Créer des bâtiments et des ressources Vista pour des jeux à l'aide de 3ds Max et Unreal Engine 5

1. Introduction Trailer: My name is Emil Ligas. I am a lead three environment artist, and in this course, I will guide you step by step through the process of creating medium to far distant assets for games, also known as Vista assets. This course has been split up into two parts. In the first part, we will go over on how to create Vista mountains, which you can easily place around aesthetic measures in your scene to make your environment feel larger and complete. We will also go over on how to create billboard trees, which you can place on the mountains for ded realism. In the second part, we will go over on how to create buildings that can be used in both medium to far distance. They will feature tilable materials and realistic parallax interiors using a simplified system based on the system that the unreal metrics demo used. Next to this, we will also include bonus chapters on how to create highly optimized and quick to create buildings using more traditional techniques. In the end, you will be able to create various types of Vista assets for games. For this tutorial, we will be using three EMC for the modeling. However, we will only cover very basic modeling and UVnwrapping so you can easily replicate it in your preferred program. We will also be using Mamas at Tolbag and Photoshop for most of our baking and texture creation, and of course, we will be using unreletent V to set everything up. With a total of 12 plus hours of content, I'm confident that at the end of this course, you will have the skills needed to create various types of VISTA assets. This course is designed for intermediate artists, so it's helpful if you already have some decent knowledge of the software mentioned. This course will also come with outer generated subtitles in English, Chinese, and Spanish. I hope that you will enjoy this course and that it will have a positive impact on your life. 2. 01 Quick Introduction To World Creator: Okay. Welcome to our Vista creation tutorial. So what we're going to do, as you probably have noticed, if you've seen the images and all of the descriptions and everything, and the trailer of this dole is we are basically going to create two types of vistas. One of them is going to be a classic one, mountains, and another one is going to be more urban, which is going to be buildings and skylines and that kind of stuff. So I'm going to nicely split this up into two chapters. We are going to now start with the Mountains chapter, and then we will also have the building chapter. And after that, there will be some additional content where I show you how to actually build some small environments using these assets. So for our mountains, just like with any other project, what I first want to do is I want to go ahead and find some reference. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and just go to the US because the US often has a really wide range of different environments or landscapes, I should call them that we can use. So I like to go ahead and go simply to Google Maps. Make sure to go up here and to set this to Train so that you can Oh, no, sorry, not Train to satellite over here. And what you want to do is if you go to more, make sure that Globe Vw. Yeah, make sure that the globe view is also turned on. Wait, actually, that doesn't matter anymore. I think, but now they updated it, so you can ignore that. Anyway, what will happen is we want to go ahead and we want to find some mountains. Now, if you have specific storytelling, of course, you would go in and find mountains like that. I'm just going to go ahead and just go I don't know, just go to like an area that looks like it has a lot of mountains. Here it looks like. And I do want to, like, try and probably avoid these really old shots. So I'm trying to, like, find some more higher resolution camera shots over here. But once I'm basically happy, with what I found. So I think, over here, this looks quite interesting. What I can do is I can hold control, and then I can switch over to my treaty view over here. So yeah, this kind of stuff, it's, of course, quite low resolution. But in general, this kind of stuff, if you just zoom in, then it will become a little bit higher resolution is quite good for us now probably, like, preview these mountains and then we can get some inspiration from it. We are not going to, of course, exactly create this mountain. So anyway, find your mountain that you like, just to get some good references. And this one is looking quite good. You can see it's not like too sharp. I might want to make mine a little bit sharp. I might want to make mine a little bit more like in this direction, not so much with the cliffs, but just like the sharpness. And for the rest, I quite like the fall of that we have here that goes into these valleys. So that's mostly like the general look that I want to go for. Anyway, now what we're going to do is we are going to use a tool that is called World Creator. You do need to pay for it, but the license is really cheap and World Creator is a really powerful real time tool that allows us to basically create rains very quick and very flexible from scratch. Over here in World Creator, let's just go ahead and quickly row over the UY, although it is quite easy. On the left hand side, we just have new file open, loading or yeah, opening, loading, saving, that kind of stuff. You can also create screenshots and stuff like that. We will only really be using this just to save some files. Over here, we have some rando settings like you can have fast render to basically increase your ndo speed if your PC is a little bit slow. You can turn off real time render, and then you need to press this button every time you want to render a change. You can add well, if we go down here, you can go ahead and you can add some clouds, for example, stuff like that, or you can add some water. So there are some quite cool stuff in here. Now, we don't really need those too much, and the most important one is on the right hand side, which is our scene or our settings. So we have some global settings which are really handy because it means that we can press a sat, and you can see that once we actually created our mountain, because it is non destructive, using this sat, we can basically generate many different types of mountains, which we can all convert into background assets. So we only really need to make one Wy good mountain with willy good textures, and then we can instantly generate multiple of them right away. Down here, what we have is we have our precision. If you set this lower to like one eighth, you can see that your noise and everything and all of your details, they will become much more clear. So that is something where while you are working, you might want to set this a little bit lower. I'm going to set this to like half a meter. And then when you are ready to export your final models, then you can set this to 18, just to get that extra bit of quality. And we can also make this seamless, which is actually pretty cool. Although our mountains will be standalone. If you ever want to make a seamless square mountain range, this is amazing. Like, you can just quickly make it seamless, and then you can copy paste it and it will just like properly transition. Now, below that, we will have our biomes. If we click on this, there is a feature inside of World Creator where you can basically generate different biomes that behave differently. When I say biomes, I mean different section sections of your rain will use different settings. Because we are only creating one mountain, we only need one biome, so I won't look into that. World Creator has some amazing tutorials on their website that I created that shows you everything in detail about, all of these settings and stuff like that. So I recommend looking into that. We have some base settings which we will go over. They are settings like controlling the strength of your terrain. It can control the general noise of your terrain to make it like this really blocky noise. Like, now it feels more like what you can see in Iceland, those type of rocks, all that kind of stuff. You can find in here. We will go ahead and, of course, go over this later on. And you can find also some presets like, for example, I want to have dunes, and then you like tone down my strength, or I want to have a mountain, and now I have like a mountain and stuff like that. So definitely something that we will go into in just a bit. We have a few different layers. These two, we can ignore. This one is for real life data, but it is a paid feature. And for me, for some reason, the feature doesn't even work even when I try to use it. But for the rest, we also over here have a custom paint layer. We won't be using that also. Custom pane layer basically allows us to, like, paint in specific types of shapes or anything like that or flatness inside of our train. And once again, the reason why we won't be using it is because we are wanting to use a procedural method. This one is really important, filters. In filters, we can add a bunch of stuff. So if I just go ahead and change my seat like this, in filters, we can add a bunch of stuff, and you can see that when you zoom over it, you can see that all these things, they basically generate different effects, see, on your train. So this allows us to basically, like this, I can make it, for example, smoother and this kind of stuff allows us to manipulate our twain until we get what we want. If you want to, for example, delete a filter or delete anything in this program, you want to click and hold, and then you can delete it. So that happens also for biomes and anything else. Now, a classic one, for example, would be if we go to a over here, erosion. And here we can see, like, for example, some classic rain erosion that you often see, which already starts to look quite similar to what we are going to need later on. So it's really quick, really cool to do stuff like that. You can also go to simple render if you want to have a slightly better look and stuff like that. We will, of course, go over this in the next chapter. This is just a quick introduction. Now having that done. Over here, we also have our materials, which we will go over later on, which we can use to basically apply textures or plain colors or anything to our terrain, which is going to be a very important thing for our rain specifically, because we are going to bake those textures down so that we can use it as a vista asset rather than having a really complicated landscape material inside of unreal, because we want to go for something quick, easy, and cheap to use since it will be very far in the distance. There are some additional settings. If you go up here to the sun, you have various settings like you can change the direction of your lighting, you can set your sky strength, your sun strength, all of that kind of stuff. You have some camera views like your filter view. You can play around the brightness and contrast to improve that kind of stuff. Some cloud control. If you turn on your clouds, you would have control over just like I don't know, light scattering, over the coverage, that kind of stuff, there's a lot of controls. We don't need clouds, so we can just turn it off. Same we like your water. If you turn on water, you can go ahead and control this. Okay, in this case, we have a mountain, so water would not really work well and also some atmosphere strength and scale and that kind of stuff, which can control those kind of values. Yeah, and some extra about displacement and train. So they're just settings. Now, we won't really need these too much. We, honestly, we're just generating a train. It can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. And finally, we have the safe section in which we will be exporting our hight map and our other assets that we can then go ahead and later on convert into actual models. Okay. So I would say that that is about it for introduction. You have over here, again, like a setting step for some additional settings like your user interface, but we don't really need this kind of stuff. So we can just go ahead and create a brand new scene because I don't want to use whatever I use before. Moving around in your viewport, right click to move around WASD to fly around. You can also zoom in, and you can also go ahead and you can hold Alt Leftmuse button to basically rotate around if you want to. But that is sorry, alter mouse, but I mean. But yeah, FRS movement is very easy inside of World's creator. Let's go ahead and jump into the next chapter where we will go ahead and we will go over now to actually generate our first mountain and I will show you the entire workflow from generating the mountain all the way to actually getting it into real and making it look good. 3. 02 Creating Our First Mountain Part1: Okay. So now that we had a very quick introduction, let's just go ahead and jump right in and start by generating our mountain. So I have my reference over here, which I will use, and for the rest, you can, of course, generate or you can of course look up for more reference images, stuff like that. But often thanks to the filters inside of World Creator, we can get something pretty close to this. Gonna go ahead and move this over to my screen just so that I can look at it easier. And the first thing that we want to do is we want to get started by generating a base shape. Now for this, I'm going to set my position to half a meter because I'm going to slap on a lot of filters and stuff like that. I don't really like to work with really high position because it can really slow down my PC a lot. We just go ahead and click on our biomes. The first thing that we want to do is we want to go to style, and we want to basically already get like our base over here, our base style. So it has, like, a few styles, and all these styles, they come with their own unique settings. So they are not just presets, they are actually controlling some settings. I want to probably go for like a mountain range over here because, as you can see in our reference, I probably want to have like yes, it is like a mountain, but I want to have some sections to the mountain because I want to be able to use it in many different directions. So we got that one, and then what you can do is you can go in and you can start by controlling your scale over here, and that will basically allow us to see how big do we want the mountain range? That sets to, like, I don't know, 1.15. I just need to get a couple of mountains in. The general goal is that we are going to generate this. At the very end, all of the edges. So all of the stuff you see on the edges over here will be completely flat, and it will softly fade out. And then what we will do is we will build basically just like grab mountains from like a top view. So you can imagine it like this. If I look here, I can cut out this mountain and I can cut out these hills, for example, and those cutouts will end up being like actual our actual mountain meshes that we will use in real. So, let's see, we have a valley range over here, which can control the height. I quite like having it a little bit lower like this so that my mountains go into, like, a flat area. Now, next, that's a range the height doesn't really need, and the steepness doesn't seem to do much. I do like to play around with settings. I don't know all of the settings, but I do like to play around it. Over here, the forest range basically allows you to control a little bit more weather than trees grow, and I'm just going to keep it probably the same. And we also have a mountain height where we can control the general height of the mountains, which I guess for this case, yeah, that shouldn't be too bad like this. Now, next this, what we can do is we can go up here. And yeah, by the way, you do have a noise height, which can once again, like, control the overall height of your mountains. But what I'm more interested in is I'm more interested in, like, the seed. And I want to basically grab a seed that I feel like looks visually interesting. And I want to try and get the mountains a bit like this where the mountains are not too close to the edges. So if I would go ahead, for example, use this as like my main mountain, and you can see that it already starts to, like, show some of those, f offs over here. The only thing I don't like is that the mountain just continues on in this area. So I'm just going to basically play around with my seeds. And the nice thing is that later on, we can actually just, like, on, let's say my skill a bit lower maybe. Later on, we can literally when we have our entire mountain ready. Oh, yeah, over here, this might work. When we have our entire mountain ready, we can just use our sat to generate more mountains. That's what I'm trying to say. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set my mountain height. In the end, I don't like the seat after all. Let's see, what is this one? No. So it takes a second to just get like the one you want, but it's quite important. I think this one might be quite nice. So we can, cut it out from over here, and then probably we can cut it out at this point over here, although it would need to be a little bit lower, but it's like an extra look around. And the seats are always different, so it's not like I can just, like, find a seat and you guys can replicate the seats. So yours will look slightly different most likely. To This one might work if we now set the mountain height a little bit more over here. I don't one thing I don't understand why they like the blue stuff so much. It's like it makes it really difficult to just see the thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and set my angle and my vertical angle down a bit to basically try and minimize the amount of lighting like this. And then maybe let's go into my brightness over here. Maybe my exposure. Not so much my exposure. Yeah, my brightness. And Contrast in my camera, just to give it, allow me to preview it a bit easier. Let's go ahead and probably go for this one. I think this one will work fine. I can have a quick look at my mountain range. But let's say that this is something we want. Over here, we also have a noise. This is the actual noise that gets added to your mountain ranges. Without it, it just looks very flat. Noise is cool. We can leave it a bit. Not too strong, maybe like 0.3. However, we are going to go ahead and use filters to basically apply a lot more different noises. In your noise, you can also control every aspect of your noise from big details to small ones. So here you can see, I can remove some of these values. And here you can see that the noise will start to change based upon that. So that's something that I just wanted to show you because it comes back later on. Okay, awesome. Now that we are happy with, like, a base shape, what we can do is we can go ahead and go up here to this little filters button. So the first filter that we would need, because we first of all, want to make our mountain look a little bit nicer. Let's go ahead and maybe try to, like, inflate our mountain a bit to make it feel a bit better. Then we want to go ahead probably use some like water erosion, which will cause some of these, like, will long streaks. And then we can take it from there. Oops. Wong screen, there we go. So I'm going to go to my art filter button. Over here. And then if we go ahead and go to design, no, not design. Let's go to effect. And let's see. So smooth riches. And I like to often just like here, see, you can see that it makes quite a big difference. I like to often play around with it. So here we have like distortion, inflate, normally inflate gives me better effect than this. This looks more like like how you say it from the Grand Canyon and stuff like that. I feel like let's try something else. Let's see. Canyons. Rocky hard. Rocky sharp. Hmm. I like the sharpness, actually. But I'm not sure we should do that now just yet. These layers, they stack, which means that we can actually stack them on top of each other to apply more effects. What I can folks example do is right now, I feel like it's too much of one mountain, so I can go ahead and I can try to get some more of like if we go to hydraulic in our simulation over here, here, see, I can try to use hydraulic to get a bit more of those streaks that you can see over here. And let's say that I add some hydraulics, and then on top of that, I can add another layer which will once again affect it. So these hydraulics they start to give me definitely like those streaks. Oh, there's another interesting mountain here that we can probably capture. It's handy if you can do multiple. So it gives me those interesting streaks. And let's go ahead and go down here. There's a lot of settings in here. Ferocity basically got off like how intense. If I go ahead to set it less, it will become less intense like that. Now, let's say that I'm going to go for quite intense because I'm going to change my shape later on. We have some range strength, which will also control the intensity here. It can make it look like a skeleton. I'm going to actually, you know what? I was happy with the first value that we had. Oh, it doesn't some reason, it lost the undo. Honestly, is there anything else that we really need to do? You have some smoothness controls over here for, like, the top mostly, but it doesn't make too much of a difference. We can go ahead and over here we have an angle offset in which we can also once again, change the angles where everything will show up. Now, most of these settings, honestly, I don't know all of the settings. I just play around with it and you can see the effect. So that's what I would mostly do. But let's say that something like this is starting to look quite interesting. Now, what I want to do is I want to just go ahead and press Art filter again. And, oh, by the way, you can actually I no, maybe I was hoping those would like art some additional larger details by changing this value, but it doesn't. Anyway, art a filter. And let's see. So we got this one now, let's say that we want to go for, like, I can try effect once again, but I probably want to go at for, like, some rocky effects. De noise. Let's go to dry. Let's see. We have a rocky white. No, that doesn't really look like what I want. Rocky hard. Yeah, maybe that if I lower it, but let's Oh, actually, you know, platas does look quite good, sharp and cliffs. Let's try platos. Uh yeah, yeah, I hope I say that correctly. And let's see. I'm just playing around with my noise to see what effects it has. So over here, you can change your general strength. And it actually has very little effect, to be honest. I swear it had like a longer effect. You can also play out with the length. Yeah, to be honest, I don't think you can use this e icon to turn off. Like, it pushes it out a little bit, yes. So I guess it is fine, but it doesn't yet do exactly what I was hoping for. Terrace, drift, simulation. Yeah, and then we have, like, Let's first of all, go to sediment. And sediment basically adds like some pieces at the bottom. So I was hoping that it would add some interest, but I don't think the sediment is great to create this type of where the rain kind of flows into, like, flat areas. That's where sediment is really good for. But basically, what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to get like Oh, for some reason, a real time view doesn't work. Let's try again. I'm just trying to get some type of softness. Let's try dry white, so let's see. M Okay, so that does add some width to it in these areas, which is quite cool. Let's go ahead and set the max count a bit higher to give it some more ridges, because what we need to remember is these are really large mountains. I'm not so much looking at it like this up close. These mountains are more looking at like this up close. Let me say it like that. So of course, over here, these are really smooth. I want to, like, game a fight a bit by giving it more in the direction over here with, like, these ridges. But you don't want to go too small, because then when you look at it from, like, really far away like that, it might not feel Correct. So I do sometimes like to look at it quite far away. So, okay, so let's say that we have something like this. Is there anything else that I let's see, Layer strength. Yeah, just pushes that in a little bit more. Let's set our layer strength to around five ish probably. And now what I want to do is I want to do the most impactful one, which is going to be our erosions. So if we go ahead and ter filter, we want to go ahead and go to our erosion because I don't think, erosion. And then over here, we have a bunch of different erosions that we can do to get like that classic flow effect over here. It makes actually a really big difference. So let's see, rigid flows. This one rocky feels a little bit too smooth probably. I do kind of like it. I just don't like how it looks at the bottom. So what I might want to do is I might want to go for, like, rocky because I like how it looks at the top, and then I might want to use sediment to basically move it down. But first of all, let's just have a quick look at Yeah, like the tin flows are a little bit too strong. And the soft flows rocky soft flows. I think I'm going to go for rocky here or see. Rocky makes actually quite a big difference, especially like at the bottom. So we got this stuff. You can go ahead and you can play around with your values, and you can see here that, it starts to flow quite high. Now, don't worry. We are going to, like, balance this out a little bit more later on, stuff like that. So right now I'm just looking at, like, the tops, mostly, like half of the mountains what I'm looking at. I'm going to go to my strength. Honestly, I'm quite happy with my strength. So let's say something like this. And now, if I go ahead and add my sediment, and I want to go for shall I do hard or mud is also pretty cool. Sometimes soft, and then toning down your lower layers, along with your general strength might work. But it often cuts away from your mountain a little bit too much, see? Which I'm not in this case, not too happy about. So let's go ahead and click and hold to remove it. And rather, let's go ahead for sediment and let's go for hard fill over here. So now we have more like our mountains. And once we've done that, I feel like I still want to get a tiny bit of sharpness back. So we have our heart fill. Let's play out a little bit more with our length to see it doesn't do much. General strength. I don't know. I don't know if I want to use sediment too much. That set this to like maybe like ten. What you also need to what you also need to remember if I just go ahead and type ten here, is that these filters, the more filters you add, of course, the more intense the calculations are for your environment. So you don't want to go too intense with it. Now, I'm still just gonna shy and having this. I feel like I want to add a little bit of sharpness. Oh, 1 second, my strength broke. There we go. Okay, Wi doesn't like me typing, so then I'm just going to go ahead and do this. So you also by the way, some combines in which you can say min or max combine, which will add some different changes, but I don't really need that right now. So let's have a look around. We have over here our rocky version, which just increases the base, that's fine. We have a rocky white, which makes quite a large difference. Yeah, so all of them do make quite a big difference, especially hydraulic over here. So, let's see. Hydraulic. Let's try and play around with your iterations a bit more. I'm just trying to see what kind of Additional effects I can give it. Maybe make a bit softer or I don't think there's much to do. Okay, what I want to do then is I feel like I want to gain a fight a little bit by making the tops a little bit sharper because even though in real life, the tops look really smooth in these areas, you can still see some sharpness and I quite like having that kind of sharpness in here just because it looks a bit better. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to art filter. And then I probably want to use erosion, and I want to use the really sharp one, which is why. No, it's like tin flows. Let's do rigid flows over here. So we can do our rigid flows, and you can see that they have a little fall off. Now, you can go ahead and you can play around with your noise first to see if we can Okay, so we definitely want to keep those up, control some of these values. And then what we can do is we can play around, let's play around maybe like our depth to, like, push it down a bit more. You can have rain strength, which controls how much of the rain has affected. I'm just trying to, like, basically get a bit of a sharper value. Now, these noises, they do not actually mean height most of the time as far as I can remember. Unfortunately, we cannot just use these to fall off their height, but I still like to play around with it just to see if it makes a visual difference. Unfortunately, in this case, it doesn't. You have iterations which you can set lower to basically control how often it actually cuts. Six to ten. And I just go at it and I'm just basically playing around with my values over here until I have something that I'm sort of happy with. Flow smoothness. Stone that down a bit more. And another cool thing that you can do, which I can show you is you can go up here and you can basically control where we want to have this noise. So right now, what I feel like is that I want to have this noise mostly like the top. So I want to probably set my iteration is a little bit higher like 15, and then I can go to my distribution. I can press R distribution. We will mostly go over this inside of our textures, but we can go ahead and press height. And then what I can control is in my height, I can control in what range do I want this effect to happen? So I can go up here and set my range to be only at the high values. Give the second. There we go. Now what you can see is over here, see. You can see that it controls basically my range a bit more. And you can also control a bit more far off over here by these lower values. So now what we can see is like it is sharper at the top. But if I would turn off my height, you can see that it basically removes some of that sharpness from, like, the base. So we got this stuff. That's looking pretty good. I don't know if I want to maybe, like, do something with my sediment to flow this off a little bit better. Let's see. So without width, without width, maybe it's a little bit too intense, still. Let's go ahead and set the iterations to ten without width. Okay, so, yeah, that's already looking quite a bit better. So we got that stuff ready to go. Now, I'm still not happy with my flow. So right now I have my sediment over here. And what if I set my sediment? Oh, actually, my erosion over here. Let's go to my erosion, art distribution, and let's control the height in here a bit more. Basically said it's a little bit lower over here, so that our far off is a little bit softer, like you can see over here. Okay, so we got that. Now, the last thing that I would say is that I feel like the cuts inside of here are a little bit too deep, which is probably going to be in our hydraulic, yes, over here. So let's set our max erosion depth. Oh, is that not the one? Oh, no, yeah, it does do something, but it doesn't do the stuff that I wanted to. In that case, we can go vibration, probably. Yeah, yeah, vibration. Let's set that one a little bit lower to make our cuts a little bit less white over here. Okay. Pretty cool. Now, at this point, let's say that I set my position to 18. And now you can see that we get some more interesting noise and effects and stuff like that. So that is looking quite interesting. The only thing is that I'm not yet happy about my seat. Now, we can go into our global, and in here, we can go ahead and first of all, control a little bit more like our noise. And our general seat and range, let's see. I'm just having a think what I want to do. So here, if you just let it random for a second, it is starting to look quite interesting. I'm just not yet happy about what I got. So remember C 31. And what I can do is I can go to different seats. Now, it will take a while to generate. So I recommend setting this back to, like, 1 meter because all you will need to care about is you just need to care about the general look of it. Also, at this point, let's just go ahead and first of all, because we got a We solid base save and just press Save and then go to your let's do source files. Mountains saves and call this Mountain underscore 01 over here and press Save. Okay. And now let's go ahead and play around a little bit more with my seat until I get something that looks visually interesting. I was playing out a bit more with my noise range to see if I can maybe, like, make it a bit more interesting. Nah, it looks like not much. Okay, in that case, I'm going to mostly rely on my seeds to basically generate, like, something quite interesting and maybe set my scale a little bit bigger over here to set this to round one. Okay, now we get something more what I was looking for. Yeah, now we get more of like the mountain range that I wanted. Okay, so this is quite cool. So 39 and with the scale of round 1.08, Let's set our range a little bit lower so that we bring out a little bit more of the mountain because this is where we are going to cut it off. Okay, so we got something like this. Yeah. That is looking pretty it's really sensitive, moving around for some reason. Visually interesting. I'm going to set my position to 18 just to have a look. Nice. Yeah, that starts to feel a lot more like what we have over here, although then on a slightly smaller scale with slightly more ridges. But, yeah, that's quite cool. Okay, so let's go ahead and go back into our filters. And what I like to do is sets back to 12 for now. Give it a second to generate. It's going into my filters. And then whenever I do new generation, I, of course, do want to have a quick look. And over here in my dry rocky white, I probably want to go ahead and I like what it does at the base, but I probably want to go at an a limitation. So let's add a height, and then I'm going to show you another cool trick. So let's go at an a height limitation, and it's at the height to affect we want it to affect the base, yes, the base. So we want to go ahead and push it down until it's just hitting the tops or not hitting the tops. Like over here. And then what you can do is in your height, you can press FX and you can add some more filter. So let's say that we add a blur and the blur is great to basically give it like a softer transition because we are blurring the transition between the height far off. So that's really good to just, you have full control over how you want to use this. There we go. So now it's a bit sharper. Yeah, we got some more of the sharp ridges, let's see, we do our erosion, which is good. We want to have some of that erosion sediment. Yeah, let's just use that to fill it in. That's fine. And our ridges to make it a bit sharper. That's also good. I would say we would now want to go ahead and add our last one, and our last one, if you go ahead and press T filter, it's technically not necessary because it doesn't work 100%, but you can go to general and add a zero edge filter. And in the zero edge filter, if you go ahead and move all of these values up, what you can see is that it will basically remove our edge. Over here. So let's just go ahead and move these all up. So it removes the edge that the edge is perfectly flat. Then what you can do is you can go ahead and control the smoothness, which basically like our far off effect over here. And then what I like to do in this case is I probably like to go ahead and go to my rules. And let's say that I want to use, I want to use some blood, but I also want to use probably some distortion. And this distortion it doesn't do much in this case. Let's just go ahead and click and D to remove it. And let's see what else. Let's first of all, check if the blur works. I guess because we are on our main biome, it doesn't work. Let's add a new biome new biome. Let's add a new distribution. And let's go for our Yeah, you know what? I'm not sure there is a good one. I might just want, there is some whirly noise over here, I guess, but it just adds additional noise back. You know what? I'm going to do? Sorry about that. I think I'm going to leave it. I think it's not as necessary. I want to maybe, like, give, like, a smoother fall off, but I don't really care about it. What I can do is I can go ahead and I can cut probably around here my mountain range. And then we will have a pretty good thing to look at. So at this point, I would say that we are probably, I think our base mountain over here is ready to go. So I will go ahead and set my precision to one eighth so that we get some nicer precision over here. And now I'm going to save my scene, and in our next chapter, we will go ahead and we will continue on by adding some extra actual colors and textures to this scene. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 4. 03 Creating Our First Mountain Part2: Okay, so we now have a really cool looking mountain range over here. And what we're going to do now is we are just going to go ahead and we are going to work on our materials. Now, for materials, what I often like to do. So if we go to this step over here, we can go to our materials is I like to always start with just plain colors, almost like to create just like the different colors so that I can see where everything is located. I will show you in a bit what I mean with that. And then what I like to do is I switch to actual textures. Because we are going to go ahead and this is a Vista asset, we will actually need to apply real textures that we are later on going to bake down into an actual model. So over here, what we can do is we can go ahead and go to our materials, and then you already have one material, which is your plain color over here. Now, the cold thing is that you can go up here and you can, for example, go to your color. And although I don't really like the color picker, you can go in here. You can, for example, change the color of your train. There's also a texturing over here where you can change it to apply textures, which we will do later, and also gradients where you can change it to apply a specific gradient. For example, what you can do if on a way taxi, this one doesn't have preset. So I will actually not be doing that right now. Anyway, so we have our first color. Now, if I have a look at this, and I also keep an eye out on my things over here on my maps over here, what I can see is we will have some rocks, which we will be using mostly at the top. They are blended in here. We will have sand, we will have dirt, which is just like a slightly different sand. We will have grass. And I think, yeah, that's probably where we will leave it. Now, of course, we also have trees and everything, but those will be placed inside of in reel engine. So knowing that, let's start with the first one over here. So let's go ahead and start probably with like some sand. So we can go to our materials and we can decide where do we want to have the sand. We will mostly be using those distributions that I was talking about, where you can go to your rules, and you can ar the distribution. I want to have my sand mostly sitting near the base, and I also want to go ahead and have it in between here. I don't want to have it like the here we go. I don't want to actually have it on the super flat basis, although I don't care too much about it because we are only going to cut out our rocks. But yeah, we won't want to kind of, like, have a blending with the grass on the basis over here. So I'm going to get started by going to attribution art distribution, sorry. And the first one I quite like is to use a flow. So what I can do at a flow if you give the second, Oh, what happened? Where is my train? There is my train. That was strange. So over here, what I can do is with my flow, you can see right away that we have over here our sand. Now, what I do notice is that let's go ahead and quickly add the new material and drag it down below. Let's try this over here. Okay, so that at least I can see everything a little bit better. So our flow will basically have all of these in between areas over here. And then what we can do with our flow is we can go ahead and play around the value. And this is great to just add some sand in between these cavities. So the sand and everything, it's quite a bit slower, although I need to also set this to like half a meter to make it a little bit faster. There we go. So we can go ahead and set our values a little bit higher. We can go ahead and set the softness. I want that one probably to be, oh, that's really sensitive. Here we go, what's the softness to be a little bit softer. So then now you can see that we really get that flow of all of our sand. And the way that this happens is often that because of the rain rain it's raining, and then the sand will basically slowly accumulate and will slowly fall down like that. So that's great for, like, material number one. Now, as you can see over here, we will have a sand and stuff like that. Another one is I'm probably going to now, first of all, spend my time on some grass. However, I often like to have two different types of sand grass, as I was talking about, which is going to be like this is like the typical sand that you can see between here. And then we also have this more dirty dirt and stuff like that. So the first one, let's go ahead and add another material. Is it working? There we go. Sometimes when I need to switch back and forth between my views, it doesn't register. So these colors, I don't care what the color is. I just care about the information. So I can just go in here and I can just make it again another color, just so you know that. Now, for this one, what I like to do is let's say we go to art distribution, and let's say that I want to start with shall I start with like a height, maybe? Or a slope. Let's try slope because slope you can control basically. Well, based upon the slope, you can control your grass. As I said before, I'm looking at the mountains. Do not look at the base. We personally don't care about that. So we have a slope, and then I can go ahead and play around with my slope range over here. But I definitely want to break it up quite a bit more. So let's see. So we have our slope range over here. Oh, that's actually like this. And we do get a little bit of grass on the tops, which we might want to blend out because I feel like that I want to have sand and stone mostly on the top. So to blend it out, let's just first of all, actually make this look good before we continue with that. So we have this one, then we can go to our slope, and let's say that we go, for example, often like an angle blur, can often work quite well. So let's just go ahead and go angle blur, set the strength a bit. You'll see that they can do some angling. Or what you can do is we can also try a simple flow over here, which can sometimes it's a little bit more heavy, but you can see here it blends into with the flow a little bit better. So let's see. So we get some grass creeping up on the bottom. Let's go in and slope and maybe make it a little bit more intense. Like that. And then what I want to do is I can then go ahead and I can add another height. So if we go to art distribution height. And with this height, if I just go ahead and first of all, select only the tops until that shows, which is up until this point, probably. Maybe the lower ones, we can keep grass. That's up to you. Let's keep the low ones to be a little bit like grass. And then what you want to do is you want to go to your height, and you want to click on the FX and grab an invert. And basically, it will just invert your mask, which means that we will no longer have anything on our height. So we now start to get some cool looking grass on top of here, which is looking quite good. Now the next thing that I want to do is I probably want to go ahead and go for my dirt, and then I will go for my rock. And the dirt and the grass and the sand, they will all be quite close together. So let's cut an art and other material. Let's go ahead and just grab it like another color. Doesn't matter, so green in this case. And for my dirt because I want to have the dirt on here, I probably want to use a curvature or something. Let's go ahead and do curvature and you can see that over here, the curvature it just grabs these dirt pieces, we can tone down the strength to control how much we want to have a blending in between. So I will most likely make white and red are both sand. Blue is going to be grass and then green. I want this to be like a slightly, like, dirty, sandy, grassy looking surface. Wow, that's really bad way of explaining it. But yeah, so let's just go ahead. We have this one. You can play out with, like, a radius if you want to make it a little bit softer or not. I'm just going to go ahead and tone down a softness a little bit more. Oh, it's really sensitive. Uh, let's see, steps. No, I don't care a bit too much about steps. Maybe tone down the intensity a bit more. Yeah, something like that, that should probably help with, like, the grass and stuff like that. Yeah, I think that will work. Um, let's see. Do we maybe need, like, some kind of, like, a flow on here or maybe, no, not edge because edges just attacks the edges. Often, I just like to, like, play around with it. Like, I don't really like angle blur. Yeah, let's just try, like, a fast flow. Okay, so fast flow if I now push this out a bit more. Also, cool thing is you can play out with your intensity. Oh, I guess, in this case, what I need to do is I probably need to go FX and I need to probably invert. No, no, no, no, no, sorry, not invert. Curvature, fast flow. Instead of doing the fast flow here, I might want to go art distribution. Add a flow on top. Set this from multiply probably to art over here. But this flow I don't like this flow. This flow is only sitting in between the edges, and I actually don't want that. So this is actually a bad one. Huh. Let's see. Sun direction. No, that won't do anything. Slope. Maybe slope does something. Probably not. Yeah, here, see slope is also too soft. Yeah, I'm just basically looking around. So if I can't find it here, then I will try once more over here. But it's not too important this one. So I'm just basically trying to look for something to make it visually a little bit more interesting. Maybe some smell flow. I swear these small flows always used to be, like, will more streaky, simple flow. No, I don't think I'm able to get, like, Wy the stuff that I want. From this, to be honest. So I'm just going to leave it. Okay, so I do recommend that you just play around with all of these values to get something that you like. But let's say that we now have our grass over here or our grass, our additional scent over here. So now we just need to have some rock, so we can go ahead and art the material. And this time, we can go ahead and find some rocks. So let's go for, like, purple, for example. And for our rock, there are actually presets that you can sometimes use in here. Where are they? They're not these presets over here. I guess we don't have them right now. Probably because they are only applied when you do like your textures or not. Ah. Strange. Oh, wait, here are the presets. So here you can select a preset. And these presets do also add some additional heresy that you can change things to be like grass and stuff like that. However, I feel like they are not really good, so I'm not going to use those. Let's go to our attribution, and let's go to probably angle. It's try angle to get started with. Oh, God, I already don't like that. I do not like angle. Angle tree. Angle three D. I see it happening a little bit here and there, but it's not Here. I guess I do want to do this, but I need to blend out the height again. So it's just a tricky one to get completely right. So let's see. Let's play out my horizontal angle. Oh, no wait. I don't like this angle. So angle sweet, I forgot that it, of course, allows me to literally control in which angle it is working for. I guess we can use the preset that's literally called rocks, although it's not yet what I want it to be. So there is a preset literally called rocks, as you can see over here that will just, like, almost do the same stuff as what we did with our grass. Now, if you just go ahead and set our roughness threshold, a little bit higher, which controls that flow stuff at the end. And if I set my strength a little bit lower, so we have this. And then what I want to do is I kind of want to try and get a little bit more rocks on like the sides. That's more what I was looking for, also. So Let's triangle again. No, I won't be able to use angle. Sorry about that. Let's instead try cavity, but then we need to blend out our flow from our sand. So let's try cavity. Okay, so yeah, okay, so cavity probably does work a little bit better, although I'm losing my rocks. I'm sorry if you just hit my cat Mio. I didn't realize he was in the room. So anyway, we have our rocks, but then our cavity over here, blends it out. So what we can do is we can set this one to art, which will just art our cavity on top, but, of course, it's way too overwhelming. So let's go ahead and set our threshold. Over here, quite a bit lower. Let's set our concave, yeah, because convex is our curvature, so concave is fine, and let's set our strength quite a lot lower. So what I want to do is I'm trying to basically get the strength strong enough to be on the side over here. Then I want to go ahead and I want to, like, blur the hell out of this. And I can probably just blur it using an angle blur. Yeah, see? Okay, so that's quite interesting. You also have a normal blur. The normal blur only it does like basic blurring, see? So it kind depends what you want to do. The angle blur often like adds an additional variation because it blurs from well, yeah, from an angle. So I can go over here. I can blur it. And it will blur everything, but it will not blur it everywhere. And I can play around with my angle to, of course, control where the blurring will happen. So we got those pieces done now. And now what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and add a height, probably to get started. And I'm going to make this height set already the height to invert over here. And I'm going to make this height to only really happen near the tops. Am I removing it from the rest? Oh, yeah, I'm removing it from the rest because we invert it, so we need to go to the other side. There we go. And then Okay. Just until we reach mostly like the end. Something is something is wrong. Yeah, something is wrong. I am inverting it. But that should not affect things this much. Ca man, where are you? So this is the height. Yes. That's fine. But I want to have the count height. Et's go ahead and delete the invert. And I guess I guess what is happening is because the cavity is art if we just multiply our heights on top now since it is a parent, it's a child node, not a parent node to the cavity. I guess it will keep the cavity. I didn't actually realize that it would do that. And if you want, once again, here the softening, you can go ahead and you can do an angle blur, or you can just go ahead and blur it. I do believe that a normal blur is easier to render. So we can go up here and just like blur the height. Okay. So we got that, and now we want to go ahead and remove. And which one was that we used flow at 0.81, but we are going to, of course, use way more flow. So if we go up here, so now if we just add a flow distribution and set the value to be like, Oh, sorry, it wasn't the value. I think it was the iteration. I forgot which one made it so strong. Like I said, there are so many values. Simply because I don't use this tool super often, since how often are you actually making mountains? I just know the workflows, of course. So let's play around with iteration. No, not evaporation. Range strength. Yeah, I just want to make this a little bit stronger, so's play around with your values because we are just going to once again use this as a mask. So we have our flow over here. Let's add maybe like a quick angle blur to I think this one can actually benefit from a normal blur because angle blur is too intense. So let's add like a normal blur over here. And then we want to go ahead and set this for multiply. Probably. We can also do this. We can also set it to subtract here, and that should cut it out. Or you can, of course, use your invert buttons. So right now, what I see is that it cuts it out in too many areas. So let's see, multiply. And I guess I cannot just do an invert. Oh yeah, yeah, I can do an invert. Just making sure that I don't know, I'm losing a lot of areas over here, but that's probably because of the redness. But I'm losing it also in these areas. So let's just go ahead, go back into our flow and's set the values, maybe a little bit less to hopefully get a bit more of those areas back. I need to always keep in mind that I need to wait for the loading because often the loading takes a second. Yeah, okay. So now we get somewhere a little bit closer. So we got our rocks, which are mostly on the top, and they're also sitting at the sides. We have our dirt in between. I do feel like we are losing some of our greenish dirt. So I might now want to go in here in my greenish dirt and then in our curve, just set the strength up a little bit to basically push through some of those values. And we can also go ahead and also play around with our radius a bit more. Here we go. So you want to push through those values in those areas. So let's have a look. We have our sand, it flows down. We have our base sand, and then we have our rocks that are blending in between the sand. Then we have this green, which is going to be a slightly darker dirt. And then we have over here we have our grass, which is blending with the rest. I feel like it might look really strange right now, but I'm just looking at the data. Feel like that's looking pretty good. So I'm just going to go ahead and save my scene at this point. And if you want, if you really want to preview this properly, it will make everything a lot more slower. So normally, I only do this when exporting. We can go to one eighth, and here you can see that everything flows quite a bit better. Oh, God. You can see how slow it is with rendering. It's really difficult to render. For some reason, it just like messes up with my mouse. So what I do is let's go down here. And that is I don't know. I feel like it must be like an optimization thing because to be honest, I have a really strong PC. So for it to render that badly, that's quite interesting. I'm probably going to go to my flow, and I feel like I want to make it a little bit softer. I can set the softness over here. There we go to make a bit softer. And then probably I also want to go ahead and start like a little bit of like a blur just to Um, I don't know if I like the blur one. Let's try maybe an angle blue. Play around to the angle. Yeah, I think that might work. Okay, cool. We now have these pieces done. I know that that took a while and the first time doing it, of course, it takes a while to blend them together and make sure that they look correct. Now what we're going to do in the next chapter is we are going to replace these with actual textures, and once that is done, then what we can do is we can just go ahead and save everything. But the cool thing about this is that everything is still non destructive. I can literally go in here and I'm not going to do it because I don't want to lose my work. I can play around with the seeds and stuff like that, and it will just generate using the exact same values that we have now set, so the exact same flows, it can simply generate new mountains. So that's pretty cool. Let's go ahead and continue on to next chapter where we will go ahead and apply our actual texture maps to these areas. 5. 04 Creating Our First Mountain Part3: Okay, so what we're going to do now is we are going to turn these colors that we have created into our actual textures so that we can capture a proper base color from our train which we will be using inside of Unreal engine. Now, the first thing that we need for this is, of course, we would need some actual textures. So what I can do is in our source folders and in our mountains, I can go ahead and create a new folder called textures. And in here, we can have a look. Now, one thing is that personally for a vista acid and I know this from experience, so I don't have to show you, is that grass textures look pretty bad just because of the tiling and stuff like that, and because they need to be so small, they will become very noisy. So I definitely dislike using grass textures. So for the grass, I actually like to use plain colors because often from a large distance, you don't really notice those plain colors, and on top of that, we are also going to use a special material inside of InvaligenFV, which will add back a little bit of that grass texture, so we don't really have to worry about it too much. So we have sand. Sorry, let's say sand on the score 01. Then we have another sand. On the score 02. Now, the base sand and the sediment sand, I'm actually going to just make the sediment like a slightly darker color than the base. So yeah, I guess you can call it dirt, the blue sand. Then we have rocks, and we are going to ignore grass. Rock underscore 01. And yes, rock. I'm going to ignore the grass. This one is a different sand or dirt or whatever you want to call it. And this one's going to be one sent. Okay, perfect. So we only really need three textures in this case. Now, having that done, we now need to get the textures. This tutor is not about creating materials because then it would be way too big tutoil and way off topic. So instead, there are many different places where you can actually find free resources. Some of my most favorite places are to go to texts.com in which you can find PBR materials and three scans. These textures, they are depending on the resolution, they are free, or you can get some credits, and those credits are often not very expensive. So for ten bucks, you can get a 1,000 credits, which you can use to for example go in here, and then you can download quite high resolution. So 1,000 credits, and these are only 25, so that's not a lot. Or if you want to go completely free, and we can do that in this tutorial because we end up with unreal, you can use mega scans. Mega Scans is owned by Unreal. So the stuff that you use on mega scans for free, it has to stay within Unreal. You cannot just go ahead and grab some mega scans and then use it in, like, a completely different software, technically, like it would not be copyright proper. So we can, for example, go to Mega Scans, and Mexicans does have a much larger library, and you can go to surfaces, and let's say that we want to have some rock. We can go ahead and we can scroll down, and we probably want to go into stone on a right here, rock over here. And we can see here cliffs, jackets, lava, mossy like we can do quite a few. Now, we probably because this is a really, really large rock, we probably want to go for, like, some cliffs or something like that. And in here, we can just go ahead and find interesting looking rock. You want to go for details that are not too specific. Like this is already too specific. If they are too specific, we will see the tiling way too well, and that won't look very nice. This one might actually work. You just need to go ahead and sign in. Over here, which I just did, and then you can go ahead and you can choose your resolution, and we need four k. If you go eight K, World creator, it will get so slow. So four k is more than enough, especially for Vista, I said. Like I said, you are so far away from these mountains, you don't need a lot of resolution. I will give you a lot of resolution just to give you the option, but technically, we are working in much higher resolutions and later Plcuns than we honestly really need. So you just go ahead and drag this into your folder, right click Extract here. And the only one that we really care about is the normal yeah, I guess the roughness you can also do and the albedo. I'm just going to leave everything in, just in case because I want to show you a little bit about, like, displacement, but that comes a bit later. So but I'm just removing, like, the junk fries. So next, we have a scent and we want to have, two different scents, but we don't want them to be too different. So we have soil and we have sand. So let's have a look at soil first, and I'm just going to scroll down and go here. So here we have, yeah, it looks like it I already used it before. So it is quite a good one. And then you also have some more muddy sand. So I quite like this one, honestly, so I'm just going to go ahead and download this. And let's see. So if we just keep that color in mind, we want to get something like that's what I mean. If you grab a color like this, don't go for, like, red or don't go for, like, super, super yellow sand. Try to go for, like, a this one, although it might look a bit too basic. I don't know. Maybe gravel road might look nice. We can always change it up if we don't like it. So let's do the gravel road over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and drag these files into my folders. Give me 1 second. Here we go. Okay. And once again, I'm just going to get rid of these junk files, which I don't need that all that we have left is the actual files, and that should be it. So another thing that we're going to do, now that we have these, is that inside of World Machine, if you just go ahead and go to your settings over here, World machine, it's really nice that this can autodtect all of our maps in the same folder. The only thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that the end of the naming is the same. So all BIDO correct. And then we have normal, and then we have AO, and then we have displacement is called depth. So I can go in here and call this Oh, no, wait, actually. Why would I do that? I can literally just change the setting once inside of. Here we go. I can literally just go in here and change the setting. I forgot about that. So yeah, that should be fine. And now what we can do is we can go ahead and go to our settings and we can go to our materials. So if I just go ahead and move this to my other screen, let's start with the first one. So I will leave grass until last, but let's start with some sand over here. Oh, looks like I need to wiggle around my view to showcase it. So let's just turn everything off except for the send to get started. And quite easy, all you need to do is go to texturing, because it will just keep all of our settings in mind, go to textures. And then if you just go ahead and click, for example, on Albedo over here, and you then just go ahead and navigate and grab this one sent. Now, one problem. The send that we have right now, it is way too dark, and I almost forgot about that. And this often happens with mega scan acids. They are way too dark. So if we would go ahead and open this up, the reason I'm not going to do it is I will tell you, if we open this up, it will look way too dark on our environment. An annoying thing in World's creator is that when I open it up and I change my texture to be lighter, it does not update. I need to literally change the name of my texture in order to basically update it. But because I don't want to do that, I'm just going to go ahead and go straight into Photoshop and already change these textures a bit. We go inside the photoshop. I do want to mention that at this point, your computer is going to slow down quite a bit when we start working with textures. So for our brightness, can I maybe, I don't think the H scrum scan will do much. But for our brightness over here, we want to go ahead and move it a little bit closer to the end, and I often set this to around 80 or something like that so that the RGB values more are just past half. And that seems to often do the trick inside of World Creator. I know this is often too bright for, for example, game engines, but for some reason, doing it in World Creator, this seems to give me a better brightness. I go up here, make it bright. And worst case, I can always just tone it back down. And I specifically use brightness and not levels because levels also adds contrast. And over here, this one, of course, I want to be a bit darker. The nice thing is that in World Creator, we can use colors to tone down the brightness. So it's easier to make things brighter or darker than to make them brighter. So I can now go ahead and go back in here. I can go to my texturing. I can click on the albedo, and it should load in everything. And now you can see that now we have our first texture on here. Now at this point, we want to go ahead and go to our UV scale. And make this quite a bit smaller, something like this. So it can still stay quite big because, of course, we are looking at it from a really long distance. So we need to keep that in mind. You can go ahead and use the triplanar projection. If you want to have your projection to be world space and not based upon UVs, it's up to you what looks better. You'll see? You can see that often it does look better to do triplanar. And this distribution, what it will do is it will improve the tiling amount. I just cannot pronounce it. But over here, it does change the tiling amount. Well, actually, no, sorry, when it's on, it does not improve the tiling amount. I do. Don't quote me on that. I'm not 100% sure. I do apologize. You also have a displacement. I will show you that one with the rocks because you can actually add actual displacement to your mesh wherever this texture is located. So now that you have this done, that's sos fine. We still have our colors. You can still go to your colors and you can control the darkness of your sand and stuff like that. You can also control the roughness amount by making it more shiny or less shiny. I'm going to set mine around 0.9. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to work on our second color. So our second color over here, the first thing that we need to do is we need to set our color back to white just by clicking on one of the white presets. Be else what will happen is our dirt will also look red. I once again going to go set my roughness to round 0.9. And this one, I was simply going to go ahead and go to textures, select the same dirt again. And then I'm just going to go ahead and so we did a UV scale of, let's say, round ten, so I can go in here. Triplanar UV scale around like ten. And that's about it. Okay. Now what I'm going to do with this one is I'm going to go into my color and make it a bit darker. See? There we go. So that art's already like a big change, and we don't actually need to do any special type of texturing or art additional textures. So let's do a darkening like this. It's looking quite good. Now next we have this is our grass. Our grass, as I said before, I actually want to go ahead and use plain colors for this. Going to grab my color, and I'm going to make this color to be like yeah, this is why when I don't like the color picker. This color picker, you can actually go to like an image with grass. You can hold Control and click to grab your color. However, for me, it's broken. So I can't actually do it. But you can see that over here, if I just go ahead and, like, play around even just like a simple plain color like this, can already give me from a distance, quite a good effect. If I go ahead and grab this one, and let's say that I go for something like this, a color like this. Next, what you can do is you can control right click On? What was the shortcut? I forgot shortcut. No. Alt Okay, d double, right click. It's a bit of a weird shortcut. Double right click allows us to basically duplicate our grass over here so that we keep the same settings. And now what I maybe want to do with this one is I might want to, like, go ahead and add like some kind of, like, noise or something like that. So the first thing I need to do to actually be able to see that noise is to go into my color, and let's say that I make the color like a little bit darker like this and we can balance it out later on. And next what we can do is we can go to our distribution over here. If you sometimes see me moving, strange, this is because my mouse logs sometimes into the view. Like I said, for some reason, the program is a little bit buggy on my PC. But basically, we want to go to art distribution, and let's like a pearl in noise. And then with this pearl in noise, if we just go ahead and one sec. I need to click on my biome and then add it. Because if I click on my height and add it, it will add it as a child object of the height, and I don't want that. So we have my pearl noise. I'm just going to go ahead and set this to subtract. Go to set the scale down so that until we get to see a little bit of noisy pattern that we see over here. And you can also play around with your strength to make it more or less. And then what you want to do is if you just go into the pearl noise and add something to distort it, like distortion, for example. And here, what you can see is this distortion is just kind of like messes things up a little bit. And we can go ahead and we can set our settings here, we can, like, make sure that our distortion is not too big, maybe set the scale to be like quite large or small, something like that. So that from a distance, it just feels like there are some slight differences. Now, of course, on a really large scale, this will look really tilable, but we don't care about that because we are looking at it from the mountains. We are not looking at it from the flatlands because we are not creating any flatlands. So something like this will work quite well, I think. Yeah, I think my dirt is still I feel like maybe I want to go back into my dirt and make the color a little bit more like yellow is your orange. Here we go. Maybe they make a little bit lighter. There we go. I think that looks a little bit better. So we got our base grass over here done, and we will improve this grass using a material inside of unwelEengine. So let's go ahead and save sin. Now the next one is this one. And this one goes hand in hand with this one. This one was our additional dirt. And this one was our rocks. Yeah, that looks about No, wait, or is this one. Huh. I kind of forgot, so we have our, this must be our rocks, right, because it's mostly at, like, the top and the sides. But then, again, this one feels like more like it would be rocks than the other one, to be very honest, because the rocks they are way too overpowering. But then again, they also at the top. I guess it's up to you. So to be honest, I kind of forgot which one it was, but let's just go ahead and let's decide that for now, the top one is rocks, and this one over here is going to be additional dirt. So what I can do is I can grab our green, set the color back to white, click on textures. And this time, I want to go ahead and grab our sand 02, open that one up, which as you can see, oh, that's really intense. Let's try try playing a projection. Ah, in this case, triplinPjection. No, no, wait. It does look better. Then let's go ahead and just set our UV scale. As I said before, noisy pieces don't often look very well. I guess, I guess it's okay from a distance. So we have this one, which is more like a third and if we go ahead and set our roughness to be even lower, let's say 0.8. And now let's go ahead and go into our color, and let's try. Yeah, let's go to like an orange color. Let's make it a little bit darker. Not too orangy. I do want to have it like a little bit of like a sandy dunes like this. I think something like that should probably work. And then we would have our rock on top. And for our rock, we can once again set the color to white, set our roughness to like around 0.9, textures, click on it, and this time we can grab our rock over here, which is this one. Planar projection. Let's go ahead and play around with our scale a little bit more. And I feel like, yeah, I'm not sure if this is the rock that I want. I think I want to swap them around to be very honest. Because this just doesn't feel right to have this much rock. It's up to you. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make my hills probably, like, a little bit more sandy. Yeah, and then have the rock in there. So what I will do is I will go ahead and unfortunately, you cannot just swap these around because of the settings. So instead, I'm just going to click on here and I'm going to grab rock. Then I click on this one. And I'm going to grab my centu and do it that way. So first of all, let's just quickly go ahead and go to our rock and I want to show you something. Oh, it's really sorry, scrollel is annoying. I don't like the controls in the software, but okay. So here we have, for example, our rock, and we can make it a little bit larger and more impressive. Now, the cool thing is that you can turn on displacement, and you can actually add jumtree displacement where your rocks are like this, which can add an extra bit. Now, this makes your sea quite a bit slower. But, I mean, it does add like some extra cool effects over here. So that is up to you. I will turn this off for now just to make my scene a little bit faster. And especially when we go to like 18, your scene will be really slow, so only use that when rendering. And now we will have our scent sitting on top of it over here. And let's have a look. Okay, so if the sand is on top, that is looking ready like a lot better. I'm going to make my rock a little bit darker, probably. So this is right now is the sand. So let's just, tone this down a bit. Oh, sorry, this is the rock, but it still had the sand colors. And now if we go to our rock color, we can go ahead and move this more in direction of the sand color like that. Okay. Let's go ahead and make our sand a little bit shinier and our rock in our roughness, a little bit duller by setting it to 0.9. Yeah, you know what I quite like that. Imagine this with trees and stuff like that. I don't know if I maybe want to, like, add some additional grass in some areas. That is something that we can also work with. So for now, let's go ahead and save Asin. If I now go into my rock and see if adding the displacement, yeah, that adds like an interesting change. And just to really see what it looks like, what I want to do is let's find a nice angle and set our position to one eighth and give the second to render. And now you can see that over here, we definitely have a more interesting position and stuff like that. So it is starting to look quite cool. I do feel like maybe, like, the graininess that we have over here might be a little bit too strong. But then again, it won't look this strong inside of real. It's also because of the lighting and stuff like that. So that's something you want to keep in mind. Now, in general, you can see that my scene is quite a bit slower. In general, that's looking pretty good. Let's twy one fourth. Oh, God. I think I backed again. Yeah, my scene is bugged again. 1 second. Let me just go to half. Okay, it's back. I think maybe we want to go ahead and render everything out at like one fourth to just bring in a little bit more of those smooth details. Sometimes Wi sharp details are not always the best. So we have this stuff over here. Now, let's go to our base grass, and let's go into our height, and let's see if we can maybe Include? Oh, that's the one way the grass a little bit more in, like, where we have our rocks. Okay, so over here, so now the grass is a little bit more included in some of these areas on the side. And now if I just go ahead and go to maybe like my single flow, you know, my strength is already set like super set my slope range a bit higher maybe? Yeah, there we go. So not too high, something like that. And what I'm going to do is I'm probably going to move this grass below my dirt. Oh, wait, I can do that. Although it does look quite cool. But if I do that, the dirt will overhear. Instead, what I'm going to do, then it's probably better. To have this one, and then we have a flow. If we then go ahead and add another distribution and like a really soft flow and said to be subtract over here and tone down the value way down just to avoid the grass in the deep ends of all of our sand. And then we can go ahead and play around with the height values a bit more. And let's play around a little bit more like our slope. Here, see? I'm just trying to introduce a little bit more grass in some of the tops areas over here. Okay, you know what? I think this is pretty good. You can go ahead and you can refine it more and more if you want, but by now, we have already spent 1 hour on just creating the train, and I think that we got something pretty cool looking. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and save my scene. And in our next chapter, we will go ahead and we will start with the exporting process where we will export all of our textures and all of our height maps and stuff like that. And then we can start turning this into an actual geometry model. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 6. 05 Exporting Our Mountain: Okay, so let's go ahead and get started by exporting our terrain over here. So, this isn't too difficult. The only annoying thing is that I personally, wow, it's really sensitive, Aon. I personally have quite a few bugs within the program for some reason. So let's just see how it goes. First of all, what I like to do is I like to go up here and we have our mountains and texts. And let's go ahead and call one like let's call it raw or something like that, just to have like our raw textures in here. Circle, let me just do this. And then I can copy this over. Okay. And now, in order to save our maps, we want to go up here to the save button. 1 second, I once again have that bug where it doesn't respond, and we want to go ahead and press art to our export presets. And we want to go ahead and want to export our height map. A normal map, a split map, and a column map. I guess I guess you can use a roughness map if you want. Yeah, just for fun. Let's also do a roughness map. I actually normally don't do that, but I do realize that I can show you how to use that in unreal. The reason I normally don't do it is because the roughness map has such little response in unreal because it is so far away from the camera that it often doesn't really matter. But we can just export it. Now, next to this, there was also an option to export your mesh over here. Mesh Export. You can click on it, so you click on Mesh and then over here. So this way, you can actually export it as an OBJ. Unfortunately, in my case, for some reason, this one literally crashes world creator for me. It always did this. I don't know why. So unfortunately, what I'm going to do is I'm not going to include that one. Instead, what I will do is I will simply use the height map. So here you can see the height map. So let's have a look. For my height map, I want to export my hi PAP height map, sorry, as a 16 bit PNG over here that is often more than enough for what I need to keep it simple. My norm map, I want to also export as PNG. Yeah, we can just get away with eight bits. You can do 16 bits if you want, but rarely nor maps need above eight bits. Only if they have very specific layering details, would they need a little bit more of a bit rate. So we have that one done. We don't really need anything else. No. Our map, our splat map is basically the map that has, like, all of the different colors in here. So we can also go for pinchy. Right now, you don't see anything, but a splat map is basically the map that controls where all of our materials are. So where there is grass, it will have one color, where there is, like, I don't know, rock, it will have another color and stuff like that. So yes, it should be fine. Only thing is with the splat map, it's RGBA. So there are four inputs. However, we have more texture, so we'll see how it goes. Color map over here, this is our actual texture, which is looking good and our roughness map, PNG, that's also looking fine. Okay, awesome. So when you have all of these maps exported, there's two things that you can do. One of them for me, often is Willy buggy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to save my scene first. And that is to export all of them at the same time. I often go up here to select folder, and I basically paste in the raw folder that we have created. And then I basically press Export. If this does not work, and I will try, sometimes it just like freezes. If this does not work, you can also go, I believe was it this one. Oh, no, no, sorry, this one. You're going to go up here, and then you can export individual maps using this save button here. But let's just go ahead and try it out, shall we? So first of all, what I want to do is right now my height map, it is like 2048. I want to go for eight K maps, actually. I'm going to go and set this back to 18 over here to go for nice high resolution and give the second a load. And now what you can see is that now it is exporting at an eight K resolution. So that is what is controlling the resolution mostly. Now, having that done, I'm going to now go ahead and Okay, yeah it's still working. I'm now going to simply press Exportl and we will see if it works. So it looks like that it has managed to export the height map, although it is setting at zero KB. So what I will do is I will pass the video because it might take quite a while to export this. It can take a few minutes. And depending on how things go, I will let you know. So it looks like it is able to export the height map. Yeah, let's just pass the video because here you can see that one map is like 85 Bs, and we'll see if it properly has been able to export everything, although, oh, it looks like it already crashed. Yeah, see, here it was only able to export the height map and not the rest. Okay, fair enough. In that case, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to my normal press Save and just call this normal map. And yeah, honestly, I don't really care too much about the names because we are not going to use this one anyway. So, well, we are going to use it, but we are going to rebake it. So let's just export it like this. So what I will do is I will export and pass every single time until everything has been exported. Okay. So that one has been exported. Now our splat map, I am quite curious about the splat map. I'm expecting to see, like, here layer one, two, three, four, five. Okay, so we'll see how it goes with, like, a splat map. Yeah, so it should stay on layers. And I'll see if it works good enough so that I can translate it inside of unreal engine. So Splat map, let's go ahead and export that one. Okay, so that one also has worked. Our color map, one of the most important ones. Let's go ahead and save that one. Okay. And the last one is our roughness map over here. Let's go ahead and save that. And now what we can do is if we just go ahead and open up the splat map inside a Photoshop, yeah, see, here, this is what I was worried about the splat map, it has some information in it, but not the correct information. So let's just go ahead and go back over here, and into our splat map, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all, turn off transparency. I'm going to export this just as like a taga file because sometimes those channels or actually not taga sorry, TIF over here. Those channels often seem to work a bit better. And the tricky thing is right now, so our layers are present over here. But I might need to, like, export them as double layers, which is what I'm a little bit worried about. So it has exported now. Let's have a look inside the photoshop and let's track ar tif. Okay, so yeah, that looks a little bit more logical. Okay, so let's see which ones it managed to capture, because I don't the splat map is not super vital for specific maps. Reason is we only need sand, grass, and rock. So what do I have over here? So, this one is definitely like the grass. Okay, that's fine. This one looks like the rock, correct? Yeah, that must be like the rock. And this one is probably like the sand. So I think that we can get away with this. I think this is already enough for what we need specifically. The reason is because a splat map for a vista is not as important because we are only using it to basically enhance some of our textures a little bit so that they look slightly nicer up close. But we rely mostly on our base color. So that's why I wasn't too worried about that. But yeah, in general, so it managed to export these layers over here. I guess another thing that you could do, although I have not tried it, is you can go up here. Go into your materials and basically turn off some of these materials so that they do not interfere with your splat map. So I don't know if this one is like, so you can, turn off one of the grass, one of the O, maybe you want to actually keep this one on. Yeah, you can turn off, like, one of the grass, one of the dirt and stuff like that. And that way, you can also try and capture your splat map. However, honestly, it's not needed for what we do. I'm trying to keep this way more simplified because we are simply not creating an actual train right now. We are just creating a model. But anyway, so our spat map is now looking correct. Let's just go ahead and delete the PNG one. And now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can open up. In my case, I want to use MmsetTolbg and we can start turning this into actual geometry, and then we can start baking it. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 7. 06 Baking Our Mountain Mesh: Okay, so now that we have created our train, we can now move on to some other softwares, which I'm personally quite happy about because they are a little bit more stable for me to use, so we won't have as many arrows and workarounds and stuff like that. Here we are inside of marmoset. Now, the first thing we need in order to basically use our height map on our in Marmoset in order to, like, bake our actual mesh is we need a plane. You can just do this in any other three software. I'm just going to use trees Max. I'm just going to create a simple plane. I'm going to make it it's not about scale, so I can just make it like 100 by 100 centimeters. I like to set it exactly in the center. And then what I like to do is I like to give quite a bit of geometry. So let's say 100 by 100 over here. And that's it. I can just go ahead and I will, of course, supply this plane for you guys. So export and nice thing is a plane is already Uvnmapped perfectly in like a square, which is what we want. So I can just go ahead and I can export this stuff over here. Plane underscore HP, for example, and it doesn't really matter. You can just export it as like an FBX or an OBJ. All we need is we need to get this plane inside of Momoset. Here we go. Okay. Awesome. So we got this plane over here. In Momoset I just like to always set my sky to like a plain color over here so that I can preview things a bit better. And that's a really weird sky. Oh, they changed it looks like they changed the default sky in the newest updates, but again, so we have a plane over here. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to create a new material and call this train underscore HP, and just drag it onto the plane. Then the second thing that you want to do is we want to go to the plane, click on the sub child over here of the plane, and you want to turn on subdivide, and you want to give it quite a bit of geometry. I'm going to give it like five subdivisions until I'm at 30 million or okay, yeah, 20 million should be fine. Like 20 million triangles. I do hope that you have a slightly strong PC for this, else, it might be a little bit slow. The next thing that we're going to do is we are going to go over here to material, set the displacement to be height. Over here. Now, with our maps over here, we want to just drag them into the correct slots. So we have our height map over here. Whenever we drag in a height map, it's a little bit difficult to see, but we will go over it a bit later. First of all, let's also drag in a norm map, and now we can see everything a little bit better. And now with our norm map, we can play around to the scale of our height, and you want to kind of get the correct scaling that we used to have before. But this is also giving you flexibility to play around to the scale. I think that's a pretty good looking scale. So 0.125. We have our albedo map over here, which will right away, give it some color, and we have our roughness map over here. Okay. So of course, it doesn't feel Ooh, wow, our roughness, we definitely need to edit a little bit because that is way too shiny. But I'm still going to bake it. It's just like it's really shiny. So, we have this, and at this point, it is looking fine because we don't need to use our splat map. If you want, I'm not going to go into how to do it, but if you want, you can add a directional light. If you want to quickly preview your scene over here. Maybe make it feel a bit nicer. Also just play around with, like, your shape to give it like a softer shadow. And I really dislike the sky, so I'm just going to quickly change the sky. It's not needed. I just like to look at something that's, like, a little bit more decent. But since the latest update, some stuff has changed inside of Momset. Okay, that's honestly, that's fine. Okay, so we now have this mesh, which is going to be our hi polymsh. The next thing that we need to do is we need to have a low polymsh that we can bake all of these hi pole details into a lower resolution because even though we have nanite in unreal, I want to show you the general technique. I don't want to show you how importing like 20 million polygons. That's just not necessary. And also, what I also want to do is I want to cut things up a little bit. So this is quite easy. All we will need to do is we need to grab our plane HP. And I'm just going to navigate to my Exports folder over here. And then you want to go to File and Export. Oh, hey, they changed this. Oh, they completely changed this window. This is the first I've seen because I just updated it before the tutorial because I expected that there wouldn't be that many changes. But it looks like it's pretty straightforward. So exports. Call it Train underscore HP OBJ and I don't need to export my materials, my model, and I can just go ahead and press Export. And that should give me the option. If it crashes, lower down your subdivision levels. That's pretty much it. If it crashes, you can just lower it down a bit, and it won't make that big of a difference because we are going to lower it down anyway. But if it works, then it should be totally fine. So what I see over here is that it's taking a little bit too long. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cancel this, and it's probably taking no, does it take a while or not? To cancel. I'll just pass the video until it's done canceling. Oh, okay. So to make it all easier to handle, we can just go to plane temporarily, we can set this to like four segments. Whenever you do that, it's reset, so you just need to turn on and off your displacement, see? And then it goes back. I don't know why it does that. But now we are only at 5 million, and that should be way easier to export. So once again, we can just go ahead and press Export, and now it should be able to export it quite a bit easier. Now, what I'm going to do is I am going to use ZBrush in order to basically optimize this and also to Van bit. So while this is exporting, let me just quickly load up ZBrush. Here we go. So it is done exporting. Make sure they're safer scene. And now inside a C brush, I know that my UI looks very different. If you want, I can switch to the one that you guys probably have like this one over here. And I like to always go to document and set my range a bit lower and press Zoom to basically zoom in my Canvas. And all we need to do is we just need to go ahead and import. And we want to import our Train HP over here. So in zebras, we are going to decide the shape of a mountain, and we are also going to optimize it. So this is actually quite exciting. So this is what I have been talking about non stop about not caring about the grass and stuff like that. It is because over here, I'm going to select out the mountain that I want to have. And I'm just having a look, so I will probably go, I don't know, we can probably keep this site over here. So what if I go like, from here? Next to this. And because I'm only making mountains, I want to cut it off quite close to the mountain. Let's say that I cut it here. Let's do here, and then I go around the back, and then over here, I will just cut it like this. I think that's a pretty good idea. And then what we are going to do later on is we are just going to jump in, like, any tree software, and we are just going to, like, improve it a little bit more. So having that done, if you hold control, you can go to your masking tool. And then if you click on your brush, while holding control, we want to have a mask lesso it's a bit tricky sometimes to see it from the top. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and let's oh, let's see. We were going to go there, right? So I'm just going to go up here. And I try to give it, like, a decent looking cut. So here you can see that I'm just going to go, like, close to my mountains. And then if I'm not sure, I can just finish my selection, okay? And then I can see that now I want to go down here and here. And let's say that I also want to now finish this selection just by selecting it like that. And then I'm just going to go ahead and I am also going to cut it off here. So let's go down here. Now, let's undo that. I did not like Osak. I did not like how much I cut it off. Let's do this. And now we are going to cut it off here. Then we want to go down here and probably just want to, like, probably leave it somewhere along this line. Yeah, that looks quite nice. If you want, you can also cut that little dimple down here. Because it's not really part of the mountain. So if you want, we can also get rid of that. And maybe you also want to get rid of this part over here. Okay, cool. So when you have decided on the shape of your mountain that you want to use, then what you can do is you can go to poly groups and you can press group mast over here. Then hold Control and just drag in empty space. And now if you hold Control Shift and click on your mountain, like this, now you can see that this will be our mountain. So you can see like now it's like a classic standalone Vista mountain type thing. At this point, we just want to go to geometry. Then we want to go to our modified topology and want to press delete hidden, which will just get rid of the hidden mesh, and there we go. Okay, cool. So at this point, it is up to you to basically decide how much of the shape you want to how much of the shape you want to optimize. Right now we have around 8,900 million points that does not mean polygons, but it is often quite close. And you can see that we have this really dense polygonal mesh. What we are going to do is because I want to show you how to create generic vista assets that you can also use in Unity or any other software that doesn't use Nanite, I want to go ahead and I want to optimize the bit. Now, this might be a bit tricky to explain. I am going to optimize it. However, I am going to keep it slightly higher poly because I will be using Nanite than I would, if I'm making this for, for example, Unity or another game engine. The only difference is literally how much we decide to automatically optimize it. So I want to probably go around 50 K polys. But if I would be making this for, for example, Unity or something, I would be at around 20,000 or something. So I can go pre process current over here in our decimation master. And I do apologize if this went a bit fast because I was distracted. Basically, if you go to Ziplugin, you can drag this window over here, and you want to go to decimation Master. You are pressing pre process current to basically index the calculations of the mesh so that it can optimize it. We are now optimizing it so that only 20% of our current active Polycold is left. So I can press decimate current. And what I like to personally do is I like to keep pressing preprocess current. Like to keep decimating it until I'm happy with it so that I can see the actual changes. So what I want to do is I want to go pretty close up and I want to try and keep the shape of my mountain intact. So if I press decimate, you can see that now here, 35, you can see that now it starts to lose the shape. If I would do it again, you can see that now we are at 7,000. Now, 7,000 might seem very extreme. However, remember that we are having a normal map that will bring in all of our details again. So from a large distance like this, you won't really notice. However, because I like to make something that you can also look at a little bit more close up for a tutorial, at least, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to Indo this once more, instead of 20%, I'm going to set this to 35. Preprocess. Decimate. 62 million. Let's preprocess once more. And this time, set it to like 80 or something. 50,000. Okay, that's looking good. Now that we've done this, right now, whenever you use your decimation master, you lose all of your UVs. So what you want to do is you want to go ahead and you want to go into your UV master tool, which is a little bit down. And I like to just often do a simple out of unwrap. I just press nmap, and that's it. It's now already done. Oh, no, wait, it was still loading. Now it is done. And because it is one large plane, it will have still kept all of the out of unwrap in this one plane, which means that there are no seams, well, on the outside, but we don't care about the outside. So this mesh is now already done. You can press check seams and then you can see that heres. The only seams are around the edges. And with the UV master, you don't often really need to worry about any stretching. It's really good at keeping it at a good value. So having that done, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to already export my mesh. So I'm already done inside of brush. You can go ahead and press Export and call this Train underscore LP and save it. Now, the first thing we are going to do now is we are going to bake it. However, I also already want to just import it inside of Tres Max. But you can use M or whatever. The tools I'm using are literally the tools that are in every single tree and modeling software. Even the naming is correct, and else I will mention you naming. So over here, if we just go at an import, A ran here. You don't yet want to change anything, but here you can see that, yes, it does feel like quite hipoly, but this is where Nanite would come in, in my case. I can go to my Unwrap UVW modifier, or you can just open up your UVs, basically. Whatever tool you're using, just open up your UVs, and then you can check, and you can see that over here. It has nicely stretched out our entire island, so that's looking good. Awesome. So what are we going to do now? We are now going to get started with the baking process. We want to go at and we want to go back inside of marmoset. The first thing that I like to do is I like to quickly go into Photoshop, and I like to edit my roughness. Because for some reason, the roughness is a little bit off. I think where it is off is that these shapes of a roughness, when something is white, it looks dull, when something is dark, it looks shiny, and for some reason, they decided to make the rock shiny, which I don't like. So I'm going to just go to edit adjustments and levels. And then what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to push up my black slider to the top to make everything quite a bit lighter. And then if I simply press Control S, and because it's eight K, it might take a second to actually save the mesh. So, um, 90%. There we go. Now if we switch back to Mm set, it will update, see? That's looking a lot more logical. Okay, awesome. What we're going to do now is we're going to get started with our baking. So for our baking, all we need to do is we just need to go up here and press this little bread icon, and then we get a new baker. In our baker, we want to drag the HP in high and just turn on this little I icon to see it again. And we want to import our low poly terrain P over here. So there's a low poly in low. Because, of course, it's exactly the same position because we didn't change any positions, it can bake really, really nicely. Next, what we need to do is we need to click on Low set out the bake to none. And over here you have your cage and your cage basically dictates from which point it will start baking. If your cage is smaller than the details on your hypol, it will cause baking error. So always move it a little bit above so that your entire hypol is covered. Because our mesh is so similar to our hi ply, this is no problem at all because, yeah, it's just so similar that we don't need to do a lot. At this point, we are ready to set up all of our baking stuff. So if we go to textures, make a folder called bakes. Mountain on the score. 01, I'm doing this because I will most likely capture a few more mountains later on. Yeah, if you want, you can also capture this one, but I'm just going to stick to the main one. I'm going, of course, in my output set this to be Mountain 01. Call it mountain on score 01, and I'm just going to go for P&G formats. I don't really like PSD because it is annoying to preview. So PNG format, I like to set my samples to 16, which will give us slightly crisper results, and I like to export this at eight K resolution. Next, we need to figure out what we need. We need a normal map, Let's turn off all of the other stuff. We we don't really need a height map in this case, because we already have a height. Oh, sorry, you know, we don't need a height map because we already have a mesh. We need a amultclusion is always handy, but the most important one is that we want to export the albedo, which is our color and the export and the roughness, which is our roughness. Funny enough, this technique you can do with any other asset. If you ever have an asset where you need to bake the textures from one asset onto another asset that is very similar. You can always use this technique. As long as your hipoly has a material with stuff on it, you can simply bake whatever is in deep material onto another asset. See this, for example, as that you have a highly optimized mesh. You you grab a A model. I've had to do this more often. You grab a A model that is high resolution, and you need to turn it into a mobile asset for mobile and VR. So you optimize the entire asset, you re unwrap it. And then what you can do is you can simply as long as the shape is very similar, use Mamset to bake it down from that really high resolution asset to the lower resolution asset, just as a quick tip. At this point, so roughness, normal. Okay, we don't need to do anything else. So once you're happy with it, turn everything on. I'm pretty sure that the bake will go fine, so I don't need to do a test bake, and then we can simply press bake. Now, give it a second. The first time always takes longer. Oh, then, I forgot to set my hypol back to high resolution. So I will just let this bake finish, and then I'm just going to quickly higher my resolution and bake again. So give me just 1 second. Okay, so that is now completely done. So we now have our bags here ready to go. If you want, you can, of course, double check by going and turning off your hypol or just hiding it. And if you press this little P button, it will automatically create a material for you with the maps assigned. See? So now we have a default material. And here you can see that now we have our low poly bake, which is looking pretty good. We are not done yet, however. So we now have a bake, yes, that's totally fine. It's not super high poly, and it will look really nice from a distance. But we will have one problem, which I'm going to show you now. Save my scene first. And that is if we go in three years Max, so we have a mesh. Now, actually, there are a few problems. The first problem, which is quite easy is that Unreal engine always reads from 000, which is where our pivot point is, which means that we would like to move our mountain. After you've done our baking, this will be a new version. We will ops move our mountain over here in the center. Like this. So that a pivot point will be in the center of the mountain. Now, if I just turn off my heads and faces, we have another problem, and that problem is basically that now if we would go ahead and expoti to reel and we would place it around, what will happen is whenever you place this, there is this really large change in height because we, of course, cut it out. And, of course, this will cause, like, really large holes and stuff like that. We do not want that. So instead, what we are going to do is we are going to decide on our base height level. I will probably go probably somewhere around, like probably something around this level. I want to twine sit in between so that because we are going to move some pieces up and some pieces down. Yeah, I think something like this should be fine. And then what I like to do is, I like to just create a very quick plane, just to make it easier for me to preview something. And next, if we just go to our twain, we want to go ahead and go to our border select, basically what you want to do is you want to select the entire outline over here. Once you've done that, you want to grab something called soft selection. It's named the same I Maya and blender. You turn on soft selection and you control the file off. And what you can see over here is it will give us a small file off like this. And then what we can do is if we now go ahead and go to our scaling and then scale this flat, you can see that it will carefully scale our mountain flat. And then if we just move it down a little bit, for example, we get this effect. So now what we are doing is we have scaled our mountain flat. If I just go ahead and hide hide this over here. We have now scaled our edges of a mountain flat, which means that it will blend much better. Do be careful that, of course, you don't make any extreme changes because then your textures will cause errors. I cannot see over here that I have a tiny error. These arrows sometimes, you might sometimes just want to, like, move this one vert C. And don't worry doing that on will small scale, it will not cause any UV problems, especially not on such a large asset, but it can avoid some weird shading arrows. It happens whenever we sometimes optimize stuff. But I think that's looking on the way. There's one more here. One more here. It's more than normal. Maybe because the higher poli you leave it, the more you often get of these. But it's just a little bit of cleanup, and once that is done, our mountain is ready to be exported to nil already, which is really cool. So, we pretty much got this one now down. Now you can choose, of course, once again, the height of your mesh, but I'm just going to have it slightly below the ground so that when we drag it in, it will also be slightly below the ground. And I'm not worried about the scale yet because I'm going to set the scale inside of Unreal engine. Since scaling entire mountains is quite a difficult one to do. So let's go ahead and go file export, export selection. And what I like to do is, I like to export it as an FBX. Mountain underscore 01. Let's go ahead and make a new folder called two unreal over here. So mountain 01, safe. And I like to turn on triangulate just in case. And then I'm just going to go ahead and oh, no, sorry, I don't want to do that because we did not bake like that. Just press ok. There we go. Okay. Awesome. So as a quick recap, we now have a final mesh, and we now have our baked textures ready to go. The only thing that you might want to do in your baked textures over here is double check that the naming is correct, which looks like it is fine. So the next chapter, what we're going to do is we are going to create a new unreal engine project. We are going to input all of our meshes, and we are going to create a special material that we will use for terrain so that we can properly preview everything so that we have a nice finer mountain that we can use inside of unreal. So let's go ahead and continue with this in the next chapter. 8. 07 Setting Up Our Unreal Engine Project: Okay, so we are now going to go ahead and start focusing on a project. So I'm just going to create a blank project for this, and I want to go ahead and find a folder. Let me just go ahead and make one over here. Vista. I always like to call my folders unreal in capital letters. And let's just go ahead and call this FstaUnscore soil or something like that. And yeah, we can just go maximum quality, and it's quite the press Create. So now that that is done, we want to get started. Let me just move this over here by creating a basic folder structure and then we can go ahead and we can start by importing all of our assets. So here we have our content. I'm just going to go ahead and create a new folder and I will call this one Vista underscore Tutil. And in here, I like to have a folder called assets. Another folder called textis another one called saves and another one called materials like that. In our Assets folder, I'm going to create another folder that I'll call mountain or mountains over here. Sorry, let me just go ahead and get rid of my filters and stuff like that. And in this Mountains folder, we can import our Mountain 01 FBX. So let's go ahead and input that in here. And now, so the only thing that we do not know yet is the scales. That's something that we do need to work on. I'm just going to go to Advanced and I automatically always turn on combined meshes. When I turn it on, it will remember the setting, so we can use this setting later on. And for now we can just go ahead and we can press Import. Next, in our textures, we can right click New folder. Mountain underscore 01. And in here, what I want to import is all of my baked maps. So we can go ahead and we can import them over here. Now, there's a few things that we need to do whenever we import something into real like this. The first one is that roughness maps are grayscale, so you want to go ahead and open them up by double clicking. And then what you want to do is you want to turn off the SRGB over here. This way, the material is able to read it properly as a roughness map. If you don't do that, your roughness will not be accurate. The second one is that we want to go in our mountain. And because we have baked this in open GL format, while Unreal engine uses direct X format, we want to go to Advanced and flip the green channel. The only difference is that the green channel is flipped. So you might hear about this a little bit more later on about OpenGL and direct X. You can also see that our normal map is really strong, but don't worry. This is something that we will compensate inside of our material. And that's about it. The rest, we can pretty much leave the same for now. Now, the next thing that we are going to do is let's just go ahead and create a base scene that we can use. So over here, what I'm going to do is, let's go ahead and probably create a new level. But let's just go ahead and start the basic over here and press Create. Basically what I'm thinking about is we will create something more visually interesting, but we will do it later. I first want to just be able to preview my mountains. So here we just have a basic level which just like some basic lighting. Looks like that all looks a, it all looks fine. I'm going to go to File. Save current levels. And in my Vista tutorials and saves in here. I want to go ahead and call this Mountain and maybe let's call it mountain range or something like that, and press save. While I will later do is because, of course, this is a Vista tutorial, I will later on probably import a basic environment, and then I will go ahead and I will place the vistas around that because else it will not look very visually interesting. Okay, awesome. Having that done, the last thing that we need to do is we need to go into our materials, and here we are going to get started by creating a custom material for mountains. It's actually going to be quite an easy material. Let's just go at the right click, create the material. Vista mountain underscore master. And I always like to call it master. And this is not an introduction to Unreal. We are just working on creating Vista, I said, so I won't really go over too much in depth or like how instances work and everything like that. So you can just follow along. But what we will be doing is some basic material creation. Now, let's get started by grabbing all of our materials over here. Dragging them into our mountain master and we can just go at them. We can place these in here. And then I just want to drag. Looks like my unhels bit slow. This sometimes happens when I have, like, too many things open. So let me just close down Photoshop, and I will keep Trees Max open. There we go. Hopefully, this is a little bit faster. It's just when I'm recording and I have multiple software open, it just starts to slow down a bit. Now, the next thing I want to do is, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to convert these to Pemter so that we can later on swap out the maps if we need to. So right click, convert to Pemter. This one is called Oh, we do need to call it a little bit more specific. Let's call it overall base coolor. The reason I say overall is because we are also going to have, of course, our mega scan textures that we'll overlay on top of it. This is what the splat map was for. So Covert PemterOall score AO. Over here, we have if you want, you can place the empty seclusion off of your roughness map in order to save some texture memory. But I'm not really going to focus on that right now. Overall score. Roughness. Okay. So we have these few maps. Now, there's a bunch of stuff that I want to go ahead and do with this. So we have over here our overall base color right now, we don't really need to do anything yet, so we can just place it into a base color. Overall embitclusion, we don't need to do anything yet. Now, in my normal over here, I want to add a node that's called a flatten normal node. What this allows us to do is it allows us to plug in a normal. And then if we a and click once, we can add a scale pemter and we can call this overall normal strength over here. And by doing this, and I'm going to set this probably to like 0.5, we can control the strength of this norm map because this nor map right now, it has an additional strength. This always happens with rains. For some reason, whenever you bake a rain like this, the norm map comes out too strong, and it's most likely because it's trying to overlay both your height map, your hypolbke and it's trying to also overlay the actual non map details from our nomp that we have inputted. However, if we would not do that, we would get lighting errors. So just trust me on this. We can just go ahead and use this for now. Plug this into our normal and our overall roughness. I guess what we want to do is maybe we just want to create a multiply over here, and we are going to plug in our roughness at the B and then a scale parameter called roughness. Amount over here, and we can plug this into the A, and let's set the roughness amount to I believe one is default. Yeah, yeah, one is default and plug this into our roughness. Okay, so we now got something really basic over here yet that's looking correct. If you want, you can already apply this material to our mountain and we can drag in our mountain in our scene. So what you want to do is you want to go to materials, grab your master, create a material instance, and just call this mountain underscore 01. Then go ahead and go into our assets, and let's open up Mountain 01. Just go to drag it in here. And there's a few things that I like to do. First of all, I like to go ahead and drag in my instance over here. Safe. Then I like to drag in my mountain and I already give it like a rough scaling, and then I like to turn on my nanite. So over here, right now, as you can see, our mountain is cute. It's such a nice, tiny mountain, but we are going to go for something way bigger. So you want to scroll down. Go into your import settings and transform. And in here, I'm going to make this like 100 times bigger to get started with and press reimport. That's why I don't want to do Nanite yet because I don't have a turn on yet. That's 200 times. Press reimport. 200 times, still feels probably like too small. Let's do 300 times. And this is where we can basically control how big we want our mountain to be. Now, without actually having an environment, it's always a bit difficult to find, a good context. But as you can see over here, the mountain already like up close, of course, the textures look quite low resolution. But from a distance, although I would probably like rotated like this, from a distance, it's starting to already feel quite nice, and we don't have really nice lighting yet, but that can also come later on. Yeah, let's for now start with 300. Next one I'm going to do is, I'm going to press Enable Nanite spot and apply my changes just to enable Nanite on this, and then I can save my scene. Now that that is done, what we're going to do is we are going to import our mega scan textures. So the ones that we had to import because we didn't use all of them, is we need a rock underscore 01. We wanted a Sand underscore 01, but I also wanted a grass. I actually wanted to have a grass in here just to give it a little bit extra detail. Because here we have more control. Sand 02. Let's have a quick Look. Let's go at where are you textis Mountain? Where's my splat map? I forgot to bake my splat map. So if we just quickly open up our baking scene over here. All you need to do is in your train HB, drag in your splat map in your Albedo map over here, and then we can right away bake our splat map. And then we just go Bags, turn off everything except for albedo. And I'm just going to go in here because else the naming will not be the same. Bigs mountain, Mountain underscore 01 underscore split. And let's do PNG. And let's save. And then we can just do a really quick bake. So that's all we will need to do. And the only thing that I then like to do is if we go into our bakes once it is done, there we go. I just go ahead and remove the underscore albedo behind it to keep the naming conventions a little bit nicer. Okay, so sorry about that. Let's go ahead and go back into reel. Drag in our splat map over here. That's now looking fine. And I want to just go ahead and open it up. So we have our grass, rock, and one sand. So we only will need to import one sent. So, send one, and let's do also Grass underscore 01 over here. Now, the nice thing is because we already have a roughness map on our terrain, we don't need to waste a lot of texture space on that. All we will need to do is we need to import our albido and normal map from our rock over here, and even the albedo map, you can technically just like, leave it. I just like to add the albedo, and then I like to blend it with my original texture to sometimes give it a little bit more of like nicer quality. Just open up your normal and make sure to flip the green jannel around. Then we have our send one, and let's just go ahead and import our send one Abdo normal over here like this. Flip green channel. And now for our grass, if you want, what you can do is you can go down here. You can go to the Quixle Bridge and just import the grass like this, or you can just go to the website. Let's see. Yeah, because we only need a normal. The reason why I'm thinking out loud is because the roughness and everything gets imported differently whenever we use Quicklebidge, but we don't need the roughness. So we can simply go in here. We can go grass, and then we can go like wild grass. If we just grab something that's quite generic looking. Um, honestly, the one that we had here. Mostly grass, I don't know. I don't want something that's really patchy. I want something that looks really even. So probably this one. Just go ahead and sign in. Here we go. So I signed in. And now, what you can do is I just need medium quality. I don't really need super high resolution. So I can just press Download, and then I can press art and it will automatically be added to our scene. And now in here, I only care about diffuse and normal. So I'm just going to track those into our grass over here. And then for the rest, what I can do is I can actually just like, What I like to do is, I like to save my scene, always, when I do this stuff and just save all of my content. Then like the right click on my contact folder and press Fix up redirectors. And this will just make sure that when we delete our Mexican folders because we no longer need them, we can delete them, and then it will not link those textures that we moved to our material. So now at this point, all we need to do is in diffuse of our grass over here, we want to go ahead and set the brightness quite a bit up because this is, of course, something that we used to change in Photoshop. So let's say we start with three. This feels really low resolution. I know it's two k, but that feels really low for to k, but we'll see how it goes. Anyway, so and this one is already correct. Now that we have all of our textures imported and ready to go, yeah, what we can do is we can start by just dragging these into our material, and then we can start setting them up with our splat map. Let's go ahead and just drag this one here. Let's go ahead and drag This one and finally, also our grass. Although I feel like our grass is probably still too dark. Let's go ahead and go over here. Okay. So those are now all done. Now I need my splat map. So let's just go ahead and grab that one over here and also drag it in here. Now what we can do is we can basically assign these maps to the colors inside of our splat map. Now, the way that we are basically going to do that is we are going to use lubs for this. So with this done, I'm going to go ahead and start with like a lub. Oh I cannot type linear interpolate over here, a lub. And one sec, I don't really let me just do this. One, two, three. I just need to keep the order correct so that I don't get mistaken, which norm map belongs to which larp and stuff like that. So, Okay, so we have this one. Now, the first thing that we need to do is we need to figure out our masking. For that, I do like to open up my splat map, and I like to have a look. So it looks like that our red channel is going to be our grass. Now, if we just go ahead and leave grass to default, that means that the next channel would be our rocks. So if we larp our grass over here, with our rocks, which is this one over here, we want to lurk it using the green channel. And then because we only have one channel left, if you just click and drag, and add another up. Okay, I wanted the sand in the top and our base at the bottom, and then lub this one using our blue channel over here in the Alpha. You can see this almost like a blend. We are just blending between the different maps using a mask. Now, having that done, the next thing that I want to do is I want to give it a bit of control over both the tiling, but also over my mask strength over here. So let's start easy. Let's add a texture coordinate note over here. And let's a scale perimeter and let's call this one grass underscore tiling. The reason for this is because I want to go ahead and I want to give it different tiling for each texture because some textures need a lot of tiling, some need very little. Let's set the default to like ten or something like that, and then multiply it. So when we multiply these, what will happen is that we are multiplying our texture coordinates using our grass tiling. So the more times or the higher we set this value, the more times our textures will be tiled. I can now go ahead and I can go in here and duplicate this three times. Call this one Rock on the score tiling and call this one sand on the score tiling. Next, just simply plug these ones into their correct UVs over here. And while you are at it, you can also go ahead and plug them into the correct non map UVs up here. Like that. Okay, so that one is also done. Now the next thing that I want to do is I probably want to go ahead and just duplicate my lubs over here. And let's have a look. Grass goes in B Rock goes in A, and sand goes in A over here. Green channel goes in this Alpha, blue channel goes in this one. Now, we might now need to also alter our masks, the strength, and we might need to invert them and stuff like that. However, that kind of stuff will only happen when I actually preview it. So I'm just going to temporarily drag my larp straight into my base color, and the only reason I'm doing this is so that I can actually see what I'm doing inside of my material over here. So let's just go ahead and have a look. So what do we have here? Our grass right now, is sitting where our rocks are. So the first thing I need to do is I need to invert and probably also control the strength. So let's add a scale perimeter and call this green strength, I guess, I will call it with the default set to one. And then I want to add a multiply so oh, no, sorry, not multiply. I want to add a power, and I'm going to control my power over here by holding control and dragging my green channel into the power and then dragging the green into the base of our power so that now we can control the power of our green mask. Then what I want to do is I want to add a one minus note. Hold control again. And we're going to use this to flip it around so that our rock is in here and our grass is at the base. Now, if I go ahead and press Save, this should flip around our textures. Yes, it does. And it looks like that we do have the sand overpowering. But if we just go ahead and go into our materials and our mountain 01 instance, we can now start by just having some control over it. So I'm just going to turn everything on and green strength. Here you see? You can see that now I can control, how much of it I want in here. The only thing is that it doesn't seem to really bring out the grass. I know that we didn't have a lot of grass, but I did expect more than this. So I feel like something is probably still warm. Like, I have my grass here, but I don't know. I expect more. So what I will do is I will also add controls for my rock over here. No, wait. Actually, I'm doing this in my green channel. So this is controlling, this is controlling the rock and grass. I am doing this correctly. So I just need to go ahead and so I sometimes just forget, like, the order in which I need to do stuff. This one is going to be Blue strength. That's hold control. And I do not need to infer this, so I don't need a one minus. Throw this into blue. Yeah, that should be correct. Like I said, it's just about the order of things. I sometimes tend to forget that a little bit. So now we have our blue strength and now we can go ahead and go in here. And this should basically see. It should give back a little bit more of the grass. However, we don't want to make this too intense. We want this, like, just on the level where there's a little bit of blending between the two. So now we clearly have our sand, and we have our rock and our grass sand over here. Don't worry about it looking really bad. This is why we have our main base color because this looks just really bad. So now what we're going to do is we are just going to go ahead and let's see, sand tiling that sets to maybe like 15. Our rock. I'm quite happy with my rock tiling. And my grass, although it is way too dark, I'm going to set that one and grass tiling to maybe like 30 or something like that. Over here. Okay. The next thing I'm going to do is let's go into my grass. Let's open it up. And let's go ahead and set this to like Bidens of five maybe, and maybe set my saturation to like 0.9 to basically tone down the saturation a bit to make it feel a little bit more grounded. So, okay, so we got our grass. It's not a lot, but it is something. And you can play around a little bit, but I don't need that much grass. So yeah, I do want to set my green strength a little bit lower, so to make the fading a bit better. Our overall normal strength over here. This is something that I want to preview when we actually have everything blended. So I'm going to go to my base color, and then here I'm going to add another lub, and I want to throw into my A, the base color from our textures and into B, our overall base color, plug this one into the output. And then add a scalar premter that we'll call base color overlay blend, for example, let's go ahead and just set this to 0.5 to get started with. And this is basically to control how much of these base calls over here, we want to blend together with this. Next, what I like to do is, I like to add a blend color burn. And I often set this to the base and then in my blend, I often set a constant tree vector over here, and I make this like white, and this basically often balances out my texture a little bit. You might not really be able to see it. You can also go ahead and convert to Bremra if you want. What do I call this? Burn color or something like that. It's just like a trick that I'm so used to doing just because it balances out our color, but sometimes it just doesn't do anything. It's kind of like a balance. Yeah. Now, next we have over here our normal, and this is where the most important stuff comes from that we have been doing over here. And that is that I wanted to get mostly the normal detail. The base color is a bonus, but I mostly wanted to get that fine normal detail. You almost can call this a detail normal, which is quite a common term if you are familiar with it. So we want to add something that's called a blend angle corrected normals. We plug in our base color over here. And then we plug in our normals in the additional normal like that and throw this into our normal slot. So this will blend in and you can already see it happening, these two normals. At this point, you can also, of course, go over here and you can use your flattened normal if needed to control the strength of your individual normals. I will simply see if I need that. Roughness, we can leave. Our embiot occlusion, I guess, if you want, you can add a scale pemter. A O score. Strength. Set the default to one and add a multiply. Over here. So that we have a bit of control over the ambient occlusion strength. But you can see, here we go. That's already it. So it isn't a lot. But now if we save our scene, and hopefully with everything added together, here see, we start to get a nice blending. So we start to get the blending of our rocks in here and of our sand, but we still get a little bit of our overall texture. Or yeah, overall texture. So at this point, you can control how much you want to blend. So often 0.5 is quite a good one. Let's try play around with my color burn to set it like slightly lower to give it a little bit more like a darkening. But it's super sensitive, so I don't want to play around with it too much. Let's see. So we got this one. I like my rock. I like the norm map strength and stuff like that, and we now get our grass. So definitely, I feel like my grass should have been a lot more, but that might just be a limitation of our splat map because our splat map has used the other grass texture. Yeah, I see over here. But honestly, it's not really that big of a deal for a vista asset. Like we could spend a lot of time trying to fix that, but it wouldn't really be that necessary. So, the first thing I'm going to do now is I'm going to go probably my mountain. Oh, sorry, my rock. And I want to open this one up. I'm probably going to make my rock a little bit darker. So let's go into our brightness that is maybe like 0.8. Maybe 0.5. No, it doesn't stand out enough with 0.5. So yeah, let's use 0.8 over here. Okay. So we got that one working quite well. Now, of course, right now, because we are in like a really basic scene, it will not look very nice. It's very flat and stuff like that. We can, of course, but we will do this later on. We can, of course, play around with our light here, see, that we already, instantly give it a more interesting look whenever you control your light a little bit. Here and we can soften the angle of our shadows, which I guess, for this scale doesn't do too much. But here, that already instantly changes up our mountain quite a bit. But basically, that's something that we will go over in the next few chapters. Now that we have this mountain, I hope that you can already imagine that it's now very easy to, for example, duplicate it. And let's say that you have another one over here, and you basically create a mountain range. So if you have this and you also have a just like a base train that you would also give, of course, like a texture. So let's say that I have this really large base train over here. I grab in my mountains. Yeah, I'll probably stay like this. And with just one mountain mesh, we can right away, create a lot of variations. So you can imagine if you just have a few mountain meshes, and they also blend in together really well. Here Cs are from a distance that can give us instantly like some really nice variation over here, and now it's just a matter of playing around with the silhouett. So I would say that that is the first way that you can go ahead and create a vista asset of some mountains. Now at this point, what we need to do is we just need to go ahead and we need to improve everything a little bit more. So what we will do in the next chapter is I will just have aT laps chapter where I create a few different mountain variations that we can also import in here. And after that, we will have another chapter. And in that chapter, I will just show you a use case where we will be using them in a little presentation environment. Once that is done, we are done with the mountain parts, and then we will go ahead and go over into our buildings into our Vista buildings. So so far, I hope that this was useful, and let's go ahead and just polish all of this stuff up until we have a nice presentation scene. 9. 08 Creating Mountain Variations Timelapse: M. I M 10. 09 Bug Fixing And Placing Our Mountains In A Sample Scene: Okay, so what we're going to do in this chapter is we are going to go over on how to actually place our mountains into a sample environment, and then we are also going to later on create some billboard trees just to really bring everything together and show you a proper example. Now, before we do that, there was one bug that I want to fix. Now, you might have already noticed that I actually in the baking chapter, I gave a quick notification on how to fix this bug. But in case you missed that, I am very sorry, but it does mean a little bit of rework. It's something that I did not notice myself. Basically, where you are baking your mountains, bake them without the norm map selected. So don't just turn it off, but literally just remove the norm map and then bake your normals, because it turns out that we had some problems with the strength because of this. Initially, I wanted to bake it with the normals that I can get a little bit more detail out of it. However, it made a really strange almost like double overlap on our normals, which normally never happens. So I feel like it's more of like a baking bug inside of Momset. But I don't know. Anyway, so that will fix the problem and that will make your mountains look a lot better. Now, what we are going to do now is I have this absolutely amazing looking large scale pine forest environment over here. Now, this environment, the guys at Real Biomes, which I can show you over here just to show you where credit is due, they were kind enough to borrow this to me. They make absolutely amazing environments. So definitely check them out, and you can get these environments in their store over here also. So basically, over here, what we are going to do is we are going to use one of their pine forest, which you can see here. Of course, their presentation is way better than what I can do, but that's a cool one. So this environment, unfortunately, it will not be included, of course, into this project because this environment is worth hundreds of dollars and I do not own the copyright to actually give it to you guys. I will not be included, but I will be using it just as a sample scene to basically overhear in the back, make the mountains a little bit more interesting. Definitely, very cool environment. So if you want to have a really nice natural environment, I definitely recommend checking them out. Everything's also filed, procedural, which is also really cool. And for us, we have a nice template to already start using it because the environment, I on purpose, removed their Vista assets so that we can, of course, have a nice look around. So what I'm going to do is because this environment is so large, I'm going to, first of all, like, change my camera speed up so that I can move it around. You can see over here that it is quite a large environment and the mountains go or sorry, the trees keep going like this. So what we are going to do. Sorry about that. My audio went a bit crazy. What we are going to do is we are going to go into our assets and into our mountains. And I'm going to Placement Mountain, and then I'm going to kind of try and balance it out based upon what we have over here. So let's just go ahead and grab, for example, Mountain one and start with the balancing. Now, mountain one for some reason, it is really small. I guess it is small because I still messed up the scaling compared to, like, a really, really large environment like this. And it's also a little bright, but that's something that we can fix. Now, this isn't really a problem, of course. It just means that I need to scale it up a little bit more. So oops did not mean to select all of the foliage. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get started, and hopefully they have some cameras. No, not that one camera tree. Four. Yeah, maybe like something around here. Oh, God. Let's just low down my camera speed. I want to create like a starting point because once again, I'm just growing to create this environment based upon what I can see. I think this is quite a nice starting point. Let's use this or maybe here. I just want to basically create a nice point. Now, you know what? I think I'm going to go over here and use this one to create my final renders, and I will make my environment based upon these pieces over here. So let's say something like this would be quite nice. Although I do see that we have a small issue over here with some rocks, but that's something that I will fix in post. So let's see. Maybe. I know that you guys don't have to do this, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it, so I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to create a cinematic camera over here so that I can at least have a look. Okay, so if I base my environment on this and I'm going to place my mountains, I'm going to place one mountain, starting with all the way in the back. And now what I need to do is I can, of course, just scale it up in here, but it's often better practice if I want to drag these in more times to just scale them up inside of our actual mesh. So let's go down here and we set our scale to 300. Let's set this to like 700. And Pasi and port. And let's see how that looks. Oh, wow, we will need to go quite high. Let's do 2000, then in that case. Over here. Um, you can also decide how large you want your heels to be. So if I have something like this, that does look like a nice size. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave it at this size. So I'm just going to scale the other ones also up to 2000. And then the rest I will do with manual scaling because, of course, when we place multiple mountains around, we can use manual scaling to basically give it a little bit more variation. So I will go ahead and do this, and then we can start with the placement. The techniques that I'm showing you now, sure you can skip it if you want, if you just wanted to know how to make a mountain. But these techniques they will actually apply with any type of environment when you are placing your mountains. So for the people find it useful, you can definitely go ahead and continue watching. We have this over here. Now, there's multiple things that we can do in order to basically keep this preview. I can go to my cinematic camera actor over here, and let's say that I want to keep this preview. The first thing I will do is, I'm just going to go ahead and think what I want to do is I want to actually go for something a bit more cinematic like this. And I already want to do this now because then at least I can have a mountain range that goes along here. And let's see. Let's go from Universal Zoom to maybe like 50 millimeter. No. Let's try I often like 35 by 35. There we go, see? So this is probably going to be a mountain range so that I can kind of cover it. And honestly, our mountains fit pretty well in this environment if I look at it like this. So knowing this mountain range, what you can do is if you will go outside of your camera actor, you can click on it, and then you can go up here and you can pin your camera like this so that we can keep track of our camera. Or what you can do is you can go to Window viewports, create a second viewport, and then in this one, set it to your camera. That's another way of doing it. For now, let's just go ahead and pit it just to make it easier for you guys, see, and we can get started with the placement. So we have a mountain over here. I'm going to get started by probably pushing this back a little bit more until it's really outside of the environment, although I don't want to push it too far back. So something like this, maybe scale this one up a little bit. And then what we can do is we can go ahead and we can just duplicate it, and then I'm just going to go for mountain number two. It's like a long mountain range, which I can maybe, rotate a bit here. As I said before, I'm really only going to make this based upon the camera. That's going to be my focus right now, like this. Now, honestly, I feel like we probably won't need billboard trees. I will still show you how to make it, but this might be one of those environments where we probably do not really necessarily need a billboard tree or something. This one, let's say that I make it, larger and maybe move it back a little bit. We rotate it a bit. So that we have a core mountain over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to actually copy this one and mountain number four. Just want to use all the mountains. So let's have a look at this one. What will I do? What if I lower this one down a little bit? There we go. So we get, like, a nice mountain range. I feel like I'm still missing something. Let's see if I can grab Mountain one and maybe make it a little bit larger and no, I don't think that one is working for me. Let's go ahead and grab Mountain Range four. Let's see. I probably make a bit small. I just want something like sticking out, because what I'm mostly looking at over here is like a nice silhouette. That's what I'm mostly looking at. And over here, it's just nice if you have a silhouette like this where everything just kind of goes into, like, a nice view. So that's looking pretty cool. So we have this mountain range. We still need to continue it on a little bit more over here. But definitely we now start to get a more interesting mountain range. And the resolutions are still looking pretty good, also. Yeah, I guess we can probably throw on some trees. Let's see. I feel like I want to have maybe something quite neutral. So maybe let's duplicate this one. Over here on this side, let's quickly just pin my camera actor so that I can see what I'm doing. Scale it up a bit. There we go. Just have one mountain that is mostly sitting at here, it's coming in from the side. That's quite large. Then we have a mountain range here. And now what I also often like to do is when I'm looking at this, I like to just sometimes, like, move things up and down to see here. See, for example, with this one, I feel like moving it down looks a little bit nicer. I'm just trying to get some additional visual interest. Like this. And now I can also decide that maybe I want to have some mountains really far in a distance also that are a little bit larger, but that are just because, I will then increase the fog to make them barely visible. So let's say we try something like that. Let's say that we have quite not too intense mountain range like this. And I just want to see if I move this like really, really far back. Okay. I feel like at these scales, we probably won't, I can play around my fork to see if we can kind of get a decent depth. But I'm not sure if it will maybe be like a little bit too overpowering, but we can see. So let's start with having some of these. I'm going to scale them also just on the Z axis just to kind of, like, push them out. And then over here, the mountain ranges are pretty much blocked, so I don't know if I really can do much there, I can try to maybe, like, duplicate one of these. But here, you can see that these mountain ranges are already pretty high. So let's say we have something like this. I don't know if it's work yet. So we get like this, but I don't know. I don't I'm not sure if I really like the look. I am going to quickly go into my lighting and see if maybe working on the exponential height for over here. Oh, God, that's really, really sensitive. Let's set to 0.00 001. Mm. I'm not sure. I'm honestly not sure. 0.007. So let's I actually think five was nice. What I'm going to do is let's say we have this one, this one, this one, and this one. And when you have all of them selected, we can just go ahead and we can temporarily electron on off and stuff. So let's see. Without width. Without width. I can also go up here and just force my game he once again so that I do not see the outlines. Uh, I kind of like this one over here and this one over here. Yeah, you know what? It is actually looking quite nice. I think what I will do is I will move this one over here. I will try to move it further back, and that's probably going to be it for our mountain placement. But you can see how quickly that we can make an van to look, much bigger than it really is. And just like, I know, I really like being able to, like, work like that. So let's go ahead and just move this one further back, and maybe, like, say, let's see. This is mountain one. That's twilight a different mountain range. Maybe this one. Maybe Mountain Range four. I just want to, like, fill up this hole over here. I'm just not quite sure yet. Maybe this. Yeah, there we go. That looks quite nice. Okay. Awesome. So that's push Macht for our mountains. I think our mountains, they are fitting pretty well. They might be slightly too bright for this specific environment. So, of course, it is up to you what you want to do with, like, the balancing. I don't know if I want to maybe change the lighting of my environment a little bit. I will change the lighting and everything because that's something that isn't really about this tutorial. I will change that later. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go into my mountain environments or my mountain not my materials, my instances, sorry. And this is a color burn color. Am I blending? Okay, so I guess I am using color burn for that. I don't know if I also want to use a multiply, what we'll see? Mountain 01. Okay, yeah, I use that like for making the color The thing about the color burn is that it looks good in this kind of cases, but it doesn't really change the overall color intensity. So what I will probably do is I will probably add one more multiply to my material. And simply duplicate the color bun color and call this. Overall color overlay. There we go. That might look a little bit better. If I just go ahead and save this if we added something like this. Okay, so that is saved. And now my annual freezes a little bit, probably because it was out saving or something. Okay, so now let's have a look. So we have our overall color overlay. Now, I should be able to, like Okay, that's that one, lower it down. And at this point, we can also decide if we want to give it maybe like a orange or more green color. I'm going to give it a slight green hue just to make it fit in this environment a bit more. And then when I'm happy with the color, let's say, I'm quite happy with this color, I can just copy the hex SRGB Condo C, go to the next one, and then paste it in so that it is the same color. Over here. Yeah, you know what? I think that will fit a little bit better. Honestly, I think for a tutorial mountain, that is not too bad. Now, these mountains are, of course, not specifically made for this environment. So maybe for this environment, we would want to maybe go for some more sharper mountains, but in general, it works totally fine. I think the only thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to select from this one, and I'm going to just lower down some of these mountains a little bit more we go, that should do the trick. Awesome. Okay, so I would like to basically save my scene at this point, and I will enti chapter here. Now, in the next chapter, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to create some vista trees. I'm not sure if they are really needed for something this far because we have more rocky mountains, but the Vista trees would be more these green areas over here. But since they are still part of vistas, I definitely want to show you. This environment here has a really advanced vista system. Unfortunately, our system will be a little bit more basic like that, but it should still work totally fine. So let's go ahead and go tu with this in our next chapter. 11. 10 Creating Our Billboard Trees Part1: Okay, so what I want to show you now is on how to create some very simple billboard trees that we will use. There are many techniques from simple to very complex on how to create Bilbo trees. You could say that nowadays with nanite we don't even have to create billboard trees anymore because nanite can keep going forever pretty much, and it will still give you, like, a really nice visual representation. However, this environment over here, right now, because of the complicated shaders, it is not actually using Nani. That's why you also see some shadow popping and stuff like that, which I will fix later. But I'm going to show you the more very traditional technique on how to create billboard trees that do not actually use nanite. And this is really something you can only use for very, very far distances like you have over here, because else simply will not look good. So what we want to do is let's just go ahead and in our vista tutorial, we are going to create a new scene over here. So let's go ahead and go to probably saves and new let's do new level. And I want to make it a completely empty level because we are basically going to render out one single tree and then map it onto like a very simple plane that we can use in the material to basically move things around. There is another way that you can do this, which is inside of marmoset, but in our case, we're actually going to fake the lighting of our tree, and in order to fake the lighting of our tree, we want to go ahead and we want to do this inside of Unreal. Unreal is a little bit more hacky. That's why I'm saying it. If you want to know the techniques about how to do it in marmoset, have a look at the building chapters that we will be that will be later on. And in those building chapters, I show you how to bake down interiors, and it is the same concept as that. So once you get there, you will start to understand this. Anyway, new empty level over here. And let's go ahead and make that load up. Okay. Here we go. So nice empty scene, nothing to see here. Now, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and first of all, I need something in here, so I'm just going to drag in a tree. And this can be any tree. Just import whatever you want. There are so many free trees you can find. If you go, for example, which you can also find if you really need some free trees, let me just try and find it for you. Here we go. If you simply type in mega scan trees inside of the unreal marketplace, you actually get really large scale free tree packs over here where you can get more trees than you will ever need all made by mega scan. So they are really high quality and really nice. Anyway, so what we are going to do is because, of course, my environment is a pine forest environment, it just makes sense that if I would use one of those trees, so I'm just going to go to my meshes and drag in one of my trees. At this point, I will also start talking in, like, more generic terms. And I will only do one Billboard tree just because I have a feeling we don't even really need it. So over here we have a tree. I'm going to go ahead and reset my location to 000 like this. And I can also see that we have some LODs, but that's something that we can work on later. The next thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and create a camera. So I'm going to go up here, create camera and just a simple camera actor. And I want to go ahead and set this camera actor to active over here. And I want to set my aspect ratio to one by one. So over here, if I set this one, guess I'm not able to see it because I don't have any lights or anything in here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to actually steal a little bit of lighting. So for now, let's go ahead and save my scene. So file save current level. And in my vista tutorial, I'm going to call this 33 billboard generation over here. And so basically the reason why I'm a bit confused is actually will logical reason, and it is because I have created my camera actor, but of course, because everything is black, I'm not able to properly see what I'm doing. So I need some lighting. And what easier way to get some lighting than to basically open up, for example, a very quick I'm not going to open up the Wiarge map because that takes a while. I'm just going to open up the example. I'm just going to copy paste all of the lighting in here to basically steal it so that we can instantly use it. So let's go ahead and open up this level over here. And this is like a smaller level, that's also part of it. It's a little bit higher quality, but it is small. And here you can see their Vista buildings or Vista mountain. So their Vista mountains, they are, of course, a lot more defined because they spent a lot more time on it, and they are a little bit sharper. But anyway, that's not what I'm going on about right now. What I want to do is I want to go ahead and just go to lighting, and I'm going to quickly grab my atmospheric fog direction light, post effect, skylight, sysphere light, I guess, reflection sphere. I don't know what these planes are, but I'm just going to go ahead and copy everything. And now I can just go ahead and press Control C, go back into my three billboards generation level. I'm going to press Contrave. There we go. Okay, so now that we have this, now I should be able to go into my camera, there we go. That looks more logical to me. So we have my camera over here, and what I want to do is in this camera, I'm just going to go ahead and basically place my tree roughly here. Another thing that I like to do is I like to go to IT. And then over here, I'm going to go ahead and have a look at my modes. So basically one of these modes, which I will most likely be using roughness, I can use almost as a generation for like a mask over here. Now, you also have your opacity generation over here, and I can see that my tree over here right now, it has wind. I actually don't want it to have any wind. So if you have any winds, you just want to go ahead and turn it off. In my case, I can do this in my material because else I cannot take a proper screenshot, then then it will look blurry. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to pass the video and quickly turn off all of the wind over here. Oh, it doesn't take as long as I expect. In that case, I will just very quickly do this here. So this one doesn't have wind. This one I can turn off. This what I can turn off. And this one I can turn off. There we go. So now it should be completely steel. Yeah, it looks more logical. So over here, what we have now is we have our opacity channel, which we can use to generate. The problem with this one is that it doesn't actually generate a trunk. But if we go ahead and try to use the roughness channel, we can often generate this and then basically push it around inside the Photoshop to get it to a correct level. So now, at this point, I want to cut off part of my tree at the base over here. Next, what I want to do is I'm just going to go down here in my console, and I'm going to type dot four LOD. Then I want to say zero, which basically means that it will use always LD zero over here like this. Now, next this, I'm also going to go ahead and I'm also going to play around a little bit my lighting to get something a little bit more favorable. We have some planes over here. I'm going to get rid of those. Clog let's see my post process volume. I'm just having a think about, like, if I really need my exponential height fork and my atmospheric fog, it doesn't really add too much to my scene. So that's probably because the skylight looks like it uses a cube map. So we there. Of course, I did not create this lighting, so I'm still having a quick look. But over here, let's say that I set this to like six. Oh, yeah, definitely. It looks like it does use the sky. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use sky and then set this to a desirable amount. Let's say, probably around six, and I'm going to change my direction light. And then just before we take the pictures, I will just go ahead and turn it off. So my direction light, I'm just going to snap this also back to zero. This way, I can see it and I can move it around a bit more. See if I can maybe, like, get a more interesting angle. And I do want to make the lighting, of course, a little bit flat, but we are faking the lighting, pretty much. And the reason that, we kind of need to fake it at this point. So over here. And right now, the skylights also giving me some, like, visual shadow bugs, and that's most likely because we are trying to switch between various scenes that use screen space and lumen and stuff like that. However, that should not be a problem because what I'm going to do is when I'm happy with this, see that's why now I'm happy. Let's go to my camera actor. Let's set this to zero. This one to 180, and this one also to zero. And then without rotating, I want to set this at like a correct angle over here. There we go. And now, finally, we have our tree. And what I'm going to do with my tree is, I'm just going to Oops one angle. G to twin and see if I want to rotate it slightly different until I get, a more interesting billboard. So let's say that something like this is fine. Now, at this point, what we can do is we can save a scene, and we can start with the rendering process. So what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and go up here to my high resolution screenshot. That we have. And at this point, I'm going to turn off my atmospheric fog, and I'm also going to turn off my exponential height fog over here. I can see that I still have some visual problems here. Now, this looks like a bug. So I will most like the first of all, render out the screenshot and then just see if it is wong or good or something like that. We can probably set the multiplier to one over here, and then we can just go ahead and while the camera actors active, press capture. And if you click on this little link, you should be able to get a nice PNG image like this. And I do see a little bit of the visual errors, but I don't think it is too bad. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to turn on game view over here because that's something I do want to do. And I'm going to go in my post process volume, and this arrow that we have over here is most likely the global elimation. So what I'm going to do is I'm probably going to try and set it to lumen. There we go. That seems to fix the error. Now, this tree will look a little bit flat. However, I am hoping that from a distance, it will not be as bad. You can play around with your lighting a little bit more to get a little bit more definition in here. But you can see over here, it's quite hard, and it all depends on the type of tree that you have. However, compared to our base color, see, it is still a lot better. So we are just going to go ahead and set this to it I'm just going to go ahead and click in my view, press G and G again to make sure that we do not have any game mode. And now I'm going to go ahead and first of all, double check the resolution that we captured. So we captured 914 by 914. That's totally fine because we want to go for 512 by 512. So we are going to capture this one once again. And now you can see now we have a proper capture of our tree. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go to buffer visualization, and let's go ahead and also capture opacity just in case we want to use it to basically generate a cutout. So let's capture opacity. And let's also capture a roughness over here. And I don't know if there's anything else that we might want to capture. Is there maybe like an embitclusion that does something? No, empt clusion doesn't do anything. And the scene depths also probably, you can use this to kind of generate some depth using an overlay inside a Photoshop, but we probably don't need it. So let's go ahead and start with something like this. That I think is looking pretty good. So now that we have these captures, all that we need to do is at this point, I can save my scene, and we want to go ahead and want to open them up inside a Photoshop. Here we go. So, the goal is simple. We have our tree over here. We first of all, we want to go ahead and generate a mask and place it into the alpha. So I'm just going to drag it over here my pieces. And this is why I was not too worried about my roughness using my roughness as opacity because as you can see, with the resolution that we have, we don't have too much to work with anyway. So anyway, what I'm going to do is I have over here my roughness. Let's go ahead and steize both of these. I'm going to go ahead and move my opacity at the top. And in my obsess, I'm just going to go to select color range, and select only the black colors over here. You can use your fuzziness. So let's try that to kind of get the best result, and I'm just going to go ahead and press delete. Yeah, that should be fine for now. We do actually want to keep a black color. So now what I can do is I can also go over here in my roughness. And for my roughness, all I want to do is go into my adjustments and levels. And I want to push these levels up to basically generate a better roughness over here. And then for this one over here, I'm going to go ahead and set the top layer to I always like to scroll a bit. I think it's a collar burn, but let's just double check. Lighting can also work. Yeah, let's use lighten. So let's go ahead and go for lighten. And now let's say that this is already like our mask that we can start with. Although for this one, I do kind of prefer that mask that we have over here. So what I might want to do instead is I might want to go ahead and set this back to normal and just go ahead and try and get rid of those black areas a little bit more. Let's go select color range. Try and select the black areas a bit more and delete. Yeah, there we go. That should probably look a bit better. Yeah, see? So that already looks better compared to the one that we had over here because this one, I feel like was a little bit too strong. I might be super picky here, it might really make no difference at all, but if it does, I just like to go ahead and at least try to get the most out of it before I get it into unreal. So anyway, we now have this one over here, and we can go ahead and we can merge these two layers, Contra A, Contra C, go into our layer one, go into channels, press the plus, and Contra V to paste this into our Alpha channel over here. Now with this one, we do not want to actually have the background to be black in this case. And the reason for that is because then what will happen is we will get a really slight black outline often. So what we want to do is once again, for this one, I'm going to actually select over here my mask, yes. But press contre contra Z. And then if I go ahead and go into my layer one and add a mask like this and press ops and then go into my channels while the mask is selected, I should be able to paste this into my mask over here. So now what you can see that happened is that I pasted the mask that we have over here, also into the channel of my fill layer. So now you can see that we now have a proper cut out. Now, the only thing that we need to do now is we need to go ahead and there's two things that I like to do often. The first one is I like to add a solid color. Below it and make it the most common color. So let's say over here, I'm using my color picker to go for, like, a bit of like a green color. I'm just trying to find something that blends well with our tree, something like this. So that's already one thing. Another thing that I like to do which doesn't always work, but I still want to show you in case it will work for you, and I don't know if it will work for this one, is I like to duplicate my layer over here, right click and convert this to a smart object. And then what I like to do is, I like to go to filter, blur. And I like to blur this Oh, I don't get settings because I need to resturize it. Filter? Blur. And I like to go ahead and blur. I'm selecting one gasienbur. That's what I meant. Gasienbu. And now what I can do is I can kind of blur this. And what that will do is it will, as you can see, it will add some softness to our outline, which makes it the dark edges a little bit less harsh over here, you see? So that often also already looks a bit better. And at this point, I might want to probably go for, like, a slightly darker tone for my background. Let's try something like that. I don't know. The background is not super important, but I do try to always match it a little bit as well as I can. So now let's say that we have something like this, and let's call this our Billboard tree. Okay. Awesome. So all we need to do now is we need to save this texture. So in our mountains textures, I'm going to go ahead and call a folder billboard And in here, what I will do is I will go ahead and file, save as First of all, I will save it as a PSD. And next, I want to also go ahead and save as copy, and I'm going to save this as a PNG or PNG. TGA, and call this T underscore billboard, underscore 01, and press Save. Okay. Awesome. So with that save, let's go ahead and go to Tres Max. And now it is as simple as loading in texture in our material, mapping it onto a plane and turning this plane into like a square. Or if you want, you can add a little bit more jom tree. So let's go ahead and go over here. Call this Billboard. I'm just going to go ahead and load in a bitmap, and I'm going to load in the one that we just had, which is our Billboard tree over here and press overide to make sure that it doesn't do like any strange Alphas. And then what the ML is going to do is I'm also going to go to my cut out opacity over here. Select the billboard tree again. And then with this one, I should have this as a Alpha output over here. I hope I selected the right setting because I rarely load in opacity maps inside of Tres Max, because, of course, I already know that the opacity is working. The only reason I'm doing it now is more for you guys, so that it makes more sense for you guys to look at things. And that's something that happens quite often with artists that there are many things that we just don't really do, except when we are teaching a tutorial because it makes it visually more logical. Okay, looks like that did work. It all depends how you want to do this. So you can just go ahead and play some loops here and here and at the top and cut it out. Or you can use modes where you can edit your plane without affecting the geometry. So over here, we have, like, a tree like this. Now, having it completely flat, I never really feel that I like the look of that, but, of course, it's a billboard tree. So I really want to try and keep it as optimized as possible. So often what I do is I tend to just, like, move it back a little bit like this, just a little bit of additional geometry, which I feel like nowadays should be doable. And you want to place it in the center, and then you want to go ahead and you want to simply rotate this 90 degrees. I don't have snapping turn on over here. And this is like a really old school technique, but a really quick technique to create some billboards because from a distance, if I turn off my ance faces, you see, also, especially because we rotated it. Now it will not look very good in MX, but it will feel like the tree has a little bit of dimensions. I never really tried, but I guess if you really want to, you can try and, like, add more geometry by rotating it like this. And logically speaking, doing this, it would show up the tree more, but it might here or see. So it might feel more like a Christmas tree. So it's kind of like up to you how you want to handle this. In my case, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have these two trees over here, and I'm now going to go ahead and export this. So file export. I don't really care about the scaling because that's something I need to figure out inside of unreal anyway. So exports to real Billboard, three, underscore 01 over here and save. And we can just press Okay. Awesome. So we have a billboard tree. I guess if you guys want, I can also just go ahead and save the scene. Billboard trees like this. And now what we can do is in the next chapter, we are going to go ahead and import this inside of unreelEngine, and then we are also going to just set up and do some nice tree painting in our scene. 12. 11 Creating Our Billboard Trees Part2: Okay. So now that we have created our Bilbo try, let's go ahead and input it and set it up. For some reason, my scene is a bit slow, but let's hope that changes soon. So over here, we can simply import this. I'm not going to go ahead and use Nante on this and just make sure combined message is turned on, and the uniform scale, we will go ahead and, like, have a look at. So we can go ahead and input this, and then what we can do is we can, of course, also input our texture, and we will start by just simply creating our material. So it's textures. Billboard T, and just import our TGA texture in here. And that's pretty much all we need. Now, the materials actually going to be really easy for this. So let's go ahead and create a new material that we'll call Billboard underscore Master. And let's go ahead and open it up, and for some reason, it opened up in my other screen over here. And now what we can do is we can go ahead and go to our where are you Billboard three and drag in our texture over here. So what do we need in our billboard master. We want to, of course, also keep our material as cheap as possible. So add as little as possible in order to basically make sure that the expense is not very large. I'm going to go ahead and set my blending mode from opaque to masked and not so much translucent because translucent will not look correct. And I'm going to make it two sided. Now, at this point, I can go ahead and just drag in my base color, and I can also drag in my Alpha in the opacite mask, and that should cut out our trio here. Then I'm going to add a scale pemter as click called roughness and set is to 0.8, probably by default over here to our roughness. And I guess if you want, you can also go ahead and try to generate a normp based upon this base color, but we don't need it because it is so far away. So we can go ahead and we can do this over here and save our scene. I am a little bit worried that my scene is so slow. Also, what you can do is you can also later on, if you want sets to foliage and have subsurface scattering and stuff like that, but I don't think that we will need it. So let's go ahead and here we are in our scene. Yeah, I think I have, like, a memory leak somewhere. Let me just go ahead and save my scene over here. And now we can just go ahead and assets, mountains, load up my billboard tree, materials, select my billboard master, and just go ahead and apply this material over here. So there we go. Quick and simple billboard tree like that. And now it's just a matter of going into our assets and first of all, figuring out the correct scaling that we want. So if I have this here, it's absolutely tiny. I do want to make it roughly the same scale as the trees that we have over here. So let me just go ahead and drag this in over here. Open it up and what you can often do. So right now, the scaling is one, one. So if I go ahead and scale this up, I can see that this is roughly the nice scale that I want, which is around 12, so I can then go down here and set my default scale. And for this one, it's extra important because we are going to use foliage painting for it to set the scale in here and not anywhere else. So there we go. Now we have our Bilbotr over here. Next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and do some foliage painting on this. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these junk materials that we have over here. Save our scene. And for the foliage painting, it is really easy to do. Now, most likely, because this seen already has a lot of foliage, it will look a little bit overwhelming. But if we go into foliage over here, we should be able to simply drag in our tree, and then when we drag it in, it will ask us where we want to save our foliage type because it will create a duplicate of this tree and turn it into a special file type for foliage. So we can go ahead and just save it into the same location over here like this. Here we go. And now it just loaded in. And the cool thing about this tree is that we can go ahead and we can paint. So if I go ahead and only want to paint on my static meshes, because I want to only paint on these mountains over here, what you can see is now that if I click, well, it would create way too many trees, so that's something that we are going to work on. So the first thing if you hold shift, you can actually get rid of them. Now, the first thing that I want to as I'm going to set my paint density a lot lower to probably 0.05. And what the paint density does is it makes sure that we do not paint too many trees in the same spot. Next, we can go up here in our scaling, and I'm probably going to set my scaling between 0.9 and 1.3. This will give us a variation in scaling. Just like that, we can also have a variation in the random angle. However, this one, you want to set quite low, so probably like something like five. Now if I would go ahead and paint, you can see that now when I paint this in, and I honestly don't know why my scene is so slow, there we go. You can see that now our trees are painted in and they have random angles to them. Now, I don't like this yet, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to hold shift to basically get rid of these trees over here. I guess I turned off real time to make it faster, but I guess I do need to have real time in this case. And I'm going to set my random pitch to maybe, like, let's say we will go for 2.5. And next to the paint density that we have, you can also have a density over here, which basically forces trees to stay further apart from each other. So if I set this to 50, and now if I go ahead and set this to my brush size to maybe like 2048 to make it quite large, let's have a look and paint on here. Okay, it's getting there. It's getting there. Now, another thing that you can do right now they are aligned based upon our mountain. So I'm going to first of all, go ahead and set this back to like 25. You can go ahead and you can scroll down here and press and turn off a line to normal. And this way, they will just be straight, which often for billboard trees looks a little bit better. However, it might sometimes mean that they sink into the ground a little bit. My goal is that when I do this, I want to have, like, a nice level of trees, but not too many. Right now, they still feel like too many. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and scroll up and probably set my pain density to like 0.02. And there we go. So now you can go ahead and paint in your billboard trees wherever you want. So as I said before, I don't know how many we need. I'm just going to go ahead and paint them in here for now. And then next this, of course, what you want to do is you want to go ahead and balance them a little bit. So what I will do is I will go into my billboard master, and this will cost very little to do. Add a multiply and a constant tree vector so that we can have a little bit more control over the color. Color and score. Overlay. And let's go ahead and do this and press Save. And because we already placed our tweet, saving it takes a little bit longer, especially when we are working on such a large scene because there's just, like, a lot of background stuff that's also going on. So it always takes a little while for your scene to properly update. Now having this down, the first thing I'm going to do is because my tree is really, really orange. I'm going to go in my tree billboard and set my saturation down a little bit. And this is my texture. So let's go for 0.8. There we go. And this makes it a little bit easier for me to then go into my billboard material. This is my master. Oh, sorry, convert this to material instance and apply this instance to your tree. So select the instance. I guess I don't have the tree turned on anymore. It will just update the foliage. Don't worry about that, so we can just open this up select the instance and apply that one because I never want to apply a master to my tree. And now what we can do is we can go ahead and go in here in our color. And also a color, remember, this scene has like clouds, so the colors is once again, depending on where the cloud is, it's a little bit different. So I'm just going to go ahead and make this a little bit orange and a little bit darker. And you can see that I orange, a little bit greener and just like that. See? That fits pretty closely with our scene already. So at this point, I would say, have some fun, paint the trees wherever you want. I completely forgot where my orientation is. I guess that's over there where I want to have my trees. So you can go up here and I can paint my trees. Or what I can do is I can go ahead and go into my camera actor over here. And then based upon that, I can also try to, like, paint in some trees. Now, these trees they should Oh, I'm not in foliage painting anymore. These trees they should basically show up very far away, see? If I paint them all the way over here, they do actually show up all the way in those spots. So at this point, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and well, undo what I just did, go into my selection mode so that I can select my And second, because there's so much stuff in here, select my camera actor and ping or pin it, go back to my foliage mode and go all the way over here. And now you can go ahead and just place the trees wherever you want. So let's say that I will place them here, and I'm just looking at my scene to make sure that they look logical. And, of course, the trees, they wouldn't really grow on, like, really steep areas. So I'm just having a think if this looks nice. And, no, it does not look nice from my pin if I have them on the top. So I'm just going to go ahead and move them around the base. At least now you know how to paint these trees. Don't feel forced to actually place the trees because it all just kind of like depends. And yeah, I do apologize for, like, the lagging. But, yeah, it all just kind of depends on what you are creating. Like, over here, I can see some of the trees. So definitely I want to play some trees here. And at this point, it's already outside of the view, but I guess if you want, you can move some over here. See, you want to look for mostly flat areas or areas where you just want to kind of, like, blend out the trees. So we have this kind of stuff. And honestly, over here, I don't think we will be able to see anything. Maybe over here. Now, see here, sir, I see almost nothing happening. I guess in these areas, you can play some trees. But I think that we are already pretty much at our limit of what we can really apply because it doesn't really show anything. In meaningful areas because it's so far away, you will just see specs at that point. So I will probably go ahead and leave it here and not really paint in much more just because it doesn't really art any visuals, and it will just be extra expense for scene. But definitely, like this, you can nicely populate your mountains. And if you have more like hills, this is great if you really have hills and stuff like that, then these work a lot better. So if I would go ahead and now go back into my camera mode, yeah, here, I can see, like, a little bit here and there. Over here, we can see some of the billboard trees. And from this distance, it looks pretty good. The only one that I really don't like is that one that I just placed because it feels like it breaks up a silhouette if I have trees here. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to quickly get rid of these over here. And I'm going to call this one done. And it is looking like a quite nice scene. Now, as a cool extra bonus, although this will really slow down your scene, there is some stuff that you can apply in your console. One of them is R or foliage LD distance scale is equal to three. And when you apply that, it will increase your LD distance scale. You also have R static LD distance scale is 0.25 for static meshes. Maybe I might actually set the scale into one. You can see the difference one, three. Let's do two over here. And it will basically lower down when your LODs start to pop away. Let's see. What else do we have? We have that streaming pool size is 5,000. This will basically increase your texture resolution sizes. I still have some old ones, which is, I have a little list for this. A that generate mash distance fields is equal to true, but I don't know if that will work in Unh engine five because these are more for, like, Unwel engine four. Yeah, you'll see, they don't really do anything. Um, I would say that at this point, yeah, that is pretty good. So I would say here, I place like a little rock here, and I would say that I consider the Vista mountain part of this tutorial course to be done. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to next continue on how to create Vista buildings that will be not just from, like, a really far distant Vista, but that you can also have for medium distance. And those chapters are going to be a little bit more complex. However, I hope that you enjoyed so far, like the Vista mountains, and I will see you in the next few chapters if you happen to also follow those. 13. 12 Capturing Google Maps Data For Our Buildings: Okay. In the last part of this tutorial course, we went over on how to create vista mountains and how to place them into an environment to create a nice presidential scene and also on how to create some billboard trees. What we're going to do in this part is we are going to go a complete 180 and we are going to create urban vistas. Mainly, we are going to create buildings. These buildings will be really cool because they will be vista buildings, but they will have actual, faked interiors that look very convincing. And so they will also look pretty good up close. And then I have a really cool idea for, like, a presentation scene where we are basically having a camera looking from a skyscraper, and it is looking at all the other buildings, and we will also have a little bit of a small bonus tutorial on how to create some streets and stuff like that. Main focus is going to be our buildings. Now, for our buildings, what I like to do is, first of all, let's go ahead and find some buildings. So here I am in Google Map scan, and we are going to do something quite interesting, and that is that rather than making all of these buildings by hand, using just like a screenshot, wait, let me just quickly find one because else, it's hot. Let's do like I want to go to, like, Seattle. I thought it was like around here somewhere. I'm not from America, but Seattle often like because I feel like New York is, like, really typical Seattle. Oh, yeah, I see. It was just really small. Okay. So here we go. I don't know why it's not rendering. That's a little bit strange. Ah, there we go. Now with rendered. Okay, so here if you hold Control, once again, you can just see these three buildings. Now, I'm going to go over a technique where we can basically, instead of going and looking at these buildings and maybe going into street viewer over here. There we go. Instead of going into street view, trying to recreate all of these buildings and all of that kind of stuff, I'm going to show you how that we can basically borrow these buildings from Google Maps, and the geometry will not be great, but we are going to borrow these buildings so that we already have a general layout. And then what we can do is we can recreate these buildings inside of, in my case tree as Max, but you can use whatever you want. And we can recreate it simply by basically mimicking the shape that we will export. Now the cool trick is that the trick that we are going to use, you can actually also use that trick alone as a vista. So you can literally just export all of these buildings and use them as a vista in real engine. However, of course, the thing with that is that it doesn't look very like a game. First of all, we won't have any interiors if you do that kind of stuff. But just like in general, it also doesn't really look like a typical game because this feels very much like real life. I don't know if I can, like, No, one sec. I messed up again. Get rid of the labels. There we go. So right now, if you would have this, maybe if it is very far away and it's like, really foggy weather, it might work. But in general, this feels too realistic for when you are working on, like, a game level. And also, it's not as high quality as I want it to be. Like, we are going to go for higher quality than this. So let's go ahead and go over the technique on how to capture these three assets and how to get them inside of Ts Max. For this, we need a few things. We do need to use blender. Blender is completely free. The only reason we need to use Blender is because there's a very specific plug in that we want to use for this. And I just want to mention to you that this is a technique that I myself simply learned from a YouTube video. I'm not going to be special, like, Oh, no, I developed this technique. It's not like that. So I myself just learned it, and that technique just showed how to export them, and, of course, we will take it from there. So there's two things that you need. The first one is you need a software called Render Dog. You can find it on renderdog.org. And then what you want to do is you don't want to download the latest one. For some reason, the latest one doesn't work, so you want to go to other builds over here, and then you want to scroll down and you want to find build number V 1.9. And then you can just go ahead and download the installer sick and just install it like a normal software. Oh, sorry, use the 60 bit version because I assume most of you guys have a 64 bit version. So next to that, there's another plug in that you need. And it is this blender three D plug in over here. So with this plug in, I will go ahead and I will include it for you guys. So just to make it easier. So let's say that in buildings, um, plugins over here. I will go ahead and place it in here so that you guys don't have to download it. Or what you can do is you can simply look up over here the link. And then what you can do in order to download it, you simply go to releases. You click on this one. And then what you want to do is you want to go ahead, you want to scroll down and you want to click on the zip, and then it will download it like that. So let me just go ahead. And we can just leave it as like a zip file. So with these softwares now installed, the next thing that we are going to do is at this point, we want to close all of our home browsers over here because we are going to use Google Chrome. However, we need to do some specific functions for that. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I will also for you guys, leave a file in buildings. I will leave it also in the plug in files, if that is okay, just to keep it organized. So I'm going to leave you a text file that has some specific code in it. So I'm just going to call it code. Let's open it up. And then we can go ahead and we can Control C, Contra V. So this is what we need, and I will, of course, show you how to use this. So let's leave this open. Now what we're going to do is you want to go down here, you want to type in CMD, just for your command prompt. Then you want to go ahead and go to your code. You want to copy the first one over here and simply paste it in and press Enter. Now, that this is done. Now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to open up Reng. So n the doc over here. There we go. And then you get this view. Might look very complicated, but it is actually quite easy. The next thing that you need to do is let's go back to CMD, and we just need to go ahead and open up the second command prompt over here, which just grabs our location of our om extendable, and then it adds some additional code behind it. So we can just copy this. We can paste it here, and we can go ahead and we can press Enter once again. Now what will happen is that it will start up home and next to comb, it will just be like a white window. It will have this code over here. So we just want to go ahead and we want to keep track of that code. And then what we want to do is so 20916, we want to go into Rando Doc. You want to go to file, inject into process. And now what we're going to do is we are going to find this number. Often, it is as easy as typing in Chrome over here, and it is often the one that says Google Chrome GPU that you can see over here because we want to read the GPU data. So 20916. Now you want to go ahead and you want to press inject over here. And then what you want to do is you want to press Okay, and that's quite important on the code. It should be normally as soon as you press Okay, that it says API and then it will say active. Then if you now go to Com, you can see that now you can just go ahead and you can select your user profile. And then it opens chrome and it's open it up on my other screen. So let me just go ahead and drag it over here. And you know it will have worked if you get this text over here at the top. So now that we have gotten to this point, all that we need to do now is we need to go ahead and type in and type in simply maps over here. And then we can go ahead and we can go to Google Maps like this. Okay, so then what we need to do is we need to go ahead and we need to scroll out. And let's go ahead and go back to Seattle over here. Let's go ahead and click down here to Satellite. If you click on Me, you can turn off labels. And now what we want to do is to go to the buildings that we want to capture. Which are over here. If I hold control, you can see that now I can go ahead and grab them. Now, what I often like to do is many people they like to capture an entire area. However, I find that the quality is not very good whenever I do that. So I like to often just like capture like two or three buildings. So over here, the first thing that I do is I on purpose, start zooming in. The reason I start zooming in is so that it loads in the higher detail because just like with game engines, it has LOD. So the further away, you'll see if I zoom in over here, it should give me o maybe not here. As soon as you zoom in, see, it will become higher detail. So that's what we are also trying to do. We are trying to just go in here and find a building that we want to create. So let's do these two buildings over here like this. And when you are ready and you say, like, Okay, this is the building that I want to capture, you want to go ahead and you want to go back to Rando Dock. And you want to go up here and you want to say 5 seconds, and you want to press capture after delay. The way that works is this. You go ahead and you press capture after delay. You go in here and you just want to move around your camera. The reason you want to move around your camera now you can see that it lagged for a moment is because your GPU needs to render. When you are moving your camera, your GPU is actively rendering these buildings. And now, after that frozen piece has started, you can see that now render Doc has captured over here a building. So at this point, we can do this with multiple buildings before we move on. So let's say that we have, yes, a building like this. We want to probably we want to go for, like, a high rise. So we probably want to mostly capture, like, quite high buildings. And maybe I will capture, like, some smaller ones like these also. So let's go ahead and just, like, have a look around this building over here. And then once again, what we can do is we can simply go to Render Doc trigger after delay. And simply start moving your camera a little bit, and there is the freezing. Okay. And just like that, we can do a bunch of them. So let's say that these are going to be our lower buildings. Go ahead and zoom in to make sure that I have the highest resolution. Oh, hey, why? No, I don't mean to do that. Come on, Google Maps. For some reason, it just kept giving me the labels, which I don't want. It doesn't matter if you have labels, but I just find them annoying. Okay, so let's say that we grab these buildings over here. Let's go ahead and zoom out. Once again, Render dog. Trig after leg. And you just want to basically grab the buildings that you think you want to turn into Vista assets. So what I'm basically looking at is I'm just looking at, like, a few high buildings. So we have, like, one, two. We have some short buildings. I'm not going to make too many. The reason for that is because it's a tus oil. Like, I'm not going to make an insane amount, but you can definitely make like ten, if you want. So I'm going to go this one and these three, and then I'm going to call it today. These two are close together that I can probably just like zoom in and I can make this as one capture. Over here. So once again around the doc, trigger after delay, wiggle it around. And there we go. There was the capture. The last one is I want to go ahead and just capture, Oh, maybe like these two over here. Yeah. These three. I can probably do these three over here just in case I'm going to capture all of them. We have these ones over here. You do want to make sure that it is within your view because else you have a risk that it doesn't capture properly, trigger after delay, move it around a bit, and there we go there is to capture. Awesome. Now that we have captured these buildings, the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and go into Rando Doc and now we just want to simply save them. I will go ahead and in our folder buildings exports in here we will go map and then I'm going to make another folder called RDC, which stands for render Doc. Now, in this folder, we are going to save Asen. We simply want to click on AfleR click and press Save. And then you want to go ahead and you want to go to the folder and call this, for example, B one, save. Save this one, B two. This one, B three. B four, and B five over here. And that's about it. At this point, you can go ahead and you can close Render Dog and you can close Google Chrome and everything. And now the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to open a blender, which for some reason is once again on my other screen over here. And we can just delete all of the default stuff and you want to go ahead and you want to install your plugin, which we have up here. I already have it Install. I assume you know how to install plug ins. But if you don't, because of course, I did not expect use blender, you simply want to go to Edit, preference addons, press Install, and then you simply want to go ahead and you want to grab that zip file that we have downloaded. And that's everything. Then you just press Install addon and it calls Maps Maps Model Importer. So I can go in here, maps model Importer and just make sure that it is turned on over here. Okay, awesome. So the credit of this plugin goes to Allie Mitchell, and it's a really nice plugin. I wish that other software had it, but I could not find any good plugins other than Blender that used this one. So we are very lucky that Blender is completely free. Now, we can go ahead and we can basically go to File Import. And this time, you want to grab a Google Maps capture. Then you want to navigate to where we saved our buildings. Now, this is very easy. All we need to do is we are just using blenders like an intermediate, and then I will personally go to my favorite, which is Tres Max. But you can, of course, stay in blender or use Maya or whatever you want. All of the concepts are exactly the same after this. You select when you want to press Import, and it can take a while to import. So your screen will freeze, and what I will do is I will go ahead and probably pass the video until it is done importing because the jom tree is quite messy. It also has imported textures and stuff, so it often takes a while for it to all import. Okay, here we go. So it has imported. And as you can see, the reason why we zoomed in is because over here you can see that the buildings are, for example, missing. The further away it is the further it's missing. But that one building that we really zoomed into, we now have a pretty decent looking mesh. Now, of course, this is still really bad quality in terms of, like, what we want to capture, but it is a really solid base for us to, like, kind of figure out what we want to have in terms of, like, scaling and just in terms of, like, the additional objects on top. Extra cool is that it also imports materials. If you turn on text shot view, over here. You get there you go. You get materials. And I guess a cool thing, although I normally don't do it because it's quite a bit messy to clean up. I'm going to show you how to, like, create some streets, but you might be able to actually, create streets like over here and this kind of stuff. But yeah, that is kind of like up to you. We might create billboards, similar to this, for our twee, and our cars will also be like top down billboards, but it all depends on the angle. So anyway, we have a building over here. All we really need to do now is we just need to go ahead and we need to select everything, and I like to just go ahead and pass Control J. Which give it a second because it's basically broken up into different sections, which means that the jom tree is not really amazing. And now that we have done this, if you want, you can also go ahead. You can also move this up and place it better in the center. This will make it a bit easier when we import this inside of tree as Max over here. So you grab your piece, you go to File export, and it doesn't matter. OBJ FBX, just export it as something, and we are going to export it in our buildings or in our Maps folder, create a new folder called FBX. And in here, you want to go ahead and press B one and you want to turn on selected objects. And now we have a simple FBX file that we can use in any other Tweet software. So having that done, I will now go ahead and just kick in the quick time labs where I am importing all of these assets, joining them, and exporting them again. 14. 13 Creating Our Vista Building Part1: Okay, so we now have all of our building I'm just going to call it blockouts because I don't really know what to call them. We now have all of our building blockouts ready, and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to use TSMC, but don't worry. The stuff that I'm going to do in TSMC is so universal, you can easily replicate it in whatever program you want. So let's just go ahead and show up. This little window here. And I will just go ahead and show you how to do one building completely from start to finish. And once that is done, then what we can do is we can have a time on doing all of the other buildings because it takes quite a while to prepare them. So first of all, let's go ahead and import one of our vistas. So export maps, FBX, and then I want to do B one. Let's just open it up because I want to do like a tile building. A Tile building is probably the easiest one to showcase everything to you. So I'm just going to go ahead and import this FBX, give the second. There we go. And let's have a look. Yeah, so this one includes this tall building that we have over here. So that's looking pretty good. Okay, awesome. So we have this building now. Honestly, I personally, I don't need the textures because we are going to change things up a little bit later on, anyway. So I'm just going to go ahead and open up my material editor. And do I get over? Here, here we go. So, because I have multiple screens, sometimes it just opens up somewhere else, and I'm just going to go ahead and give, like, a play material. Then the next thing what I want to do is just to make my life a bit easier, I'm going to go to my Face Mode, and I'm basically just going to go ahead and delete everything that I do not need. I guess if you want, you can keep this one in. This one also feels like close enough in terms of quality. But I'm not going to go ahead and do that simply because it's Citi utoil I don't need to go ahead and create like 20 different vista buildings for Titil course. Since once you've done one, the workflow is the same for all of them. So I only will need to show you how to do one of them, and then you just know how to do it. I'm just going to go ahead and I want to, like, place my pivot in a logical location. So I'm just going to move this down and maybe move it in here. And then the next thing that I want to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go to my top view and I want to kind of straighten this out because we all know it's not easy to model whenever you are working on a non straight building. So let's just do something like this over here. Let's go to my site view. There we go. So that's like nicely in the center. Awesome. Okay. So we have this one. I feel like there is some junk. So what I like to do is I like to always select my model pas contro I and then just press the lead. Okay. Is the junk gun? Ah, C. Okay, so that's quite strange that it's still it's a bit annoying. Oh, wait, that's why. If we go to Vertex mode now we see why it is doing that. So it has these wy width. As I said, geometry that comes from maps, it's willy messy. It's not meant to be for games. It's just meant to, like, easily show in your browser. So I just want to go ahead and clean this up a little bit better, even though we are not going to use this. The reason I wanted to do that is so that when I press Z, it will, like properly zoom in and it will not tute zoom in really far away. So that's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and let's focus on this one building over here. So the first thing I want to do is I just need to look up the building again in here so that we actually know what it looks like so that we can recreate it. I should have saved that probably. But I know because there was like this really specific shape next to it, this shape over here, which means that it's probably this building over here. Well, no, doesn't feel like this one. This one is it? There we go. So this is the building over here. Now, you can use this view if you want. What I normally like to do is I like to simply go ahead and go into our street view, and then I can have a better look at what the building looks like. And we can see that it's like one of those classic really large concrete buildings. Maybe let's move a bit back. Street view is your friend in everything that has to do with Gay art. Even if it's like props, assets, reference, whatever, it's always your friend. So having this stuff, now, there's a few things that we are going to need to think about. One is that everywhere where we have windows, we will most likely have two types of variations. We will have one that will show interiors in our buildings, and we will have another one that will just show like windows that you cannot see through. So basically, Oh, actually, this one is perfect. Yeah, you can literally see the effect. So sometimes because there is light, you can clearly see through the windows and you can see bind. And sometimes because there are reflections, you cannot see through the windows. And we are going to slightly get the same effect like that because if we need to have interiors on every single building like this, two things will happen. One, or the interiors will look very repetitive because we need to create many different because we are not going to create many different interiors. Or what you need to do is you need to create a massive amount of interiors just to make it feel logical, which is both more expensive to render and takes way more time. So keep that in mind. Windows are their own things. We don't need to worry about it. Now, the second thing that we want to think about is materials. So this building over here, it's pretty much concrete, as you can see. I do feel like, yes, it does have quite a bit of geometry, so it's up to you how much geometry you want to give it. I'm probably going to make my windows a little bit wider, to be honest, just to minimize the amount of geometry. But if I look at the building, it mostly feels like it's like a single material. So whenever we create buildings, there are often two ways that we can do it. We can use tilable textures, which are just repetitive textures like we have seen with the grass and the dirt from our mountains, or we can use something called the trim sheet and a trim sheet. Let's go ahead and have a look. Here we go. So here is an example of like a trim sheet. Now, you can see this entire environment, and a trim sheet is basically one single texture in which we reuse the same elements over and over again. For example, all of these elements, like I know that this is not a building, but it's the same concept. All of these elements like over here, we have the window, we have this pillar, we have this floor, and we have this wall. All of these elements use the exact same trim sheet texture. So if I go ahead and go up here and open it up, you can see that this is the trim sheet. You can see that here it's like a piece of the floor panel. It has a piece of rubber. It has a piece of metal. It has some additional floor panels. And with that kind of stuff, you see, you can see the floor panels, you can see this one. We are able to basically repeat everything over and over again. Now I have entire courses on how to do this. However, for something as large as a building, I often do not recommend it for the core material. What I mean with that is right now this building, as you can see, it's very clearly a concrete material. However, there are also sometimes trim sheets can be very useful for these kind of small details for like a trim sheet where you just have these details inside the trim sheet, and that way you can save a lot of texture memory. It all has to do with optimization. However, I feel like whenever we have these really large textures over here, like we have these bricks over here, which need to be repeated many, many times. And over here, we have these bricks or like the concrete. Then I recommend tile boll materials. I guess for window frames, if you want, you can use a trim sheet. However, for a vista asset, I sometimes literally use a plain color for window frames. I will also be doing that here. Like, I'm not even using a metal color. I'm just using a plain color because from the distance that we will be previewing this, you will never ever be able to see the actual detail in a black metal compared to a plain color. So knowing that and knowing that we have a building, what we will be doing for this building is we will be recreating the building, slightly altering the windows. For your base, it is up to you what you want to do. Over here, these buildings have a base. You can create a very very plain looking base like maybe some shop fronts and stuff like that. And I recommend making those quite generic. So I can give you a look, or I will give you a preview on how to do those. So that's definitely something that we can do. However, we are mostly focused on the large scale building. The reason for that is because it's use cases. Often for Vista assets, you have two use cases. One of them is far away. Like this. When you are this far away, as you can see, it is very difficult, especially if you have trees and everything to see any detail in like the basis. So sometimes it's as easy as simply pushing the building all the way down so that it just looks like one big building a bit like you see over here. Another use case, which is the use case that we are going to have is that we are going to have a like viewpoint, let's say, we are going to have a viewpoint like this. I want to make a presentation scene, so it's really difficult to, like, do this accurately. I want to make a presentation scene from like a skyscraper, and the skyscraper, I cannot properly show you, unfortunately. We are looking down from a window in a skyscraper, and we see like part of the city. Yeah, something like this. So let's say that you have, like, a skyscraper, and our presentation scene will be that we are looking down, and we see, like, some of these buildings in here. And we also have, like, a cool night scene where we will have, like, missive and stuff, and we will see part of the roads and maybe, like, some of the trees. So just keep that in mind that that will be our use case. Because that will be our use case, it is one of the few use cases where I recommend where are you? There we go. No, wait. Sorry, I was looking at this. It's one of the few use cases where I recommend having, like, a very, very basic entrance and stuff like that on our building. And I completely lost the building. There we go. There it is. Keeps changing Cool. Butoke. Okay, awesome. Now, that was about it for the explanation. Sorry that it took so long. What we're going to do now is we are going to work on our building over here. So let's jump straight into Trees Max. I will have this view over on my other scene. And the first thing that we are going to do is we are going to define the shape of our building, which in this case, is a very, very simple shape. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go to the top. Sometimes what I like to do is, I like to select one red square so that I can from the top view see which building I need. And then I can see that this is the building. Now, this one is square, so the techniques that we have been working on is not very useful for something like this, although we can get the scale right right away. So I'm just creating a box. However, if, for example, have buildings like this or like this, it's way more easy if we have an actual preview. So over here, we have a square building, and we know that the building is sitting exactly at 000. Do keep that in mind. So what you can do is you can temporarily move it up because I do want to try and keep the same scaling. We can temporarily move it up, select the top, and move this one up up until this point. Now we know that this is going to be the scaling of our building, I can now go ahead and reset the Z axis to zero. And nextly I can do this with all of them. I can set this building now to zero, zero, zero, and over here for our blockout what I often like to do. And in Blender, it's called collections and in Maya, it's called layers and in trees max also called layers. I just add this to an extra layer. And call it back up and then turn it off. Okay, cool. So we have our buildings. Let's turn on our edges and faces over here. And then the first thing I want to do is I want to define most of the solid elements. That's going to be that over here we have an element where it's sticking out and we have some various bill elements, and then over here, we also have a top element like that. Now, knowing that, often what you can do is you can simply use a scale reference. I like to just simply go up here and then if, for example, have a look, now, I know that my scaling is not completely correct, so I need to not completely correct based upon human scale. So that's something we need to work. For now, I'm just going to create a very quick cube over here, and I want to set the height of this cube to be 180 centimeters. And the length and the width, I don't know, 20 by 20. This is the average scale of a person, knowing that you can see that our buildings are way too small. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to probably create a loop, 1 second. I'm just looking at my have a L. I need to look at it from a distance. So seeing the trees are annoying. There we go. That's better. Okay, so seeing this, let's say that I'm going to create a loop roughly around here. We can still move it around. And the reason I want to place a loop here is because I'm basically guessing where our building is going to be inserted at the base over here. That's basically what I'm doing right now. So having this loop over here, yeah, that gives us, plenty of building. And then what I'm going to do is I'm simply going to go ahead and I'm going to scale up my building to a massive size. And this is what I was talking about. Have a look at what you at the size. For example, car is often at the height of, like, the neck of a person. Let's see if there's anything. Oh, yeah, wait wait. Over here, we have a door. So here we It's yeah. Okay, you can see it. Here we have a door, and a door is often two meter ten, something around that area. I'm not going to go super precise. But let's say that if a person is this height, one, two, three, let's say 3.5 to four people long. So we can go over here, one, two, three, and four. And now we can scale up our building. And for now, I'm just going to move it over here until the top of our line is roughly hitting that point. And that's basically how I tend to like guess this kind of stuff. If this is a building I would be walking at up close, I would be way more accurate because I would probably make the building modular, but now I'm not doing that. So knowing that this is our building over here, now what we can do is we can start by defining where we want to have these pillars, the top and these bottom frames over here. So for that, let's go one further over here. Okay, so we have even space between the top and the bottom over here, which means that I can most likely simply select these etges, place a double connect, and then evenly space out this connect. And once again, I'm honestly just guessing over here. And I'm going to guess something like, Yeah, something like this should be fine. Okay, cool. So we got those pieces also done. Now what we need to do is we need to create some pillars. I can go ahead and go up here, press Connect, and I can see that these pillars, they are both of them are at an even spacing away from the corner over here. So it's up to you to decide, so I'm going to go for maybe like let's do. And keep in mind that this is a massive scale. It might not feel like a massive scale, but keep it in mind. So I can go ahead and I can create a quick box from the line that we just created to the end. And then just as an easy trick, often, you can use cubes simply to measure. So I can now move my cube over here. And I can do the same where I go in here, connect. And this time, I just need to move this back a little bit. And now we know that we have pretty much like a rough, even connection on all four corners. Now at this point, we are just going to go ahead and we are going to select these edges. And we are going to, in this case, arther hanf or Bevil depending which program you are using, and you can use this to basically split your edges up. Don't make it too big. As I said before, it's a massive building. I don't want to make it too big, so I'm just going to go and I keep looking at my Google maps because the base is always the most important one. Let's set this to 8.5 centimeters over here, something like that. Yeah, that should be pretty good. Okay. Awesome. So at this point, what you can do is for these pieces over here, we can temporarily, although we are going to improve them later on, we can select all of this around, and then we can go ahead and go to extrude settings, and extrude your meshes by the local normal and push them in until we get something like this so that it is pushed in. Then we can also go ahead and we can get rid of our base over here because we don't really need to see the bottom anyway. So let's go ahead and do that. And over here, I'm just going to select by angle. Basically just get rid of the base. That's pretty much it. Okay, so we got that one, done. Whenever you extrude, sometimes these side panels, they are not perfectly straight. So I like to always just, like, select them. Scale them flat just to make extra sure that they are perfectly straight. Although, in this case, they look pretty much fine. Okay, awesome. And then what we can do is later on, we can place like some window frames or something super, super basic right next to this. Okay, so we have this. We now have the stop bath. And often for an easier use case, well, first of all, what I want to do is I want to go up here, and I want to that might actually be a little bit too thick. I want to give this like a little trim. It's a bit difficult to see over here, but often these buildings do have, like, a trim like this. Maybe it's easier if I show you here, here, they have a little trim, and then they go inside. So what I will do is I will actually let's do this. Let's add another swift loop roughly up here. And then for this one, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to scale it and it will be super sensitive with the scaling, probably, here, see. So that's one. I'm just going to twine and scale this like that's two. And then I'm just going to go ahead and do one extra extrude. Local normal, extrude this out a little bit. Yeah, something like that. And then what we can do is we can go ahead and I'm just going to select the center and grow my selection a little bit. And then I'm going to, like, extrude this in and extrude this down. There we go. So that just gives us a very simple top over here. At which point that we can later on, I will just have a bunch of, like, rooftop assets that we can throw in there to kind of like atras RC. But those assets, we will not go on how to create those. I will just have those ready to go. Okay, so we have a top part. If we go ahead and go back, data. Yeah. Okay. So we have our top part and we have the side parts that we are also going to work on and we are going to slightly alter them. Now what we want to do is we want to start working on our windows over here. What I always like to do because the windows is often such a large undertaking. I often like to just select the areas where we want to work on our windows, and I like to go ahead and detach it so that it becomes its own model. Geometry for vista assets, they don't have to be as perfect as geometry for up close. I'm going to do the same over here. We have these assets over here. I'm going to detach this I'm also going to go ahead and I'm going to detach this one. The reason for that is because we are going to create some details over here. However, I don't know yet what these details will be until I make my windows because you can see that they link up with every single window. There are a lot of windows here. I'm going to try and save a little bit of polygon count by lowering the amount of windows. First thing that I want to do is I'm going to do I still have a scale v? I guess I lost it. Let's go ahead and do another one. So let's make a floor. If a person is 180, I'm going to make a floor like two meter or 20, probably, just to make it quite a low floor. And this one, I'm going to set like at 15 by 15. Often it's like between 22250 that's the floor height. So if this is going to be a floor height, we have a floor. And then what we will have is we have an intersection. So this intersection, it's going to be it's like this one. 25 centimeters maybe. And let's try 25. 25 centimeters. That feels a little bit low. Tie 35. Let's try 40. I'm just trying to give it a little bit of space in between. Okay, so we got these pieces over here. And now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this again, and then just keep duplicating it up and up and up until we have reached roughly the end over here. And yeah, that looks like a pretty solid end, to be honest. I'm gonna go ahead and, you know what? Let's move this one up to give it like a proper closure. And over here, let's also move this one up, and we will go ahead and improve that later on. Okay, so we have these window pieces over here. Now what you can do is, I'm just going to do manual placement. You can, of course, do actual automator placement. But I don't know, I feel like often this is good enough measurement for manual because it's a vista asset. I don't want to spend too much time on it. So I don't care about that 1 centimeter difference. If you would be making this as an actual asset that will be in your game level up close, like you're walking right next to it, then I highly recommend using modular assets and not just creating everything out of one building. However, for a vista asset, the strength comes from being able to just place down an entire building wide away without needing to do any type of additional work. S. So we have this one. And this one, actually. Okay, so let's see. So we have this one. I'm going to probably move this then up because just like I move the other one up, this one will also be moved up. There we go. That probably gives a pretty good closure like that. So we have that one done. If you want, you can now go ahead and just delete these pieces over here. Okay. So we now have our floor heights defined. The next thing that we want to define is how many windows do we want to create? We know that over here, these are going to be pillars and we need to have windows right next to it. And this is why I separate it because now that I separate it, it's way easier for me to just go ahead and select everything. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go up here, and I like to because the spacing is never exactly the same, we do need to do a little bit of ifiness, but I like to go ahead and ter connect. And just see how many windows I can get away with. Remember, you need to keep some space in between the windows. Here, the windows are way smaller than what we will have. We will have quite larger windows and quite larger space, as you can see over here, but that will, in our case, also improve the readability a little bit more. I think like around three windows is probably, I don't know, three. If I do two, there's a lot of spacing, but those would be really large windows, to be honest. Yeah, I do feel like the scale is a little bit small. Yeah, okay. So let's try three windows over here. And then the next thing that I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and Um, S No, wait, I don't want to change for just yet. I'm just going to create a box, and I turn on an outer grid that I can create a box over here. So the size of one of our windows is about yeah, so long length and a width, about 125 centimeters. Okay. Now, what I'm going to do over here, these spacings should be exactly the same. So if I go ahead and just isolate these two pieces, go to maybe my top view and just select these corner pieces, I should be able to just simply line up the scale I select them by adding a connect feature. So that pushes out. And that one pushes in. That's a little bit annoying. In that case, what we need to do is we need to do like a tiny bit of I won't call it cheating, but let's just go ahead and place a box on both sides over here, and then we just need to do the sides individual because we cannot move one side to another side. Oh, sorry, don't place the box on the outside. Don't know why I sat on the corner. So instead, it might take be a little bit more time consuming. However, we can use symmetry if you want. Why? Yes, we can use symmetry if you want. So if you want, we can just create a quarter of a building, and then we can copy it over. It's kind of up to you if you want. So if you just place one single connect down here, it can save us a bit of time. So it should probably do that. Anyway, if we just go ahead and focus on only a quarter of a building, we want to get started by selecting one site over here, placing the three connects over here. And basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take advantage of the corner window and make that one a little bit smaller because it will be a larger window anyway. And I can do the same over here, connect. See? And then this window will just be a bit smaller, but you will never really be able to properly see that. Now at this point, we can go ahead and go up here and one, two, three. Oh, that's going to be an interesting scale. I feel like these windows might need to be a slightly slightly wider. So let's just have a look at that. Let's go ahead and go to Connect. Yeah. So we have three. But I do want even spacing. So it might be best to keep these windows like this so that they are slightly thinner. You won't really notice. And if you want, you can make your building a little bit wider and stuff like that to work with it. But I think for now, this should be fine. One thing we need to keep in mind is where the pillars are. So right now, we need to split up this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this, this and this. And these edges over here. Okay. Let's go ahead and cham for them. And we are going to go ahead and cham for them, and after that, we will do, like a bevel because you can clearly see and yeah, then there is, like, additional extrusion up here. I felt like the windows were bevelled inwards, or are they just, like, straight? It's really difficult to see if they are perfectly straight inside or if they have, like, a slight bevel on them. I don't know if you guys can see it. Ah. They feel straight to me, to be honest. Whoa. Didn't mean to do that. Yeah, you okay, Google Maps? Yeah, I have a feeling that they are probably straight inside. So let's just go ahead and go for straight. And this is something like it's really difficult to change up later on. So do make sure that you're happy with it. But I don't know if you're making the same building as I am creating right now. So, okay, we have these pieces. We are going to go ahead and we are going to chem for them and give them quite a thin chamfer over here. Let's see. Maybe like two. Let's try 2 centimeters over here. Okay. I feel like they are a little bit long. Maybe maybe I miscalculate the floor height, but I mean, I calculated the height based upon a normal person. So theoretically, that should be pretty much fine. Anyway, so we have these ones. Now what we can do is we can simply do a normal extrude. So we basically want to select all of these pieces. And then especially for this one over here. And then what we can do is we can do normal extrude. And let me just double check that I did not forget anything. Let's see, so we extrude this one in, and then we will create a window frame. And I might want to, I might want to just try and create that window frame directly in here. The only thing is that it might be annoying when we want to apply our materials because we need to, like, select the window frame and stuff like that. But that's something that we can have a look at later on. So I'll just, like, show you what I mean. That's probably easier. Let me just pass the video until this one is done. It's a lot of windows. Okay, here we go. So I have all of these windows extruded in, and now it's up to you how much detail that you want to create. I want to create some window frames, so I'm going to, first of all, extrude this in on the local normal, very important and push it into the amount that you want, which is probably something, yeah, like minus four. Might be like a nice amount, minus four. And then what I want to do is I want to press Okay. Right away, I want to go to inset, and I want to inset my meshes. In Maya, this means extruding and only changing the offset, and in blender, it's also called inset. I basically extrude these meshes over here, and then I'm just going to go ahead and press Okay, because we are now working with a lot of asset management. So what we're now going to do is we are now going to go ahead and extrude this again. See? And now we have this. Now in order to basically keep our selection, often, I will do it universal. Normally, what I would do in Max is I would grow this twice that I select everything. I go down here and call this frames, and that way, what happens is when I deselect, I can save my selections. But I understand that this doesn't work the same in every single software. So the alternative is to simply detach, okay? And now because they are detached, we have a lot more flexibility. So we now got these pieces over here. The next thing is that we have all those windows over here. I don't know, can you shrink your? Okay, so yeah, you cannot shrink your selection. That's a little bit of a pain because that would mean I would need to select them again, and then I would need to delete them. The reason I want to delete them is because I want to make my windows separate. So what I'm going to do, should I delete them? I'm just having a If I delete them, it will be annoying for you guys. Like, I can look past it, but it will be annoying when we mirror it for you guys to, like, properly see what we are doing. If I keep them in, however, yeah, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to keep this a little bit more non destructive. And basically, what I will be doing is I will mirror my entire building, but I will keep it as an instance, which means that later on I can simply remove these windows and replace them with our custom windows, and then it will just automatically update. So just trust me. This is just like creating a basic building. So we have these pieces over here. One thing that I notice is that it has this nice little frame over here, which I quite like to capture. Now, unfortunately, I don't think just capturing this because of the angles, that would probably be a little bit more annoying. What we could also do is we could also move this. However, if we do that, we do have some additional faces that are hidden, and then we can extrude this out. That is technically another way that we can do it if you want to do it quickly. Or what you can do is you can create a custom model and I'm just having a think if a custom model, a custom model is probably fastest because I only need to create it in one area. So let me just quickly create a random box over here. And let's place this box in this position up here. And let's move it down here. And now I can just go ahead and I can convert it soon at a Polly and I just realized I did not have my keyboard registration turned on, so I do apologize for that. So basically, I have this piece. It's just sticking out if I look at my reference, and it looks like it's pushed down a little bit. It looks like it's a little bit if I turn off my snap rotation like this. Oh, wait. Let me first of all, fix the thickness before doing that. I don't make it too thin because then we won't be able to even see the detail. So move this down a bit, push it down here. And I guess last thing that I want to do is I just want to go ahead and delete that backface over here, that I do not need like this. And then it's up to you, with your window frame if you maybe want to move this down or just going to change to local. Let's make it a little bit thinner. It's up to you what you want to do with your window frame. If you want to match this up with your window frame or if you are happy with this specific look. Now what I can do is I can simply go ahead and move this over here. And as expected, we have a slight difference, but that's because of that one window. So what I can do is I can, first of all, move it like this. That's quite curious how big of a difference that is, to be honest. Yeah, that is really a big difference, isn't it? I'm going to slightly alter that because I'm a little bit worried. I did not expect it to be that big of a difference. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to select all of these etches. Oh, sat spector view. And I'm just going to wing it a little bit. I'm going to move this one, a little bit to the side. And this one until visually, I don't really see a big difference. Okay, so let's do that one, and we will know soon enough. So I know that it's not perfect yet, but don't worry about that. We cannot make it perfect since we don't have enough space for that. And now I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to move these pieces inside over here so that they are not clipping with the rest of our concrete. Okay. Awesome. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and duplicate this, and we only really need to create one frame of them. I'm just going to move this one over here, and then I will most likely also want to wing this one a little bit. So let's go ahead and select it. And let's see. So yeah, definitely, I can work much cleaner whenever I do like modular assets. But, in this case, I'm lucky that Vista assets are so flexible. Like, it's almost like cheating with how easy you can just, like, fake stuff with Vista assets. So let me just kind of, like, move this stuff out until by the naked eye, it feels almost like most of the windows are the same with Okay. We also have this one over here. So while we're at it, we can just as well move this one in a bit. Honestly, these ones look fine right now. Yeah. Okay, cool. So that is now altered. So I'm really happy that I decided to go for, like, a mirror or like symmetry rather than anything else. Let's go ahead and turn on snap rotation, rotate this one. Oh, wow, we are at 40 minutes already. That's really fast. Don't feel like I've done a lot. I'm just going to go ahead and web up these frames. Then I'm just going to copy them a bunch of times. And then we should be golden. And we will continue on to the next chapter where we just need to work. So this is just simply takes time. We are simply doing some basic modeling, which takes time. The stuff becomes way more interesting when we actually apply our interiors and when we apply our materials. Now, again, like our materials, we will just go ahead and use mega scans for those just to capture some easy concrete materials that we can use, for example. Okay. For this one, you can replicate this in other software. However, this is the easiest to do inside of blender, which is that you just do a symmetry. Oh, wait. Let's first of all, reset our transforms so that everything looks correct. Yes, we do asymmetry. We set our symmetry to the Yaxis and then we simply rotate it 90 degrees over here. And when you do that, see you can push it. And that will just instantly here just add like some smoothing and there we go. Okay, awesome. So we got this one. Now it's just a matter of quickly combining these few pieces because t 15. 14 Creating Our Vista Building Part2: Okay, so what we're going to do now is we are just going to go ahead and continue with our building over here. The first thing that I want to do just to make sure that everything is properly lined up because vista buildings are one of the few times where I don't really care about connecting every single vertice whenever we, of course, split the mesh. But what I do want to do is I want to go ahead and turn on my snapping and it's snapped to vertex points, and I just want to re snap them to our vertex points, which basically makes sure that everything's exactly on top of each other and that we do not have any, tiny holes or anything. The reason for this is because remember when we do symmetry. So if I look like William Close, there's like a tiny hole in between these pieces, so I'm just snapping it back. And that well, in general, improve our mesh. And then what we're going to do is we're going to just add some small details over here. Then we're going to add some window or window, some store fonts and stuff like that. And then pretty much like our base mesh is done. So let's go ahead and finish this off over here. Don't forget that we also do need to do the same stuff. Up here with this one. So not the most fun stuff to do. Oh, Do be careful that thinking still goes correctly there. But once this is done. Then what we can do is we can just go ahead and continue on. I don't know why it's so sensitive with the weird placements. That's strange. There we go. And, of course, if you want, if you have the time, you can connect all of these vertices over here, but we are now going to actually add more edges to these two pieces over here. Come on. So I'll try to do this a little bit quicker for you guys. But leave that's it white? Oh, no wait, sorry. I still need to do this one, I think. Okay, that should be it. Okay. Awesome. So we have these things, and what we're going to do is we are going to just add like some really basic, concrete strips over here. In my case, it's easier to do these concrete strips in geometry. Because then I can just use the same concrete. So then I don't really have to worry about it too much. Let's see. We look at it over here at the top. I guess the first thing that I want to do is I want to just place a quick double connect at the top and bottom, which will just make my life a little bit easier when we start placing these strips. So just cup like a little connect that we basically stop all of our details in these two points. We can do the same over here, just select this. And for this one, it's especially important because here these connects go over straight into the rest of these details. And now that we've done that, if we just go ahead and select both of these, we basically want to try and give a fairly even spacing in between here to create these additional details. So since these are all at the exact same level in terms of the geometry or at this exact same position, I can just go ahead and gon out and add a pol, which in three years Max just means editing it at the exact same time. And then what I can do is, let's say, we probably need to do this separately again. So I can go ahead and go up here and let's go to connect. And let's probably add three connections or shall we do four? No, no, we probably want to Oh, yeah, we want to line this up with our windows, don't we? I have a look? Yeah, we want to line this up with our windows. I completely forgot about that, to be very honest. So if we want to line up with our windows, I mean, it's kind of up to you what you want to do. In this case. I think I'm just going to go ahead and do it manually. I know that it might take a little bit longer. But it is not the most difficult one to do. If I just go ahead and convert spec to added poli over here, and I can probably actually reuse this one at the top, so I shouldn't need to worry about that too much, but we'll see. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to basically roughly place. When we place it like this, I guess that you can merge all of these pieces together, yes. Because you now have coincidentally the exact correct Polycount. So in the end, I do realize that we could have just extruded this and that would have probably extrude this when we were extruding our windows, and that would have probably made things a little bit easier. But for now, honestly, it might seem boring, but because it is a bit boring to do, that's why it feels longer, but in the end, it might only take 5 minutes to do everything. So let me just go ahead and pass the video, and I will just continue placing all of these edges over here. Okay, so that is done. And now, just to keep our life easier, what we're going to do is we are just going to go ahead and select every other one over here. But you do not want to select, of course, your pillars. So the selections will be a little bit uneven like this. And then we're just going to go ahead and we are going to extrude those in, and for now, I'm just going to leave it at that point. Then what I will do is I will work on my shop windows, although those are going to be quite interesting because, of course, we have quite a height difference. One sec, let me just finish this. We have quite a height difference over here, and, of course, the shop windows would not be that absolutely massive. So we can, of course, have a look how they do it in real life. And in real life, I can remember that the shops are like, lower or something like that. So basically you have this one extrude settings. Normal push it in a little bit like this. There we go. That is more than enough detail. I'm just adding a little bit of additional detail because I know that the buildings, I will see them a little bit more up close. But if you, for example, have a skyline that is Willy far away, then I recommend not even adding any of these details. Then I recommend literally just having a texture of some windows and just placing those on it. There will be a little bonus where I will show you how to create an ultra low detailed building, but this will come after we have, of course, finished all of these buildings and stuff like that. But I still want to show you that. That's like a really old school method where you literally just throw on a texture on a cube, and there you go. You have a building something in that direction. So what I can do is I can go ahead and do this, one, two, one, two, one, two. Okay. And then if I extrude this in local normal. There we go. Okay. Awesome. So now with these things done, let's have a look at our shop windows over here, and then most of our building is pretty much ready to go for some texturing, but our texturing will once again be super simple to do. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to have a look Ah, see here as I expected. So it feels like the shop windows, they are quite large. She can see if this is the door, they are very large, and then they basically push in and then there will be another layer of windows. Also, what I can see over here is that you have a little trim where you have your concrete. Now, technically, this one is granite. However, what we will be doing is we will simply be using the same concrete but slightly changed the color. So this is an easy way to just quickly add that extra bit of variation. So yeah, that is quite high. I'm going to make this super simple shop windows. And the way that I like to do this is almost like modular. A. So I'm going to well, I'm going to, like, use this space over here as a base, and we can reuse the shop windows everywhere else. I'm going to go ahead and create a box. Oh, turn off out a grid. Over here. And let's make this box like 30 by 30 by 180. So we know that this is like a person over here. And next what I can do is I can create another box down here, and this one will be for, like, our shop windows. I'm just going to make this like quite thin windows because you will not be able to look through it or anything like that. So let's go ahead and just use this as a sample. You can make it perfectly modular if you want to. I'm just going to make it and manipulate it based upon my building. So we start with like a granite base over here. It's not too high, something like that. Okay. And yeah, I will also do some doors. Don't worry about that. So we have our granite base, and the next thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to duplicate the scube. I want to go ahead and I want to scale this probably somewhere along here. And then this one will be like our default shop windows, which goes up until, like, this point, probably. Okay. Yeah, let's do this point over here. Then I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to reuse, once again, the granite cube. I'm going to stone this in a little bit, and I'm now just going to create a little structure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's scalt in a bit. Now I'm just going to create the little structure behind it. I'm not going to make it as intense as I have on my reference because I just don't like it looking that intense. So let's go for something like this. Select the ends and do a double connect. Here we go. And you do want to try and go for, like, slightly larger shapes whenever you're working with Vista buildings if you want to be able to see the details. So you can see over here, I'm just pushing this in, and then I'm selecting the top face. Hold Oh, I wanted to hold Control to, like, select a loop around, but it's selecting the Wong loop. Basically, you want to select these pieces, contra them and then delete everything else because you cannot see anything else anyway. For these pieces, what we're going to do is we can simply extrude this out into a window. I do want to make it for that. Yeah, I want to make my cube exactly the size of these windows over here like this. And then we can simply go for an even spacing, let's go connect. Four, let's make them nice and big. Let's go for nice big windows over here. Next, what we're going to do is we're just going to go ahead and cha for them. Set this to zeros that we only have a single chamfer. And once again, look at it from a distance. I'm going to make my window frames a little bit thicker so that we are just able to even see them. And next what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and do another connect down here for two. Move them down. Connect here. Little one over here. And now at this point, what we can do is we can simply go ahead and I'm going to grab these planes and I'm going to detach them so that I can use them as glass right away. I'm going to hide selection. Next, I'm going to go ahead and grab the backplanes, and those I can just delete. Then if I go for border select, I can select all of these borders, and I can press bridge, and this will just automatically bridge the borders. And then once we unhide that one plane, we can push it back Panda. Here we have a plane. For now, I like to just go ahead and attach them again so that I can control them a bit more. Going to go up here, select this back line, and just move this back all the way. See, so you can see that I'm doing this really quickly. Because these will be the furthest away from the camera in my case, so I'm just going to do this as basic as possible. I can go ahead and I can go in here. I can, of course, just push this down. However, if you, for example, want to maybe do a double window, you can always go ahead and push it down more. And then if we go and center a Pivot point and, for example, a symmetry over here, we can most flip the symmetry around. See, we can quickly create a double line like that. Add a pole again, and then I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to slightly move this down. And if needed, you can move this one little bit back so that it is in the center over here. Okay, awesome. So that's like a really, really basic shop font over here. You can go ahead and you can, of course, reuse this shop font in all the sides like over here, and center my pivot and then rotate it 180. And see how far. But it's actually quite far away from no, you know what? No, that's not too far away. I like having it pushed in a little bit more. And also symmetry is your friend. I will show you how to do the corner in just a bit. But what I can do over here is even for this one, I can use symmetry. I can start at one point. And because it is way too large, I can simply go in and just cheat a little bit by using a quick symmetry and then pushing the symmetry modifier inside of here. And then what I will do is I will push it a bit further that we only have two windows left. And then add and add a pole so that we can edit everything, push one side over here, and place the other one in the center. See? And once again, you do want to center your pivot after this, rotate. Yeah, let's move this a bit further over here. Okay. Awesome. So at this point, for the corners, we are going to have basically two corners. One of them is just going to be windows, and one of them, I will just go ahead and create the most basic door you have ever seen, and that should pretty much do the trick. So corners are once again really simple. We grab one of our areas. We go ahead and we add a symmetry modifier on the on the X axis. Yeah, I think on the axis and flip it, and then simply snap rotate. Oh, no, no, not X axis. You know what I need to do? I think I need to reset my X forms or freeze your transformations, however, or remove your history. Whichever program you're using, they all have different names. So let's try that again now that I've done that. Okay, this is the one. On the Y axis, when it is not flipped. There we go. Found it. On the Yaxs rotate this like an even spacing over here, and then just push this back. This will be like a window piece over here. Any chance I can get exactly like a window frame. There we go. If I push it back, it's too bad that that window frame over here does not work, but it might be a bit easier if I just do a double window frame like that. And then alter things a little bit more. So let's see if I do that, and then I push this to roughly match up with the window behind it. And then I want to match this up to the side. No, I'm selecting something wrong. There we go. That's the one that I accidentally selected. So let's move this in. Let's go go to our top view. Okay, let's see. So we have two windows here, and then this one will become like a door later on, but I'm first of all, just going to create the base window version. So windows here. And then on this point, let's go ahead and just collapse this so that I can edit it. Honestly, it's up to you what you can do. I'm not really attached to, making it look perfect, so I'm just going to quickly extrude out like a plane over here and just call it today. Now, also, it does have some leftover jom tree, as you can see over here. This leftover jom tree, you can, of course, remove if you want to. Since I'm going to use Nanite, I'm going to basically say that it's not that important because Nanite will add hundreds of thousands of polygons to this mesh anyway, just for it to work. So I'm not going to be too worried. I do want to go ahead and just add a smooth modifier to fix my smoothing on this one, on this one and on this one over here. And now we can see that we have a pretty easy corner. There we go. So let's go ahead and grab. Do I have everything? Yeah, let's go ahead and grab this one. Copy it. Center, 90 degrees. And move it over here. And yeah, it doesn't have to line up, absolutely perfectly because that's not what I really was focusing on. I just need something presentable. And you can, of course, make it way more accurate. If you are making the Vista buildings anyway, you can just as well make them nice and accurate. It's just like in my case. Oh, whoops. It's just that in my case, begat is for tutorial, and I'm going to basically throw away all of the work that I'm doing after the tutorial is done since I don't really need them. I don't want to, of course, waste too much time. So I can see over here that the rotation messed up Did it mess up a lot? Yeah, it did mess up a lot. Sorry about that. Sometimes it's easier if you just merge things together because sometimes the rotation gets confused, and yeah, you can keep resetting your transforms and stuff like that. Or what you can do is you can simply quickly go ahead and just make it one solid object like that, and that makes it also easier to manage your pivots rotate it without any issues. There we go. Now we won't get any of those strange issues anymore. And I am going to fix those small problems where it's not touching the rest of the walls. So first of all, I will place them. Shall I I'll do another entrance over here on that side. So basically, just going to move this one. I want to probably place this one in the center because I am a fan of symmetry a little bit. Or not symmetry. I am a fan of, like, evenness. I feel like they would not just make windows at different widths because then you would also need to cut the glass at very specific points, and that would just be a lots of extra work. While for these large buildings, all of these glass and all of these frames would probably have been made very standardized. Okay, cool. So for our door over here, let's say that we make a little door around in here, so I need a scale reference. And let's say that I make the door from the end of this frame. Whenever you have an edge that is not completely straight, you can simply select it and scale it flat and then move it and then it becomes straight. So we got something like this. I can go ahead and I can select this piece, hold Shift, and rotate it, and then I'm just going to select this to its own object. So now I've duplicated my mesh, and right away, I edited it. And I can use that basically to create like the door frame. So if I just go ahead and place the door frame somewhere along this point, let's not make it too wide. Once again, I don't really care too much about, like, the scaling and stuff like that. Gonna place it over here. Oh, did not copy. Huh, that's strange. For some reason, it doesn't copy. But it does copy. Okay. That is weird. Doesn't matter. I managed to get a beam, and that's all I care about that I got one of those. And then for this one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go ahead and I'm going to move this one probably down over here. And this one goes all the way to the bottom. And this one I will probably move to the end like this, just to give it a better connection. And this way we can also control a little bit better the width of our door. Something like that. Next, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to place another loop, scale flat, place loop here, delete, whatever is on the side of it. And yeah, I'm just going to bridge it, and I'm just going to place it in front of here. I'm not too worried about that. If you want, you can do it like this where it ends over here, but I like to just have like a chunk sitting around there. So I can go in here. I can select the bottom face and push this one also down, and then I can select the Oh, I need to place in Edge connect, probably need to place it over here. There we go. And once again, for the glass, you can just go ahead and because it is already detached, I can probably simply move it up. And place a loop on it, and then extrude this down again. So then now over here you can see that we have a frame. Need to do some cleanup, like bridging this gap that we use to remove it. There we go. Simple door, simple frame. And at this point, if you want, oh, wait, I can actually reuse this one over here. You can, of course, also create the actual door mesh. So what I tend to do is I tend to just make this willy quickly in those cases. Because I don't want to waste too much of your time. This is not really a muddling tutoil so that's why I don't want to also spend too much time. So we have a door, and if you have a look, it's a bit difficult to see, but it's like a standard door frame with, like, a wider base. So it's basically like this. It's basically a connection over, like here. You can choose the width. Probably gonna go for like 60. Then there is another connection at the top the one at the top is even to the ones at the side like this. And then the one at the base over here, it's quite a bit wider, like you can see. I feel like I want to probably scale this out, maybe. Yeah, I feel like I want to scale this out a bit more to give it a little bit more space. Yeah, here, that feels better already as soon as I did that. So make sure to, of course, alter all of your meshes to reflect this quick change. There we go. Okay. So we got this one over here. And then what we can do is we can just go ahead and oh, I can see the back. There we go. I selected. The lets play a bridge all around. Maybe make it a bit thicker. And we will, of course, also have like glass sitting in here. So at this point, you can just go ahead and I know, just create a plane, turn an outer grid so that you can snap the plane right away on your door. And then, push it in. And then if you really want to, you can even create a little door handle for which I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to create or use a line where I just create like a square like this. The most basic door handle you will ever see, it's just a simple square. I basically figure out roughly the height, and coincidently the height is pretty good already. Maybe make it a little bit bigger and higher. And I'm just going to give the ends a little bit of, like, a fillet to make them a little bit round. And then what I will do is I will add, in this case, it's a sweet modifier, but basically, you just want to guide a cylinder around. Make it quite low resolution, maybe like one. There we go. And that's already still quite high resolution. But there you go. Most basic door ever, but from a distance, it totally works. So we got these pieces done over here. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to select them. Oh, I was worried about that, that it's annoying to select them now. Then I'm just going to do some manual selecting. Here's this everything? Yes. Okay. And then what I can do for this one is I can simply well, another twig in Tres Max is to isolate your mesh and then attach everything in the list because it will only show whatever is attached into the isolated list. And then I can just do a simple mirror over here, flip it around. And move it into place. There we go. Now we instantly have it. After mirror in trees Max, I do always like to reset my X forms. And the reason I want to do that is because I want to make sure that my normal maps are not flipped or that my normals are not flipped. So if I go ahead and just check. Okay, so that's all looking totally fine. Okay. Awesome. So there you go. We have ourselves a building. Now, of course, it doesn't look like much yet without any textures, but it is a really solid start. So what we will be doing in the next chapter is we will go ahead and we will get started by looking up textures for our building, and we are going to apply those. Once that is done, we go to a real and then the real thing starts, which is going to be the interiors. That's the biggest thing. This is just basic modeling. Don't worry about these numbers over here like 160,000 polis is because we have a massive backup. If I actually select everything, it's around 20 polis 40 verts, which is fine when you use nanite. However, if your buildings really far away, you might want to simplify things even more. So let's go ahead and continue on to our next chapter. 16. 15 Creating Our Vista Building Part3: Okay, so we are now going to go ahead and get started by finding our materials and applying them. Now, we are going to make some specific decisions. Let me say like that in this building in order to basically save the amount of texture that we need to use. I want to get away with this entire building using only two different textures. And the reason for that is simply to optimize the material more. The more texture you have, of course, on your building, the more expensive it is to render. Now, of course, you could have used trim sheets for that, however, we are going to use tips. And the way that we are going to basically save some stuff is we are going to find a really nice concrete texture. And we are simply going to split up our building in multiple materials that will have differences in darkness and differences in color that we can control inside of unreal engine. And then next to that, we also have our window frames, which are just going to be like a plain color. And our glass, I don't really count because our glass that's going to be part of the interiors and everything, which we will go over in just a bit. Now, normally, what I would do is normally I would use vertex colors. And vertex colors is a way that you can basically give your specific vertices or faces a different color. And that way, what you would be able to do is you will be able to inunreel assign materials based upon those colors. I can show you if you want, very quickly, although we won't be using it. So here, if I go to vertex paint, what I would have been able to do is I select one piece, and I want to go vertex colours. And then I would, for example, make one of them. I would make red. Like that. And then if I select another one and I will make it green and you want to go for RGB, so red, green, blue, like this. Now you can see that I've assigned vertex calls to these different phases, and inside of unwel you are able to then use those to basically apply different materials based upon your vertex color. Now the reason we are not going to do that is because I want to use Nanite and unfortunately, Nanite does not support vertex colors yet. 1 second. Let me just go ahead and set this back to normal over here. And this is basically the reason why I want to use just separate materials. Makes it a lot easier. So let's go ahead and go back to mega scans because that one is like a really easy resource to find some stuff. If we go source files, this is really large. Let's go over here. Buildings textures. And here I will go ahead and I will start with concrete underscore 01. And I also want to have something on my hoof. So I'm going to call this Roof 01 for the roof slates. Okay, so surfaces. And I want to just have a quick look. Yeah. It's like a pretty clean, yellowish looking concrete, not too many specific details. So knowing that, I can just go ahead and go concrete, and I want to probably go for smooth or painted concrete. Probably smooth concrete to get start with. One concrete floor. But this one parking garage, concrete floor. That one might actually be. Of course, there's a floor, but it doesn't matter. It's just concrete. This one has two specific details, I feel. This one might also work. I have a feeling that, where are you? Parking garage concrete floor might be a nice one to use, although I'm a little bit worried that the details are too strong, to be honest. Now I look at it. But let's go ahead and open that up in another screen. And then what I will do is I also want to have a quick look at painted concrete and see if there's maybe something interesting in here, but I don't see something directly. No, so Casting stun, no. Yeah, I don't think I'm just trying to have a look, but I don't feel like there's anything else. And if this one doesn't work, we will just find a different one. The nice thing is that UVs, we only need to make them once, and even if we change out the materials, we can still just keep the same. So we can even, like, switch out materials for these buildings to use them multiple times, but have them looking slightly different. Okay, so over here, we have a concrete. Let me just quickly sign in to download it. Here we go, and it's up to you, you can easily get away with two K resolution. I will set it to four K, and then I will simply lower it inside of the game engine depending on my needs because inside of wheel, you can simply lower down your resolution of your texture like that. Now, another one that we need is we need a roof. I hope maybe I can just type in a roof and then I'm able to find what I'm looking for. I'm looking for, like, that really specific ta look. But it's why texts.com. And let's try over here and go, maybe I can type a roof over here and then it will work. Here, this one. I don't know how to call it Bitumen Roofing, I guess, that's what you call it. Yeah, I that one or are there more variations that is also cool. No, I think that is like the right one that I want to use. Where are you? There you are. Okay. Over here. So what you can do is you can just go ahead and you can download this one. I'm just going to go for the free version for you guys. So I want to have the albedo, normal, and roughness, and that's probably all I need. So first of all, let's drag in concrete, which for some reason, the file they called it asphalt, so I just want to open it up to make sure. Okay, yeah, that's fine. Okay. And then I'm going to go also for roof, and I'm just dragging in those textures into my roof folder over here. Now comes the path of assigning materials and UVNwpping which might take quite a while to do. Let's go ahead and go over here in our material, and I'm going to get started with a Concrete Crete Underscore. Wow, I still can type. Concrete underscore zero, one, underscore A, and let's see how many do we need? A, B. We can also use B over here. And maybe C at the bottom. Let's do three variations. Concrete A. If you want, you can hold Control and you can drag it over here to duplicate it. Concrete B, concrete C. Roof, and frames. Let's start with that stuff. Yes. Okay. So now that we've got this point done, yeah, we also have a glass over here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do an automatic unwrap on my entire building. So first of all, in order to see everything a little bit better, let's go in concrete 01 A, and let's assign just our base color. Give me 1 second to load it up. I'm just going to select a bitmap. Now I want to go ahead and select this one, and I'm going to over white over here my Gamma in order to properly give it enough light. Okay. And so, yeah, the way that automatic unwrapping works inside of Unreal engine is inside of T max is really easy. You can even use triplanar mapping to do this in real engine. However, I will just do the unwrapping in here because it is a little bit easier. We basically assign our material, and it's just an automatic unwrap. It doesn't matter which software you use. All the softwares have automatic unwraps. So in my case, I will use a UVW map, set this to be a box to do a box unwrap. And then I make the box an even number like 500 by 500 by 500. And now you can see that it instantly has UV unwrapped, everything, just like that. So now that we've done that, the next thing that I'm going to do is at this point, I want to start to remove my windows because we are going to focus on those in a little bit, because we are going to place make a very specific window mesh. So I'm going to go my dipoli over here, and it might be a little bit annoying to be able to select everything. Here we go. But it will save us a lot of time if we do this now over here. So I can just go ahead and I can select this. The nice thing is that it will just automatically select all of our mirrod versions, and then we are going to delete this one, and then I'm going to show you how to create the fake materials because just in general, we first of all, want to just go ahead and have the systems working before we actually start applying them to the buildings. However, creating the systems is not too difficult. Well, actually, okay, no, it is a little bit complicated, let's be honest, and it is a little bit time consuming to create them. But we are going to have our interiors in three layers. Layer one is the fake interior, and this interior will look very realistic even when it's fake. Like, it will feel like there are three D models just sitting in it. It's not just going to be a simple image. It will feel like there are three models sitting in it that follow the camera around. And on top of that, we will have another layer, and this layer will be the curtain layer in which we will basically create an atlas with multiple different types of curtains and blinds and stuff like that that you can use. And once we've done that, we will have a last layer and that last layer is going to be our glass layer, and that one is really basic. It's just simply a layer of glass on front of it. The technique that I am using, it is slightly means you get a slightly higher plcunt however, it will be so much easier to do compared to creating a really complicated shade that handles everything for you in those multiple layers, and I don't want to go that complicated because even I wouldn't probably know how to do it. The only thing that I'm a little bit worried about is that glass and nanite do not normally go together. However, in the latest update, they should be able to go together. Transparency should be able to work in the latest update with Nante. However, in the event that nans will not work, because I can, to be honest, remember that it was not working completely yet in the latest update, which is 5.1. In the event that it does not work yet, what we will do is I will just do it in the shader and I will show you how to do that. So there are multiple options on how to do this. I of course, have done the building before. However, the glass and stuff like that, I'm kind of winging creating the glass, so to be very honest, but don't worry. I will figure that out. So okay. We have these glass panels over here. Done. These ones will mostly contain our interiors, however, not all of them. The ones down here, I will most likely give them fake glass. So that would probably be like another material. So we have concrete roof frames. Fake glass because it is so far down and I don't want to create an interior for something as complicated as the ground floor level. Rooms are easier to basically create interiors for. So we will have a fake glass level on top of that. That is also fine. Yeah, I think for now, that should be fine. So okay, we have applied all of our concrete over here. That's totally fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over here to my top. And I want to go ahead and art and added pool. Oh. I'm going to go ahead and just grow my selection over here and this one is going to be a roof. Don't worry about the tiling. I know that the tiling is correct because of all the stuff that we have done. Sometimes this happens where whenever you apply a material, it tries to apply it everywhere, often just converting this to an added poly works better, as you can see over here. And now I convert it to an Adipol and it is able to read it as two different materials. I know it's a little bit annoying, but it's just one of those things. Now, for this one, the outsides are going to become No, wait, I will keep the outsize concrete zero so that it properly transitions. And then the inside over here. So if I convert this to Adipol and luckily it saved my selection from last time, I can go ahead and call this one concrete 01b over here. And at this point, I'm just going to hide selection everything that I have already finished. These pieces over here can also become concrete 01b. The day become a little bit darker. Right click height selection. This is just a massive frame, which is really annoying to preview right now, but This one we can once again convert to Alipol that's too bad. I lost the selection because I was showing you how to do. Maybe I can delete the vertex paint. Does that remember my selection? No, that sucks that I lost my selection, so I just need to quickly go ahead and select all of these frames. This one will also be dark, just like the other one. Oh, yeah, I like that. And then the bottom one, we are just needing to separate the glass from the rest of the frames. Oops. So yeah, nothing too special with just assigning our materials. So this one is also concrete B, and that should do that trick over there. Now, for these ones, we want to go ahead and make most of them our frames. I think it's easier probably at this point to just convert all of this to an dipole. And then I probably want to go ahead and for these frames over here. Since they are going to be fake, we should be able to just simply apply our fake glass. No, wait, I'm going to first apply my frames. That makes it easier. Let's just select everything. Let's grab our frames over here and apply frames on everything. And then we can go in set this one to fake glass. And if you want, you can quickly change the color to be like a little bit more like a bluish color so that we can see it. So that one is going to be fake glass. All of these bottom ones over here are going to become concrete C, which I probably want to also set to like a slightly different color. And over here, once again, this one, fake glass. So it should probably look something like that with our frames and everything else. Hight selection. So let's go over here. So this one is going to be concrete. This one is going to be fake glass, and this one is also going to be fake glass. Height selection. First of all, do this one. Oh, nice. It's already Oh, no, A did not remember my selection, so I need to select it anyway. Fake glass. Fake glass. Concrete. See, it's nothing difficult. It's just time consuming to do. But once this is done, we don't really have to touch the building anymore and we can just start focusing on our interiors, which will be what our next chapter will be all about. Over here, I'm just going to do this. And I'm going to make the fake glass, of course, super generic in these cases. Concrete. And normally this one would be like a different frames. If you want, you can go frames two. Yeah, I I do frame 02, and this one frames on score 01. The cool thing about the frames, because they are going to be plain colors, there's almost no expense on them because it's literally just a plain color that we are going to apply. So this one is also fine. And now we get to a little bit more like a more annoying area because we need to it's like one solid object, so we need to select more. So fake glass. And then over here, I can just select the entire bottom area, height Fake glass. Same over here. Oh, way, this one is not connected, so I can just select the separate model. Hey, I'm trying to do all of this stuff, of course, quite quickly, so you guys do not get too bored. But just in case for the people who also want to see how to actually model the buildings and not just know about the workflow, I want to include this stuff. But if you are confident in modeling, of course, and stuff like that, which often because I feel like a Vista asset is such a Vista assets is such a specific thing to learn that most time the people that are learning this kind of stuff, they would not often be beginners. They would be like people that already know quite a bit about the engine, and they just want to know the workflow on creating specific Vista assets and stuff like that. That's why I'm also not going to be too worried. But yeah, as you can see now, our building is pretty much ready to go, of course, without the glass. Awesome. So we have this stuff done over here. Now, next thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to create, like, a sample. Oh, wait, sorry. I completely forgot that these frames over here. Double checking? Yeah. These frames, I need to go ahead and apply the frame one material to them. Now it is done. Awesome. Okay, so as I was saying, in order to prepare going into unreal and actually creating a interior shader and everything like that, which will be a complete new chapter next time, I'm going to already go ahead and I'm going to create a plane going to place the plane over here like this. And what I want to do is I want to just move this back. And my main goal is to basically make this plane at the correct size. Now, scaling of the planes is not too bad. The nice thing about all these techniques is that we only need to create one floor, and then we can duplicate it down down down, then all we need to do is just juggle around our UVs a little bit, and then we have a lot of variation. So over here, there we go. We now have our plane also ready to go. I'm going to go ahead and set my plane to zero, zero, and zero for now and apply this to a new layer. Call it interior, turn it off and then select the entire building and also apply that to new layer. Building underscore 01. I accidentally place it into the one. There we go. Now we have our building and now we also have our interior plane over here. Great. Since this chapter is not too long, I'm also already going to go ahead and just export this specific plane to Unreal engine. Here we are inside of Unreal and we can go ahead and once again, create a new basic level just to preview stuff. I'm just going to go in assets, new folder. Buildings over here. I'm also just going to do a file save current level S and just go ahead and save this as our, just do buildings. Vista underscore. Buildings and save. Okay, so that's now also done. And then what we're going to do is if we just go ahead and go into our folder, we can already, prepare some small stuff. So let's go exports buildings to underscore unreal just in case and in here, I can go ahead and I can grab this plane, file export export selection. And I have a feeling that the plane needs to be square most likely in order for our interior to work better, but that's something that we can have a look at, of course. So don't worry about it right now. I can just go ahead and go in here and just call this interior underscore test underscore plane and save our scene or export. And go ahead and let's track it in here. And we don't need to really use nanite for now. That doesn't really matter. So combine meshes, and I'm just going to set the uniform scale back to one because this time we did do, like, pretty decent scaling, as you can see over here. So the scaling is pretty decent. I might want to quickly rotate it over here. Okay. Awesome. So we now have everything prepared. In the next few chapters, what we will do is we will create our system, which is very similar to the system that they use in the Metrics demo in order to create fake interiors along with everything else for our building. That will be quite a large chapter. It will also be quite a lot more technical. So I will try my best to, like, slow things down and really explain everything, and we are going to make something awesome. So let's go ahead and continue with this in the next few chapters. 17. 16 Creating Our Interior Room System Part1: Okay, so now what we're going to do is we are going to work on something really interesting, which is interiors. Now, we are going to borrow part of this system from the Matrix demo. I'm sure that many of you already have heard of this and else give it a look. The Matrix demo, it is like an Unrelengent five showcase demo, and you can just go ahead and have a look at it, and all of it is generated in UnrelgentFV. Everything that you see here is from UnrelgentFV. Now this is really cool. You can literally download this entire environment and all this kind of stuff here. You can literally play around everything. But basically, the goal with this was that and I have it over here, these are buildings from that specific demo, and they had an amazing system that can make your interiors feel much more realistic compared to just having those classical flat interiors. You know those interiors where basically, it's just like a flat image with like empty rooms. But over here, you can feel like there's actual sofas and there are actual products and everything standing against it. Then just like that, you can also see that there is a difference. You can see that over here some of these windows are not with interiors, some of them are with interiors. Now, what we are going to do is we are going to create something similar. I was so impressed by this, so I really wanted to know how to create this. However, there was almost no documentation. So I had to develop or recreate, so to speak, their entire workflow. Now, there's a few things before we get started that I want to let you know. If we want to go ahead and do these interiors, if I would literally show you the material, you can understand why, if I go to Oh, God. Let's just have a look. I should be able to go city sample buildings, just give me one sec. I just need to like I just load in, like, a building with an interior over here, and I just need to find the parent material. And you can see already like how many settings that are on here. This material that we have, just give me a second to load it. It's a very complicated material, safe to say, way too complicated to showcase you. Come on, where are you? Finally, I found it. Okay. So this material, it is way too complicated to show you how to create it from scratch inside of a as you can see over here, inside of a tutorial. It would be its own tutorial course on its own, all on its own thing. And on top of that, I would not have enough experience to properly explain to you what every node does. So you can see over here, we have a massive material. The reason that this is so large is that next to the interior system, which shows you like this fake system, it also arts the glass in this one material, and even adds all of our curtains and blinds and everything. All of that is being done in this one material. So that can be really, really overwhelming. So what I did for you guys is we are going to borrow parts of that material, but we are only going to borrow the interior parts. So if we go in our vista tutorial, I imported the material in here, and let's have a look. So I went ahead and I called it Windows simple, and this is the material that I changed for you guys. As you can see, I optimized the material. So all of this stuff, it's not mine. Credit goes to the Metrics demo. What I did is I basically just removed a bunch of stuff and optimized a bunch of stuff to get it more to make it more readable, where we have a few things over here. We just have some data orders. You don't have to worry about it. This stuff over here handles the UVs of our interior. This stuff over here handles the quality of the displacement, which is making your interior pieces look three D. Over here, this one handles the exposure so that we can control the brightness of our interior. And then over here, we just have some technical debuffer loading, some position loading and some more stuff that has to do with the height map and the dittering. I won't try to explain to you. The most important one is that over here, we control, we basically input all of the stuff, all of those things that are created are being inputted here, like your UVs, like your Ditter steps, like your actual masks and your actual cube maps and everything like that. And it will output it into an emissive that we can use. So don't worry too much about the material. It's simply too complicated for this type of a tutoil and it just wouldn't be worth going over it. However, we will have our hands full, honestly, creating the actual interiors that you see over here, and I'm going to show you how to do this, or I'm going to show you an example of the interior. But just creating those interiors, that alone will already take us quite a bit, because we need to create entire systems for it. One thing that I want to do is I created this cube over here, this rectangle. However, I want to turn it into a cube. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to quickly go ahead and move it down here instead of four windows, we will turn this into two. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go up here. There we go and make it into two windows. And then I just want to go into my UVs and just double check that the UVs are exactly going border to border. That's quite important that UVs are covering all of the borders over here, which they do. Okay, so having that done, I'm just going to quickly re export this, and then I can show you what the material does that I have, which is just like a leftover from the much larger material. Then I will show you that we are going to do it. And after that, we will go ahead and we will start step by step and we'll take small steps because there's quite a few steps in this. We will just simply go step by step in creating our interior system for one window, and once we have done one window, it's easier to just replicate it. So to unreal interior plane test, let's go ahead and export that. And now if we go ahead and go in here, and I will close this one. You can get this for free on the Unreal marketplace. So you can just go ahead and you can go to your lounger garment. Over here. And if you go free, permanently free, you should be able to find them in here. And else, what you can do is you can just type in matrix. Oh, Let's type in matrix over here. And here you can get the city sample. The city sample is the entire Matrix demo. However, if you type in building, and set this to low to high. Here is the city sample buildings, and the City sampl buildings are those buildings that I just showed you. So here, if you want to have a look, you can have a look around in the buildings. They're really interesting how they are created. It's all quite advanced technology on how they are all like, placed together using massive building generators and all that kind of stuff. And also with your interiors and everything. But in general, it's a great thing to just have a look at and just admire the quality of all of your buildings. So we will also be creating Vista buildings with basically interiors close to this quality. And the way that we are going to do that is if I just go ahead and I can close this one. I can go in our scene, and let's re import this. Okay. So over here we have our interior. What I can do is I have my window simple into the window interior. I'm going to right click and create a material instance for us. Interior on the score 01 on the score day because we will also have night interiors. And if I go ahead and so, yeah, I'm going to basically I've basically developed a more simplified method of creating these interiors mostly for Vista assets. Now, if I go ahead and just drag this one on, and then the first thing I need to do is I need to go into my exposure, and I need to, like, tone this down quite a bit like minus five or something. You can see that here you can see the interior. It's not perfect yet because there are no frames on it yet. But in general, you can see that it looks really cool. It almost it's really amazing to think that this is just a plane. But when you actually look at it, it just feels trey. It's not perfect, and I did not create this interior. This specific interior is from the Matrix demo. So even with those interiors, you can see that it's not perfect, but from a distance, it looks really, really cool. So what we are going to do is instead of having everything into one single shader, I have now this one simple material just for interiors. And we are just going to go ahead and have a slightly higher material count. The way that we would do that is we would have over here our interior. And then in threes Max, we would go ahead and place another plane over here in front of it. And this plane will basically contain our window blinds or curtains. I will show you how to create some with curtains, some with window blinds. And the cool thing about that is that we can simply do really basic UV unwrapping on it, and that way we can very quickly swap out the different window blinds on our building. Then in front of that, we can actually choose. We can choose the Oh fake the window effect. On our, we can choose the O fake like the glass, sorry, the glass effect on this layer also that would save us also some geometry. And the reason we most likely will be doing that is because our nanite does not yet support a proper window shader. However, if you are not using nanite, you can simply duplicate another plane in front of it and you can add a glass material to this plane. Now, we won't be doing that. However, this glass material, you can find many different glass materials simply even just by going to the store or looking online, it's really easy to create a transparent glass material. It's just that with anite it doesn't work yet. So what we will do is we will have two layers. One of them is going to be our interior, and the other one is simply going to be our blinds along with some glass sitting in front of it. And that will make things a little bit easier. Okay. Awesome. So knowing that, few more things to keep in mind. It needs to stay square over here. Well, we can make it long, but it's a bit more annoying. And we do not have control over the textiu map. So our texture map has to be also like a square texture that is hitting all the corners. We cannot just go ahead and, for example, map four of these interiors onto one texture to save texture space, unfortunately, because we are using HDR images for this. Okay, knowing all of that, there's a few things that we need to create two big steps. The first step is that we want to go ahead and we want to create the actual interior without over here or Can I show you that? I don't think I can just turn that off. Oh. No, so I won't be able to turn this off for you. Oh, wait, yeah, sort of. I can sort of turn this off over here. So this is basically what we want. We are first going to go ahead and we are going to simply create a room, which will be our interior room. Once that is done, we are going to create a system which will be our actual interior, and that is going to be that we get the actual interior. As you can see, they are separate from each other. So to create a room, what I like to do is you can go ahead and you can create a new project, but for you guys, I want to go ahead and just do a custom project. So in my SAS folder, I'm going to go file. I'm going to create a new level, and I want to create a completely empty level. Plus create. Yeah, I can save this one for now. File and right away do like a save current level a, we want to save this as Room nscore creator. Over here. Now comes something a little bit more tricky. So for this room creator, later on, what we will also need is we might want to use some assets. Now, we can find many assets and materials, as I said before, from our mega scans over here. But let's say that we have a room. We might not have stuff like doors and everything like that. So what I want to do is let's first of all, create a room. Then I will show you where you can find some resources for the doors, and then I will explain something about copyright to you. So we have this stuff over here. What do you want to do for your room? It is actually quite easy. You just go ahead and go, for example, in your Tris Maxine over here, we want to simply go in and we want to create a box. Oh, turn on the right layer. You want to go ahead and create a simple cube. Now, this cube, I'm going to make it 100 by 100, no, no, w. Height 220. Yeah, let's do 220 by 220 by 220, just to try and get roughly an average height. I'm going to place this exactly in the center. And then what I want to do is I want to convert this to an added Poli if you are using Max, and you want to select the font phase, which is, that's right. This is the font phase. I look up here and select the font phase, and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to delete it. Next, I want to select my entire cube, and I want to invert it. So I want to go ahead and go up here and press flip to flip the faces. Basically, what I'm doing if I would go ahead and turn on my backface culling is you can not see the outside of the cube. We are only seeing the inside of the cube. And this way, this is like, these are the walls, and these over here are the ceiling and the floor. So this is basically going to be our room. It's just a basic cube, not too interesting. If you ever want to like longer rooms, you can simply make your cube longer, and that would also work. Um, however, it might not always work perfectly, so we are going to stick with just simple cubes over here. Okay, awesome. So we have this kind of stuff. Now the next thing that we need to do is we need to divide up some materials. So in order to do that, what I like to do is I like to simply go ahead and detach all of these sites over here. Makes it a little bit easier for me. And then we have over here, left wall back while Right ball floor and ceiling. Okay. Awesome. So now that we have that stuff done, the next thing that we need to do is we need to apply separate materials on top of this. So we can go ahead and we can just go to our material editor. And for these materials, let's make them like a little bit to the side. So left. B. Right. Ceiling floor. Okay. So we can go ahead and go to this one. This one's left. This one's back. Right. Ceiling and our floor. So basically what we are now working with is later on, everything we place in this room will turn into an HCR image, which is basically like a sky image. If you ever use marmoset or substance paint or something, you have that sky that you can rotate around. We are going to create something similar to that. So we now have all of our materials here ready to go. The last thing I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to add a UVW map. Basically, I want to just do an unwrap. I want to automatically unwrap every single plane to hit exactly the center. So if I go ahead and do this, and convert to Abl now what you will see is your unwraps. They will all be exactly on the center. This way, it is tilable. Every single phase over here is now perfectly tilable. Yes, it is perfectly tilable, which means that if we would add like a wall material or something, we can simply tie that material to our liking. So we now have this stuff done. We can go ahead and throw this into a layer. And maybe got interior module. You can then go ahead and you can select it, export selection. Interior score module, and just export it as a simple FBX file over here. Awesome. If we now go ahead and go back into NWL, we can import this model, here it is. There we go. Yeah, input it as one because we should have set roughly the correct scale so we can go ahead and we can press Import. And then you multi track this in and just throw it into zero, 00 in your scene over here. So we now have this model over here. The reason why we don't need a back is because this is where the window would be. So it's almost like we are looking into our file. Now what we need to decide is we of course, need to have some materials and also some doors and stuff like that. This is what I wanted to talk about. This is a bit of a tricky one from my perspective. This is because I am creating a tutorial course that I am, of course, selling because I'm selling it. I copyright terms, I'm not allowed to give you the assets that I use in here. So I will go ahead and I will use mega scan assets for our walls and stuff like that to basically dress this room. However, and also in Mexican models, however, I'm not actually able to supply you the project with those assets. So whenever you open up this project, those assets will be gone, unfortunately. But it doesn't matter because the image that we generate from it, I am allowed to supply that to you. I'm just not allowed to supply you raw assets. Now, on top of this, later on, you will also need furniture, and you might want to have a door or you might want to have a lamp or something in here also. With that kind of stuff, it is super important. To have a nice, large library of assets that you can use so that you can quickly generate multiple different interiors. So what I recommend doing because honestly, I'm not going to create all of those assets that would take a long time is to simply go over here. And for example, right now, this one is free for a month, but that might be done and simply look up free interior assets. You can just go to free, and let's say if we have a look at the permanently free over here and just look up stuff for, like, interior assets. So if I just have a look around, the broadcast studio has interior assets. And you can also go ahead and you can, of course, free furniture pack also has here a bunch of really cool assets completely for free that you can use. You can go ahead and you can download this and we can then also use this kind of stuff. This one is already great now that you can use. I myself, I already have some packs over here. If I scroll down, I have a like some really cool packs that are like some houses that I will be using the Triplex House Villa, for example, if I open that one up. Here, I just has a bunch of architectural visualization style assets, which is really easy for me to just quickly use to create a bunch of different rooms. I can create bathrooms, I can create living rooms, all that kind of stuff. And, of course, also bedrooms, which is the ones that we will be using the most. So go ahead, look around, find a bunch of assets that you want to use to dress your room, and then you can go ahead and import that into your project. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to leave off this chapter here. I'm going to import a bunch of assets, and then what we will do is we will go into mega scans and find some nice designs for walls, maybe we want to go for like a plaster wall with like a door or anything like that. And then we can go ahead and we can start by dressing this one specific room. 18. 17 Creating Our Interior Room System Part2: Okay. I went ahead and I input a bunch of assets, so now I have enough to dress my room. So let's get started. Now comes pretty much like a fun bit. We are just going to basically nicely design an interior of room. We are going to only start with the walls and anything that is really close to walls like paintings or doors and stuff like that. So let's go ahead and quick so bridge. And let's go for maybe like a wood floor. So let's go in surfaces. And you can be super flexible with this. Remember, in the end, you end up with just an image, so you don't have to go perfect with geometry or anything like that. So I can go in here and I can go wood parquet. Maybe that's one or maybe like Herring Bone. Yeah, let's do something like this. And then you can just go ahead and you can press Download, and then we can simply already drag in this actual material from Mega scan. So that's quite nice. So let's just go ahead and press art. And it's as simple. And right now I'm in unlit mode, because in lit mode, you cannot really see anything. It's as simple as literally just dragging on your material instance in here. There you go. And then you can open it up, of course, if you want to say, go to the tiling over here. If you want, you can send it, for example, to two by two. If you want to make it smaller or bigger. So that is all up to you. Okay, so we have that one. Now let's go ahead and go for our walls. And sometimes what is interesting is if we go for something a little bit more stylized. Let's say that we grab, for example, let's do, white plaster and then maybe like a rustic red brick wall, something like that might look cool. So here I already see bricks. Um yeah, that's a little bit too, let's do modern that feels a little bit too strong. I just want something that you can also probably seen in an interior. Maybe something like this, this one. Let's go ahead and download that. Just something cool. And then we can go ahead and take it from there. Now let's go ahead and also go for the Um plaster. There you are. Plaster. Probably let's go for fresh plaster, something like that. That's really, really white. Maybe that's one. Yeah. Actually, I guess it's fine if we go for something quite white. Let's try this one over here to get started with. And then we'll see how it goes. Okay, so we have other dose? Oh, I forgot ceiling. Let's go ahead and drag in, like, a white plaster on here. And let's say that we go for, like, bricks. Or shall we do bricks on this side and then white? Hmm. I'm not sure I like the bricks too much. I can go ahead and change the tiding, too. Like that. I'm not sure if I'm a big fan of it. Yeah, we can make a variation like that later on. For now, let's just keep it white. For now, keep it white, and we can make a variation later on. I want to just create something. Like, it's not like I've created this specific room before, so we are just playing around with seeing what looks best. For our ceiling, we can probably also go for plaster. I can try and type in ceiling. Maybe maybe there's, like, some office type ceilings or anything. Yeah, like a soundproof ceiling. That kind of looks like an office ceiling. Let's just go ahead and use that one. Why not? And sa, of course, you can also use your own materials, or you can go to text.com. There's many, many options. Okay. So let's say that we have something like this to get started with. Now the next thing that I want to do is because I need to be able to actually see, I'm going to add a light and I want to add a rectangular light over here. There you are. And now let's go ahead and set this from unlit to lit mode. Rotate this so that it is pointing towards our room. Let's go at the Seti source width a bit higher and the source height also a bit higher over here. And we don't really need to cast any shadow so we can turn that one. Maybe set us to like 20 in terms of, like, the strength. Okay, so now we have a room that we can definitely look at. And yeah, it's just a box. So we have like a box. Let's go ahead and see if maybe we can do a door and maybe we can do some other stuff. Whenever I need to look for something quite specific, I hope that the packs I downloaded got correct naming. I go to content. I go down here to the little filter button and I check the static mesh, and then I just type in door and here we go ahead and we can see, here we go. This door, although it's a white door, do we maybe have because now we would have white on white on white. So I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah, the door is a little bit large, but I guess it is correct. Let's say that we have a door, maybe like the side. Say that our door is going to be here. And I'm just going to push it in here. It's just a really basic interior. I don't need anything super special. So let's say I have something like this. I might want to just like ops turn off your snap scaling. I'm going to scale down a little bit. I know that this might not be super logical compared to real life. However, my hope is that by scaling down a little bit, it will make the room feel a little bit bigger. Also, for my plaster over here. Let's go ahead and go in here and let's set the tiling also to two. There we go to make it a little bit softer. Okay. So we have our door. I don't know if I can maybe change the color of my door to something more interesting. Looks like, Well, I can just quickly edit the material. Just by simply adding a I don't know why they didn't do that. So maybe like a multiply and simply multiply your base color using a constant t vector. Right click and convert this vector to Bmterolor overlay over here, and set this to whitish. There we go. And now once that is done, let's save it. I should be able to simply grab my door, go to color overlay, and now I can set this to be like maybe like a dark door. Just something to break up the shape. Next, I can go to content, turn on the static mesh filter again. Maybe painting? No. Something with like a wall item, maybe. Wall lamp. I don't want to do lamps because I can do those as three D. Wall panel. Let's see. What are these type of wall panels? Let's have a look. We have something like that. It's weird that, there we go. Ah. No. Huh. I was hoping that there would be some kind of, like, paintings or something like that. I would have been nice. But I'm not sure if I can find anything really good in here. I can have a really quick scroll through to see if they maybe for some reason, like, changed it. But else we are just going to dress up our wall with other stuff. Yeah, I don't think we will be lucky to find, like, a painting or something like that. Oh, we have some of these things. That could be cool. It's really large. I made my cube real life, so I'm quite surprised how large this is. So let's just go ahead and scale these down and maybe, like, move them over here. Just like a small detail. It doesn't have to be anything special. Just something. Now, another thing is that lights are so the way that this works, as I showed you in I don't have it open right now, but as I showed you, we can have our tree D models in here like furniture. However, those TD models they work best when they are close to the back. So having, for example, a light here in the center, I want to have a light so that I have a logical light source. However, doing it as a tree model, what will happen is you will get this problem, give me a second to load it up. You know, Vista building. You will get if it is in the center, the further it is in the center, the more stretched it will be. So you can see that you get the problem that just like with the chair, it looks will stretched. So because of that, I kind of want to twe and avoid that. So I'm going to go ahead and find the light, but we will have this light baked into this room. So if I go light Or lamp, maybe? Lamp. Lamp looks a little bit more logical, I think. Is there no ceiling lamp, Willy? Roof. I mean, this one, but that is pretty useless because I want something really close to the ceiling. I guess, small, there we go. That's good enough. So we have some small lights. Let's say that I have two of them over here. That should be fine. Especially for just like an example. You can make this look freaking amazing if you want to. That is no problem at all. Okay, so let's say that we now have our base room, and this is like the room where we want to later on be able to, like, look around and all that kind of stuff. Now, the next thing that we need to do is we need to activate a plugin. This plugin, if you go to Edit, plugins. It is a plug in that is built into unreal. You just need to activate it. Panoramic capture over here, panoramic capture. So this plugin allows us to capture basically an HCR image that we can use for room. So you want to simply turn it on, and then you need to press Restart. So let me just pass the video and restart for you. Here we go. Okay, so we are back and that has been restarted. The next thing that we need to do is we need to create a camera. So if we go ahead and go up here and want to go ahead and well, actually, I normally just create a camera by going down here, and then I can just create camera here. And you can just go ahead and you can go for a normal camera. You don't need to have a cinematic camera. I'm going to set this camera at 000, and I'm also going to set a rotation at 000. Ooh, looks like that I might want to rotate my room around, actually. That might be better. Let's go ahead and just Oh, that it doesn't really matter. You can rotate your room around, but it should not matter. In that case, I'm just gonna set my camera probably to like 90. I wanted to face the wall, basically. So -90, there we go. So we are now facing the wall, and the next thing is our room is still one by one by one. I made this two meter 20, which means that I need to set this at 1:10 in the Z position. There we go, 110, so that it is exactly in the center of our room, as you can see over here. That's why you want to keep even values. You basically want to make sure that your camera ends up exactly in the center of the room. Next, what you want to do is you want to set your spect ratio to one, which means square over here. And now what you can see is when we have it exactly in the center of our room, you want to make sure that when you have your field of view, that it covers exactly one wall, and it looks like that 90 happens to be exactly that. So if I go into my camera, you can see that over here. You can zoom out, see. I need to cover exactly one wall, which often if you keep even values, you can do that by setting your aspect ratio to 90. So what will happen is with a panoramic image, it will take a screenshot like this. It will take a screenshot like this. It will take one like this, like this, and like this. So it will basically just flip all the way around. And then what it will do is the software inside unreal will stitch it all together. So what we need to do now is we need to get a note and you can find this note in your engine tools. If it doesn't show your engine folder, you want to go up here to settings and in here, you want to go ahead and turn on show plug in content and show engine content. Next, if we just go ahead and go to the AL folder, it is called BP nscore Capture over here, BP nscore capture. Just going to drag this in here and I'll just throw it into the center somewhere over here. Now, if we go ahead and open up our BP capture node, you can see that there is a few things that we want to do in here. Now, this note, it might be a little bit confusing, but there isn't much that we will need to focus on. The only thing that we need to focus on is over here. We have a output directory, and you want to go ahead and copy my output directory I have here. It looks like it saved from last time. The original output directory, if you use this for the very first time, it's a little bit broken. It doesn't always work. It's often throws in error. However, if you just copy SP, that output D with O and D, and then you do the little bracket project underscore DR, another bracket, and then a slash. If you do that for 99.99% of you people, it will work correctly. Now next to that, you can overhear change any other settings that you might want. However, if you don't know what you're doing, then I recommend not using these settings. All of these settings are still default for me, so I'm not will to worry about it, so I'm just going to keep it the way it is right now. Once that is done, we can go ahead and we can press Save not that we made any changes, but you can just go ahead and make us safe. Oh, that's interesting. Censel. I might not have saved because I have, because I have it open or something like that. But anyway, okay, so we now have a capture over here, ready to go. So in order to capture this image, you want to go ahead and you want to go to your camera over here. You want to change any settings. So for example, I'm going to set my screen percentage to like 100 just to make it a little bit sharper. And then what you want to do is you want to go down here, and you want to go ahead and press similate over here. Now, as soon as you press similate, what should happen is that your camera will freeze and that it should be able to capture your BP over here. You can also go in here and you can double check to make sure that it is capturing and try that again. So's press. Oh, there we go. Now it's capturing. For some reason it I will freeze when it's capturing. So that's when you know that it's trying to capture your image. So it's still frozen. Let me just pass the video until it's done with the freezing stuff. Okay. Looks like it's done, so we can press pass. And now it should have captured an image. So basically, once again, you want to go ahead, press simulate. If you are worried that it doesn't work, what you can do is you can press simulate in your blueprint in here, and then it should do the same thing. So if I now go ahead and press simulate here, you can see that the blueprint is running. At which point it should have simulated. Yeah, it looks like that. By now, it has simulated. Sometimes it can still take a second for it to really properly capture it, but it looks like that now it is a little bit faster. I don't know why it froze so much. Now, where can you find this note? It's a little bit messy, but you want to go to your installation directory of your project. So with that, I mean going to your C Drive. Let me go over here. Windows C Drive program files Epigame. You want to select your engine version. In my case, 5.1. Then what you want to do you want to go to engine, then you want to go to binaries. Then you want to go to Win 64 and then in here you will have your project DR folder in which you can get all of your captures. I know it's a bit of a workaround, but I rather show you the method that has the least amount of errors than showing you a method that might look easier. Now, if you just go ahead and click on your latest folder, so we can see that we capture this one today because today is 2 February. Then we can go to Final Color over here we have an EXR file. Please note that if you get a PNG file, all you need to do to change it to AXR is set the SP output bit depth 8-32 or 16-32, just set it to 32. Whenever you do that, you get an EXR file which is a Oh, why don't you work? There we go. You get an EXR file which is an HDR style image. Now, once that's done, we can double check it inside of Photoshop. Here we go. And now, this is what we will get. So it might look a little bit funky. This is because there's a few things that we do need to change. So right now, what I noticed is that for some reason, it did not capture the floor, maybe like a one capture. So let's go ahead and try that again so we can go in here. And yeah, it definitely has our floor ready to go. It shouldn't matter where our blueprint is. So let's try to do one more capture just to make sure that it is working correctly. Just to show you, an example, this is what it's supposed to look like. Uh let's have a look. I think this is the one. Here, this is what it is supposed to look like, so it should be able to capture the floor. So let's go ahead and go back in here. And sometimes it's like a little bit buggy. That's why you want to go ahead and just try to recapture it again. So I can go ahead and I can go in here, simulate and it has my camera. Oh, shoot, will you not move my camera. Okay. Sorry for the quick cut. You guys, you won't believe the stuff I had to go through. So basically, as you might have noticed, when I tried to capture, there was a delay, and it was weird and that it was weird that they didn't capture the bottom. So it turns out it was a bug. It was an actual engine bug. Look at this stuff. I know it's a tutorial, but, like, here, it has like it ended up giving me many different problems. So I managed to fix it, which is quite strange because I've been generating interiors for many, many times. But here, you can definitely see it was clearly that it was like a plug in bug. I'm not completely sure yet why it happened. It all of a sudden seemed to happen on any project. It didn't really matter. But finally, I managed to capture a correct scene over here. Now, how did I do this? Very easy. If we just go into our blueprint, if you have this problem, what fixed it for me is setting the capture width to 40 96 instead of 6,100 something. And for the rest, right now, I set my bit debt to eight. However, I should be able to simply set it back to 32. Oh, at this point, because I feel like it's the capture debt. Over here, 32. So let's go ahead and press compile and save. And now, in order to run this script, it's a little bit weird, but if you have the same problem as I have, I basically go ahead and I went from simulate back to just like the selected viewport over here. I will go ahead and I will press Play and make sure that you are still in your camera. And then it's kind of stupid, but you need to just keep pressing stuff until you see that the engine freezes. And then so at one point, it will freeze. But it seems like if you don't do any activity, yeah, see, now it froze. If there is no activity on your screen, for some reason, in my case, it is not able to read the blueprint. So I guess the reason is probably because the BP capture plugin is mostly from Unregen four. So I guess there is maybe a little bit of conflict when using it in UnreigentFV. I'm not completely sure, but now that we know this and it looks like the freezing has stopped, we should have captured, hopefully finally. Although for you guys, only a second has passed, but for me, like 30 minutes has passed. If we just go ahead and open this one up as transparency. There we go. Okay, perfect. So as you can see over here, we have now managed to capture an actual proper panorama shot like this. Now, one last thing that I did do, but it's not necessary is that just in case I added a post process volume, just by going down here, visual effects and post process volume. And I went into my exposure and I set everything to default, one, one, and one, just to make sure that everything was correct. Now at this point, we have our panorama shot over here, and, yeah, we can work with this. Now the next thing that I like to do is I like to go ahead and go to my crop tool, and I just want to go ahead and crop out half of it. I don't know why it's trying to capture two of them. I've never been able to figure that out, but just cropping it will work. At this point, if you go to your image and your image size, it should be 40 96 by 2048. I always like to capture a high resolution and then lower it down as much as needed. Now that that is done, you just want to go ahead and you want to go to edit, transform, and flip horizontal. It's key that the black cube over here is in this position, is in the left side position, not in the center, but the first one on the left. And then you still need to keep some space in between here because this is a perfect cube, and our shader will read this as our window. So that's why we need to keep it at this position. Now, what is pretty cool is that at this point, you can actually go into, for example, filter and go to your camera a filter. And you can make changes to this image. If you want, you can even drag in other images. So you can even drag in like a painting on here, but it might look a little bit distorted, so you might not want to do that. But I can go in here. I can play around with my exposure and my contrast like this, and I can just in general, maybe want to make my room like a little bit more warm so I can give a little bit of a warmer tone. I can go ahead and, like, improve the texture by making this a little bit sharper and maybe improve the clarity a little bit. I can do all of this kind of stuff. That's no problem metal. In order to create this room over here. So now we can make some changes. The same counts for lighting, which is something that I will show you in just a bit. I'm first of all, showing you the concept, and then we can improve it. So let's say that you are happy with what we have right here. Now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and grab a folder let's do like source files, buildings, text shirts. Let's do interior underscore HDR over here. And let's use this one as like a folder. And then you simply want to go file, save a copy. And you want to go ahead and copy this, not as an EXR, but as an HDR file over here. And I will call this interior under score 01, and then you can go at the Bra save. Awesome. So now if we go ahead and go back in here, let's save our room. We can now go into the Vista buildings, and I can show you what we have just been doing. So over here you can see that this interior already had some additional stuff on it, and it's also quite low resolution. This is because the CRs that unreal uses, they are only like one to eight by 256 or 256 by one to eight or something in terms of resolution, which we can also do. So what we want to do is in our Vista tutorial textures. Interior underscore HDR. And in here, you want to go ahead and drag in your HDR image. At this point, you just want to go ahead and open it up, and there are some settings that I always set. I always set my text or sorry, my MIP generation to sharpen one over here. Then what I want to do is I want to go in compression and advanced. And in here, so I want to set this to HDR compressed, just to optimize the scene a bit more or to optimize our texture a little bit more and compress it. Okay. So we can control the resolution later on. That's something that I just want to gradually lower until we are at a comfortable level. So we can now already use this HDR. We just want to go ahead. We want to grab our interior over here. Open up the material. And then it's as simple as grabbing our HDR and dragging it into the cube map slot over here. Now, the first thing that you might notice that this one is really dark. This is because for some reason, the cube maps and everything that they used, they are really overexposed, and this is to compensate something in the shader. However, we no longer have that specific thing in our shader. So what we can do is we can just have it at a normal exposure. We plug in our cube map and we can set our exposure to zero. And when we set it to zero, it will just be like the default. Now, what you notice that our interior assets over here, if we just go to the interior color, those are also overexposed. This one is also from in real. You can see that it's only 512 by 512. What I'm going to do is I'm going to scroll down and set my brightness to something like 0.1 or 0.05 or something like that over here. Just to temporarily tone down the exposure so that I can show you everything over here. So now you can see that now we have our interior that we just created working quite well. The lighting over here is way too strong, so we will definitely work on the lighting. But in general, it is working. And by the way, the stuff about the ditter steps and the steps I talked about, this is what I mean. If I set this to 128, you can see that the quality increases. If I set this to 32, you can see that the quality decreases. So you can control it. Of course, the higher you go, the more expensive your interior. So if I go for 1024, 1024, the quality will be really cool, but it will also be like super, super expensive to render. So we are going to go ahead and set this back to, like, 64 over here. Now what we will be doing is in the next chapter, we are going to improve our room. We are going to go ahead and we are going to place actual proper lighting in our room, and we are already going to create a design for our furniture. And then what we will do in the chapter. After that, is we will start working on our actual three D furniture models over here. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 19. 18 Creating Our Interior Room System Part3: Okay, so now that I've shown you how to create the actual room system, what we're going to do is we are going to start by, first of all, placing assets in our room creator over here. Here we are. There we go. So the goal is that we place our assets in our room creator, and then what we will do is those assets will probably also include lamps. Using those lamps, we can get accurate lighting in here, and then we will simply capture the room with the accurate lighting, but without the assets, because the assets we need to capture them separately using a different system. So we have our room over here. The first thing was that I did not really like that my door was on this side of the room, so I'm just going to go ahead and move it over here to, like, the other side. But honestly, that one is not too special, maybe have it, like somewhere. I know, like somewhere over here. And let's say that we make this into, like, a bedroom, for example. Now, I feel like just white feels a little bit boring. So I want to take one last try to see if we can find something to make this more interesting. So I know that there are tri acids and there are like interior acids over here. However, they are often like super ornate, so I'm not sure if they will fit this specific room. Yeah, I don't think they will fit this specific room over here. But there are, like, a bunch of assets in here if you want to use it. In that case, what I'm going to do is, let's say that I go to surfaces, and I do want to go to brick and I want to go for, like, my modern bricks. And I'm just going to see if I can get something that's like a little bit more I know, something like this might just an interesting brick color because you would imagine if it's like an interesting brick color, they can use it as like a interior design rather than just having everything white. Of course, what we are going to do later on is we are going to create a bunch of different interiors, so you don't have to worry about it too much right now, which one you are going to create. But we can now go ahead and we can go in surfaces, and it is this one over here. Let's go ahead and throw this one on here. Set our tiling to maybe like two by two. There you go. Okay, so that's done. Now I'm going to play some assets so I can go ahead and go in content, and I'm just going to turn on static assets. Actually, know what? Let's go into the big typexHusefll, or whatever you want. Just I should not say specific maps, but the gas I don't know if you guys have, of course, these specific maps. Now, having this, what I'm going to do is, let's say that I have an air conditioning, maybe nicely up there, and then let's say that I want to have over here like a bed and make it quite a bit smaller. Well, we don't have a lot of room with our beds, do we? So I'm going to basically scale everything down to make it feel like the room is larger than it really is. And it's easier to scale it down than to change the room's size. And the reason why that is easier is because I don't want to go around to needing to redo all of my exact measurements with my cameras and everything like that because we just spent a lot of time setting it up. So I have this one square to scale this one also down to make it a bit smaller over here. So let's see, we got that one. We got a bed, then we can do maybe like a nightstand next to it. And maybe this nightstand will have a lamp on it. So here we have a nightstand like that. And let's say that we have a bed side lamp sitting on top of it over here. So that's already one light source. These two over here are going to be another light source. And I do like to try and keep everything, like, near the site over here, near the back. So let's see. Is there anything else that I might want to create? Maybe like something like a book case or let's see, there's a shelf. I'm sure there's something in here that I can use. Of course, I'm not familiar with all of these assets, so I sometimes need a bit of time. Let's do, like, a shelving like this, maybe. And so at this point, I can show you, but most likely if we place at so far away, it might cause some problems. And also, actually, I don't like this shelf. It doesn't look very nice. Oh, hey, here are picture frames. I was looking for those. Butoll. It's not really a problem right now. We can go ahead and keep that in mind later on. Garage shelf. We got some sofas in here. Well, let's Let's type in book. Willie, so they give us books. Well, no wait here, they give us Oh, God, that's a really large bookcase. I don't want such a large one. And I have another one over here, the free furniture back. And this one might also contain something. So it looks like we have, like, some standard shelves that we could use and like a bookcase over here. Let's maybe try something like this. There we go. I think that might look a little bit nicer. I will try to place it at the front. However, as I said before, it might cause problems with it not looking good, and if those problems are there, then we simply place it further back. So it's up to you. But of course, it wouldn't make too much sense to have this one sitting next to the bed because then there's almost no space. So we have this one over here. And let's say that in this one, I can now go to my meshes and props and type in book, and I can maybe throw in some books in here. And duplicate it and maybe, like, switch it around for some other books. Let's move forward a bit. There we go. So let's say something like this is already a pretty nice looking room. Awesome. Now the next thing that we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and get started with some lights. I'm going to set my frontal light quite a bit lower to, like, one. And then I want to go ahead and I want to go in here and let's go lights, and let's start with, like, a spotlight for this lamp over here. These lights also come in handy later on when we are actually creating our where we are creating our night versions because our night versions, we, of course, want to, give it a little bit of realistic looking emissive. So for now, let's say that we capture our light over here, and now you can choose what you want to do. So I'm going to set my temperature to maybe 5,000 to make it a little bit of, like, a warmer tone. I'm going to set my radius not to be too large over here. And you can also play around with your inner outer cone to, for example, give it like a sharper far off. I guess I'm going to go actually quite a smooth far off and maybe set like a little bit lower. Yeah, I guess something like this should probably work. Then the next one that I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this light. Oh, and sorry, set it to movable. Let's not forget that in real, we want to go ahead and set it to movable so that it is a real time light. Now I'm going to go ahead and go up here. I'm going to places light here, and let's say that I make my radius quite a bit larger, my cone a little bit smaller, and I'm going to set my intensity maybe to like 15 to make it quite a bit stronger. And then I also want to place one on the other side over here. So right now we have this. Now, this might look nice in terms of the lighting and everything like that, although you might want to go ahead and set the source radius. Or, actually, let's play around with the cones. I'm basically trying to get, like, some soft shadows over here. I'm just going to temporarily turn this one off. Let's see, because shadows stay quite harsh. Normally, what you can do is you can change these values. There we go. You can change the source radius. And also sometimes you want to play around with the soft source radius, but not in this case. When you change the source radius, you can make your shadows a little bit softer. So 42. So let's say 40. Let's also set this one to 40. There we go. So now we have some softer shadows. So having all of this, it is looking really cool, but we do have a problem right now that this will most likely come out too dark. I'm going to start with just this light over here. I'm going to move it back a little bit, and I'm going to set this a bit stronger to five. And don't worry. It will still capture those lights. Maybe let's say four, but we want to make this room quite a bit lighter so that when we look in it, it will look nice and interesting. So at this point, we can go ahead and make a save our scene. And then what we want to do is we want to do a little bit of organization. So all of these assets that we have over here, let's go ahead and select them. Throw them into a folder. Call it assets. Next, our actual room and our lights. Throw it into a folder. Call it structure. Here we go. And now what we have is we have left our lights over here. If you want you can, go ahead and call it lights like that. Awesome. So what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and we go to save sin. Now, first of all, the assets that we have over here, we want to go ahead and we want to turn those off. Right now, with your assets, you cannot just hide it over here because when you hide it over here, as soon as we press play, it will just unhide your assets. So what I tend to do in these kind of cases, honestly, often, what I just do is I just temporarily move it like this. And then I just move it back because it doesn't have to be super accurate. And now at this point, we can go into our camera. Yeah, I see here, it's probably a little bit too dark, but we can later on use our boast effects over here to control the exposure. So we go into our camera. Then we go ahead and we go and play our scene and do the whole stuff where you just want to kind of, like, there we go. Now it freezes. So now we just give it a second. And unfortunately, it captured my mouse while it was freezing. So I'm not able to pass the recording for you without bringing up a lot of windows, bars, and stuff like that, but it shouldn't take too long. So basically, we are going to capture this. And then what we need to do is for our assets, unfortunately, we cannot actually capture our specific assets inside of Unreal engine. And the reason for that is because we need to bake height maps from them, and UnreLengine does not have a way of actually baking height maps. So I have now captured this. And what I want to do is I want to now go ahead, and I just want to preview it. So this was like our first room. If we now go ahead and go to our capture folder. Select the next one. And drag it in here. Press Okay. There we go. So this is our next room, which is actually looking not too bad. No, no, I can live with this type of brightness. So now at this point, you can once again crop it so that it's just one room. Add it, transform, and let's do a horizontal transform. And if you want, you can once again go into your camera raw filter to maybe play around with your settings a little bit more. So let's say that I go set my exposure, maybe set my contrast up a little bit. Maybe set my highlights up a little bit and texture. Maybe clarity else a little bit. There we go. So it's like quite a clear looking room. Maybe tone down my exposure like a tiny bit. Over here, use my highlights up a little bit more, just to get a little bit more of those highlights captured. And let's say something like this. So we can just go ahead and we can press. Okay. And there we go. Awesome. So let's go ahead and go into our interior HGRs folder. File, Save a copy. HDR and call it interior 02. And now we can go ahead and we can save it. Okay, so now that we've done that, we can already go in here. We can already, preview it. That's no problem. I just want to go ahead and I want to Undo moving my assets. Oh, for some reason, it lost the Indu history. Doesn't matter, then I just move it by hand. There we go. That's pretty much as close as it was before. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to save my scene. Just want to make sure that everything is saved. Okay. And now we can just before we do anything else, first of all, of course, test our work. So if we go into our Vista tutorial, VistA buildings, open up our interior instance. Drag in our interior 02 over here and set the same settings as that we have done before. So we want to go for HCR compressed. It's really slow with the calculating. Normally, it's not this slow, so that's quite curious, quite interesting. Sharp and zero, I meant to say sharp and one, to be honest. And then what we can do is we can also go ahead. We can start lowering down the resolution until it gets to a point where I'm comfortable with just to optimize our scene a little bit more. So we can drag in interior two in here. And I can go to save my scene. Now, just to make this a little bit nicer, let's just go ahead and quickly create a cube over here and just make this like a frame. So I'm just going to like a cube over here, almost like it's going to be a window frame. So we got this one. Duplicated also at the bottom. There we go. I'm just going to go ahead and add a filter for instance, materials, material instance over here and just grab something that's like black. There we go. Okay, so that reads a little bit better. And now we can see that we have our room, and we already have our lights and everything in here. So our room, it is always like flipped around. So do keep that in mind that our light will be here. Um there is a little bit of warping, but yeah, it's not a perfect method, of course, so you guys need to just live with it. So we now have this one done. Now what we're going to do is we are going to in the next chapter, work on our actual asset system, which is going to be quite an interesting system. However, we cannot do this in real, as I've said before, so we will go ahead and move to MamosetTolbag for this. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 20. 19 Creating Our Interior Room System Part4: Okay. So now that we have a base interior, what we're going to do is we are going to start working on creating those fake tree models that you can see of your interior room. So this is actually going to be quite an interesting system. And this was the one that was, like, quite difficult to figure out when you don't know how to do it. So I'm quite excited to show you. Now, the first thing that I want to do is over here, I have, like, a bunch of models, and I want to go ahead and I just want to combine them. So I'm going to, oh, sorry, go to your modeling tools over here. Uh, modeling. There we go. And we are going to combine them. The reason for this is we actually need to use these models inside of marmoset, because we need to bake two very specific height maps in order to make this work. But as I said before, in and reel, you cannot bake these type of height maps. So I'm just going to go ahead and select all of the models that I want to go ahead and have in those three looking assets. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and press mesh Merge. The only thing is that I do need to select material, so I hope that it will just properly do that since I've never used it with this many materials like that. Okay? So it looks like that works totally fine. Now it is basically one model. At this point, what I can do is I can go up here to search and I can find this specific model. And then what I can do is if we go to buildings, exports, let's do from underscore unreal. Then in here, I can go ahead and just right click and you want to go to Asset Asset actions and you want to press Expot and paste it in here. So we are going to call this interior underscore 01, for example. And yeah, we can do an FBX. You can ty OBJ if you also want to export your materials, but normally it doesn't work. Yeah, see, that's unfortunate. Sometimes OBJ in other softwares, it exports your textures along with it. However, in this case, it doesn't I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to stick with FBX. I just want to quickly try that on the fly. So that's the annoying thing that we do need to have a base color. So let's see, we don't need collision, we don't need level of detail, all that stuff. C just grab the presexbok. So, yeah, we do need base colors. We need these base colors because that is the only two maps that we need. We need a base color map and we need a specific looking height map. Now, for these base colors, often the easiest thing is simply by going here, and you know what? Let me just go ahead and make a folder. In my folder called interior 01 so that we can just throw all of our texts also in here. So basically, the way that I tend to do this is I go ahead and I select the material. It's a bit time consuming. It's easier if you have created the asset yourself because then you will have these already, you then find the base color over here, and you only need to do this for base color. So you right click Asset Actions and you export, and you just want to go ahead and export the base color and I'm just going to press Save. And then I do need to go ahead and I need to do this for every single one. So it's often easier if we just leave this window open over here. Right click Asset Actions export and save. Then we have the next one. So it doesn't take too long, and it depends how many interiors you need to create. But I will just do this one, of course, all the other interiors, I will just do those using a time enaps just because this kind of stuff it also time consuming. That's the annoying thing about creating these type of things like once you know the workflow, it's really easy to do, but it's just super time consuming. So let's see, we have our books over here. Yeah, why not? Let's just also I already regret adding. So yeah, the more acid you add, the longer it will take. But also, yeah, you don't want to go too intense. I'm not going to do chom because I can easily create chrome automatically inside of marmoset. Over here, we have some wood, which for some reason, it's no longer a interior. So let's just go at an export. The wood, and then we have our air conditioning. So I'm glad that they used only one texture for this kind of stuff. So export that. Okay, cool. So all of those things are now exported. We have our models and we have everything ready to go. The last thing that we need to export is we need to export the back wall that we have over here that is inside of the position. Now, I want to make sure that I did not do any type of scaling, which looks like I did. And then if we go ahead and go to Tres Max, you just want to select the Bwall, leave it in the location because everything is set to zero, zero, zero, so it should be the exact same position as in Unreal. It's not a big deal if it isn't. It's just easier if we have it like this. So I'm going to go ahead and in our parent folder in the From unreal folder, for example, over here, I'm just going to call this like interior Bwall, for example, and then just save it. And all of the UVs should already be correct because it is a perfect square. Okay, awesome. Now all we need to do is we need to go ahead and go into Mom's and tool Bag, and here we are going to set all of this stuff up. We're going to get started by just dragging in our interior back well, which we have over here. And then what we want to do is B want to drag in the FBX that has our meshes. And it looks like that, unfortunately, it is no longer at the same position over here, which means that I just need to, like, make some changes. So I guess it's this one. I guess it is because of this pivot point. Now, you could go ahead and thy if I select this it might just be as easy as going into modding, then you don't have to keep manually placing it. And if you just scroll down into your molding mode and go to pivot and set this to be your center and then to your bottom, and then press accept, now it will be at the center, bottom of your scene. And now if we export it again, that hopefully gets everything a little bit closer. So that's export. And now if we go into reel, there we go, see. So now in Mom set, now it has updated, and now it is in the correct location. Okay. Awesome. I'm going to go up here to fill quality. I don't know why it was set to albedo. And now the next thing that we need to do is we need to go ahead and we need to apply our materials to these pieces. So first of all, here we have chrome. For chrome, I can just set my metalness up and my roughness down a bit. Then we have this one, which is, I don't think I can read the mode. So mode board. Do I have something in my textures? Else, you can also control the color. Okay, so that is wood. So I can just drag in the wood. This one is the air conditioner, so I'm just looking if they correspond with the names of my textures. Some of them seem to correspond and some do not. So this is all like touch and go because, of course, as I said before, I have not actually used. These are not models I created, so I don't know how they are structured. Mi bed, which is the bedside table. This is the blanket. This one is the body. This one is the pillow. This one is the lamp. And these ones are the books. Okay, awesome. So we now got these pieces also done. Now they are very shiny. However, because we are not going to actually grab the Roughness or anything like that. You can just leave it like this, or you can just quickly go in your materials if you want to look at it a little bit nicer and simply lower down your roughness. It doesn't make a difference. It's just nicer to look at something that's not so shiny when it's not supposed to be shiny. But yeah, we only really care about the colors in this case. Oh, sorry, don't do that for the home. Well, me actually doesn't really matter too much. So we now have a piece done. So the way that you should see this is that this backplane is low pool and all of these acids over here are high pool. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all, save my scene, file save scene over here, buildings, saves Interior asset baking. And let's presve. Next, what I like to do because this is my scene, I'm going to go to mode set to do like a default color mode like this. And now what we can do is we can get started with our baking. So, did I already Oh, yeah, I already showed you how to do the baking in the Vista mountains. So, in case you did not see it, you want to go up here to this little bread icon. And then what you want to do is you want to grab your interior into high. And your wall into low. Just press this little button over here to activate the view. Now, the most important thing is that in your low, set your out a big to none, and then push your cage out all the way so we need to go like 500 until it covers the entire mesh. Oh, 500. Let's do 450. So that is still quite close. But basically, you want it that when you are looking at it from a front view, it is covering the entire mesh like this. Now, at this point, I'm going to go ahead and we have over here my interior back wall. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this. And for this one, I want to basically hold control and rotate this 180. Although, you know what? No, we can do that later. Normally, what I do, if it is a problem, I basically just move this one outside of my baker and then hide it. However, because our PivPoint is actually in a really favorable location, I just figured a faster way of doing this. So just follow my lead. So we want to go ahead and go to our maps, and we want to bake a hight map, and we want to bake a albedo map. Now, later on, what we can do is we can also bake an emissive map. However, for that one, we will be using the photometric stereo stuff. So having this one done, we are going to go ahead and so, yeah, albedo and height. There we go. Now, you want to go into your height, and this is always like, you need to play around with it a little bit. So often what I do is I often set the inner distance to zero and the out distance. I often set quite high for this kind of stuff to maybe like 100, but it's something that we need to try and then we will see if it works. In terms of your texture resolution, it's up to you how high you want to go. The higher resolution, the more expensive. So I'm just going to leave it at two k. That's honestly more than enough. Textures. Interior underscore assets. Interior under score 01. Let's go ahead and copy this one and paste it into our outputs. Interior underscore 01, I want to go ahead and just save this as a simple PNG and let's press Save. I'm going to set my samples to 16, just make it nice and extra crisp. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can simply press bake, and that's already it. Now it's done. We now have our maps and if I open them up, here we have our base color map. The first thing I see is that I forgot set your padding to none and bake again because you do not want to have those strange outlines. You want to only show, as you can see over here, our actual interior shape like this. Now, next, the next one is our height map, so let's have a look at that. And our height map seems to look pretty decent. Yeah, I think we got, I think this might work. So your height map it's actually not as easy as this where you can just plug in a height. There's a bit of editing that needs to go back and forth with every single height map. It's a little bit annoying, but we'll go over it. So we have this height map over here. What I would like to do is I'm going to call this interior height on the score 01. The reason for this is in order to calculate the correct depth, we need a height map from the backside to the front, but also one from the front to the back, and then the shader will basically be able to calculate those two height maps, combine them together to clamp down the depth of your scene and create a proper depth look. So what I'm doing is I'm just simply rotating this around. I'm going to turn off my albedo and I bake my second height. And now we should have something like this. So we have this one, which you can see is almost completely white, and we have this one which shows a lot more depth like that. So having these two height maps over here. The next thing that we want to do, and I personally sometimes it's easier for you use a mask. You can try to make this from your height map, but sometimes it's easier to simply go to configure and quickly add an Alpha mask over here and also bake that one. See? Yeah, makes our lives easier inside of Photoshop. Okay, so we have a mask. We have our albedo, and we have our heights. Now, the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and go into Photoshop. And for our heights, we basically need to place these heights in specific channels, and then we need to balance it out. B do, we actually don't really need to do anything with it. We can literally just drag it directly inside of unreal engine. For our height, you want to grab the first height. So let's call this one square 02, just to keep it organized. You want to basically dragon your first height, which is the forward facing one over here. And then what you want to do is you want to go ahead and straightaway drag in your Alpha mask. The reason for this is because everything outside of this area, you want to make this black. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to layer from background over here. Going to give it a black. Background by going up here into a solid color and just making a black background. And then in here, all we need to do is go to select color range and click on the black color just to select all of the black colors. At which point, we can go back into our layer and press delete. So now this is what we get. The reason we need to have the background black is because it acts as a mask inside of Unreal engine using the shader. If it is not black, it will create a massive wall of depth, basically. Now that we have done this, the next thing that we need to do is we need to drag in our second height over here. And for this height, we want to go to edit, transform, and flip it horizontal so that it is in the same position. Once again, you can just go ahead and you can go up here, select color range. Right click a Rest R so that you can edit it and press delete. And now we also have this one. Okay, cool. So at this point, what we can do, normally, I would use substance Zina, but I don't know I want to introduce an entire new software just for this one thing. So we will probably do this in Photoshop. So what I like to do is, I like to go ahead and quickly duplicate this layer. And now we have these two, which we can right click and we can convert these to a smart object. And we have these two, which we can right click and once again convert into a smart object. Now at this point, for this one, what we can do is we can just keep it as is. And we want to go into our channels. And first of all, in your blue channel, you want to go ahead, oops and just completely remove this. So I'm just going to grab a black color. Oh, sorry, I need to probably go ahead and create a new layer below. Let's call this one like final. And in here, turn it off. In the black in the blue color. I want to go ahead and I want to turn this some my flow all the way up. Okay. And we want to in our blue channel, That's interesting. Why doesn't it paint in the blue channel? It doesn't really matter. Basically, just make this layer black. I just don't want it to be a fill layer. Then what I'm going to do is we have our first one. This is, our first one. Just press Contra A to select your entire canvas and press Contra C, turn it off, go to final and place this one in your red channel. Press Contra V. Now, this is important. Now the second one over here, Contra C. To your final and this one needs to be in the green channel. So these are the only two channels that our system will read. It will not actually read the blue channel. So this way it can read the front and the back just like that. And now, of course, every time we do make an edit, so this is what you should roughly see. It's often like a green, yellow looking image. We can now, of course, whenever we need to make an edit, and you rarely need to make an edit to the back because the back is often really close to the wall, so it doesn't really do much. However, if you ever need to make an edit, you can go in here and you can just go ahead and double click on it, and now you can see that we still have these separate layer. So having this one done, I'm going to first of all, go ahead and just save my scene as PSD. And then with this one done, file, and I'm going to save a copy, and I'm going to save this as, it doesn't really matter. TGA, PNG. Let's just do Taga. And I will call it interior 01 under scolled depth. And press okay. I know it's weird that I use PNGs and TGAs. The reason for this is mostly that I'm so used to using TGAs and then all of a sudden I export as PNGs and stuff like that. But anyway, so now, if we go ahead and go into our Vista buildings, yeah, we can save sine over here. And then if we go to textis interior assets, and I will be grateful for the Int underscore 01. And in here, we can basically drag in our base color. And we want to drag in our depth map over here. Yeah, that should pretty much do the trick. Now, if we go ahead and just look up our material over here, now it will probably not work right away because Oh, yeah, my channel is Oh, wait. Make the blue channel. I think it actually needs to be completely active. There we go. That's more logical. So, the background needs to be blue, not black. Almost forgot about that. As I said, there are many little steps in this entire process. So you might need to go over it a few times, just like me, just to kind of, like, remember everything. So over here, this is what it is supposed to look like. We like the blue and the pinkish color, I guess. So anyway, we can now go in here, interior assets, right click and re import. And now, when we drag these in, it will not work right away. We need to balance out the heights. So first of all, we have B do, and then second of all, we have adept over here. And this is what I mean. As you can see, first of all, I probably want to place the door on the other side. So that's the annoying thing when it gets flipped. However, whenever we flip it around in Photoshop, it will most likely show like a black void. So we'll see. But anyway, having this, now what you can see right away is that, yes, our depth is working, but we have some problems with it. So we just want to kind of address them one by one. And this stuff over here with the door, it's something that we can look at in like a bit. So let's get started with probably the obvious one, which is our bed over here. Basically, the way what you want to do is you want to go in here and you want to select your bed. So let's see at which point it. So the pillows are still a pretty decent depth. It's just like the white part. So what I'm going to do is I'm simply going to go in here and use my magic one tool, and I'm just going to select the white areas. And then although you can even do that in your green channel if you really want to, sometimes, if you want to save some time, you can go in your green channels, and you can try to play around with it in here. But then if you mess up, what will happen is you cannot easily go back. So let's say I go in here, just in my green channel to save some time. And I'm going to go to my brightness and contrast, go into my levels and then set the levels over here to be a little bit darker. And most likely you also need to go in here. Let's say my tolerances a bit higher to like ten. Yeah, you know what I'm going to do both of them. I want to basically select these areas over here. And tone all of these areas down. So it's just like controlling your height because the height it doesn't work as straightforward as it does with other pieces just because it is so sensitive. So let's go file adjustments levels, and let's tone this one down, and then while it is still selected, we should be able to simply already save a copy. And this is why I like to do it inside of designer because inside of designer, I can automate this process. However, I don't want to introduce an entire new software for you guys. You right click and press RIport and now you can see that now we've done this, but it's a little bit too much. So what we can do is we can just do that levels. It's really sensitive, so you will need to be a bit careful about it. Until it is right, I want to keep my selection. So we can go in here and reimport. And there we go. Yes, you will keep that stretching. You can't really avoid the stretching, but that doesn't matter because it's about what it looks like from quite a distance. So yeah, this is looking pretty good. Maybe I make it a tiny, tiny bit. Say, like 250 over here. And then I am quite happy with that. Okay, next, we have over here, the light stand and stuff like that, and it is not extending out enough. So what we can do with that one is we can go ahead and go back into Photoshop. And it's a bit unfortunate that we have one object in front of another, else we would be able to easily select probably our mask over here. But what we can do is we can go ahead and select color range and just select all the white parts and then hold Alt using our selection tool and deselect some of these pieces over here. So now we have that all selected, and we can turn it off, go back into our re channel. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use my polygonal selection tool to basically deselect some of these areas over here. There we go. Okay, so we have this one, and for this one, all we need to do is we go to levels. And sometimes for this one, it can be nicer. If you just move the top slider to make it more white, rather than just pushing the white levels out, this sometimes gives us a better soft look whenever something is round. So we can try this. We can save it once again as a copy, interior, that, right click and reimport. Yeah, it's a bit intense. And yeah, it's really hard to avoid making round objects look a little bit straight. You can remember from, like, the chair. But honestly, I think for now this over here, that is fine. Yeah, I quite like that. I'm not really too big of a fan. Next time, let's avoid having objects intersecting for the next one. But for this one, it's fine. Over here, we have R. Oh, one, one. We have this one over here. For which I can probably just go ahead and do selection mode, control, no control shift I to invert my selection and deselect everything that is not this piece, and now we can go ahead and once again, push this one out. Here we go. Save a copy. Yeah, I know it's a bit time consuming this way. But honestly, that's why I'm just going to time laps the rest later on. Getting there, it could go a little bit more away from the wall. But yeah, I think you get the points. You can just, like, play around with this. There we go, see? That's why it now also feels good. And now, finally, we have this one, which at some angles looks a little bit round, which is interesting. But remember, we will have frames and everything in front of it, so it won't be as bad. So this one, I guess because we are looking at it from the front, we have lost any detail that are like the books and stuff like that. That is unfortunate. However, we cannot really avoid that because these are not real three D models. So that's something I kind of forgot when I placed the books that, of course, we are looking at it from a front view. We simply cannot do everything. Else we would have just created an actual interior. So what I'm going to do for that one is that one is a bit interesting. So for that one, we can control where we want it to start and where we want it to end. Now, I want it to end probably pretty close to our wall, maybe like a slightly further away from what we have here. However, I don't want to have it starting that early. So what I can do is let's once again select Control Shift I deselect everything that is not this piece. And for this one, so this is our front. I'm going to go to levels, and I'm just going to like, take this one. Push it back a little bit. O. Let's go ahead and click green pot. See, it's really sensitive. I think I want to have a little bit closer. Let's Undo that. Let's push it back a little bit. Let's say it was 40, so let's make it like 4249. And now what we can do is we can go to our green channel, and we still have the same selection. And in our green channel, we need to make this more white to have it closer to the wall. So let's make it once again darker, to have it further away. Let's try around 230. File, Save as copy. Targa. And let's go ahead and right click and reimport. See? And that's basically how you can control this. So I'm probably going to make it a little bit darker, and then I'm just going to call it done just because we will also have window blinds and everything in front of it. That's kind of like the art. To improve this, you basically hide stuff. That's how you can improve this stuff a little bit more by hiding it and, of course, having it not too close to the camera and stuff like that. But okay. So does that do the twig? There we go. I think that's looking pretty good for andere. I'm not too happy about the backside. The backside, I was expecting it to be a little bit better. So here, that's fine. Is it maybe not able to read the backside well? I mean, if it's really not able to read the backside well, I guess what you can do is you can go ahead and select it Control Shift I to invert selection and only select the backside and maybe then also some of the pillows. And then you want to deselect the front. So if I just go ahead and do a polygonal selection, Oh, wait. No, if I do polygonal section, it will not look nice enough. I can do a polygonal selection over here because we don't need this entire piece like that. But yeah, I want to get these back pieces. So let's go ahead and use, like, a magic one tool to kind of, like, select all of these pieces. Set to like 15 And then basically if we make it a little bit thicker, it should show up a little bit better in our height. The only thing that I'm a bit worried about is the pillows. Now, of course, you can then also deselect the pillows, but that will take, again, a little bit of extra time. So we have this one. I can go ahead and now go to levels and push levels out a little bit, maybe like 0.45 or two, four, five, sorry. And I can tie that. Okay, I might want to do this without pillows in the end. But we can go a little bit maybe a little bit stronger. Let's try this. There is, like, a threshold where it starts to look more solid. And right now we are just below that threshold. 01. You see? You can see that it's starting to look more solid, but now also the pillows are starting to get pushed out too much. So what I would do is I would probably do that and maybe set my tolerance, quite high to like 30 and see if that maybe Okay, so it is able to capture those windows. Now I set my tolerance to 20 back. Just trying to do this as fast as I can, because I don't really want to waste any time on this. Let's just go ahead and then finish this off with like a polygonal selection tool. In the end, it's just about showing you, of course, the techniques that you can use to fix these type of problems in case you want to really spend a lot of time on your interiors. So it's the selected pillows over here. Okay. And now that should give me a little bit more safety to push out only the backside. And then, of course, yeah, if this pillow is darker, it might cause some problems. However, those problems are often not as visible. So Yeah, you know what? I think I'm just going to leave it here. Let's also just for the fun of it, set our steps like one to eight. And you'll see if I do want to eight, then it is able to read it. So it's just like it's sitting just below that threshold. And I don't know. I can keep trying to push this, but there comes a point where it will just break. So I don't really want to push it too much. And I guess if you really, really want to look at it, that up close, yes, then you can just set the threshold a bit larger. Yeah, if I now go to like 64, see, here, it's just not able to read it at 64. So you just need to go a little bit higher. Even if I just do, like, let's do one to eight, just for now, just for the fun of it. Let's leave it at one to eight, just because I'm looking at, like, just a pretty picture. Okay, we got this. Now, out of curiosity, what we can do is so we can open up that HDR that we created and try to flip it. However, I am 99.9% sure that it will not work and that we actually need to flip around and re render the entire thing inside of our room one, so let's do interior 02 HR. And the reason for that is because how the shade reads it. So if the door is over here, if I go ahead and just right click and layer from background so that I can edit it, and I'm editing it by flipping it back horizontally. So yeah, we should keep in mind to mirror our room, pretty much. Now I can do a saves copy. Normally, I don't really note because I don't often add doors to my rooms, which I know is kind of ironic, but actually, if you look at the Metrix demo, they also don't often show it. But this is what will happen. So we now mirrored it and we go ahead and we reimport it. And it will have most likely a black void in one of the cubes because it's no longer in the correct location. See? The back wall has become a black cube, and it still didn't even fix the problem. So that's why we basically do not want to mirror that kind of stuff and always have the black void into the same location. Okay, so it doesn't matter. We need to go back anyway because I also want to go ahead and generate a missive map on this. So we can go ahead and for re import this. Oh, wow, we are already at 40 minutes. Okay, so let's cancel this or let's stop this chapter here. Now that we have this, what we will be doing in the next chapter is we will go ahead and just do some bug fixing and do some final polish. And once that is done, we have a proper interior, and then we can actually test out on our building already. We can just, like, import our building with one or two of the interiors, see what it looks like, get a fuel for things. And then what we can do is we can do a massive time naps where we will just go in and, like, create a bunch of interiors, a bunch of rooms. We still, of course, need to create an emissive so that we have also a night scene, and that's also quite important. So yeah, let's go ahead and continue with this in the next chapter. 21. 20 Setting Up Our Building In Unreal: Okay, so we left off with our interior. However, our interiors flipped. Now, last time I was thinking way too difficult. I was thinking about, like, Oh, we're just going to swap around the entire environment and rebake it and all this stuff. But I can literally just swap around the furniture. For some reason, I just didn't think about that. So what I can literally do is I can literally go into our depth and our bido and just go edit, transform, and just flip it horizontal. That's all. Dt. Okay, this one, we need to, like, right click and lay a firm background and press Okay before we can do this. Transform and flip horizontal. So that's just me probably being tired or something like that and forgetting about it. So I'm just pressing Contras to save my scene. And now I can go ahead and I can Oh, wait. Sorry. For the dep map, I need to also save it as a TGA over here. There we go. Okay. So we can just go in here, interior assets, interior one, right click and reimport, and Tata fixed. Okay, awesome. So I would say that our very first interior is now pretty much done. And now we have gone over the workflow on how to create our interior rooms and also on how to create our interior assets. Now what we're going to do is I want to go ahead and I want to start applying this to my building. And after that is done, we will go ahead and we will work on, well, in our case, it's probably going to be window blinds because our building windows are really thin. You can also, of course, create curtains. It goes the exact same way. However, because the windows are so thin, it makes more sense to have window blinds. So and also the corner is going to be a little bit interesting to map this onto like a corner. So we need to have a quick look at that. Oh, first of all, over here, if we just go ahead and we know that we want to make it like a cube, so we can probably just go for a simple plane. Oh,'s going into my building, and I can just create a simple plane to get started with. And I know that we already have this plane created, but it's easier for me to just recreate it. So 500 by 500. So perfect cube plane, no segments needed. We can go ahead and we can rotate it and we can place this into place on our building. So what we're going to start doing now is we are going to start Wi like taking this building to final. So I will start with just one interior. And once that is done, we will go ahead and work on the window blinds. And for this interior, we most likely want to do for over here, like two windows like this. And don't forget we want to keep some space at the top and the bottom to basically make the depth effect look better. So here we have our window interior, and I can go ahead and I can go in here. Now, there is a way that you can actually shaders. You can map multiple window interiors into one shader. However, I actually don't really like doing that. I like to have more control over my environment by simply using a few more materials because else we need to create a massive system about the spacing of our windows and things like that. This was part of the system from the Matrix demo, I believe. However, we are going to go for something a bit more simplified. It's a vista. It's not going to be that impressive from a distance. So I will call this Int underscore 01 over here. Oops. Int underscore 01. And I'm just going to go ahead and apply this to my plane like that. Okay, so everything is now applied. All of our textures are ready to go. So at this point, we can pretty much just export this building. It might not look very good yet, but that is something that we'll work on later. What I can, however, do, by the way, is I can already, duplicate this one and call this one for the fake Windows. That is something I can definitely do. So we can go ahead and go in here. And call this fake window. And the fake windows, basically what those will do is they will not have any interior, because if we place an interior everywhere, it's way too easy to see everything repeating. So just doing, like, a nice fake window interior, it will look a little bit nicer. So let's go ahead and do this. Now we have these two pieces. For my fake interior, what I most likely want to do is I most likely want to go ahead and move this one in here. And, shall we do one window or two? I think what I will do is I will make my fake interiors in segments of four. So we will have one, two, three, and four. The reason why we want to Oh, that's three. I don't know what's happened to four. So the reason why we want to have four of them is that we have a little bit more variation because we are just going to create a very basic texture, which will incorporate these four fake windows. I actually have a YouTube tutorial I made before on how to do that, so some of you might have seen it. So this is now done. We can select our entire building, save our scene. Give the second over here. And then what we can do is we can probably just go ahead, Oh, this is a buck, by the way, with my screen whenever I resize my screen. So just ignore that. Sometimes my menu is on the side. I need to re stop my entire PC just to fix that, so I don't really want to do that. Anyway, let's go exports, and then we now go buildings two and real. And we will call this Vista Unsce building Underscore zero, one. Let's keep it nice and simple. I'm just going to turn on triangulate just in case. And for the rest, there isn't really anything I need to do because we made our building to scale, so we should just be able to use automatic and we can go ahead and press Okay. Awesome. So now, in real, what we're going to do is we are going to start by setting up this very first building, finalizing our interiors, and then the rest will come later. So textures. Let's go ahead and we need concrete. Concrete under score 01. We need another one that is going to be roof score 01 over here. Those are the only two textures why now that we have, of course, there might be more textures when we create more buildings. So we only need the albedo normal roughness. We don't really need a displacement for this. So let's import that one and also for roof 01, give me a second. Yeah, albedo normal roughness. Let's throw this in here. Now, next thing that you need to do is you need to go into your roughness and you need to turn off SRGB, else the roughness will not read correctly. Same over here, and we need to go into our normal, and we need to scroll down and we need to flip the green channel because norm maps come in two formats, open GL and DirectX. These normals are currently open GL because that's the most common one. However, unreal engine uses direct X, and the only difference is that the green channel of your norm map is flipped. So our textures are now also ready to go. So what are we going to do? We are going to get started by going into our materials, and I should have probably organized, it is a bit better. So we got our window. Ah. Yeah, let's go ahead because I know that we are going to create a lot of building materials, probably. So let's do buildings over here. And in here, I will go ahead and I will create a master material. Let's see, building, underscore TilableUnderscore, master. Let's do it like that. So building tilable master in here. Okay. Awesome. So what we're going to do is we are going to start by just dragging in some of our textures. So let's grab our concrete over here. And let's nicely drag these out. Now, I already showed you about the insisting and everything in the mountain toil, so I will not explain what it exactly is, but you will see what it is when we actually go through the flow. We want to convert these to perimeters, called the base color. So just right click Convert to peimeter normal map, and convert perimeter roughness. I don't know why I call this normal map. I always call it normal. There we go. Next, what I want to do is I want to add a texture coordinate note, texture. Coordinate over here so that we can control the tiling. We need to a click for a scale parameter, call it tiling, and let's just go ahead and set the default value to one, and we want to simply multiply our tiling with the texture coordinate in order to control the tiling of our concrete in case that we want to go ahead and work with that. Here we go. Next, what we want to do. This one is quite important. We want to add a multiply again, and now we want to basically multiply our base concrete with a constant t vector, which is a plain color. Right click and convert this to perimeter again, and call this color. Oh fleet. This will allow us to basically control the color of our concrete, which in turn will mean that this is what I was talking about how we are going to have one single concrete texture. But the building will still look different because we are going to give it differences in differences in color. Now for the normal map, I don't really need to do anything, so I can just plug it into normal roughness map if you want. You can multiply your roughness with a scale perimeter called roughness, amount or strength or anything like that, default set to one like this. And that's why we also have a little bit of control over our roughness. So super easy material. We can just go ahead and save it. And next, what we're going to do is if we go into assets, buildings, we can go ahead and we can start by importing our entire building. So buildings two and real, Vista Building 01. Absolutely make sure that combined meshes is turned on, else you will not have a nice time because then it will try to import every single mesh individually. And if you want, we can use Banitredy. We can turn on Build Nanite and it will right away turn into a Nanite mesh, which could be handy because that's what I was planning anyway. And then I can just go ahead and press Import. And there we go. It will throw in a bunch of temporary materials. We don't really need to worry about that. But if I go ahead and drag this in here, Dad, we have our entire building in here. Nice and large. So what we're going to do now is which side has my Oh, that site. I'm just going to go ahead and just quickly rotate this. Makes it easier for me to brevi. Here we go. Okay. So let's go ahead and get started by creating some material. So right click Create material instance. Concrete underscore 01. Shall I just do zero, one, 02? You can make it more descriptive like underscore light or underscore dark. But I think I just want to go ahead and do 01. And then I like to first of all, activate everything like this and save my concrete. And now I need to have a tink. So let's have a look at the building. So we have concrete 01, then we have concrete 02. No. Let's do this better. Let's rename this to concrete zero. One dash dark. Yeah, that can work. So 01 dash dark. We will have another duplicate, which we'll call Roof underscore 01. And I'm just dragging all of them in here. Let's see Roof concrete. Frames. So our frames, I'm going to show you how to basically create another very basic material. So that is frames. That's fine. Fake glass and fake interior. Okay. Okay, so there's, like, a few more materials that we need to create. But let's just get started with the first one. So we have concrete 01. We have concrete 01 dark. I'm going to for now just make the dark one, the color overlay a bit darker. And then later on, of course, we will nicely balance it. Roof Serra one, what we need to do is we need to go to our roof over here and simply drag in these textures, and that should already be it. And now what's want to do is if we just go ahead and open up our vista building over here, let's also drag this one down here. We can already start applying some material. So we're just nicely going to apply them one by one. So we have concrete 01 over here. We have our roof 01 over here, concrete 02, which is the dark version over here. That's all working. Okay, frames. So the next one is going to be frames, buildings, we can go ahead and create another material that we'll call. I'm just going to call it metal underscore master, just because I know that the frames we can use also for metal and everything else. This one, it's going to be a little bit more customized. So what I want to do? Is, let's see, in my textures, let's create a new folder and call this metal. Now, in this folder, because remember sorry, my microphone cuff, remember how I said that I wanted to go ahead and save a little bit of texture memory by not applying any textures. There is one texture, however, that I will apply, and that is a normal map just to give that extra bit of quality. It's not really needed, but it's great if you have really large pieces of metal like we have. All I need to do is I just need to go to for example over here, text.com, 1 second. I'm just creating a folder. Where I can place the texture that we're going to download and let's say that we go to treat scans, although treaty scans often don't really, because you don't really scan plain metal. So maybe we want to rather go to, like, PBR materials, and then we want to go to metal over here. And we just want to get some really soft like metal Normal map. Brushed, no, worn, clear. Let's go for, like, plain steel. Zoom in just to see. Oh, no, plain steel let's go for this one, plain steel number two. Zoom in. I want to have a very subtle norm map, but it does need to be slightly visually interesting. Let's do battered steel. Let's try battered steel, and then we will just control the strength of norm. You can make this super small, so just 512 by 512 is more than enough, and we can go ahead and we can go into reel and we can import this one. Don't forget to open it up and flip your green channel. And basically, so if we go ahead and track this in here, this is the only texture that we want to create. Now, before you do anything with this texture, you want to right click and you want to first convert this to a texture object because we are going to use an automatic UV node for this, and converting it to texture object collapses and allows us to use that specific node. And then you can convert this to peremter and call this metal on the score. Normal or just call it normal doesn't really matter. Now what you want to do is in order to basically automatically UV unwrap that, we are going to use technique that is called triplanar unwrapping, or you can also call it worldspace unwrapping. If you just go ahead and type in world aligned texture world align normal, sorry, world align normal because we need a nomap. All you need to do is you need to plug in your no map, and you need to plug in a scalar perimeter. That's what we call tiling and set is quite high to like 250. This is because basically what this node will do is it will project our nor map from every single angle. So top, bottom, left, right, front, back. Then it will smoothly blend those projections together so that you don't really see any harsh seams. However, it does this over the entire world, and that's why our tiling needs to be so large. So you will see how it works. We plug this into a flattened normal node. And the reason we want to do that is because we want to control the strength of our no map. So create a scale parameter, normal strength. And this is something we already used all of these notes in the mountain tutorial. I'm just showing you here for the people that might not want to show or might not want to see how to create mountains and just want to know how to create Vista buildings. So I'm trying to just include a lot of people. Next, we want to have a constant three vector. Right click, convert this to premor and call this base color, super simple. And I'm going to make the default just like a whitish color. And then we would just want to have a scale pemter for metallic. Keep it at zero. And a scale peremterF the roughness. And now the roughness we can, if we want blend the roughness, also with a grunge map, which I believe we already have. Oh, no, do we not have crunch maps? No. But that is something that's only if it is needed. So for now, I'm just going to have a simple roughness and set this one to like 0.3, probably. So that is not too shiny. Maybe like 0.2. Okay, so very basic material so far. We can go ahead and save our and then if we go ahead and go into our materials, buildings, we can grab a metal master, create a material instance, and let's call this one metal underscore frames underscore Black let's open this up. Once again, I like to have it on my little window over here, and I'm going to make my base color quite a bit darker over here. And then I just need to see what it looks like before I can do anything else. So we plug this into our frames, and let's have a look. Over here. Okay, so frames, metal black. Let's make it a little bit darker. Not too dark because you almost nothing is ever completely black when we work with PBS. I'm going to make my roughness maybe like 0.4 or 0.3. And I feel like my normal map. Set us to zero. There we go. So now we get a bit of norm map. That set us to 0.2 or maybe 0.5, because I don't want to make too strong. And I'm going to set my tiling to like 400. Or did I need to go lower? 200? Oh, yeah, I have to go lower to make it more tilable like this. And now it is up to you if you also want to go ahead and maybe, like, blend this with like a grinch map for your roughness. If you want to do something like that, you basically would do something like this. So let's Grunge. Let's create a folder called grunge in our texture folder. And then if we just go ahead and import something. So let me just quickly find like a grunge map. You can just get this one from the unreal or sorry, from substance designer, you can just get this, for example. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to import like here. It's just like a random grunge map like this. Very common in substance designer, substance painter. You can download them online, type in grunge map, and then you will be able to find it. And let's go ahead and grab this and throw this in here. And honestly, all you will need to do is multiply your roughness amount with this grunge map. However, also multiply this grunge map with a scale perimeter called grunge amount. Yeah, that should be it. There are different ways of doing this, but this is probably because I want to control the base roughness and then I want to overlay my crunch map on top of it. So that's why I want to keep my base roughness in here. But now, if I just show you, we should be able to pretty much go into our metal frames. See? And use our grunge amount to basically control if we want to make our grunge right now it is shinier. Yeah, shinier, so let's make our grinds like duller. No way, that is shiny. Yeah. So here you can see that now you can go at and you can control that effect. And if you want, you can once again, right click convert this to texture object. And then you can go ahead and add a world aligned texture this time, plug it in here. Plug in the same tiling or not. You can do new tiling. You can do scalar. Grange tiling might actually be nicer to make it new 200. There we go. So we are just giving it some generic UV and if we save our scene. Yeah, we now have something more than enough for grind tiling, see? So we can make this tiling, like, really large if we want to or really small, give it an interesting effect, playground with, like, the Roughness variation. And just like that, so you can add more and more variation if you want. It's just about if you want to spend the time or the effort on it because this variation, you will never see it from here. So, you can literally go for like a plain color. You might not even need a roughness map or norm map, but I want to because I know that our versions are going to be a little bit closer, I just want to make sure that I cover all of my bases. So we have a metal frames black. Then we have a concrete C. Concrete C, what is which one was using concrete C again? And here, we can see like a roof. Oh, yeah, concrete C is over here, the granite. That was the one that we were going to make concrete C. I don't know if we can probably just use concrete dark, but let's just go ahead and duplicate this and call this concrete 01, underscore granite. I don't know. Just give it a name and throw this into concrete C. And later on, you can, if you want, swap out the texture, but I don't really want to use another texture. Let's give this maybe a little bit of like a blue tone over here. Like that. Just to give it a little bit variation and maybe set the tiling to like three or four. Okay? Not too much because then I can see the repeating. I can already see it a little bit over here, there's this repeating detail. But from a distance, that should be fine. So there we go. So that feels again a little bit different. Okay, so our fake glass, our grunge map actually comes in handy with also our fake glass, and we have frame 02. What do we need frame 02 for? To be honest, I'm not completely sure, let's isolate it. Oh, frame 02 doesn't exist. I don't know why it's in here, but frame 02, see? The reason I know it doesn't exist is because when you isolate it, it should show something or when you highlight it. So that's really weird. There might be like, some kind of, like, leftover piece somewhere. But honestly, at this point, what you can do is or you can just in case, throw on the frames black. But that's something Oh, no, wait. I know I know where it is. Want a bet? I think it's this one. If I go ahead and change this, see, here it's this one. Let's go ahead and duplicate this and call this chrome and throw this one on here. And let's go ahead and make this a white texture with metallic set one. See? So now it is chrome, and I'm just going to make this like completely white. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set my roughness to be a little bit duller. And I'm going to just tone down my grunge amount. Make my roughness a bit duller. There we go. Something like that should be good enough just to give the handle. It's way way too much overkill. I know that I'm making everything, like, way too nice for a vista building, but it's just like that urge I have with this stuff. I just want to make some cool looking stuff. But, okay, so we got this one over here. Can see some shadow palms, but let's address those a little bit later on. Those are most likely just nanite problems because nani proms, lumen problems because we have a building that's like, has all the insights and everything. Okay, so let's go for our fake glass. Now, our fake glass is slightly different from our fake windows. So our fake windows, I want to go at and make those slightly better than the glass here at the bottom. For our fake glass, what we can do is we can probably go ahead and, yeah, we can probably go ahead and just duplicate our metal master. Where are you? Metal master. Let's duplicate this and call this generic, fake glass master over here. And let's go ahead and open this up. Now for this one, we don't need map. That's one. We do want to have controls over our roughness amount over here and over our base color and our metallic. Let's see, is there anything else that we will need? To be honest, that's probably it. So we have this. I might not be happy yet about how I do the grinch map. First of all, let's right click and convert the grunge map to parameter. Called roughness crunch and what happens is whenever you convert a texture object to a perimeter, there is a bug where it will reset your texture. So you need to quickly go into Granges, select it, and then we can go ahead and just assign it again by pressing the little arrow button over here. Let's see, we have a grunge amount, we blend it with our roughness, we have control over our metallic. That should be it for already our fake glass. Now I'm not confident that this grinch map will look very nice. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to quickly go into substance Zinger and I'm just going to export like a bunch of grunges. Here we go. So here we are in substance. We can just delete all of that stuff. So super easy just to get some grunges and you can do the same thing in painter. I'm going to have some leaks over here. I want to have maybe like the grunge 01 I like, grunge number 13, I quite like. And let's stay with this for now. What I like to do is, I like to set my contrast quite low for glass. I'm just going to go ahead and change my random sat for this one. Okay, so here it looks like the contrast is already quite low. We can play around once again with our random seat. There we go. Okay, so you just want to grab a few grunches. You want to create a few output nodes over here. Plug in your grunches and just call the output node Grunch under score 01. A copy this in label. This one, grunch under score 02. And and this one grunge on score 03. Of course, you need to do this once, and then you can use it for any project you want. And then simply right click on our grunge note export outputs as Bitmap, select a folder where you want to export it, I created a Granges folder in our textures, and you can just do DGA export done. Super, super quick because I don't really care about it. I just need to get some grunge in here so that I can play around with my metal with my glass. So materials and buildings. We now have a generic fake glass master. Let's create a material instance, Gal is fake class underscore zero, one. And drag this into our fake class. There we go. Into our fake class slot over here. Now we can just go ahead and double click on. And basically what I like to do with this kind of fake glass, it's one of the few times that I break PBR, is I set the metallic to around like 0.8. I make my color quite dark like this. And then I basically play around with my roughness and my crunch maps. So let's set my crunch map tiling quite high, and it's going to make the roughness mount quite high so that I can see what I'm doing. So let's do something like this. And I can just give it a little bit of roughness variation and let's not make it too shiny. So let's do 0.4. Now, let's do 0.3 in my roughness. Yeah. Something like, okay, maybe, like, a little bit less crunch. Bit more. 1.05 maybe. There we go. So super, super basic, super quick glass like that, just to basically get something and you can play around a little bit more with your metallic to get different effects. So in this case, it's your metallic that really controls the shine of it and everything. So that's up to you to basically control. But from a distance, see, it will just look like some glass that you cannot really look through. You can also if you want to make it a little bit bluish, that sometimes looks nice. So if we just go in here and just make it like a tiny bit like bluish color, maybe a little bit lighter, like that. There we go. Okay, super easy fake glass. And the only difference between this fake glass and the one that we are going to create later on using our windows over here is that these windows, they will just have some more localized dirt. So the dirt will be around the corners, and that will make it look a little bit nicer. So we got that one. Next, what we have is we have our interior 01d. And what we can do is we can really throw this into our interior node. And then I can see that I have my I have my mirror. Oh, so my plane, the one way around. So I need to, like, go ahead and rotate this over here. Was there anything else that, I'm just going to close this. Is there anything else that I had to do with this? No, it looks like that our frames are pretty much correct. Of course, it's like, quite a small interior in this case, but we can go ahead and we can re export this entire thing. Oh, that's really annoying that my no Wong won vista building Here we go. Buildings, right click, reimport. Give that second, and there we go. And there is our interior, which, of course, from a distance, from distance, you don't really see the stretching, so it just looks a little bit nicer. So now that we have done this one, now the next thing that we're going to do is we basically want to just go ahead and create some window blinds that we can place in front of our interior. And those window blinds that material that will hold the window blinds will also just make this feel a little bit more like glass. We're just going to make it a little bit cloudy and just like visually more interesting. But I think that you can imagine that from a large distance, this will look quite nice. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 22. 21 Creating Our Window Blinds: Okay, so now that we have our interior, the next thing that we are going to do is we are going to create some window blinds to kind of, like, cover up the interior and add more variation to our building in general. Now, these will use most of the same techniques, and I'm going to just go and create something like really simple for this because honestly, you don't really need much. However, I am going to use this building because it's, like, a good template to see how large I want to make my window blinds. So basically, what I like to do is, let's say that we just go ahead and this is going to be very basic. Let's go ahead and create a cylinder, and I'm just going to turn on outer grid so that I can create it over here. And the cylinder will be the base of our window blinds, basically. We can go ahead and just remove the height segments. And because I'm going to bake it down onto a texture, I don't really care about polygon count or anything like that. I'm basically going to have this sitting roughly like over here because it will be behind the window frame later on. And just pushes out. Let's say something like that. Okay. And let's say that I will move it probably up until this point, that we start with covering the entire window, and then we will create a few variations that are more open or less open based upon that. Then what I will do is I will go ahead and I will simply go ahead and create 20 sides on my cylinder, convert to an antipol and I'm literally just going to go ahead and maybe, first of all, we get a little bit thinner. Yeah, okay, a little bit thinner. And then select one of the top faces and just do this. There you go. That's probably already enough. Now, if you want, you can go ahead and you can make it a little bit nicer by maybe like selecting these two edges over here, but you probably will never see it and move these up a little bit. Like that. I can see that it's not exactly in the center, but you won't really be able to notice that from this distance anyway. So we have this version over here, and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and reset this version to 000, and I will go ahead and art this into a new layer and call this blinds and turn off building 01. Okay. So we have our window blind over here. Now what I will do is I will have this window blind, and I'm just going to go ahead and say, how many versions are we going to fit on here? One, two, three, four, maybe. So one, two, I'm just thinking three, four, five, six, seven. Maybe let's go for, like, eight versions. Yeah. Yeah, let's go for eight versions. That should be fine. So let's say that we have eight different variations. And all of these variations, they simply have a slightly different position. So we basically just, like, move everything up a little bit. And then we have full control over how much do we want to have our window blinds and stuff like that. There we go. That should be totally fine. Okay, cool. So we have these versions. Now the next thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and create a simple plane. Let's do on a front view or left view over here. And let's go ahead and create a perfectly square plane. So here's a plane. Let's make it 450 by 450, probably, like this. Scaled out a little bit more. We're just going to nicely fit this on our plane. And then we have these last remaining four. I don't know what that is. I like a little ts that I missed? Oh, we can go ahead and we can move this one over here. And honestly, we even have space for, like, more if we want to. So for now, let's just leave it like this, and we can always add more if needed. Oh, let's have a look. So this is almost the same concept as when we had our interior. We basically have our window blinds, which is our high poly, and we have a low poly, which is our plane over here. And all we need to do now is we just need to bake it down, throw on a quick fabric texture inside of substance painter and a mask, and we will have some window blinds that we can easily use. So let's go ahead and let's see, exports, buildings, lines. And you can do the same with curtains or whatever material that you want. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go, Oh, wait. I don't need another folder. I can use this folder. So we have file, that's really annoying. Export, Export selection. Sorry about that. I know that it looks a bit stupid with my UI bug, but I'm kind of used it by now. So this one will be LP, safe. Okay. Honestly, if you want, you can even like a turbo smooth. I don't know if it will look good. Okay, not in this case. Although you can try to Turbos smooth will just make it look a little bit smoother, for example. But I don't think that is really needed in this case. I think it should be enough if I just leave it as it is. So we now can go ahead and we can have our window blinds. Come out and add Poly because what is that? It's so weird. I'm having a lot more problems than normal, which is a bit strange, but I will. That's about how it always happens with our whenever you are creating a tutorial. So let's go ahead and call this one HP over here and safe. Here we go. Okay, and now we can go ahead and we can open up Mom's atolbg. And here we have a high ply and a low poly. And if we just simply drag these into a new scene in Mamosat, oh, I can see that my plane needs to flip around. Let's select my plane and just press. I'm just going to add and no modify. Basically just want to flip around the norm map or the normals. And call this low poly again. There we go. That should do the trick. Okay. Awesome. So just to do a very quick bake, we have our low ply in low high polen high, same way as that we created our interiors. We go ahead and we set the outer bake to none, push our max offset to cover our entire blinds over here. And then we can go ahead and go textures blinds. And in here, let's create another called bakes. And in here, we can throw the following maps. So if we go over here to our baking, let's go ahead and set this 16 bits and use our correct output PNG, and this is going to be blinds as our name. And we want to go ahead and honestly, four k is more than enough. With this kind of stuff, you can get away with 512 or two, five, six, even later on, but we can always optimize it later. So it's better to go high and then low than to go low and then not being able to go higher. Let's have a norm map in here. Let's have a Alpha mask in here, which we'll mask out specifically where our blinds are. Do we need anything else? No, we don't really need an embitclusion for something like this, that's honestly already fine. Let's just go ahead and have these two versions over here and we can just go and press Bake and double check. Yeah. Yeah, that seems to work totally fine. Awesome. Now the last thing that we need to do is we just need to go ahead and give it a little bit of a texture and we can do this by loading up substance painter. Over here. And in substance painter, we want to go ahead and I believe this is the first time I'm showing you substance painter, but I do expect that you already know the basics of it, but it's very easy what we are going to do. We're going to create a new file, PBR metallic roughness. So for the file, what we want to do is we want to go ahead and select the low poly plane from our blinds over here. Document resolution can be two k, non map format OpenGL. And then in the Import baked maps, we want to go ahead and press art and we want to select those maps that we just baked. It was open, and then we just press to load in our file. Now, one thing that we need to do in order to show our opacity is we want to go down here to our dis sorry, not to our display settings, to our shader settings. If you don't have this window, you can go to Windows, and then in here, you can go to Views and find shader settings. And I want to go ahead and I want to click on the ASM Metal Ruf and select A PBR Metal Rugh with Alpha test, which allows us to basically create a opacity map. In our text set list, we can control the name. So call this Blind. And in our textiset settings, over here, we can control all of the channels that we want to go ahead and add something to. I'm just going to go ahead and press a plus, and I want to add an opacity channel over here. And then if we scroll down, we want to go to select Normap. Click on the Blinds norm Map. And then you can see that now the blinds over here are activated. At this point, all that we need to do is in our layers, create a simple fill layer. Call this base. And in our base field layer, we want to go ahead and scroll down to opacity and select our window blinds, which you can often find near the top. Now we have our window blinds here ready to go. At this point, we can just go ahead and we can find a nice looking fabric that we can quickly throw on it, and we're probably going to go for something that we will probably make it white so that we can control the colors of it later on. So let's go ahead and type in fabric in our smart materials. Let's see, fabric baseball hat. Honestly, that one might already work. Don't know fabric canvas creased. Sometimes whenever this happens, you just want to go ahead and you want to turn off the opacite so that it properly matches. I don't know, fabric creased. Let's have a look. So what do we have in fabric? What else do we have, Axe? Reinforced, denim, aged, fabric linen creased and fabric linen warm. Just have also look like the linen creased one. I like that one more. So let's go ahead and do fabric linen creased over here. And then next thing that I like to do is I always like, open up my material and just turn everything off so that I can have, like, a paper look. So this is our base. We are going to go ahead and make it a little bit lighter so that we can control the color later on, something like that. Not too light because then we lose some of the details. I then go into my fabric base. And it looks like I want to click on wave tree and set my tiling a bit higher. So let's set this to 30 and my messy fibers, let's set this to like three or two over here. Actually, you know what I liked one. Let's stay like this. Then we have our fibrous patron. Our fibrous patron right now is way too intense, so I'm just going to go ahead and in my base color over here, change the opacity to, like, tone it down a little bit. And what I want to do is I probably want to go ahead and set my height a little bit lower in my creases. And also in here, just to not make the height map as intense. Then we have our lighter fibers over here. Once again, let's tone down my height map, and that's fine. And then we have our actual creases. And what I like to do with my creases is I'm going to go ahead and add a blur on top. So let's add a filter and then select blur. Yeah, I like to give a little bit more of a blur. And the next thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to switch from base colour to high and then tone down my opacite to basically give it. And the height map is the same as non map in substance painter. Something like that. And I don't know. Maybe you want to tie it creases twice. Yeah, maybe, like, scroll it down a bit. So over here, it's tiled twice. Maybe not twice, maybe. I just want to make it a little bit small. Let's do something like that. Honestly, that should be totally fine. It's just some really basic window blinds. We don't need to go too intense with it. So when you are happy with whatever you have, you can go ahead and you can go file and let's first of all, save our scene. So buildings saves lines and psave next, we can go ahead and go file export textures, select your Export output map, which is just going to be in our text folder, PBR metal roughness. Taka. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to export it starting with probably, let's do 2048, but we will lower it down later on, most likely. So having that done, now, if we go ahead and oh, wait, I forgot to export Oh, no. You want to double check something. You want to double check that your Alpha map over here. It's it's inside the Alpha of your base color. I mean your mask. And it looks like it is, so that is good. So the next thing that I want to do is if we go ahead and we go over here to three years, Max, I'm just going to go ahead and copy my plane, and I'm going to drag this one into Building 01 to n on Building 01 into an off blinds. Yeah, select this. Over here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and create a new folder or folder, a new material. Call this blinds underscore 01. And then what you want to do is you want to go ahead and load up your base color over here, loading up a bitmap. Now, the annoying thing is that in threes Max, you cannot just rip off the Alpha. So even if I load in my base color, what will most likely happen is, like, I need to then go down to transparency over here. Or not transparency. I want to go down to my cutout over here because this is not a transparent map, but a cutout map. You want to once again select your base color. But this time when it opens up your settings, you set this to Alpha and then of course, apply this to your plane. This is very specific to three years Max, so this is something that will work differently depending on whatever software you are using. Now that this is done, we can go ahead and convert this to an added poly and now it's as simple as going in here and creating some lines so that we can nicely cut out our window blinds. So we have one of them. Let's do this one first. Let's have one over here. Select this, detach, and press Okay. Place another line here, select this, detach. And the reason why I do it from large to small is so that you don't have to remove the lines that go crisscross through them later on. Detach, okay. Over here, it looks like we need to do another line here. For the rest, it looks pretty. Well, this line, you might want to carefully turn on preserve UVs, in this case, and just move the line a little bit. Or every software has preserved UV, so you can just look it up, how to use it. But in general, this is working fine, so I can just go ahead and keep detaching these pieces. This one I need to move it a little bit. And after this, it is just a bunch of placement. But that's something that, of course, I will do in the times the actual placement and stuff like that because that might take quite a while. So first of all, showing you how to, like, create every single element of the building, and then we will actually make it look nice. So it might take a second for it to look really, really nice, but it will come later. So we can go ahead and go over here. And so for now, I'm just going to throw these into their own layer called lines just so that we can keep track of them. And let's say that for now, I'm just going to use, I don't know, these two. Let's say that I have these two over here, and you just want to go ahead and copy them over. And these ones I'm going to throw into building one and just very simply move them just in front of our glass over here. And over here. Now, one thing I do realize at this point, although few things that I do realize at this point, is that I made a mistake in what I said. So I said that our window blinds are also going to make the glass look like glass. However, that was wong. I mean, our interior. We are going to change the shade of our interior to make it look more like glass. And over here, it looks like that I made them a little bit too white, but that shouldn't really be a problem. So that's just my mistake, but it doesn't make that big of a difference. So we now have this stuff. Let's say that we turn this one off. Let's go ahead and once again, export our building, and let's have a look at this. Export Tom Reels, Tom reel buildings 01, let's go ahead and just reimport our building. Reset to FBX is often easiest to do. Oh, I meant to say done. Press done because else you lose your materials. Sorry about that. That is really dumb of me. Anyway, let's just go ahead and create a texture called this blinds. And in here, you want to import your base color, normal roughness from your blinds, because the other two maps, they don't have any information, so you can just remove the other two maps. Same thing as always, turn off SRGB on your window blinds. And the funny thing is that actually substance painter pots as direct X. So it's one of the few times that we don't have to press flip green channel on our no map. Do I already have just like the base material? I don't think I actually made that. No, because our Vista mountain is very different. Let's create a material called this basic underscore master, and this one is super simple. We can just go ahead and we can import our blind textures over here like this. It's just this. Convert spremeter base color, normal roughness. Let's do a multiply in our base color and multiply it with a constant three vector, which is going to also be a parameter called color overlay, same as before. And I'm just going to already give this like a darker color as an overlay, just as default. That one goes into base color. Normal goes into normal. And if you want, you can also multiply your roughness using a scale pemter called Roughness amount set is the one that is our roughness. And the last thing that we need to do is we need to go into our basic master, and we want to set our blend mode to mask over here. And then we just want to go ahead and grab the alpha over base color and throw this one into our best mask. And that we'll cut out our mask just like that. And then it's just safe. That's it. That's all we really need. We can now go ahead and we can just go into our materials, buildings. And here we have our where are you basic master? Let's duplicate or sorry, create a material instance. Call these like blinds underscore dark. And then we can just go ahead and open up our building, and I'm afraid we have to reapply our materials again, but that is my fault. So see buildings. And we have our concrete 01, roof 01, concrete dark, metal frames black, concrete granite, fake glass, chrome. And this, like, yes, we have a lot of materials right now. However, this is something where if you would use like texture atlases or trim sheets that you can lower down the amount of materials if you wanted to. We have an interior. I'm not going to do fake windows yet, and we will have our blinds dark over here. White? Does that work? Oh, yeah, there we go. That works. And then I just want to go ahead and go into my window and create an interior over here. Okay, cool. So these are our blinds. Yeah, we definitely have some shadow arrows. But just in general, as you can see over here, that covers it up quite nicely. And especially from a distance, you can still see some of the environment, but in general, this is working quite well. So if we would just go ahead and like, as a sample, go in here and create a few different interiors. Of course, the interior will looks exactly the same. And I'm not going to cover how to do the side yet. But just like that, we can go ahead and we can. Well, actually, what you might want to do just to make your life easier is already place all of these window blinds in, like, the correct position. This and moving them up. And the reason why I might want to do this is that when I, for example, select a blind, I can just simply copy it and move it over here. Now, I'm not too worried that they are a little bit bigger. Oh, sorry, and one thing, center your pivots. There we go. That makes it a lot easier too. So I'm not too worried that they are a little bit bigger because, of course, we have slightly different window sizes. You can just scale them up if you want, or do whatever you want with it. So I can just go ahead and show off some window blinds over here. Let's say that I show you another one over here. And let's say one that is just, like, completely rolled out over here. For this one, I want to maybe move a little bit higher. And let's say another one that I will do here. This is why you also want to keep them quite generic so that you can just easily place them all around. Like this. Okay. So we have those window blinds done, and what you can then do is you can basically just go ahead and select all of them and just throw those into the Building 01, or you can create your own little layer. I don't know why this one there we go. So having that done, we can go ahead and turn off our window blinds. And once again, export this. And this time, let's not press reset the FBX. But let's go ahead and just press Done. So although it should not actually try to reset the FBX, that only happens whenever we export a new material on our model. That's when it gets confused and it asks us if we want to reset all of our entire model. But if we just do this, there you go. So you can see that you very quickly can start creating some variation with this. Okay, awesome. Now we are already quite overdue with this chapter. So what we will do is in the next chapter, we will go ahead and work on our fake glass windows. And once that is done, we will go ahead and we will start by just populating, like, a side of this building, and we will also have a look and see how the corner works. If the corner doesn't work well, we will just make it fake glass because I did not, of course, really think about using a corner in that way. But that's something that we can work on. And once that is done, then I've pretty much shown you all of the workflows, and then we then I will go ahead and do a big time lapse, where I will create various interiors and various variations of everything to make the building look visually more interesting because that is just very, very time consuming. And after that, there might be some bonus chapters on how to optimize your model, how to do things like improving the material counts and that kind of stuff. But that is something that we will go over in a future bonus chapter. So for now, S look already quite nice, especially when you look at it from the bottom over here, it looks already quite impressive. And let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 23. 22 Creating Our Fake Windows And Finishing One Side Of The Building: Okay, so what we're going to do now is we are going to work on our fake windows over here. And doing these, it's actually really easy. It's even easier than doing our window blinds that we had before. So let's say that we have these four over here, and these are going to be our fake window templates. We want to go ahead and we want to UV unwrap them into a one by one square to give them a unique UV. And I will just go ahead and I will do that over here like this by just UV unwrapping them quite simply. And let's just go ahead and, um, of course, you want to twin and give them as much space as possible, which in this case, might be a little bit annoying because of the rectangular shape, but we'll see. So I feel like, Yeah, here, so we can maybe if I do this. Let's say that we have these two, and then one of those goes over here. So this way, we can already make these three quite a bit larger, and then we just have this one, then we have a little bit of space left. So just try to optimize it. I do not want to make one window much larger than the other windows because then the taxa density will be broken, and you'll be able to see a difference in resolution, which we do not want. So let's say something super basic like this, totally fine. Next, what we're going to do is we are simply going to export, and I still have that bug over here, unfortunately. It's never been this bad, but well. We are going to go ahead and export from our buildings. Let's make one called Windows. And in here I will go ahead and call this Windows underscore painter, because this one we'll go to Substance Painter. There we go. That's all. Now we just need to go ahead and go into painter, create a brand new scene, PBR metallic roughness, and we can go exports, buildings, windows, windows painter. 1024 is fine. Open GL is fine, and we can just press Okay. And there we go. Here are our windows. So at this point, everything is very similar to the material that we created for a fake glass inside of wal engine. So first of all, over here, oh, I already got a good material name, which is fake window. That's totally fine. So we are going to get started by just creating our base glass, which is going to be a very simple fill layer over here, and we are going to set our roughness to like 0.8, just like we did in our material. Also in my metallic, my roughness is going to be a little bit higher. The base color, we want to go ahead and make it a bit of a darker bluish tone, like something like that. And then what I will do is I will start by our first variation, which is going to be another fill layer. And this fill layer will only have the roughness activated. And then I'm just going to go ahead and add a black mask, call this rough 01, as in roughness, variation 01. Here we go. And then in this black mask, you want to add a fill layer, which allows us to input a bitmap. In which case, we are just going to go up here to textures, and we want to go for, like, a really soft fill layer, maybe like some fingerprints or some smudges or something like that. So let's have a look around. Maybe like some wipes over here. There we go. That can actually work. Yeah, here. So just something to make it look quite nice and soft, and then we can also play around over here with our roughness amount, and that's our first layer. Now we can go ahead and simply duplicate this and call this roughness variation 02. And in this one, we want to just have a black mask, and we are simply going to grab a brush, and you can use any brush you like. Probably, I have a bunch of custom brushes, which you can also get for a wy cheap price on my station profile. But for now, I will keep it with the defaults, like a fur, soft white brush over here. And then I'm basically going to go ahead and I'm going to paint this brush around my windows. Sometimes it's easier if you actually press C. And if you press C, you can cycle between your maps. So here, what you can see is that I'm cycling between my maps and I'm starting and I look at my roughness map. And I just want to give some variation, of course, in the amounts and everything. And then what we can do is we can again, break this up using another grinch just to make it look a little bit nicer. So let's do something like this over here. And now what we can do is in our roughness, we can add now a fill layer, but set the fill layer to be a multiply, which means that it will keep whatever we paint it in. And then we can just, like, multiply this using, I don't know, maybe like here, some dirt. And then set the balance like quite lows here, just to give it once again, like a bit more variation. And now it's just a matter of playing rounds with your roughness amounts and stuff like that until you get something that you like. So at this point, I like to already get it into unreal so that I kind of like get a feel for what it looks like because it always looks very different in painter compared to unreal. And then based upon that, we can make some changes. So I'm just making a folder. And we can go ahead and first of all, let's do a save over here. And let's call this one fake windows And then what we can do is we can go ahead and PBR metallic roughness, Taga 1024 more than enough. We honestly don't need that much, but I will show you like some optimization techniques in the bonus chapters later. And then make new fake underscore Windows. And in here, I'm just going to grab my base color metallic roughness because we don't really need a num map in this case. And now, because this is like a default texture, we should be able to go into our materials, our building materials and our blinds over here. They also have a default texture. So I should be able to duplicate this one and call this fake windows. Let's open this up over here. We do need to make some changes to it, but first of all, let's go ahead and input where are you fake Windows, our base color. Oh, wait, we don't have a metallic map, but we should be able to control the metalness in there. So, honestly, so we just need a base color and a roughness. We don't even need a base color, to be honest. Yeah, our base color and our metallic are flat colors because I didn't add anything. You can add some dirt. So if we are going to have a base color, we can just as well go in here, throw in a base color and just give it a little bit of, like, a brownish dirt. To make it more visually interesting. I feel like that if we will have a base call anyway, or we can just create an entire new material, but sometimes it's just nice to, let's once again like art some brownish dirt. And then I just play around with my opacity to not make it too strong or too soft. Let's try that. Export once more. And then over here, right click and re import. There we go. It's very, very subtle, but now we can see some dirt in here. So anyway, pay coolor check, roughness check. Now, for our normal map, what we want to do is I basically just want to input something that has, like, a very soft normal. Or what I can do is I can just go ahead and set my normal to zero. So over here we have a concrete 01. Oh, no, whoa, that's way too strong. I forgot about that. In that case, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to alter my material a bit. So here we have a basic master material. And what I want to do is let's have a look. First of all, in our normal map, let's add a flattened normal node. The scale premter called normal nscore strength. Set the default to zero. This way, we can literally turn it off just by changing our nor map. And then in our base color, we have a color overlay, so that's also still fine. Oh, yeah, we needed a scale a perimeter called metallic so that we can control it when we want to use metalness. So let's go ahead and do this. And your opacity, if you don't actually input anything, I will just not have a mask. So we should not need to worry about that. So 0.8, and our norm map strength is going to be one, which means no norm map strengths. Now we have this and then our color overlay. We can make that one right because we are controlling our color inside of substance painter. Our roughness amount, what am I doing with my roughness amount again? Oh, yeah, I'm just setting it to default, so that should be also fine. Awesome. Okay. At this point, you do want to once again re export your building. To in real Vista building. Over here. And reimport? Now we can go up here to our building, so let's just go ahead and open it up. And let's apply our glass material. So materials, buildings, fake windows. That's the one that I want up here. Okay, so there's no roughness response. So let's go ahead and boost that up by a lot. Quick way, easy if you want to boost up like all of your roughness is to simply create a fill layer or just a normal layer over here. You want to set this layer if you go to roughness. You want to set this to pass through. And then you want te levels. And if you're in your levels select your roughness, you can literally control the roughness of all of your windows in one go. So this is what I was talking about that there's quite a big difference between unreal and the rest. So sometimes you simply need to go in here and then balance everything out a little bit. So we have our fake windows. You can just go ahead and re input here, I see. Now it's a lot stronger. So first things first, let's start with the very first roughness. Let's turn off this one. And I can also go in here and control the roughness if I wanted to, but I like to have a little bit of my level controls also. Let's start with our base roughness just to see. That's too strong. So we want to now go ahead and lower down our levels a bit. Let's have a look. How is this? It is okay, but yeah, it has some of those that's probably because of this, that it has those strong values. So I'm going to lower down this roughness and then I want to hire this roughness a bit over here. Let's twy that. Basically, you just play around with it. That's honestly all I'm saying until you get something that you like. It's still not. And by the way, how about the darkness? The darkness is about fine, but this is still not what I want. So I'm just going to play around maybe like my middle roughness slider over here. Let's have a look at that. Re import. Wow, it's really difficult to get. Yeah, you do get it. So I should be a little bit too careful because when the sun is hitting it, you do definitely get the dirty window look that we have before. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to set the overall roughness a little bit lower. So over here we have the overall roughness. Let's go ahead and tone that one down. And then we have our secondary roughness in which I first of all, want to play around a little bit more like my breakup using grungesO here. Let's play around with that. Okay, here, see, now they start to look a little bit more dirty, which is working quite well. Okay. I would say that, that's actually really close to what I want. She's going to go ahead and I'm going to maybe make like, this roughness, a little bit lower. And I'm going to go ahead and, uh, what shall I do? I'm going to make my main roughness just like a tiny bit less, just to make it not as reflective. And think then we got, like the sweet spot. Yeah, that works well. So we got like a nice sweet spot. And then the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go into my base color over here. And I'm going to go to base color. Make this base dirt a little bit stronger in my base color to also whenever there's no roughness reflections, give it a little bit of, like, some additional dirt. There we go. I think that will work quite well. And next to this, we also have control over roughness in our actual material, which I already lost fake windows over here. Oh, and I forgot to set my roughness response, actually. That's really bad because that means that I might not have been adequate. So let's go ahead and definitely change that up. There we go. And let's see. With my roughness, see, here. Now that I set my roughnesponse to turning off SRGB, that already looks a lot better. So that's why there was not a really great comparison between these two. So let me just quickly balance this out once more. So that's what I meant with the SRGB, we have to set that off, but it looks like that I can just do this. And then I can just tone down the entire roughness amounts a little bit. And that probably does the trick already. So that doesn't take too long. Yeah, and I'm going to make my base collar a little bit less strong. After all, now that this is balanced out. Of course, right now, because I'm talking, it's all going a little bit slower, but normally you would do this very, very quickly. Yeah, there we go. Dirty windows. That should look pretty good. Okay, so at this point, of course, you can go ahead and you can keep playing around with it. Maybe you want to give it more roughness or less roughness. As I was saying, we have a roughness slider, so we can actually control the amount a little bit by going in here. I setting it lower or less low. So I'm going to set this, for example, to 0.8, just to do some quick balancing, and I am quite happy about that. Now, there will be a chapter later on where we are also going to balance everything once more just to make sure that it all works quite well. But in general, it looks very similar to what we have over here. However, it is a little bit more defined, and it has a little bit more localized dirt. So now you also know how to do those two things. So that is looking pretty good. I think what I want to do at this point, just to finish off this chapter is kick in a very quick time laps. Where I will go ahead and populate an entire side of this building over here and maybe also like around the corners, we can actually first in real time, figure out what to do with the corners. And the reason I basically want to do that is so that we can get a better sense of how everything looks. And then there will be time laps where I create various interiors and stuff like that so that we have, like, more stuff to work with. So first of all, what I wanted to do is I just wanted to see what would happen if we grab an interior, and I know that this is not going to work, right? Like, I don't know how sure I am, but I'm pretty sure this will not work. And to be honest, this is the first time that I'm actually doing a corner because I never actually thought about needing to do a corner on these windows. And I think that other games also just, like, avoid it whenever you have a corner. So I can do this just to see what it will do. But we will most likely want to go ahead and just make these fake windows in the corners, just to make our lives a lot easier than trying to create a corner window and stuff like that. But we can see. Maybe you can also use like window blinds to cover it. So over here, it's not great. See? It looks like an error. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to Oh have the window blinds, which are like, all the way down or almost all the way down over here so that you can not really see exactly what's inside of the interior, or I'm just gonna have fake windows. So at this point, let's go ahead and kick in the time labs and start populating this entire side of the building. 24. 23 Polishing Our Building: Okay. So now that we have this done, what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and just improve our general look a little bit. So it's already starting to look quite interesting, although, of course, yeah, we only have one interior, so I definitely want to change it up. And I might end up like placing more interiors later on. So the first thing that I want to do is, I'm not happy with these windows. I want to give them, like, some window blinds, but I want to make them, like, really dark so that you can barely really see them. And the matrix demo did something similar to that. Now, generally, it should probably be just as simple as over here we have our window. In placing them basically on top of here. So if I go ahead and if I go because I want to have my window, but I have a look. I'm just looking at my textures. There we go. Blinds because well, we can use a mask if we want to. So let's just go ahead and use the final versions of this. I'm going to go ahead and go to File and then import resources, and I'm just going to import my I pretty much only need a base color. And a normal map, pretty much. Now, what I'm worried about is I think I also want to just import the baked mask because I'm not completely sure. I don't think we can actually read the mask for my base color when it is in the Alpha. And I'm just going to import this into my project and set this to textures over here. Okay. Oh, no, wait, sorry, I was able to read the mask. Fair enough. Now, after this is done, what we're going to do is we are probably just going to go ahead and create a nice layer over here. It's actually a folder. It's for the blinds. Base blinds in our layer. Then if we just go ahead and do a simple projection, you go up here and click on projection, and then we are going to scroll down and just drag in this projection over here, and I want to also drag in my no map and for my roughness, I'm going to go set this quite dull and I don't really need a height and I don't really well, actually, metallic is going to be set to zero. Now what we can do is we can just give a few bits of variation. Go to get started with this one over here. You basically just want to place it around our mask is not reading. That's a little bit annoying. It is no problem. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and on my window blinds, let's do this. Let's first of all, paint paint my window blinds, like this. A I know it won't look good, but don't worry that's something that we are going to work on. So we have a window blind like this. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go up here and paint in a black mask and once again, set this to projection and dragging your alpha here. Because if you leave it at the same position, see, we can just paint in the alpha. There are many ways to do this, but this is the first way that comes to mind for me. So we got this one over here. Now, let's say that for this one, I'm going to go for maybe, maybe like a lower one over here. And let's go ahead and go into our window blinds. And our window blinds, you won't be able to see it now until we have our mask done. But if I just go ahead and paint this in and then just go to the mask, it remembers our setting, so we don't just have to paint this in like this. Ah, let's also go in here and paint the corners. Okay. Then for this one, I'm going to go for maybe like this one over here. So once again, just painting it in, even though I cannot see it because as soon as I paint in my mask, I can see it. There is a bedrock system for this, of course. So we can use anchor points and all that kind of fancy stuff. But honestly, I only need to do this four times. So sometimes I'm just lazy. And if I need to only do something like four times, it just feels a bit overkill. So let's use this one for the last one over here. Like this. And just paint it in and go into a mask and also paint this in here. There we go. Of course, if you are making a really large project and you need a perfect system, then you can, of course, play around to things and improve them. But in general, let's say that we have this. Now, what I'm going to do is first of all, I'm going to control my color a little bit of my window blinds, and I also want to control the intensity. So for my color, I can just go ahead and because this is a layer, we cannot literally, change the base color, but we can add a filter. And in this filter, I can add or color replace, color balance or an HSL node. So let's not do color balance. I think I'm just gonna go for an HSL note. And let's say, let's make it, like, quite a bit darker over here. Or if you are not happy with just darkening it, another one that you can do is you can add a filter and do the color match over here. And then here, we can make it a little bit more like a bluish color. So that's up to you. Okay, so we have this. But however, I want to have this feeling like it is sitting behind my window. So having it behind my window, what I might want to do, let's turn off a projection is by gathering some of these roughness details. Let's see, these ones over here, moving them above our window blinds so that they are at least above it. And then in my window blinds itself, if we just go ahead and we go to our let's add levels. Let's add like a levels and set these levels to be only our roughness maybe make it a little bit rougher. And then what I want to do is let's see if I can just, like, tone down the opacity of this. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to add a let's add like a fill layer over here and set the fill layer to be black because the reason for that is that if I just change the opacity over here, then what happens is that I'm only changing it on my base color, but I'm not changing it on my roughness or anything else. If I add a black fill layer, I should be able to just simply control the color over here or control the opacity over here to get something a little bit better. I'm not I don't think this looks the way I want just yet, but we can already just export it just to see and get a sense for it. So because I spent time in my time laps, if you've seen it, not just copying the same windows over and over again, but like randomizing them a little bit. When I go ahead and import my textis fake windows over here, it should give us, a lot of variation. Okay, so that does Oh, no, wait, I don't have a norm map in here. So I would need probably, like, a normal map. But in general, so it does show the window blinds roughly the way that I expected them to. The only thing is that are they? I accidentally rotated one of them here and there. So okay, seeing this. So I think what I want to do is I want to get started by just importing a norm map. So just give me a second. Window blinds normal over here. And with my norm map, I am going to tone down the intensity a lot. So first of all, oh, no, wait, sorry, we don't need to flip the green channel because it comes from Substance Painter. I'm going to go ahead and go to my fake Windows, which is a basic master. Okay, yes, perfect. Oh, nice. It even has the window blinds, normal, but I'm just going to go ahead and fake windows and drag this one. No, sorry. Not that one. I made a mistake. I need to drag in the fake I accident need to drag in the window blinds, but I want to drag in the fake Windows one over here. And then I can just delete the Window blinds one. Okay. And then the next thing would be to go into my normal strength. And if I set this to zero, it shows the window blinds from a distance C. And then if we just set this to, like, maybe like 0.5, to tone them down a little bit more, 0.8, even I just want to have this quite subtle. 0.7 maybe. Okay, something like that. So now it does start to feel like, especially from a distance because I am working from distances. It starts to feel like we have a little bit of the window blinds in here. And at this point, maybe I want to make it like a little bit more visible over here. Yeah, so we are missing a little bit of that china, aren't we? I guess what we can do is we can add another levels, set these levels to metallic and swap around these colors over here, which should make it automatically metallic or not? Yeah, so that does make it metallic. But so I'm just trying to, like, play around with the intensity over here. So now they are metallic, so they should be more reflective. Let's try something like this. So we are basically cheating a little bit because window blinds would never be metallic, but we are behaving as if that the window blinds are behind the glass and not so much in front of the glass. Oh, one, one. So let's go ahead and re import. Okay, so that's already starting to feel a bit better. And here, see, you can see the shine stays now on our windows, which makes it feel like it is sitting more behind the glass. Now, I feel like right now it's probably a little bit too noticeable. So I'm going to go ahead and just, like, tone it down a little bit more. And then it's probably fine for something as basic as just like some fake windows. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Awesome. So we got that one. I would want to probably later on place a little bit more interiors. And also, sometimes over here, I managed to accidentally rotate one of my windows. So that's like another bug that I would like to fix. In time. Now, at this point, I think the last thing that we want to do is that, of course, right now, over here, this is looking absolutely perfect our interiors. So we might want to give a little bit of, like, a glassy look to it. And once that is done, we also want to copy and paste that glassy look on our window blinds, because that's the tricky thing. So normally, what I would do if I have something like this and I was not using nanite, I would simply place like a big cube around the entire building and make it glass. And that way, everything will look automatically like there is glass in front of it, and it gives me a little bit more flexibility and control and a little bit more depth. However, right now, I can do that. Now, I can go ahead and try to create a very complicated system and shader. However, what would happen is with this complicated system, it would also make the rendering of our building more expensive, and I want to make because from a distance, honestly, you probably don't even need glass, so we are going to just create a very, very cheap looking glass here, so that when we are looking at it from a distance, bit like this, that we can just see some glossy reflectiveness to it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go into my vista tutorial and windows, and I want to open up my window sample over here. So this is the one. So the nice thing is that this one goes into the emissive color. However, we still have full control over our roughness and all that kind of stuff. So we can play around a little bit more with our roughness. Now, here we have an overall room color, as you can see. What I also like to do is, first of all, I would like to have a little bit of control over how strong our emissive is in general. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add a larp. And the reason for this is to almost get like that foggy effect, the effect that you cannot properly look through the entire room. So we want to go ahead and we want to larp this using a constant vector. And let's call this convert spemter and call it foggy luke or something like that. And let's start with just making this white. Throw this into emissive color, actually call this foggy k color. And then if we're at the scale pemeter, call this foggy k strength. Here we go. Oh, sorry, I flip these two around. There we go. Okay. So now we can have control over the strength. So if I set this to like 0.5, see, it will look a little bit foggy. If I set it 0.9, it will look even more. And if we combine this, and we, of course, can use the foggy luclor to just generally, slightly change the color of our windows, and I do this in air quotes, windows. But if I now go ahead and have this, now the next thing that I want to do is I want to get a normal map. And it's going to be I need substance designer for this most likely. So let's just open up designer. It's going to be like a pearling noise norm map, a wy wavy norm map that we can use to kind like give it the effect as Whoa. What's wrong? Kind of give it the effect as if the glass is, like, slightly distorting. And to be honest, we can even add this effect to our normal glass also. The way that you would art this to our normal glass because we now have a normal, it's basically this is what we're going to do in our Shader and I didn't even think of it, but we can also artist here. It is a fill layer that only uses, in this case, a height, but we will use normal. And this normal, it will have a if you type in pearling here we have a pearling noise. Oh, sorry, artist into a black mask with a fill, and in here, we can add a pearl noise. Doing it in here gives me more flexibility. So now I can have more control over here, see? So let's make it really strong right now. But then set the projection over here to triplanar and make it like a very soft projection or a very large projection like this and then tone down our height. The goal is that we just have something very subtle to give it a little bit of like a distortion look. And we are going to do something similar to our shadow. So for this one, we can go ahead and export it. And let's go ahead and go into our textures and our fake windows. See, this is only a norm map, so let's re input this. And from a distance, it should give us, I can see it a little bit. I might want to later on make my windows like a little bit shinier, and then it will most likely be more visible. So if I go in here, set my roughness mount to maybe like 1.2 actually. Oh, sorry, not 1.2, 0.5 maybe. Yeah, I can see a little bit better. Honestly, most of this is just going to be balancing. But if you're not interested in that, of course, you can just go ahead and do some of this stuff on your own. If you are experienced, at least, it's not very special what we're going to do right now. So let's just go ahead and call this, start or something like that, I probably write it incorrectly, but you set this to empty. And all I want to do in here is I want to go ahead and I want to grab a Perlin noise, set the scale to be quite large. Artists into a normal node, OpenGL. Here we go. And control light scale. And artist into an output node, which I will call window underscore Perlin or whatever you want to call it. You know what? I'm going to throw this into our Granges folder. Just because that's a little bit easier in this case. So grunges folder, export. That's it. That's all we need. So we go in here, and I'm just going to also add this into grunges because I feel like even though it is a norm map, it kind of feels like a grunge. So we just want to go ahead and flip the green channel, and now what we can do is we can drag this into our material over here. Okay, so we have this grunge. Now, first things first is we are going to turn this into a texture object and add a world aligned normal node and also scale peremter that we'll call window Dart, tiling. And let's set this quite large. There might be like 400 to get started with. And there we go. And if you want, you can also add a flattened normal note to this. Window resort. Amount and set the default. Yeah, let's leave the default to zero. There we go. Throw this into our flat and normal, just like that. Okay. So we got that one done. And now what we can do is we can also have control over our specular and our roughness. And I'm going to keep this quite basic. Like you can once again add a Geng met to maybe like a roughness variation. Let's create a node and call this specular. The reason I do specular is because sometimes specular gives us a little bit of more flexible it gives us more flexibility in our reflectiveness, because metallic is not the same as specular, but I'm also going to use metallic. And for my roughness, I want to go ahead and if I grab my where are the I forgot what this one was called. I want to get the fake glass 01, and you are using the generic fake glass master over here. And for my roughness, I can just basically copy this, paste it in here, and throw this into my roughness, so that I have a little bit more control over that also. Okay. So we got a few of these notes in here, so let's see what they actually do and try to play around with things a little bit more. So I'm just going to save my shader. And let's go ahead and open up our window instance or our interior instance over here. Okay, let's have a look. So all of these parameters, they are just in the global scale parameters because we did not really place them anywhere special. So first of all, we have our foggy look strat. If I set this to one, yeah, that's fine. So if I set this to like 0.1, and the foggy look color, if I set this one, maybe like a bit more of like a bluish color, we can control the darkness also in here. So that already gives an interesting effect. Next, what I want to do is we have our let's see, our specular. Specular right now doesn't seem to do much. So let's first of all, go ahead and go with our window desort. It's a bit difficult to see this 200. There we go. Now we start to see it. I think I need to just boost up my strength a little bit more. And now if I set my dessert larger, Okay, my strength will be less like three. Let's see. Form and distance. Maybe set just like five Yeah, there we go. Now I start to see a little bit of distorting on our windows, which is better already. Okay. So we got that one done. And now let's also look at my roughness. So my roughness, it's a bit tricky to see. The reason why it's tricky to see is because our missive is still quite strong. So if I go 0.1, it is actually heresy. It is actually reflective, but it's a bit difficult to see. So that's why you want to kind of, like, play around with, like, the foggy look strength, maybe set it to, like, two, and stronger you said it, the more that you can see it. So let's do something like this. And then we should also have exposure controls over here to set the background here. See a little bit, or the actual emissive to, like, make it a little bit less exposed. So if I set this to, like, minus, I don't know, one Okay. And then it's just about playing around with the values until you get something that looks a little bit more interesting. We also have a grunge amount over here, I can see. But because we don't have a lot of roughness, it won't really show up very well. Of course, this is also by use cases. We have really basic lighting, and later on, it will look a bit better. But this is already starting to look like a little bit better. Now, what I want to do next is I want to also have this on my window blinds. Or roughly this effect on my window blinds over here, just to make it feel like it is also behind the glass, so I want to get that fogginess in there, too. Now, the way that I can do this because, of course, my window blinds, they technically don't use emissive, but we can try to fake it using our color, for example. And yeah, I'm not going to use emissive on it, so we can fake it using our color. But yeah, I am improvising a little bit over here just because I want to use a more optimized technique because I have other techniques that I can use, but they are really not optimized. And I use those often to create stuff willy Willy quickly, but that doesn't mean it will create it really well. So let's go ahead. And if we go in here, we can grab this foggy look system and throw this into our base color. So this should already give us some control where if I set this to 0.5, Okay, we'll do that. Now, another thing that we need to do for our window blinds isOn weight, we already have control over our normal. So we have control over our normal. So this will create that foggy look and we have control over also create an SCLC let's create control over our specular and our roughness. Yeah, that's like enough. So if we go ahead and save this, and it just needs to look good. I think I'm being too picky right now, probably because it's a tutorial, and I would just want to show you guys cool stuff. But honestly, Vista buildings, they are just like really basic. They are expected to be shown from like this distance or Wayford or even from over here. But it looks like that our building still reads really well, even from like a far distance. So that's definitely something we did right. Now, let's go ahead and go in here. And we have our window blinds like this over here. And let's go ahead and let's see our foggy look strength. Foggy look color. Let's make this colour to be like a little bit of, like, a bluish color. Sets to like 0.15 maybe. And then we have a specular amount. Oh, sorry, roughness amount or secular amount. So first of all, normal string, let's set this to 0.5. We like a little bit less strong. Specular should probably, will not do anything. Like, you can see a very small change over here. But basically, I'm just trying to get here we go. Something like 0.3 on my roughness. But right now what is happening is that our roughness, it's too specific. It's too specific to like our window blinds. So in general, also, I don't like how it is making the color so strong. So let's tone down our foggy color. So what I'm going to do with my roughness is so we have a roughness amount, same concept. Let's lurp our roughness. Using a I guess we could just use a constant for this. So let's do B over here and let's do A up here. And our constant roughness is going to be zero, and then we want to have a scale parameter and call this roughness, underscore blending or something like that. So let's have a look if I did this correct way. So I sets to one. I think I need to set this one also to one. I don't think I can really see it in here, so I need to save my material and then have a look at it, else it's really difficult to see. Because basically what I'm doing is I'm adding a value, and because the value is zero, it will just be shiny. So now if I go ahead and play around with my roughness blending, you see, I can make the overall roughness a little bit shiny while toning down the original roughness. I can also go in my normal strength. Make this a little bit lower over here so that there's less roughness ones. So now here, you can see that now I can change the overall roughness, and now you can start seeing now it starts to feel like it's behind the window. So we had a roughness blending of like 0.5. There we go. Now it feels more like if we look at, like, the overall reflections, it feels like it is part of the window. Yeah, of course, we still have our interiors, which will not show up as much in the reflections, but I think for now that this is looking pretty good. I think we got, like, a pretty solid start over here. I would say my window blinds maybe are, like, a little bit too bright. So let's just go ahead and tone down the darkness, just set them all the way to black over here. Yeah, I see here, that fits just a little bit better. And let's make our fake glass windows. I need to do this in painter. I want to make them maybe a little bit lighter. So this designer, I can just get rid of it. I want to go in pain her and then the overall base color. Let's go ahead and just set this a little bit brighter and see how that looks. Yeah, that feels like it fits. It's a bit better. We have some lighting bugs, but I'm not going to address those until we actually start doing some lighting. But yeah, I think, in general, that works quite well. And even for a vista building, if you just have two interiors, you probably have already enough. So in general, that's looking pretty good. Of course, we would still want to place the windows here. But once you place one side of your building or like a few rows, it's way faster because you can just pick, for example, the first four or five rows over here and just use those entire rows and place them. So if I would, for example, do this, one, two, three, four, five, and then I do need to go in here and it's probably easier if actually height selection. It's probably easier if I height this kind of stuff. Because basically what I want to show you is that if we grab the first few rows, well, you know what? Yeah, let's make it even easier. Let's grab all of these windows that we have over here. There we go. Now if we just go ahead and unhide all again, you can grab these first few rows, and you can just jumble them around. So I can grab these, and instead of having them at the top to add more variation, I can have them at the bottom. Now, of course, what I might want to do first is just actually rotate this entire thing 180 and place it into position or at least place it roughly the position I want. Like this. And now, if I just go ahead and grab these pieces, for example, I can move these at the bottom and then move these at the top. Just by switching it around a little bit like that, you can often get already a really good look and because the window sizes, this is why I already regret making my window sizes not absolutely perfect. But when you make your window sizes more perfect than this, it will also be quicker because you will get less errors. So now if I just go ahead and place this one over here, and I do need to make sure that I'm sitting at the right levels. Yeah, like this. There we go. So now we already have the entire other building done, just like that. And then when you would export it, and now we can just go ahead and apply this. Oh, I still have this Oh, the bug became worse even. Okay. I can just go ahead and, of course, also apply this to the sides. And then it's just a matter of, like, creating some more interiors and everything like that. So let's go ahead and go in here. And let's just re import my windows on my building. There we go. So now, see? We also have this side. And what you can also see is, it looks like that we do have a little bit of a problem where our emissive whenever it's dark, it shows up too much, and this is because of, like, the fogginess. So this is again, balancing. It's balancing between our here it's balancing between our exposure and our foggy look. So if I set my foggy look a bit lower and then set my exposure to, like, minus two, for example, or minus five, here or see, then it balances out a bit more. So let's say minus four, something like that, but it still looks funny. And now in the darkness, you can also see that reflectiveness a lot better. So you can see that we get here, see. See, you can see that we get that actual reflectiveness. So it all just depends on your lighting conditions. In direct lighting, of course, it's harder to see, but that is something that we are also going to, of course, work on. And later on, we're also going to create a night scene and everything like that. So what will I do at this point? I will go ahead and in the next chapter, let's go ahead and make a list of everything that we still need to and I know that this might seem lazy, but I'm actually doing this to show you like a planning. So let's say that we get at this point. So the first thing I want to do is finish placing building windows on this one building. Now, next thing that I want to do is I also want to go ahead and I want to create a night variation. Before we actually do that, I probably want to go ahead and also create, like, uh, create interior variations. And these two, the finish placing the building windows and creating interior variations and all that kind of stuff The will be time lapses. The night variation will not be time lapse, but it will just be us playing around with, like, a specific emissive map that we will bake. Now, I think once we get to this point, this building and all of the workflows are pretty much final, and it would just be about polishing and also creating more buildings. So this is what we'll be working on first. And once that is done, it will mostly be polish and presentation. But I hope that in general, you already like. So we are almost done with, like, all of our workflows. See, like, a tiny bug over here, so that's like small stuff that we also need to fix. But I hope that so far you already enjoyed the workflows that we have covered. There's one thing also that I will do in a bonus, bonus super cheap building in which I will show you how to create an incredibly cheap, like, literally a cube which is windows on it, like an incredibly cheap building variation. It will not have any fidelity, but it will be great if it is like this far away. If it is so far away, then you can work with it. But even with this, what you can imagine is, let's say that we are like high resolution, this. It's still really nice and readable. It looks great. Like, it feels like something that you can also watch UpClose because technically, you can pretty much watch it UpClose, although not super close. But let's say that you have a video game with a sniper rifle and you want to, like, zoom in. At least then, like you are zooming in with your sniper rifle or something like that, you can still read everything. And it looks here, see. It looks much better further away. Then, to be honest, then it looks like UpClose, which kind of is the goal for Vista buildings that it's not supposed to look amazing when we look at it this up close. But I think so far we've done a really good job. So let's go ahead and continue with our next chapter, which will be timelaps of finishing this building. And then we will have a few more time lapses of actually creating multiple interiors. So yeah, let's go ahead and continue with this and then finalize our building. 25. 24 Finalizing Building Timelapse: [No Speech] 26. 25 Creating Interior Variations Timelapse: D No. The So Do. The the Mm. I I things like things like that h. 27. 26 Creating Night Variations Of Our Building: Okay, so we now have our building over here done, our very first building. Of course, the very first building, it takes absolutely the longest, and that is just because we need to develop our systems. Now, what we're going to do in this chapter is we are going to go ahead and also create some night variations for our building. So this is our plan before we start going into the really long time lapse chapters. First, we will have now a chapter where we will create the night versions of our buildings. Then we are going to have two bonus chapters which are going to be very important, actually. One is on how to create a highly optimized building, which will have a lot less flexibility, but it will literally almost be like a cube that just has, like, some windows. But it is really quick to make, and it is also very optimized to make. The second one is on how to optimize this building without Nanite. Right now, in order to keep our system simple, but if we still want to use nanite, one of the few things that we have is that we have a lot of materials that are needed to be applied on our building. However, without anite, we can be way more flexible with this. So I'm going to show you techniques that if you would not use nanite but just LOD on how to actively optimize your building to have a lot less materials over here and just in general, make your building more optimized. So anyway, that is our plan. Let's get started with the night versions. Now, for our night versions, it is honestly quite easy. The first thing I want to do is because we are in just like a sample scene is I want to make sure that my exposure does not change. So I'm going to go down here to my visual effects and then to my where are you? Oh, sorry, not visual effects. Yeah, yeah, Visual effects. Oh, sorry, post process volume. Here it is. And then what I want to do is I want to scroll all the way down. And then in the post process volume settings, I want to turn on infinite extent. What this will do is it will make sure that this post effect is active no matter where we are in our scene. Then if we go ahead and scroll up, we want to go ahead and go to our exposure, and I want to take on my exposure compensation and my min and max. I'm going to set my min and max often to one over here, or you can even set them to zero if you want. So let's say zero, for example. And then what I'm going to do is I can use my exposure compensation to give my scene A fairly even lighting like we have over here. I also noticed that now I do this, but this is because of the lighting most likely that my windows over here, they are looking quite dark. That is something that you can definitely also balance out and it is something that we will balance out. However, it's something that we are going to balance when we actually create our final scene. Because right now, as you can see, because of our lighting, I cannot trust this. I cannot trust that these windows are specifically dark right now. Anyway, we have our exposure done. Now for Nitin, Anten we are simply going to swap out our interior materials. That's the only thing that we want to do. I'm going to get started and right now, we have created our scene with our interiors over here based upon a day scene, and they are looking pretty good, as far as I can see. Yeah, I don't see anything special with it, so let's leave them as they are right now. Now, for a night scene, I'm going to go ahead and grab my directional light, and I'm going to rotate this all the way up until we get, like, a darker, darker scene, probably something like this over here. I like to always I give it still, like, a little bit of lighting. It kind of depends on what you want. So use, this is like pure night that we get over here. But of course, we are going to balance out our night scene later on, just so that we can see everything working a little bit better. That we have done this, now we can see that already it is sort of working, but it's not really amazing yet what we have right now with our interior scenes. So what we can do is if we go ahead and go to our interior day one, two, and three, we can go ahead and just duplicate them. So let's say I will go ahead and duplicate this and call this interior 01 on the score. Night, this one duplicates interior 02 on the score. Night, and this one duplicate 03 night. I am then going to go ahead and just drag these in one of my buildings just so that I can preview them. Two and three, and then we can go ahead and open them up. So as you might remember, when we did our material, or we did some balancing, we had an overall room color. That one is really useful right now. So what we can do is we can turn those on, and first of all, we can have a look at our exposure. So seeing this with my exposure, I might want to make my interiors a little bit Let's see. I set this to zero, a little bit brighter or a little bit darker. Zero or minus minus five minus two. Maybe let's start with zero. Then what I like to do is, I like to change the rooms up a little bit because from a distance, it will look interesting. So if we go to your overall room color and let's set this color to be like an orange color like this or like a yellow color, we can simulate as if that our rooms have differences in light. So let's say this is going to be like quite an orange looking room. And we have our exposure, so we can go ahead and like. The more we make it, the more they actually affect the buildings around us. Now five is really, really strong, but let's see let's go maybe for, like, a I don't know, one, 0.5, I want to have it quite subtle. Let's try 0.5 for now. And the foggy look over here, you can also use this to maybe, like, enhance the overall window tint a little bit more just by setting this to be a little bit orange. So let's say that we have one that is orange, and then the second one, we are going to go for more like a bluish color. Like a gold blue collar, something like that, and say 0.5 again. Let's see. Do we need a foggy collar? I don't think we really need to change that one. Just go to change my blue collar a little bit more like this. And then interior three. I'm just going to simply change the exposure to 0.5. Maybe like one. Oh, interior three is not used a lot, is it? This is like the office interior. So oh, wait, here's the office interior. Okay. So let's have a look. I'm going to make maybe interior two, a little bit of like a deeper U blue color. So let's push this all the way to blue. Let's look at it from a side or from a distance, and now tone it down a bit more. Okay. An interior tree over here, we want to go ahead and make it like a tiny bit blue just to give it like a willy gold feeling, and this one will simply be white, something like this. Yeah, that should pretty much work. You can also, if you want to playout a little bit more like the other window. So you can have it like this, which is going to be just like a building where we have the slight differences in color, although I think now it's actually a little bit too blue. Tone it down over here. So now from a distance, yeah, that will look quite nice. But if you just want to go ahead and also give all of your other windows like a very, very slight emissive, you can, of course, do that. And for that, I would go ahead and go to my fake windows over here, and I would simply or fake windows. I always get mistaken. Yeah, yeah, the fake windows because we also have fake glass. Now, that's my mistake that I should have given that a better name. So we can go ahead and we can duplicate this and call this fake Windowscnight. Track this into our fake windows. And for this one, if we just open it up and if we then also go ahead and open up our basic master over here, we can add a S click scale parameter and call this emissive strength and keep the default to zero. And then we want to go ahead and we want to multiply this using a constant three vector, and this constant three vector. If we also convert this to pemeter we'll call emissive underscore color over here. And we are going to go ahead and set this one to be maybe like a slightly yellowish white color over here. So this way, we also now have control over our missive, so we can plug this into our missive color. And if we set this like super, super low, it will just give like a soft glow from our normal windows just to enhance the feeling a little bit. And it's up to you to decide how much you want to use this or not and everything like that. It also depends on, like, your lighting scene. Right now we are a pitch black, dark, almost. And then this might be a nice effect. However, if you are like a sunrise scene like this, then it is way nicer to just only have like a few windows light up. So we will probably go for something more like a scene like this. But anyway, so we have our fake Windows night. We can now go ahead and we can find our emissive strength and our emissive color. And then if we just go ahead and drag on here, see, you can go at it, you can make this really soft. So maybe like 0.00. Let's do 0.01 over here. And then from a distance, see, it reads just like that little bit better, but it all depends on your preference. I'm going to go 0.006 maybe, so that from a distance I can just make out the extra windows. Maybe 0.007. There we go. So that from a distance I can only just make out the actual windows like this. Now if we go back to a day scene, it's up to you. So these materials, I often like to switch them around. The reason I like to switch them around is because I often make very specific scenes that are all day or night. I don't have day and night cycles. However, you can try to balance out your original materials in a way that depending on if it is day or night, it will still look correct, even if it turns from day to night. Like, for example, over here, like, okay, this might be a little bit too yellow for a day scene, but in general, like, it is still passable. So it is up to you if you don't want to switch around your materials, and you want to make your buildings more flexible to balance them out so that they work for both scenes. But I have control, so I just want to go ahead and do it this way. And honestly, that is it for this chapter. So what we're going to do in the next chapter is I'm going to show you a quick example of a very, very easy to create building. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 28. 27 Bonus Creating Fast Highly Optimized Vista Buildings: Okay, so what we are going to do in this chapter is I'm going to show you another technique on how to create a building very, very fast. So, of course, there are times that you just want to create a very quick skyline and you don't want to spend hours creating buildings. You just want to very quickly throw in like a building. Now, the way that we are going to do that is using a much more traditional technique. So let's say that we have our building over here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide this, create a new layer and call this building underscore fast, for example, something like this. Now, I can go ahead and I can create a box over here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cheat a little bit by using my original building just so that I know, roughly the size so that I don't have to once again figure out the actual size that I want for my building. So let's say that I just create a box using the same size. Over here. Now, this technique comes in two ways. Basically, what you can do is you can have a building that is all windows all the way to the very base. And what I'm going to show you is I will show you that technique first, and then I will show you another technique where we are basically stealing the base from here, and it would be as if you are just modeling a base, and then you throw on the fast technique in between. So we have our building over here. Now, with this building, I'm going to go ahead and let's say let's create like one swift loop here at the top, so this is going to mark the end. And we are just going to give it like a very simple extrude settings, a very simple extrusion over here like this. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to extrude these in. And let's say that I'm just going to go ahead and extrude these in again and push this down. There we go. So that's like the base of my building. Now, at this point, what I would do is I would go ahead and start already working on my materials. So give the second to load. And then in my materials, I'm basically going to create one material that I'll call black, which is just going to be for the roof and one that I'll call windows, which is going to be for the base. And you can simply go ahead and make all of this black over here. And if you just invert it, make this gray 1 second didn't do it correctly. Oh, yeah, yeah. I did work correctly. Okay. Over here, I'm just going to make this bit brighter. There we go. So we basically just only have two materials for this building a top and just the actual windows. So how are we going to do this? Very easy. As I said, this is the most basic stuff ever. We are going to go ahead and create a buildings, textures, and I will just go ahead and call this Windows underscore fast in here. And we are just going to grab something from texts.com. Because over here, let me just move this over here. Texts.com has a lot of buildings. So if you go to texts.com, you can go to regular photos and then buildings over here, and you get a bunch of different buildings. Now, the ones that I am mostly interested in is going to be high rise. You can also try Tall, or you can try departments. Those often work best. But let's try high rise, for example. Even better is that you also have a night version in here. So you can instantly just create a night version. And for the night versions, you can actually use this texture over here, not just as a base color, but also as an emissive, which makes it extra cool. So let's go ahead and say that we go for I don't know, glass is a little bit boring. Let's go ahead and go for office, for example. So here we have our office buildings, and we can just choose whatever we want to go ahead and create. So let's say that I'm going to create this one over here. And then the nice thing is that text.com already made them tilable. You might need to pay for premium if you want to make them why well table. But in general, you can just go ahead and let's say that we select this one. And we just want to drag this into our buildings fast. As I said before, we are not even going to create a how we say it, like any normal maps or any that kind of stuff. Like, we are just going to use the base color that we already have over here. I'm literally going to just instantly drag this in here. So let's go ahead and materials, Windows, click and load in a bitmap, and you can do this, of course, in whatever software you want. Like this and's press over wide because else the texture doesn't look good. Here we go. Then the last thing that I want to do is I want to do an automatic UV unwrapping. In my case, inside of Tres Max, this is really easy because you can use the UVW map, set this to a box, and let's say that we start with 500 by 500 by 500. Okay, way too large. So now we can just go ahead and scale this up. And we just want to go ahead and of course, make the scaling look a little bit nice that This building ends on a nice corner like this. And then once again over here, you can also move this so that over here, it also just ends nicely on a corner. Let me just carefully keep scaling this until I like it. There we go. So it ends nicely on a corner here, and it also ends nicely on a corner here. Wow, that's what I call fast. And then maybe at the top, also just give it like a nice like this. So at this point, you could already say, like, Okay, I'm happy. This is all completely fine. Like, we can go ahead and let's say that this is version number one. I'm going to go to Expots buildings to unreal. And over here, I'm just going to export it to our original folder. And just call this fast underscore V one, for example, just so that I can show you what I meant. Now, inside of Unreal Engine, we can go ahead and we can go into our textures, fast underscore windows. And also, let's go, first of all, before I navigate there to assets, buildings. By the way, all of these leftover materials over here except for the back ceiling. But here, all of these concrete materials, you can actually get rid of them. Once you have replaced your building material, so it should be able to delete all of these, see, and also delete this one. Oh, sorry, concrete, A, there we go. Just make everything feel a little bit more cleaner. And then here we have left right back, and these are just from our interior cube. So anyway, fast, zero, one, Import it as one, combine meshes, all totally fine. Awesome. So fast building 01, we have over here. What we are going to do is in our materials and buildings, I want to have a plain master, which is very similar to probably our metal master over here. So what I can do is I can probably just reuse my metal master, create a material instance, and call this one black. Or you can, of course, use your roof material. Honestly, I can just drag in my roof material, and that will also work. But yeah, in that case, let's say that we would just use a plain color just to keep it easy, so we can go ahead the black. And let's just make it like a dark colour. Don't make it perfectly black because nothing in PBR is actually 100% black. I'm going to set my roughness really low like this. And of course, your grunge amount, um, Well, it's up to you what you want to do with it. So anyway, so you just want to create a plain black collar or use your roof, however you want. This all going to go very quickly. Now, the next one is that if we go ahead and probably use our basic master, that one can probably work. If I go ahead and duplicate this and go ahead and call this fast underscore windows, underscore 01, I can also go ahead and open this one up. Oh, sorry about that. I didn't want to duplicate the material. I want to create the material instance. Fast unscore windows underscore 01. Okay. So what do we have over here? To be honest, this is too much. I don't need that many controls. So let's instead create a new material. Let's create a new material that we'll call fast underscore master. And all I really need for this is I need a few very specific controls. I need, of course, a textures. A texture, sorry. And I'm going to just find it fast Windows. And let's drag in my texture in here. Just give me a second to find it. Here we go. We have our texture. If you want, you can go ahead and you can multiply this using a constant t vector that we call. We've done this before. Corso O, lay. So I don't really want to go over this again. Here we go. So that is our base color, and for the rest, we need to scale perimeter for the roughness over here, and that set us to zero point probably like four. We want to keep these ones quite dull or maybe 0.3, because, of course, we are not differentiating between the windows and the stone. Of course, you can go ahead and generate your own roughness maps. That's totally fine, but I'm working on speed right now, not working on niceness, so these are buildings that are not meant to be shown even remotely close up. You can also if you want to create a scale perimeter for metallic over here, and that can just stay to zero like that. And once again, if you want to have emissive map, you can also generate emissive map. But let's say that this is all that we really need, so we can go ahead and save this. We can go into our materials, buildings, fast master, convert this, and just say fast underscore windows, underscore 01. And you know the drill, open up your building. Go ahead and apply your materials. So we have black, fast window 01, and go ahead and there we go. Okay. Nanite is turned on, so we can go ahead and press Save. Honestly, we don't need Nanite for something like this. So version number one, very, very quick will work fine from like a long distance. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can go for version number two, which I'm also going to show you. So building fast on the score 01, and the only difference between version number 01 and 02j go ahead and uh Building, nscoeFastUn score zero, two. And for this building, if we just go ahead and we can, for example, place edges over here, and then it's a simple matter of, for example, extruding them. So we can do this. And it depends how much you want to do this. So what I can do is I can say that, let's see. So where does the tiling start again? So we have this one. Up until here. Yeah, so up until here. So what I can do is I can move it like this. And then everything below it, I can just simply duplicate later on because it's the same tiling. So I don't need to do this over and over again. So this is just if you want to give it a little bit more fidelity to your asset. Then you get, of course, do this. This is it's starting to get more similar to our more complicated building. The only thing is that we don't use all of those fancy interior shaders and everything. We just use a plain texture, which is quite a common technique. Over here, I can see that something is not the way that I want it with this texture. That sometimes happens. Sometimes you just need to go in manually, and it's better to, of course, do this before we make any changes. And then we can just see move this up. And this one, oh, this one is also not good. There we go. Looks like I happen to have looked only at like the two correct faces, and I just assumed that everything was correct. So that's my fault. But anyway, let's go ahead and continue placing these loops over here. And this one is already placed, and this one is well, it's not perfect, so I would now probably go in and move my UVs to make sure that they are perfectly aligned because else I would need to do too much UV mapping. So yeah, that looks pretty much fine. Okay, awesome. And at that point, you just want to go ahead and select the stuff that you want to include. Which is up until this point, probably. And you guessed it. We are just going to simply extrude this back. Sure, there will be a tiny bit of stretching and sure you can fix that stretching using your UVs, but it's often not even noticeable from that distance. So we can just go ahead and just give me a second. I will do this. And then you basically just delete the bottom half of your building, and you would go ahead and duplicate this top part over and over again. Just to once again save some time. Like all of this, even if I would not be explaining this, it would go even much faster. But yeah, you would really work with speed with this because this is if you, for example, want to push out, I don't know, 2030 buildings for a specific skyline. At those points, you don't want to spend weeks just creating buildings that you will never be able to see up close. And that's where it is good to sometimes use more old school and simplified techniques. But, of course, it will not look very good up close, most time. But anyway, we have this, and I would just do, like, an extrude using the local normal and extrude this back. And I'm going to exaggerate my extrusions a little bit more just so that I can really see it from a distance. Oh, didn't mean to select that one piece there. Try it again. Extrude. Local normal. Push. Yeah, here you see a little bit of stretching, but it's often not notable. And then we can just delete the side. We can go ahead and we can detach the top over here. So let's just detach that. And then it is just a matter of grabbing our building, holding shift, moving it down, and I actually need to also delete one of the There we go. Pass. And I'm just going to go ahead. I'm going to move this, and let's see. Yeah, see, form a distance, that looks totally fine. So we can just go and move it and then just apply a number of copies over here. And then over here, often at this point, I would just go ahead and, like, push it to a nice breaking point and then just move it all the way down just like that. So building number two, also done export, export selection, fast underscore V two. And this one at least, we'll catch up a little bit on the lighting. That's really the only reason we do this just to catch a little bit of that nice lighting. So if we just go ahead and import this one exports buildings to unreal fast V two. Import it. You can go ahead and open it up, go to our materials and black and fast Windows 01. There we go. And here we have building V two. So you can see that that already looks a little bit nicer for still quite minimal work just because we have some nice shadows now coming off it. And building number V three would simply be that if we, for example, grab one of our original buildings, over here, we would replace the window parts with our own building, and we would keep the bottom. So you would just basically create a bunch of different bases, and then you would just stick in normal quick windows in between. This one is more like, yeah, really up to you if you want to do it. So what I can do is I can go ahead and say, where are you building? Turn off isolation. So here we have building 01, and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select the bottom and the top pieces over here. Yeah, like that, I'm going to press Contrave to copy them. And let's call this one. Building, underscore fast, underscore 03. Turn off building 01. And it's up to you, where do you want to have the copy? So in my case, let's say that I move this up a little bit, and then I will just go ahead and I will extrude this inside a little bit so that I have a little bit of wiggle room for my building. And over here for this one, I'm probably just going to go ahead and here, leave it at that top. And then I would, for example, grab my building fast 02, grab the center and copy it once, drag this into my building far 03 layer. And now it's just a matter of going in here. And once again, as you can see, over here, the concrete doesn't really matches. So you want to apply textures that look maybe a little bit more logical. But what I like to do is, I like to use an FFD modifier. Although if you use blender, you can use a lettuce late. No, not late. Lettuce modifier, I believe it is called. Same for Maya. And basically, if you just then nicely push this in, you can give it a little bit of a trim. It doesn't have to perfectly align with your building because once again, we are working with distance over here. Yeah, see, we can just nicely fit this in here. Or you can already originally make it this way, and then you don't have to do any type of weird fitting. There we go. And next, we can just go ahead and we can move this up. And for this one that I moved up, I'm just going to make it a bit nicer by removing one of the bottom columns. Here we go so that it fits all a little bit better. And again, I'm just going to create another copy. And for this copy, I'm going to cut it off at this point, grab my original roof over here, and I'm just going to detach it so that I can move it a little bit easier. There we go. You want to go ahead and move this one down like this. Yeah. So we got our roof also done. And now at this point, you can see that here, we just have very quickly, we've created another building. So let's say building fast 03, Export selection, fast underscore V three over here. Oh, no. Why does it say V two? I tried V three. Okay. Huh. That's weird. Let's type it. V three. Safe. Okay. Strange. Anyway, let's go ahead and press Copy. And now if we go into unreel, we can once again import this one. Import. Over here. And let's delete this one and use our normal version that we have over here. And we can just go ahead and apply our materials as many or little as you want. And with the next bonus chapter where we will go over optimization techniques, you can also once again combine those techniques with this. So I would go ahead and I would start with we have frames over here. So those will probably become metal frames black. I'm just going to also do that in frames two. Concrete C, I can just highlight or I can isolate it, although that doesn't seem to work, probably not because I have nani turned on. So number C is, I believe, concrete dark. I know a concrete granite is number C, and then we have our fake glass, which is going to be fake glass 01 over here. Concrete A is just going to be concrete. Concrete B is going to be concrete, dark. And then finally, we have our T one is going to be roof, most likely, and we have our fast windows over here also. There we go. So as you can see, we now have this one. Now, it might not matches really nicely with, of course, our base concrete, but this is up to you to just balance it out and create whatever concrete you want. Or if you are really lazy like me, I could open up the concrete over here, and I will, of course, change this back. I could set the saturation to, like, 0.7 and then set my brightness to, like, three. See? That's just me being really lazy, but just to get my point across, basically, over here, 2.5. So that's three ways on how to make very fast buildings like that. Each building has a little bit more detail, so we have one with just a cube, one with some extrusions, and one that actually has a little bit more logic, which all from a distance, of course, the last one reads way better. But from a distance, you can very quickly create some nice buildings, and then we have a much more complicated building that can work a bit more closer up, as you can see over here. Okay. Awesome. So that was it for this chapter. Now, what we'll be doing in our next chapter is we will go over optimization techniques for our original building for when we would not be using Nanite. So we will dive a little bit more into that in our next chapter. 29. 28 Bonus Building Optimizations (Without Nanite): Okay. Welcome to this next bonus chapter. So what we're going to do in this chapter is I'm going to show you some techniques on how to make your buildings much more optimized in terms of a materials perspective. However, this also does mean that we do not have the power of nanite. So that has been the thing with these buildings. Like, we have been juggling around a little bit. Between being able to use Nanite and still having everything logical and simple. Now, you can totally use Nanite and still have everything very optimized. However, it would require some very advanced material art and very advanced technical art in order to really get the most out of it. Which is why I choose to rather have a little bit more materials over here and a slightly longer setup in order to keep the workflows a little bit simple because this is, of course, a tutorial. This is not going to be a highly advanced AA development type project. However, although we have saved a lot of memory in terms of that we are not using a lot of different textures over here, we do have quite a few materials. So I want to show you some techniques on how we can lower down the material count and how to also keep things a little bit more flexible. And that's what we'll go over now. The only annoying thing with this is that we are not able to unfortunately use Nante with these techniques because they involve vertex painting. So let's say that we go ahead and go into Trees Max. I do not know why it's on my other screen, but let me just try Max doesn't like it when you use multiple screens in your recording and stuff like that. So let's say that we have our building number one over here. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to let's just go ahead now copy this to stay safe and call this building underscore 01 underscore OPT, as in optimized. So this is the one that we can use. Now, basically, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and use vertex colors to reduce my material. So right now, if we just go ahead and open up this material over here. So what we are able to do is we are actually able to have one concrete material, so that will already get rid of 12 materials over here. We are also able to only have one metal material, so that we'll get one of three materials. Then we will have one, two, three over here, of course, which are going to be just our simple interiors. We will keep those the same just to keep them a little bit simple. And then what we can also do is we can also actually map our fake windows onto these windows, which is something you can actually do in the original building. It just means that the dirt might not look perfect, but it will be more optimized. So we will go ahead and do that. So that is another material gun. And yeah, I think then we are at, like, a pretty good place. So let's get started with the first topic which is going to be our concrete. What we can do is we can actually control in our material if we would have vertex colors, our concrete colors based upon vertex colors. We have four or actually, no, we actually really have three options for this R, G, and B, so red, green, and blue. You can use the Alpha, but it isn't always the best, and it's a bit annoying to set up, so it's easier if we just do this. Now, the nice thing is that we already have a building over here. So let's see. Over here, we have our roof, and what I'm going to do is in our roof, if we just go ahead and go to selection, we want to go ahead and go Control I invertle selection. Now, inside of TS Max, you can control your vertex colors over here with the color. Or what you can do is you can go ahead and you can add a modifier, which is called the vertex color modifier. Sorry, vertex paint modifier. Inside of Blender, there is a built in vertex painting system, and in Maya, you have a similar system to this. With the vertex pine system, we are able to once again select, for example, here, press show vertex colors. You can see that I am able to, for example, select these vertex colors over here. And then what I can do is I can turn them into a different color. Now, basically, over here, what we have is we have our roof and our roof will not use vertex colors. So you can choose what to do, or you can go ahead and keep it whatever it is, or you can make it red. I'm going to make my default concrete red, so I'm just going to select everything because that's the easiest way of doing it. I'm going to set this to fill red, and then I press this little paint all button. And now you can see that now the vertex color is shown as red. I can then go ahead and I can go in here if I want to turn off this display. Now, just like this, if I go ahead and now convert to an added poly, that is now completely done. Let's say that we now have this one. Let's say that I want to go ahead and I just want to go to Face Select and luckily enough, I already have everything selected over here. Let's say that this is the dark concrete and I want to make this one green. Also, Cool tec inside of Trees Max and blender, you might need to download a specific plugin is that if you have nothing selected, but you already applied your materials, you can press Select ID. You say this two and press Select, and then it will select your material or if you select one, it will select our normal concrete. So I can now go over here in our vertex colors, and I can quickly set this to green. I definitely like doing this the most inside of Max because it's very quick. And then I can press Control I to invert and set these ones to red because this is our default vertex color. And now just to make sure that it is working, we can add a vertex paint over here and display the vertex colors. Okay, that's all. So we now have this done. We can go ahead and we can hide this version. Over here, this is all going to be one massive yeah, red color, I believe, because it looks like this is all just like the same. So we can make this red hide selection. For our frames, we don't really Well, our frames, you know what I'm going to do because we might want to switch out to chrome. I am going to go ahead and select those and make those also red. Red is often like your default, so you often want to just make stuff red if you want to keep it red. Now, for this one, what I can do is I can go ahead and and this is once again max specific. I can add a vertex paint. Oh, didn't mean to dread. Go to Element select, select everything and make them green, actually, in this case, we want to make these green. So let's just go ahead and there we go. Perfect green. You can preview it. There we go. And what you can do with this one is in Max you can just copy the vertex pine modifier and paste it over here. And then it will automatically apply it as long as your model is exactly the same, it will automatically apply these pieces over here. And same overe paste it. There we go. And this is another way, an easy way of doing it. Of course, you can also use trim sheets to lower things down. However, in trim sheets, you would often still use tilable material. So in the end, if you use a trim sheet, you might be able to lower down your material count, but you would still have the same amount of textures often that we have right now. So in our case, I'm not going to spend hours more using a trim sheet on a vista building. And I do recommend, I created a tutorial about trim sheets. I I talked about this before. But in my case, I'm not going to spend hours more mapping everything to a trim sheet and creating a trim sheet when I can do it this way, which is way quicker, and it just means slightly more materials. Now, over here, all of these windows and everything like that can stay the same. We are not going to change that. This one, once again, we have the inside, which is going to be our green color. And over here, there we go. Contra I to invert selection. You are going to be our red color. And then we also had our granite over here, and this one can become our blue color just so that we can give it once again. The cool thing about this is that you can even also use these, not just to change colors, but also change textures. So even though I am using them for colors, same concept goes for textures. If you want to swap out, for example, a granite texture for these and you just want to have a plug and play, you can once again also do that. So I'm just going to go ahead and apply these colors over here. I think what I want to do is just make things a bit easier. I'm going to detach my concrete just so that I can nicely hide it. And that's mostly just to make it easier for you guys to see everything that I'm doing. So let's hide this.'s let's just go ahead and detach this one. I am one of those molars that likes to keep things detached as much as possible. Sorry, I can't speak, because I feel like it gives me flexibility. But I know plenty of modulars who like to just attach everything together and then detach whenever they need to. And I don't know. I think there's no wrongs. It's just whatever your preference is. So let's go ahead and once again here. And don't forget that we also for our frames, we need to probably make those red, but we can just make all of this red. And then what we can do is for our windows, our windows will not use vertex colors because we have our own material for that, which is a unique material. But yeah, okay, so we have set all of these to red over here, height selection. Now what I'm going to I'm just going to select all of these pieces. And the quickest way to do this is to simply add a vertex paint. Here we go. It's start by just setting everything to red like this and you can do this double check. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to my element select, and I'm just going to select the door handles and make those green in case I want to change those to, like, a different texture. So we can go ahead and turn this into green. I don't know why. Sometimes it has a little bit of trouble selecting in vertex mode, I guess. I can't remember that happening, but it didn't happen in a long time. Did that work? Yeah, okay, so now it sometimes just accidentally selects the back faces. So then you need to be a little bit more creative with selecting or just detach these pieces and select them customly. But anyway, there we go. Also done. And by the way, if you accidentally collapse your mesh and you forget to turn off vertex colors, you can just add a new vertex paint and just switch it back to the normal colours. Okay, awesome. So now that we've done that, the next thing that we would want to do is over here we have our windows. Now, if I just go ahead and detach these just so that I can easily show you what I want to do with this. And that is that instead of using a unique material for these, we are going to use our custom window material and just going to scale it a bit. It means slightly lower resolution and slightly less roughness variation, but in turn, we do save, again, a little material. So I can go ahead and I can here we have like my fake window yeah, because the other one is fake class. I can go in and I do need to grab. I don't know why it's so slow. Let me just save my scene because I don't really trust it. Or I have to buck again. Let's try it again. Huh. Oh, okay, weird. Now it works. Anyway, so let's go ahead and go fake windows, and we want to grab our let's see which one? I think our roughness is probably the easiest to read and set is to overwrite over here. I just need something that I can easily be able to see what I'm doing. Once we've done that, Let me just double check. Yes, all of these windows are separate, which is good. Now I can go ahead. And if you want, you can even, like, unwrap these all at the same time. But now what you want to do is you just want to go ahead and you want to unwrap it. On your window. So what I tend to do with this is I tend to open up my unwrapper. I tend to show my actual windows. And then I start by just mapping out these windows over here. And then it's just a matter of tolled control to do even scaling. And I just kind of want to make those these fall in between our windows over here. They don't have to be perfect, as I said before. So you can just go ahead and's say that this one I'm going to change up a little bit. It is actually really difficult to even see. Where all of our fake winds are. I guess it's because our fake windows have our window blinds in them. Yeah, so you might want to get or you want to keep the blinds. Or what you can do is you can kind of just, like, rotate them in place into this window to basically slightly changed up, as you can see, see? So now it looks a little bit more changed. And yes, this is a little bit slow, but you do want to actually do this for all of them. However, what you can do is you can kind of, like, if we would go ahead and cheat. What I would do is I would detach my windows Over here, and let me just pass the video and just do this off camera because it's not very interesting. Okay, here we go. So I detach my windows. For these pieces, I could go ahead and just copy my UVs and paste them in here because it's the exact same model, and that should translate correctly. Same for these ones. For the other ones, that might not be as easy because we did a lot of mirroring and stuff like that, and then it will not work as well. Here we go. But let's say that you want to go ahead and cheat a little bit because you are in a rush. What you can do is you can go ahead and just select all of our windows over here. That we have like this, and I'm just going to wiggle it around to make sure I did not forget. I'll do the door separately just because doors are specific, and then unwrap them all at the same time. And what I tend to do for this kind of stuff is if I go ahead and go in here, I just want to switch this to, like, a fake window view. I often just go ahead and I just, like, unwrap every single window so that it's basically falls in between the same location in the center. And then I can just go ahead and select the windows and move them all at the same time into, like, a random window texture, and then all I do is I just roughly rotate them around. As I said, this is not made to look as nice upfront, but it is definitely efficient. It just takes a little bit longer to UVNwpi, but if you are going for a slightly more optimized building, then this is a great way of doing it. And, of course, in terms of polygon count, I will also show you how to, like, apply LODs instead of nanite to optimize our building more. And what you can also do is, of course, lower down your texture resolutions, which is something that oh, hey, this one does not seem to oh, no, wait. Sorry, this one, I did not Van web yet, so I'll go over that later. What are talking about? Yes, we can also lower down our texture resolutions, but that is something that we will do a little while later as like a very final polishing bonus chapter. Cause I always like to do that until at the very end. Yeah, so in general, not too difficult. And once we've done this, Oh, God. I one sec. Sorry about that. There's this annoying button if you press it, then you get like a bunch of errors that just keep popping up for every UV shell. But anyway, so basically, yes, UV unwrapped this, which I am almost done with over here. And then it would be as easy as what I like to do is, I like to go over here to Element select, and I then just select these at like differences in length to make it a bit easier over here. And then we can just go ahead and we can Nice to place them. It's a location. So I'll place this one here. This one, let's say that I do that one over here, for example. And yeah, here you can see that we have our limitations with our dirt. You can try and stretch it out a little bit and see if that does look okay with the dirt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Honestly, that is up to you. However you want to UV unwrap this, I'm just going to keep this nice and simple. Over here. And then what I tend to do is I tend to just select some random pieces like this. There you go. Oh, sorry, it's actually easier if I do it one by one. And I then just go ahead and rotate them around. So over here, let's also do this one. There we go and rotate these round. There we go just to add a little bit more variation, and it's up to you how much variation you want to add. But anyway, so my point, I think, has come across. So now at this point, the only thing I want to do is I want to just go ahead and this last little window over here. Which is our door. There we go. Okay. So hid, and now we have pretty much prepared our mesh, and it is ready to go. Now, I do want to make sure that now for our concrete, we only want to have one material instead of having multiple materials. So we are just going to apply this was one of the reasons, once again, why I just wanted to separate my meshes. I just want to go ahead and I want to apply to all of my concrete, the exact same material. Because we are now using vertex colors in there in order to basically separate between them. And this is also why I definitely wanted to copy this building and not do this on my original building because that would not have been a fun time needing to reverse it if I forgot about it. Okay. So we got this one. Let's go ahead and apply. Oh, one, one, concrete A. Let's go ahead and also wiggle it around just to make sure. Yeah, that looks good. Looks like I'm missing my window. So let's right click and press nhit Oh, no, wait, I do have my windows. Sorry. It's because of the selections. That's a bit difficult to see. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to for now, height selection and I want to go ahead and I want to select all of my window frames over here. So actually, no, I don't need to do that. I only need to select my door frames over here and make those into our windows. So frame 01 over here because only a door has a different metal, so that will once again save me a bit of time. Okay. So we've done that, also. Let's unhide. Last thing, I just need to reverse the stuff I did over here on the roof. So let's just go ahead and turn this one back into our roof, which is going to be concrete, concrete roof over here. Okay, perfect. So that is now back the way that it was. I can go ahead and I can save my scene. And I can export this as an FBX. And then if we go ahead and go into Unreal Engine, we have a vista buildings. We have a lot of junk here, so that's definitely something in the polish we will also clean up. But let's just go ahead and import our second building. And this time, what you want to do is in your vertex color import option, you want to go ahead and you want to press replace, yes, replace over here. And let's turn off build Nanite and that should be it for now. We are going to generate LDs a little bit later. Okay. Awesome. So we now have our vista building over here, as you can see, rotate it a little bit. And let's open it up, and then you can see that now this one has quite a few less materials compared to this. So with these materials, some of them we already have and some of them we need to recreate. So we have our interior one day, interior two day, and our interior three day over here. We have our window blinds material, which I do want to keep. So where are you? Blinds dark, probably. Okay. So we got those. Our fake windows are actually going to become the windows that we had before, so that will be fake windows over here like this, and that is now also being used at the base. So here you can see the how that one looks, and I can see that I once again still forgot one of those. But that is something I can just very quickly fix simply by going in here. And let's just very quickly UV unwrap this and re export. One sec. I forgot that I need to do it 11 because the plugin I use does not have a tool to just overlay all of the pieces at the same time. At least last time I checked, it didn't have that. But anyway, so we got this one. There we go. Easy, does it? And you can just go ahead and copy this UVW nwp. Also place it over here, paste it. And I'm just going to grab a couple of them and rotate them 90 degrees to give them, once again, a little bit of variation. Sorry about that. So let's go ahead and re export this. Interior building 01 optimized. And we can just re input them without problems. Okay. Cool. So we got those ones now also done. We have our roof over here, and now you can see that we have lowered it down to one concrete and one frames. So the way that we want to go ahead and work with this is if we go to our actual master materials, the first one that we want is we have our concrete over here, our concrete 01, and that one uses the building tilable master. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to call this building tilable master underscore VC as in vertex color. And then I'm going to open this up and move this over here. Now the very easy thing that we want to do with our vertex colors is here we have our base color. We basically are going to create three colors and multiply them. So Contra V and Contra V. Let's call this one color, underscore. R, color score G, and color underscore B. You want to plug in into the B slot, steal your base color. So we are basically trolling the color for all our three channels. And then what we need to do is we need to lp these together using a linear interpolate. And in this linear interpolate, we want to go ahead and add something that is called a vertex color node. And with this, what we can do is we can go ahead and say everything that is I believe that what we need to do is we need to have the default here. The first one is always a bit annoying because you can swap it around. But let's say that everything that is red becomes the red color. Then we can lurk this again and say everything that is green becomes a green color. I might need to, like, flip these around, but that's something that I only always know whenever I actually look at it. And the last one, everything that becomes blue. Gets the blue collar. And the same works for your metal. Now, I'm not going to set up the metal because I'm not going to use this technique for my other buildings. And instead, I'm just going to use my default frame color because one thing that I, of course, also realized is that the door handles, you will never ever even be able to see them. So why spend so much effort making those tiny pieces chrome. But anyway, what we now can do is we can go ahead and let's say that we have concrete 01. Let's duplicate this and call this concrete 01, underscore VC. Open it up. And then what you can do is if you go ahead and drag in your til boll VC, you will get a few more options. And let's apply this one to our building. So we have a building over here. Just going to drag it out here. And materials building so black frames metal can just be the frames. Here, I'm totally fine with that. And then we have our concrete 01 VC that we can plug in over here. Okay, cool. And I have a feeling that I still have my original Oh, yeah, sorry about that. This was an example I showed in the previous bonus chapter. There we go. That's better. Okay, cool. So, theoretically, what we should be able to do now is if we go ahead and go into red color, our red colour should be default, so it doesn't have anything because we already have a concrete. And then in our green color, we want to make this one a little bit darker. Now, so far, that does not seem to work completely yet. If it does not work for some reason, oh, here, it looks like that my blue collar is overwhelming everything. What we can do is we can go ahead and maybe there has been a import problem. So we can go down here to our mesh paint. And then if we go to our call of you mode, we can press RGB channels. Okay, so that does work. So green and blue. Then let's have a look around. So vertex data, red, green, blue, and that goes in here, which looks completely fine. Did I properly save my material? Because, of course, here you can see that now we have properly imported our vertex colors. So the next thing would be that it is we need to, like, quickly check. Because it looks like the blue is, for some reason, overlapping everything except for this one. I guess they are swapped around. I guess the green color. Yeah, so the green colour has been swapped around with the blue color, which means that I need to her blue color goes in here. I want to probably do like a one minus on that blue. Let's see. To flip that around that this is what I was talking about, that I just need to, like, balance it out. I thought something was wrong, but it's just because we barely used the blue colour, so I didn't really notice. So if I go ahead and make the blue collar blue, green color green. And the red color red. Then we can see now that the only two that are swapped around are red color and our green color. And of course, if you want, you can just leave it like this, but I do like to make things a little bit more tidy. So I will just go ahead and do another one minus, and I believe I only need to do this on my green color because my red colour is already filling everything else because it's a default color. So now we have a green color over here. Okay, I guess we do need to also flip around our red color. Interesting. I can't remember ever needing to do. But of course, since we have nanite it's been a while since I've actually used this technique specifically just because we have been using nanite. But there we go. Blue, green, red. I can see that over here for some reason, I have missed a few pieces, which I will just go ahead and fix one moment. There we go, that is now all fixed. Now we can give them their actual correct colors, which is going to be plain white for number one, slightly darker for number two. And dark bluish for number three. Something like that, for example, and save us and there we go. So we have a fewer materials now, and you can keep optimizing this even more by just combining stuff together over and over again. And now the next thing is that if we just first of all, have a look, you can see in terms of the buildings, very little difference because all difference is in the geometry optimization. But as you can see, the buildings look almost exactly the same. So in general, this is a great way to, of course, optimize your scene, but now we have one problem and that is that we do not use Nanite for this one building over here, which is a bit of a shame, especially when it is new technology. However, our building is still quite hypole because we are still at 40 K triangles, which is just normal because we have so many insertions from our windows. So in order to basically optimize this, what we can do is we can go to our LOD settings, and level of details like the old school version of Nanite. It basically allows us to optimize our mesh based upon the distance that we are viewing it from in set distances. You should see it as Nanite. With the distance we are viewing it from, it will automatically optimize everything for us. L with the old LOD system, it will basically have four different measures and it will cycle between them. That is the biggest difference. I can go in my LOD settings, and I want this to be often I do a large prop or level architecture. So let's try large prop and then press yes. Now what it will do is it will generate some LODs for us. That's the nice thing of real that it can just do this by hand. With large buildings like this, it might actually be better to make them manually. But let's say that we have something like this. Now what should happen is that we now have four LDs LD zero, LD one, which is at 19,000, and you can see that it starts to break quite a bit, LD two, which oh they are breaking too fast over here. Let's see if we can maybe cycle this to level architecture. These are all just different settings in heavy they optimize, basically. So let's try level architecture. So let's see, level one, good Level two. I can see some problems over here. So what you can actually do is you can control how much you want your building to optimize. So in Level two, I can go ahead and I can go over here to LLD one reduction settings. And instead of having 50% polygons, I can set this one to, for example, let's say, 75 and press Apply. And now it will only keep 75% of all of our polygons instead of only 50%, and that looks already a bit better. We can go ahead and go to Level two, and we can say Level two. Sorry, it starts at zero, so that's why it might be confusing. I can say, I want to go for 50% and I want to apply my mesh again. Over here and purply, and then Level three, I can go ahead and say, Okay, at this point, we are so far away that we can probably set this to 30% and see if it still keeps up. Okay, so that's 30%, it looks pretty bad, but we should be really, really far away. So now if we will move our camera and have a look at the triangles, the further we get away, it should start switching over. So LOD one. And here it goes into LLD it's really large because it's, of course, level architecture. Two LD three. See? So three, two, one, zero. And just like that. I can see like a slide popping between Let's have a look. So here, Oh, no, see? Yeah, you almost do not see the change. You always want to test to make sure that you don't see the change. And the same in here. So we now have like our fancy building over here that might not have nanite, but it is still quite a bit more optimized. That when I move back, you don't really see much detail. You can see that the Nanite over here keeps up way better, and this is because Nanite is integrated into our lighting system, so the shadows keep working better compared to this one. And that's why I want to use Nanite for these buildings because it's just like here, see. It's just way better. It's so nice to use nanite. But in general, this is a good optimization technique. If you want to visualize it in your level, you can go from IT to overhear your level of detail coloration, mesh LD coloration, and it should be from gray and then it should go red, green, and blue, depending on LOD zero, one, two, and three. That is how we would do the optimization techniques for our buildings. This is a great way if you just want to go ahead and you want to optimize your buildings more. However, you are limiting the quality that you have a little bit. So keep that, of course, in mind. Cool. So we have now arrived at the point that what I will do is I will start by creating a massive time lapse where I will create a bunch of different buildings. Creating these additional buildings will not take as much time as the first building because now we have all of our materials ready to go. And after this, what I can do is I can create a little presentation scene, which will also be a time lapse, and it will probably be like a narrated time lapse. I'm not sure yet. Depends on what I will cover. And I will just create like a nice presentation scene to show you how you can use the buildings in context. So let's go ahead and continue with this in the next few chapters. 30. 29 Creating Additional Buildings Timelapse Part1: Thing. Banana. D. D. D. D. D. D. D the Mm. Thanks, I I 31. 30 Creating Additional Buildings Timelapse Part2: A I Thank. The 32. 31 Building Our Sample Scene Timelapse: D 33. 32 Outro: Okay, so we have reached the end of our tutorial course. Now, in the end things did take quite a bit longer than I actually expected, but it's just like creating those base systems. They always take a while. But once you've done it, what you've seen in the time naps, is that our original building took us multiple hours to create, just because we had to create all of these systems. This building over here took around 1 hour to create. This one only 30 minutes, and this one probably also like 30 to 45 minutes to create. So in total, the time goes down quite a bit. You can definitely create more buildings if you want. In my case, it's not really logical because for me, this is a bit pretty much like throwaway work. But we got some pretty good looking buildings. Now, one thing that I almost forgot to show you is that right now the buildings are still using four k textures. If you want to lower this because we honestly don't need four K, and you can lower it depending on the distance from your buildings, you can simply open up a texture and down here in compression, go to Advanced and set this lower to, for example, 1024, and then it will only render the textures at 10:24, which are still looking totally fine. If you would go wow low like 64, for example, then yes, then it just becomes like Willie blurry. But even this blurry at 64, from a distance like this, looks still fine. So it is up to you to, of course, decide what you want to go ahead and do with this. Now, what I will be doing reset this back, is that these concrete textures over here, they are all based from mega scans, and I'm not actually allowed to supply any mega scan textures with this project. So you will get the buildings. However, I will just replace these textures with some of my own textures. Now we have a few sample scenes. So one of them was that I showed you over here, the sample scene of this little city. This sample scene is not included, unfortunately, because it has a lot of different assets that I do not own the copyright to. I just threw it together or I threw this into an old project that I did a while back. So you will only receive the buildings. And the same goes with our mountains. You will only receive the actual mountains and not that entire environment that is also with it, which is this environment over here. So you will just receive the mountains because that is what this tutorial is all about. But in general, I hope that you learned from Mr. Doyle and I hope that you enjoyed it. I would say that that is about it. So I think we did end up with a really nice result. So thank you for watching FastRcor Doyle and I hope to see you next time.