe some of the mechanics a little bit later. The main thing I'll be coming back to when we start out is this cave face just here, and this is just going to give us a good idea of what kind of assets to look for on the marketplace as well. So jumping back to that with that in mind, I'll go back to the Epic launcher. I'm going to move this off screen for now, but we've now got an idea of what we're looking for, and I'd recommend as I said, if you wanted to come up with your own concepts entirely, there may be look for similar things, but in different environment types or maybe an urban setting, whatever interests you. But the main thing is we can go to the marketplace here, so we'll go to the marketplace tab and in the search panel here, we'll look for the goddess Temple. If you went to the Quicksall Mega scans provided here, everything is free to download. And the good thing about these packages is that they come with a bunch of sort of custom assets as well as just the assets that you can get from mega Scans. So they've actually tailored some of the content to make it just much more usable and quick to get together, and I'll show you what that means a little bit later when we have the project open. So another one that I'll be using is the Nordic Coast. We've also played around with the Qary collections, which is quite good. But the main thing is we can just come in and we can use these for free. So I'm just going to go back to the Goddess Temple though. That's the one that I want to get first of all. And the reason that I'm starting with the goddess Temple is because this is one of the asset packs that I know requires you to create an entire project. This doesn't just import the assets into an existing project. So what I'll do is I'll use this part of the process to have this created as my asset holder project. So I'll just press Create project. We're going to go in here. I'll set the folder, so this is the directory. I want this to be stored. I'll rename this to asset holder or beginner asset holder, so it's clear what this is related to. We'll make sure that this is selected with the correct engine version, which needs to match your main project that you've created. So for me, that was 5.3, and then we can press Create, and this will create an entirely new project for us. Of course, if you're going from an asset pack or you're not interested in this pack, and you're using one which doesn't create a new project for you, what you'd want to do is take the same process we've seen previously create a whole new project as we did originally. That one a name, such as the asset holder and then import all of the assets that you'll be working with into that new project that you've just created. I'll show that step in just a moment. For context, in the background, neither this is finished, creating that project with the goddess Temple, what I'd also like to make use of is the Nordic Coastal. The Nordic coast is the part, I think is going to look most like that cave that I found the entrance for. So I'm going to go back to the Quicksal Megascans asset. We'll go to the Nordic Coast, which is just here. And this is one of the asset packs, which is different, in that it doesn't create an entire project. Instead, it needs to be added to a project that exists. So instead, we'll make use of the add to project button here. And then I've just filtered down to find the beginner asset holder project that was just created. So that may be the step you need to take separately, which is to create another empty project, which will act as your asset holder for me. That was using the Goddess temple, so that has now the goddess temple assets in there, and it will now have the Nordic assets as well, so I'm just going to say Add to project. And again, that's going to work away in the background. We'll add the Nordic coast assets into that existing project. Then I'm going to have a fairly bulky project with a lot of different assets. What I'll be showing you is that we can very easily make use of the same asset over and over from different rotations and scales and things like that. We'll make one rock set potentially look like multiple different variations. Again, this is something you'll find done in production quite often because you're limited to the number of assets that you can use, and also there are performance boosts that you can get from not using hundreds of different assets, but instead using ten of the same asset, but in different ways to make them look like new variations. That will save you performance, it will save you space and memory and so on. So I'll be showing you some of those tricks as well, which means we may have an asset pack with 20 different rocks in this Nordic set. We may use two of them, but we can make it all look very unique and interesting. And that's why we don't need these gigabytes worth of the full packs, and we'll be moving just the stuff that we use back into our main project. I may seem like some extra steps at this stage. It would be great to just get straight into the landscape stuff and start carving away at things and making things look pretty. But this is one of those things which will honestly be so useful and save you so much time and effort in the future when it comes to managing and structuring your own projects, just getting started with some good structure in mind to make things more maintainable and easy to keep in check as you go. And there we go, so you can see, again, in the background that's I finished processing. So that project that we've just created when I have all of the assets that I currently want to work with, we'll come and get some extra foliage and looking at the PureRef, I'll probably get some trees or something later as well, just to keep the ideas somewhat in line with these concepts I'm going to be going from. Keep this as well. If you do download PRF, and you start creating an artboard, this is essentially an artboard. I'd recommend using this it's really useful. Then like with any other kind of file type, you can press control in S, and you can save this artboard as a pure board to come back to load later. So when you come back to your system next time, you can load PR, load this exact same artboard. You have the same concepts to go from when you start back up. I'm just going to jump back over to the library and from here, I'm just going to go into the asset holder and open that new project we just created. Again, I'm just going to find the beginner asset holder here, and we'll double click and open this. This one may take a while. We now have a lot of different assets in there depending on what it thinks it needs to compile and have ready. We may have a lot of shades going on here. The actual opening of the project didn't take too long. It's doing some shade compilation in the background here. Because I created this as the goddess temple, we can see it's the Goddess temple opens up first of. So again, we're not going to use the bulk of all of this information. It's a really nice looking level. It's just overkill for what we're looking for at the moment. And we wouldn't be able to set up a good kind of camera render or any game play or anything through this just because a lot of this is only really intended to be looked at from a distance, and you can very quickly see the cracks and things appearing with some of the background information, which isn't even there and stuff like that. So not a problem, just a nice way to hold that content for us. And then the other content we're going to be looking at, if we go to the geometry, for example, in assembly, we have the cliffs, so this is from all of the Nordic asset packs. Many of the mega scans do this type of thing. This is what I was talking about that it leans into having that visual representation of what I was trying to describe. If we were to go to the Quicksall mega bridge, and import the assets individually, there are some really useful things, but it can take a little bit of extra time to create some custom assets and get things looking as we want them to. When we use the full packs in this way, though, we get these things in here. So if we go back into our assembly cliffs as an example, this is a really nice one to use or some of these are really, really large, which means they cover a big area of space very quickly, and it means that we can very quickly get our ideas going. The main thing is just having that kind of visual noise in the background. People won't be paying a whole lot of attention to it. But if we click into these you'll notice, they're not just static meshes. These are not just the individual assets. These are called packed level actors, which are essentially a collection of instanced meshes that the designers from Quick have put together, and we can reuse these to quickly implement our levels. It also provides some performance improvements for us because they're using something called instant static meshes, which are slightly different to static meshes. These can be batched and rendered all at once, so you can have several different types of meshes all batched and processed. At roughly at the same time for a much lower performance hip to oversimplify a topic. But that is the essence of why we would use these. You can see if we go to the viewpoint here. We actually have is a number of much smaller meshes and assets all placed together. Now, the nice thing about this compared to using the Quicksall mega bridge plug in directly and bringing in the assets individually, is that most of these are only actually one sided, which means if we just use the assets as they come. So if we go and find some of the megascans, three D assets, we can find Any of the cliffs will pretty much be the same. It doesn't matter which pack they come from, but just as an example, we'll stick with the Nordic pack. There will go Nordic coastal cliff. If we drag one of these in, you can see as much smaller. So even though it's a cliff is still quite small, and that one actually goes directly against what was trying to show there. We'll find another bigger cliff. This is the kind of cliff face I had in mind. Just get rid of the one I brought in a moment ago, hide the content drawer, and what we'll find here is that they're one sided. So these are quite difficult to work with just because you need to do a lot of playing around to make sure that this invisible side or the side that doesn't exist isn't going to be viewable from the camera. If you're not great, a level design, I'm by no means an artist or a level designer as will probably come across. It does make it quite difficult as well. Just trying to mix and match things to get two or three different cliff faces looking as though they belong next to each other, whereas if we use this big pack, which is already provided for us, someone with a much better skill set than myself to do that has put these together. From a distance, even up close a lot of the time, they look believable and acceptable to just litter around. That's why I'd recommend going through that and then we'll move just the assets that we want across to our project to still save a little bit of space. The final thing before wrapping up this, I just want to get these looking correct. You may notice we have some visual issues going on here. Now, this seems to be an issue with some of the new versions of real five when we're working with different asset types in some pre made projects. You may have noticed we had a warning at the beginning complaining that the SM six Shader wasn't set correctly. What we want to do, if you're having the same problem is just go to the project settings. You should have this tab here open ready. If not, we just go to edit project settings, and that will bring you in here. In the search bar, I'm just going to search for SM six. I'm just going to turn on the windows, the d3d 12, and we'll turn on the bulk and target to Shaders as well for the SM six shading. This will expect you to restart the project, so I'll just tell it to restart, save any changes. Quick cut away here. Just wanted to show that after restarting with that SM six update, this has started to resolve. You can see it still preparing some of the measures and shaders down here. You can see that's resolved some of the assets not being visible, though due to these shader issues. I know that this has been quite a setup just to get started before we even begin creating our level, but I realize that there's some issues and things that could catch people out in the current versions of unreal. Just wanted to cover this in case anybody else did encounter the same issue. But that's pretty much it. I'm just going to let that finish rendering and get everything set up. You're doing the same when all of that's done, when I ready to go. When I begin implementing the terrain and the water systems and getting all of that fun stuff on the go and start building out our cave or whatever environment it is that you're looking to build. 22. 20 - Terrain / Landscapes: Moving on to the next step then, we'll be looking at our landscape. So we're going to now start building just a platform that we can add our level designs from our concept arts onto. To do this, I'm just going to go into a new map. In fact, this is going to be a very similar process to what we've taken previously. So I'll press Control in N when inside of the viewpot. Click into the viewpot. Control in N for a new level. Empty level create. And I'm just going to take that process again where we go to window environment, L light mixer, and we're just going to click each of these buttons to get a general kind of visual going. So just a useful process to get used to anyway. And it will actually be inside of this project that we do the bulk of the level design because we want to test here which assets we'll be keeping. I'll also take that hiding step where we shift select each of these assets, right click, select, move two, and we'll create a new folder, click the folder, press F two, rename this 12 Lighting. Nice and simple, so we're back to where we were previously. Now when it comes to adding a landscape, this is nice and simple. We go to the top left hand side here. We change from selection mode, so at the moment, we can grab all of the objects within our viewpoint. This is what we'll be doing when we get to the actual level editing portion of things. But we now want to drop this down and move to landscape mode. Inside of landscape mode, I'll leave the details here as their standard. We don't want to make the landscape too big. If we increase the size of this too much, it will become quite slow and difficult to work with, and this is actually relatively large as it is. It doesn't look big, but when we press play, and we jump the character into this area. It's actually going to be quite a large landscape. So we'll hit create, and that will create a landscape for us. With the landscape ready to go, I wanted to run through the tools that you have access to very quickly. I won't be making much use of the landscape tools in this project just because most of the terrain will be built from the meshes, and it's relatively flat. There's not a whole lot that I can envision the cave needing to have variants and things, but I wanted to give you an idea of the tool set you have available. So I'll run through some of these with you now. Main things you want to consider are the sculpting tools here, so you'll be in sculpted mode immediately. If we come in a little bit closer, I'm just right clicking and using the W AS&D movement, so up down forward and backwards, based on where you're looking in the viewpot. If things are a little bit too fast, I can see I'm zooming around a little bit too fast when I move. If you hold the right mouse button and then drag the mouse scroll wheel either toward you to slow down the camera or away from you, so forward to speed up the camera. You can see up here, the camera speed is updating. I want this to be somewhere closer to like 1.5 in. That's a fairly decent movement speed. If that's too slow for you, then you can go all the way up as high as you want, and you can see that just controls how fast you fly around the viewpoint there. If you didn't want to use that shortcut, you can also select the button here, and you can just control the speed of this manually. As I said, I want this to be closer to sort of 1.5, 1.6 was fine around that speed for movement. That's what we need to do, we'll fly around the landscape and we'll make some of our changes. The first thing will be in sculpted mode, we have the sculpted brush selected here inside of sculpted mode, as you would expect it sculpts onto the landscape. This is how you'd start creating your hills and mountains and things like that. You can change the tool strength, so the higher the strength, the more immediate effect that we have, so you can see that's going to give much sharper, larger hills immediately based on the brush size and the fall off. So if I zoom out much further, the brush size is, of course, the brush that we have in here. And the fall off is that inner ring. So how much strength we have? If we have a fall off of zero, then it's as strong around the outside as it is in the middle. Whereas if we increase this, it's going to give you a bigger value a stronger strength being painted on in the middle, and you can see it kind of tapers off towards the outside there based on that fall off. So that's the sculpted mode, just going to control Z to undo that to get back to the flat landscape. One thing we can also play with here is we can add layers. So if we right click in here, we'll create a new layer. This is actually quite useful, especially for demonstration purposes like this. If I were to come in and make a bunch of big changes, we'll increase the strength and everything like this and playing around, and you decide you didn't like that. You've still got your base layer of the landscape, and in fact, we can change the strength at which this layer is taking effect. So if I wanted to completely undo that, I can just set the strength effect that this has 20. For people familiar with things like photoshop, this will be familiar to working with different layers, generally, what you want to do is sculpt between different layers because that way, if you completely mess things up towards the end of the landscape, looking how you wanted it, you can just undo, revert, or remove entirely that layer that didn't go very well. In this case, I can play around, we can come in, we can flatten some of these, and just playing around with the different tools is the main thing if you wanted to use these just to get comfortable with what these do. Of course, smoothing things will smooth things off. We can flatten things entirely. So if you wanted a raised base here and then smooth around the edges, what you might want to play around with as well, kind of feathering this. Change the brush fall off and change the tool strength as well, and we'll get a much smoother lighter effect bringing this in then. So we're not losing as much of that shape. You've got things like your erosion. A ramp is a tool where you actually have to place two different things here, so we'll place a point here and a point here and we'll move this. We need to add the ramp here, and that will just create some landscape in between. Again, very useful if you wanted to create an actual path or something like that in between different parts of your terrain without sculpting it in manually. This is very much what you'll be doing. Once you've got that path, for example, we could come back in and then we'll just want to smooth the outsides a bit. I'd need to bring the strength and the tool size down, maybe make the path a little bit wide because we don't have enough information there. As I mentioned, though, the level that I have envisioned isn't going to use much of the landscape, but I just wanted to let you know that those tools are available. They're very easy to work with. And you can, of course, just arrase things as well. So if you wanted to get rid of some of what you've done here, you can use that as a tool as you would usually expect. For my landscape, I will leave this completely flat for now, so I'm just going to delete Layer one entirely just because as I mentioned, we'll keep this flat, and then I've got my base layer to work from here. So a couple of other things, we do have the managed tab here. So this will let us do things like adding new landscapes entirely, so not affecting the current one, adding a new landscape, importing existing ones, resizing and things like that generally. Again, we tried to make a good estimation of what we need when creating the landscape originally and not updating it mid production where possible. But just be aware that those options are there if you need them. And then finally, is the painting, which is going to require a custom material. We're going to create a landscape material, and we can paint that on. At the moment, we have a checkerboard effect. Of course, we don't want this checkerboard. So we're going to create a very basic material to allow us to give a base layer to the entire terrain. Before doing that, I just wanted to come back into select mode. And just keep in mind that we want to click into the viewport. The map again is untitled, meaning that it hasn't been saved as well as the Asterix. Just double confirming there that we haven't saved this yet, so I'm going to press control in S again. This time, we already have a somewhat cluttered project just from all of the assets in a general setup. We do have a maps folder though. I'll just double click into the maps folder to make sure we're in the correct folder here. Rename this one again to Maine. This will be the main map that we're working from with that updated. We can press save, and we now have the terrain, the lighting and everything ready to work with. 23. 21 - Landscape Material Basics: To make the terrain look a little bit more interesting then, we will need that landscape material that I mentioned, then we can begin painting things on. The way that these generally work, you can think of things as in layers. So we'll give it two, maybe three different types of texture information, image information, and we can layer and paint between those layers. So the ideas that you have in my mind at the moment, we're going to have a base sand layer, and then on top of that, we can paint some pebbles and rocks and things like that. So it can sid complicated, and some landscape materials definitely do get complicated. These are actually quite easy to set up. So we're just going to go to the content draw the materials folder. If you don't have a materials folder, I'd recommend creating one. Then inside of here, we're just going to create a standard material. Just right click inside of the content drawer, create a material, and I'm going to call this one M Underscore Landscape base. So this is our base landscape material. Naming convention with M underscore just to keep things nice and tidy there. Everything that I do, as we go through this, will be working with the naming conventions and the recommended conventions for creating and managing your unreal projects. And again, these seem like small things, but if you would to start working with a team or in the industry, these kind of conventions are the things which are already in play, and it will just make you onboarding and getting into other projects and working with other people so much easier. So for material and landscape base. Inside of here, we need to make a few different changes. So by default, we have a material with a material domain of surface opaque for the blending mode and default lit for shading. This is all fine. This just means that we're going to take in the light from our surroundings. We're going to have no capacity or transparency, so the material or final results will not be somewhat see through, and we can provide the metallic specular and roughness properties to create a PBR of physically based rendered materials. So trying to some accurately recreate the kind of surfaces you'd expect to see in real life. So this is perfect. What we want to do over here, I'm just right clicking and dragging on the graph to move around. We need a little bit of space before we come over to this side. We're going to right click, and we'll look for something called a landscape layer blend. So we can see here, landscape layer blend. We'll click on this and add one of these to the graph. Now, depending on how much you wanted to flesh out and build upon your material. The next few steps will be quite repetitive. But once you know how to do it, it's very simple to just add more and more layers. We want to keep this somewhat toned down. We can only manage a certain number anyway. And of course, as you add more information, they'll become more performance intensive as well. So we'll add two or three. What we want to do is with our landscape layer blend. We've got an option down here in the details to the left hand side to create additional layers. And this is what I was mentioning earlier. So we'd have one. This one, for example, could be for the sand. This one could be for the rocks, and then we'll paint between those. When it comes to naming these, I'm actually just going to use L one, L two, and so on. And you can see that gets reflected over here in the node. If we did call this sand, for example, it would say layer sand, and so on. Now the reason that I'm sticking to L one, L two, potentially L three is that if we wanted to switch between these, we don't need to account for the material which is being placed in there. So we may think that the sand might be the base layer. After some testing, we may want to change that to gravel, and of course, we need to keep updating the names and things like that. So we're going to make this quite universal. The next step is to actually provide some texture information to plug into the layer blend. So we want to provide that visual information to switch between. So I'm just zooming in with the mice we're here, just in case you're not familiar with the movement here, so I'm zooming in to just get a little bit of a better focus on what we're working with. And the next thing we want to add is a texture sample. So I'm going to press and hold the letter T and then left click into the graph, and this will give us a texture sample, which can provide the visual information that we want to plug just in here. Because we don't have any textures that will be useful to work with here. We do get a bunch of them provided with the plug ins that we've been using. None of them really work for the ground that we'll be looking for. They're all mostly based around the geometry and the static meshes that have been provided. So textures more specifically for the static meshes and things like we can see here. What we want is something which is tileable and will work across a landscape. What we're going to do instead is we're going to go to the Quixel mega bridge plug in. If we go back into the main map, when we're back inside of the main tab here, we want to go to Window and then Quixel Bridge. We have the Get content option category and Quixel bridge. This is where we can easily get those meshes and things that I mentioned earlier. We've already got the packs which combine them together, as I said in a more useful and workable way. But if you wanted to get meshes individually, you could definitely come in, search for three D assets and add these individually to your project. It's a little bit more time consuming, and I just prefer working in reverse here. So we get the full packs from the marketplace, and then we take across just the assets that we want to our individual projects. What we're going to be looking for though are textures. Instead of looking at three D assets, I'm going to look at surfaces, and I know that I want some sand to begin with. So I'm just going to go to the search bar and look for sand, and we can just find all of the sand available to us. So this will provide some materials, which included within these materials will be the textures that we're looking for. At this point, it's just a case of looking through which one do you think look good. So maybe some rippled sand. We're going to want some sand for the general areas of the cave entrance and things like that. We might want some wet sand towards the coastline that we're going to add. And then maybe some shingles and the little rocks and pebbles that you get in certain parts as well. So maybe three materials here would be quite good. Now, as I'm scrolling through, I'm just thinking of the different colors and everything that we're going to be working with. So bringing up the concept again, one thing that catches my eye here is that we could potentially have some brighter yellow sand, more like the patch here, but further in the cave. Then we're going to have some nice splashes of green, the gray rocks, and then the gray rocks in the background might all contrast quite well together. I'm not great with color theory, but that is what currently comes to mind. So, in fact, what I think I'm going to do is I've used this before. So I'm going to make use of the rippled sand because that has quite a nice bright yellow and then we can change this and we can tweak the colors in engine anyway, and then find some other similar sand that would go together with this, just to add that variation to it. There's actually quite a lot of sand here. So another way that we can work this in is I know that the rippled sand here looks pretty good. It tells you which assets are related, and we can go to some of these, and we can also find if there are any packs which come with these. So we can look for coastal packs or beach packs here. So if we go to collections, environment, and then the natural option down here. We can find different packs that work quite well together. So this is another much faster way to find the assets that you want to work with. So I'm going to go to tropical Beach. This is why I think I found these before, so we can find the record sand here. Maybe some flat sand, so I'm just going to shift click into these. And then I want something which will provide the kind of rocky look as well. So we're just going to go with three different materials. And I think that should be enough in this case. I'm not finding it from this pack, so what I'll do with those two selected? If you haven't already done so, you need to download the asset first of all, so click on that and wait for the asset to download. If you have the green arrow. And if you have multiple selected, you have the green arrow over here, so that will download all of them. Then once you have those downloaded, you need to press the plus button, and that will add all of the assets that you currently have selected. Into your project. So you can see that we've now added under the Mega Scans folder, the Tie Beach assets into our project. So I'm actually just going to go back to the Nordic Coastal Cliffs collection as well, which is the other one that we're using. And I think this is the shoreline that I was looking for. It was from the Nordic pack. So this is one I've used in the past, and I'll just use this a little bit deeper into the water just to give it a slightly darker look. We're not going to see much of it anyway, so it doesn't need to be super detailed. Again, if you haven't already downloaded them, download this and then add this to your project. So that will be everything. We basically we just need these textures available for us in our material. With that done, we can close the browser, close bridge for now, and we'll come back into our landscape material and we can start making use of these. The way that we're going to build these to avoid wires going absolutely everywhere, we basically want a bunch of three different types of information for each layer that we're going to be working with. The way that we can do this and condense these nodes a little bit is if we take all of this information here, we want to fill the important things are the base color, metallic specular and roughness and some normal information. So we can collapse all of this information and have this be built from our layer blend just over here. To do this, we're just going to click on this node that I have selected, so the big output node on the left hand side in the details, I'm just going to tell this to use a material attributes pin. So this will collapse all of this into one thing. And then we can use that material attributes information to build our image act. So we'll right click in the graph. Search for material attributes, and we want to use the make material attribute node. So this is now looking very similar. This is essentially the same information we've just collapsed over here. But this is what will allow us to plug this information here. And then whatever's being blended from our different layers will create in a moment can be passed into the final material render. We'll get the first layer working to begin. So inside of the texture sample, select this one, drop down the texture information and look for a sand texture. So we've imported a few of these, the one that I wanted is the Tai beach sand. We then have a bunch of jargon next to it. And the thing at the end, the underscore D is for diffuse. Diffuse and albedo are often used interchangeably, and it basically means color. So this is our color texture. We can plug the red green and blue, so all of the channels making up this color can be plugged into the base color here. And at the moment, this won't change anything because of the material type. But if we right click on our attribute node here, and start previewing this, right click and select start previewing. We can see on the left hand side, what information this will actually pass out to our landscape. So at the moment, we have a very flat, somewhat smooth looking plastic key sand material going on. That's because we haven't passed in information for the metallic specular roughness and the normal. So if we select our texture sample, press control in D to duplicate, so D for duplicate, we're going to drop this texture information down again, and we'll select the next one, which is our kind of bluish purple color here. And the important thing is at the end of the name, we have underscore. Which is for normal. So this is our normal information. Normal information is basically just going to provide some fake offsets and make things look as though they're presenting more three d information than we actually have on our shape. So if we plug this in, so again, from the red green and blue pin, we're going to plug that in to our normal pin here. And you can see the light reflection there, especially. You can see it's looking a little bit more cracked, a little bit more like you'd expect sand to look, and that's from the normal information. So it's just taking different heights or colors from within this image and offsetting and actually affecting how light is bounced off of this surface. Then the final thing, we now need some information for the metallic specular and roughnes, so we'll press control India again. To duplicate this once more. We use the drop down here, and there should be one final Ti beach sand texture here, which is not under rippled. So because of the naming conventions, Ripped has kind of taken the wrong order here. And the one we're looking for is this one here with the name underscore OR DP at the end. So that stands for occlusion, roughness, and displacement. So if we select this, I'll show how we use that in just a moment. So the important thing is in order of where those letters are showing is the order that we plug these in. So the OR and D are spread out in the two D texture package that would have created these. To the red, green, and blue channel separately. So we don't use the RGB combined here. Instead, what we do. So for the occlusion, for example, will come from the red channel, and we have an ambient occlusion mask just here. So this is our occlusion information. The next one that we want to make use of is the roughness channel, from the green. So again, in order, we're going to go from the green. Put this in the roughness channel, so that will now make this less shiny. So we're getting the value of how rough this should be from that texture sample, and then the displacement, which is the world displacement information we can use can be plugged in down here. Now a lot of the time, I find that people don't use this, and I'm just going to keep that unhooked for n, so I've just pressed t and clicked on the pin, and we'll leave out the displacement for now. It will also give us a little bit less repetition to do. This isn't now going to start looking like a much better material, and the next step is to recreate this. This is why I said it gets a little bit repetitive because we're going to need to take this step for every different layer that we may want to paint onto our landscape. So I've actually got the three layers. Remember, I've got the sand here. I've got the rippled sand, and I've got the pebbles from the Nordic Beach. So I'm actually going to come into our layer blend. We'll add in a third layer, and I'm just going to call this one L three. Something else that we'll probably find that we want to do. Before moving on to the next layer is controlling the UV layout of our textures. So what this means is we've got this UV information just here, and this is providing information about how big or small the image should be wrapped around our mesh or in this case, our landscape. Now, by default, if we apply this, it's probably really tiny, which means we'll see a lot of tiling, which means it'll be very obvious that there's a kind of a grid shaped pattern going on. To control that, we'll use something called the UV offset. To manipulate and manage this information. So what we can start doing is we could begin to actually apply this to see what this looks like. If we hit apply and save, we'll go back into Maine, we'll go to our landscape, and I'm just going to click in here and set the landscape material to be Underscore landscape. So I've just selected the landscape in the world in the details panel to the right scroll down to a landscape material and find M underscore landscape. Or landscape base. We'll apply this, and everything will go black, and that is perfectly fine. The reason is is because we haven't yet provided it the information that it needs to map that information across the landscape. So if we go back to landscape mode, so use the drop down here, go landscape, and go to the paint tab, so this is what I mentioned previously. And you can see here it's now trying to work out what to do with that single layer that we've begun providing for it. We use this drop down, we can see that it doesn't have the type of asset that it's looking for. So what we can do is create something called a layer information asset. So if we allow it to create one for us, we can press this plus button, we'll create a weight blended layer, and we'll just tell it to put this into the materials folder. So if we select this, we can see what's happened here. We've got our landscape material that we've created, and then this layer information asset, which is just about the information contained within the blending and how this is applied to our landscape. We'll need one of these per layer that we're creating. But you can see it's really easy to make. The main thing I want to show here is that tiling. So it's very very obvious. I'm just going to lower the brush size here, but it's very obvious. We've got this small grid shaped tiling going on, and you can even see if we get in close enough. You can even see the pattern is super obvious where each part of the texture starts and the next one begins. So if we press play, and we go down this is roughly head height, and this is what you would be seeing when you're walking around the level. So very, very obvious, we've got these rows and that's what we want to get away from here. So to solve this, we're going to go back into our landscape material, and this is where we want to offset the information in the UV section. So to do this, we use something called a texture coordinate. So I'm going to press and hold U and then left click in the graph. This will provide a texture coordinate. You can find all of these if you want. Anytime that I'm using the name of something, you can right click and search text Card. It's just a case that you would need to know what these are called and what the search functions are. Where possible, I'll give you these shortcut keys. With the texture coordinate node selected though, we can go to the details panel, and if we turn this down to, let's say 0.5 on the U and the V for the tiling, and then plug this in to the UV information. You can see that that's changed the way that that looks. So with this already plugged in. If I changed this to two, again, you can see that's changed how that image was spread out. So if we press apply, that means that this is now trying to pack two times the information per tile that this is going to be spread across. So this is actually going to be much worse. We actually have much smaller tiling going on now. So what we want is we want to make this a lower number, but it's trying to find that sweet spot between being too detailed and showing too much tiling or being too largely spread apart, and then looking grainy and bitty. I think 0.5 will work fine on here, so we'll hit apply and save, we'll go back down and take a look at this. So ale bit of information isn't coming across because what we ideally want to do as well is just plug these in to anywhere else that these textures are being used. At the moment, we're only really accounting for the color, but we're going to be seeing a lot of information in the way that this is passed back through the normal as well. So we'll hit apply and save. And there we go, we can see that's looking a little bit better. I think if we make it too much bigger, that's the problem as I mentioned, is it is going to look a little bit less detailed, and you can really start seeing the pixels and things coming across because we're just spreading out the information so much more. Although from down here, I think that looks better close up. Because it's less obvious at a glance that we've got tiling. A lot of this is going to be covered by the assets and the meshes that we bring in, and we're not going to be looking at it from up here anyway, but just to give an idea of what this is doing. So this will be another important part of our material as we go through and change this. You can really see this is getting a little bit messy. The other option is that we could duplicate these and then just use one per texture sample that we want here. But the problem, of course, is that we want these scaling to be the same for each of these different textures. We wouldn't want this one to have a UV offset of 0.5, and this one have a UV offset of two, because if you look at the textures and what we're working with here, these textures are actually exactly the same. So the divots here is what this is kind of trying to show from the normal. This lump, for example, will reflect differently to this more dented part here. But we do have that lump and the dents dine here. So usually a normal texture is just a texture with these specific color offsets to indicate to the render how to bounce light in a more correct way across these usually flat surfaces. So for that reason, we want our UVs to be the same on all of these. And what we'll do next, is I'll show you a little bit of a in depth, but much tidier way that we can start managing our materials to make it just more flexible and faster to work with. 24. 22 - Landscape Material Improvements: Okay. This is one of those processes. The initial setup is going to be longer, but it will make the rest of the process much less painful. What we're going to do is we're going to unhook these for now. As I mentioned, the one thing that we first of all know that we want to do is to make this a uniform UV mapping for all of the texture information. And we also want to make this a little bit easier to update and expose to work with the material that we'll be creating a little bit later. What we can do is I'm going to pull from here and I'm going to find a multiply node. So we're going to multiply the number that we have here. We'll keep this at a standard uniform one for the U and the V. Then we'll multiply this by number, which will offset this and then plug that in as the final result. The number that we want to plug in, what we want to multiply this value by when we get to this node here, we can expose this as something called a scalar parameter. I'm going to press S and then click in the graph, and I'm going to give this a name. I'll just call this one UV scale. With that parameter created, we have this variable here, which at the moment we can only access from within this material. If we plug this pin in here, we now have access to this elsewhere, I can very quickly and easily change the scaling value of our texture coordinate. If I make this 0.5 as I had before, that will of course be multiplied by one and one, one and one multiplied by 0.5, is 0.5. The outcome here is going to be that 0.5 that we're looking for. If I multiply this by two, same again, multiplied by two is going to be two, but the outcome will be two. And because we have two values, our U, and our V, that will be applied to both of those coordinates. In fact, I think I said it was more like 0.25 was preferable here, especially when we're close up to those assets. Then the other thing that we know that we need to do is we want to use this another time. We don't actually want to plug this into the occlusion or roughness because they're just scalar parameters are not based on the actual size of the texture, so we'll leave that as it is, but we do want to use that down here for the normal. Instead of having these wires going everywhere, we're going to pull this back a little bit, and going to lt and clicked unhook these, pull from here and we'll find something called a named reroot node. So we'll add a named reroot node, and we'll call this one UV scale. Same as the parameter. That's perfectly fine. And really, all this is doing is allowing us to call this by name, find what this value is, and plug it in anywhere. So if we now right click and search for UV scale, you can see we've got a named reroot node option coming up here. We can plug this in. And this is just as I said, a handy thing where we can just now duplicate this. I've pressed Control indeed to duplicate, and we can use this wherever we need this information. So especially because as I've mentioned, we want this and this to always have the same texture size. We can control that with the UV scale here. And means that we can kind of tuck this away in the background. We won't need to update this again, but wherever we want the value, we can just use this named reroot node. A reroot node, by the way, if we pull this and plug this in here and double click on a wire, you get this little pin, this little circle. That is a re root node. Just again, it allows us to keep the wires nice and tidy. We can move these around, avoid other wires and things. All this is a named version of that that we can call as a reusable feature. So that's the first step of improving our work flow here. The next thing that we want to do is we can just grab this information. We want this information to be pumped out two more times, one f layer two, and one f layer three. So I'm going to press Control in D with all of those selected. We've got another set of nodes here, and we can move this up, and then we'll move this one over here, and we can plug this in. The outcome of this attribute, the material, the make attribute node that we're using here will be the result of Layer two. So we're going to come down here. We'll need to select each of these texture samples individually, and we'll need to set them to the relevant rippled sand information. So we're going to go to the texture drop down, search for rippled sand. In fact, we can just start typing ripple, and that will find it for us. We want the diffuse first of all. Remember the underscore D goes into the base color. I'll do the same again for the O RDP, so this is the ORDP. And then the final one again, the rippled sand for the normal. So that will now be our layer that we can paint the rippled sand into, and that will be our layer two, and we want the same thing one more time for the gravel. Now, the way that I would speed this up is I'm going to grab this information again. I'll right click on any of these nodes, and I'm going to tell this to collapse the nodes, which will give us another hidden graph here. This one, I'm going to select and press F two, and I'll call this one flat sand. I'm going to take that same approach, so I'm going to select all of these, right click. We will drop this into another claps nodes. Again, I'll select this, press F two to rename, and I'll call this one rippled sand. We can move this up here. And basically, all we've done here. We still have the same information. If we double click into this, we can see all of that information in here is just kind of hidden it away. When you double click into that, you'll be in your collapsed version, so we just need to click here to go back to the material graph. And then with these created, I'm just going to select either one of these, it doesn't matter. Press control indeed to duplicate. I'll rename this one to pebbles. I'm going to plug this in so we don't need to come back here. Just line this up a little bit, and then double click into pebbles. And what we want to do is just make that image change one more time. The texture here, in fact, they're not called pebbles. I forgot what they're called. I think it's like shoreline. Is that what we're looking for? Shoreline rocks? Yeah, Shoreline rocks. This is going to be the one we're looking for. So we'll come back in just here. And in fact, some people like this workflow, so I'll just show what you can do here. I find this a little bit fiddly, but you can come in. If you select your texture, bring up the content drawer. I need to make this a little bit smaller. You can then drag the diffuse texture that you want into this slot here. So this is the pebbles for our color. We need to do the same thing again, and then we'll get the O RDP, and then we'll drop this in here. Then again, we'll select the normal. We can come to the content drawer, get the normal, and drop this in here. So you may like or dislike that approach, just to you know, you can just drop these assets into the relevant slot. And with that done, if we go back to the material graph, we now have three fairly tidy little nodes here. One for the sand, one for the Record sand, one for the pebbles, going into layer one, two and three, and then that information is all being combined, and then we can paint between these to make our final landscape color. Then the only thing we have to left hand side here is our information to keep our texture coordinate nice and tidy. And of course, because we want this to look pretty much the same between whichever layer we're painting on, we've made use of this UV scale information, and we're just passing that into the texture ample size, essentially being able to use that information once and use it anywhere inside of our material. So I'm just going to press Control Shift and S to save everything because we've changed a few different things now. So Control Shift and S will save everything. We'll close these down, and that is the material pretty much ready to go. We need to go back into our landscape. So we now have the information. We have these layers available. So what I can do for layer two and three, I'll take that same approach that I did previously, so we'll click the Plus button for layer two. Add this into our materials folder again and press Save here. So we now have layer one and two information. And then finally, you can probably see whether this is going. We're going to go to Layer three, press the Plus button, wait blended, go to materials, and press save here again. That isn't looking correct for you. I think although I press save, I didn't press apply, this material hasn't yet been updated, so we'll just press apply to make sure that all of this information is saved. I think previously, I only had the information about the flat sand. Then if we go back, you can see this is all updated. The way that this works, we now have our different layers. By default, everything will be painted with Layer one. If we select Layer two, though, inside of paint mode, increase the tool strength a bit, and then just paint a patch down here. You can see what we can do and this is what I was saying earlier, is that we kind of like with, again, photoshop and layer painting. We can now paint between these different layers. So as we get maybe closer to our shore, we may want to paint more of this darker kind of sand color with some ripples. And then as we're actually in the water, we can maybe paint some pebbles and so on down here. Maybe not quite that strong, so you can change the strength and the opacity and the fall off and things like that. But this is what you would normally do with your landscapes, as you can just dot this around to give that extra bit of information. So again, I'm just going to Control Z a bunch of times S so that we have a blank slate to work with. So with the information about painting ready to go, something to play around with and start designing as you want. The next thing I just want to show very quickly is we can make one final improvement to our landscape material. As I said, these can be quite simple, but they can also get quite complex. We've exposed one variable here, though, which is the UV scale, and we can make use of that through something called a material instance. So at the moment, we'd still need to come in here. If I wanted to see what this would look like with a bigger value, I'd need to come in, press apply, save, go back and check what this is looking like. It can be a little bit difficult to remember between switching in how this was looking. Using a material instance, though, we can get a live update. So I'm going to come into our materials folder, right click on our landscape base, and I'm going to create a material instance from this, and I'll call this one MI Underscore landscape. Again, just using good naming conventions here, we've got M four material, MI for material instance, just so that we know what they're responsible for. So if I double click into this, this will open our new instance. You can see we've got one variable exposed over here, which is our UV scale. So anything that we've named as a scalar parameter in our material, which is kind of like our base now for all of the information driven here will be exposed in the instance when we're using it. If I click to enable this, and then just drag this as a floating window for now. What we can do is we can get some live information with our material if we apply it to the landscape. I'm just going to need to go into selection mode one more time. So the drop down here, we'll go to selection. We'll make sure we have the landscape selected. And then instead of using the landscape material, we're going to use that new instance we've just created. This is the other good thing about naming conventions is if we search MI, and then underscore, we'll only get the instances in the project, and then we know that we want our landscape. It makes it nice and easy to find what we're working with here. Not too sure what this is. Maybe QuickSel has provided one for us by default if you wanted to look into that one. So just taking a quick look at this opening it up to see if that is something we were responsible for. This is definitely provided by Quiksil as I said, other landscape materials can get much more complex than what we're working with. But this will just give you a bunch of different properties. So there material instance is again, much more complex. Now is all of these different properties that you can edit for real time feedback. Fino, I'll just close that one, keep things nice and simple. We're going to drop this back down. We're going to go to our MI underscore landscape, which is our SA. Drag this back over. And the key takeaway here is that if I change the scaling, we'll get that instant feedback as soon as I let go, we'll get immediate feedback on what this scaling is looking like. Again, if we drop down, we can see that's far too grainy, so we'd need more information. But as we change this, we can see we're getting less of that obvious tiling as we go over. So with a combination of this, if we go back into landscape mode, I'm not too sure why it lost the layer of information there. If yours does, just make sure that you always have the correct layer of information in the dropdown. And then in paint mode, we can just paint this on. And again, this is going to be useful, maybe to see a couple of the different layers together as well, just so that we can get an idea that as we're scaling it, whether this is working for all of the different layers too. I think at the moment this is all looking fine, I think they're going to be scaled in a fairly similar way when it comes to the texture being provided. So it should work just as well on all of them. Some of them look really bad with the tiling, so the rocks are a really good example of where we wouldn't want to use the standard one by one for the U and the V, instead, we'll just make this a little bit bigger. Yet, just a case of playing around. That's a nice thing with material instances, and that kind of parameter that you can expose there does give us a bunch of freedom like that. I'm just going to get rid of that though. Paint back the normal sand layer just here. Just make that really big. We can get rid of everything in one go. And that gives us a good starting point. As I said, we'll come in. We'll do some layer painting and painting with the landscape a little bit later when we've started set dressing with the meshes so that we know where things are going to be going. 25. 23 - Water Plugin: The next thing to give us an idea of the scale of the level, already the core focus that I had in the concept. In fact, now's a good time to probably bring the pure ref back, just oom into the one that I'm thinking about most, which is going to be the focal point of the concept we're working with. Again, I'm just going to press Control Shift and A to make this stay above the other layers on my screen. Control Shift and A will disable that to allow you to click on and that will kind of disappear into the background. But the main thing is having this around so that I can keep in mind what we'll be looking at. So the main other key point here is going to be the water. We can add the background from the assets we brought in a little bit later. If we go back into a selection mode, we want to use the new water plug in, and this is actually a plug in, which isn't enabled by default, so we'll go to edit and plug ins. We're going to search for water. We don't need the extras, as it says here, just maps and things not intended for shipping. Just some examples. What we do want is the experimental feature, the water feature here, so we'll just tick this on. Just get a message at the moment telling us this is experimental, perfectly fine, just for playing around and seeing how it works, and getting a good kind of initial test project going, so we'll say yes to that. And then when you add plug ins through your project, you will need to restart the project. So just hit restart, and this we'll load the project back up for you. If you've made any changes, make sure that you say save selected when this pops up. When the project load, you probably just need to get rid of the plug in window here. And you will have in current versions at least a message about some collision issue with the collision profile for the water. Perfectly fine. It's not actually a error, which will break anything. Just press this button here and it's just going to add some information to the.in file that is already in your project. That's perfectly fine. We can clear and close. One other thing you may have been met with if you've closed the project up to this point and come back is you will be in the wrong map. So this is a good time to look at this. At the moment, I'm back in the default map, which for this project, because it was from the goddess Temple was the Roman cave. So what I want to do is just go back to the Maps folder. We'll find the main map that we created, double click to open this and we'll be back in the map that we saved earlier. Now to avoid that happening in the future, every time that we open the project, we need to do the same thing. I'm just going to go to the project settings. We'll go to maps and modes just here on the left hand side. We'll just move this out the way for now because we're not doing anything artistic. In the default map section here, in the maps and modes, we want to change this from Roman cave to Main. This just means every time we load the editor, our main map that we're working in will be the one which is loaded by default. The game default map here would be the same thing, but if you were to package and build the project to give it to a friend or family or put it up on HIO or whatever, this would be the map that the player would see when they first open your packaged game. In this case, we can leave that because we won't be worrying about that. The main thing is for us, every time we come into the editor, we want this to be our main map. Back in the main map, we're just going to go back over to this tab. We can start working keeping this in mind on what we wanted to create here. We've got half of the core feature from this concept, which is the beach kind of sand inside of the cave. We're going to get the cave assets a little bit later. But now, we're just going to use this quickly add to project button we saw a little bit earlier. And again, remembering that we can just search for things here, I'm just going to type the word water. We can see here, we've got loads of different types of water, body of island, Lake, ocean, river, and so on. The one that we're looking for obviously is going to be the ocean. So we'll just click Ocean, and that will create this for us. Now, for whatever reason, this has created this at a really weird height. We can see with the water selected. So anything here, if you haven't already select this main darker part of the water body, and that will let you see the details and the details panel over here about this, for some reason, it started -12,970 on the I'll just click into this and press zero, so we'll zero that back out, and it's now the same height as our terrain. If you're unsure on that, I'll just move this out the way. Just select the landscape, and we have the Z axis over here. So this is the place in the world that the landscape is placed. This is currently zero, which means if we select the water body ocean, we want this to be zero as well. That's all that was. If we change the height of this can give some interesting effects actually, which are worth looking at. If we increase the height of this, then we're going to get some dips like a valley down here, and if we make this much lower, then we end up with a pyramid. That's all that was doing. The other thing you can see, we're quite far over here, so I might just place this cave somewhere more in the middle. So I'm just going to move this water volume over here. Using the widget there. What I've just done is making use of the section in between the two arrows, which means this will move across the horizontal planes and not the vertical. So it's not going to move up and down. It's just going to move it freely across the horizontal, which is x and y. Now, if you want to be really particular, you could try and get rid of this little crease here. You can see it's just where it's trying to work out where to merge in with the landscape. By just slightly moving this up and down. Again, it's not too important. We're going to have so many meshes and things overlapping this. That doesn't need to be perfect. And if you do try and get that perfect, you may end up with issues where the water then doesn't look quite as good. I'm actually going to leave that exactly the same height as the landscape for night. So this gives us a good idea of where we'd start building our meshes from here. We know that we want to be looking out somewhat in this direction, so we're going to have our cave front over here, which is why it's just nice to have this lying around as a point of reference. So I'm going to keep this on my second screen just so it's not getting in the way for people following along. Now, one other thing to keep in mind is again, this might look quite small. But if we were to come down here, we can see, for example, we've got this different color, which is just like a sort of background noise, so this is very low detail, much cheaper to render than this one specific block that we have here. I might move this back a little bit actually, just because we're not going to see the back of the cave. And for that reason, we can get much more distance on how far we see the more detailed bit here. The core thing to remember is that this is actually really, really big. So another thing that we're going to need a little bit later is if we add another item here from the drop down and search for something called a player style. With that selected, I'm just going to press the end key, which will snap that to the floor, and I'm going to press F to focus in. So you have to remember that this is roughly the size of a character that we're going to be controlling. So our camera, when we're moving around, would be roughly around about here. So you're not going to see that fire in the distance. And as I said, that landscape is actually quite massive. So we're not going to make use of most of the size here. We're going to be building our cave, maybe about a quarter of the size of the way around this. So do keep that in mind when it comes to scaling things. This might be a good point of reference just to get an idea of how big the character is going to be when we press play, or what we're building for. So when we zoom out, we can see that's a very small asset there. Another thing you might want to do is bring in a cube or something because that's not very easy to see. I'm going to press the ad option, again, we're going to go to shapes, drag in a cylinder, might be a bit better. We'll just drag this up here. I'm just going to make this a little bit thinner and a bit taller, so it's about the same size as our capsule. So if we select both of these, that's probably about the right size, it doesn't need to be perfect, just to get a very rough approximation, roughly 2 meters towards kind of what we're looking for here. So when we're from a distance, we can see like that would be a person on the side of the shore when we come down. So it just gives us a good idea of the scale and scope of things that we're working with. And since we've just added it, but I haven't really mentioned what it's doing, just very quickly cover the player start here. All of this is kind of a spawn point for us. So if we were to press Plano, we will start directly by that cylinder. So this is now our starting point in the level. Previously, before we had this, we would have just been spawning a random point. It was basically spawning us when we press play from the point that the camera in the viewport was currently placed. Just to prove that that is happening if I move the cylinder in front of us, so we've got a point of perspective here, and I'll move this back. We press play, even if I'm all the way out here, we'll press play, and we'll start looking directly at the cylinder. If we come in and rotate this as well. So I'm just using the shortcut keys, W E and R to switch between move, rotate, and scale. So if we rotate round, press play, we can see that we're now looking in the same way that that player start was rotated. That's all that's responsible for. So getting back to our C that we've just created, we can see that the waves here are possibly a little bit extreme, at least for the ideas of what I wanted to kind of get in the camera views. So what I'm going to do is select the water volume again, the body of ocean. And then in the details panel, we can scroll down, and we should find something called the wave attenuation that we're just going to play around this slider. We'll raise that all the way up. We can have a somewhat charmer sy just so that when we do get to adding the cliffs and things in the background, they're not going to be quite so obscured by giant waves when our viewpoint is all the way down here. Now, one thing that you may remember that we did quite early on is we've turned off the real time. You can see that every time I make a change to this value, it will try to render the waves out. So if you wanted to see that just in real time to make it easier to update, just remember that was in these settings up here. We're going to tick on the real time, and that's essentially what that was doing. So this is one of those things where even if you're not in play mode, real time we'll try to have that rendering and stimulating, which can take a lot more processing power. Quite useful for times like N where we may want that to be here, so we can see exactly what that's doing very quickly. We can then set this to be roughly what we'd want the waves to be. And then when we're happy with this, I'm just going to go back up and turn off real time again. Now, if you wanted, now that we have the water here, this is quite a stylized look to the coloring and everything they've given this. So if you wanted to come in to change this information, we're just going to go to the water body again and scroll all the way down in the rendering section. We've got the water material. And if we double click on this, this will open up a new tab for us. I'm just going to dock this in the top window. In fact, this one might be on those things, which is quite useful to keep over here. And similar to what we created earlier, this is just a material instance, so we can change any of the information here and get live feedback over in the editor, which is quite useful because we don't get a display image or anything down here. So it's going to be quit nice to have that live feedback as we make changes. So we can change information about the normal settings on the water volume. Fluid simulation will be the movement and the foam and things like that, we have control over. All I'm really looking for at the moment are the vector parameters. So if we scroll down rather than just dropping everything down, this will be controlling the color for us. The absorption, we can change here. And we can see how turning that to orange completely changes the effect that we see. We've got the foam scattering and things like that as well. So you have control over all of these properties, and it's one of those things that's worth just playing around with and getting familiar with the options that you have available to you. Now, in this case, I actually quite like the supertylized very sort of turquoise bright blue look of that ocean. But we can come in and play with this. Again. This might be one of those things that you want to tweak later in the project. When you have everything put together, depending on how the foliage is coming together, the look of the rocks and everything, we may find that a brighter or darker blue looks better in contrast with the the rocks and things that we end up with. So I'm going to leave that for now. I just wanted to let you know that there is an option that you can play with, and if that immediately just looked off to you, you can come in and play with all of this information through the material instance just here. One other thing to mention, I've just been reminded looking at it there, because I've been playing with this in another project, the test project I have going. The properties that you set through this plug in in the materials will be saved from one project to another. One thing I've had to increase is the anastrophy here, and that is just because the shadows sits off at a much lower value, 0.1, and on bigger objects, it's going to be more noticeable when we get to adding the rocks and cave surfaces later, but you get some very weird shading. I can try to recreate the problem. So just to kind of exaggerate the problem. This is what you had without this, so you get two shadows. You get the smoother shadow going under the water here. And with the lower anastrophy, you may have a shadow appearing on top of the water, which if you do find that in yours, just come in here and you can see that as we increase this value here, that kind of fades away, and we just get left of that nice smooth underwater shadow. That's when my value, I think was about 1.4, so just so you're aware of that. So just something to play around with. Keep in mind that if you do get we're shadowing, no, just come back into this material instance and play around with the anastrophy value. Again, we might see that a little bit more later when we come to adding the larger form assets, the rock faces, and things like that. 26. 24 - Level Design Pt1: As it stands, our cylinder is currently looking a little bit lonely on this big empty island, staring out into the sea. To solve this, we can begin adding those meshes and assets to populate and just decorate the island that we have here to make that cave outcrop and the final kind of idea that we had in mind. So again, this is where the pure RF reference is going to be useful. The next steps will be trying to recreate this around where our cylinder is. So we already have the core part here, the shoreline brushing up against the sand. The next thing is to add what I would say is the main visual point here, which are these rocks, that kind of cove covering or whatever you want to call that. So I'll just move this out the way so that I have all of the screen, but that is on my second monitor, and I'm just going to be using that as a reference point to try and get something looking somewhat similar. Fore starting, I'll just drop down the lighting section here. And as we're going to start adding a bunch of different assets. I'll take a similar approach that I did with the lighting assets. I'm going to shift select each of these, so everything to do with the landscape and the water body. I'll get rid of the player start, so Control select to deselect that one. Right click on one of these. We'll navigate down to the Move two option. Move this to a folder, and I'll just rename this one, so F two again will rename, and I'll call this one landscape. Encompass the water as well. But just to keep things easily searchable, and what you will find a little bit later is we're going to have potentially hundreds of assets going through our outliner, and it will become a little bit more difficult to find individual things or just filter through them. So to start adding things. I'm going to go through the process of the general button prompts that you want to use, some quick hints and tips, and then we'll put a bunch of this into a kind of speed design type thing as it's going to become somewhat repetitive. And once you know how to do the basics, you'll be able to keep up and then add your own ideas in. I'm just navigating through the content browser here, going to find our geometry selection, the assembly, which is I know the main assets that I want to work with will be fine, just to let you know that you can hold control and mouse will forward and backwards to change the size of the icons here. If you wanted to get a better look at what things are going to look like before dragging them into the world, then you can make these icons a little bit bigger. Now the way that I'm going to approach this, I'm just going to drag the core things I'm looking for at the moment are the initial big rock faces. Remember what I've mentioned before is we want to try and use the minimum amount of different assets, which is why we're showing you how we can reuse these and have just one or two assets do the bulk of the heavy lifting for. To make sure that we're getting something that we can work with. I'm just going to have a quick look through and find the ones which are sticking out to me. Remember, we're looking for this kind of shape ideally here that we can merge some of the meshes together to get these initial walls. I'm just going to drag these into the world and see what they're looking like. This is more of a far away boulder, so we're going to get rid of that one. And it's just a case of bringing these in, see what they're looking like, and if they're going to be usable. All of these at the moment are more like floor surfaces and further away out crops from the cliff. The ground, of course, is not going to be what we're looking for. I know that these are quite high, so these might make some interesting information for the backdrop, so we'll keep in mind that these exist. Inside of the hoodoo folder. Rock pillars, some nice decoration there. And I think the cliffs and boulders might be what we're looking for. So the boulders again, they look a little bit long and flat for what I currently have in mind. But it's just a case of having look through what we have available and picking some of the best options. So I think maybe the cliffs are going to be what we're looking for initially. And there's a few things that we'll need to look out for in a moment. So again, actually this immediately is what I think I'll be using for the backdrop, actually. Even though I said there was something in the Hodo folder. That is a really good shape in comparison to what we have there. So if we imagine, we'd put this out in the sea, and I'm just going to go into scaling mode. So there are shortcut to go into scaling mode, or we can change between move, rotate, and scale up here and just grab the center point here. So on this widget, you have the different axes. You can scale this in any single direction, but I want to keep this uniform, so I'm just going to drag that middle block, and that will scale everything uniformly and that would be this that we're creating kind of in the backdrop. And then just moving this into place. Trying to keep in mind, again, roughly the size of the character, where this cave entrance is going to be. And this is really the process we'll be taking. So I'll leave that there actually as a point of reference and we can come back here and add this is more of a decoration thing a little bit later, but just to get the idea of what's going on. And I've just noticed there's a nice rock face over here as well. So maybe something like this one because it's quite flat, and that looks like it's quite a straight edge. We could potentially move this in. So it's not a case of being completely stingy with the assets that we're using here. But what I was kind of getting across is in each of these folders, there might be eight or nine different assets, and we don't need to use every single one of them. So from this folder, I'll probably use these two for the backdrop, so just to get an idea of how this would look. That this might be the entire backdrop for the scene, and that's just using these two assets from this folder. And then for the cave, we might have one or two assets that we use from this folder, and you can see we're cutting down on the bulk of the things we'll be using. I'm just going to press the cylinder here, and press F to zoom into this one just to get a a good point here. You can see ready that's coming together for the backdrop. We can maybe duplicate this out later to add these extra points of interest up here, and we'll come in and get some foliage going as well. Again, all of that comes down to decoration and that will be a little bit later. What I want to do at the moment is just get the general scene map tight. Inside of the cliffs folder, I really want to focus on the cave at this point. I think we're really going to struggle to get something that looks exactly like this, so it's going to be a bit of mixing and matching different assets together. I'm just going to move back because that is placing the asset there in the water. So I'm just going to use our cylinder here. It is going to be my kind of return point. Every time I want to get back into a rough area. I'm just going to press the cylinder and press F to focus in just a quick way to get back somewhere. And there we go. These assets are now looking, in fact, that is pretty perfect. For this section. Fire far too small, so it's going to scale that up again using the middle option there. We can scale this up, maybe a little bit bigger, and there we go. We've got something which is looking like a pretty good cave entrance there. And this is one of the tips and tricks that I figured that we'd end up using. I wanted to show you. So we could, if we wanted, just try to duplicate this. I'm going to hold lt and drag the site, which will automatically duplicate the object that you have, press E to go into rotate mode and just rotate this around the z axis. What we could potentially do. In this case, this just being rotated around is perfectly fine because one of the things I mentioned previously is the nice thing about these asset packs and using the full pack from the marketplace rather than those individual assets which only have one side of the mesh showing. This does have most of the full 360 turnaround fully covered with a mesh, which is really handy. There are some though. I'll just trying to find one as an example where this may not work. For example, this one, I know is a bit of a problem. If we were to try and do that with this, we have different parts which are floating in the air, and you would see some of this wouldn't be visible. In that case, what I might be tempted to do is I'll just delete this one as a quick example. I'll grab this one again, drag the site with the ult key selected. And if we see the scaling dine here is currently 2.7 on the x, I'm just going to drop a minus in front of this. And you see what that does is it will invert the scaling along the x axis, and we've essentially just flipped this to get a nearly symmetrical asset into our levels. So you can see that matches up really, really well. If you needed something to look a little bit more symmetrical and reuse an asset that way. This is actually quite useful something we'll be doing later if we get to adding things like pathways and level pieces like that into our scene. So just another quick example of this. If we go down to the mega scans, I think it's under the Icelandic sections. So the Icelandic cliff, for example, we have this asset here, which is a nice straight path or a nice straight asset, and I think maybe it's the other one, so it's the second one. What we could do here is if we just rotate this, I'm just lt and rotating, so the same as lt and moving something, we'll duplicate the asset. And you can see a quite line up because the point down here is a little bit higher than the point over here when we've rotated it. What we could instead do is we could use that same option. So I'm just going to move this out. Again, I'm just going to scale this to minus one on the x just there and then if we rotate this round instead, obviously, you can see the two points here are symmetrical, they line up exactly, which means we just get something a closer height. We can move these together and we'd have a kind of a walkway or a path or a floor that we could make. And of course, we're going to have a seam that we'd cover with different assets. You get something a little bit more snug and symmetrical this way. Just a useful thing here, and essentially what you want to think of, just get rid of those, but what you want to think of this as is a way to reuse the assets where possible. This one asset could essentially quite easily become four. If we drag this out and move this over here, we have one asset looking this way. If we just rotate this, have a second asset because of course, from the player's perspective or the camera's perspective, this second side is completely new to us. We haven't seen that yet, so that would look like a second asset. Then if we drag this out again, maybe rotate this or just do that flipping trick here. We'll just flip this to minus two just there. At a glance. Obviously, we know this is just a symmetrical version of this asset, but at a glance, the rocks are jutting out at a completely different direction. When you're just playing through, or you're just quickly looking at something with a camera pan through or something. You probably won't notice that these are the same two things just facing the opposite way. This is another trick that is often used in production. We're going to try and make use of the same asset as many times as possible. You've also got the other options. Obviously, we've not seen the sides of the asset yet, so we could use these in different areas as well. And then just simple things like scaling it, making something much smaller, turning it around, flipping it symmetrically. It starts looking completely different to the one over here. So this is what you'll see me doing when we go into that kind of speed design where I'm just putting the assets together. I'm just going to pick one or two different assets. I'm going to be scaling them, rotating making them symmetrical by flipping the scale over here. And that's essentially what I'll be doing to create the entire cave. In this case, I think actually, again, this is just trial and error that I wanted to include. I think the first way that I had this, when this wasn't symmetrical, I'm just going to set this back to 2.75 and then just rotate this in so they're both looking at each other. Again, we're essentially seeing the front of the asset and the back of the asset. But that is starting to create that cave entrance for us. Just move this more in place. And again, we're just going to keep looking trying to get an idea Of how we can make this look more closely resembling our concept we have going here. So if this is our character, this is the kind of height that we would be at, which is making me realize that maybe this is a little bit too big. We'd want to move this over to the sides again. I'm just going to need get rid of this. But we'd want to move this over to the side to try and keep that more in line with the concept, where only a little bit of that cave is jutting out from here, or I should say the cliff side, not the cave, where in the cave. Yeah, this is essentially what I'll be doing. So I've got my concept on the other monitor. I'm trying to get something looking somewhat close to the cave that I have there, just making use of these assets duplicating, moving things around rotating, and so on that we've just seen. Quick pause in throwing things together here. Just notice that we're now going to be encountering something that if you're new to level design or just getting started, you may have started noticing that the approach I've taken here has left. One of the things that I was mentioned, we want to kind of avoid these sections, where they're fine from one side, they're going to be obviously not looking as great from the other side. So we will get to this. They're not all going to be working perfectly. Some of the assets will only look good from one side and so on. But we can still make use of them in this way, so I've just made a very rough approximation of the shape that I wanted in the cave front here. So then the next step is what you'll be doing for the most of this. And we've got the same issue here, in fact, where if we were to have the camera pan around from this side or if the character was able to move around and see this section, obviously, that's not going to look great. So this is the next part of what we'll be doing, and this is actually creating the inside of our cave, and it's essentially taking a very similar step, pulling out some more pieces. And with one thing to mention with nanite and Lumen and everything that we can leverage here, can get away with pretty much as many of these pieces as we need within reason, of course, especially because these are all using instanced static meshes. As I've said, they're using some of that tech wizardry in the background, which means we can have a bunch of these rendering or costing much lower on the draw cool. So we can just kind of move these around. And what we're going to want to do to finish the internal part of is duplicate these and just be rotating them to create like a bit of a wall and the ceiling. And what you'll find is that the issue points that you can see up here, will start to be covered by the rest of the meshes. As long as we have these overlaps, it's surprising how because there's just so much information in the rock faces and everything, they merge together quite well. They actually look as though they are like an intended mesh that we have here. So that's just something that I figured people might start wondering about as I was going through that section or that part of the process, is that we had some very obviously unpleasant geometry sticking out here. So just to make sure that we don't see that in camera renders, if we're doing a sequence render, or if the player can walk to this bit, if you have a player moving around, we just want to cover those with the different meshes that we can bring in here. Some things to be aware of That's going to be the next part is now just getting what the internal part of the cave might look like. This is going to be something we'll have to make up. The concept obviously only goes so far. But then this is the other reason that it's useful to have these other reference points. We might want to make something like this, or we've got a long tunnel looking cave option that we could have here, so something a little bit smoother. Or like I said, the idea of a hidden garden looks really cool or appeals to me. If we want to choose the archways and the things like that that come with the goddess temple, then we have those assets ready to But that could mean that the next step is just getting creative at this point. So we've got a nice starting point with that main reference. I think if I was to take an initial sort of selling shot, something to grab people's attention, it would be that initial concept. When we get the foliage and some extra design work in here. That would be my main screenshot. Then we want something in the background, a cave that the camera can pan around or we can walk around if we add a playable character. We want that to look interesting and pretty cool as well. Pausing the level design again quickly. Just wanted to mention what just happened there. I deleted a bunch of these because they were starting to look a little bit too same when I pulled the camera out a little bit further. One thing that after just playing around with what I mentioned earlier, just dragging some of the assets into the level to get an idea of what they look like and if there's anything that would fit better. A lot of these are quite jagged and pointy, either jagged and pointy or very flat, so more of a cliff face rather than the inside of a cave. This one is really large, so I'll need to scale this down potentially, but this has some nice smooth surface here. I think that could work quite well as the core part of the ceiling, and then also some information on the other side. To act as the walls if we move this around for the walls. Again, just thinking of how we can use one or two core assets. At the moment, I think all of this is just one asset flipped and rotated. We can add a second one here for some variation and then some details in the background. Again, we're getting to like four or five different assets, and I could see that making up the bulk of the main part of the cave, the backdrop, and the main level. Just to mention is you're going through as well. I just had the issue there where the scaling, the snapping was automatically enabled, and because this is quite a large asset, we've got 0.25 snapping increments for the scaling, ten degree increments for the rotation, and ten unit value movements for the moving. So when you're moving something around, it's snapping sizes of ten. In this case, because this is quite a large asset, going up and down in 0.25 increments was either way too big or way too. What I've done is if you have this little blue icon here, that means that snapping is enabled. We just click that to turn it off and you can see you get complete freedom over the size of this asset. So I'm just going to rotate this around a little bit. Scale that down, so it looks a little bit different. Again, this is just a symmetrized version of this one, just minus the scale it so that the other side of this rock face, and it merges together perfectly, and it's very difficult to see it's the same thing, and just making it a little bit smaller changes the level of detail that we're seeing between the different assets. You can come down as well, move this below the ground surface if you want to hide some of this. But again, we're going to be adding a bunch of meshes and detail a b in the decoration phase. This doesn't need to be perfect at this point. We're just trying to get a level map tight. I might want to do the same s thing, but maybe to this piece, maybe it's a bit smaller on this side, on the other side of the cave. And I think just was adding this in. At first, I had the idea of a more rounded cave, but I think for some reason, this path stuck in mind, so I've started making a longer path here. We'll see how that goes. 27. 25 - Level Design Pt2: Okay. So I'm getting pretty happy with the results from the inside of the cave here. You may have noticed I spent a bit of time there. At the end. I've got the general shape and the layout. I was going to cover the entire roof, and then I saw this long kind of rock sticking out completely accidental there, and I just figured that from the bottom, that's quite a nice kind of silhouette that you get. And I like idea of having one section here when we get to the lighting and playing around with the environment and everything like that. This will give quite a nice potential to have some interesting shadows and a lighting effect happening here. But the main thing I've been doing is just looking around and going into play mode, so we get the spectator pawn where we can kind of fly around and get a view of what it would look like in game, and just looking out for areas like this. So it seems a bit more obvious when you're in play mode, that's going to be very visible. So we want to try and hide these sections here. So those bits where it's one mesh, which was meant to be on the floor and because they've used it as part of a wall, it kind of sticks out. So where we can. And I don't think I can on this one because it's the main part of the cave wall. I've just been trying to hide those. So a lot of the time, I've just been able to push them kind of back in like this to another part of the wall and hide them. But this will probably just get a small kind of rock face or something a bit later. We could look for that now, in fact. So I'll show the approach for this. So we're just going to look for something of a similar color, similar shape, but just smaller. So maybe the rocks rather than the big cliff faces and everything, so they're going to be too small. But we have so many different assets to work with. We'll definitely be able to find something just want to hide the obvious things like that. The things which would be closer to the camera or the player. We just want to make sure that we can do something to hide that. In fact, I think something like that could look pretty good. It's just a little bit too big and takes to hide it properly there. We take up a lot of space in the entrance. We could always do that. There we go. I think that looks pretty cool actually. So it gives a little bit more of a form and shape over here to the entrance. We're going to paint a bunch of moss and foliage around here anyway to make it look a little bit more interesting later. It's just a case of trying to get this in a decent place here where it covers it, but it's not taking up too much room. It just gives slightly more unique looking form to the entrance here. So like I said, it doesn't need to be one to one with the concept here. These were just purely for ideas. I mean, there are some rock formations over here anyway, so kind of approximating what we have going on here. Then we've got this outcrop here, which could be the outcrop we have here. So sites look fairly similar, just kind of accidentally there whilst trying to hide things, and we're going to paint things on to merge these in. The main thing is just trying to get rid of those really obvious sort of geometry issues. I remember there was one over here, I think is that bit. Is there a way that we can just move this back? Is just the same thing again, because this was meant to be flush with the floor, but we've rotated it to use this more for the ceiling. We can see quite evidently that there's an invisible bit there. And because this is where the cave ceiling is ending anyway, I'm going to want some different light shafts and we can get some god rays or something cool coming in here. So few gaps here won't be the end of the world, same on this side. The other gaps I was trying to fill, you may have noticed. I just added a few extra pieces over here. And again, you're not going to see all of this from the outside, so this is perfectly fine. But I just wanted to make sure that I think we'll try and keep this part of the cave dark so we can get some dark lighting going on if that makes sense to get some really nice shadowy effects and things. And then we're going to keep this side a little bit brighter. So for that reason, I want to make sure there's no holes and we're going to patch everything up here. And then just also playing around every now and again. Just trying to keep in mind again, the concept is very useful here so that we can see roughly how big we're going to want these cliff faces in the background to be. And the lighting, we're going to ignore this for now, it looks terrible. We will get around to fixing all of this and really improving the lighting quality, the colors, and everything that we have going. But at the moment we just want that general shape and form. I think we're getting close. We've got a nice big cliff on either side. If we look out, we can imagine some rocks and painting some of the foliage on the floor and stuff to get the extra detail, that noise, which is added to a scene to make it look more organic and believable, we're going to paint all of these rocks in and everything rather than placing them by hand. So at the moment, we're just looking for that form and shape. So that's what I'd focus on now. It's just getting a level that you can either set up for a good camera shot or for the player to run around if we wanted players and things like that. But just to get the general form and the layout at the moment. Now, though I say that we're going to ignore the lighting, one thing that is kind of hard, and I think this is because of the auto exposure is trying to correct the way that the light is being picked up. Making this look much worse than it should, which can be just harder to flash things out when you also have to kind of ignore how bad the general lighting is at the moment. If we go to project settings, I'm going to go into the search bar and look for exposure. We've got this option here, Auto exposure bias, and I think this is what's causing the issue. It's trying to somewhat simulate what happens when your eyes go from being closed or in a completely dark room for a while to having that immediate flash of light, and it's okay, but it doesn't always work very well. And you end up with this washed out. Ideally, what we would want is something that will always look the same That regardless of where we're moving around. So just going to try and get that to be correct. In fact, rather than turning off the bias, I think that was wrong thing there. We're just going to untick the auto exposure. There we go. So now the idea is that it's not going to be constantly trying to correct and update the lighting, which just gives us when we press play, all of that is kind of worked out anyway. So it gives us a better. It's not perfect, but it gives us a better idea of what we would be working with when we're rendering something out or in play mode. So that would just be a little bit easier to work with as well and the inside of the cave is now looking darker and more gloomy as we kind of wanted. And if you are new to software in general, doesn't really matter which application you're using. I should have mentioned, press save. Control S, press that often to keep the work and progress that you've made so far. I've been lucky. I haven't had any crashes, but I think I've only remembered saving once or twice. Definitely something that at this point. You want to make almost a nervous twitch where it just keeps happening because you will probably have the editor give up on you at some point, and you don't want to lose all of the level design work that you've been doing. Just another quick word for me here. So this turned out being a little bit different than I expected different than the processes taking a lot of the rest of the cave. So I just wanted to mention my thought process here. I remembered that we had some kind of flat cliff face type assets. I just quickly looked for those, partly because I was thinking that again, while we're in the level build, the viewport here, it looks like quite a small space, but remember that the camera that we're playing through or recording a sequence animation th will be more at this area here. If we did a full turn round, it would look actually quite big, especially if you wanted a character to walk through this. It's going to be quite a lot of traversal, and also means that it's a lot more for us to flesh out and add that detail. And I really hate that process. Adding all of the fine detail, the rocks and things that will add on the floor, I'll definitely be doing that. But I'm just thinking that I can cut this down. If I add some really big walls here. This takes up another big chunk of visual information. A nice big bit of space. It has taken up now separating this off. It gives us more of a kind of different lighting opportunity. Keep everything dark in the first half. And then all we need to worry about is doing something interesting with the second part of the cave here. So I think I'm going to keep this. I just wanted to mention why this appeared. It wasn't part of the original idea, but I think that that's taking up a nice chunk of space now, and I'm going to look for another way to take up a big chunk of space out here, just that I have to do less of the foliage painting and the fine detail and stuff like that. I think it's a nice divider for what is quite a large cave space, and it's going to, again, forward thinking a little bit, open up the opportunities for different interesting types of lighting, god rays, all of that will now be much more possible and easy to make look quite impressive just because of all of the different angles and shapes that it has to bounce off of and traverse through. I'm just going to finish this off at the moment, again, just getting that core shape, making everything look somewhat tidy, but it doesn't need to be perfect. I'm just trying to make sure we don't have any of these really big gaps here because you can see like underneath this rock face here. I'm just going to make sure this is flushed with the floor whilst also not leaving a big gap the ceiling. And we could even looking at this now, actually, we could even make use of another of the water features, so we've already used the ocean. We could add a small river or I think maybe lake, I can't remember what they're called. If we use the adoption, we'll search for water, and we have the river is just going to be the long stream, obviously, as a river would be. So what we want is the lake, and we can place that somewhere around here. Again, I'm just thinking that this would be another way. We don't need to paint all of the information in here. This is way too big, but that's fine. We can pull this back. It doesn't need to take up. We don't need to actually be able to access or see the back here. In fact, that's kind of what I want to avoid is seeing the whole back side of this. We could have a little pool of lake, which is just built up here, thinking of a back story for my cave. And if That's actually looking okay. I'm thinking we could have this blocked off as well. But either, again, always thinking both gameplay and rendering sequences and things like that. We could have a cinematic sequence where something happens, and maybe Indiana Jones style, boulder or a large part of rock that would be covering this is actually a doorway and animate site. So just thinking of ways that we could hide this off to begin with, because I think it'd be quite interesting if we have a big rock door or something rather than having a passageway there to begin with. That would make the entire cave here dark. We'd need to do some lighting to make the internal lighting look pretty interesting here. We could have a sequence with the cinematic or if you're playing with a character walking through, you could have them pick something up, and then that doorway would open, letting in a big shaft of light in here, opening up a completely different looking area in the background over here. So I think that's actually going to be quite an interesting idea. Just want to make sure the water isn't taking up too much space. And one thing with the water volume here, what we can do. We have this spline, so you can see this fairly thin white line. If we grab one of these notches, it has a few notches. Along the spline point, so this is what's making up that shape. If we press lt, so again, just duplicating something t and drag the widget to make another spline point. We can see we've now got four of them, and we can move these around to control the shape of where the water is interacting. So we could even give this like a bit of a curve so it doesn't go all the way around. And you can add as many of these splines as you want. I'm going to lt and drag again. Move this one, the original one back over. So I still want it to take up a fair amount of space, but we can just give it maybe a bit more of an interesting shape like so. Again, nothing is set in the ways here. We're just playing around, seeing what works. The thing to be aware of you've got these long purple wires. We can grab one of these. This is controlling the intensity of that curve, so we can make this sharper and we can give it a little bit of rotation and round that off. So if we wanted to change the shape as well as just changing the location of this, we have full control there. And already, that looks a little bit more interesting rather than just being a completely flat shoreline for the lake. I don't know if you have shorelines in the lake. There's probably a proper term for that, but that's just looking a little bit more interesting to me. I'm just going to drag this back out as well, just so we've got a nice curve going both ways. And then it's going to be, I think, just a round this off, so we're just going to do that initial pass. I'm not going to be inside of the rocks from I'm talking. We want that initial pass to get the silhouettes essentially is what we're looking for here. If we go into unlit mode or shadow mode, or whatever would work, the idea is just getting those core shapes, something and it looks interesting without all of the detail and the foliage that we'll be painting in a little bit later, and just thinking like the story that you'd tell through a cinematic or through gameplay. See what's happening. So this is really what we're trying to do at the moment. We don't need anything to be looking super polished at this point. Just want this to be the main parts of our level will be in place. We can add to them as we go. But this is definitely look much more interesting in coming together compared to what we had previously. Even if we didn't add the passageway, if we had a render from here, for example, it's not very visible of the water. As I said again, I think I've made this maybe hit a little bit too big. It's quite a big distance to travel there. But it's quite nice to look from the other side of the cave and you have interesting archway. And then you can see that whilst you're all covered in here, there's clearly, like an open space above you in the other side of the cave. So yeah, I'm liking that. And similar to what we did with the seawater, the waves here a little bit extreme, so I'm just going to search for wave with the water selected here. Put this back into real time. And just drop the stone. So as the other way is that you want to turn the attenuation down here, I'll turn it up to make the waves less extreme, especially for a lake or something sort of an internal pool here might not be given quite as much motion. So I'll just make that look good. I'm happy of that. If we right click from here onto the floor, we can select play from here just so we don't need to fly through the whole cave. If you wanted to test a certain section. I definitely wish I'd made this smaller. We could probably change that. I think I think the inside of the cave here is probably about right. When we start filling this out with rocks and other detail, it's just the fact we would need to do full fly through for a cinematic to see the whole thing or have the character have a character which is sable to walk around and interact with things. That's fine, though. Just gives us plenty of space and room to play around with and make look as interesting as possible. One final thing, I think that add before wrapping up. I don't know. I've not looked at this reference for a while. But I think maybe in the back of my mind, this was still playing a part here where we've got this lake of water and something kind of sat in the middle of it. I might add that as well. We don't have any folige yet, but we can obtain that. We just need the platform for and something to work with. The one problem with the water body, just to be aware of is that if you go into landscape mode, so if we select the landscape, what might be tempting is to come in and paint like a platform to raise through here. Unfortunately, we can't paint through the water. This is doing something quite clever to cut away automatically at the landscape to allow this water body to exist. But it does mean for that reason, you can see there's this boundary, where if we sculpt on the landscape, it doesn't affect anything within a certain range of the water, which is fine. But it's just to say that you wouldn't be able to paint that directly on. So what we would do instead is we're going to find some ground assets, maybe something that was quite around platform. Now we could go for something like that, and you're not going to see a whole bunch of this anyway. So Doesn't need to be super accurate obviously. Why is there grass and mud inside of this sandy cave? We're not going to ask, and we're not going to see this from any sort of close up vantage point. But this could just be a nice point of interest here. Then we'd surround this with things like some rocks, obviously says this isn't floating, a nice rock formation there. Although maybe that is a bit big. In this part of the cave, perhaps we don't have quite enough space. So again, we can just very easily tweak things here, grab all of these walls. The one thing that came to mind is the first section of cave felt a little bit big. It felt like quite a long distance to see what was happening back here. So, but then this bit was feeling a bit small, so we could grab our water body, we could bring that forward, and then that means that this will have much more space and can be bigger, and we can make this more of a focal point here. So it's just trial in now, see what's working well, and there we go. That's actually more of what I had in mind. So if we were to look out here, that's a pretty cool view, we can turn around and you can see there's something else going on straightway over here in the background. So I think that would look pretticol. And this is really the process. Just travel and no, see what's working, use some references where possible. And yeah, play around with the results until you're happy. The final stages here really just going to be grounding this, so finding some rocks or something, and maybe feel free to play around that might not even be the best option. So I'm just going to drag in a few of these pieces to see if we have a better option for the ground piece to work with. They all look pretty much the same. Remember we've got scre as well. I don't know if screw would look any better. Again, we're probably not going to put the camera directly on here, or if we have a character, I wouldn't allow them to walk on here either. So this, I think would be perfectly fine. From a distance, we're going to paint a bunch of foliage on here. Some more tropical plants or something are coming to mind, and maybe some palm trees or something like that. So you're not going to see a whole lot of the ground anyway. It's just going to be a nice focal point. All we really want to do is we're going to find some rocks and see how we hide. I keep forgetting that the rocks are just ground pieces. Do we have any? No, so this is really just ground surface stuff. Want something partly flat. Maybe boulders would be quite useful here actually, and we can drag these into the water. It looks as though this is just like a nice outcrop from the water down here. We'll just make this big enough to make sure you can clearly see its part is connected to the ground down here. We can find some different top pieces to merge this in better. But at least we've got some rocks underneath to give the idea that this is not just floating randomly in space. Give this a slightly different rotation. I think that was pretty good how it was. Yeah, if you Do look through the water. You can see. It looks ash it's actually part of the ground at least. I'm just going to grab both of these shift select. Press rotate, so ea rotate mode t and rotate this around, and then we'll get both of these duplicated. And I can just stick these behind as well. So we've got something popping up from behind. Again, you definitely won't see this bit, so not super important. But just a passing glance it doesn't look as though it's just randomly floating. And we can see if there are any other pieces which would work well. The other side, but I think I might just just going to make use of that one piece and just keep rotating and flipping and scaling it around because we need some edge pieces as well, like so. We can actually make this lower. Again, some of this not being completely flush isn't a problem. The main thing is we're just trying to hide the fact that otherwise this will be a floating platform and we want to give away the idea that it's a raised shelf for some reason. I think actually this is too high, and we're not going to see that side anyway. And what I would do is I maybe get some other rock surfaces or something just to somewhat hide that because there may be a point that we can see that one sticking out a bit at the end, so we'll get some screw. I think that's all going to look equally bad. Maybe we do want to make use of this rock. Maybe this one could just do with being inverted on the scale. I'm going to go to the details and we'll scale this by minus one, or just put a minus in front of that top that and get a symmetrical symmetrical shape there, rotate that round, just trying this from different directions, really. I think we're learning that one is not going to work. Maybe we will make use of this one just because I can see there we go. So that actually stick site just the right mind, whilst also showing that we've got this rock information going on underneath. That's pretty good. Can even rotate that bit. We're not going to see from this side. The bit I'm most concerned with here is we're going to have this bit just this edge and actually another edge over here where you can see, it's kind of there isn't anything there. So I might look for some smaller rocks. So maybe we will make use of one of these There you go with these combined. It's not obvious anymore that there's any clear gap there. Then just double check if there's any way that we'd see the problem on this side. But we'll need to move this out just a bit very difficult to get this one side lined up. Then just find another rock or something to merge in over here. Definitely not going to see this back side. Although just in case, it won't hurt just to grab another of these, rotate it round, scale it down. Just making sure that we don't see inside the water at least will save any issues here. Bring that back up. In fact, I'm just going to grab this rock because we've got the same sort of issue over here. Just to hide this. We can rotate it a bit, move it. Then it just looks like we have everything covered and a proper platform, which is going to have some nice information painted on it anyway. Just wrapping that up now from something which I wasn't expecting to add in. If we had a camera or the player was immediately looking here, that's not quite able to see straight thug. We could potentially move these around. Also remembering, we've got the same parts on the other side. We want to grab these as well, and then move this to the side, just seeing if there's any kind of good shot where you'd see a little bit of everything if we wanted to show that off like a quick render or something. There you go, so that could look quite cool. Also, I still I'm not great with level design and the artistic eye. So I definitely have that issue where I go for symmetry quite naturally. I put that walkway directly in the middle, which is quite uncanny and weird. That probably looks a bit more believable as well. You've got your cave entrance here and another random outcropping wouldn't necessarily be directly in the middle of the cave or directly in front of you. Somewhere over here would look quite cool. Then we'd see the palm trees and the foliage and some light shafts coming down here when we get to the polished stage. I think That is now looking pretty impressive. I'll leave that as my initial outline and the initial design. We can come back and tweak things if you wanted to. But I think this will be a good starting point, and we can start adding those points of detail and information to really polish this up and make it look much more interesting, organic, and believable. 28. 26 - Landscape Paint: Our next focus, we'll be taking another quick look at the landscape painting tool. Again, we're not going to dive it deep into this. I just wanted to add some detail, essentially around some of the shorelines and just to provide a little bit of variation between the types of sand and potentially pebbles that we have on the landscape. We're not going to see much of it, so we're not going to spend much time. I just wanted to really show off the features a little bit more to let you know what you can do with some of the different landscape or tyranals. Before that, I just wanted to mention that between the recordings, I was playing around with a little bit of the visuals just to see if I could get things looking or feeling a little bit better. And I just wanted to cover a few of the things that I've done offscreen. Very, very minor changes, but I just wanted to mention them. One thing that came to mind, I couldn't quite pinpoint why I didn't like some of the general shapes and designs going on. I realized that we had a lot of flat, solid quick stops between the wall and the ground. Whilst I think this in a lot of places like here, you can say I've still left this is perfectly fine. What I've ended up doing is I find some of the areas which looked the worse to me, and I've just added some different static meshes down here. You can see down here, I have a piece of screen. I just went into the content drawer inside of the geometry, the assembly Remember we had the screen folder here and just use several of these. A couple of these, in fact, drag these in, rotate them around to fit, and all these really seem to do is they are mounds of rocks, rubble and different rock shapes, but they provide a more organic natural looking ease from what would be a flat wall into the ground. In places like this, it would just ease that d. I don't think we want this everywhere because then it's going to look like the entire cave is falling apart. Which is why I think a few of these flat surfaces into the ground more than acceptable. But in some places like these harder corners here, you can see that I've just added that in it also merges between when you've got two very different surfaces, this flat rock face and then this more rugged worn away wall, it just makes that look a little bit more combined. I think that was one thing that just stood out to me. Then whilst I was doing that, I did notice if you've taken a similar approach to me. All of the cables that I had around here were flush with the terrain when it was just one flat terrain. When we added the water, remember that gets the terrain will then be knocked down. Some of the caves are actually quite visibly like this one, for example, was quite visibly floating somewhat above, and if you look through the water, you could see that it's just hovering. I have moved some of these down and then in a similar way for the same reason, I've added some more screw around these edges as well. So just a very similar approach of just rounding out some of the edges. That's really all I've done completely optional. Just wanted to mention more from a design or the artistic side of things, just a few very small tweaks I've made, if you noticed that things were different between recordings. Other than that, the level remains entirely the same. No new features or anything added, just wanted to recap. So moving back on to the landscape painting, we have all of our material and everything set up for us very much forward thinking early on, and also because we needed at the least a kind of sandy texture that we could just apply across everything. But we can now make use of those different layers that we've added. One of the things I want to do is make the sand closer to the shore a darker color and then add those pebbles. So we're going to go into our landscape mode. Move on over to the paint tab. And then remember inside of here, all we want to do is just grab the different layers that we're going to work with and paint those onto our surface. I'm just going to make sure that we're selected on layer, which is our terrain, water is obviously the water layer. And then we just want to paint this with a much smaller brush size, so just test this out quickly. We can have a much bigger fall loft here. So again, the inner ring, remember is where you have the strongest effect painted onto the train. And then as you get towards the outer ring, everything will be smoother, a little bit more faded between those, so it'll add a nice natural blur, then we're just going to paint these details on. So what I think I'll do is, I'll come over here. We're going to paint mostly on this side, and I'm just going to start with our layer two information, which is our darker rippled sand. I'll just paint some layers down here. We can paint somewhat around here. We don't need to get all of the way around. We're not going to see a lot of this. I think some of this might not be quite soft enough, so I'll add a little bit more brush faller and then just paint back in here to try and smooth this side. That's another thing we can add some noise in between these if we want to so play around with some of these different options. So we can try and smooth between these. I don't want it to be a really obvious hard break between those lines. I think that's working pretty well there. As we get further out, and again, we're really not going to see much of this information. But I just want it to look a though we've got some shingle that pebble going on at the front of the beach here. We're just going to grab this layer. I'm just checking this quickly before going ahead. I think that's looking okay. Again, very nice, smooth, natural transition. I really do like that. I'm just going to go back to the front as I said, we want this pebble information, which we're not going to see a whole lot of, but I think it'll make things a little bit darker and we'll have some nice detail there. Making sure that you're not still in smooth mode. If you did change, we need to go back into paint. Make sure you have the correct layer selected, and then we can just paint down here in the sea and again, you're not going to see a whole lot of this. So we can be Somewhat rough and careless with all of this. We're not going to see a whole lot of detail. It's just that when we do look out to the sides, we want to make sure there's some information there. And again, we're not going to see very, very deep past this kind of coastal line, but just to show that it doesn't just magically disppear, we'll paint down here as well. And we do have a little bit of a hard edge here, so we're just going to smooth some of this out as well. We can also improve this with a little bit of the static some form of screen or rock static measure, I think I remember seeing before. So just something I'm going to do. Again, this is that I think as you here, you can see it gives it a nice gradient, if you were to come in a little bit closer. Obviously, this is what we'd be looking at is actual rocks and pebbles, that shingle that you get closer to some shorelines. If you wanted to bring that a little bit closer, again, you definitely could, again, just remember, you may want to smooth things off, so it's not too obvious. Sometimes as well, it may not be as perfectly straight as I've got there, so it may be that it's been washed up in certain areas. You can really play around with the designs that you wanted. I think when you do that, it just starts looking all that much more natural. So going to turn the tool strength down actually and just move the site a little bit, so I've started liking the look of that up here. And that's the kind of look that I'm going for. So I'm just going to hop on over to this side of the cave, and we can probably do something very similar around here. So we can paint in some of the harder detail here. Again, we can go in quite rough, get the foll strength to begin with, and then we can tone this down and tweak things around as we go. So that nice kind of iterative trial and error process. Yeah, give that go again. We're going to keep the tool strength a little bit lower, and then we can just smooth some of this out. In fact, before smoothing, I'm going to go back into paint mode and we will lower the strength and because we're working in quite a small zone, just going to lower the size of the brush as well. Just remember to paint some of this rougher sand closer to where we've got some of the water over here, we've got some of damp looking sand essentially is what we're going for. We're painting this dine in here. You get some nice shadowing, you get some nice different variation and stuff like that. You really won't see a whole lot of this from a distance, but it just adds those different layers of detail. And some of that to me is just looking. I think that's come a little bit too far, so I'm just going to brush further than I want on purpose here, just that I can kind of smooth it back with a lower tool strength and add some not perfectly straight lines all of the time. We don't want it to be completely wavy. But again, we've got a nice curve to the shoreline here. I'm going to keep calling whatever that is a shoreline. And then we can kind of emphasize that with how we smooth these back out and paint them in. So from a distance, you really won't see very much. When you're down here, you might notice a bit more. But the main thing is if we saw anything down here, we just want to make sure that things like these pebbles are going to be a little bit more visible, and we've got some nice detail here. Again, we can add new static meshes and things. To really flesh this out if you wanted. I guess it makes more sense to have this painted closer to where all of the rocks are. Again, we're just insinuating really that kind of pebbled information is going to be closer to different parts of where those rock formations are. It's still all looking quite flat. We're going to get to this very soon, playing around the lighting and tidying things up. But I just wanted to cover some of that. If you wanted to, I guess, maybe certain areas in here would benefit from a little bit of rippled sand, so we can bring in the tool strength, and we can just again just insinuate that some areas are get maybe a little bit damp around the corners of the edges. Let's move this back out so it's not so clearly really strong. In the because you will get essentially what we're avoiding, when I say, not too strong and smoothing things out, is we want to somewhat avoid a really obvious circular kind of brush stroke going on in these areas that we're painting. So we're just going to come back in and smooth between the different layers. So it will just look a little bit more natural and organic. That's the great thing about this process. Is very much, you can kind of add as much as you want, and it's very very simple to then take it away if you realize that you've overdone things or you want to just completely remove it. Just go back to your other layer and you just paint over it. So you can't really go wrong and mess things up. It's just a case of a little bit of trial and error and playing around until you get the look that you're happy with. I think with this side, I'm going to purposely not paint too much of this in the darker rippled sand. We're getting a lot of sunlight here, so we're going to assume that the sand here would probably dry up faster. Maybe it's only where we've got some movement around the shoreline here. We might see that. Inside, a little bit darker, makes it look nice and damp in some areas, a little bit colder in here. And again, I think that's just looking pretty cool. So I'll leave that there as far as it goes for painting. You can take this as far as you wanted. If you had a lot more ideas that you wanted to do with this, if you've got extra layers, feel free to spend that time and really make the level your own. But for me, I just wanted to again, really show off what the tools can do and the options and the ways that you might use this. Flesh out some of the design of what we already have going. 29. 27 - Foliage: We can now begin adding some of the detail to the inside of our cave or the level that you're working on. Myself this will include adding things like the rocks down here on the floor, some of the moss over these rocky areas that we already have, and then the climbers and things like that here. We'll also be painting the detail onto the caves in the background, as well as the back of the cave over here. We'll have some foliage and just again, adding things in for that variation in color. Just a couple of things I wanted to mention before getting started on this. So that I didn't need to go through the process. We've seen this a few times and I working with Bridge. I already have a few new plant assets in here. You don't need to use all of the same things, but I just wanted to mention that I have included some things like the IV for the creepers. So we've got creeper IV here. I'll likely be making use of some of this a bit later. Then also, I'll be painting in the rocks on the ground, making sure that you've got some rocks, climber IV and things like that. It's just a case of going to bridge. We can go to three D plants, and then just searching for the things that you want. I also have some aquatic plants as well. I think I got something from the tropical pack, so you can see have these the Tundra tornado. If we just click on these, we can see where they come from the Tundra pack. So you may see me using some of these assets, as well as things like the different types of creepers and climbers. I'll just see which ones work better as we go through. Then of course, the ferns looked pretty good as well, which I'll be using inside of the cave. Just to mention that you may want to get some of those ready to go very simple process. Just wanted to mention that between recordings, I have installed some of those in the background. We diving in. Again, this will be mostly just a speed design. I'll go through the steps and processes that I think are most important. But I'll run you through the very basics of working with the foliage tool. It's actually really simple. I'm just going to go outside of the cave so that we have a lot of space to work with just so that I have a piece of ground to demonstrate a few things. To begin working with and get into foliage mode, we just want to go up to the selection mode tab, the drop down we've used before to get to landscape, and this time, we're just going to go to foliage. To get started here, we want to go to our content drawer. I'm going to begin with the rock, just because at the moment, I think the inside of the cave is just looking very empty and probably the part which is just looking to me the worst at the moment. So I'm going to go to three D assets instead. I'll drop this down for night to give some space. I'm just going to use the filter tool just here just so that we see only the static meshes, and we don't need to go through the folders then in order. So if we drop this down, we'll go to filter static meshes only, and you can see here, this just lines up all of the meshes that we have inside of the three D assets. Want to pick a few of these that I like the look of, and what we need to do to get these foliage ready. We're just going to drag the assets that we like over into this section just here. If I find a few rounded, just to bring in the reference again, we're looking for these smaller smoother kind rounded rocks. I think we have a few here from the Nordic Bach. These will work perfectly fine. We can change the scaling, we can randomize things like that. We'll see this in a moment. And I think I'll we'll ignore the jaggedy ones for now, and we'll start with shift selecting just a few of these rounded ones, and this one down here looks pretty cool as well. Going to need to move the content draw down a bit. Then, as I've said, we're just going to select and drag these into the foliage section. With that done, you can see these are all ticked on. We have a brush in here, similar to the painting tool based on the brush size and the density, and we can just start painting these on the floor. And that's really what we're doing with the foliage tool. We're just painting this like we have previously. Have similar shortcuts where if we press shift and click. Instead of painting, we will start raising, so you can very easily erase the things that you have here. And you can see that as we paint things in or raise them, we're getting a tally in the left hand side of how many of these assets are being used. Now, foliage is quite cheap to render, but we don't want to go over the top, so we will try to cut this down and not use too many where possible. We don't want to go over kill with the foliage that we'll be having. We have a lot of these at the moment because the paint density is quite high. What we could do is we could lower this dine. I'm just going to erase these, and then I'll paint in here and you can see sources with a lower paint density, and then I'll paint over here after lowering that again, and you can see the difference that this is making. We're getting a lot fewer of these rocks being painted in. That's really what we're going to be doing. It's just playing around to these different values similar with the landscape painting, the material painting just until we get this right. I'm just going to bring this back up and erase these out again. That was just a quick demonstration. A few other things that will be useful to know, and then you can pretty much just go wild and play a round of this and it's really just a tri and an error type thing. If you select all of these rocks. If we have a selection of these grabbed at the same time, I'm just shift selecting those. We can do things like we can change the maximum and minimum x scaling, which is basically going to give us a uniform scale over the meshes being placed in. If we make some really small as a minimum and then maybe really large as a maximum, just as a demonstration, this may not actually look very good. So we'll make the smaller size we'll get a 0.25, and the largest will be two. We can paint these in, we can come down here, and we can see we've got some really tiny rocks and then some much larger rocks. That does actually look pretty good. Again, if we maybe make that less dense, so we'll just erase this. We now have that random scattering. They rotate randomly, they are being scaled randomly, and it just looks a little bit more natural than what we would get if we were placing this by hand. That's really what I'm going to do inside the cave with these rocks. Just to give it some visual information, look a little bit more organic and natural. It'll be a very similar process when we get to the plants and things as well. Just to show you that process, if we come back into the content drawer, go to the three D plants. I'm not going to keep these, I'm not too worried which ones I pick. I'm just going to select these three down here, and we'll drag this back into the foliage section as well. And what you can do with the rocks still selected, we'll just untick these, and then we'll just double check that the plants are ticked. So basically, we're only going to paint things which have been ticked here. So if we now wanted to paint just this one plant, this one here, we can untick the other two, and we're now just going to get just that variation of this single plant. Likewise, when it comes to erasing, we can only erase the things we have ticked. If I shift select and click over these, you'll see they're not being removed apart from that one plant that I still have ticked on. So if we press control in A, we can grab everything here, I'll tick all of these on, and then we can just erase everything. So very simple as I said, You can't really get this wrong, very much trial and error, and just getting comfortable with the tools. So I'm just going to untick the phones again. We don't need these for no. We'll go to the rocks and just making sure as well, you keep in mind that if I were to come in and change just the details on this rock, Let's say that we make the density of this one really high. We'll just get a lot of these painted in. So this is the density per unit, so thousand unit one by 1,000 unit area. This will control the number of instances placed here. This is the overall paint density based on the brush size. Like with the other brush sizes as well we could lower this and paint in just a much kind of smaller path or something if you needed to. So you will want to tweak from time to time the different values here. Again, we're not going to use anything this heavy, but I just wanted to show these options are available. But like I said, we want to keep these counts as low as possible whilst getting the detail that we're looking for painted in. What I was going to show is if we change these details, I've got a really high density here on this one rock, but then we select all of the rocks again. You'll see it has multiple values, which means that these three rocks will be painted in at the 100 unit density, whereas this one is painted in at I think it is like 6,000 something. So yeah. Just be aware of that. If you want to make the change globally, you'd want to select all of the assets that you're looking to change. Make those value updates, so I'll set this back to 100 on all of them. And then also change things like the scaling and those different options down here if you want to play around with that. Generally, when we're painting on the floor, we're going to be looking at things like align with normal, just means that where the floor is painting up, we want the rocks to be painted facing in line with the floor. So no strange rotations or things like that. We'll look at this a little bit later. I won't go into too much straightaway, but we can also paint on the walls, which will be useful a bit later for the climbers, but I'll pause the video and cover that when we get to that topic. But you can play around with things like the random scaling. By default, I quite like uniform. Just because if we put this on free form, it means that you may have a really long, but thin rock, which in a lot of cases clearly looks like it's been stretched rather than just having a kind of randomly sized asset. So I quite like to keep this uniform, but allow random scaling on a uniform grid there instead. So I think that's the main kind of crash course that you need with the foliage tool with that in mind. I'm just going to go through. I'm going to do the rocks. I'll do the plant foliage inside the cave and also in the background because it's a very similar process. I'll just be painting different leaves and things like that on the rocks in the background. And then I'll pause and come back and show you some of the other tricks that we can use to get things like the climbers and some of the V inside of the cave on the forward facing walls, the vertical walls, opposed to the horizontal floor, which is the standard place that you'd be painting. And really, what you will find is that most of this is just going to be me tweaking, which assets that I have selected, playing around to some of the densities and the scaling to get the look that I'm going for, keeping the concept out. This is reminded this one, open on my other screen, just so I can reference back and get something looking roughly like this, a bunch of smaller rocks here to start with, and a few of these randomly big placed rocks, and we'll come back and we'll hand play some things for the moss and a more interesting detail a little bit later. One final thing I have just remembered before jumping into this. Do be careful as well, that by default, the paint on static meshes will be enabled. So if we were to come in here and do this as an example, I could paint up here and you can see that we get a lot of random little rocks. I just look a little bit strange in some places, painted over static meshes. In this case, I'm going to get rid of those. I'll untick this, and it just means that if I wanted to quickly paint around this big rock fixture, it's only going to paint on the landscape, keeping everything here kind of free of these small scattered rocks. So just something that I thought would be useful to mention as well. And also come in and take a quick look here. I think this gray rock is sticking out a bit much. I'm not sure which one of these that is coming from, but you can definitely come in mix and match and pick the assets you think are going to work best or your design as well. So I may get rid of those just because it seems to stand out against the color of the sand, although looking at some of the background information here, we do have darker gray rocks as well. So we'll see how it goes. I may end up keeping in just something that came to mind though I'd mention. I. At this point, I was actually quite happy with the random sizes that I picked the really small 0.25 and two for the minimum and maximum. I've scattered those throughout the cave, and I just realized that it would be quite nice to have a slightly more dense selection of stones inside of the water volume, roughly where those pebbles were painted in the landscape painting. So that's all I've done here. I'm just going to the brush density, just increasing that a bit and lowering the brush size, just so that we get more stones at the same size painted in a smaller area, just for the kind of the shoreline, the coastal bit. And that's the main change that I've made there. At this point, I have all of the smaller scattered debris everywhere that we'd want it, so you can see me playing around with a minimum, maximum size for the scaling x. The thought behind it at this stage is that I wanted to get just a few of those larger clumps of quite big rocks. I'm playing around with what a good kind of scaling would be, playing around with what rocks I want to appear there, so I'm using the same ones as the pebbles, just making them bigger. To do this, I'll also be doing things like reducing the brush size even further. Again, maybe lowering the density as well, so that in a smaller range, we'll have less stones appearing, looking for that to 4 stones in the patch appearing. But still without needing to manually place them just to avoid the very easy to to hit human made filter, where I might line up in too much of an organized manner or similarize them or do something, which just makes it clearly look like it's placed by a person. It's quite a nice thing to still be able to use the foliage tool for this. Let the randomness come from the tool and the algorithm behind it, but still hitting the same kind of style from the concept. That's the thing you'll see here. I goes on for a little whi. It was just very difficult to hit what felt like a good spot for the minimum and maximum scaling, getting them to be far enough away and still looking somewhat unique and interesting. Overall though I think by the end of this part of the process, that did also work, and it looks pretty cool, similar to what the concept provides with the clumps of larger rocks. That pretty much wraps up the rock portion of this. I'm going to be moving on to the ferns. I've got the collection of ferns I chose a little bit earlier, making sure that they're enabled playing around with the scaling again and making sure that they are painted onto the static meshes. We want to paint this onto a mesh, not the landscape at this point. I'm also coming down and making the scaling a little bit bigger because I want these to be in the distance. I don't want to have to paint them too densely to fill the space. We're not going to really see what they look like. They're just going to be here to and that visual information in the background. So I'm making these a little bit bigger than you might otherwise just to fill the space with less of them being required. This is very simple, just going to paint them on all of the kind of flat surfaces, leaving some gaps in spots that doesn't look as oughy' appearing absolutely everywhere. But I think immediately, it shows a very, very nice contrast in the color. Of course, doing the same thing for the cliff on the right hand side as well. Then finally, with the same tool, same plants still selected. I'm just doing the very similar thing on the other side of the internal part of the cave or the bit, which is still part of the cave but exposed. Just again to add contrast in color. So we're going to add these to the rock faces. Also filling a big bulk of the central piece, so it looks less rocky, and it's very nice. I think the idea behind this having this one out of light and water providing the chance of this life to grow and flourish in this one area. I just think that's a really cool kind premise. I'm going to go that That's the main thing here. I will also put some in the entrance again, just assuming, got a little bit of that light coming through, something might grow in the entryway, even in the kind of more sandy area. Quite happy with the initial pass there. I think that's added some information to the background. Again, just bringing the concept across. The main thing is that when we're looking at this kind of cave entrance, we've got these different colors. It just brightens things up. It's one of those really nice greens that off yellowish green combo that I think looks really nice for foliage. So we've got that on the rocks. Put some of that in the doorway. I know here is more of a moss, and we will add that assets a bit later. But I think that just livens things up a little bit. We're going to get these climbers in a moment, which is why I've stopped to come back in here. Then I figured for a similar in view through here, where we're getting some light coming in. We'll make use of this as an opportunity to add a bit more color here as well. On the basis that we're seeing light, you would expect that things might be growing where the light is showing, so put this over some of the rock faces. The nice thing is if you're not getting too close to these, you won't necessarily see what type of plants they are, but they just give that different color variation in the contrast that we're looking for. Just notice the waves are a bit big and they're coming through the beach. I'm going to go back to the water settings. Remember that we can tone the waves down in the water settings. Just something to look out for as we're going through and polishing and tiding things at the moment, just some foliage right now, though. And the same thing how I've added a few of these the front, I'm going to add some water foliage in a moment. For the bits down here, we'll add a slightly different plant inside of the water. But the main thing before doing that is we're now going to look at these climbers, which is going to be a slightly different approach to what we've taken so far. Making sure that I turn the ferns off, we're not going to want to paint knees anymore. Although I think Looking at this, we might make use of a phone or two, maybe at the top, just because I'm not sure what that is, but it's a bit more leafy than just some IV or climbers coming down, and I think that might look quite cool. But mostly we'll be looking at these climbers. So we'll go back into the content drawer. We'll go to our three D plants, and as I've said, I've already got a range of different climbers. I know that some comes under IV. And just to let you know that if you get this issue, where you're not getting a demonstration of what the asset looks like, if you just press shift A to select everything, and then just move it slightly and then move it back. It's really strange, but that seems to go away. It kind of refreshes the editor to let you know that we want to see this. Think these are odd shapes and would stick out. Maybe it wasn't the IV I was looking for. Maybe it is the creeper. Just do the same thing again, Shift A, move that over, move it back. That could be the creep IV. And yet, under creep, we have these here. So we've got creeper IVs or just creepers in general, maybe it's not the IV that we're looking for. This lightly colored one is what I'll be using. I'm going to grab just a few or several of these slightly thicker ones. We do have these smaller branches, but I think that would just mean that we're going to need to paint more of them on. We're going to try and use the least amount of these foliage tying up as possible. Again, we're just going to drag this over, make sure that these are selected. Know for a fact, we're going to want to increase the size of these and also make sure that you have static meshes ticked on, so we're going to set this to something like five and ten as a range. Just give this a quick go, and that looks okay. So this will take up a fair amount of space. I just controls Ed to get rid of that one. Then as I've mentioned, initially, this is intending to work on somewhat flat surfaces so we could paint it along these perfectly fine. It's going to again just get rid of those for now. But we want this to go Like here, more across the vertical pieces of wall in some places. So we can do that really easily. We just scroll down here. We're going to go to the ground slope angle, and we'll just increase this somewhere past 150 in. And you'll see that this previously where that wasn't working, we can now paint directly onto the wall. So that's just a quick example. I get rid of that one because we may want to lower the density there just a little bit. Maybe the size as well. We'll see how this looks. Now the other thing is this doesn't give quite as nice of a contrast as the other ones. This is the other thing I thought I might need to show. Before I go back into speed mode painting, I'm just going to show how we can get this color to look more in line with the other foliage that we have here. So grabbing any one of the assets that we're using here because I think they're going to be using a shared material instance, which is going to be really useful here. So we can just click to select one of these creepers. I'm going to double click to open this asset. And then if we just dock this at the top. I will come in here. This is our material instance that we're looking for. So I'll double click this. I think this is the shared one, and this is where we can make use of those exposed parameters. So we've got a overlay intensity set to one, which is fine and an overlay color. So if we tick this one on, and we'll come in here and we'll give this more of a greenish yellow, and you can see the change that's making over here. If you want to make that more obvious, we make that red, and this is the way that we can overlay the color here. We'll come down here, give this a yellowish green and maybe move the value up a little bit here. And say, Okay. It's going to undock this actually, just because we want to see this in relation to the level that we have open. So going back down to that same color value, I think it's still a little bit off of the colors that we have here, and it doesn't need to be exact, and it's probably going to be nice to have some variation, but we'll get a little bit closer so that it really pops and stands it against the backdrop of these gray and brown rocks. We're just playing with the different values and the hues there and that is I think looking much closer and that's really good actually. So I'll leave that. And then if we paint more of these on, you'll see it starts is the other color. But actually when it does completely rest in place, we're getting the color that we wanted, and as I said. Although we've applied that just to one, I think you can see as we click these, they're all change in color is because they share that material instance, so we've made that change once, and it will apply to all of the IV. And already, we're getting quite a nice kind of going overc this b. I think I prefer the look I have here just to really lay it on thick, because we're getting some nice contrast here. Otherwise, it was looking very dull and colorless at the moment. Now one other thing, I'm just going to get rid of the majority of this. That was just to test. The colors more than anything else. I think the density is actually looking okay, because again, it's nice to have that really painted on thick at the moment, and also the scaling is working fine as well. I think that'll be okay. But what I wanted to show is going back to what I mentioned a little bit earlier, where it wasn't quite as relevant because we've just been painting on flat surfaces, but this aligned to normal. If we take a quick look at what this is doing, in some cases like this, we may not want this to align to the normal. We may still want this to sort of dangle down. So essentially, we have two different ways we can look at this at the moment. Unlike the rocks, which are just made to be sat there, these climbers are made to kind of hang and drop vertically. If we align this to the normal, though, what this is doing is if we imagine that this rock is facing this way to the right, it will try to rotate the climber, so that it also rotates to the right or we'll wrap around it more. If we wanted something, for example, where we have some of this foliage here, which is dropping down and hanging, then we can definitely achieve that. It just means that we need to come in, select the ones that we want here and just stop this from aligning to normal, and you can see we get those hanging dropping IV branches here. This is making me think that some of these may be a little bit too big, but like I've mentioned, We'll use some of the bigger ones just to fill in the space, so we don't need to paint in thousands of instances to cover a surface. Then I'll probably come back in lower the size of some of these to get the hanging dropping IVs like we've got there or the creepers. Just a quick example of what the line normals and things like that means. You can play around to different things, play around and see how you got in with the average normals as well. All of this will work different depending on the type of surface, the face that you're trying to work with. But it's just to say you can definitely a, even though this is made more for painting on the floor, you can definitely achieve the different looks that you might be going for. The different parts of your level. So that was just a quick new tool that I wanted to provide for your arsenal. Then again, that will hopefully let you build and design the rest of the level with the different types of foliage that you now have available. So when it came to the vines here, I did find that they're actually a little bit too big. I thought the size was going to be okay. They were poking through a bit too much and just taking up a bit too much room. So I've came in and scaled those down a little bit. They'll still fill the space really well. They just don't need to be quite that large. Playing around with the different aligned to normal and average normal as well, just to see what was kind of working best. When these were being painted to the walls and kind of to get them hanging down was the main main key point here. Think after some trialin error, although I was thinking of having them mapped mostly as kind of climbers stuck to the wall. I realized that having them dangling looked cool. I think that was the slightly nicer style. It gives a better shape and just makes the rocks look at b less repetitive and dull. So I went quite heavily and leaned on that, and just painting some on the outside as well, so it looks as though it's not just coming from one side, even if we only see the cave from the inside, having a clear kind of level of depth. And just showing that the focus was there that we're considering that the outside may also have some climbers and you can see that we've got different layers, different sides that they're appearing on. Taking the same approach here, so I want to I really liked the results from the front of the cave, so I've just hopped over to the exposed area of the outside part of the cave. And I'm just doing that same thing in the parts of the rocks that caught my eye earlier. Remember, I mentioned that there was a really nice outcropping from the ceiling. So I'm just putting some climbers or IV to dangle dime from there as well. The creeper sorry, just again to just make everything look a little bit more busy, a little bit more interesting to look at. And again, adding that contrast, that color contrast is popping in front of us, from the side, above, below, is just coming from everywhere now, which I think has a really good look to it. Now at this point, you may have noticed that as we move further from inside to outside the cave, we're getting this color variation going on. It was a level of detail thing going where different parts of the vines, the creepers show through at different distances. I noticed this previously when I was originally showing you how to change the material and the instance color. It did have two instances, two different slots, meaning that there are two materials, one for each individual part of the static mesh, making the creeper. A I've done is I've just opened the second one, the instance that we didn't change earlier. I'm just making that same change there. I'm making it slightly more yellow. I think this is more of the ny stick part of the plant here rather than the leafy part of the creeper. But again, it's just giving it that same color so that when we're moving from the forward to the back, it's not quite as obvious of a change. Also, we're just making sure that we've got that very vibrant yellowish green on all of the plants in here. Pretty much the final things I wanted to paint in were those plants from the Tundra pack, the tropical Tundra, or the tornado tundra. They look to me a little bit like seaweed. I'm pretty certain they're not seaweed, but they've got a nice set of color variation. I figured it'd be quite nice to scatter these along with the rocks in the very shallow part of the water along the coast. Again, you're not going to see a whole lot of that. But if you just take a brief glance, it's going to add a little bit of density down there, a little bit of color variation. And you can see how I'm just testing the size very quickly. I'm not going to paint it inside of the cave. I'm just getting an idea of how big they are and how big I need to make them and I am painting them inside of the water. So that's the only thing I'm doing here just adding a few extra. Can see I'm just doing that quite lightly. They're not super dense. We don't need it to be bunched up, but you can see something just swaying in there, just looks a little bit more interesting. Adds a few extra colors, a few nice reds to go over all of the greens that we have at the moment, and a lot of gray and brown in the rocks. Okay. With all of that, I think we are pretty much done with the foliage. We have a lot more contrast in just interesting looks going on now. We've got a lot more detail in the floor and things like that. We could bring in some more static meshes, maybe some other kind of rock detail to bring in and stop the being just so and flat. But again, we've added all of this color, which I think looks great at the moment. So different information in the sea, so we've got some kind of sea looking stuff down there. The other thing from the concept that I want to bring in are these rocks with some moss on them. Tried in the past. This is really hard to get with foliage. So we're actually just going to use some specific meshes. And then for this garden over here, similar thing, the mega scans foliage is more plants and small shrubbery. There's nothing like a big tree, and I wanted a really nice focal point tree here. So we'll probably take a look at that on the marketplace just to recap some of the other options that we have. So that will be just outside of the foliage, that will be part of the polish and tidy up past. But I think at the moment this now gives everything a much better shape, a much better idea of the different colors we'll be working with, which will be quite important when it comes to focusing on things like the environment and the lighting and getting all of that to work together as well because at the moment this is still looking quite flat, and there's a lot more that we can do here with things like fog and the atmosphere colors and things like that. But they are the main tools. You're now able to go around and flesh out your own level with the different assets and the things that you wanted based on the design that you're looking to implement. 30. 28 - Additional Set Dressing Polish: So this will be a perfect time to go through the polish pass. We just want to get those trees in the background, a tree for the garden. We might add the cable there. I did think of the idea where we have something which might move away or just block this initially. Well maybe think about that one. We also want some assets down here to add a kind of mossy rock, and we can download those with the moss ready attached. If we wanted to spend a bit more time, it's more of an intermediate kind of topic, but something that is possible is that we can make some materials where we could paint or vertex paint onto existing rocks. But we're getting to the point where it'd be nice to wrap this up and get the final scene or gameplay or whatever the goal would be in your project together and ready to go. So to do this, we can start with the main point we can finish this cave face off, maybe. We'll go to the Quixel bridge and we'll just get those rock assets. Going to go back into selection mode. We won't be foliage painting anymore. We'll go to window, Quixel Bridge, and we'll just find something with some moss, as I've said, already applied. It doesn't matter too much how the rock looks as long as it somewhat fits the theme that we already have going. So we're going to go to three D assets. I think up here, I'll just search for the word moss. We can see this is the type of thing I'm looking for. We've got some nice Nordic as well, so we've got some more nordic rocks. We could maybe use a few of these. And bring these in and see how they work. We want to make sure that we're avoiding things with this kind of red mud. We don't have any of that anywhere else in the level. So this probably would stick out a bit too much. This one would fit with the other assets. So that's really what we're looking for at this stage. And just several of these so that they don't look too repetitive, and we can put them either side of the cave. Just where it looks like it's going to be damper, but still getting that light, we'll have that moss growing. After a quick brows, I'm just going to pick the boulder, and then there are a couple of others up here again, we're avoiding these more red rocks here, just because they will stand out as they're not part of the same kind of environment or pack. Can maybe see what a big ledge looks like. We've put this Nordic forc. We have this rounded forest rock here, and then we probably don't want to use the cliffs. I don't know how they're going to look in the smaller assets. Maybe a couple of these larger rocks here, and that should do so. Just several new assets. We'll download these. We need to let this download, and then we can add this to the project, and we can start with that one. With all of these still selected, now that's downloaded, of course, we just need to add this to the project as well. So the fun thing now is we're going to have to go through and try to track down the assets we've just added to the project. We now have quite a lot of different assets in our folder structure. So we'll probably assume the one which is called Moss is going to be one of the ones that we want to use. I'll just drop this in here, and I'll just start making a little bit of a collection down here that we can work with so that they're ready to go when I find them. So we're just looking out for all of the different assets right now which have the Moss applied to them, so we've got these two. If you've done this one and one go, one thing you can look out for is the ones with the asterix, which means they're new to the project. You can see this one fail to install. So I guess this is the one which is broken, and we just couldn't get the material or the texture or something, which is fine. Going to get these three because I can see they will have mos applied to them, so we'll drag these in. So again, they're ready to go. You do get some interesting colors going on here as well when working with Quick. All these will work perfectly fine when you're in play mode. They just look a little bit odd in the ditive for some reason. I guess that is all of the assets I've just downloaded for the moss assets. And the textures are looking a little bit blurry right now just because we have the shaders being prepared at the bottom here. See if we have the cluster. So I think that was the one I was missing, so we'll just add the cluster rock in as well. So that should be all of them. As soon as this finish compiling, we should see a bit more of the color and everything come through when the textures and shades are ready to go. Quick recap. Really, all we're looking for is just a few rocks like this down here. So we're just going to add a few of these to the side, just covering what we have here with the completely clean rocks, just to get a little bit more of that detail. So I'm just going to take that process quickly ugh. Get these laid out just to get things looking a little bit more interesting, and then we can move on to the next part of the polish. So I'm fairly happy of that. We've got some extra information at the front now, we can move on to the other parts like adding the larger trees, and then also working on the atmosphere, which is going to really change a whole bunch of the overall look of this. So I just wanted to mention, if you want to get rid of this filter, at this point, we can untick the static mesh, that will let us view anything inside of any of the folders again. And if you want to get rid of this little window that's popped up entirely, we just go to the filter dropdown and just untick the static mesh, just essentially saying that we don't have any filters whatsoever, and then that we'll get rid of that new window compartment. For the tree that I'll be using over here as the focal point, I'm just going to go to the Epic launcher and open the marketplace. Whip the marketplace open. I just want to go again to the free section. I'm just going to look for trees. Just a case of finding something you think will fit. I quite like that, again, I think because the color of the green. I know that we can change this, but I think these would look quite striking. So I might go with the decagon Old West as out of theme, but we're mismatching quite a lot of things at this point, so it shouldn't matter too much. The other ones just look a little bit to stylized like the tropical ones would fit thematically, but the style of them just looks a little bit cartoony. I've looked at this before. I think this will work quite well. I'll add these to the cart, and then once I've put that through, I'll import that to the project. Same processes previously, we just select the Ad two project. We'll find the beginner asset holder, and then we'll just add this to the project. We're here. There's a couple of other things that I know that we'll need a little bit later. I'm also just going to go back to the free section. We'll remove the tag for trees, and instead, we're going to look for Niagara. We're going to look for some free effects that we can use here. There's not a whole lot of them that we have available, but we can add some flames and fire just to get used to the particle system so that I can demonstrate that. So we'll come in here. And again, if you don't already have this, purchase the asset pack for free, and then we'll do the same thing again. We'll just add this to our project. So we'll find the Beginner asset project. Select this one add to project. That way we have some new assets and also some particles to look at later, just to add some lighting, and add a little fire into the level of something like that. Just to make things look a little bit more interesting. Whilst all of this is downloaded, that's just reminded me we need something else inside of the project. So I'll open up the Quixel bridge one more time. That's all kind of working where in the background anyway. So we'll go to Window. We'll go back to the Quixel bridge. One thing that I thought was included inside of the Goddess temple is a bunch of pillars or lamps just to kind of act as somewhere to hold visually the fire to make it look somewhat believable or have a reason for it to be there. So we're going to find those instead because they weren't included inside of the Goddess temple. I think it's under the Japanese category or one of the Japanese packs. I'm just going to search for that. And yet, it's the lanterns, not the lamps. So looking for the Japanese lanterns, just somewhere that the fire can be held. And again, really more of a reason just for us to look at different features than anything else. We could also go the lanterns like this if you wanted to have something hanging from the ceiling. These are the ones I've played around with before. And I think what idea is, I'll just grab a couple of these and we'll just download these if you haven't already and add them to the project. So what I'll do is, I'll put these maybe at the front of the cave doorway that I'm thinking of. Maybe it'll be a case that we have that turned on before the big boulder moves out the way just to get an idea of some simple blueprint logic. Ws also looking at things like adding sound effects when it happens, and then the particle effect can be ignited at that time as well. So the assets that we're using aren't too important, but it just kind of stitches everything together, so the flame isn't just floating around randomly or something like that. So with those added to the project, we can close bridge. Just go back to the marketplace and see if everything's ready to go, so this seems to have been added to the project, which I think means the decagon tree pack should probably be in here as well. So we've got old West, volume seven, meshes, and there we go. We have a bunch of trees. So all I really wanted is one or two of these, maybe something quite interesting. If we just drag this in. This won't be foliage because these are just going to be like our key focal point. So we're just going to have a couple of these really large scaled up trees like this, making it look somewhat magical and just a little bit strange that these are all in one place, and that's perfectly fine just to make it stand out and make it somewhat unique. Dragging things at the moment to see which one stand out the best. So we won't need the bush, but we could make this more of a hero asset, so I'll just click out to get rid of the riser. Make this much bigger because this will be one of our focal points. And this is what we'll be seeing kind of from a distance when we're first looking in here. And we can grab a few of these, put one behind, move them around, put it in the ground just a little bit. I think I dragged another one in just a moment ago. There you are hiding down there, so we'll make this one bigger as well. And you can see I kind of had that in mind earlier, so I've purposely left a little bit of the patch here less crowded with the shrubs and things that we're painting in just so that I could place something like this in manually, and it'd have a little bit of space around them. Make this bigger, maybe rotate it so that the key places that the player will be seeing or the camera. Have a more interesting kind of view there. So if we go back into the cave, there we go. So again, if you just imagine that if we have a big rock or something that moves out the way, the first thing you'll see is that will open up, and we've got these interesting looking trees, just want to make sure they're framed in a nice way as well. They don't all necessarily need to be right next to each other. You could probably add a couple more in or something and just have this one really large tree here. In fact, I think I might add a couple more of these in, just scale them around. Move them a bit. Just take up a little bit of space in the background around the main kind of key focal tree there. It just looks a though we've got this one area where everything's growing out quite nicely. I'm happy with that because then if we come through here, we've got a bunch of interesting things we can look at here, a lot of information that we can present to make look pretty interesting, with a fly through or even a character being able to walk through and explore little parts of our cave and this tropical tundra area outside. So the last few things, I'm just going to grab a few more static measures. We can get rid of this cylinder and we won't need this anymore. I just wanted to grab a few rock pieces I remember seeing earlier which look as though they're more manmade. I specifically wanted to add those in. I'm just going to come in and add that filter again. For static meshes. If you remember we had those rock collections, I think actually, they weren't in the mega scans, where they probably won't be in static measures, so we'll just need to remove that filter. I think they were in geometry, and they were part of the assembly, and we had those rock pillars. So these are some more blueprints. Again, they're the packed level actors that we've worked with before. And it's just so that we've got something we can suggest that people have been here before us. Something which would not necessarily always appear completely naturally and just a few interesting manmade things. And I just think they look really cool. I always like these. And again, just to give that same sort of suggestion out here. We'll have a nice big one. Just to suggest that people have been here before, even if it feels like it's the first time that cave entrance has been opened, just to say that people probably have been here, and they were bored, stranded or whatever in the cave and made some pointless little rock statues like so. So they'll hopefully just grab some attention. We might need to make sure that they're in a more kind of visible place or we light them up or something. And this is how you just come to interesting designs as realizing that you may want to cast light in different places just to grab the the viewers attention and really make sure that they're seeing this information you're placing. And then the final things, so we will go back into our mega scans, three D assets one more time. We'll make sure that we have those lamps ready to go. I think they were called lanterns went so if we search for lantern. And I'll just drag each of these in. I'm not sure which one I'll work with. I'll probably just use one of the assets, but if we put them side by side, we can see which may be the better one to work with. This is interesting looking as a little bit overkill, though. There's nothing else which is kind of built up apart from a few rock statues. I think that's too detailed, also a bit too large. So I'll get rid of this one. One is not going to have much place for the flame to show. I think the clear winner here is if we have a couple of these, and we can just place them, I won't put it in just yet. I think we'll make this a blueprint a bit later instead to show off the communication between different classes calling events, but we're going to have a big boulder here. We'll place this as a kind of an entrance thing to grab your attention again, and then we'll have both of these light up, and when they're both lit, that will be when our other blueprint event will be called to move something out of the way. We'll look at this a little bit like a door entrance and just blind these up and put them in place. I needed, if they do turn out to be a bit small, we can always scale them up as well. But I think the camera will probably see it more from this kind of height. But we can have these show something off, have something open up there, and then expose all of this. So again, just ideas of how we'll be set dressing this a little bit later. And I think that's it for the meshes and assets. As I've mentioned in the past, if you wanted to come in, we can go to our geometry, our assembly. Remember that we had that screen. So if you're still thinking that the floor is looking a little bit plain and basic, we can find some of these floor pieces. I think screen seems to always be angled, so maybe we want the rocks. And if you just wanted some extra information, in fact, that does look a bit better, just to break up what would otherwise be kind of very flat surfaces everywhere. We can move these around as well as having the foliage everywhere. So it's just more of that trial and error, seeing what work, seeing what you like, and placing those pieces around. That was the other thing. We obviously have a folder here called ground, which would probably be more ideal for this. We don't need to see all of it, so you can wedge this in the floor, and then we'll just get these chunks that you'd see. We probably want something which looks a little bit less grassy. I think all of this is meant to be more in the forest. So we may not be able to make use of this. But just ideas I think I'll leave. This is all perfectly fine. We've got a lot of information in detail here, but just to show off some of the things that we could have done. I'll leave that one. So I do like the look of this. Maybe scale it dine and then scale it out, and then down again, so it's not quite as tall. There we go. We've got a nice big chunk breaking up some of the floor over there as well. Merge that in more over here. There we go. 31. 29 - Lighting Atmopshere: And that leaves the final topic, which are just some quick changes that we can make to the environment. So the final part of the polish is really changing up the background here. We've left this at the complete unreal kind of default with the atmosphere and the lighting. So the first thing that would really bring, especially this back area to life over here is we can add some volumetric fog. We go into our lighting. Make sure that you have, if you put everything in the folder, we've got our lighting folder here. We're just going to grab the exponential height fog here. In the details panel, we want to scroll down and search for our volumetric fog tick box. We take this on and we already get some extra information being added here, you can see everything got colored with the fog immediately. And then we have some control over scattering distribution. So if we increase this or decrease this, we can see how that's going to be affected based on where the light is hitting. So immediately, we're just getting in a little bit more of that atmospheric effect coming through there. And this is one of those assets which tie directly into another asset, and that is the directional light. So if we select the directional light up here in the lighting section, and we want to scroll and find our volumetric scattering intensity. So this is how much the light will actually be affected. Through that volumetric fog that we've just added. And you can see this is where we start getting things like those god rays, and it can start making, especially this kind of area look quite interesting. It just makes everything look a little bit more interesting. And I think this will definitely be a focal point of a final render, just because this looks much more interesting now than the front does. Because the light is coming essentially from over here. So the way that the directional light works, we can see the sun is over here. The way that this works is we do have an object in the world if we press F that is just down here in the floor. As I've mentioned, it doesn't have any relation to where this is actually placed, but it does have relation to how this is rotated. If we rotate this around, we will get the light being updated, and we can see that's controlling more where these god rays are going and the time of day that this is kind of recreating here. So there's not going to be any real way that we can get the front and the back looking interesting at the same time. Making this a little bit darker, though, does help tone the front down a little bit and just look less fake and sort of bright that way. Another shortcut, which is really useful here is control in L, but you need to hold control. Press L and then keep hold of the control button whilst moving the mouse. And this gives you a kind of free rotation of the light source, as long as you hold control down and move the mouse. So you can see this is rotating in all of the different directions as I move that around. If you lose that, just press control in now again, holding control afterwards, and then you can rotate the The directional light, essentially what we're doing here is just rotating that directional light object with the mouse. So you can very quickly that way from different places. You don't need to always be holding the directional light. The main thing is we can come over here, do the same thing and see if it looks better from one direction than the other. So we could get a pretty cool here actually if we had the light in this direction. But then, of course, we're going to lose all of that interesting lighting in the back over there. So I'll probably render this height twice to get some interesting screenshots, once, maybe of the light over here because then makes it look much more interesting than when the light was around the back over there, and then I'll probably do another render with the lighting set the other way. You could even have this type of thing where you've got a sunset and that really cool stream of light across the ocean there. So it's quite impressive the changes that can be made just with the way that you've got the lighting and some of that simple volumetric fog setup. So play around that, get things lit as you wanted. Then we have a few final things that we can change You can go much deeper into all of this. But just to get a sense of the final style that we could go for, we'll go to our volumetric cloud would be the next one. This is going to be easier if we're outside, if you're inside of a cave or something like that. This is controlling the Cloud, remember I said that before. We can just hide the things if you're not sure what is responsible for the different areas and which one you want to affect. If you're not liking the clouds, we can change the altitude of these, lower them, raise them. We can make them thicker, thinner. Again, all of this will come in on how things like the lighting. Or the rays are blocked and things like that. So you can play around with various settings like this, as well as where different parts of this sky atmosphere class is starting or ending, and just again, tweaking these values to see what happens and the kind of results that you're looking for. And just to say as well, a combination of these, if you wanted the clouds to pretty much disappear, you could start lowering the layer height, the bosom altitude and things like that. And you can see the Do you become a bit grainy. If you want them to be gone altogether, we just lower these and we can get rid of the clouds entirely. I quite like the look of this, though, so I'm going to leave this pretty much as standard. Just wanted to let you know that you do have full control over the clouds through these different details just down here. So there are all of the different options that we get with our lighting, the atmosphere, the general environment that we've created. Another way that we can very quickly tweak the color grading and a lot of information. More on mass is using something called a post process volume. So we're going to add one of those in to wrap up this kind of polish and tidy topic. We can add one of these from the quick add to project option up here. We're going to search for post process. And with all of these are exactly the same so we can grab any one of these. It doesn't matter where we place this. We won't actually be seeing this in the level. I will put this inside of the lighting note. It's not really a lighting asset, but it's part of that same kind of process. So we'll put this into the lighting section. And the first thing that I want to do is, I will move this up just to show you that by default, This will have a box, generally, only things inside of this box, the cameras inside of this box will be affected. This will allow us to do things like add really strong bloom. If we turn bloom on and increase this, you can see the bloom value has been ramped all the way up as long as you're in the box. If I fly back out the box, then we turn this off. If we wanted this to be applied globally, we can scroll down. If we go into the details panel, scroll down and we can find the option somewhere near the bottom, this infinite extent unbound. If we turn that on, now, wherever we are, we'll have all of these effects, turned on automatically. So now we don't need to worry about where that post process volume is, will get those effects regardless of where we are. Again, you can see these effects will very quickly start making your scene just look much more refined and polished. So the bloom being quite that high is maybe a little bit intense, but we could definitely add to this and bump it up to get some nice results. We've got other things as well, so the mobile depth of field not relevant for what we're doing here. We can change the exposure, and people who are more familiar with cameras or doing your cinematic edits and color grading for TV and film and things like that. You'll be much more familiar with this. But we can add different features like chromatic aberration is quite a popular one, not for this type of scene, but is that outlining effect you get going on. Just say that we do have a lot of different options that we can play around with and tick on here. It's one of those things. I'm going to add a few of these now, but it's mostly going to be trial and error, playing around with what's available. If any of this makes sense of you, then you'll be nice and comfortable to come in and play around with this type of thing. I quite like adding a vignette through the image effect. Is that black ring that we get around the outside? Maybe not too intense. It's quite a nice kind balance to the bloom, so we can make things look brighter in the middle of the camera, and then we get that nice vignette around the outside. In the final core feature you may want to look at things like adding a temperature to your level so you can do an overall override of the temperature that we have here. If we turn this on, we can play around and make this a warmer kind of scene or cooler depending on what you're looking at rather than changing the color directly. In this, I think a kind of a warmer yellow would fit quite well here because we're inside of a somewhat tropical cave. And again, that just makes the outside here just looks that much more interesting to me. That would be an overall temperature balance change. We can come in as well, change things like the colors that the shadows would pick up, so we can add more or less saturation to the shadows. We can have all of the shadows in our level look a bit more blue or green and adding this kind of effect to these. And that was select on global, sorry. That was like a global color override there. What I meant to be showing was the shadows there I said the shadows, so we could, as I said, make the shadows have different tints and colors applied to them, changing how strong the contrast of the, things like that. Any of that if that's of interest, and if you're familiar with that type of thing. Again, like I mentioned, Those people more familiar with film and TV edits may be more comfortable with this type of thing. But you have all of these different options available under the post processing volume. With things like the ambient occlusion, notice that's now working. I didn't used to work in some of the versions of five, but we can accentuate the detail that we get from the shadowing by bumping up the ambient occlusion inside of this, and that immediately brings us out a lot as well. So I'll leave that there for this part. This is one of those where you've now got a huge toolbox of different things you can tweak and play around with or your environment, your atmosphere, your lighting, and this overall post process override as well. Play around with some of these, maybe pools the content, make sure that everything is looking as close to final product as you envisioned. You have so many different options here to make the scene look just how you want to take that time just to refine things and make it look as good as possible. 32. 30 - Migrating Assets: With the bulk of the level fleshed out. This is going to be a perfect time to swing background and look at the feature where we can migrate the content that we want. So everything that we've put inside of this main level. We can move this over to our core project. Before doing that, I just wanted to make sure that we have absolutely everything that we might want. So I'm just going to go through the assets. I'm going to add in some placeholder stuff, the lanterns we already have, I'm going to build out the wall, which will act as the door, which will be a blueprint a little bit later on so that we can put code in there, but for now, it will just be a simple static mesh. So we'll get some of these from the content drawer inside of the three D assets and our geometry folder here. I was also thinking as well that before moving everything over, we could tweak a few final things like playing around with the landscape, building in some different levels of detail, some small mounds or something like that, just to make it look a little bit less uniform. I was, in fact, thinking it might look quite interesting to build a mound here so that you'd actually have to go up the hill before you see the bulk of what is behind in that kind of hidden away part of the cave. To get started, I'm just going to go into landscape mode. I'll make that change first and sculpt a little bit of the landscape around, so it's not just a large flat area. So we'll have the train selected, we'll go into landscape. Changing the brushes in the tool strength, so it's not quite as strong or big so that we have a little bit more refined control here. And this is just going to be a case of sculpting a few things out, smoothing it down and maybe flattening it back off. These are going to be the main tools I can see myself using. So I'll just do that quickly, first of all. Keeping in mind before I get started, that we won't be able to paint or sculpt anything out over here, so this will be quite a flat area. Remember that we have this area which we are unable to paint on because of the water volume. But that's perfectly fine, something to be aware of, and I think we've got enough detail, and we want this to be quite flat anyway where the water may have been a little bit more init and just leveling that off. So you will notice here that as I'm going over the foliage, any of the foliage we've painted onto the landscape, not the things we've placed by hand, but the foliage assets themselves will raise and lower with the landscape. So we do have that flexibility as well, a very nice kind of automated, appreciated feature there. And where I have buried things like the lanterns and some of the rocks, we can come back and we can tweak those a little bit later. And then you can see here. I'm just using the smooth tool, like I've mentioned, and the flattened tool, just to get rid of some of the sharper creases and just to smooth things out obviously. Also lowering the platform down a little bit. I've kind of purposely over sculpted and then flatten that back down to a more reasonable level. Also able to flatten things out like the crease that we get between our water is affecting the landscape because of the boundary that I've mentioned before that we can't paint over. We can flatten that in together, though, so there's not a lip or whatever you would call that. Then just making some final tweaks and adjustments here just to get this looking right. Just playing around of the camera. What I'm noticing is I do think this is going to be quite a good direction for this because not only will this take up again a little bit more space, make things look a little bit more interesting, but we also are now directing the eye, the only thing which is really standing out in here, especially when we put the wall in, everything's just going to look like one big wall at this stage. The eye will naturally be drawn towards this one single hill in the middle of this cave. So it'll be a nice focal point to just set the viewers gaze towards. And then when we have the door and the lanterns lighting up and the door animating, I think that'll just look pretty cool. So then the main tweaks that I wanted to make with the sculpting tool there, we will need to come back in and just move some of the hand placed static measures around, but that's perfectly fine. We've gotten rid of that little ledge between the water boundary and the landscape there, just double checking everything on the other side is looking okay. Thing we could probably do is put some assets in here to act as like steps or something. Again, just to show that maybe there's a reason that this mind is here, maybe it's covering something, and there's some kind of man made intervention going on here. But I think that is going to be well leaved there. It just looks that a little bit more interesting than it did previously with everything just being flat. Back in selection mode, like I've mentioned, what we want to do is we'll add maybe some rocks here or path or something, so it looks as though this has been built up at some point. And then also the cave rock wall kind of door thing, whatever this is going to be. So, in fact, I'll start with the doorway. I think this is going to be one of the key points, and we're basically wanting something quite specific. It's going to be a large rock, but also preferably we'll be looking for something with two sides. And I think there are a few of those in this pack, just not many. Could stitch one piece together and give it those two sides, but preferably, I'm pretty sure I remember something like this, having an option which had both sides automatically. So we'll make use of that if I can find this one. And there we go. It was this one that I had in mind, the coastal cliff. It does definitely have two sides, somewhat symmetrical. We can play around and flip this around. We'll probably need a couple of these in the blueprint. We'll just kind of approximate that for now. As I said, this is very much just very quickly, roughly getting things in place. So that we know that we have all of the assets that we want to be taken across to our other project and just making sure it kind of works as intended. We can probably flip this one, that it's more like that there. And then if we drag this up, we can maybe flip this the other way and flip it around as well, and maybe make this one larger just to take up the rest of the space. As with everything else, this doesn't need to be perfect. You won't notice the small discrepancies like that, and in fact, if anything, it will make it look a little bit more natural and believable, which is what we're going for. We just want something which will completely fill the space just here. So we might need to make this one bigger as well to do a bit more of the work. Main things we don't want any light poking through to begin with. We'll make sure that we push this back far enough. And this is very much how we'll be creating the blueprint based on these assets as well. Just making sure it does the same job here. So it does stand out a little bit, but as I mentioned, the main thing is if you were to just take a quick glance around the cave, that hopefully wouldn't stick out too much, but having this sand mound, this kind of hill going up, will draw the attention here. Just give you something to look at as one of those kind of key focal points. The other things that we've lost, I'm just going to search in the outline here, we can find any of the items we have in the level. We're going to search for a lantern. They have indeed been buried, so I'm just going to select both of these and drag these up. We can either reposition these or maybe paint a little bit more of a mound to meet the floor of these depending on which way you wanted to go. I think in this case, I'm just going to go back into landscape mode. And I will raise this just a little bit to meet those. Though, again, they can be a little bit buried, that's perfectly fine. And if we flatten this down, let's move this out. It's just a case of playing around with this to get things and then smoothing this just a little bit more so it's not fully hidden away, and there we go. Back in selection mode, just move this one across. That one is now looking just a little bit out of place, not quite in line with the doorway. So these are the type of tweaks that we want to make before finalizing things and moving everything across. The other idea that I had in mind is we could potentially just move this one as well. Just going back and forward between the landscape and the assets quickly just to finalize this, using the fall off point there to make some more kind of gradual increases there before smoothing that back down. That gives it quite a nice mound actually. So again, it's just looking less symmetrical, a little bit more how that the sand might naturally move around or fall, so we'll leave that perfect. What I was going to say is that we can also look at adding something extra with foliage. So if we've got any stones, I think the goddess temple comes with some pathways and stones and things like that. We only have one of them is called Roman stone floor. That's perfectly fine. We can bring this in, and yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for. What we can do is we could either place these by hand. Quick tip if you wanted to do this, as I've already unticked the snapping for rotation and location. If we use this option here, we can add snapping to the surface. Then if we go into movement mode, so W on the keyboard for the shortcut and drag the widget around with this small circle, this will snap that to the surface. So it's a little bit easier than rotating it by hand. We will need to make some changes. But what we could do is we could place several of these just to make it look. I'm just pressing lt and dragging to do the quick duplication. We can rotate things around and then just drag it again back into place, letting the snapping do the bulk of the work there. And what we'd want to do is probably place these somewhat under the ground, so it looks as that they've just been sort of buried and covered over time. We can maybe rotate some. So again, they don't always look so perfect. Maybe make the gaps a little bit bigger as we get further away, so it looks as though it's more kind of built together as we get closer. To the main focal point again. It's just something doesn't need to be perfect. This is just again grabbing the viewers attention over here. Making sure we probably don't have this poking through rocks and things, so we may need to come in to the foliage tool. And you could make this foliage if you wanted to paint this on, but I think in this case, I'm just going to use a few so we can get away with that. What I probably will do, though, is going into foliage mode. I just select everything to be quick here. Take all of them on and just make the brush really small. And these are just the refinements, just to make sure nothing really obvious is poking through here. I'll make the brush even smaller. And just here where we've got a rock poking through our ground, I'm just going to hold shift and click to raise, make it even smaller again, just to get rid of a few of these little rocks. So the ones in the sand perfectly fine, the ones which are overlapping because I do like where the floor pieces have found themselves there. So we'll have something looking a little bit like this. That's perfect again. You can make a few tweaks if you wanted, so I notice this one's ever so slightly hovering. So if you wanted to come in, rotate this around, and as I said, maybe dig this a little bit into the ground, so it looks as though overtime is worn away. Into the sand. Just being careful, we don't have anything happen like that, where it becomes really obvious that one side is completely poking out. But I'm more than happy of that. At this stage, I think we can safely say that would be all of the assets that I would want to use in the core project. The other thing that we will need to bring across will be the particle effects. We haven't added those just yet. We could look into this if I untake the static mesa and just make sure that we only have maybe the fire effect that we want to use. We can then edit that and use that a little bit later again in the core project. Other than the fire effects, I don't think there's anything else that we're going to need in here. So we're going to make use of these as blueprint a bit later. We've got all of the foliage and the assets that we want in this side of the cave. I'm not going to decorate this with anything over here. These floor pieces will be the new parts here and just everything decorated inside. I'm going to do that. We're going to take a very quick look at the particle pack that we've installed earlier. To do this, I'm just going to save this map, make sure that we've got everything updated. And we can jump into our demo map inside of the VFX volume here. Going to go into maps. And specifically, I've just realized what the naming convention is for those of you not familiar. We used to have a particle system in unreal called cascade, that is going to slowly be phased out as epic have replaced it with something called Niagara. So I've just noticed here we have N Underscore. So these N underscore map names are the Niagara versions, the ones before the older versions, the cascade. So we'll try and use the newer version, which we'll see a lot more of going forward with versions of Unreal five, especially. So we're going to go into one of the Niagara maps. And this is just a quick demonstration map, which will allow us to very quickly. We can come in. We can change the play mode up here with the settings option. And instead of going into selected viewport, which will drop us into a live kind of simulated game mode, we can just tell it to simulate, which leaves us in the editor, but it forces everything to start running in the background. Very useful to seeing things like this with the particle effects. So we still have full control over the viewpot and the editor, but we can see everything start playing as though the game is running. Okay, so I had to recompile some shaders, but here we can see the examples here. This is the side we have the examples of the directional fire, so being affected by wind, not something we're looking for. You could always add something cool like a big fire pit. This would be perfect for that type of thing. I just want some really small flames that will look more like candles than anything to put inside of those lanterns, and we can see that over here. So we're not going to do anything fancy with direction or anything like that yet. So we can just use one of these. These look a little bit too controlled. We could potentially make use of this one, tone it down a little bit, make it smaller, and I think that would fit the lantern almost perfectly. So what we want to do here, now we know which one we want to use, we can exit play mode. Just drag this over a little bit so I can see. There's this one here specifically that we want to work with. I've just double clicked to specify it out of this group, which one I wanted to interact with. And we can see just here, if we scroll down in details panel, we have our Niagara element, and it's not telling me which system this has applied. I'm just going to go and click off of this, click back into this asset to make sure we've got the correct part selected. And you can see, in fact, if you scroll down the way that this asset has been provided is this is an exposed property. But the main thing is that this is where we can find which Niagara asset was being used. So we can now use this shortcut here. So this folder and the magnifying glass is a shortcut to find the asset we want to work with. We can drag this into the map. And again, if we just press simulate just to double check. Yeah, that is definitely the one that we want to work with, so that's perfect. And all of that was really just a quick way if you're ever wondering where something is, especially when you're in a project where you've got a ton of different folders like this, and you just want to know where the asset is inside of your project structure, that's a quick way to find it. So if you can find an example of it in a level or a map, and we can use this magnifying glass to just kind of quick jump to where this is in the project. So we now want to keep this one open. Keep in mind that we want to be inside of Niagara reference and Torch. I'm going to need to jump back into my main map, the one that I've been working with so far. So inside of the maps folder here, mine was called Mine. I'm not going to save anything that I've changed in this level, and all of that was really just so that I can come back and find where it is. This is in the torch folder, the one that I'm interested in. You may be working with something else, whichever one you found, and just drag this into the level. We're not going to keep it here. The main thing is that when we migrate to this map, it's going to look for everything which is being used inside of this map, and it will bring that across to our other project. We just need to make sure that everything we want to keep is inside of this level, and we'll tidy up and use all of this a little bit later. In the final demonstration. So that's the main thing we can save this. That is everything now in the level that I want to bring across to the other project. So when it comes to migrating, the main goal of this entire topic, what we want to do is very simple. We're going to go to our content draw. We want to find our map that we want to move across, and this will work for any type of assets, but in this case, I'm using it for the map that we've been working on. You could, if you wanted migrate just a fire particle, for example, from one project to another, It would work in the same way. But inside of the maps folder, I'm going to right click on the main map. We're going to go to the asset actions, and we're going to choose the migrate option. We do have options to export things. We could copy and paste this through the file browser in windows or whichever operating system that you're using. It's often recommended not to do that just because the migration does a bunch of extra clever stuff behind the scenes for us, which will ensure that no references are lost for things like which materials might be using which texture. And any cross reference stuff will all be brought across as well. So we're going to select migrate, and this is what I mean by that clever stuff which is happening. So it's by default, chosen everything that we've used. And as I've mentioned, anything that it knows that we've used which is referencing another asset, whether that be a material, a texture, whatever it is, will also be brought across to the other project, just ensuring that nothing is going to come across broken or causing any problems inside of the other project. So you can still see we do end up with quite a lot of assets which will be coming across, but this is still a lot less than if we had all of the assets that we've been trolling and testing and playing around with, had we not taken these additional steps. So just confirming you think that looks correct, making sure that nothing is glaringly missing that you know that you've used by default. This normally works without any customization or anything. With that confirmed, we can just press okay, so we'll let that default to what it has, and we just want to find the file directory of the project we've made previously. So our main project, which at the moment, is pretty much empty with just a main map. So we'll say, here, and then for me, this is going into the T underscore boot camp folder, so this is the name of my project, and this is the really, really important step here. You cannot miss this, get this bit wrong. It can break the process if you get this step wrong. Just for reference, the folder structure that we're in at the moment inside of our project. I'm just going to close that down as a very quick takeaway because this is really important. You can see that everything nests inside of something called the content folder. If we drop this back up, everything disappears. All of this, these folders regardless of what we've brought in, what we create, goes inside of the content folder, and this has to be the target point of the other project that we want to bring the assets into. I'm just going to need to go back and take that step again. I'm going to go to my right click. Assets actions migrate, and then we'll say okay. And then this is that really important step. So back inside of the file browser, I'm inside of the boot camp project. So T underscore boot camp is the name of my project. I then want to make sure that I double click into the content folder so that this is the final file directory that we see when we're bringing this across. So this is our target destination. Very easy to get that step wrong. And if you do, then you will get a warning saying that some of the links or references may be lost in the transfer. It will try it, but it usually fails. So just make sure that you have this in the content folder. We'll say select folder here. And then this is going to migrate all of those packages across and make sure that everything works when it gets into the other project. So just as a quick recap, the goal here, what we have is our tester project. So our asset holder is where we've been doing all of our trial error, testing, bringing things in, getting it quite mucky, and not worrying too much about what we bring into this. Probably several gigabytes at least in sides now, and we're taking all of the content we will be using across to our main project that we made a little bit earlier, which is currently pretty much empty. It just had a main map that we've created. And this can be useful for many other things. I tend to use it for things like this, where we'll have big projects, where we'll have an asset holder. Throwaway project that we're not worried about losing later in the development process, and then the main one which will be keeping backed up and stored on the repository, and we'll just migrate things across safely from the test projects to the other projects. The other use cases for this, though, might be that you've had several projects on the go over the years. If you've got some really cool blueprint features, some components or assets that are very reusable and can be shared across multiple projects. It's another really perfect example where you can migrate those from one project to another just to get those core features or those core elements that might be reusable from past projects that you've created. Depending on how much you're transferring across, that may take a little while to get everything going. The next step will just be testing or checking that all of that worked. Navigate to your other project, the core main project that was empty a moment ago. You can do that either through the Epic launcher or the file browser. In this case, I'm just going to go to the directory where I know the project is stored, and we can open this up from the U project and just make sure that everything's moved across. We can see here that it looks as though all of that has been brought, so we've got the water, the old west, and the things that we know that we've been working with. We just want to make sure that there are no issues. We may have to recompile, something you see quite a lot with unreal projects is recompiling shaders. We are obviously going to need to do that. And then we just want to make sure that there are no broken water features or that the terrain is all working as expected. Back in the other project with that migrated, there are a couple of things to look out for. If you haven't already taken the migration process, one thing I forgot to mention is that you will want to make sure that your other project has all of the same plug ins already installed. In this case, for me, I hadn't installed the water plug in, just as a quick example, going into the plug in section, I just needed to come back in here and tick on water. Didn't cause any major issues. Everything was mostly still working. All of the content has come over. But what you may find is if you don't have all of the plug ins installed, which are required for certain assets and features to work, in my case, the main map just wasn't here. So I just had to pause things. I enabled that, restarted the project all offscreen just to save a little bit of time. So that is the first thing to keep in mind. Assuming that you have all of the same plugins and features enabled, everything should look like this. So we now have just the content that we want to work with inside of our project. I also had a quick look because I wasn't sure how much space we'd be saving when we get rid of the asset holder. I said several gigabytes. My current project is actually at 94 gigabytes for the asset holder. And this new project that I'll be working from with the main project is at 4 gigabytes. So this is the kind of difference we're looking with and what it could be worth taking this process. So the next step is going to be opening the map just to a test that everything is working correctly. And this has actually highlighted something else, which is really useful. Otherwise, I wouldn't have thought about double checking this. And that is the fact that this project, the one that I want to work from, has lumen enabled correctly, so we can see that everything is lit here. It's quite bright, a little bit brighter than I kind of intended, but this is looking pretty good, especially when we look out here, this is really, really bright. Just going back to the beginner asset holder, so this is the other project we've been working from. So far, you can see the lighting is very, very different. And I wasn't aware that when I created this project for some reason, if I go to the project settings and search for L lumen, for whatever reason, Lumen is disabled. So what I would need to do is if I come in here and search for global illumination, I'd need to change some things here, so dropping it down to do some form of ray tracing or lumen in this case to get the lighting that I was kind of expecting. So this is working without Lumen enabled, which is one of the nice real engine five features we'll be working with. So again, not a problem, it's just something that we'll need to consider and tweak when we go back into the main project. We don't need to have this one looking perfect anyway. It was just to get a good starting ground. We'll be doing all of our refinements and the final features in the core project. But that was just to mention jumping back over to this, you can see it really does look very different. I think this looks quite nice. We're going to need to tone down the colors here and the brightness just because the lighting is just so very different. The first thing that I want to change is going back into the project settings in the new project and just double checking that auto exposure is turned off. I can really see that it's not, which is why it's getting quite so bright in the cave it's bouncing the light around where it really shouldn't be. So we're going to untick auto exposure. Then when we come back in, we're going to get a much darker cave. Perfectly fine. We can fix this easily. But this is more of what we wanted to be working with here. And then just to double check, as I said, if we search for lumen in the project settings, you'll know that you have lumen enabled by default because you already have the dynamic global illumination, the default method will be set to lumen, and you'll notice that in the other project and I demonstrated this, if you type lumen, just nothing came up. So these are the main things to consider. All of the remaining content has come over correctly, though. If we look at things like the post process, if we hide the post process, we can see that it's retained all of the correct color treatment that I've provided the temperature update, things like the vignette, and everything is still being applied correctly. And likewise, we can see that we're getting all of the results that we want from the directional light, the height fog, and so on. So all of that's working fine. The other side is actually still looking pretty good, especially with the new lighting. It's just the case that the cave is now looking somewhat dark. I'm going to quickly fake this. I'll just show you a few quick tips we can use with some wreck lights, just to add a little bit of vibrance to the cave. We don't want it to be fully lit up. I did mention a few times. I was expecting this to be a little bit more of a darker gloomy cave and that would really accentuate the other side. We're just going to add a bit of light so that when the cameras going through or the players going through, we'll have something at least we can see the bare minimum of the cave. We'll also get rid of this flame in a minute, but just to say that's also gone through, so we have our particle effect to work with. So the main thing here, I'm going to go to the add item. I'm going to search for the lights down here, and we're just going to drop in a wrecked light. Drag this up and just turn this around at the moment, if we look at where this arrow is facing forward on the x, we want that to be facing into the cave, so I'm just going to flip that round. Drag this back a little bit because I want it to look like essentially we're going to be faking a little bit more sunlight coming into the cave just in the entrance and at least to show off some of the key points up there. And all I want to do is I'll just increase the radius a little bit, so it goes a little bit further. And if that's not quite enough, we can also increase the brightness. Again, just pull this back so it looks as though it's not just a light hanging in the doorway. We're just adding essentially a fake layer of light, which is meant to look more like the sun still. If we come back in here, Just to see how much that's lit up, so it's not quite enough, but if we disable this, we're definitely getting some illumination from this. We can bring that aroundabut here, and we still get the correct shadows. We can bump up the attenuation radius as far as needed. And if we wanted to soften some of the shadows this is casting down here, we can increase the source width and the source height to get a little bit more control over the shadows because it shouldn't look like a light source, which is right next to any of these objects. And then what I think I might do is we might be able to duplicate this. I'm going to drag another one of these into the cave. We're going to rotate this around, just because we can't see anything at all inside the cave, might make this one a little bit less bright, just so it kind of looks as though the light is at least bouncing in here and then bouncing a little way through the cave. But again, we want to be careful with it, it doesn't look as though we just have a hovering light up here, we can do a few tricks to mask that in a moment. But this way, there we go. So we're getting some information over here, at least, which will look a little bit more interesting as well. And one thing which will make the standard, you can see we've got this effect from the fog. So if we go down to volumetric, if we just search for volumetric when we have the wrecked light selected, You can see here, the bolumetric scattering intensity. We just want to turn this down to zero, and that stops it looking as though there's just a light clearly just sat up here. And then may be tucking this a little bit further into the wall so that it doesn't look asth shadows are being cast from over here. It's going to look a lot more at a glance, at least as though light is bouncing off this core area. We're getting some light over here. And it can just be a case of playing around with the intensity as well, but we can increase the intensity of one of these to make one have more effect than the other. And that way, so if we imagine the camera might have a nice look at here or the player may be looking out here first, and then you turn around, you've got a key point, which is drawing your attention over. But at least we can see other parts of the cave as we go through, still making it look quite nice and gloomy in certain areas. We've got those tiles to grab your attention as well. Just make this a little bit less bright. Again, the goal of this one is more just to light up some of the inside of the cave. So they were the main things. Some tweaks that you may need to change because I didn't realize the project settings were not set up correctly in my demo project. I've been working on a slightly different basis than I'd expected. This is now just looking a little bit nicer anyway. I think we've got some better lighting here. We might need to tweak and play around with some of the brightness settings if we go to the directional light. We may want to bring down the brightness of the sun here because that is now just a very, very intense light with the changes that have been made. But overall, I think we're getting a much nicer general lighting and environment set up with those tweaks and changes. And we're ready to go now, where in the main project, we can start adding the final touches and some of the logic and getting everything wrapped up. 33. 31 - Working With Audio: We'll now be taking a look at audio and how to get this into the engine, few things to be aware of and a few recommendations on how to get started if you don't have some sid effects or music to get you started. The first thing is I'll be using some side effects from the website Free signed. This is just one of many options. You can get a lot of copyright free and open commercial use from a bunch of different websites. You've got things like Pixel Bay, and Free sign, which I'm on now are a couple of popular options. Just a simple search on Google for free side effects for games or movies or whatever you're looking for, and you'll get a bunch of results. This is just easy to use and I've already found a few that I can demonstrate here. Now, when you download these, you may get them in the wrong format. So we're specifically looking for dot WAV as Unreal engine only accept and works with wave and OGG files. One of the ones that I'm going to be using is an MP three. I'll also show you how we can convert that and export it back out into a file type that Unreal engine will accept. To do that, what I'd recommend downloading in the background is getting udacity ready. If you don't already have a version of udacity, you can come here. Again, this is completely free software. It's a really powerful tool for customizing, editing, and even just converting your audio files to work as expected with the Unreal engine. But you can use it just as a converter from MB three to Wab file. But I'll also show you some really quick tips as we don't want to stray too far away from the Unreal engine topics, but just some tips and tricks on how we can add some base and change the pitch and things like that to the sound effects so that they may fit the theme that we are going for. So come here, get the installer for your current version. If you're working with unreal engine, you're probably on a 64 bit version of windows, and just download the version that you want to use. The two sound effects that I'll be wanting for this project. Mentioned this a few times already, but I'm going to have a somewhat exaggerated flame effect. Of course, when you light a flame, you don't actually have a big rush, usually, especially for something like a small torch like this. But as we're just going to have a cinematic or something further away from where the viewer or player is looking, we want to draw their attention with some kind of sound effects. I'm going to have a rushing flame wohing sound effect. When these two lanterns come on. That's going to be the first one. And then when this big cave door is moving up, I want this to make some kind of grating scraping sound effect of rock on rock. That's what I'm going to be looking for, and we'll get all of this ready to go so that when we start adding the logic and functionality into the classes, those audio files are ready to go. For this, I've just gone to free sign. I've searched for something like flame wish or fire Wooh as you can see here, and I've downloaded one of these I like. You can come over here and play these. I won't keep playing these through the browser, just in case some of them are a little bit annoying, but you can do a demonstration play here, and that will play the sign that you're looking for. If you find one that you like, click on the audio file, and that will just take you to a download option, and you can download that. You may need to sign up for some of these, but it's a free account. Then a similar thing for the scraping noise, so I've just searched here for grinding stone. I found a really good one where we have a few different examples down here, this concrete block moving. We can stitch a few of these together to make it sound longer, and I'll show you how we can make some of those changes to the pitch, so it's a little bit deeper and closer to what I had envisioned when I was coming up with the idea of the rock door scraping open. So that's all I've done. I've downloaded those, I'm ready to go, and I'm going to jump over to audacity. When you have audacity downloaded and installed, you should have something like this. This is a completely blank untouched version of audacity, so it should be looking the same. It's a very simple editor. You can literally drag and drop the audio file that you want to work with. I've got my file browser open. I'm just going to drop the audio file in here, and you can see here we have the wave form. So the flame sound effect that I found, I'll give you a quick demonstration. You can see that it's kind of a lighter clicking on and then the wohing sig. I'm only interested in the wohing sign. We don't want the lighter. So this is one of the initial things that we'll use audacity for here. We can come in and we can make a quick cut to the audio that we want to remove. So if we just grab this selection of the bar and press delete, that will get rid of everything we don't want there. And then, likewise, there's a lot of empty sound afterwards and we can get rid of that. After listening to that, I can get rid of a little bit more as well. Just making sure we're not getting rid of any of that kind of key key information that we wanted. Now, this one, I think this is probably okay. So we could play around to some of the audio here with the different effects. I'm just going to press control in A to grab the entire timeline, and we can go to effect, go to pitch and tempo, and we can change the pitch because it did sound a little bit too high pitched. We can play around this and then we can preview the change. So you can see we get two very different signs there. So we do have control over things like that. I'm just trying to clean it up a little bit. So I think somewhere around that value is okay. We're here apply. And you can do a bunch of other things. If the sound that you bring in is too loud or too quiet by default, and you just wanted a more standardized volume throughout all of your sound effects, you can come in and add some volume or compression to this as well, adding things like delay and reburb, all very similar kind of editors. We're going to bring up a bar, play around of the sliders, preview the changes, and apply what you wanted. Just for demonstration purposes, I think this is sounding perfect for a flame. So then it would just be a case of coming to file. We want to export the audio. You don't need to see this. So we're just going to export this to the computer. Find a location that you're happy for this to save, and then make sure that we have the format set to Wave Microsoft. As I said, you can use OGG as well. I just find that WAV is going to be a little bit better. The main thing is not using MP three. If we try and import an MP three into unreal, it's almost like an unknown file. It won't be able to play or use that in the editor. So we'll give this a name. We can leave this at the default sample rate. Again, Unreal is okay with some sample rates. It doesn't actually go this high, so we can't turn these values up super high. 48 k, Y default is fine. 16 bit is also accepted in unreal so that will be perfect. And then with all of the changes that you need to make, we can hit export and save that to our desired location. That done, I'm just going to do a very similar thing. I'm going to press control in A and just delete that. In fact, we can get rid of the whole track if we're done with that one. And then I'm just going to drag in the other sound effect, which is the concrete. So as I said, we have a few different noises there, which we can merge together, or we could probably just use this longer one here. So what I think I might do is the same thing again. We'll just cut everything leading up to that. And one thing which might be useful here, there's actually a lot of background noise, so this could be a useful thing to demonstrate. What I want to do is maybe get rid of some of that. So if we select just this section here, in fact, I'm going to cut this out and this because I want this really long section of silence, and we're going to tell it to find anything that sounds like this background hum. And with that, I'll just play a little bit of so to try and show the white noise that I'm talking about here. So you can hear it's just like a general hiss hum, kind of background noise. If you listen out for it, it definitely comes across whilst the stone is scraping. So we're going to try and remove that. It's actually quite simple. We just want to grab all of this silent portion here or the bit that we want to be silent. With that selected, we'll go to effect, noise removal repair, and we'll go down to noise reduction. First thing we want to do is we want to get a noise profile, so that's going to be very quick. It's now stored what this section sounds like, and this is what it's looking out for, we will need to go and select everything, and then we're going to go to effect again. I've just hit Control in A to select the whole track, go back to effect, do to noise removal repair, back to noise reduction. Now we can preview this. I think by default, the noise reduction at six is going to be a little bit too low. If we try and preview this. We can see even in the empty portion at the beginning, there's still quite a lot of white noise there and it's still coming through in the background. If we bump this all the way That's definitely worked. We can hear at the beginning, there's absolutely no noise now. It's probably made the main noise a little bit, the actual scraping a bit tinny, though. So we don't want to remove too much of the noise information. We could probably come somewhere just in the low double figures. I'm just hearing it come through there, so maybe a little bit higher. And there we go. When there's no noise at all, it's almost completely silent, and then it doesn't take any of the noise away from the scraping or add any kind of tiny effect to the core sound there. That's perfect. We're just going to say, Okay, we'll run that and it's very quick, but that is now gone. Yeah. So there we go pretty much completely silent, and we're not going to hear that through the scraping. We can then get rid of the intro, and we can leave a little bit of the tro there. That's perfectly fine. So just some quick ways that you can effect and change the sound effect. I'll also come back in. Well maybe add another effect again to lower the pitch on this one. So we'll change the pitch, and if we can just lower this a tiny bit. Well, that seems pretty cool. I like that one. We can change things like if you wanted it to take longer and sounds slower. We can change things like this, as well. I think actually making it a bit slow is going to sound quite good, but maybe not quite that slow. So I'm happy with that. We can keep that change as well, and you can play around with all of these different effects. I'm not going to go too deep into this. But as I said, it's a very, very powerful free tool if you haven't used this before. You can make a lot of changes before we even bring this into the editor. But the main thing is that we can now save this again, so we're going to export this in the same way, so we'll export audio. Save this to a location on the system. We give this a better name. Call this one rock grinding or something. Again, making sure we've got the WAV file, correct sample rate, and then we can export this. With that done, we can now head back on over to the Unreal engine. You should have your sid files ready to go, and we want to bring these into the engine. Keeping the conscious approach on our project structure. I'm going to go back into the main folder, so the folder, which shares the name of the project. We have our main map in here. At some point in the future, I will want to move this map over to our main folder structure. We're unable to move maps whilst we are actively in them with them open, so we'll think about this a little bit later. That's perfectly fine for n. What I do want to do though, is I'm going to create a new folder in here, I call this one assets. So these are the assets that we're responsible for importing. I'll create a new folder inside of the assets folder called Audio. Inside of the audio, I'm just going to find those two sound files that I've just saved and I'll bring those in, and we can do that by simply grabbing them, dragging and dropping, and we can bring those directly into the project. In here, we know that this has worked if we have this playback option. And we can hear that play in correctly through the editors. That is perfect. Brilliant. Just as an example, I'm going to go to a different folder quickly because we'll get rid of this in a moment. I'm dragging in the original flame MP three, so just a different file type. And you can see here that we don't get that playback option. It knows that it's a media file. It's not too sure what to do with it, and we get this. So this is essentially what you want to avoid bringing into the project. This is actually fine for things like MP four, but for sin files, we want to make sure we don't have this media file type created. Instead, we want to make sure we have something like this where we get the playback options. So I'm just going to get rid of that. I just want to show you what to look out for and what to avoid. As far as audio goes, though, that's pretty much everything that we needed to do. We've converted them to the correct file. We've tested that they work. We could expand upon this and use different file types to get some randomization, but we're only going to hear this once, so we don't really need to worry about customizing this in editor, and that would be a slightly different topic in itself. So we'll leave these as just the default sound waves that will be perfectly fine for our use case, just to be aware that there are things like sound cues and meta signs that you can look into if sign is something you're more interested in and wanted to dive much deeper. 34. 32 - Niagara Particles: Next up, I'll take a very similar approach to just getting our flame particle ready to go. So just a few small changes, again, like with assigned, we're not going to take a deep dive into particle effects or Niagara, that would be its own topic and subject by itself, but it's going to be useful just to understand how to navigate and work with some of the basic features. So what we have here is called a Niagara system, and I just wanted to first of all demonstrate, if we bring this up to the lantern that we want to use it with, I know for a fact, this will be a little bit too big, so we're going to want to make some tweaks and changes to the size of the particle. I'm just going to hold the left shift key and move the widget here. What this is doing, it's keeping the camera in the viewport in line with the flame. So I don't need to move both things around individually. We can obviously just move this where if we wanted to go, but this is just a nice quick shortcut if you haven't stumbled across that one. And what I wanted to demonstrate is if we put this in here. So when we create the blueprint and get everything together, this is what we want this to kind of look like. And you can see immediately, the initial problem is that we have these flames poking through the outside here. If you press G on the keyboard, so G for golf, this will hide all of the widgets. So this is somewhat approximating what the in game look of this scene would provide without any of the editor widgets. Another shortcut when we get closer to visualizing things would be F 11, and this will put you in full screen mode. So again, apart from these widgets up here, and this loading message, which hasn't gone away for a while, this is much closer to what we'd get in the full realized scene. Of course, F 11 will tog U back out, and G will put the widgets back on. But this is just to get this somewhat in place here because we can see it's not quite central, and we just want to lower this a little bit. So we can get away with lowering this a little bit into the lantern, but we're still getting some of these flames poking out. Overall, though, that's the kind of look we're going to go for when we add all of this into one combined blueprint. With that in mind, we can make these tweaks to the fire effect now, so it's ready when we have that blueprint that we want to work with. So as with anything else, we can select this in the editor. If we double click on the icon down here, this is the Niagara asset we want to change. We can double click on this and this will open the asset for us. And these can look quite daunting. There's quite a lot of information that goes into creating this fire, but we're just going to look at the very basics. I go to pulls the playback here by just pressing space on the time frame, and we're just going to look at the very basics so that we can get somewhat familiar with the different parts of this system. So inside of any Niagara system, the system is the thing that we can drag into the world here. All systems are made up of at least one emitter, and some of them have multiple. For example, this torch system has these five different emitters, all doing slightly different things. We've got three different emitters just for the torch, the flame itself, and then one emitter, which is controlling the members coming off of this. Like with anything, if you untick them, you'll go back into play mode. You can see exactly what they're responsible for. So as we untick these, we can see the detail of all of this is going away. One thing we could probably do actually because the member is the main thing, which is causing us a problem. Coming through the lantern, which could look a little bit strange. We could simply come in and just turn off the numbers. We probably wouldn't notice, and then we have that problem resolved. In this case, I will keep this on so that we can play around with different things like the scaling and trying to control a bit more of the flame itself. So what we want to do here, essentially, just make this maybe fatter but shorter, and all of that information can be found through these different emitter modules and the information found within them. So some of the core things to look out for, if we go to our spawn rate, this will can control how fast these are spawning. We have things as well, such as the type of spawning they're doing. Burst instantaneous here, we can see means that we're just spawning a bunch of these at once. Under the particle spawn, so these are different categories. The update is what's happening throughout the life of the particle. The spawn is what happens when we first start trying to create this. This will give you just a general indication of where to look to update different things. Some of the names are very obvious like if we wanted to change the color of this. We would do that through the color property. Things like the initialized particle section here would allow us to control how long the flame will last. Generally, we randomize a lot of the particle information, and this is randomized from a minimum lifetime of 1.5 seconds up to 3 seconds. Changing things as well at random. All of this is made of individual sprites or images, and we can change things like the minimum and maximum size of the sprite. So if we wanted to make this, as I said wider, thicker, we could change things like that through the Sprite information. I think what I want to focus on is just making the members a little bit smaller. So if we go over to the member emitter, the one thing that this is doing is it has a linear velocity being applied upwards, so we can grab this property, and we can just change how high this goes. So the moment is going a minimum distance of 20 units and a maximum of 60. So let's say ten and 30. And see how that looks. And we can see that way the ember is stopping a little bit closer to the top of the flames. That hopefully won't be going through the lantern. It does make it look a little bit strange. So we could maybe make the flame a little bit shorter as well. If we go to one of the torches here where we see other velocity information, so pretty much everything apart from the initial torch here, which is a billboard of images, and we might want to reduce all of these to the same. Generally lowering these seems to be doing the job here. And that way, we can see that the embers now, they're still going above the flame, it's just that the flame is shorter. So if we compile this, we'll go back in, and we can see some of them are going through, but only because we have that selected. If we leave this, we now won't see any of those embers leaving the lantern. So just some very quick changes here, and this is one of those things that when you're just getting used to the engine, as I mentioned, this would be an entire course by itself, just becoming proficient with the Niagara system, there's a lot that you can do with it. But we can make very easy tweaks just by reading roughly what's happening here. So we could also do things like if we wanted to change how and where these are appearing. We've got information. So if we just mute some of the noise here, the visual information, or disable everything else. We can see what this is doing now, and we can change, for example, how this is spawning in a sphere. If we wanted this to be wider or thicker, we just change the sphere radius, and you can see that is now much bigger. If we increase that a lot, we can see that this is now spawning in a sphere in a much wider radius. That's all that was doing So it can become quite easy if you look at things that way. It can become quite easy to make the changes that you want to existing example, Niagara systems and things like that. It's just getting familiar with reading through what this is doing, playing around of the properties, and seeing the results that you get. I'm just going to turn all of those back on. I think that change that we've just made to the flame is pretty perfect. The main goal there was just to make everything a little bit shorter and fit within the confines of our land in there. Again, from a distance, I think that's pretty perfect. It's going to Just a nice, interesting focal point for the scene. We don't need to set this up now. As I've mentioned, we could just for demonstration purposes, see what that will look like in both of them, but we will be completely replacing those with blueprints, which make things just much more reusable, and will allow us to put some code and that reusable functionality in them as well. 35. 33 - Blueprint Lantern: With all of our effects ready to go. We can now move on to creating some blueprints. We're going to have one for the lamps, so we're going to replace these static mesh and individual pieces with a blueprint, and also the door rather than having a couple of different static meshes lying around. We're going to combine this into a single blueprint, which will be able to house some logic as well for the animation of the door moving upwards and that sign being played. To do this, we're going to go to our content drawer. We're going to go back into our main folder here. The folder showing the name of the project. We'll right click again, create a new folder here and I'll call this one Blueprints. Inside of the blueprints folder, we're just going to create our first thing. If we tackle the lamp, first of all, I'm just going to get rid of this filter again, as well, so we'll just untick the static mesh filter here. And then we can right click to create a blueprint class because it's something that we use quite a lot. It's in this basic asset section here. We do have a bunch of different options for blueprints as well. So slightly more unique and lesser used blueprint types, but we can use this generic option at the top. And from this dropdown, there are a bunch of different options that we get when working with blueprints, all with their own custom unique functionality and features. The classes that we're going to be working with are actually very, very simple, and all we need is something which can exist in the world. It has a transform and is able to be placed in the world. We can see here, just by that description, we have this thing called an actor class. This is an object that can be placed or spawned in the world. Perfect for what we need. Anything above that, and we're looking at things like the pawn or character types, which are more for what you're possessing, and then we have a bunch of other things like components, which are usually individual parts that you would attach to an actor. We don't need any of these. We're just going to want the actor class to begin with and the naming convention when it comes to this is going to be BP underscore all in upper case, and then the name of the thing that it's responsible for. This, in this case, is going to be responsible for being a lantern, so I'll call this one BP, underscore lantern. Nice and simple, with that done, we can double click to open this. This will be our first blueprint. We have a few different tabs, we have a viewport, which will show us what the elements or the components within the blueprint. We have a construction script. This is fired off and is able to run functionality or logic in the editor, and then we have an event graph, and this is where we're going to house the bulk of our logic, which is the content that can be played at runtime, allowing us to make dynamic and real time updates and provide feedback whilst rendering something out or whilst the player is interacting with a game or that type of thing. Just as a couple of examples there. So what we want to do, I'm going to go back to the viewport for now. The goal is to replicate what we have here. So two components, we have a static mesh lantern and a Niagara particle effect. We want all of that to be inside of a blueprint. So the first thing is if we press the ad component here in the left hand side, and we're going to search for a static mesh actor, and we'll just search for static mesh. So you can see if we type static, we get a few options here. We want the static mesh option here. We can see a new component has been added. We get a widget, but at the moment, the mesh hasn't been filled. So we're just going to use the drop down on the right hand side, and we'll look for the lantern object we've been using. We can see we have the Japanese stone lantern. And if we fill that in, that's going to be the first step. We now have our visual representation for the lantern in our game inside of our level. The next thing, remember, I said, we want two components, one for the static mesh, one for the Niagara particle system. So selecting the default scene root here. This is kind of acting as a parent in the hierarchy, wherever this moves, everything else will move with it. So as a quick example, I'll select the static mesh instead. I'll duplicate this, and then I'll nest this second one below the first one. I'll just give this a little bit of a rotation so we can see this. So we can see where I got two meshes. This is mesh one that we have here rotated, and just standard mesh is here stood upwards. When it comes to parenting and hierarchy, if I have this one selected, and I move this around, we can see that wherever this goes, the child component will go with it. So that's all the default scene route is going. It's kind of keeping everything in check for us. It's acting as our pivot point, the parent in the hierarchical chain. So that's something just to be aware of and get used to that because it will be useful to make sure that we have everything nested where we expect it. So I'll just controls d, all of that. We can revert the location, we want this to be back where it was. I'll delete this component. We don't need this one. As I've mentioned, if we select the default seam roots, we'll press add for another component, and we're going to search for Niagara. So we want the Niagra particle system component, a bit of a mouthful. And with this one selected, the Niagra component we've just added, we'll do the same thing again in the right hand side in the details panel, we'll drop this down to find the particle system that we've brought across, which is our Niagara torch that we've been working with, and we can see here. We just moved this out that that is the one that we've just updated. So all we want to do is we just want to move this in place with our static mesh. In fact, now I think about it, taking this opportunity to hammer home the hierarchy topic. If we grab the Niagara component and actually put this on top of the static mesh, This now means if we did need to move just the static mesh anywhere, the flame component will move with it, which in this case, makes a lot more sense because we want the Nagra component to always be inside of this little outcrop here, so it's always inside of this window of the lantern. And I'm just going to move this down a little bit, so it's now relative to the point within the static mesh. Just check that's looking okay. We can add one final component, which I think will look pretty good as well. So if we grab the static mesh, we'll add a light component, which will also be relative to the mesh, the lantern. So if we press add, we'll search for a point light. So we'll have the point light option. And you can see here this is just going to add a light. So when we turn the lamp on, we'll turn the flame on and we'll also add a little bit of light as well, because the nigra particle effect isn't actually casting out any light that will be bounced around the level, so this will just add we can add a nice orange hue or something here. So Using the arrow just here, we'll just zero the location back out, we can see it's got a little bit of an offset over here. So we'll just Put this back on zero, zero, zero. We can then just grab the widget and we can move this up inside of the lantern, so this will be where the light is coming from. And we can play around to the attenuation radius. This is probably a little bit big for just a small flame to be casting. Maybe if we have this pone, and we'll see how it goes. But we'll use the attenuation radius here, which will make this cast a light in a shorter distance, and we'll change the color to be a kind of RNG color. So we can see that color is being reflected on the inside there. It's a little bit hard to tell right now because we don't have any background or anything to really show this off against, but this is the property we want to update just here, so we'll get this a nice warm orange. One way that we could test this is if we go and compile, we'll press save. We'll go back into our level. I'm just going to grab both of the torch fires here, so control selecting both of those, and I'll just delete those, and a quick trick for replacing things that we've had just kind of as placeholders in the world for now. If we select one of the lamps, we'll go into the content drawer, making sure that we have our blueprint selected. We can then right click on the lamp here. We can choose this option here, the replace selected actors with. It will find the thing that we have selected in the content drawer, and we can automatically replace that with the blueprint equivalent. So this is what this would look like now. If we were to turn all of this on and have this running, by default, we'll set it all of this is turned off by default so that it won't be lit up immediately. But then when we have the camera or the player looking at this, we'll have this turned on through blueprint at runtime, just to make it look that much cooler, that it's happening whilst we're actually playing the simulation and having some dynamic feedback through the code itself. But this is just to give us an idea of what this would look like if we needed to make the attenuation a bit higher, change the color, and things like that. I'll take the same approach over here. We'll right click on this one. We'll say replace actors with, and then we'll replace this with the lantern, and we'll get the same option there. This is already showing that some things like having the light directly inside of the lantern might not be ideal here because we're getting some very sharp lighting effects going on here, as well as maybe the intensity being a little bit high is so high, in fact, we can't even see the particle effect. So maybe we could do with turning the attenuation radius back up, so it goes out further, but maybe turning the intensity down instead. That we have a wide reaching, but less powerful light being emitted. And that's still quite high. So if we come here, I'm just going to drop this down. We want to make sure that we're changing all of these details, the properties in the blueprint. This way, of course, we're changing it once, and it will populate across to everywhere that we're making use of this blueprint asset. So if we tone this back down, there we go. So we want this to be at a point where we can see the flame, but also have some nice light in coming out. You might want to increase the source radius here as well just so it's actually casting a little bit further. It doesn't need to be completely realistic, I think, in this case, it's quite nice to have more of an effect going on, even if it's somewhat seeping through points where perhaps it wouldn't otherwise. Again, if you're finding that the color might be just slightly off, then we can change the color here as well. So just making these changes going to be much easier. Now that we can see it lined up with something in the world. So this is actually looking a little bit nice, and I think still a little bit difficult to see the flame. But at the same time, I think if we keep lowering this too much, we won't see much of the lighting either, and it's going to be quite nice to have some light cast on the outside of the cave. I think that will do, again, at a quick glance. We're not going to be paying too much attention to this. But the next thing is we want to make sure that we're compiling and saving our changes, I'll just dock this back up here. And as I mentioned, when we start the experience, I want this to be switched off completely. So I'm now going to keep an eye on these values that we've made So let's just say we've got an intensity of 1,400 to round this done. That will be our target that we want this to hit when we activate this through blueprint code a bit later. But by default, we're going to set this to zero, which means we'll have no brightness. And then if we select the Niagra flame, we're going to come and search for something called auto activate in the details panel, and we'll just tick this off as well. So now, if we compile and save this, this is what the cave will look like when we first hit play. So this gives us some time to get the player's attention around the cave, see everything unlit, turn the flames on a little bit later, enable those lights and then have the door creep up. Just going to be a little bit more interesting than everything just starting on, and we can see then the difference as well at runtime in all of these effects being made. So that's going to be a little bit more totive of the blueprint logic. We're just creating the blueprints at the moment. So that will be one of the next upcoming few topics. So we'll leave that for now. We'll compile and save this, make sure that we have the lantern ready to go. And then we can move on to our cave door. 36. 34 - Blueprint Doors: The process for the cave door is going to be very similar. Now, there's one thing that you can do. I will introduce this tube, but it's not a process that I like taking when it comes to creating new blueprints. We can take an object in the world, in fact, to avoid messing anything up and going to create a new object very quickly. We'll create a new static mesh, which will be a cube, and with the cube selected. What we can do is we can convert something that already exists into a blueprint. The selected. If we go to the little icon just here next to add, this will convert what we have selected into its relevant type blueprint. By default, just now, I showed you how to create an actor. This would make a static mesh actor because it knows that the core component that this blueprint would hold would be a static mesh. That's one of the things I don't like. We don't have full control over the hierarchy of our own class. But basically, we could do this if we wanted. We can press select, and we can see here that what we have is a static mesh as the default components. Now, the problem is that where is our lamp or our lantern, if we just look at this quickly, comes with a default scene route, which if we wanted, we could override, this is not able to be overridden. Where it says edit and C plus plus. This means it's part of the Unrel engine source code, and we wouldn't be able to remove or change this component type. So it just becomes a little bit more restrictive. You can see as well that the top right hand side of the lantern, the parent class is defaulting to the actor class, which is one of the most basic, kind of rudimentary, simplistic classes that we can use. And for our current use case, that is perfect. Was with this one, it creates this as a static mesh actor, which is just an actor class, but with a static mesh attached to it by default. So I just wanted to mention that as an option. You may come across that approach in the future, and may be wondering why I didn't mention it. It's just because I don't really like the process, but I do want to mention it as possible. But I'm just going to delete this and just so that we have full control over how our Cave door is set up. I'll take the same process that we have with our Lantern, right click in here. We'll go blueprint class, create an actor, and I'll call this one BP Underscore Cave door. We'll double click to open this. This will open this in the cave door. Again, we have a standard actor class now. And when I say that we could change the default scene route, all this is is something called a billboard, which means wherever we look at this from, it will rotate to look at the camera. And the reason that we have these is sometimes you'll have an actor class which doesn't have very much in it apart from some code. In those cases, it's quite useful to have this scene route. Because if we have the widgets switched on, it means that we can at least see, find and click this in the world. That's really all this is doing. It's just a nice visual kind of waypoint for us to find this component, if we didn't have other things added. We do have things to get rid of this. So if you didn't want the billboard, for example, with our lantern, we can still see that billboard at the bottom here. It doesn't really matter because the players will never see this when we're in run time. This is all hidden anyway. But if you really did want to get rid of this, I'll show you a quick way that we can achieve that inside of the cave door. If we go to add component and just find something called a scene, This is a very similar thing, but without the billboard. So if we click this here, we can see it has a transform. It can exist in space, but it doesn't have any visual representation. I'm just going to zero the location back out. And then if we select this and drag it onto the default sine route, can see that is now removed, and we have absolutely no visual kind of waypoint inside of the class. It can be useful if you don't want all of these billboards littering around the level. You can imagine as you start adding a lot more things and a lot more classes, you will start seeing a lot of these billboards just poking through different areas. Either way, it doesn't really matter in most situations because like I've mentioned, as soon as you press play or render something out, those billboards will be hidden. It's more for us as editors or developers just to have that flexibility. But at the very least, remember, I mentioned previously, that when working with actor classes, we need at least one component to act as the root, for all other things to be attached to. So what we're going to do now is we'll make a very similar update to the class that we did with the lanterns. We're going to take these static meshes, and we want these two big Nordic coastal cliffs to be placed inside of the blueprint es static meshes. So I've just navigated to this in the folder. Remember that you can use the magnifying glass, and there's a reason for that. So make sure that we have this one selected, and it will just save us a little bit of time in a moment. Just to mention as well, that we're not going to be using these meshes. We will get rid of these a bit later. We can see here there's a few refinements. We'll need to make there's some cracks and gaps in the doorway. This is really just to get a visual idea of what the end result would look somewhat like. But we'll make the final tweaks and changes through our blueprint class, and these were very much placeholder. So inside of the cave door, we can close the lantern. I'll just get rid of that to avoid confusion. Inside of BP underscore cave door. I'm just going to add a new static mesh. And you can see here that because I have the Nordic coastal cliff selected by default, it will actually default to creating the static mesh with that field. So I just wanted to show that that would just save a little bit of time and make things a little bit easier. If you make sure to hit compile and save, we can just go back into the map, and this time, what I want to do is just double check here. Remember, I dragged the cave door in as an example just a moment ago. I just wanted to make sure how this lines up with our current door here. So at the moment, it's just a little bit small. Now, where possible, we try to keep the scale of our actor, so the blueprint class. At a uniform one on the scale that we have down here, where possible, just because when it comes to working with code and things like that, it makes it a little bit easier if we know that we're applying a scale to the default one. So what we're going to do instead, we'll drag and drop this over, and I'll make a very similar kind of change as I did with the Lantern a little bit earlier, where we'll make the changes to the static mesh when we have this open here. So this will just give us a live update by having this window open, and I'm just going to make sure that we have the static mesh selected. Just quickly checking here. The scale that we've applied to get this to roughly fit the doorway is 4.5 on the x Ys. So we already know there's a bit of a gap, which we want to avoid. So I'll make this a tiny bit bigger, and we'll just call this five on each of the axes. So if I press the lock button here, that means that I can apply that change once. I I apply this just to the x, we'll say this is going to be five units. We're locking that to be the same on the X Y's and you can see that's changed there for the ins Z as well. And you can see in the level, we now have a really, really big cave door. So I think that will definitely fill all of those gaps. So that's going to be our first step. And then just to quickly demonstrate again, I'll drag this back up. So what I mean here is we have a static meth, which is the thing that we want to be adjusting and tweaking the size, location, and rotation of. But then the actual blueprint in the world. So this here, the BP underscore cave door. You can see that if we select this, it still has a uniform scale of one, one, and one. So when we apply our code in the blueprint, we know what we're working from, so that's what I was trying to get out a little bit earlier. So if we start moving this in place, in fact, what I think I'll do is I'll begin getting rid of the existing placeholders, so we can see how much space we're left with and what we need to fill exactly. I think I've just lost my cave door. So I'm going to find the BP underscore cave door by searching in the outliner, and then we'll just bring this up. But I think rather than rotating this one. I think this will look okay, actually, if we have this facing up in the right direction, we definitely have a bit of a gap up here. And then if you imagine when we animate this open, we're going to have something like this happening, which I think is going to look really impressive. And this is just a case of tweaking things and set dressing until you get the look that you like. So this is why we're going to drag the cave door back down here and just play around. So one thing that I did previously, I remember, I grabbed the static mesh and rotated that, we may want to do that here. We may want to default this to be rotated at 180 degrees, and it's just a case of seeing if that looks better with the door facing this way. We do then get those issues, where it's going to be much harder to fill this space. So I think because the bigger gaps are in the middle, in this case, I'm going to leave this not rotated at all, which means what we want to do is, if we imagine the door is going to start down here, just want one more piece, which will be just above us here. So if we make this a little bit bigger, I'm going to press Control and D, or we can right click, so Control and D or right click and duplicate. I just want to duplicate this rock piece. I think what I'll do is I'll grab this second piece that we've made here. We'll drag this one up in the viewport. And then if we zoom out a little bit, it's getting a little bit cramped, but it's really useful to be able to see what's happening here. If possible, I'd normally put this over on a second monitor, so it's not quite as cramped, but we're working with this just for the recording. And yet, we're essentially just trying to make sure that we can fill that space. I'll drag this up. I will rotate this one, so we'll give this a 180 degree rotation. Drag that back up there because that's going to take up a nice chunk of space. I think if we flip, this the other way. It won't look quite so obvious that we're reusing the same piece, and there we go. I think that is now filling everything. So we won't get any light seepage. We may want to bring this over to the side just a little bit in the level. The main thing here is just looking to avoid any light seepage or cracks, because like I mentioned, I want this to initially look at quick glance as though this is a fully closed off inner part of the cave. And then when we get to adding the logic, this is going to slide up and reveal a really pull back drop here. That's it. So some nice simple changes. Again, the core takeaways here just to hammer this home. We're making the scaling and rotation and kind of set dressing the asset that we want to be reusable. We're doing that inside of the blueprint. So again, you can see the static meshes are the things which have got the scale changed. And then the blueprint itself, we're just going to drag this in and use this in the world. And this is going to be here pretty much as a stationary object. So if we come in press plate, we can come over, and we can see, as I mentioned, a quick glance, you hopefully wouldn't be paying too much attention to this. And it shouldn't look as though anything is going to happen to this, which will make it that much more interesting when that suddenly starts sliding open, the lanterns turn on, and all of the cool stuff will happen through the code that we'll look at next. 37. 35 - Lantern Functionality: It is finally time to add some logic to our blueprints ready for our fly through and to work into the sequencer cinematic we'll be making. Before that, I've just restarted the project, and I just wanted to swing background and make those changes I've mentioned previously about the map because we're now in our new project. So I'm just going to go to the content drawer. You can see here this is opened into the untitled map, meaning a map which has been automatically generated when I open the project. That's just because I haven't set the project defaults in this one. To begin, I'm just going to make sure we have the boot camp folder open, and I'm just going to go from our maps folder here and drag the main map into the maps folder inside of the blueprint directory. Because this has been referenced in some of the config or any files in the project, it's just giving us a warning that this will be lost if we move or rename this perfectly fine. And remember, the main reason I couldn't do that previously is that I was in the main map, so you're unable to safely move your map from folder to folder if you already have it open. So this was a perfect example just to make that change. It's in the right place, and we can start getting rid of things that we don't need. And then the other change I'll need to make is just going back to the project settings. We'll go to maps and modes and then down here, rather than having this create an unnamed open world map. We'll just change this one to our main map. The good thing about making that move first is if we navigate to this, it we'll now know exactly where this is in the project, so it's not going to get lost with lost references or anything like that. And then we can also set the default map to be our main map if we were to package the game and deploy this. The final thing, of course, is to go back into our maps. We will go to the boot camp, our maps folder. We'll just double click to open the main map to make sure we're inside of the map that we want to be using. And then we can jump into our blueprint. We'll start with the lantern. This is going to be a little bit easier to implement with some very simple logic. We're just switching two things on or off. So if we select either one of these shortcuts, if I didn't mention it in depth previously, is that we can very easily access the blueprint we want to edit. You can see anything which is a blueprint here. We can just click into this and this will open the blueprint for us. As with a few other things here, we're not going to take a super deep dive into blueprints, covering every aspect of what things are. This again would be a slightly more intermediate to advanced topic, but we'll definitely cover enough that you can create some simple blueprints and code yourself, or if required tweak and update blueprints that exist. So inside of our BP underscore lantern, we already know that we have our viewpot set up with everything looking as we want in the correct places. We came in previously and we disabled the Niagara particle and the light. So by default, if we come in in press play during runtime mode, these will automatically be off. What we want to do now is create some functionality to toggle that so that we can turn those back on at runtime. Inside of the event graph, this is where the core of your logic will go. Anything you want to happen in runtime will be in the event graph or an extension of the event graph. Just to tidy things up and make a little bit of room here. We can get rid of this one. We won't use the actor begin overlap at tool. We will look at the begin play, which is the function. It's an event which is called as soon as you press play. This will automatically be run, and this is a great place to test things or to set your logic if you know that something has to happen. When you first start playing the game. And then the event tick here, this is run constantly, so this is updated based on the frame rate of your project. This will run 60 to 120 to whatever your FPS is. This will run a set number of times based on your frame rate, your frames per second. So if you're running at 60 FPS, this will be called 60 times per second. When it comes to adding the code that we want, we can start with a really simple one to begin with. If we grab our point light from the viewport and we just drag this into our event graph here. So you can see I've selected the object, we can pull this in, and this will get a reference to that object. The useful thing about this is almost anything that we see on the right hand side in the details panel, when we have an object or a component selected will be editable in code, as long as we know the name. In this case, we're looking to turn the intensity back up to simulate this being switched back on or having the light appear. We've set the intensity to zero, and Unreal provides some really useful context sensitivity searching. So if we pull from this pin here and drag out, this will give us access to the variables that we're looking for inside of this component. So if we let go of this in the event graph, this will give us a search bar, and we can search for the word intensity because we know that that is what we want to manipulate in code. So this is really just getting you thinking about how we would approach doing this. And like I've said, just getting you comfortable with doing some of the basics and problem solving yourself. If you have a blueprint that you're given that already has some code or logic in it, and you just wanted to make those tweaks or updates, but you weren't sure where to look. The context sensitivity and the searching helpers are really good here. We can see here that what we want to do is literally given to us in text. We want to set the value of the intensity, so we would know that it's probably this one that we're looking for, so we'll click on this. It did give us another reference to the point light. We can get rid of this one. That was just real trying to be helpful in that way with the one that I selected, providing something we didn't actually need there. We've already got the reference to our point light, which is over here. And then to get this to be called to have this functionality updated. We're just going to take from this execution pin here. Plug this into the execution pin here, and like with the materials. It's essentially calling one thing to happen next. When this is called, as I said, which will happen automatically through the engine code. When you start the play button, this will automatically be called. The next thing to happen from left to right will be the intensity being set here. You can see that we have a float value for the intensity, the point light selected, the float value by default is zero. I think I said we wanted this to be 1,400. For the strength when the light is on. So if I end to 1,400 here, what we should expect is if we compile and save this, by default, the light will still be off. But as soon as I press the play button, the begin play will be called, and the light intensity will be set to 1,400. One thing I'm going to do just because at the moment when we press play, the player start is looking out into the s. I'm just going to rotate this so that we can see that immediately, we're going to be looking at the torches over here or the lanterns, and we should see that get lit immediately. So I'll just press play, and we can see the results. And there we go. So we already know that we've manually turned the light off. And that code is obviously running and it is updating that as expected. Nice and simple, we have a quick example of how the begin play works and how we can update code at runtime. Just to give a quick example here of something running on the eventi. I'm going to run some very simple maths. You don't need to follow along with this, but it's just to give some visual representation of what this is doing. I'm just going to increase the intensity of the light over time. Something you probably won't need to do, but it's just a quick example of some maths, how this will come together, I'm watching something happen at runtime because that was quite hard to see that anything happened just because it was already on automatically. Just very quickly, somewhat break down the code, as I said, we won't go through this in depth. This isn't something we'll use or even that important, but it does show off here that using the same reference, so this point light reference, as well as setting the property, we can also get the intensity. That was done by simply searching for get intensity. This will return the current value, the current strength of that intensity, which provides this value. Then using the Delta seconds, which is a very small value providing the difference from the time between one frame to another. So this allows us to smoothly animate things because we're just multiplying a very small value by a random value I've chosen here of two. So over time, as this is constantly called, we're going to be adding. We're using the addition node here to take whatever the current intensity is, add two multiplied by a small value like 0.003, to keep things nice and smooth and slowly incrementing. And then we're going to set that value, so the return from this will be the new value that we're passing into the intensity. So if we compile this, I'm just going to come over here and rather than flying around. I'm just going to press simulate. So this is still playing as I said, This will turn all of the game the real time functionality on. But it just means that we don't need to go into the editor and actually play with the character and fly through. And you can see here we have a very gradual increase to the lights being switched on or the intensity growing. If we wanted to increase the speed here, we could just come and maybe make this much faster, or make this five multiply by Delta seconds, press simulate again, and we can see that that is growing. Much faster, so more than twice as fast. Another thing that we could do here, which is really useful for when you're getting familiar with blueprints, is introducing the concepts of something called a print string. So if we pull from here and search for print string, We'll select this one. And because we've grabbed this in between two execution pins, Unreal again is smart enough to know that we want this to be hooked up. So now going to on the event tick, every tick, we're going to print something to the screen, which at the moment would just be the word hello. So if we come in and again, we'll press play, we can see it as just printing hello 60 times per second for as long as this is running. What we could do is we can plug this in, so if we get the intensity, we can plug our float value here, so a decimal point value. Into the in string and it'll do a conversion, making that number readable text. So if we hit compile again, come and press play, we can see that value being increased over time. Now, that would tell us that this is actually increasing really slowly. We wanted this to be about 1,400 before it was visible enough to really make a difference. So I'll just come back in again. And we'll increase this to maybe 50 times Delta seconds. Then if we hit compile, we'll go and save, come into main, and again, we can find this. We can see that's now increasing much faster and providing a lot more of that impact on the level around us because of how quick, this is getting closer to that 1,400 value that we wanted. Again, this was really just a somewhat pointless experiment or example here, but it was just to show the way that we can add different functionality and some simple code into our blueprint to debug and see what's happening. Left it running there just so that we can see the brightness really ramping up and you can see the difference that is making and the light which is being cast out from that as it gets much much higher. As I said, the main thing though was just to show that we've got a few different options. We've got our function, for example, which is called automatically when we press play. Then we've got options of things that if we wanted something to run constantly, in the background, we have our eventi. You want to use this loosely because as you can see there, that will be running constantly. In this case, that mass equation is being run constantly, and it will start making things a little bit more costly when it comes to the performance and the hit that I'll take on your system. So I'm just going to get rid of this code. We won't be using or keeping this, as I said. The main thing that we want to do is set our intensity. Now, another thing that we could have done is if we come from the begin play and we'll search for something called a delay node, We can choose this one here. We can give this, let's say a three second delay. So if you ever wanted to stop something happening for a period of time, we can throw a delay on here. And if we come back in and simulate, we now know that this is going to take 3 seconds for this to reach the value that we've set. Now, I've just remembered as I was talking. I haven't set a value because I hooked up the math nodes that has defaulted back to zero, so I'm going to set this to 1,400 again and we'll hit compile and save Go back in and then just to demonstrate this is definitely working, 3 seconds later, we'll have some lights appear. So just another way to show all of these useful features that you have in Unreal. And if you ever not sure if something exists or had to do something, Google is your best friend, and you can see that Google mixed with all of the context sensitivity and the helpers that the Blueprints provide, you can get quite a lot done quite easily. Now, the final thing to wrap this up is we don't want this to happen on begin play. We want something to be called from our sequencer to activate. The lights being switched on. So, as I've mentioned, in my mind, what I think we'll do is we'll start with a nice camera shot from over here, and then we can slowly kind of rotate around until we're looking somewhat at this point of interest. Maybe have a glance around the dark and cave, come back over, and I think I'll have a fly through happen and roughly when we get here. So when we've got that point of interest more in camera, I one lantern to switch on, we'll maybe leave it half a second, get the other lanterns switch on so we get those nice wohing noises one after another. And then once they've both switched on, the camera can start moving and have that focal point where the cave door will then also have a function to make it start raising and animating up. So with all of that in mind, that's the target goal that I have in mind, that lets me know that the begin play solution isn't going to be what we want. We could try and fake a delay, but again, that's going to be a little bit hit and miss. I don't know how long that animation path will take to get from the panning and the animating through with the sequencer. So what we're going to do is we're going to use something called a custom event. So if we right click down here in the event graph and search for custom event, We can see here, we've got the option to add a custom event, and it will give us an option to name this. So this is very similar to the event tick and the begin play. It's an event, or people who might be familiar with other programming languages would be familiar with things like functions or methods. It's just something that we can create that can be called at the time that we want it to happen. And for the naming of this one, I'll just call it light on or turn light on. And that name is something that we can then call in other parts of our code. So if I come from the begin play, we'll pull from the execution pin here, and we can call the turn light on function or event. And you can see here that custom thing that we've just made is now callable. If we double click this, it'll take it down here, which is showing us that this is indeed going to call the thing that we've made. Again, just for testing when you're getting used to everything. If we throw a print string on, these are incredibly useful. We'd know that when we press begin play, what we'd expect to happen is immediately because we don't have a delay anymore. This will call our custom function, which will print lighters on to the screen. If we just come in, simulate, and we can see that's called. It's a nice and simple there. And just in case you're wondering, the reason we got two of those is because this is happening for both of the lanterns in the level. If we were to drag out a third lantern, I'll just duplicate this, we'll get three messages. This is why we use blueprints. They're heavily reusable, very convenient, which means that we can program all of this once. And each of the blueprints will do the same thing, even though we've only had to code, that I'll set this up once, which is why, as I mentioned, we weren't going to use static meshes and individual lights and particle effects and things. Instead, we're just going to house this into a nice reusable blueprint. Okay, so the final thing is we know that we want to have our turn light on function called through our sequencer when we're playing the camera animation. We don't yet have that, so we're going to leave this on begin play for now just so that we can test and see things working. I'm going to throw a quick delay on here. So similar to what we had previously, I'll pull from here and search for delay. And let's just add back in that two or three second delay will be perfectly fine just so that we can let things load the lighting and have time to view through the camera quickly before anything is called. And all we want to do is I'm going to get rid of the print string. We've got half of the functionality here, which is to turn on the intensity of the light, and the thing that we've currently missed is to turn the Niaga particle system back on as well. So once again, I'll just drag the Niagra component into the event graph so that we can get a reference to this component. And all I want to do is we've told this to be not activated by default. So we're just going to come in here and we're going to search for a functionality to activate this again. So we can see here, we have the option for if we just search for active or active ate, sometimes you might not know what you're looking for, so you may need to switch up the words. But by just typing active here, we can see we've got a function called set active specifically for our Niagara component. So I'm just going to say yes and select that one. Same thing again, it's just created a reference that we don't need here. So we only need one of these. So we can delete the second one that's tried helping us with. We'll pull this over, and we're going to say that the new active state is true, so we want this to be active, no. When this function is called, we're going to turn on our point light. And we're going to also activate the Niagara flame particle. So if we hit compile, we'll come back in, we'll wait those 2 seconds, and there you go. So it is definitely very difficult. There's definitely a problem with that light where it's really masking the flame. So we may need to do something about that, but if we get nice and close, we can see the flame was correctly activated. It's just the case we can't really see it unfortunately with the point light. So that might just be something to tidy up and improve in the polish stage. But at the very least, we know that those two things are working. And then the last thing that we want to add here, so the third step, is utilizing those sound effects that we've brought in. So this is really simple as well. We don't have a component here to use for the sound, but what we can do is make use of the built in functionality, a function called play sound at location. So these two options do exactly as they would suggest. Play sound two D is a global sound. It doesn't matter where you are. It will have the same volume. It will come through both ears at the same intensity, whereas play sound at location is locational. So if you're facing away from it and only your left ear is kind of in the direction of where the sound came from, It will sound louder than in the right here. And of course, as you get closer or further away, the intensity or the volume will be louder or quieter. So we'll make use of this nice three D sound option. We'll use the play sound location. The location that we want to provide, we'll make use of something called the default player pawn. The thing that we are possessing when we're in the world, even if we're in a camera, we still have an entity, which we're viewing that camera through and we can find that with two simple searches, so we're going to look for something called the G player pawn. So this is what Unreal creates for us by default behind the scene, just to give us something to view the world through. And then we can get information from this, so these pins at the end here are all of the information about the properties within that object or that actor. In this case, we want to know where it is, and we know that we want something called a location, so we can pull from here and we can finally get location or get actor location. So we'll find the location of the actor. Again, I mentioned previously, you'll see this terminology a lot, the actor of something, that's just because it is the first type of class that we can place into the world, which has information about the transform, and the transform includes the location, rotation, and scale. So if we find this, we can plug this in here, so we can find where we are in the world, where we're viewing through the camera. We'll get the location of that, and then this will tweak the sound. So as I've said, be louder or quieter based on how far away we are from the thing, which is playing the noise. And then the final thing that we want to do here, we'll drop this down. And we've got the fire sound. So a bunch of examples have come across is either called fire or flame. So to filter those out, we'll just search for the one that we want. This is the one that I've shown how to quickly make some changes and make sure we have the correct format. So I know that's the one that we want to play. And now when we press play, just do a quick test again with the sound on. And there you go. You could see that as well as the light and the flame being activated, that sound is played, and you can hear that coming through. And as I've said, we will rather than have both of these cooled simultaneously, we'll do that with a slight delay between them so that it just feels a little bit more impactful. But as I said, it's actually some really simple functionality, and a lot of this will just come down to getting familiar with what the engine provides and being comfortable with searching for things that should be available, and you'll just need to find what the name of the function you might be looking for or the feature is called and dropping that into the event graph. Just a reminder here, we'll leave this for now. We want this to be called on the begin play so that we've got something to demonstrate or test. We will be coming back at a later time when we've got our sequencer ready to animate, and we will be removing this call from the begin play and we'll be controlling when this function is called manually through the animation. But for now, this is the lantern ready to go, so we can compile and save this and move on to the next blueprint. 38. 36 - Door Functiolity: Taking a very similar approach with the cave door that we've just taken with the lanterns. I'll do the same thing in fact, we can grab it from here and open this through the outliner. Now, we're going to take the same approach here is where we actually won't need the event tick or the begin overlap, so we can get rid of these. We'll make the same demonstration test functionality of the begin play. But again, we're going to create a custom event that we'll be cooling through the animation when we have that sequence so ready to go. The first step will be to create that custom event that we want to use. If we right click down here, and again, we'll search custom event. We'll call this one something logical like open door. When it comes to naming things, we just want the functions or the event names to describe as succinctly as possible what they're responsible for. If you're ever interested in guessing more into code and the programming side of things, the general rule of thumb is that your code should read somewhat like a book. You can step from one thing to another and know what's happening without really looking at the code. But just by reading the descriptive function or event names, it should tell you exactly what the process is doing. So in this case, we could kind of say that we'll have that because on begin play, we're going to call the function open door, and we'd expect that function or event to open the door. So we'll call open door from here just so that we can test this nice and easily. Again, let's add a quick delay here as well. And we'll make this one a little bit longer than the lanterns. Just to get a very rough idea of what will be happening when we do animate this, we'll have the lanterns turn on first. When they've lit up, a second later, the door can slide open. Nice, simple stuff there. And a lot of this will be somewhat repetitive. We've now had a good look at what the Blueprint editor provides and how we can utilize some of these features. We essentially just want to reuse a lot of that same stuff. The first thing is going to be the play sound location. We want that grinding sound to start playing. We'll do the same thing again. We use the play sound location. We want to get the location of the pawn that we're looking through, so the position of the camera essentially. And we want to get the location of that pawn. We can plug this into the location pin here as we've done previously, and then we just want to set this to be our rock or grinding sign that we have. Mme is called rock grinding, and that will just start that playing as soon as this function is called up here. I do apologize. I keep going between function and event. The term is used fairly interchangeably. There are some differences. We can create things called functions here to the left hand side. Again, a little bit out of scope for what we're covering. But the main thing is just to know that these are named features that can be called and will trigger something to happen afterwards, which is why they're called events. They will trigger an event to happen when the name of this is called and used as we're doing up here. The main difference as far as you'd be concerned at the moment between a function and event is all of our events go in the event graph. Where is if we create a new function over here, we could call this again, as with the events, we would call this anything. I'll just call this one D T. If we pull a print string from here and just type the word thing, we can find this by name. If we go back to the event graph, and as I've said, the main thing is that the function gets its own little graph, so we can see that nothing else is in here apart from the logic for this function. But if we go back to the begin play, just double click on the begin play there to return to the event graph. I'll move this aside. I'm going to call the D thing. So we can see here, we can just call this by name again, and this is before the delay. So if we hit compile, we've got one door, so we should expect the word T to show just once when we press play. So I took a little bit of time to load there. With faster loading, you can see the word thing appeared straightaway. So we know that this is coming in is calling the function do thing, and it's acting very similar to an event. It is just to say, as I mentioned, they're, for the most part, very interchangeable. To keep things simple, though, we're just going to work with events. So I'm going to get rid of the do thing function. We'll get rid of the cool here as well. And then just hook this back. Just wanted you to know they're available is very easy to lapse into using those terms interchangeably because they do very similar things. So back on our open door event, we now want to have that animation happen of the door sliding up. So it sounds like this would be a little bit more complex. But again, this is actually made very simple by some of the default functionality provided by the Unrel engine. So if we pull from here, we're going to search for something called a timeline. We want this option at the bottom, which is add timeline, and this is essentially going to provide us a small graph where we can tell it to animate something over a given period of time. We can come in and name this if we wanted. So if we press F two to rename this timeline, we'll just call this one door animation timeline, just to keep things nice and tidy because you'll see it did create a component over here, which is currently just called timeline, which is a little bit vague and ambiguous. We don't know what that would be when we return to our code. So we'll call this one door animation timeline. Or door anim timeline for shot is fine. And then we can plug this in. So the one other thing that we want to do here, by default, this hooks us up to play, and we want to make sure that this always plays from the start of the animation. These different options just allow us to do things like pick up from where we left it, if we were to pause it or reverse it. We can pick up and play from the timeline previously was because we only want this to play once and we want it to play the full animation. T to be sure we'll tell it to play always from the start point and finish at the end point. The next thing we want to do is double click this node. As I mentioned, this actually has a graph feature, so this will bring us into the timeline, and we can add a track up here. So I'm just going to add a float track, and this is our graph that we can work with. And quite simply, we can hold a shift, so left shift, and then left click and you can add these points. So this is our animation graph, and essentially, we would animate the location of the door. And offset it by these points. That would obviously be quite a jagged up and down movement, we'd probably want this to a little bit more like this. We'd be going from a start point to an end point. I'm actually only going to use two points. I'll just select all of those and delete those. The other thing is that by default, this will have a length of 5 seconds. I'm going to normalize this and just turn this down to 1 second. If we press and select in here, we'll say one and then hit Enter, and we can see the length of our timeline is just decreased. Then all I want to do is I'm going to shift in left click once here. And then shift in left click once over here. I'm going to select this first note. I'm just dragging and selecting, and we'll give this a time of zero, and a value of zero. So this is the very start of our animation when nothing has happened. And then the end result of our animation will be here, and I want this to be a value of one and a time of one. So at the end of that second, the door would have fully animated into its resting position. Now, a really cool feature is that we can select both of these. I'm just drag selecting both points. Right click on either one of them. I'm just going to tell this to have an auto interpllation, and it just gives us a nice bit of easing. We can select either of these if we wanted. If you wanted it to really have a quick sort of animation out and then ramp off to closing or to hitting its resting point, you could do that. To change the kind of animation that you're getting. I think the default interpolation there is going to be quite nice. It just makes it look a little bit less flat and rigid, so we'll keep it like that. And then the other thing here before leaving this graph and making use of this, I'm just going to select this word that says new track zero. I'm going to press F two again, and this is something else that we can rename. It wasn't super clear there, but this is the variable that will be provided by our timeline we've just created. I'm just going to call this one Alpha because this is the difference between where we start and where we go, often referred to as the Alpha or the Delta value. In this case, it will be the Alpha, so we'll press and compile and save that. Go back into the event graph. And you can see what's happened now is that we have this Alpha value, which has been created, which is from when this is called, this will play the full timeline over the duration of 1 second, and that value will be getting changed. 0-1 will be the value being returned over that 1 second. So around about halfway through the animation, we'll be getting the value of 0.5, down here, we'll be returning the value of 0.15 and so on. And we can use that to offset the animation of the door moving up. So the way that we do this is surprisingly simple. We again, similar to what we did with the player p where we have the context of the actor's location. We can do that from inside of our own blueprint as well. So we can find the actual location of this door in the world. So if we just right click in the event graph, and we'll search for the word get actor location, This time because we're not telling it to get the pawn, the context that it's looking for, it knows that we're probably interested in the location of the object that we're calling this function from. If we press that here, we can see that the target is self, so we're going to get the location of our self, nice and simple. And what we want to do is we want to set the end location as well. So again, we're just going to right click in the event graph, and we're going to search for set Atcation. So you'll quite often find that if you can get the information about something, you can set it and vice versa. So we're going to set the act to location. Again, the target will be self, so we're updating the location of where we are in the world. Really, all we want to do is over the duration of this timeline playing or animating. We want to update. So we're going to use this update execution pin. We want to update the location of ourself, essentially just animating up the screen. So nice and simple. So at the moment, we only have one thing, which is the new location. We want to animate this from the start location to the new location. So we actually need two different vector points A and B, essentially the start and the finish. You'd expect, real has some functionality built in ready for us to do that. If we pull from our new location, and we're going to search for the term Lp, short for interpolate. This is a linear interpolation between two points, essentially meaning doing a smooth animation from point A, two point B, like I've just said. The reason we have this value is we want to tell it how fast or how much to move between these two points over that given time, which in our case is a second. As I mentioned, this is by default quite often called the Alpha. We already have one of these properties exposed and ready to go with, so we've already created our Alpha, so we can plug that in here. And then the only other two things that we need to fill in for this to kind of tell it what we want it to do. We want to get the start point, which we currently have. The start point is where it is now and the end point. B, where is in the world at the moment would be A and B would be however many units up. On the Z axis. So we're essentially just animating this value over here. To make this nice and simple to visualize, we're going to do some code altomation in a moment, which is a little bit more complex. So to get the very simple example done, we're just going to hard code this at the moment. You generally wouldn't want to do this, but I just wanted to show the core concept before diving in any further. So we're going to take the values we have at the moment, which is our X Y and Z, and we're just going to copy those by hand into the X Y and Z respectively inside of A. So a little bit time consuming, as I said, you normally wouldn't do this. This is just to show the core concept at the moment. And then with that done, we're going to take the x and the y because we know that these are unchanging. We're not moving side to side or forward and backwards. So we can copy these into the x. And the y of the target results, where we want the door to end up. And then the difference that we want is to see how far we want this to go. So this is something we can quickly check out in the map. So if we grab this and move the door up, it depends whether we want it to go all the way through the ceiling or if it's going to look nice just to have a sort of a halfway opening so that's not fully exposed and that way we need to go through the doorway. This is something that we can tweak. But the main thing is seeing roughly what the difference is here. So we know we're starting at 94, and then let's say that we want to animate it just up here. We're going around about 1,000 units up. So let's call this 1094. That could be our animation end point. If we come back in here, if we simplify this, if we just turn this into 94, we can do some really cool stuff with unreal. We can do some simple equations at least I quite like this and blueprint. So if we say 94, plus 1,000. If you've got a more complex number, this might be useful. This will give us 1094, just something to make you aware of. You could have just plugged in or typed in 1094 as well. As I said, if you wanted it to be more precise, then you can add it to the decibel point value or whatever. But what this will now do, hopefully, the visualization before we hit play is kind of starting to make sense. Over the space of a second, this will go from our initial location to our end location, which is essentially just 1,000 units up on the dead axis. So we can have a quick look at this if we come in press, Controls Ed. I'm just getting that back down on the floor. That will also remove that that's undone the changes I've made in the blueprints. I'm just going to need to come in quickly and type 1094 again, hit compile and save, just so that this was back where we wanted it. And then if we simulate this, remember that we would expect the lamps to come on first, and then that will animate up. Over the space for a second. Nice and simple, that's really all that we're going for. And then, as I mentioned, we can rather than hard coding this because we want to make this as reusable as possible, the door may not always start and end in those points. So we're going to use some code to track where we want this to animate between. The first thing we want is we know that we have a starting point that we want to remain unchanged. We already have the start of this over here. We have our get at location. Now, if you think about it, if we plug this in here because this will be animating over time, the point A would be changing as the door raises, which would give us a kind of a buggy unwanted animation. Because each time that this is called, it's kind of like a temporary tick or an update function, the atication is being updated, so we're not getting that smooth interpretation that we wanted. So the first thing we want to do is we're going to Pull this over here. We'll pull from the vector pin here, the location value, and we're going to create something called a variable. This is just a value which can change over time, or it can just be stored as a placeholder. You can see we've got the option here to promote this to a variable. And when we create one of these, this will be in our variables section to the left hand side, and we just need to give this a name, and I'll call this one Start location. So again, we just want to give this a clear concise name. This is the location that the door starts. We just want to make sure that we hook this up to the execution pins. So we need to actually store this as a variable, and to do that, we need the execution pins to make sure that this functionality is cooled. And then just to recap, essentially what's happening now is when we call the door to be opened, is going to play the sound, is going to store the current location of the actor or the door. Something called the start location, and then we begin to get the variables that we need to run the animation over here. If we select and drag the start location into the graph, we'll get two options, because we can get or set the value, we just need to tell it that we want to currently get the value here, because we want to use this, we want to read that information, and we'll provide that as the argument for A. So we're going to start from the start location, and then to make this more reusable, we can duplicate this. I'll press control in D to duplicate the start location, and we can do some really simple maths here. If we pull from here and say plus, So we can add to our vector. We basically want to say that we don't want to make any change to the x or the y because again, remember we're not moving forward or sideways. We're just moving up, but we can say that we want to have the door end 100 units higher. Than the start location. So the start location, remember is essentially when we press play, it will be this value here, so 94.610, whatever. So we're saying that the end location will be 94 point plus 1,000. And that's where we want to animate two. The first example was just to show you what was happening to get the concept of the animation across. Generally, we don't want to hard code things because the really good thing now is if we come in in press play, that will work exactly as it did previously. So we have a nice smooth animation there. But the really good thing about this is remembering that previously, we were hard coding everything, so this was our start and end point plus the sizing that we were putting in by hand. Let's say that we do some reworking of the level. We want to keep everything exactly the same, but we just want to move the cave door over here and we move all of the messes around with it. But this now has a new start point. So we need to go back into the class and re hard code all of that based on the designer or the level editor making some changes here. With our version now, it's finding that information through this function cool. Setting whatever the designer or level designer has changed, storing that in code, and then we're just using that with some simple maths here to add 1,000 units to be the offset. Now if we press play. That will animate from here and do exactly the same thing. So the core functionality is still working exactly as intended. So it just controls ad that back so that it's in the right place. That was really just to get across the point of why we would put this in a blueprint and how making this more of a dynamic code situation is going to help us in the long run. And then just moving things around to keep the code somewhat tidy in things like this is not that easy to keep things neat and easy to see, but we can double click on the wire here, and this has created something called a re root node, just so that there's not quite so many things overlapping in all directions. The main thing again, just keeping it readable and easy to see. So we know that we're storing the location that the door starts. We're telling it to play the door anim timeline, so the animation, and we're telling it to update the location of the door and interpolating it, so smoothly animating it between two points, which is the start location plus the start location plus 100 units on the dead, so 1,000 units higher. That's it. Really that simple. Now one other thing that you may find is perhaps the door is moving too quickly, so it's only taking 1 second to go up, that may be faster or shorter than your sound effect is actually playing. We can make a really simple change to our animation timeline play rate to have more control over how long this takes. Just turning the sound effects back on so we can quickly test this. And I think the flames actually sound really good there. I think that's a nice effect when everything lights up. But of course, we can see that our sound effect is playing for probably two or 3 seconds longer than the animation. So we want to tweak that. Now, we can come in here, so we'll find the rock grinding sound. We'll search to this. We can highlight over this, and we'll see that the duration is actually 6 seconds. It's quite a long sound effect, I think because I slowed it down, so that's something to be aware of, so 6.6 seconds. So we want to make our animation at that long. So what we could do is we could come in, and we could change the length there to 6.6 seconds, and we'd have to move this. But of course, this is very similar to the movement situation where if through play testing and showing it to the designers or the sound engineers, and they decide actually, that sound effect is far too long. We want to speed that up and change the pitch or whatever. Again, that means that you're going to get a task or request a little bit later that now actually the sound is 3 seconds long, so you need to come back in and change the duration, change the timeline, and everything like that. So we want to make this dynamic as well. And that's why I always set my animation timelines to a length of 1 second, which is a uniform normalized value, and then we know that we can multiply this or divide this by a certain value to either increase or decrease the length of the animation. So that would make a bit more sense when we go through this. I'm just going to move this over to the side. I'm going to grab all of these and move them to the right. If we drag in our door anym timeline, we can get a reference. Again, we're going to get a reference to the door anym timeline, which is this. What I want to do quite simply is set something called the playback rate, the speed at which this plays. So it's called play rate. I'm just going to use the set play rate function here. I've just searched rate to find this one. And then we want to make sure that from this execution pin, we hook this back up, so execution to execution. Remember that if there's ever a dead link between these, then this wouldn't get called. So always remember to hook back up your execution. The best way to think about this is this is your command from here to do the next thing. And then from here, once this is done to do the next thing, if that chain of command ever stops, then the next thing won't be done. Very easy for new developers I find to overlook that. So always make sure you're keeping an eye on what's happening and also remember you're always running from left to right. So all of this won't be called or processed until this is complete or done. And then the play rate is essentially how fast this is playing. So if we say a play rate of two, this will run two times faster. So if we hit compile, we'll come in, press play. You can see that only took half a second. So what we want to do is we want to work out some kind of conversion here. If we made this 0.5, then obviously, it would take 2 seconds and so on. So we want to set our play rate here so that this takes roughly, I think, what was it 6 seconds for the duration here, so you can see the duration of the audio file is 6.62 seconds. So roughly around about there will be perfectly fine. This way, we just get much more flexible control here. If people do start playing around with the sound effects or they want you to change this. We do still need to come in and make that change, but it's much easier to change just this one variable compared to always coming into the animation timeline, we need to change the length, the different variables within the graph, and this is a really simple graph, but they can get more complicated in this as well. This means that you can animate just once, you can leave this alone, and then we'll just change the play rate to match the effects or whatever's going on in the background. We're aiming for 6.62, if we just call it that. So we're going to divide one by 6.62, which is 0.15 something. So we can probably just round that to 0.15, and it will animate for roughly the correct period of time. So that should take about 6.6 seconds to update. In fact, we can pull in a calculator. We just double check here, 6.624. So if we plug in those variables, we've got 1/6 0.624. So just over 1.509, which will be fine. Again, we're not going to need to match this up perfectly. I think the sound effect, especially because the sound effect I've used, is not going to sound amazing with the rock moving, is not quite the correct sound effect, but it's just to give that suggestion. Ours, a sound engineer would do a much better job and provide you some proper sided effects. But if we give this a quick play and then we can see if it at least roughly matches up. I mean, that was pretty spot. So I'm happy of that. As I said, the main thing, we've got the time to be correct. The sound effect. It sounded like a stone being dragged across concrete rather than large boulders moving across. We could probably make that more basic deeper. Again, I'm not a sound engineer. If you have a sound engineer on. They could really do probably a really good job with that. Just to say, we're just guessing the ideas across at the moment, and that is a really nice quick way, as I've mentioned. The great thing about this is if somebody does come in and change this and you hand this over to sand engineer and they say this is far too long, we need to make this shorter, deeper, whatever, you come back with a three second long clip. You're just going to come in here, nice and simple, double what that value is, or whatever the case may be. And remember, it's nice simple one divided by whatever the target time is because we've set this to a uniform one value. So that wasn't picked at random. If we normalize this value, it makes it much easier to update the play rate to match how long we want this animation to take. Again, remembering that we will be coming in and removing this from the begin play a little bit later. But hopefully, you've seen how useful it can be just to set some of these debug testing situations up, so we can easily come in, press play, let the things do their stuff, test the sound effects like that. Just a click of a button, and the next thing we'll be moving onto is the animation and the sequence. We can look at how we can trigger these events from external classes or areas inside of the unrelenum. 39. 37 - First Person: This point, we have our lanterns and the door blueprints pretty much ready to go. We will need to make some tweaks to these a little bit later just to get them fully interactive. Now, I've mentioned a couple of times that we could have been looking at using the sequencer. In this version of the course, we'll actually be going through a more kind of gameplay oriented approach, and we'll be making the different blueprints that we have, the lantern in the doors interact with a character, so a character that we can actually control with the mouse and keyboard, run around and have some feedback based on what the players doing. So to get that ready, we will need a first person character just to keep this nice and simple. You can choose to import the third person character. I'll show you how to get all of these into the project in a moment. And that will also provide us with the opportunity to look at how we can get some of the core classes set up for a game based project. So to get started, we're just going to go down to the content drawer to bring things into our project. I have mentioned this very early on in the course, that as well as importing the assets from the marketplace and manually. We can also bring things like the templates into our project. So as long as you have the templates installed to your engine version, which you'll need to do through the Epic launcher, if you don't already have that through the options that I've shown before to add the extra features packs and the templates. With that installed, we can go to the Add button just here. We're going to add a feature or content packs. So these are the things that are installed per engine version. And we're going to add that to our project. And these are the options that we have quite simply when it came to choosing whether we wanted a blank project or a project based on a certain game type. In this case, as I've mentioned, we've got things like the vehicles, the third person. I think it's going to be easier to work with first person, making sure that we keep this as a blueprint project up here. So select first person, and then just tell it to add this to the project. So nice and simple, that was done almost immediately. And that's what I was saying earlier on in the course is that it's quite nice to start with a blank project. You're then in full control over what you're bringing in, what you're working with. But it's super simple to add things like this into the project if you decide that you need them a little bit later. Some of this is going to be much more in depth and would require a much more detailed explanation than we're going to be going for in this completely introductory course. But what we can see here is that we were automatically opened into the first person folder. So again, in a similar way that we've kind of given ourself a name space with the boot camp folder here, when we've imported this has created a first person folder so that we know that everything that we've just imported for this template is going to be in here. And that is all of the blueprints, and we won't be looking at all of these, as well as some inputs, which again, is a little bit more of a kind of technical in depth topic. Which I will be including and covering fully in future courses, but this one, we're just going to make use of what we are provided inside of this template pack. And then if you wanted, you could also go into the first person map. So if we just jump over very quickly, we'll have a look at what this is, we'll close these down for now. But really, this is just a nice kind of playground where you can come in, shoot things, pick up the gun, shoot these physics objects around, and just experiment with the first person controller. We won't be using a lot of this. We're just going to keep our focus on the first person character. So if we go back into the content draw, I want to do just to keep things nice and tidy. I'm going to go into the first person folder here, into the Blueprints folder. And I want to take our first person character, the player controller and the game mode, because these are the only classes that we really need to bring across to our project. We won't need the projectiles, the gun, or the weapon component, because it doesn't really fit what we've been creating so far. You can keep these and use them if you want to, though. But I'm going to go to the Blueprints folder inside of our boot camp folder here. So we'll go to Blueprints. And this is where we want to take those three assets. So that everything that we know we want to keep working with, will always end up in our own named folder. So back into the Blueprints folder for the first person project, we'll grab these and then just move them over. And we'll do that now just so that we don't have any redirector issues or kind of lose the classes in transit when we start making changes to our project. Going back into the map that we've been working from, we'll just go to our boot camp, the maps folder and open the main map just here. I just wanted to show that if we press play at this stage, we still have our floating pawn, so something which will just fly around. It doesn't have any collision, we could easily go through the different elements here that we don't want to. So that's going to be one of the first things that we want to change. And this is what I mentioned. This is going to introduce us to those gameplay framework features and allow us to manually manipulate the core elements in classes for our project. And really, the main goal at this stage is just to make sure that when we press play, the first thing that we want to control is no longer this default pawn. Remember, if we press play, if we press F eight to eject, we can see here, we're controlling this thing called a default pawn, because we haven't told unreal what to use when we press play. We haven't given it a specific class type for us to control. It's just creating this gray floating sphere, which can fly around the level kind of like a spectator in first person games. So that's what we want to change, and we can do that very easily. So if we go into the project settings, which if you don't already have that open in the top left hand side here, we can go to edit and then project settings. We'll navigate on over to the Maps and mode section. So we've seen this before when we're setting our map. As I've said, this will be used quite often, and we can see here that we're using something called a default game mode or just game mode base, which is our default game mode. If we drop this down, the selected game mode, we can see all of this is grade out, meaning that we cannot change any of these properties. So what we want to do is we're going to leverage the BP, underscore first person game mode. So it's using the same naming convention that I've recommended before. Another reason that I've kind of been reiterating and making heavy focus on the naming conventions. As I've said, epic themselves and the templates and everything like that, we'll all use this naming convention as well. So if we change this, we can see a few other changes have been made. So it's changed the default class from our default pawn, which is what we were controlling before to the BP underscore first person character. And that's what we want to control is the first person character which can walk around, pick things up and interact with the world. It's also changed the player controller to be the BP underscore first person player controller. And really, again, this is much more in depth than we need to be looking at in this completely introductory section. But the way that you can think of the character or the pawn versus the player controller is the pawn, the first person character is the thing that the human, the player is controlling. It is the player's direct interaction with the world. Whereas the player controller is the first thing that receives input. It's kind of like the brain or the sole for the character. It receives the physical inputs you're passing into the keyboard or the mouse, whether you're telling the character to move forward or backwards, it's the player controller, which picks up that information and passes that down to the character or the pawn classes. So that's why we have these two, one to receive the input, and then one to act upon that input in the world. So the main change that we'll see now is if we go back into our main map, we press play. We can we can still move around when we click into the window, we can move around and or look around with the mouse. If we look into the right hand side in the outliner, you can see that rather than default pawn, the game has indeed spawned in the BP underscore first person character, which is exactly what we wanted. The main changes on top of that is if we press Q and E, we're no longer floating up and down, which is confirming that we don't have a spectator pawn anymore. This is a grounded physical character, working out the standard physics constraints that you'd expect, meaning that if we were to walk off of a ledge, we would actually drop, whereas the other pawn would have just been floating in space. And if I press W AS and D, our movement bindings, you can see that we're moving forward back left and right. Again, we can do things like walking up the hill here. So we're taking into account slopes and things like that. We just have no your bog standard first person character input, which is what we wanted. If we press space, we'll jump, and you can come in and add things like sprinting and crouching. All of that is possible. Slightly past what we need to do. We just need something where we can walk around and interact with the world around us. So that's the first part of the goal complete, and just a very quick overview here. You can look much further into this if you wanted to, but just to have a quick idea of what's going on. If we go into the input folder inside of the first person, we should probably bring this across as well. But what we have here in the IMC underscore default, this is using the new enhanced input mappings under the mappings folder here. The reason that we can move, look, and jump is because we have all of these bound to certain keys. So when we press space, that will make us jump, and the reason that this is useful to know without needing to go full in depth with blueprinting and creating your own character is we can quite easily come in here. We can press the ad button up here, and we can add a new binding. So if we also wanted to make something strange, let's say Z to be jump as well, we can press this button just here. We can press the ZD key, and now if we come in and press play and press the ZD key, the character will jump, like so. So nothing fancy, but just to say that these are kind of set up ready for us to go and very easy to customize and tweak. Likewise, we already have the up down left right, as well as WAS andD and the game pad set up for movement. But if that wasn't enough, you could come in, you could add some more bindings here, and we could have different things moving the character around. So this is where we'd go to change the input settings for our character. And the way that this is working using a bunch of different action classes here, to say what type of input the jump action should count as. We're just bring in the jump here, just saying it's a digital Boolean, which means it's either on or off in comparison. We have things like the move action here, which is a two d vector, meaning that it will track forward back, left and right, and the values kind of going between those between minus one and one, essentially, whether something is pressed in a positive or negative value. And then just to show where this is all used, inside of the blueprints folder, inside of the player controller. You can see here quite simply, it's taking the enhanced input. It's binding the input to this class and anything controlled by this class. So this is what it's saying now, this is literally taking that physical input that you're providing to your mouse and keyboard. It's binding and sort of checking for that here. It's mapping your keys to this default input mapping context, which is what this counts for the IMC is your input mapping context, and it's using the default one, which is the one that we've just looked at, if we just quickly go back here. Taking all of the jump, move, and look inputs. And then because the player controller passes that information across to the player class, if we open this one, the first person character, we can see here, we've got bindings to the look, the move. And the jump. Now, this is the sort of thing it would be much nicer to go through in a kind of step by step to recreate this, but I really wanted to just get the core concepts of blueprints, class communication and some basic features and functionalities across at the moment. So I want you to be aware that all of this exists, and in future courses, we will go in depth, and we will tear all of this apart, and we will make this from scratch. But for n, just be aware that you can research into this. You can read back through what's happening here. You can recreate this type of thing if you wanted. We just know that this is where this is located, and we have something working for us just to get our initial tests and features up and running. So the final thing, before wrapping up this topic, I'm just going to go back into the first person folder here. I'm going to grab this input folder, and I'll move this back into our boot camp folder as well. We won't need the map. We don't need that demo map, and we won't need unless you wanted to. We won't need the rifle, the weapon component, or the projectile. Quite simply, if we bring this into the level, this is just what allows us to walk over this, and the character will attach this gun to them. And we can fire projectiles around the world this way. Now, again, you can probably see, it doesn't really fit too well with the theme that we've had going. We're not going to have any enemies or anything like that in here just at the moment. So I'm just going to choose to remove those. And just to keep things as tidy as possible, I'm going to come in because I won't be using those, I'll remove the weapon from the level, and I'll get rid of the first person folder just here. I'll right click and we'll delete this. And we can tell this to force delete all of the relevant assets here. There won't be any conflicts or anything being used or overlapped. Likewise, for the same reason, we now don't need the visual assets that came along with the weapon or the weapon class, so we can get rid of the FP weapon folder here. So they were quite simply the textures, materials, and the static meshes which were related to visualizing that gun. The first person arms will probably be useful because we do have this when we press play. If we look down, we can we might need to move here. But you can just make out at certain points, the animation will be happening that the arms are moving around, so we can keep these. That gives us something to at least look at if we look down, and we see those come into play. But what I'm going to do again is inside of our assets folder. I'm going to move the character, which is our mesh materials and texture and the animations, and we'll just move this into our own assets folder. So again, we're just making sure that the things that we're working with and that we want to keep are going to be inside of our custom boot camp folder here. And then that way, we can come in and we can get rid of the first person items. And then everything else is going to be a little bit overkill to try and tidy this up just because we've been getting so many different assets and folders from all of our plug ins. But that template project was nice and kind of condensed and easy to tidy up a little bit, so I was happy to spend a bit of time there to fix that up. And then if we just press play, again, just to make sure everything's still working as expected, you can see that actually when I jump, the items kind of come in at the side of the screen. Everything works, even though we've moved everything into its correct place now. We still have everything running as intended. With just a few small changes, we've now imported the first person template, the character, the game mode, and the player controller, all of the movement bindings, and we have that ready to go to walk over and start triggering these different effects with the lanterns and get the door open based on a few kind of gameplay related requirements and mechanics. 40. 38 - Flame Pickup: So the next thing is we're going to get the character interacting with the items around the world. And I wanted to make this somewhat like a very, very simple puzzle game. If you think about something like Tom Rader, where you would need to pick an item up, and then only once you've picked those up, could you go and interact with the other items around the world? A way that I think would be quite nice to show off different types of class interaction, which is really one of the core concepts that you need to learn to be able to start fleshing out your own ideas, which is how one class, either reference or check information in another class. The way that I think we could make heavy use of the few different classes we have available is that I'm going to create one new pickup, which will be a flame, and the character will need to be holding that flame, not visually, but just having it noted that they've collected it before they can go and light the two lanterns. And then only when the two lanterns have been lit, will the door open? That means that the door needs to check that both lanterns have been lit, and the lantern needs to check that the character has the flame. If you've never done any programming or blue printing like this before, that alone can sound like it would be quite complex. But I wanted to show you that the programming logic and the concepts behind this are actually really simple. The first thing that we need to do, if we break this down in a list of problems to solve The first thing that we don't have is a pickup. So that's going to be this topic. We're just going to create another blueprint class, very simple, something that when it's overlapped with the player will be collected. So I won't spend too long in this process. The actual creation of the class will be very similar to what we've seen with the lanterns and the door. So we're going to go into the content drawer. Boot camp, Blueprints, right click, and we'll find the blueprint class. Again, we just need the bog standard actor class, just something which exists and can be placed in the world, like it says here. Remember, if you're ever not sure what you need, have a quick read of the descriptors, and they will probably point you in the right direction. Naming convention, we want to make this clear and concise to what it does. It is going to be the flame pickup, so BP underscore flame pickup. And then inside of this, I just want two different components. Now, the first thing you probably know that we want to add is a Niagara flame, so we're going to go to add the Niagara component again or the Niagara particle system component. We'll head on over to the details panel and we'll set this one to be our torch. If we hit compile, we should see that come in. And then the other thing, so this is the thing which may not have been quite so obvious if you haven't done this type of thing before. But we want a bound an object of some sort, which we'll be checking on whether it's been overlapped, so whether it's in the same physical space as the character. And we do that with something called a collider, and we have different types of colliders here. So if we just type coal to start finding collision, we have the box, the capsule, and the sphere collider, they all do the same thing. They will just be checking if something ever enters the same physical space as itself. For things like this, I quite like using the sphere collision, just because it means that you can approach this from any direction, and it kind of feels as though you're getting a fair kind of pick up bound here. It can be quite hard to notice, but you will see that things like using a cube collider or box collide It can be quite obvious sometimes when you've walked over an edge or something or a corner, and it can make the player notice things like this. I'm just going to go for a sphere collider, regardless of where we end to this, it will be the same distance from the flame. And then the main property that we want to change here is how close we want the player to be. So this thin line here, our sphere representation, the player needs to touch this before the pick up will be collected. We can control on the right hand side with the sphere collected. In the details panel, we can change the radius by increasing or decreasing this. If you wanted this to be quite forgiving, we could give this a much bigger radius, and the player would need to be at a much further distance before this class is being picked up. If you want the player to be right on top of the particle or the flame here, then we just need to make this radius a little bit smaller. So I'll give this quite a small radius. And then just considering how we might want this to work. I'm actually going to grab the sphere. And again, this is going back to reintroducing the hierarchy. I'm going to grab the sphere, place this to be the new default scene route or the new scene route, so we'll make this the new route, just because in my mind, I'm thinking that we probably want to bring the particle closer to the bottom of the pick up here. And then wherever this sphere goes, we want the particle effect to follow that. We now have control over how big or small this is with the sphere somewhat in the middle. We can place this manually on the floor, so it kind of sits snug on the floor, or we can have this hovering. That's not too important. But the main thing is that when we bring this into the world, What we want to ensure is that wherever we move the sphere or the object as a whole, that flame is going to be following it around, and we have that full control there. Another thing here with that kind of thing in mind, if we move this down a little bit, and in fact, it is a little bit difficult to see or guess where this particle might be because we can't really activate it before we come in and hit simulate or press play. What we can do instead is if I move this right to the bottom Of our collider here, so maybe just up a little bit from that. That gives us a good idea that as long as this collider is flush with the floor. So if we just press end, I'll move this over, move this up, and then press end, as long as that is flush with the floor, we know that when we hit simulate, that will look as though it's just a flame sat on the floor. I Doesn't make sense, but again, we just need something for the player to pick up. So that's perfectly fine. And these are just the considerations I want to get you in the habit of making when setting up your classes and things like that. There's no right or wrong way, but this is just how you would kind of approach. This is essentially teaching you how to think about solving the problems that you're given. So that is the setup of the flame particle done. The next thing is we just want to add that interaction with the player when it gets picked up. So in some tutorials, you may see, in fact, a little bit too often, I find that you see a lot of the logic being done in the character, so the character class is always checking on whether it's opening a door or picking up an item or being hit by an enemy and stuff like that, and you end up with a very cluttered complex character class, which has got too much going on. Now, the way that we want to approach this when coding ideally is each class should be responsible for as little as possible, but for very specific things. So in this case, the pickup should be responsible for being a pickup, checking whether it is being collected, and then whether it has been collected and then destroying itself. That's really all a pickup should be concerned with. And then the character should really only be concerned with moving around. It's there to receive the input and interact with the world based on simple physics and movement from the character, which is where we get that weird overlap. So essentially, what I'm trying to avoid here is having the character do pick up things and vice versa. With that in mind, we're going to go back to our spare cliide. We'll scroll back down to the collision settings here. And we just want to make sure we have a collision preset, and this gives us a bunch of different information on how this object perceives other objects in the world, whether it physically blocks things. So we have two main options here. We have block and overlap. And this is saying whether something should be allowed to pass through it, which would be our overlap, but it will track that something has passed through the same space. So I always like to think of this as your checkpoint in a racing game. Obviously, we want to know when a car has gone through a checkpoint, but we don't want to block them. Obviously, if you're playing a racing game and you go through a checkpoint and it's physical wall, that would be quite frustrating. And then that's the second option is that we have blocking. So this is when something is in the same physical space, and we want to stop it from proceeding any further. So in the racing game, that would be your boundary walls. We don't want the cars to be phasing through what looks like it should be the floor or sndd walls. So these are the main two options, we can either overlap something, which in unreal means that a message will be updated or senti saying that something is now in the same space as me, but I'm not stopping it. Or we have blocking, which is hitting, and unreal will pass that message back saying that something's trying to be in the same space as me, and I'm trying to physically stop it from getting any further. We have the third option as well, which is ignore. Very similar to overlap, where it doesn't stop the object from passing through, but it also doesn't send any messages. It does as the name wouldn't suggest, it ignores the collision entirely. So for the pick up, what we want to avoid, we don't want the player to be pushed away or blocked or stopped when they're trying to pick it up. So we want to make sure that this is set to overlap. So I'm just going to set this to overlap rather than overlap dynamic, and we can see that the object type here is set to static, meaning it's not going to be moving around, or this doesn't stop the object from moving around, but it stops the processor from tagging this as an object which is expected to move around. And then it's just set everything here to overlap. So it will overlap with everything in the world, including, and most importantly, this option here called the pawn, which is what we will be controlling a type of pawn. Specifically called the character class. So with that done, if we hit compile and save, we're just going to want to go to the event graph, and we can show this off in a really, really simple way. So with the sphere collider still selected, we're going to scroll down a little bit further in the details panel. And we will go to the events section just here. And we can see we have a bunch of predefined event dispatchers set up by Unreal, essentially allowing us to bind when one thing happens, we can bind a call to something else being followed up afterwards. Similar to the event begin play, the event tick that we've seen previously, we can press the plus button on any of these, and then bind some new functionality to happen if any of these are called. So in our case, we know that we're looking for something to happen when we overlap the sphericider. And you can see here we have the on component begin overlap. If we hit the plus, we'll get a new event created. And basically, when anything now overlaps this, this will be called. And what we want to happen here, quite simply, we want to let the player know that they've picked the flame up. And as we've said, the only other thing the pick up needs to do is to be visually removed. So we can do that step straight away. We can check something here. So we get a bunch of information about things like which component has overlapped us, which actor has overlapped us, so the other object in the world. We can get if we right click on the sweep result, this is a structure. This is just a holder of information, so we can choose to split the structure pin, and this gives us a bunch of other information as well. When this happened, the location that happened, things like the name of the thing that hit us. So we can get quite in depth of this if we wanted to. If you needed more information to find out who hit you from where they hit you, like applying knock backa or physics and things like that. You can get all of this information from here. For now, we're going to keep this super simple, so we're going to right click, and we can recombine the structure pin to hide all of that information just because it was a little bit too much information. We won't be using that for something. Quite this simple. What we want to do, though, is to make sure that nothing else in the world can pick up the flame. Because remember, other things could potentially touch this. The floor could touch this, other objects that we may have placed around if this was moving, if we had the flame moving around, could also overlap or touch this bounding zone here. So we want to make sure that a rock isn't picking up the flame. So what we can do is we can check here from the other actor, and we can pull from this pin and use the double equal sign. So we're saying if the other thing is equal to a specific object, Then we can use this conditional check, which is essentially giving a true or false return. And then if this is true on what we're looking for, we can tell it to do the next set of logic. And quite simply, all we want to check is whether the other actor, so the thing which is overlapping us is the player. And nil, again, has a really useful helper for this called player pawn. So we can get the thing that the human is controlling the human player. This is returned through the GT player pawn function. So when we are in control of the FP, the first person character, this will be classed as the player pawn. So this will return true if the thing overlapping the flame is our character class. So from our execution pin here, we just want to find the branch node. A branch is a kind of if statement. So again, that true or false, and that's how we use this Boolean. So the Boolean returns A or B or true or false, depending on the equation housed just here. Another way to look at this. So we can make use of our Boolean variables here. And then if this is true, so this is nice and easy to read here. If the result of this check is true, this is when we want to do something. If it's false, then that could mean that we've just sensed that the floor is nearby or a rock has rolled past us or a wall has been touched or something like that. So we wouldn't want to do anything. So what we can do here off of true, we're just going to call it another inbuilt function called destroy. So we're going to find this one specifically under the actor category, we want to call the destroy actor, and the actor that we want to destroy is ourself. So nice and simple. We're just saying, again, if we just try and read this, as you would, some text, essentially, we're checking that when we've overlapped, so on component begin to overlaps, and when this sphere has overlapped something, we're checking if the other actor is equal to, so this is just saying if it's equal to specifically the player pawn, so the thing that the human player is controlling. And then if that's true, so just a simple branch check, if that's true, then we're going to destroy ourself. So we can come in, we can press play, making sure that we're in the selected viewport or the play and editor, either of these will be fine, just not the simulate. Come in and press play, and then if we walk on over to the flame, you'll see that as we get close, and we overlap that. So maybe the clod was a little bit too small, but as we walked over that, it did that check. It found that we were indeed overlapping with the first person character, which, in its simplest form, is the player pawn, the thing that we're controlling, and then it destroyed itself. So nice and simple. And then the final thing is we want to pass that information. Across to the character class. So this will be our first form of class interaction. So I'm going to leave that for its own topic. It is then becoming a little bit more complex. But again, I just wanted to mention it's not a difficult concept. It's just something that will take a little bit of trial and error in practice. Once you've set it up in a few different ways, you'll get that kind of a ha and clicking moment where this all starts falling into place. But fornight, we'll keep this nice and simple where we're checking for an overlap. C hecking, it's the thing that the human is controlling, specifically here, the character class. Then if it is, we're just going to destroy ourselves for now, we'll come back a little bit later, and we'll need a little bit of functionality in here. But we'll need to set some stuff up in the character class first of all, which will be our next topic. As always, just remember to hit and pile and save or just press control shift S to save everything before moving on. 41. 39 - Flame Pickup: With our flame ready to pick up. The next step is adding that information into the character class. So we want to track in the character class if and when they're holding the pick up flame. I just wanted to mention that there will be better ways to do this, especially if you have a more kind of complex inventory system where you may be picking up multiple items, that would probably require and be justified to have an inventory manager of some sort, because as I've said, We do want to try and keep the amount of logic different classes are doing to very specific things. In this case, we will cheat just a little bit, just to keep this as friendly as possible to people completely new to programming. This isn't a course designed to teach you the indites of programming. I want to try and keep a good folks on that where possible, but this is just getting you comfortable with the unregin as a whole. We'll have follow up courses that you can look at taking and following along with if blueprinting and code and getting kind of good clean code base is something you're interested in. That will be something to look out for. But yeah, just to say that this isn't going to be the cleanest approach, but I will make it as clean and maintainable as possible. With that disclaimer, just because my coding instinct kicked off there. We're going to go into the Blueprints folder again and inside of the character class this time, so we'll just open up the BP underscore first person character class. We'll keep the pick up open as well. We will need this a little bit later. And what we can do is we can create a new variable here, just a very simple way to track whether we have something picked up. So we're just going to make use of a similar thing we've seen already, which is our Boolean, so true or false. Inside of the character class, we can go down to the left hand side in the variable section. And with the plus button here, we can create a new variable. The naming convention for a Boolean is B, and then the name of the thing is doing, and I'm just going to call this one Torch Held. So no underscore or anything like that. Be torch held, and this is whether or not we're currently holding the torch. If we hit compile, this is really important. We need to hit compile first. Otherwise, we won't see the variable change. And then in the right hand side, with our torch held Boolean still selected, we can see that we have this tick box here, whether this is true or false. At the moment it's false, which is what we want. We want to ensure that this begins as false because we're not holding the torch at this point. And then when we pick up the torch, we're going tog with us on essentially to look like this where it's true. And this is really simple to do. So we'll make sure that we save the changes we've made here. Again, this is one of those things where in an ideal scenario, we wouldn't be editing and tweaking a variable manually from one class to another, but this is a nice quick way to kind of visualize things. One thing I will do is, I'm just going to reimplement inside of the character class our event tick. So you can see that's been removed because it hasn't been used inside of this class. So under the event graph, we've only got the input settings here. So I'm going to right click in the event graph and we'll search for the event tick. We're just going to make use off of the event tick here of the print string that we've seen previously, so we'll pull from the execution pin and search for the print string. And then from here, rather than printing hello or something random, we're going to control drag, so remember we can get the variable immediately if we hit control and left drag this into the event graph. If we hit lt and left click and drag, then we'll set the variable. So this allows us to change and tweak this. This allows us to read the current value. And what we want to do is we're just going to print whether this is true or false. So whether we're holding this or not. This gives us some information about how long we want to print this to the screen. So by default, we have 2 seconds. And because this is printing, as I've mentioned, 60 to 120 or whatever the frame rate is, this is printing a lot of times per second. If we press play, that's why we have this scrolling down the screen so fast. What we can do to avoid this rather than having a long list of the same thing printing act is I'm just going to set this to zero, and that means that this will last for such a short period of time that by the next frame, when that next frame happens, it will replace it with a new version of this, which means it will always look as though the text is on screen, if that makes sense. Now it looks as though it's just always saying false at the moment, rather than scrolling all the way down the screen. A really simple thing to do here. If you're running something on the event tick, and you don't want it to run all the way down the screen. And the reason that we're doing this, I'll just get rid of this very quickly is that we can now move back to our flame pickup, so I'll hit compile and save to make sure that's well updated. We'll go back into our pickup. And from here, before we destroy the pick up, what we want to do is we want to communicate with our BP underscore first person character. We want to find this variable, and we want to set it to be true to tell it that you are now holding the flame. So this is again, nice and simple. We'll move this to give us a little bit more space. We're going to duplicate. I'm just going to grab the get player pawn because this isn't providing quite enough information. We can see that this is just a default pawn reference here. So the most basic version of a class that we can control is known as a pawn. And the character class, in essence, is a type of pawn, in the way that everything is a type of actor. Every character is a type of pawn, because that is just the most basic class which can receive input from a player controller. What we want to do is we want to specifically make sure that the pawn is also The BP underscore first person character. So I'm going to press control indeed to duplicate this. And the way that we check a specific type of class is through something called casting. So from here, we're going to grab our return value, and we want to search for something called a cast, and then we want to cast to the BP underscore first person character. So we can see if I start typing that here. Another good reason to use naming conventions is that that filter out all of the different things that we can cast against. Because we are working specifically with our own blueprints, our BP. If we finish that off with just BP, it will filter down the things just within our project or name spaces. So we're going to find the BP underscore first person character. And what we want to do is make sure that we hook up the execution pin from here to make sure that we have this cat. And then we have two different options here. Kind of like the branch almost, we have a true and a false. Here, we have a success and a failed. So if this cast is successful, meaning that we check against the return value just here, and if that is indeed the class that we're looking for, then we'll get a success, and if it isn't, then we'll get a failure. So in a similar way, we could look at this very similar with the actor overlap here. What we'd be saying is that if we cast against a floor or a wall or the C, that isn't going to be a character class. That is going to be an object, a visual representation of something. But if we do walk over this with the character, then it will be a success because it will be looking for that right type of class, and then this will be called. So, the other benefit that we have on top of this is that you can see that we have this return pin, and this returning specifically a reference to the type of BP first person character. And from this, we can grab all of the information inside of this class. So that means that we could find information on things like the capsue component, the are different components that this holds, as well as and more importantly, the variables that this holds. So just as a quick example, we know that the character has a capsule component, a mesh, a first person camera, and a first person mesh. So if we search for first person camera because that's quite specific, we can pull from here. Search for first person camera, and you can see here that we've got all of the information in the different things that we can do to the first person camera specifically in that class. And just to kind of cement what's happening here, that's not just a generic thing that already exists inside of unreal. If we rename this to something like boot camp camera, I compile and save so that those changes are made. If we pull from here and search for first person camera, you can see we don't find anything anymore because there's now nothing called first person camera in there. We do have boot camp camera. So we now have the same components, but with a different name. So we can search for things specifically in this class because we have a reference to the thing that we've just cast against. As long as it is the right class type, which in this case, it will be because we only have one type of character that the player is controlling. But of course, you can hopefully see where this is going. What we want to do is we want to come in, find the information about whether the torch is held, and we want to set this to be true. So if we pull from here, we're going to find the torch held, we can see here get torch held. We don't need the B for Boolean. A clever thing that Unreal does is the naming convention to prefix it with a lower case B, but unreal knows that that isn't really needed, so it actually removes it for us. So we can just search for the term that we're looking for. So from here, we can call the set torch held, so setting the value type, We will plug this into the execution pin. We want to say that this is now being held. And then after that, we'll do the thing that we're doing previously, which is to remove that torch so we can't pick it up a second time. So if we hit compile and save, and this is another thing when it comes to blueprinting, you want to try and start visualizing what you think might happen, even if you're not 100% sure on the process that you're taking or what you think you might be doing. All of this is new, and it takes a while to learn this. If you try and read through the code, we can kind of get a kind of an assumption of what we expect to happen. So when this sphere is overlapped, we're checking whether we're overlapped by something controlled by the player, the human player. We're then checking if that's specifically the thing that the human player is controlling, whether that is the first person character class, and if it is the first person character class, we're going to set the torch held to be true. Now the knock on event from that is that we should expect this print string to change from false to true. So that's one assumption that we can make. And then we should expect the torch to disappear. And we already know that that happens because we've seen the destroy actor get called before. So if we come back in and we press play, We'll come over and walk over the touch, keeping an eye on the top left hand side, where it's currently printing false. And then as soon as we walk over that it's printing true. So the character is now technically holding the touch. We don't need a visual representation, but we can see that that change has been made. And in the character class, that is being tracked as a character, which is holding a touch. And as I said, if we move back, the torch has been removed because we've called the destroy function. So just another little exercise is these little things kind of guessing or not guessing, but trying to somewhat assume what will happen based on the code that you've written, rather than just especially when you're going through tutorials, rather than just following along and blindly just seeing the changes being made, before you've even press play, just stop and think, why have they done this? What would the knock on effect be? What would I expect to happen from my current understanding? And that will help you just pick things up and learn a little bit faster. But all of that means that we now have a pickup that works a character, which can be tracked, is holding a touch. And the next thing is to do some very similar stuff. But now, When we come and overlap the lanterns, we want to check if the character is holding a torch and if it is, then we're going to allow these to be lit. And then the final step, remember, we're breaking this down into individual problems. The final problem after we have the lanterns lit is for the door. To be told that two lanterns have been lit, so we'll make this very specific because we have two lanterns in the level and their individual assets. The door will track wether both of them have been lit, and then only when they both have been lit doesn't matter which order, then the door will open. So they're the last two problems to solve. I'll provide a write up for the next challenge, but your challenge is to get these lanterns in a state where they can overlap with the character in a similar way, check this value. So see if the torch is currently being held, and if the torch is being held, only then do we we already have some of this functionality, but only then will we allow the turn light on to be cooled, if the character is holding the torch. So of course, meaning that if we walk straight past this, if we come over run straight up to the lantern, I need to make this level a little bit smaller or make the character move faster. But if we come straight over here and we're not holding anything, then of course, we don't want the lantern to be lit. So that's going to be your challenge. Just go ahead. Some of its repetition, some of it you will need to piece together and see if you can get that going. 42. 40 - Lantern Challenge: To recap and round off this challenge. The core goals were to have the torch be collected by the human player through the first person character. We're already tracking that, so we have part of that process ready and going. And then the core goal of the actual challenge was to make sure that we have that Boolean poggled to be true and only allow the lanterns to be switched on or activated if the torch is held. As I've mentioned, the bulk of the core concepts of this, we've already done. It's just some simple class communication that we've seen before. And your main goal was to add a little bit of extra custom logic to get you thinking about some of the basic code and syntax that would go into this. So I'll take you through these steps so that you can see how you could have approached this. Hopefully, you've given this a go. Again, the challenges are super important. I really want you to be trying them for yourself. And if you haven't already and you were thinking of skipping ahead, I would highly recommend that you just pause it here, give it a quick go, and even if you don't get it fully working, it's nice to see and have that kind of understanding for yourself, how you may have approached it, because you may take a slightly different approach, whether it'd be better or worse than the one that I will show you, and at least you'll have something to compare against, and you can kind of compare contrast and learn from that as well. So these challenges, I think are really going to be important. So assuming that you have taken the time to go through that process, I just wanted to do a couple of things here. So the first is I'm going to grab the torch, and I'm just going to move this a little bit closer to the lanterns that we have over here, just so that there's less moving and walking around to do. And for a similar reason, I'll take the player start. And again, I'll just move this over, so I'm holding the left shift and moving this so that the camera moves with it. And essentially, I'll just put this so that we start directly in front of the torch, directly in front of the lanterns, just to save a little bit of back and forth whilst testing. Now, for the core part of the challenge, the first thing you probably would have noticed is at the moment, the lanterns don't have anything in them, which would allow us to interact with them. There's nothing tracking whether the player is within range. So again, we've seen this logic before. We already have our sphere collider here. So we just want to do something somewhat similar inside of our lanterns. So I'll just click onto one of the lanterns here. We'll go into the edit BP Underscore Lantern, and this will open the Blueprint class for us automatically here. And the first thing is we want to have a colliding bound, a volume of some sort, in which we can have the character tracked and overlapped with this. So we'll go to the ad components. I'm going to search for collider. And this time, I think I'll probably use a capsule collision just because it's a little bit taller. Again, we still get the benefits here that this is somewhat kind of rounded. It won't matter which direction the player is coming from. It will always feel as though we can approach this from the same distance to get the result we're looking for. In this case, I probably won't make this the root component. Instead, I'll make sure that this is just nested along with everything else in the hierarchy. This allows us to raise this up somewhere in the middle. And then in the details panel, we can increase the half height, which is the height of the capture. And the radius so that we can be a little bit more lenient and flexible with how far away the player needs to be before they would be classed is interacting with the lantern. Again, I'll just make that same changes we've done previously. We'll go down to the collision presets, just making sure that we have this changed to overlap all instead of overlap dynamic. The main thing is that the object types the type of object this will be classed as will no longer be classed as a dynamic object. It's not a huge difference. But because we know that the lantern won't be moving around, we can change this to overlaple, and you'll see that that's changed from dynamic to static, but all of these remain the same. So we're getting the same interaction checks against other classes. So that's the first main quick change here. If we go back into the main map, you'll see that applies to both, so again, just reiterating and reinforcing why it's quite useful to try and think of things as reusable blueprint classes, because we can make this change once and use the benefits of in multiple different places. So the next step of the problem, and this is what I probably should have done, actually. I've mentioned this a few times. We kind of receive problems as programmers, and we are then kind of required to break these down into their subcomponents and consider how we would approach and solve those on a case by case and problem by problem basis. So for this, the main things that we know that we want to do, we want to have the character overlap with the lantern and have that fire the first event. That event will then check if the character is currently in possession or class is being in possession of the torch, and it will do that through the Boolean check. So we'll need to use that casting logic to have this happen, and the final part of the problem is then just to activate the tern. It's only really a three point problem, and we already have that functionality. So if we tackle stage two, we've now done Stage one with the capsule through that capsule. Stage two is just binding to the begin overlap, and again, we've seen this previously, and we want to do some very similar logic here. The only thing that we're really going to change, and we can come back into our lamp here. The only thing that we're really going to change, if we come back into the flame pickup that we had previously, we'll open that from here as well or you could find that through the content drawer, if that's easier in boot camp, blueprints, and we just wanted to open the flame pick up because we have the bulk of that code already here. We want to do the same thing essentially. So on overlap, we want to check that we've had the currently possessed pawn walk into us. We want to check specifically that that pawn is the first person character, and we're going to do something slightly different here. So I'm going to copy just these nodes here. So the equals the branch and the cast. With that copied, we'll just paste that into our lantern class, and we'll do the same thing here by just hooking these up. So if the other actor is equal to, so checking here that the other actor is equal to the currently controlled pawn, and if that currently controlled pawn is specifically the first person character, the main difference here, of course, is we don't want to set whether the torch is held. We want to retrieve that information and check it. So we'll pull from here. We will find the torch held. As I've mentioned before, we can quite often either get or set the value. Getting, will read the information. Setting allows us to change the information. So we want to use the GT version to find out what the state of the torch held currently is. And if we pull from here, we can search for a branch node. And again, that branch node is just allowing us to check whether or not this is true or false, and only if that's true, so only if the character is currently classed as holding the torch, then we will allow that to light the lantern. And this is really the third part of the problem now. And we've already kind of solved this previously up here with turn light on. We already have the functionality to do this. So we can just hop back down here. If true, we can call the turn light on function. And remember that we have this function because this was a super easy thing to check. We could implement this very quickly just to get some cool visual feedback and that kind of early win when we were first looking at blueprints. But now we can throw this into some actual logic and part of a kind of a core system of a really, really simple game. So if we hit compile and save this, this small change is the challenge done. And that will now have the Lanterns actually interacting with the character, checking whether a certain condition has been made. So this is where we get some blueprint communication going on. And then using the functionality that we've already implemented in previous topics. So if we come in, press play, we can have a walk through. We'll come in and grab the torch pick up when that's been picked up. Remember that we've turned the event tick there to change the text to say that we have this as true. So we now have the pick up being tracked correctly through the character class. And then if we come over to the lantern, we can see that we can now light this as expected. So we've turned that on. That's one thing I have noticed is that we can walk through the lamp still. We can fix that really easily. Then we can come over here and just check the same thing. Will happen again. So I think that looks pretty cool. It's very clear that the character is responsible for that change. So a couple of small things to fix here, but that's perfectly fine and very simple to do. So the first main thing I want to change is just making sure that we cannot kind of phase through the lantern. That seems a bit weird. And I think we probably have the same issue, in fact for the door as well, and we'll fix that a little bit later. And then the other thing that of course reminded me of is if we go back into the character class, we now know that the logic is working. So if I open the correct class there, we'll go into the character. We no longer need this eventi. We know that the torch held Boolean is being toggled correctly because we've been able to turn on the lantern. And just to double check, if we walk around the pick up here, and go straight over to the Lanterns, of course, that event is still being fired off. We know that that is still being triggered when we walk through this. But of course, the lantern isn't being switched on because that variable is false. I'll show you something very, very quickly, which is really jumping ahead in the complexity of what we really want to be looking at when blueprinting outside of an actual programming specific course. But if I go back into the lantern class very quickly, I'm going to come into our on component begin overlap here. I'm going to press the F nine shortcut key. This will add a little red.in the top left, and this is called a break point, and this is for programmers when we're looking to debug through things and get a better idea of what's happening in our code. It's just a slightly more complex topic to fully dive into, and this in itself would be several videos worth of useful information, which will be covered, as I've mentioned in previous topics in future courses, more in the programmers path rather than the kind of general getting to know real stuff. But what this will do is when this event is fired, because we have a break point on here, this will pause play and let us step through and see exactly point by point what is happening when this is being processed. So back in play mode, what I need to do is walk out of range a little bit here and then walk back into that range, making sure that we have no debug object selected here, because it was trying to specifically find a certain object in the world that I wasn't overlapping with. So we'll come back in. We'll try this again. And when I walk over this, anything which is having this called will be broken into and stopped as I said. So we've had gameplay momentarily paused. Just in case you're trying to site, just be aware this is I paused. We can't click back into this on move around. That's perfectly fine. That's expected. But what we can do is we can use these buttons up here to step into or through the code as it runs. So I'm just going to click to step into the next node, which is our branch. And we can do some really cool stuff here. We can hover over some of the details. If we hover over this, this will give us some information, and I think because of my recording software is getting a little bit twitchy here, but this gives us some information on what we've overlapped. So the other actor, we can see here is indeed the first person character, and we can also confirm, as well. By hovering over this pin, we can see that the other actor is the first person character, as we've just seen. And the player pawn is also the first person characters we can see here. So, of course, because there's the same thing, and we're checking that these are the same thing, that will also return true. So we can see here the Boolean return is true. So we know that in this branch, that will now go through to the next execution. So I'm going to choose to step over rather than in because this is like a small function. We don't want to go inside of that. We want to go to the next node. So I'm going to press to step over here. And we can do the same thing here. So we can check. We already know that the player pool is specifically the BP underscore first person character, and we're casting here to check that that is indeed the same thing. So, of course, again, we know that this will be a success, so we can step over this. And then the next thing we want to check. Whether or not our character is classed as holding the touch, and we know that we haven't picked it up. Again, just trying to think ahead a little bit, we should expect this to be false if we hover over the value. If we hover over the boolean here, we can see here that the character indeed is not holding the touch. So of course, that means the next thing when we go through this branch, this function will not be cooled. This pin, if we had something hooked up, would be cooled. So you might want to put a print string or something here saying, character not holding touch, something simple like that. This is a really simple overview of how we can use our debug mode and going into break points and stepping through the code of line by line, essentially, or node by node p. If you wanted to go back into play, just remember that we will need to come back on over here, and I'm just going to select this again, press F nine so that we don't break into this every single time. And then if we press the resume button, that will put us back into play mode. And of course, if we go back down, grab our torch, walk one back over, that will not work as expected. So just a really quick overview of some debugging and break points there. Now that we know for sure that this is working, we can go back into the first person class. I'm just going to remove the event tick altogether. We won't need this anymore as we know that that variable, the Bolan here is being updated correctly. Close the first person character again, making sure that I've made a save to all of the changes. And the final thing that I said that we want to do is make sure that our lantern has some collision to block the character. So I think the issue here is just that some of the assets that we've brought in from mega scans didn't have any collisions applied to them. If we go into the lantern and go to our lantern mesh, if we scroll down to the collision section, we can see this has been set to block everything, which is what we want. Remember anything set to block, if we go to the collision presets, It is set to block the pawn. So what we should expect because we know that we're controlling a pawn, and we know that this is set to physically block us. From that information alone, we know that there's probably something gone wrong with the asset and the assets collision. So we can test this if we come back into the main map and use this drop down here where it says lit. We're currently in that lit mode that we've seen before, and we have those different options where we can change this to be unlit, so we're not taking in any lighting or shadows, but we have a really useful one, which is player collision. So anything which would block the player will be showing up in this kind of turquoise bright color over here. We also have visibility collision, so we can see that these will turn different colors because they will block different visibility channels, but not the player channels. We don't have any of that bright coloring, which means that these won't be blocking anything. And we can make some really easy changes. I'm just going to change back to this few access a little bit uncomfortable to look at. But I'm going to go back into our mesh here, and I'm just going to quickly navigate to this. I'm going to grab the lantern mesh and then use the shortcut button here that folder and magnifying glass. That will take us to the content drawer location. Double click to open this. And all I'm going to do is give this a really, really simple collide. So at the moment, if we drop down this collision option, you can see we don't have the option to delete or remove collision. And again, this is just further cementing and reinforcing our assumption that the asset just doesn't have any collision details or properties applied to it. We can use these options here. We can give these different depths of precision for that's DOP depth of precision, or the collision that we have. If we give it a high depth of precision, it will try to more accurately cover the colliding zones of this lantern. If we drop this back down again, because this now does have a collision, we can tell it to remove this. And if we give this something really simple like a box. It will just provide a very rough outline of the bounds of this mesh. And I think in this case, actually, that will be perfectly fine because it will cover the space that the lantern is in and stop the player from walking through it. And that's really all that we need to happen. So with that change, I'm going to press save. So all I've done is I've come in here, given this a box simplified collision, and that's provided a rough shape to stop the player from walking through. So we can close this back down. If we wanted to check this, we can go back into our player collision. We can see that now has this purple colliding bound over any time that we use this mesh in the level. Even if we just drag in a standard mesh by itself, that would now block the player at that point. So going back into the lit view mode here, we can come in and we can press play, and we can just double check that we can now no longer walk through that, so a little bit better there. It just doesn't feel quite as weird of being able to phase through because a lot of the rocks that floor, everything else we expect to work does have the correct collision setup. I think from memory, because these were probably meant to be used as background information, I think there were cliffs or something, I think these also don't have collision. So yeah, we can walk through the door, simple to fix, a very similar process. We'll go through it a little bit later when we get to the door topic. But I think that's the main thing, so we've now solved that problem. We can come in, pick up the torch, light the lanterns, and we can make sure that we don't just phase through and walk through the lanterns. And the final thing is now when both of those have been lit, we want this door to play the animation to open the door. So a little bit more complex, but I'm actually going to give this to you as a second challenge. Similar thing again, break that down into small sub problems. What do you need to do to approach having the lights being tallied up, so checking whether one or more lights have been collected. And then when that happens, how do we relay that to the door, or how do we get the door to read that information and then open when that specific criteria has been met? So trying to think of it that way. I'll give you a bigger problem, which is just open the door. But then trying to think through, what do I need to do to make sure that this is happening? And as a little bonus, just see if you can recreate those steps to make sure that you no longer are able to walk through the door. That's an easy one to fix. But just make sure that we try and make this as feature ready as possible. So this is just another quick challenge. And again, I think we've seen the bulk of the class communication and how we can get things like that working. The main thing for you to figure out at this point is how to start tallying the torches being lit and how to relay that information to the door. 43. 41 - Door Challenge: Okay, so final task, and that is to get the door acting as a door and opening when a certain criteria has been met. That criteria is having both of the lanterns lit at the same time. And only opening at that point. Now, there are a number of different ways that you can go about doing this. As more advanced topics like having the door be a listener. So listening out for certain things to be triggered and then responding when they happen, essentially subscribing to the lanterns being lit. We could do things like kind of a manager pattern where something else is tracking all of the different subtasks that can happen and firing off when certain things are registered as a criteria being hit there as well. In this case, I'm going to show the really simple approach again, just trying to keep things simple and easy to grasp as we get in. So it's just to say that there are different ways to do this. Some may be better than others, we're just going to take a nice, simple approach for now. And again, it's just a contrast to see how you approached it when you took the time to run through the challenge before watching the video, and then you can compare whether your approach was faster, easier, more efficient, or whatever the case may be. The main thing is just to get you thinking through the process, and even if you, as I've mentioned in the previous task, didn't manage to finish it, that's perfectly fine. I just want to get you thinking at this stage and trying to start problem solving. So again, the main issue that we're trying to overcome at this stage is that we want the door to open specifically and only if both of these have been lit. The first thing is we want some way to pass a message from the lanterns to the door. Or vice versa, as I've said, if we went for a listener pattern, which is a little bit more complex than we would be diving into here. Instead, we'll just pass a message directly from the Lantern to the door when something happens. If we open the door class first of all, I'm just going to create a function here, and this is a really nice way actually to introduce functions versus events. So we've already used a couple of different events. They're doing very similar things. If we now create a function in the left hand side, and we'll just call this one Lantern lit. When Lantern lit is called, all we want to do. This is where we're going to be tracking how many of these lanterns have been lit. So that tells us we're going to need an integer, something to start tracking or tallying a value. So if we come over to the variables, we'll create a new variable here. It defaults to Boolean, but we can drop this down and turn this to an integer. Integers are just whole numbers, so one, two, seven, and so on. And I'm just going to call this one Lanterns lit. If we hit compile and make sure that we have lanterns lit selected. You can see that defaults to zero, which is what we want. At the start of the game, no lanterns should have been lit. And then what we want to do is whenever this function is called, we want to add one to this value. So if we lt and then left click and drag in, so Alt is our shortcut to set the value, and then we can control and drag this in. So we're going to get that value. What we want to do is we want to find out what this currently is. So the first time this happens, it will be zero, and we want to say we're going to add one, so we're going to find the ad symbol here, and we're going to add one to the current value of lanterns lit. So a nice simple mass thing, we're going to take what this currently is, which is zero plus one, which would be one. We then want to check if this is hitting our current target, which we know is two, so we're going to make another integer here. So if we press control in D, that will duplicate the value that we have, and we'll just call this one something like total lanterns. With this one still selected, again, we'll hit compile, and this one, I will set manually because we know that we have two as the goal of the total number of lanterns in the level. And all we want to do, just another really simple conditional check here, a conditional check just being our branch that we've used before, if we've hit a certain criteria or condition. And what we want to check is whether the number of lanterns that we've lit is equal to the total number of lanterns that we have in the level. So we're going to control drag the lanterns lit and then control drag the total lanterns. I'm just going to rename this because I realize I had a typo there. And what we want to do is we're going to do our equality sign, so if this is equal to this value here. So if these two are equal, so the number of lanterns lit is equal to total lanterns, we're going to find another branch And then we can plug these in here. And like we've done in the past, if that's false, we won't do anything. We're just not worried at this stage, nothing needs to happen. But if this is true, then we're going to come back in and we're going to call our open door function here or event specifically. We'll come back in here and we'll call our open door event. Okay, so nice and simple. So that's all of the logic that we need inside of our door. We're updating the value. We're checking the new value against our goal because we knew we had that pre defined goal. And then we're cooling the open door function if that criteria is met. So we've actually kind of completed the end of the challenge there. If I was to break that down into the kind of sub problems, I'd probably class that as sub problem three. That's the end thing we need to do. So we're now going to backtrack a little bit, and we need to get our lanterns interacting with the door. Now, this is really nice and simple to do. Back in the lantern class here. I'm just going to create another variable. I've shown you how to create really simple variables so far, integers, Booleans, and things like that. But we can actually create variables of the type of another class. So if we create a variable here, as I said, it defaults to a Boolean, we'll drop this down, and we're going to search for BP underscore cave door. We can see here, we can create an object reference type variable of cave door. Now, this is very, very similar to casting. This gives us all of the information about the other class. So it's kind of skipped this stage here. We don't need to do this anymore, because inside of this variable, we already have. So if I can control drag this into the graph, from this return pin, we already have all of the information about Cave door. So remember, that would be things like we could find out information about the Nordic coastal cliffs. We could find out information about the Lanterns lit. So just as a quick example. We can come in, we can search for Lanns lit, and we can find the information just here from the other class because this is a direct reference of a class type holding all of the information. Within this class just here. So before we start acting upon this, I'm just going to come back over here, selecting the variable that we've just made press F two so that we can rename this, and I'll just call this one cave door RF as is just holding a reference to our cave door. Then after we turn the light on, so if we go to our events just here, when we turn the light on, we can probably add another little bit of logic here. I'm just going to cut, control in x to cut that variable, control in to paste that down here. And what we want to do, when our light has been turned on, we're going to set this Niagara event to be active. We're going to play the sound at the location. And then we'll do one final thing, which is to let the cave door know that the lantern has just been switched on. So remember that we've just created this function called Lantern lit. So from the lantern, we will come in here, and from our cave door reference, we're going to find that lantern lit function, and we'll just call that. We don't need to update the variables manually. We'll let the door handle that side of things and all of the checks and everything like that. We're just going to pass it a message to say one of the lanterns has been lit. That will cool this function, and then the door can do all of the checks that it needs, which are relevant to whether or not it should open. So just make sure that you remember we need to hook this up on the execution pin here, we'll hit compile and save. And that's pretty much everything. There's now one very important final step, super important. I'm actually just going to come in here and I'll press play because this is so common that people overlook this or just forget this sep. I'm going to make a really big deal about this. So if we come in and press play, We can walk over, we can get our flame, so we now know that has been collected. We can walk over one of the lanterns, and it doesn't look as though anything's happened yet, and of course, the door isn't opening. As I mentioned, we have a big problem, so I wasn't expecting that to open. But if we press escape knife to stop playing, we're actually going to be throwing some errors here. It's telling us that during runtime, the class has tried accessing something called cave door ref, which is that thing that we've just created in our lantern class. So in the lantern lit function, inside of the lantern class, is tried accessing cave door, but it was returned with the value of none, meaning that we didn't have a reference. There's nothing there or to cool our function on. There's a really nice way we can visualize this, so back inside of the lantern class, I'm going to use this icon down here, which is an i. And if we turn this on, the Cave door ref, it can pile and save, this has just made that variable public, which means that we can access this in the level through the editor. If we come back in and grab one of our lanterns, we can see that we now have a new thing called Cave door reef that we can see here. And we can only see that because we've made it public here, so again, just to reiterate we'll turn that off, compile and save, and that variable disappears. Okay? So that's just a nice way that we can make this visible outside of the blueprint. Now, what that tells us if we turn this back on. Again, just making the eye visible, making cave door rep visible. You can see here it actually says the value is none. There's nothing selected in this slot. Andre is really useful here because we've told it that we only want this to be a specific class type, and that specific class type is BP underscore Cave door. We can see it's only letting us fill this with one specific actor, and that is the cave door just here. If I select this, if we tell it to select the object in the viewport with that shortcut there, it will select this. We know for certain that the reference that this lantern is holding to the cave door is specifically this big cave door that we've made here. Again, just to show if we select that, this is the reference. Now, what this means, again, step by step going through this. When we call this function, we're going to call a function on Cave door ref, which is this one here, and we're going to call that lantern lit function. It will do the check on the number of lanterns that have been lit. If it's equal to two, then it will open the door. We just want to make sure that we take that same step. And really, all this is doing, it's called setting a reference. We're making sure that we're telling our lantern classes exactly what they need to be communicating with, because at the moment, it just doesn't have anywhere to send that message to cool the lantern lit function. So we're going to do the same thing again. We want to make sure that in the cave door ref, we're going to tell it to send that message to this cave door. And now if we do the same thing, this will actually all work. So we're going to pick up the torch. We'll come on over. We'll light the first one here. So that message has been sent off, but of course, we know that that is currently only adding up to one, and we can come on over to this one. And then as soon as we light that second lantern, we can see that same message has been fired off. It's updated that to discover that two doors have been opened, and then that animation has been played. So hopefully that's all making sense. Some fairly simple logic there. The main thing is just starting to grasp and understand what we're talking about with references and how we pass messages from one class to another. So just to try and put it all into context now. We've seen a couple of different ways that we can do this. So if we go back into the blueprint, this is one type of class communication where we're finding a unspecified kind of unknown entity at run time. Confirming exactly what that entity is, and then communicating, so essentially finding the information from this reference and communicating with that class or the variables within that class this way. Then inside of the lantern, I just wanted to show you a different way, which is taking a very specific hide set reference. So we're filling this manually. We know this before run time. We're specifically telling the lanterns that the door that you need to interact with is this one just here. And we're doing that through the references that we're providing just here. And then with that reference, we can just pass this message to call the lantern lit function and let the cave door do its thing. So that's the challenge, essentially, the core concept of challenge met just there, which is having the multiple classes communicate, having the door track how many times the lanterns have been lit, and then only if that's equal to the total number of lanterns, which we have just here. Then we'll tell it to open the door. Now, there's some other really useful things that we can start looking at. So again, this is currently hard coded, which is useful if you know that you're only ever going to have two lanterns in the world at any one time. But let's say again, we are working with a designer and they decide, actually, you want two on each side, so we're going to have two over here, and then two over here, and we want all four of these lanterns to be filled before the door is opened. This means that we're going to need to come back into the cave door. Come back down here, update this to be four, and then they decide again, actually, two was probably the right number, so you're going back and forth with what other members of the team are wanting. So we've got really useful features and functions that we can use here. We could come in to our event graph, and on begin play. I'm going to show you one quick function call we can make here. And that is to search for and find all actors of a very specific class. So it's called G A actors of class. We'll finally get all actors of class function here. The class that we want to find are the lanterns. So we're going to search for BP underscore lanterns or just lantern. And then we should only have one of those results here. We'll plug this in, and we can see that this function is returning something quite specific here. This little icon is indicating that this pattern of squares is indicating an array, which is essentially a list or a collection of the same type of variable. In this case, it's providing a list of all of the lanterns that it found. So, in this case, it's going to find four different lanterns, and it will have a list at size four. And we can make use of this information. So if we pull from the array pin here, and we can find the length of this, and how many items are in this array. So if we just search length and we'll do a quick print string, so we'll pull from here and do a print string, And as we've done previously, I'm just going to hook this up in here. This is converting our integer, so the number of lanterns that it's found into a string, and again, it's just going to print that to the screen for us. So if I press play, we can see that it's found four lanterns. A really quick test here, is if I delete one of these, we'd expect this to print three lanterns. So it's finding three, and this just helps us automate the process a little bit. And this is one of those things we want to think about if we're working with other people, and then we think they may want to be making changes, we'll just take steps like this. So instead of setting the total number of lanterns manually, we can just drag this in, and we can set this variable to be the result of the length of the total number of lanterns we find. I'm just going to delete the print string, and then we'll move this over here just to tidy things up. So now total number of lanterns will always be equal to however many we have in the level, which means if someone wants to keep coming in, adding and removing them, Then we don't need to worry about this because the cave door, the function is still going to be the same. The lanterns lit function is always going to be checking against how many lanterns have been lit so far against the total number that we have stored. So if we come back in, we'll press play, we can see that we can come over here. If we like just two, so we'll like this one, and then this one, which was the previous goal, the cave door won't open. And then if we like the third one, we'll get that functionality working. So just a nice way to automate some of the logic that we have going. So I just wanted to show that, again, none of these are the right or wrong way. There will be trade offs where people class, this is a somewhat expensive call. This isn't going to cause any performance issues as such, unless you're doing too much of this on begin play. But it's just to show you some of the other tools that you can add to your arsenal to streamline the process of things. So we no longer need to set this value manually. We can let this be updated based on the number of lanterns in the level. So in this case, I'm going to come back in, I'll remove that one as well. We only want the two, some symmetry going on there. We can come back in. We've not needed to change any of the code. And that now works the same way as we wanted. It's nice and simple there. So hopefully, things like that are quite interesting to see and just have a peek into some of the capabilities of blueprinting. And then the final final thing is we have that issue where the cliff doors are not providing any collision. So we can confirm this again in the player collision. We don't have any of that bright neon shading, meaning that this simply doesn't have a lider applied to it. So if we come back into the cave door, grab one of these. Navigate to the content drawer through our shortcut, and we'll double click to open this one. We can see, again, if we drop this down, we'd expect this to not have any option to remove collision, simply means it doesn't have any collision applied. And maybe we can give this one a little bit more of a accurate collision box here. So it's still not precision perfect, but this will do the job that if we press save, it's still not overly expensive. This is one thing to keep in mind is that there are ways to get more accurate collision, if we wanted something as a hero asset, where it needed to be almost vertex precise in where the collision was lining up with the visuals. You can see we've got some big gaps and things here being filled. But as you get that extra complexity with the collision, you will get more of a performance hit, as well. So in this case, I think this will be a perfect trade off. It doesn't need to be incredibly precise. The player won't know that their invisible capsule isn't colliding specifically with each crevice and nook inside of this mess just here. But if we come back in, we can see that big purple Clyide has not been added, so we will indeed be blocked, so if we come in impress play, just run back up here. At the very least, we're unable to walk through the wall just here. So that kind of runs everything off. We now have a game where we're stuck in this small room. We need to come in and pick up the torch. We need to light both of the lanterns before we can do anything. We get the door opening. We get this really cool kind of visual given to us here with this hidden garden and we can come through and have a little walk around and see what's happened. Nothing too fancy, but it's shown us a lot of different features and functionality that we can do with the unreal engine. The next thing is if you wanted to take this further, we'd be adding things like you could potentially find some assets for spikes or an arrow or something like that and have traps as well. Have a look at how you could add a simple health system, that if the player walks on the wrong thing, then they receive damage and set something like a dark trap off or something. We've also got the option. This is super simple to keep things nice and short and condensed. But you could even start playing around with level design concepts. At the moment, everything's all in one place. But if you think about how we set dress this, we might want to move torch over here into a slightly less well lit place. We'll put this on the floor, and then we'll just move this back on over a little bit more into the corner. And if we place the character, we'll get the player start, and we'll just move this back as well. Maybe turn them around, so we'll make them look back out the front to begin with, and again, I'm going to hit end to drop this on the floor. Press play. So we'll start with a nice view into the open sea, but we can see that we're completely stuck here. We can't go anywhere. We can walk into the sea partially at least, but we're pretty much blocked off. From a gameplay perspective, that's going to drive us back into the cave. There's not really anywhere to go. We get something interesting up here. But if we walk up here, which is our main focal point at this stage, there's nothing that we can do. But then we'll notice back in the cave here. We've got this well lit thing. So this is just how we kind of set dress things in a really simple way. What's this flame do? Can I pick that up or interesting? I'll go back to the other point of interest. And then we can see we've got some basic interactions taking us through. So you can start doing some even with a really simple level like this. We've got some basic set dressing. Driving people's kind of focus and attention down certain avenues that we want the player to focus on. Of course, and this is where you could maybe set some traps. So make this a little bit darker, have the flame in a dark corner, but add a pressure plate or something which will trigger something if they go just slightly too far, things like that. So just things to really get you thinking whether you're interested in programming, level design, or whatever it might be, ways to flesh this out. And that will be your final challenge for this introductory course. Just add some extra features. Any other ideas that have come to mind as I've been going through this that we may not have covered. See if you can take any of the concepts and the topics that we've gone through and just make this level urwe. Add some unique features, functionality, or assets to the level, and be sure to show off any extra results and features that you add in the discussion forums. 44. 42 - Project Wrap: Hello, and congratulations on getting to this point. So if you're here, you've completed the entire class at this point, and you have your project wrapped up and ready to go. As I've gone through, I've shown you the complete process to get from an empty project. We've focused on keeping the project tidy and maintainable, sharing out the assets that we're not going to use in two spare projects and keeping just the assets that we wanted. This one, along with a bunch of other useful features, tips, and functions that we've seen that the Unreal engine has to offer. Hopefully, you've taken some extra steps or sidestepped completely with the project that you're making to create something unique and interesting. And this is the point where if you haven't already been sharing things I did mention in the past, that it would be useful to have some update and progress images or videos of the projects as you go. But if you haven't had chance to do that, this is your time to take that final render, the final screenshot, a video, a sequence, whatever you wanted to do, but begin providing the updates and share the progress that you've made with the Unreal engine and the project, and show of what you've been able to create through the process of completing this class. So remember, we can do this in the form of a short video, some screenshots, whatever you think is going to be best to show off what you've created. Especially if you've added some custom functionality, videos may be a nice kind of snippet to see exactly what you've added with the functions provided. Just keeping in mind, as I said, in the previous video on this topic, the project at this point may be upwards of your single digit gigabytes. So we probably won't be showing around the projects, even though that could be quite cool. So we're going to stick with images and videos. So remember to drop that in the discussion, below, submit your project to the skill share pages here. Also, remember we've got that hashtag and you can add me on the social media platforms with the links to the side. And we can get more people into the discussion about the content that was covered in this class and what you've been creating. Get that feedback on your project, and remember to get involved and give other people some useful, constructive criticism, feedback, what they can improve, or especially what they've done well. I'm sure that we have loads of really cool and stunning projects by the end of this, and I'm excited to see what you've all been creating.